Yes, I did that. I started off a review about 9/11 with a Family Guy quote. You all saw it. Take my goodreaders badge a...moreLet's terrorize the terrorists!
Yes, I did that. I started off a review about 9/11 with a Family Guy quote. You all saw it. Take my goodreaders badge away.
Too late? When did the satire on 9/11 begin? Is it still acceptable? Let's ask the hipsters.
okaay...
Yes, I laughed at the Family Guy episode. GW refounding the confederacy and starting a 2nd Civil War that resulted in 17 million dead including Cesar Millan.. it puts a nice spin on the 'what happened if 9/11 was thwarted'idea.
I guess I'm just feeling...uncomfortable? lax? unworthy? about reviewing this... I also feel that everything has been said. Jaded. I think that fits. I'm jaded.
Last year I visited the 9/11 Memorial with my two daughters, then 16 and 13.. The line was one of those bank sort of lines where the nylon rope is zigzagged and you're carried like a mouse looking for cheese until you get to the airport like security circus at the end, and through all this, all you see is a baracade. No glimpses of what to come.. My daughters complained about the line to which I gave them my evil stare and then used all my guilt tactics... then ended up telling them to shut the hell up. The mood of the crowd was light... kids were skipping and people were snapping photos... I just stared. I tried to imagine where I used to sit when my husband and I would take nightly walks to the towers. I tried to recall how repulsive I thought they looked at night, big.. well SHADOWS blocking out the sky. I tried to remember hugging one of them and staring straight up and getting dizzy. It wasn't happening. I stared at the two square holes in the ground and saw two square holes. I didn't even take in the installation, the cascading water, the names etched on the side. I do remember the trees. They were so tiny.. and the one tree that had survived the attack and then later survived a hurricane so that it could be replanted and memorialized.. it was tethered with wires, kids were trying to touch it and people were posing in front of it smiling. Jaded.
Spiegelman's story seems just as jaded in his paranoid, neurotic, disillusioned, horrorific take on the attacks. He constantly refers to his pivotal image.. "The image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized" It is present in each piece and it's beautiful.
He talks about visiting small town America a month after the attack--"Still the small town I visited in Indiana--draped in flags that reminded me of the garlic one might put on a door to ward off vampires--was at least as worked up over a frat house's zoning violations as with threats from the 'raghead terrorists.' It was as if I'd wandered into an inverted version of Saul Steinberg's famous map of America seen from Ninth Avenue, where the know world ends at the Hudson; in Indiana everything east of the Alleghenies was very, very far away."
His references to early twentieth century comics is astute, in a conspiratoral sort of way.. how there are allusions to falling towers...Sometimes I had to put aside my cynicism and see this for what it was.. a scared, but prolific writer, trying to figure out what all of this means and how to survive it.
"Still time keeps flying and even the New Normal gets old. My strips are now a slow-motion diary of what I experienced while seeking some provisional equanimity--though three years later I'm still ready to lose it all at the mere drop of a hat or a dirty bomb. I still believe the world is ending, but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought... so I figured I'd make a book."
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