Today, we remember “9/11.” It’s a depressing day. I feel it personally, having lost one of my best friends, Michael Asher, 11 years ago, a victim of a terrorist attack, an attack that initiated deep and wide global suffering. Distant suffering, the deaths and mortal wounds of individuals and groups large and small, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and elsewhere, including the four corners of the United States, combines with personal loss. The day is doubly depressing in my judgment because, tragically, remembering poorly has provoked more suffering than the terrorist act that started the whole mess, and this continues, guaranteeing that the suffering will not end. The term “9/11” and its remembrance are dangerous.

When I went to the ceremony commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks with my dear friend Steve Assael, a survivor, I heard too many blind patriotic cries, saw too many signs celebrating retribution and military might.

On the day Osama bin Laden was killed: I viewed with dismay the wild celebrations of young people outside the White House and elsewhere in the country. As I wrote here, their enthusiasm confused me. I didn’t understand it, though later with irony, I pretended I did as a way to call for the end of the war on terrorism.

And even as I shared my enthusiasm for the clarity and fundamental soundness of the Democratic Convention last week, specifically as it contrasted with the Republican Convention, the repeated reminders that Obama killed Osama turned me off. “Osama Bin Laden is Dead and GM is Alive,” Biden’s favorite slogan, I believe points the American public in the wrong direction. I understand why this served good partisan purpose, but find this deeply depressing.

Action is the major antidote for depression, and I have been self-medicating here at Deliberately Considered. Thus, over the past year, I have published at Deliberately Considered pieces that try to open up more careful remembrance. These are all highlighted on the home page today, as featured pieces and as favorites. My modest attempt to contribute to a higher quality memory is to invite readers to take a look at these, organized as they are around two themes: 9/11 and Osama bin Laden.

Note how forgetting is natural, as Gary Alan Fine explains, but also consider what should and what should not be forgotten. My suggestion: remember the loss, forget the impulse for revenge. It is interesting to me that this morning NPR reported that now three quarters of the American population doesn’t think the war in Afghanistan has made us safer.

Consider how we look in the eyes of the world with Anna Lisa Tota reporting from Italy. Perhaps wild chants of USA, USA, USA! is not in the national interest. Either at ground zero, or after the killing of Osama bin Laden, or at a national political convention. Read through the thoughtful reflections and debate we had here about this, and don’t stereotype all Americans, note the diversity of judgments and opinions.

I am committed to writing a more scholarly paper on collective memory. Its title will be “Against Memory.” It will be informed by the discussions here.

Ideological clichés are deadly. In 1989, the end of the short twentieth century (1917 – 1989) with all its horrors, I thought this simple proposition was something that had been learned, broadly across the political spectrum . I was wrong, and the evidence has been overwhelming. This was my biggest mistake as a sociologist of the politics and culture.

When Soviet Communism collapsed, I thought it had come to be generally understood that simple ideological explanations that purported to provide complete understanding of past, present and future, and the grounds for solving the problems of the human condition, were destined for the dustbin of history. The fantasies of race and class theory resulted in profound human suffering. I thought there was global awareness that modern magical thinking about human affairs should and would come to an end.

My first indication I had that I was mistaken came quickly, December 31, 1989, to be precise. It came in the form of an op ed. piece by Milton Friedman. While celebrating the demise of socialism in the Soviet bloc, he called for its demise in the United States, which he asserted was forty-five per cent socialist, highlighting the post office, the military (a necessary evil to his mind) and education. He called for a domestic roll back of the socialist threat now that the foreign threat had been vanquished. Friedman knew with absolute certainty that only capitalism promoted freedom, and he consequentially promoted radical privatization as a solution to all social problems. This was an early battle cry for the neo-liberal assault of the post-cold war era.

The assault seemed particularly silly to me, and hit close to home, since I heard Friedman lecture when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and even taught one of his true-believing graduate students when I gave a summer school course there on social problems in American society. Friedman and his student’s absolute conviction that the market is the source of all good perfectly mirrored my Marxist friends’ convictions that it was the root of all evil.

