Squaring the ....say, wha?

 
From Frank Rich of the New York Times:

Obama’s speech struck me as the sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign policy America has ever known. But some circles of hell can’t be squared.

Rich goes on to make a number of very good points while mixing an incredible number of metaphors. However, the key point is interesting and perhaps left unsaid. We may not have reached the end of history that the neo-cons babbled about after the wall came down in Berlin, but we have reached a point of the trivialization of history. Between the media wall of white noise and the distance in time, something as awful and as immediate as 9/11 can become trivialized and banal. Rich pointed to the age of the cadets at West Point -- a senior who joined the Corps at 18 was 13-14 in 2001. Horrendous as 9/11 was, it has been overwhelmed. Historical perspective lost; in the oddly distorted flow of the space/time/continuum, it falls into the pit of yesterday. In ten years, asking people to remember 9/11 will be like asking them to remember the Maine, or the Alamo, or Tippicanoe. It's history, not My-story. I'm not proud of that construction, but it has the disadvantage of being true. 

Today, citizens in the developed world have so much stimulation that they become numb. Our brains have not evolved as quickly as our world. A friend of mine in Olympia, Washington, Dr. Sarah Reade, an Internist and one of the brightest people I know described it to me roughly this way a few years ago. In the past, say, 10000 years ago, there was little sensory stimulation except one's immediate surroundings. I recall her saying that, "The most exciting thing that might happen IN A YEAR was seeing a bear. If they survived the encounter, well, that was it as far as stress and fear and endorphins. If they didn't,well, it was irrelevant. Long story short, compare that to a trip on I5 through Seattle during rush hour."

The story of the healer who saw the bear and lived would become part of the tribal memory. As the healer aged, she would be sought for advice on surviving seeing the bear. People would ask what the bear meant...searching for meaning a la Joseph Campbell or The Golden Bough. (Or, for that matter, The Madness of Crowds!) Perhaps over the decades, the healer would become a goddess, or a seer, or a legend. The bear would become a moment of epiphany, a hierophany, a moment of the intersection of the sacred and the profane.

Today, too much. Except for those physically touched by the event, much or most of its power has
been lost. I realized that it was receding quickly in my life later that September, when I opened the drapes to my hotel room high in one of the towers of the GM complex in Detroit, and realized that I was on the 55th floor of what has to be still be a symbol of America. I'd checked my bags in at the curb, shown my ID, gotten on a plane and flew to Detroit from Seattle. It was sort of overwhelming, looking out over the city...

And realizing that the city was dying. It was really obvious over the next few days. Detroit, not 9/11, is what is killing us. So, outside of having to comfort a 20-something  volunteer on 9/11 because her dad had been in a meeting in 1 World Trade Center that morning -- which had been moved to the Marriott, so he survived -- my clearest memory of the time is of the fact that in terms of my life, it became irrelevant watching the lights of Detroit just before dawn, from the 55th floor of a lumbering brontosaurus that hadn't quite realized that at least a couple of its brains had died.