America does not officially mark September 11. We don't December 7, either. We have a Memorial Day. I think both September 11 and December 7, if there was no work for example, would be observed as true days of mourning by Americans. Unlike Memorial Day which is now the unofficial start of summer and one of the biggest party days in the year.
I once researched why we memorialize certain things and not others. I think the impetus for my research was the discovery that the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York is still there (the Brown building I think?), has been gentrified and is in use as just another office building, the very floor where the women died or from which they jumped to their deaths is being used by NYU! I couldn't believe it.
So I think the Triangle is what started it. Then I started looking into other disaster sites, the Iroquois Theater and S.S. Eastland in Chicago. The Iroquois site is completely gone, there is not even the footprint of the building anymore. And, it was reopened the next year under a different name. :o I was fucking shocked. The Eastland site is marked with a plaque. The Cocoanut Grove in Boston. Been there, too. Also completely gone. Fucking plaque in the sidewalk. Beverly Hills Country Club, Southgate, Kentucky, outside Cincinnati. That site has never been redeveloped; of course it's owned by someone and there are no trespassing signs but there is a marker down on the highway at the turn-off and there are plenty of make-shift memorials at the site, which is now overgrown. That, to me, seemed fitting. I don't think it was deliberate but just letting nature erase it in nature's own time time seemed fitting. At least it wasn't rebuilt as the "NEW Beverly Hills, under new management!" Jesus Christ.
Anyway, all of this struck me as strange, there was some psychological thing going on here it seemed to me, I mean, my God, Americans are the most sentimental slobbery people on earth; every goddamned county seat in America has got a memorial-something to war dead, if it's an old enough town, to Civil War dead, and so I looked into it. There's a book--Shadowed Ground--awesome title, to me, the best part of the book was the title, it conveys the point that these sites are not memorialized because they're stained with horror and people don't want to remember. It made a certain amount of sense but then I started thinking, then why do we have fucking graveyards and I started researching death rituals and I lost the scent. But after the title, Shadowed Ground was all down hill for me; it was written by an academic and he had, like, five categories of sites and how they're different and hence memorialized differently. It just seemed so academic of the author to make five categories, stilted. I read a couple of them and was not impressed, not convinced at all.
Shadowed Ground is the book, man, state of the art, and it didn't cut it. So I don't know. I wasn't looking then for why we do and not memorialize certain days and actually never thought of the lack of an official day for September 11 until today. December 7 is known as Pearl Harbor Day but we don't do anything official to mark the day. How about a moment of silence for September 11 and September 7, three moments for September 11? At those times, and at the time the first Japanese bomb fell, we just pause in our day and observe a moment of silence. Why couldn't we officially do that? I don't know.
I once researched why we memorialize certain things and not others. I think the impetus for my research was the discovery that the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York is still there (the Brown building I think?), has been gentrified and is in use as just another office building, the very floor where the women died or from which they jumped to their deaths is being used by NYU! I couldn't believe it.
So I think the Triangle is what started it. Then I started looking into other disaster sites, the Iroquois Theater and S.S. Eastland in Chicago. The Iroquois site is completely gone, there is not even the footprint of the building anymore. And, it was reopened the next year under a different name. :o I was fucking shocked. The Eastland site is marked with a plaque. The Cocoanut Grove in Boston. Been there, too. Also completely gone. Fucking plaque in the sidewalk. Beverly Hills Country Club, Southgate, Kentucky, outside Cincinnati. That site has never been redeveloped; of course it's owned by someone and there are no trespassing signs but there is a marker down on the highway at the turn-off and there are plenty of make-shift memorials at the site, which is now overgrown. That, to me, seemed fitting. I don't think it was deliberate but just letting nature erase it in nature's own time time seemed fitting. At least it wasn't rebuilt as the "NEW Beverly Hills, under new management!" Jesus Christ.
Anyway, all of this struck me as strange, there was some psychological thing going on here it seemed to me, I mean, my God, Americans are the most sentimental slobbery people on earth; every goddamned county seat in America has got a memorial-something to war dead, if it's an old enough town, to Civil War dead, and so I looked into it. There's a book--Shadowed Ground--awesome title, to me, the best part of the book was the title, it conveys the point that these sites are not memorialized because they're stained with horror and people don't want to remember. It made a certain amount of sense but then I started thinking, then why do we have fucking graveyards and I started researching death rituals and I lost the scent. But after the title, Shadowed Ground was all down hill for me; it was written by an academic and he had, like, five categories of sites and how they're different and hence memorialized differently. It just seemed so academic of the author to make five categories, stilted. I read a couple of them and was not impressed, not convinced at all.
Shadowed Ground is the book, man, state of the art, and it didn't cut it. So I don't know. I wasn't looking then for why we do and not memorialize certain days and actually never thought of the lack of an official day for September 11 until today. December 7 is known as Pearl Harbor Day but we don't do anything official to mark the day. How about a moment of silence for September 11 and September 7, three moments for September 11? At those times, and at the time the first Japanese bomb fell, we just pause in our day and observe a moment of silence. Why couldn't we officially do that? I don't know.