Today neo-liberalism and anti neo-liberalism are in an ideological dance. The Republican positions on taxation of the job creators, deregulation and the denunciation of standard social programs as socialism constitute one sort of magical thinking. Newt Gingrich is particularly proficient in spinning the language of this political fantasy and developing its newspeak (with his concerns about the United States becoming a “secular, atheist” country promoting sharia law, and the like). The criticism of neo-liberalism from the left too often present magic: dismantle capitalism and all will be well. As I see it, both propose a future based on a failed past, often with a certitude that is disarming and dangerous.

I wonder how people can imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, when there is overwhelming evidence that it has never worked, in Europe or Asia, in Africa or Latin America. I wonder how Republicans can ignore the evidence that the market does not solve all economic challenges and social problems, and that sometimes, indeed, it is the primary cause of our problems, particularly evident in the shadow of the world financial crisis and the great recession.

Friends in the academic ghetto, on the cultural grounds of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, Berkeley, Ann Arbor and Austin, imagine revolution with little serious consequences. On the other hand, the Republican market fundamentalists pose a clear and present danger. On the right, there is ideological tragedy. On the left, there’s farce, except to the extent that they enable the right.

I didn’t anticipate that market and anti-capitalist fundamentalism would have such a role in the twenty-first century. I also did not anticipate or understand the possibility of the replacement of the secular totalitarian imagination by religious ones, Islamic, but also Hindu, Jewish and Christian. “Religionism” is replacing “Scientism.” I didn’t see what was brewing on the religious/political front. The attacks of 9/11 and the American fundamentalist response forced me to pay attention, which I attempted to deliberately consider in The Politics of Small Things.

Chastened, I have become accustomed to the persistence of modern magic, of ideological thinking and its appeal, but quite uncomfortable. How can a thinking person accept and actually support the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez? It and he are so transparently manipulative and fantasy based, so clearly squandering Venezuelan resources and not really addressing the problems of the poor. Yet, many critical people in the American left can’t bring themselves to observe that this king of the ideological left, this revolutionary hero, is naked. How can the sober Republicans believe what Gingrich and company say about the economy and also about international affairs? If they do so and prevail electorally, I am pretty convinced that they will preside over the decline and fall of the American Empire, what they claim to be most against. Perhaps that is reason for true-believing anti-globalists to support the Republicans.

P.S. As it turns out since 1989, I have been bombarded with evidence that ideological thinking is a persistent component of modern politics. It seems that everywhere I look its importance and its dangers are to be observed, but so are its limits. I am thinking again about my big mistake as I reflect on Occupy Wall Street and its prospects, and its extension to the New School. As Andrew Arato pointed out in his critique of the idea of occupation, there is a danger that when people, who speak ideologically for the 99%, will turn themselves into the 1%.  True-believers are convinced, but the rest of us in the end aren’t. Sooner or later the insights of ’89 prevail. On the bright side, from my political point of view, I think this is likely to apply to the Republican Party, with its true-believing, fact-free ideology. This is the major reason why I think that the Republicans will fail in the upcoming elections. I think this is why the Republican field is so dismal, as Paul Krugman has cogently observed. But I am trusting that ideology will end again.

Over the past week, big changes have occurred in the little virtual world of Deliberately Considered. We have put up a changed format that has been on the drawing boards for months. You will note that while now the text of only the most recent post is to be found on the home page, the titles and images of many more posts can be viewed and easily accessed. We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but rushed this week to get it going in response to events just south of my New School office in lower Manhattan, in Zuccotti Park and its neighborhood. We are part of the neighborhood and seek to have neighborly discussions.

The new format provides easier access to more of the unfolding reports, analyses and debates on our site, and allows us to bring forward posts past that continue to address pressing problems, particularly in the editors picks.  And most important now, it will permit us to highlight more intensive investigations of pressing political issues, hoping to inform debate about those issues. Thus, now you will find the continuing posts on Occupy Wall Street.

