Looking Back at 9/11 from a New Perspective

Next month, another 9/11 anniversary will come and go. While the “War on Terror” seems to be on the back burner at present, the surveillance state it spawned continues to grow with every new emergency. Why can’t anti-war and civil rights activists make any headway?

I think we have greatly underestimated the role that fiction could play in undermining the bad narratives that prevent critical thinking.

I look to my favorite political satirist, Mark Twain, as an example.

When Huck Finn ponders whether or not he should turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave, he is deeply conflicted. Good Christian society of the day has taught him that slavery is sanctioned by God. Huck truly believes that to help Jim escape would be immoral. But he decides, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

It’s moments like this in literature that serve humankind best in its often-halting progress toward tolerance and peace. Throughout history, good, decent people routinely condone revenge, segregation, greed, fascism and war, simply because they follow those they admire most. Every era has its own peculiar blindness, and going against complacency and conformity of neighbors can be more difficult than directly confronting a tyrant. It is often a disenfranchised voice, such as Huck’s, that awakens the literature of a nation, makes it more self-critical. Sometimes the voice needs an author—a humorist, a poet, or a good story-teller—to help him speak in a way that he can’t be ignored or further ostracized.

Twain published his famous novel a generation after freedom had been won for the slaves, but the hypocrisy continued, and Twain revealed it to the public using a voice unusual in literature.

A “literary” writer uses language in unusual and often poetic ways to encourage critical and creative thinking. What we call “literary fiction” today is writing that is conversant with the literature of the past and questions the notion of narrative itself, as it questions the assumptions of some of the dominant narratives of society. In contrast, “general fiction” and “genre fiction” tend to affirm stereotypes and prevailing narratives. Literary fiction strives to keep readers in a constant state of awareness of the process of meaning-making by putting it in the foreground. Literary fiction authors can help readers have greater empathy for their adversaries and to better understand themselves.

Unfortunately, much of today’s so-called “literary fiction” is dedicated to questioning the assumptions of Fox News audiences, institutionalizing the avant-garde, and lulling readers into voting for lesser evils with the soothing warm milk tone of NPR. Many of the best literary fiction authors today preach, quite beautifully, to the choir. But what crimes are the choir—the educated, liberal, progressive purveyors of culture—ignoring today?

In 2009, a poet I know, Tom Briedenbach, author of IX XI, told me (somehow, it’s important to me that the messenger is a poet) that the dust samples he collected from Ground Zero on 9/11 tested positive for high-tech, military-grade incendiaries. (Tom had heard that chemist Niels Harrit and physicist Steven Jones were seeking samples to test.)

Of course, I immediately got copies of the government’s three phonebook sized reports and read them carefully. I discovered that they never tested the dust for explosives. Moreover, our government—I’m very sorry to say this—did not even investigate the cause of the total collapse of the buildings. It is still unknown. They analyzed what might have happened to the structure when the planes hit and the fires burned, but when they reached the point that the damaged upper blocks of the buildings starting to lean and crumple, they ended the investigation and did not try to figure out how the whole buildings subsequently collapsed. I knew that to write about these three indisputable facts (incendiaries detected, government didn’t test, no investigation into the actual collapses made) could likely wreck my literary career. At the very least, I, grouped in with “conspiracy theorists,” would be ridiculed by good, decent people.

So be it then.

I relinquished my seat at the table with the highbrow, the degreed, New York Times subscribers, the fit and traveled, that community of well-intended liberals—with whom I share reading lists and favorite subtitled films.

I’d risked my career before. In fact, I’ve always written in what might be called the “posthumous style,” as if I had no reason to fear censure and derision.

In my 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, move to the country to start a sustainable farm. Eight years later, Horatio, who has had a Ground Zero dust sample tested, arrives to tell Hamlet that his new stepfather, Claudius, a government bureaucrat who worked on the World Trade Center towers report, is a fraud. The report, even Claudius admits to himself, is “nothing but a fermented blend of preconception and irrelevance.” As “conspiracy theorists,” Hamlet and Horatio are labeled nutcases.

Like Huck, they are marginalized and seen as socially unfit.

Case in point, when my novel first appeared, Martha Frankel, of Woodstock Writer’s Radio, loved my novel; “genius,” she said, and she had me come in to the studio to record an interview. She asked, “What was it like, having to do all that research on conspiracy theory?” Apparently, she hadn’t realized that complacent readers like herself were the target of the satire, not the conspiracy theorists. I told her that, as a researcher who valued empirical evidence over speculation, I built my narrative strictly on the facts revealed by scientific analysis of dust samples and what was written in the government reports.

After the interview, she sent me an email,

Before I could respond, she followed up with,

I was not able accommodate Ms. Frankel’s request. She did not run the interview. Like my Hamlet, I decided, “When the world is crazy then it is the sane ones who appear to have lost their wits. Crazy it is then. Hysteria, be thou my sanity.” My Hamlet’s line is meant to echo Milton’s Satan, who said, after being thrown out of heaven for singing too well, “Evil be thou my Good.” Milton’s Satan is, maybe some of you don’t know, a Promethean figure, who dared to bring light—reason—to humankind.

Shakespeare’s play ends in a pile of bodies. Likewise, my Hamlet and his family are all dead (apparently) in the final scene, reported in the coda, which takes the form of a poorly written, factually inaccurate local newspaper article. The faux article reflects the dominant narrative today about 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Only ironically do I give the “good, decent” people of the world the ending they expected. What is reported in the paper is so very much out of tune with everything that has been related in the main narrative that no serious reader can accept it uncritically. By the time my readers get to the end of the novel, they have learned (I hope) that they cannot believe everything they read in the paper. Doubt is good, if it keeps you open-minded and encourages you to ask difficult questions.

The “War on Terror” has been based on false assumptions. It is creating terrorists where none existed before. True global security depends upon turning our attention from manufacturing weapons to supporting (as my Gertrude and Hamlet do, not incidentally) local organic agriculture and critical thinking in the schools.

I am grateful to my readers (and listeners of the audiobook) who have opened their minds to this terrible news and recognized Locus Amoenus as an important anti-war novel.

With the exception of some few people, the reception has been extremely positive and Locus Amoenus continues to find new audiences among the truly good, decent people of today.

Read more about Locus Amoenus.