It would be nice to believe that a pajama party could be enough to ground airplanes. But we know now that silence in the skies comes at a terrible price. Last year, on a crisp blue-bird day, the planes stopped. The sky over Lake Harriet and Lake Nokomis was silent the way it hasn’t been in more than 50 years. The last contrails over the IDS tower became clouds and drifted away. It was eerie, of course, and when the planes started flying again a week later we wondered if we’d ever get comfortable with that horrible ripping sound. Was it the music of regular daily commerce, or the cacophony of some new, unspeakable horror? Or both?
We’re reluctant to dwell on this particular anniversary, because newspapers and magazines have been busy doing precisely that ever since it happened. A few weeks ago—on the 11-month anniversary of September 11, you know—the Star Tribune published a front-page, over-the-fold investigation with the astonishing news that no one is quite sure how to mark “the day we can’t forget.” Without self-consciousness the Strib wrung its hands in empty space. “When it comes to plans for commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks,” wrote puzzled reporter Deborah Caulfield Rybak, “the only thing that seems certain is the relative uncertainty about how to proceed.”
In uncertain times, the passage of time is our only certainty. It’s as if our new world disorder is a premature baby, its anniversaries measured in days, weeks, and months. Perhaps because we were so entrenched in a hollow form of journalism for so long—so little real news that our papers began to read like magazines and our magazines began to read like catalogs—we can forgive ourselves for the crisis coverage that really hasn’t let up in 12 months.
Still, no matter how much we are nagged by the popular press, most anniversaries mean nothing because they are as hollow as they are random. This month, for example, marks the 10th anniversary of the Mall of America’s opening. It’s not clear why we’re marking time out in Bloomington. True, the last resort of a slow news day is to look at the calendar and sift through the press releases for, say, the 50th anniversary of La-Z-Boy furniture, the centenary of Lindbergh’s birth, or the three-week mark of the Mayor’s Commission on Navelgazing. But there is something essentially wrongheaded about celebrating the Mall’s birthday—not because there’s anything wrong with the Mall. It’s just that the Mall is emphatically not about memory and meditation. We can’t even remember where we parked the car.
There are, of course, interesting points of comparison in these two anniversaries—and not just because we can pursuade ourselves that the Mall would make an attractive target. “Celebrating a decade of fun!” is a slogan not obviously connected to “Infidels Out of the Holy Land!” But we had better get used to these non sequiturs. We are more connected than we realize, to each other, to the world at large. Whether we believe that is less important than the simple fact that others do. This makes us both powerful and vulnerable—which is disconcerting indeed to the modest and self-reliant Minnesotan.
It’s good to remember: There is a place for fun in your life. But now we know there’s a place for terror, too. And if our only response is to count the passing hours, there isn’t much to look forward to except the day the clock stops.
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