Elzbieta Matynia and I find the occupation movement to be of great interest. For her, it is a case where her ideas of performative democracy apply. For me, the occupation is a clear case of the power of the politics of small things. We proposed and are now coordinating the Flying Seminar with our intellectual interests  and our previous work together on the Democracy Seminar in East and Central Europe and beyond in mind. As we have already reported, it is off to a quick and extraordinary start. Occupy Wall Street and Shiroto no Ran on Tuesday, Adam Michnik on Saturday. And Deliberately Considered now has a space for the announcement of upcoming sessions of the seminar, for reports on the seminar sessions, including videos of the events, and for what I hope will be sustained ongoing discussions about the issues discussed in the seminar.

And please note how the everyday posting will quite often inform the discussions in the Flying Seminar and, I hope, the discussions and debates in various groups in OWS. This week, in addition to the posts that have directly related to the occupation, Malgorzata Bakalarz reflected on the problem of curatorial practice as it attempts to address large public issues, in her case what she calls nine-elevenism. How we remember 9/11 is key to how a social movement in lower Manhattan is understood. The need to “re-remember” (as Toni Morrison put it in Beloved) the attack of September 11^th may be one of the reasons why OWS is so powerful. Malgo is dissatisfied with how an art exhibition dealt with the problem. I sometimes think that the greatest significance of OWS is that it is a much more successful exhibition. And Anette Baldauf thought about her film on the tragedy of Victor Gruen, a progressive architect and urban planner who designed the shopping mall. He hoped to “combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center” and instead he “integrated living into shopping.” As she walked downtown through Soho, an art center turned urban shopping mall, on her way to visit the occupation, she imagined the city where this tragedy is overturned, where “people come before profit.”

Deliberately Considered is still a place for informed reflection on the events of the day. Now, I hope, we are moving in the direction where we can deepen the reflection and get closer to the events.

With mixed feelings I rushed to PS1, to see its September 11 show. The promise was indeed intriguing and somehow relieving: in a lavish shower of commemorative events, PS1 curator Peter Eleey wrote in his statement on the show that “the exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.” The public commemorations seemed to be unthinking. Perhaps art would present a rich alternative.

Yet, I went to the show with some trepidation. I’m getting more and more uncomfortable with contemporary art curatorial projects: less for professional reasons, while working with an artist often invited to group shows, more personal reasons, as a viewer. Following Sontag, I might decry interpretation. Yet, I must add an important qualification. Art critics are not the problem. Curators are.

I find contemporary art all too often trapped in labeling, paradigm-itizing and contextualizing; as if the death of universal values art had been addressing for centuries became conclusive with the need of pinning down the reading of art and awarding more or less random collections of artworks under common thematic, paradigmatic labels.

It does not mean that I don’t appreciate interesting juxtapositions of artworks, revealing their unexpected meanings, which have been proposed by some curators of group shows. The issue starts when these juxtapositions are radicalized, with artworks only used as a mere illustration of a curator’s statement. The art curator becoming the artist, placed somewhere between film director and writer, seems to me to be a corrupted idea. I’m sure many curators would disagree with me, and I would like to underline that it doesn’t apply to the profession in general. Rather, I address the scary moment of transformation from witness/revealer/“midwife” to superstar. I’m sorry, but I can’t help the feeling that I’ve been manipulated as a viewer. Art as manipulation is not a viable alternative to unthinking commemoration.

But Eleey’s was an interesting invitation, and there were notable works at the exhibit.

Watching a short film “Little Flags” by Jem Cohen (embedded below), depicting the carnivalesque welcoming of soldiers coming back after the Gulf War, leaves disturbing thoughts about the continuation of that story.

So does the “REPORT” by Bruce Conner, addressing the astonishing fact that there is hardly any complete TV footage covering JFK’s assassination, with the artist’s statement that violence is ultimately without the representation: quite mind-blowing, considering the fact that 9/11 attacks were probably the most intensely visually present catastrophe in history of humanity.

