Nine Eleven no, No, NO!

Each year, as September 11th approaches, the air is filled with a kind of horrid nostalgia. It makes us all into self involved little automatons. Particularly idiotic are the suggestions that we build some sort of 9-11 Shrine or declare a National Holiday of it. The prospect makes me shudder. Here is why.

Some celebrations of national events ennoble and uplift participants. They bring us all into one space, one nation. Like the headlines on 9-11 itself, we gloried in "We are all Americans now." Other celebrations are like the organ recitals of the aged. What is otherwise to be an expected glitch of the flesh (say a slipped disc or a rectal lesion, a dimming eyesight or the inability to hear well) is dwelt on until it becomes a major identifying force. 9-11 would be one such debilitation. The celebration would take what is otherwise peripheral and make of it an obsession, an orgy of the put upon self. We do not need to magnify 9-11, letting it exert full force on us. We are quite injured enough already.

Theologians call the ennobling rituals, symbols and the demeaning ones, diabols. Symbols bring integrity and wholeness. Diabolical rites make of us petty and smaller than we might otherwise find ourselves to be. Several features of a proposed 9-11 holiday make it a sure fire diabol.

First, we are in the habit of thinking that we are different than everyone else on the globe. None of us will ever forget where we were on the morning of September 11, 2001, as scheduled airliners plunged first into the World Trade Center towers in New York, then into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and finally into a barren field in rural Pennsylvania. The day is memorable. But it is not notable. Here is why. What made it seem consequential was the sheer surprise of it. We want to magnify the sheer number of souls lost. But held up next to the annual carnage on the nation's highways, the death toll was rather small (by a factor of 10). And if we measure death against the war deaths we ourselve have inflicted on others, say in Dresden or Hiroshima, the death toll of 9-11 is minuscule, by as much as a factor of several hundred. Terror did happen to us, but not in near the volume we ourselves allow. Such a holiday would only underscore our gross exaggeration of our self importance or worse, our overreaction in 2 full scale, ill advised and long duration wars. We do not want to spend too much time dwelling on that, I would not think.

Further, such a celebration is vulnerable to the worst of our patriarchal excess. We probably need a holiday to celebrate public servants, the police and fire personnel who, like troopers, put their lives in danger on behalf of others. It happened to be true in those days, that those who responded to the tragedy were men, family men most of them. We grieve their loss. We look for heroes. It is but an opening to relish in a confusing past of a man's world. Today, those who respond to our public tragedies may be family men, but they are also women, gays and lesbians. The temptation is to use the responders of that one holiday to imprint a generation with patriarchy. There is at least as much danger in a gay couple trying to live "out" with integrity. Single mothers who face overstacked odds have a bravery worthy of the 9-11 first responders. We have quite enough trouble trying to get our Boy Scouts to face the world as it is, a world made up of men, women, gays and straights. No need to pile on yet another stack of fraternal orders to confuse, or worse, to derail the progress we are making.

In the end, we need for a holy balance. We came to 9-11, 2001 in near total ignorance of any other holy group on the planet, save for the occasional Jew. The "we're number one" crowd looks for a chance to spread the deception of the US as a so called Christian Nation, in contrast to the terrorists we so easily identify with Islam. Jews, Baha'is, Hindus, Muslims, animists and a host of other persuasions have shared this planet with the righteous for a long time. They threaten to share it for a good long time to come. We are not well served by fooling ourselves into thinking that 9-11 was the opening volley in some holy war or other. We would do well to try to find out the righteousness of others on the holy days that we already have available. (Ramadan, anyone?)

We have managed to twist a goodly number of national holidays to the service of our meanest desires. I see no reason to drag gender and faith into the mix. We might better take the time we might have celebrated 9-11 to figure out how we are going to get meaningful holy days back from the ones we have already lost to a variety of interests. Veteran's Day or Pearl Harbor Day or Memorial Day or Armed Forces Day or Thanksgiving or Independence Day or Mother's Day, each has departed from its original shape so profoundly that it is but a diabolical wart on the nation's hide. Only the insanely curious can tell you what gave rise to these holidays in the first place! They have been co-opted by special interests. We would do well to get them back.

We simply do not need another day to dwell on ourselves with such magnificent obsession. So use September 11th as a day to get at what you usually do on such a day! But please, no holiday.

