Image and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I can tell you where I was on 9/11, 2001. I was in front of the television. Most people were, I think. This 9/11 I made a special effort to stay away from the television. When is television going to learn from the other media, as we have, that its grip on our minds and hearts is no longer a given?

It was a big thing, it’s true. A lot of people died, and it was all captured on film. It’s not like a hundred years ago, when something like that happening would have filled columns on the front page of the newspaper, a day or two after it’s happening. And then ten years later, a mention of the memorial service, crowds, rousing speeches. Yes, a lot of things happened over this ten years. Nothing that looked as alluring on television though.

Photogenic, is what they call it. Somehow the person or non-person looks even better on film than they do in real life. We surely can’t say that our overwhelming attention on this scene, on this story, is just our obsession with ourselves, with our small part of the world.

No, there is something alluring about this story.

A lot of it looks like a movie. A lot like the kind of special effects that come out of America. And it is a bit ironic, because it’s very rare that such effects come out of a real life drama. Real life dramas are usually a bit more prosaic. Like – too much smoke, or too far in the distance to be able to get any detail. Had the day been cloudy, for example, much of the startling sharpness of the documentation would have been lost.

Then there is poignancy to the fact that the missiles had voices. The bullets huge airplanes filled with ordinary people going about their lives. With mobile phones. The buildings filled with people filling in the details of what happened. It’s no wonder that the names of the people who died have been put down in so many dimensions, when the dimension of Who was Where When with Who was added. Because we know.

And then – the missiles were us. Turning our planes on ourselves. Like taking the hand of a child and making him hit himself. A double insult. I say us because it was both America’s tragedy, only America’s – but somehow it also was not someone else’s tragedy. It was our tragedy.

How?  How was it our tragedy?  Perhaps it was simply because we were saturated with it.

We watched it, and watched it, for months, and now when we look at the tenth anniversary of it, what we are seeing and reliving are those months of our lives when that is what we did. We are commemorating the experience of seeing it on television.

Perhaps it was a moment – the moment, of a new kind of connection for us. One where the smallest and largest grids were in place, the tiniest personal gesture with the hugest intention, where it all came together to give us the most detailed and massive depiction of damage that we had ever seen. Perhaps the perpetrators would be embarrassed to realize that they gave us the Greatest Show on Earth, and that it was from America. And perhaps it was ironic that television had been “internationalized” by the wars of Kuwait and Iraq. Access to cable television, CNN, and satellite had been in part pushed along by those wars. So too perhaps was our tolerance to endless depictions of damage.

We all remember 9/11 because we were there. We were in our living rooms, our offices, in front of screens, there. Ten years on we can still remember it clearly as we place ourselves back in front of screens, there. How could we forget the day our television opened up and spat out such a vision to us. Like the first real 3D movie, not an imagined space but a collective one; our first truly Sensurround experience.

As for the rest of us, those who were not America, perhaps we had never before realized how big America was. And it was huge. Far bigger than the biggest flat-screen. Far bigger than the biggest network. It was everywhere. It was in every lounge room, in the corner of every restaurant, in a window of every village. I don’t believe that there was any place that did not know America in those days, in those early 2001 days. Perhaps we will never again know an America as big as that. Myself, I saw America in a foreign land, and I saw it whilst waving goodbye my holiday plans in the days after, not knowing how far the dust of this America would be traveling.

Do you remember? How America was everywhere? Do you remember, that we held our breath, wondering what America was going to do, wondering if we should look away, seeing the handprint of America’s own hand upon its cheek? Do you remember how you tried to go about your business but just couldn’t? Had to have another look, and another, and another? And how kind the television was, not scolding you for that, but just nicely replaying it again, just one more time, just one more time. It’s really no wonder we feel so nostalgic about it, those were generous days. These days we must sit through many more interviews in between replays. When they come they seem too short to give us that breathless feeling. Perhaps at some time in the future that will be considered voyeurism, we will no longer be free to gaze. Those of us who were there, those of us will never forget the indulgence of those early days.

It has been ten years. The America has had its revenge, ten years of it, and we have watched some of it, most of the time. I wonder if we have been satisfied. I wonder how things have gone.