MEN
Something caught me by surprise on the anniversary, this year, of 9/11. I hesitated to comment on it at the time as it seemed disrespectful and possibly flippant in view of the enormity of the event that was being commemorated. But I found it startling, and it lodged in my mind. I suppose the surprise came from the fact that there should have been nothing surprising about it at all. It was my own reaction that surprised me.
During the ceremony in which people, mainly widows of those killed, read out the names of all the victims of the attacks, there was a long series of name-readers, each with perhaps ten names to read. Usually there were two women, alternating. And almost always the last name each spoke would be the name of the speaker's husband, or boyfriend, or son, or father, who had died.
And there they were: women clearly in the prime of life, physically, mentally, emotionally, not weak people in any way; women of commanding presence and competence and assurance, each expressing, after five years, the deep grief and love they felt for the man they had lost. And this is what struck me: it was there, it was genuine, and there was no explanation whatever given as to why they loved this man, or what he had done to deserve their love. It was just a statement of love, period.
It did startle me. I know it was television I was watching, and just that fact alone spreads the veneer of triviality and unthinking convention over everything, but this was reportage too, in stark contrast to the peppy backdrop of popular culture, of TV-commercial-land in which every man is a pompous fool and every woman is cute and amazingly smart. But even setting aside the clichés of the commercials and the sitcoms, there is a standard respectable way that TV handles tragedies and anniversaries of this type. And therefore, insofar as the TV anchors are in control of the content, there has to be an angle, a reason, a hook to stimulate our vicarious melancholy - to keep us all on board with the appropriate degree of collective grief.
So we see pictures of beautiful young women killed, mothers desperately missed by their equally photogenic children. And we get detailed narratives of the heroism and fate of fire-fighters lost, of police and rescue workers, and other performers of brave compassionate deeds, often at the cost of their lives.
This is why I was reluctant to write about this, because these are all real tragedies, real mothers lost, real heroes destroyed, and I don’t want to draw away from those. But these stories, sadly, are always with us, and so perhaps there is a little room for a more puzzling observation. One that really has nothing at all to do with 9/11, except that the mourning ceremony revealed it to me and, surprisingly, surprised me.
For when the TV anchors were not in charge, and the cameras were simply rolling, then it was not only the firefighters and rescue workers who were mourned. It was also the husbands of this series of widows, men about whom we knew nothing at all except that each one was a man, had a name, and had been very much loved.
I am absolutely not making any comparison here with the mourning for lost women, children, or anybody about whom we know a great deal. But I am a man, and I speak as a man of my reaction to the grief, without further explanation, over these lost men. It truly caught me unprepared, and was like scales falling from my eyes.
We are all to some degree trapped inside the stereotypes of popular culture and unthinking assumptions, especially when filtering the world through television. And in that unfairly simplistic world, just as to be a woman is to be oppressed, so to be a man is to be guilty. Women struggle against their oppression, and men struggle with their guilt. Sometimes it is real and sometimes it is piffle, but it’s a wallpaper background against which we live our lives. And the 9/11 ceremony inadvertently showed me a chink, giving a glimpse of something else. The possibility that it might, after all, be possible to live as a man without having to spend my entire life apologizing. What a benefaction!
I wonder, when you saw my title: “Men”, did you expect the tenor of this essay to turn in a different direction?
My Web Home Page
My Agent
© ajm 2006
During the ceremony in which people, mainly widows of those killed, read out the names of all the victims of the attacks, there was a long series of name-readers, each with perhaps ten names to read. Usually there were two women, alternating. And almost always the last name each spoke would be the name of the speaker's husband, or boyfriend, or son, or father, who had died.
And there they were: women clearly in the prime of life, physically, mentally, emotionally, not weak people in any way; women of commanding presence and competence and assurance, each expressing, after five years, the deep grief and love they felt for the man they had lost. And this is what struck me: it was there, it was genuine, and there was no explanation whatever given as to why they loved this man, or what he had done to deserve their love. It was just a statement of love, period.
It did startle me. I know it was television I was watching, and just that fact alone spreads the veneer of triviality and unthinking convention over everything, but this was reportage too, in stark contrast to the peppy backdrop of popular culture, of TV-commercial-land in which every man is a pompous fool and every woman is cute and amazingly smart. But even setting aside the clichés of the commercials and the sitcoms, there is a standard respectable way that TV handles tragedies and anniversaries of this type. And therefore, insofar as the TV anchors are in control of the content, there has to be an angle, a reason, a hook to stimulate our vicarious melancholy - to keep us all on board with the appropriate degree of collective grief.
So we see pictures of beautiful young women killed, mothers desperately missed by their equally photogenic children. And we get detailed narratives of the heroism and fate of fire-fighters lost, of police and rescue workers, and other performers of brave compassionate deeds, often at the cost of their lives.
This is why I was reluctant to write about this, because these are all real tragedies, real mothers lost, real heroes destroyed, and I don’t want to draw away from those. But these stories, sadly, are always with us, and so perhaps there is a little room for a more puzzling observation. One that really has nothing at all to do with 9/11, except that the mourning ceremony revealed it to me and, surprisingly, surprised me.
For when the TV anchors were not in charge, and the cameras were simply rolling, then it was not only the firefighters and rescue workers who were mourned. It was also the husbands of this series of widows, men about whom we knew nothing at all except that each one was a man, had a name, and had been very much loved.
I am absolutely not making any comparison here with the mourning for lost women, children, or anybody about whom we know a great deal. But I am a man, and I speak as a man of my reaction to the grief, without further explanation, over these lost men. It truly caught me unprepared, and was like scales falling from my eyes.
We are all to some degree trapped inside the stereotypes of popular culture and unthinking assumptions, especially when filtering the world through television. And in that unfairly simplistic world, just as to be a woman is to be oppressed, so to be a man is to be guilty. Women struggle against their oppression, and men struggle with their guilt. Sometimes it is real and sometimes it is piffle, but it’s a wallpaper background against which we live our lives. And the 9/11 ceremony inadvertently showed me a chink, giving a glimpse of something else. The possibility that it might, after all, be possible to live as a man without having to spend my entire life apologizing. What a benefaction!
I wonder, when you saw my title: “Men”, did you expect the tenor of this essay to turn in a different direction?
My Web Home Page
My Agent
© ajm 2006
posted by Andrew Massey | Friday, October 13, 2006
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home