Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends ...
“In retrospect, telling us that the best way we could deal with 9/11 was to just 'get on with our lives' as though nothing had happened was really messed up.”
Hello! Welcome back to The Shitshow Room, where we have spent the past seven months trying to drop a check on that highly contagious Covid-19 party, but drunk and rowdy patrons at other tables keep buying it extra rounds of drinks and desserts and sneaking in their own horse dewormer.
Everyone here is in various stages of losing it. The sadness, confusion, betrayal, and—as the brilliant Katherine Miller wrote this week—rage, is just spilling out all over the place, uncontrollably all the time. We all feel depressed. And then feel guilty for feeling depressed.
I think back to late April/early May when I had my Dos Dose of Pfizer, feeling physically and mentally stronger and lightly hopeful for the first time since February 2020. Then BLAMMO. A crowd of new people joined the Covid party (and wanted to order apps and cocktails as if the table had not already overstayed its welcome by A LOT) and it felt like the pandemic was looping itself. That maybe we just live with The Plague now and it is going to continue mutating and morphing and finding new ways to upend our lives forever. Mourn the folly of my brief optimism.
Into this 19 months of persistent, ambient grief, comes the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11 and all the Big Anniversary Coverage, like picking at a large, not-quite-healed wound while you are sitting in the middle of a deep, sewage filled pond.
When I have thought about September 11 this week, I’ve thought a lot about how the national response to a shocking, deadly terrorist attack was that we all needed to “get back to normal” or we would be “letting the terrorists win.” (I’ve also thought a lot about this absurd Saturday Night Live skit) We needed to go shopping and spend to fight back. As we fast approach at least 700,000 in the US dead from Covid, it would seem that “just keep going” is still the national response to tragedy and that is still really messed up. The numbers of the sick and the dead have long been so overwhelming it is hard to properly memorialize those lost and adequately try to comfort the grieving. Sometimes it feels like everyone stopped trying.
Just Keep Going Ethos of September 11 helped convince me that if I buried myself deep enough in the work of covering this tragedy, I could avoid dealing with it on a personal level.
Come spend every day peering into the bottomless well of horror and misery, but don’t feel pain or grief. That’s journalism, right? No time to be soft. Have this hairshirt made of other peoples’ grief and pain and death and war to toughen yourself up. You have a job to do, focus on that. See how lucky you are?
I felt sure that I could just ride the adrenaline of a crisis and focus all the tasks that go along with covering a breaking news disaster and avoid my feelings. I couldn’t really stop bad things from happening in the world but I could try to explain them to people, right? Of course, there was the inevitable crash and then I’d get a little rest, and the cycle would start all over again when the next terrible thing happened. If anyone suggested to me that this was not a great way to live, I would point to loads of other people in journalism (or equally masochistic enterprises). “That’s just the way it is,” I’d say.
When I try to remember what I did following the attacks of September 11, I can only recall a mix of anxiety and gallows humor and sleep-deprivation with all-too-short moments of feeling proud of the work being done. At the time, I felt like a cartoon character moving at exaggerated top speed, but 20 years later now those memories are like foggy bits of a nightmare that pop into my head. The most vivid bit is when the towers fall, the billows of smoke and the people running and the towers collapse and everything turns gray and all you hear is sirens. The high pitch ringing of the alarms attached to buried first responders’ clothing. The drone of 1010 wins. The smell of burning that follows me home. The dust bloom. Being evacuated from work because of suspicious packages in the mailroom. Drills involving gas masks. Worrying about another attack. See something, say something. This is all normal now. Never forget. Just keep working.
If September 11 escalated my unhealthy work habits 20 years ago, the pandemic has kind of forced me—and a lot of others—to look closely at our own jobs and relationship with work and try to think differently. Maybe we—maybe I—gained a teeny bit of perspective in this nearly two-year crisis. But who really knows?
I haven’t been able to read much anniversary coverage, and related cha-cha. I am even actively avoiding even the Mets-Yankees game on Saturday, but here are a few exceptions that I can recommend:
The Jennifer Senior Piece in The Atlantic
Carlos Lozada’s close reading of 9/11 literature
Spencer Ackerman’s book Reign of Terror and his newsletter are very, very good. Here is an excerpt.
Also, my friend Steve wrote this beautiful piece in 2014 and I read it at least once a year.
If you are looking for something fun to read, I loved Lindsey Buckingham’s Festivus Airing of Grievances by Amy Kaufman.
SIDEWORK: Thank you for reading The Shitshow Room! You can sign up for The Shitshow Room for free, but if you if you do decide to become a paying subscriber, $5 a month (or $50 a year), half the proceeds will go to a few charities that help struggling food-service workers and Americans experiencing food insecurity. Our next round of donations will go to New York Common Pantry. We have previously supported No Kid Hungry and World Central Kitchen!
Follow me on Twitter: @lisatozzi or email: lisatozzi@gmail.com