Very successful are some intimate artworks in the show, as a photograph turned into wallpaper, by Shannon Ebner, called “Ash Wednesday” (2001).  A close-up of a man with a point made with ash on his forehead poses questions about the hues of public manifestation of religion and their complex meanings, as well as un-obvious responses to them. Would the ash on one’s forehead ever evoke the same reaction at the airport as a burka? Do peyote “weigh” the same as the Muslim beard? And how much had it changed in a period between Ash Wednesday of 2001 and 2002…

Lara Favaretto’s “Lost & Found” project of displaying suitcases, found with some personal things of their owners and sealed so that their content would remain unknown, promptly brings to mind “If you see something, say something” campaign for “civic vigilancy.”

Yet, the show leaves discomfort of moving from invitation to reflection to terrorizing with “nine-elevenism” of perception.

Diane Arbus’s (sic!) photograph “Blowing newspaper at a crossroads, N.Y.C” (1956), as written in the press release, “assumes a haunting cast in the context od 9/11 (despite having been taken in 1950s).” Really?

Among many “terrorizing” artworks, Maureen Gallace’s “Late Summer” (2002) – a small painting rendering a house with no doors nor windows, looked through some bushes in the foreground – is the extreme of the curator’s expectations towards the viewers. I would assume that we should decode “late summer” as September, and the Bushes as…

It reminds me of an old Soviet anecdote about the oppositionist caught by the police with a handful of brochures he was disseminating. Asked why he was spreading blank sheets of paper, the oppositionist replied: “all is clear anyway.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I object to the ubiquitous requirement to use given lenses for contemplating art. Yes, art does address current issues, as it has been doing for centuries now – when Brueghel painted his “silly peasant” with metal funnel on his head, everybody at the time knew he was commenting on Erasmus’s broadly discussed work “The Praise of Folly.” Yet, we can still enjoy his painting despite illegibility of some of the encoded symbols, clear and witty for his contemporaries.

Presenting artworks from a particular perspective, arbitrarily gathered “on the occasion of,” and arbitrarily claimed to be eligible for a particular interpretation, creates a danger of promoting a “journalistic” reading of art and disables not only a possibility of expanding meanings. It disables the viewers learning something about themselves through the art experience.

I officially declare my personal war on terrorism. The terrorism of perception.

Sitting quietly at my desk yesterday, thinking my thoughts about earthquakes, hurricanes, and the glorious Libya campaign, I was awakened by a phone call. A radio reporter from one of our major Chicago stations called, asking for my opinion about a newly minted coloring book that is designed to help children remember the “truth” of 9/11. This effort from a company named “Really Big Coloring Books” is what they describe as a “graphic coloring novel.” Perhaps we should think of this as a “Mickey Maus” effort.

While the coloring book, rated PG by corporate description, aims at teaching children “the facts surrounding 9/11,” it is not without its red-state politics. The company claims proudly that “Our Coloring Books are made in the USA. Since 1988.” The production of coloring books has not, yet, been outsourced to Vietnam. The book, We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom, has as its target audience a group that can, in fact, never remember 9/11, but only know of the day through the visceral accounts that we provide. According to the publisher, “The book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth.” When a publisher (no author is listed) suggests that a work does not “shy away” from the truth, he is suggesting that others are doing that very shying and that the truth is both unambiguous and uncomfortable.

The book is filled with accounts of brave Americans and dangerous Arabs, and the text reminds its readers, “Children, the truth is these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.” Nice touch, particularly on the page in which “the coward” Bin Laden is shot, while using women and children as a shield. One wonders which age child is captivated both by Crayolas and by the moral philosophy of human shields.

But my argument is less about this canonical text than about the process by which hot memories become cool.

By the tenth anniversary, particularly after the shooting of Osama bin Laden and the organizational decay of the Al Qaeda infrastructure, September 11^th is barely with us. Yes, we have to remove belts, shoes, and wallets at the airport, and yes we make Canadians show border control agents their passports (and we, in return, are compelled to show them ours when we visit Canada). However, on most days we think no more about the World Trade Center than we think about Pearl Harbor. September 11^th remembrance has become ritualized – a calendrical custom – rather than firmly situated within our national identity.

