By Abby Ohlheiser
Photos by Merel van Beeren

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and the Hartmanns perish??” –Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

I was sitting in a French-style chain cafe (sorry America), finishing my croissant, talking to Merel, when we heard the opening notes of “The Star Spangled Banner.” It was a restrained, beautiful choral rendition, and we listened. It was all kind of a relief: we were just blocks from Ground Zero, at around 8:30 AM on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001, but the only signs we’d seen of something solemn going on were the expressions on the cops’ faces as they watched us leave the subway at Fulton Street, as they told us to keep walking in a no-gawking zone, as they told confused spectators no, not that crosswalk, you have to go around the block. This moment, listening, would be the closest we would get to the ceremony at the memorial plaza finally established on top of the former World Trade Center site. Instead, we spent the day in the blocks around the site, in the throngs of tourists, New Yorkers, missionaries, and protestors. We watched as a block’s worth of people waited to move one block forward, in front of St. Paul’s.  Merel said, “I wonder what this would look like as painted by Norman Rockwell.”

Here is what I, and the rest of the crowd, saw on the outskirts of Ground Zero during the ceremony, on the other side of the police checkpoints and “you can’t go theres” between us and the heartbreaking, mourning substance of the official ceremony.

by Jeremy F. Walton

9/11 fatigue is a fully comprehensible, affective response to the cadences of nationalism that have accompanied public commemoration of the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. But this fatigue should not constitute the alibi for indifference, solipsism, or cynicism.

Several weeks after September 11, 2001, I participated in what was surely a frequent sort of event at the time:  a hastily organized panel of academic experts summoned to reflect upon the radical political upheavals of the recent weeks.  This particular panel occurred at the University of Chicago, where I was then a second-year graduate student in Anthropology; the first speaker was the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, an early mentor of mine.  Rolph, as we affectionately called him, struck a dramatic note:  “A pillar of impenetrable, black smoke in the firmament.  The echo of jet engines above, weapons of war.  On all sides: death.”  He went on to describe the brutal and tragic events of September 11, but not the September 11 that we had gathered to reckon—his own narrative was set in Santiago, on September 11, 1973, the date of the coup d’état that constituted the bloody birth pangs of Augusto Pinochet’s military junta in Chile.  Rolph’s rhetorical and political point was as sharp as his description was vivid:  Already, in a mere two weeks, the meaning and collective memory of “September 11” had come to exclude everything other than the national trauma of the United States. To this day, I continue to wonder how Chileans interpret and experience each anniversary of September 11 (and note that September 11 can now only exist as an anniversary), especially if they happen to find themselves in the United States at the time.

Catch The Revealer books editor Scott Korb moderating an event tomorrow night at Gallatin (Jerry H. Labowitz Theater for the Performing Arts, 1 Washington Place) at 7 pm.

The panel will include Alia Malek, editor of Patriot Acts, Adama Bah, Noor Elashi (daughter of Ghassan Elashi, who’s been placed in a “Communications Management Unit”), Ebadur Rahman, a student at NYU’s Gallatin School, and NYU’s Imam Khaled Latif.

For more information, see the Gallatin event page and the Voices of Witness page.

The best and most prominent reminder of the diversity of American Christian thought arrived on the New York City mayor’s desk this week, in the form of a petition with 62,000 signatures.  It was written by that epicenter of hate speech, The Family Research Council (and City Councilman Fernando Cabrera, a Bronx pastor).  FRC’s beef?  That the ceremony at the World Trade Center tomorrow will not include pastors or priests.  Each year, in a ceremony format now a decade old, moments of silence break up the hours-long reading of names of those who died.  Representatives from across the religious spectrum attend. But the petitioners want explicit prayers and they want them from their own leaders.

Getting the man is almost mythological.

by David Morgan

Late one night the President of the United States suddenly appears on television. In our post-9/11 world, the first guess about why is a terrorist attack. It’s too late in the evening for a planned appearance. I brace for images and bad news. But the President announces the death of Osama bin Laden. After ten years of searching, the U.S. government has found the facilitator of the attacks of September 11, and only moments ago executed him on the spot. He might have waited until morning to herald the news, but President Obama acts promptly in order to take charge of the news cycle. He dares not delay, for the Internet will spread the news around the globe, leaving the administration to appear reticent, or worse, timid. The news is capital to be spent to great effect. And the margin of time in which to do so is pressing. These are the days of immediate, global ubiquity. There is no local news. A preacher burns a copy of the Qur’an in Florida and there are riots in the cities of Afghanistan. Indeed, the top-secret helicopter assault on Bin Laden’s compound is simulcast by a local tweeter.

In breaking the news, the president spent the first moment of his remarks eliciting images, a collage of images that Americans harbor in their mind’s eye, “seared into our national memory,” as Obama put it: “hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.” We walk about with a common archive in our heads, placed there by the public artifacts of modern life.

by Jo Piazza

It’s been four months since the Peabody-winning public radio program formerly known as “Speaking of Faith” changed its title to the more universal and spacious, “On Being.” The number of listeners writing into the show to tell host Krista Tippett they mourn the loss of the word “faith” has tapered to one a week.

The semantic change wasn’t undertaken lightly. Names imbue things with meaning, something Tippett is keenly aware of.  Play a game of free association with the words “faith” and “being” with a mixed group of believers and nonbelievers and the words conjure very different connotations on each side of the spiritual spectrum.  Faith – god, church, mosque, worship. Being – exist, doing, Hamlet’s soliloquy. Tippett knew the name change wouldn’t be simple and when she advocated for it two years ago plenty of people thought she was crazy to hijack the name of a brand when that brand was chugging along perfectly well.

“I knew it was the right thing to do but in implementing it I realized what a big deal it was. It was messy and it was interesting,” Tippett recently told The Revealer during an interview about the change and its aftermath.

Elissa Lerner: Last Thursday, after Senate republicans filibustered their way out of passing the Zadroga Bill, also known as the 9/11 health care bill which would provide $7.4 billion in health aid to ailing first responders, few took notice. However, on the Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart took the issue quite seriously. Little did we know that staying to work and pass the bill would require the Senate to denigrate Christmas!

This photo was taken yesterday by Jeremy Walton, assistant professor at NYU’s Religious Studies Program, in downtown Manhattan where various groups gathered to protest a proposed community center or to march in support of it.

Akbar Ahmed is getting some praise for his piece at Salon that works to portray both Terry Jones and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf as men “adding fuel to the fire,” both exhibiting an insensitivity to a “civil” society that’s decided to make them media headlines.

Jones, you know by now, planned to burn the Quran yesterday, then decided he could get more publicity by putting the fire away and flying to New York for 9/11 events. He arrived at 11 pm Friday night wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt.  Definitely a tough guy.  Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf  is the sometime government  go-to on Christian-Muslim relations who made plans to buy a vacant building downtown and got caught up in a storm of anti-Islam noise by proposing to open a community center in it.  He’s been criticized for not explaining his intentions for the privately-owned site.  Silence too can inflame, I guess.

We’ve been wondering what makes the site of the 9/11 attacks “holy ground.”  Michael Daly takes this saccharine stab at it in today’s New York Daily News by asserting that tragedy (or seeing shells from foxholes) makes all of us pray in the same way:

Ground Zero is a mosque.  It is also a church and a synagogue and a temple and an ashram on ground made holy by those of all faiths who died there.