Distorting Reality, Memory and History

As of this writing, we are two days and counting away from the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the fall of the World Trade Center and the massive loss of innocent lives to the demented ambitions of unscrupulous men. The years since that event have been intense with extraordinarily high levels of stress, fear, subterfuge and ugliness. Perhaps the anxiety is one of the reasons reflection says those years passed quickly when time as it occurred seemed unnaturally slow and burdensome.

We humans seem consumed by a need to recognize common benchmarks in our lives with various forms of monuments and reaffirmation. Certainly the tragedy of 9/11 falls into this category, not just because it changed our parochial view of the world, and the world’s view of us, but because it has changed our relationship with ourselves and over 250 years of the concept of democracy. Since our normal functioning is eerily dependent upon the electronic media, it is no wonder that the bulk of our moments of recognition of 9/11 will be in rerunning five year old film clips and in creating new ‘commemorative’ films, be they dramatizations, documentaries or mockudramas. The latter, of course, is propaganda at its worst.

During the last five years, many unanticipated monuments have been erected. Our governing of ourselves has changed. Our view of privacy has been altered. Our willingness to take on the worst aspects of a dictatorial society has expanded. Our trust in our leadership has been shattered. We have given unearthly powers to a small group of fanatics with an extreme ideology but not a country. We have learned to hate. We accept smear campaigns as truth. We have let fear rule our intelligence and emotion channel our energy. Many of us have grown embarrassed at ourselves, our actions, our inactions, and our inanity.

As with most things that are emotion laden, the reality of what was becomes garbled and warped. When real emotion is the cause of such re-writing of events, it is easily forgiven because we are all frequent victims of the heat of such feelings. When that warping is premeditated, however, and then disseminated as propaganda to achieve some political end, the distortion is unforgivable. That is the situation with ABC’s projected presentation of a docudrama about 9/11 produced for questionable reasons by highly biased individuals.

As history, five years is a very short time. Individuals involved in actions and decisions relative to 9/11 are, for the most part, still living and still capable and coherent enough to personally relate their part of those events. Ergo, using the excuse of literary license or historical interpretation to alter those events is not only arrogance of gigantic proportions, but is foolhardy in the extreme. Memories about that day are still sufficiently fresh to automatically expose any glossing over or exaggeration, so why would anyone, regardless of their motivation, blatantly alter events, words or deeds? The entire viewing public is not stupid, yet revisionists seem determined to view us all as easily fooled, easily led, and easily duped.

During the last five years, there have been sufficient government displays of incompetence, disdain, arrogance and indifference to the welfare of the people of our nation to last over several lifetimes. Most of us are thoroughly tired of it, and very probably the 2006 and 2008 election results will prove the point. This latest attempt to force knowledge and memory down a crooked, unlit path is not only bad theatre and shoddy craftsmanship, but it is rotten politics.