And this is how it should be. Trauma has an expiration date: a time after which it is no longer relevant as an insistent reality. As a people, we have moved on. While there are terrorists about, they excite no more concern than a low-grade fever. The likelihood of an event on the magnitude and complexity of 9/11 occurring again is remote. Radical Islam is in retreat, if it ever were on the march. Yes, a few failed states exist in which radicals have found a home, but there are no states where the central authority actively pursues a radical Islamic agenda.

And so I call for the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks to be our final collective gasp of über-patriotism, serving as a bookend for active memory rather than as a spark to inspire the furious. To be sure we will remember the attacks in the same modest way that we recall Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, or Hiroshima, but mostly as a historical curiosity.

Days that are said to live in infamy have a way, over time, to live as relics. This is to the good. Times change. Crises pass, and villains find their evil trimmed. The death of 3000 is no trivial matter, of course, and it deserved the shock and anger that we felt in 2001. But in the past decade, many have been targeted and many more have succumbed to disasters natural and manmade.

My recent reflections on the debate over the Park Islamic Cultural Center have been fueled and inspired by my personal experiences surrounding the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.

After 9/11, I despaired.  As I put it in The Politics of Small Things, it hurt to think.  I knew that the people who attacked the World Trade Center really were a threat, but the political responses to the threat seemed to me to be wrong.

The attack hit very close to home.  Two close friends were in the Towers, one survived, a childhood friend, Steve Assael, but one was killed, Mike Asher, my closest adult friend . On that fateful day, I didn’t know what had happened to either of my friends.  In the days, weeks and months that followed, as I attended to personal consequences of the attacks, I was dismayed by the public response.

A war on terrorism was declared which didn’t make much sense, as the very real threat of Al Qaeda was not sufficiently recognized by anti-war critics.  Terrorism and anti-terrorism seemed to be replacing Communism and ideological anti-Communism (the most radical and resolute form of which were Fascism and Nazism), and many who were critical of these tendencies were not realisticly facing up to the challenges of the day.  Simple Manichaeism again overlooked global complexity across the political spectrum. There did not seem to be any alternative, as the Republican President was getting carried away, pushed by a broad wave of popular support, and the Democrats in Congress, and reporters and commentators in the media, dared not question the patriotic effervescence.

My book, which was dedicated to Mike, was an attempt to explore how alternatives on the margins did provide grounds for hope.  Specific small interactions provided alternatives to faulty grand narratives, people meeting each other on the basis of shared concerns and commitments, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. constituting political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt.  I knew how important such power was in the development of the democratic opposition in Poland as it formed and supported the development of the trade union Solidarity.  I examined how the same sort of power developed in the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign, opening space for the cultivation of critical opinions and policies among people who were concerned about the state of world affairs.  Obviously, the same sort of power supported the Obama campaign, as I have explored on earlier posts.

I was very impressed to see how a focused political campaign provided coherence to a broad array of dissenters, observable in anti war demonstrations and on many websites.  But the strength was not just the unity. It also was grounded in the diversity of experiences, opinions and actions that made up the movement.  People concerned about a broad array of immediate circumstances came together in opposition to the Bush administration and its policies.  But as important as the opposition was, their primary concerns were perhaps even more important.  A broad coalition concerned with a broad set of issues, foreign and domestic constituted an impressive social movement and political campaign leading to the election of Barack Obama.

And herein lies the significance of the Park 51 Islamic Community Center.  It is a local example of the politics of small things.  Those involved have rejected civilizational conflicts and are promoting civilized inter-religious and inter cultural dialogue.  They have planned a community center in their community, with places for people to hear lectures, discuss problems, play and exercise, and pray.   They are clearly open to discussion, already engaging in it with their fellow New Yorkers.

In the planned activities and in the way they have engaged the broader community to date, they enact dialogue as the alternative to clashes of civilizations.  This is ground zero of the opposition to terrorism and ideological anti terrorism.  These are important facts on the ground that are in opposition to dogmatic truths of the Islamic and the Islamophobic fundamentalists.  Intelligently thinking about their activities, taking them seriously beyond simplistic ideology doesn’t hurt at all. It is a way that honors my friend and many others who were lost on that bright and sunny September day.