[in the works . . . ]

Tony Horwitz: A Voyage Long and Strange

Tony Horwitz: A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America (2008; paperback, 2009, Picador)

Wall of Shame

September 11 kind of snuck up on me unawares this year. That seems like a good thing: after seven-plus years of Bush playing it up as carte blanche for warmongering, it's finally succumbing to a decent burial in history, where it will quickly be forgotten -- like almost everything else in American history. I'm not necessarily in favor of forgetting history, but it beats misremembering it for malign purposes, which is about all there was to the official 9/11 legacy. No one at the time was allowed to suggest that the US might have done something to have provoked the attack. Susan Sontag was villified for as much as suggesting that Bush's characterization of the attackers as "cowardly" wasn't quite correct. Since then the US has used 9/11 to rationalize war after war, resulting in thousands of muslims killed from Somalia to Pakistan's frontier territories. So forgetting the initial pain seems like a good first step toward dismantling the reign of terror that the US subsequently instituted.

I was reminded of this recently in an odd passage from Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventures in Early America. His research brought Horwitz to Santo Domingo, where he toured the Faro, a museum and lighthouse built to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's New World discovery (pp. 82-83).

The Faro had been intended to honor not only Columbus, but also the global network he helped create: a monument, its builders proclaimed, to world peace. So Dominicans had set aside space -- immensities of space -- for countries from around the world to put up national displays, rather in the manner of an old-time world exposition.

The first room we'd visited was Spain's. Next was Japan's, which displayed samurai armor and a picture of a golden pagoda. Most nations followed this model, exhibiting proud emblems of their history and culture. China: calligraphy and Ming vases. Russia: a samovar and a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls. And so on through the continents until we reached the Americas. Guatemala displayed a Mayan vase, Ecuador a set of twenty-five-hundred-year-old bowls that Leopoldo said were worth millions of dollars. As we toured room after room, I began to wonder how my own country would present itself in this ersatz United Nations.

We went through another door and there it was, spanning two walls. On one hung a few small photographs of July 4 celebrations: fireworks and flag waving. The otehr wall, much more prominent, was covered in poster-sized blowups of newspaper front pages. All were dated September 12, 2001, and bore images of the previous day's attack on New York's Twin Towers.

"DAY OF TERROR," read the hugely enlarged headline from the New Hampshire concord Monitor.

"HOW MANY DEAD?" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette).

"OUT NATION SAW EVIL" (Raleigh News and Observer).

"WAR AT HOME" (Dallas Morning News).

No other items were displayed. Registering the shock on my face, Leopoldo shook his head sympathetically. "I am so sorry," he said. "You must think of it every day."

What I felt at that moment wasn't sorrow for the 9/11 victims, but mortification. Tiny Ecuador gave precious pottery as a token of its heritage. My nation, the hemisphere's richest, offered only this: Share our fear and feel our pain. In a venue designed to promote global amity and understanding, the United States chose to emphasize how divided and troubled the world remained. It was a minor thing, really, a display in a little-visited Dominican museum. But still, the exhibit rankled: my own small wall of shame.

The "wall of shame" refers to a wall built to shield visitors to the Faro from catching a glimpse of Santo Domingo's slums. But the wall of 9/11 does something different. It exposes the demented underside of the American psyche. It shows the world that we are incapable of showing concern for anyone else. Only one other country wears its scars so prominently on its sleeve, and that's Israel -- one of the things that binds the two countries together. But even Israel softens their PR a bit, showing beaches and oranges along with ancient ruins. Or so I'd guess. Horwitz doesn't mention an Israeli exhibit at the Faro.

posted 2009-09-11