Turkey Day, 2008

National Holidays make me suspicious. It may be something Anglican in me that leads me to approach Thanksgiving and its noble Pilgrims with trepidation. An apocryphal story is told about the Bishop of South Carolina, Fitz Allison. Bishop Allison when confronted with his child dressed as a Pilgrim for the Thanksgiving Pageant is reported to have asked, "Why are you dressed like the enemy?" As a preacher, the annual Community Thanksgiving Commemoration (complete with the mayor's intonation of the presidential proclamation) gave me the creeps.

H. L. Menchen's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," takes me to a place I would not rather go either. The problem with Thanksgiving is not gratitude, nor is it the pursuit of happiness. My problem with thanksgiving is empire. It is the same kind of avarice that has transformed Mother's Day from a lament over wholesale destruction in our own Civil War into a Sentimental Hallmark Day. It is that greed that makes of the end of the carnage of World War I in an Armistice into a happy little "support our troops" day. Empire does that. It takes the deeply painful and transforms it into a cartoon that serves its own ends.

Nowhere have I read work as keenly sensitive to the dynamics of American Empire than the new book, The Wordy Shipmates. Sarah Vowell uses Thanksgiving themes to explore what has happened to us in these days since the winter of 1620. She does it with depth and great good humor. What fascinates me most is the intentional meeting of politics and religion in the Pilgrm narrative, manipulating both our politics and our faith. That modern day t. v. evangelists and even Roman Catholics more resemble each other than those long ago renegade protestants is quite astonishing. As the groaning Thanksgiving table invites all to eat too much, the religious fare invites all to talk too much. Vowell's explorations give some important hints about all that religious yammering on the multiplying religious channels. Television, it turns out was not the first of the genre of overheated one way communication in American history. Pious New Englanders had mastered the craft fully three centuries before t. v. showed up. So, if you like to talk back to the one way politics and religion of our day, you'll love a day spent in Vowell's company.

On the subject of Empire, in an accidental juxtaposition of texts, brought unexpected insight during this past week. I had picked up copies of two books in one trip to the library, reading one right after the other, quite by accident. The first was a recent translation into English of Agnes Humbert's well know French Diary, Resistance. In it Humbert chronicled her days in the French resistance. Then she wrote in painful detail about her imprisonment and use as slave laborer in the Third Reich. These descriptions of life in first prisons, then camps were genuinely repulsive. I had thought I would read a book about the glories of a resistance group, successfully subverting its Nazi occupiers. I had no idea that I would be slogging from prison to camp to factory in a dismal tale of unimaginable human misery and degradation. Next on the book pile was My Guantanamo Diary, the story of Mahvish Khan's quest to provide legal representation to detainees housed at Gitmo under our supervision and flag.

My mind went back to an evening with the grandfather of a young German woman of our acquaintance. Sharon and I were visiting the woman's family when it was announced that grandpa was coming over for a chat with the Americans. As we talked, it unfolded that grandpa had spent a good part of World War 2 in a prison camp stateside. I was not sure what to think. Should we ask about it? Should we change the subject. It turned out that grandpa was treated very well in American Custody. He looked back on his imprisonment with fondness, with laughter and with admiration for his captors.

Hearing Khan tell it, a lot has happened in American internment camps in the 60+ years since WW2. The change is not the sort of thing one wants to look squarely in the eye. My little experience peeking inside Nazi interrment camps and then into Gitmo did our Empire no favor. I was astonished to find, in this little informal comparison, that resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, while suffering horribly, held not a candle to the horror inflicted on Gitmo detainees in Kandujar or Abu Ghraib or in the one of many of the Empire's sites of extraordinary rendition sites.

National Holidays make me suspicious because Empire never insists on National Days of Contrition. In the Empire, it is always Easter and never Ash Wednesday. C. S. Lewis described one such haunted land as "always winter, but never Christmas." We are living there on Thanksgiving, 2008.

This holiday, maybe we can be grateful for the distraction of a Detroit Lions game. Otherwise, we could drive ourselves batty in search of the contrition that is required of us. But, please do not blather on about how those Germans did not pay attention to what was happening in the Camps. Pay attention and tell someone you are watching.