By PLS
By dawn’s early light on September 11, 2001, the towers were still there. Before the commuter rush was over, they were reduced to a heap of ash and twisted steel. Since then we have been living in the shadow of no towers.
In the Shadow of No Towers.
That is the unforgettable title of Art Spiegelman’s brilliant comix-style recreation of a moment in history whose horror has been overshadowed only by the horribly opportunistic use of it ever since.
Art Spiegelman was in New York the day the towers burnt and crumbled. He and his wife had to run around the city trying to collect their children from school. But he did not jettison his clarity of vision, his humanity, his brain, on that day. Instead, he has produced an irascible, from-the-heat heart hymn to a hurt city and its spirited people—and a scathing criticism of politicians who have used a wounded city to solidify their grip on power.
There has been much lamenting about how long it has taken artists to confront 9/11 and some doubt as to whether any artist in any medium will ever be up to the job. It took Spiegelman nearly three years to produce this book. Not only did he have to assimilate his own emotions, his fury, his paranoia, he had to find the right context for them, the right voice. The voice he found riots out of the pages of the great old comics of New York, the literature of the little man, he says. And so he has attached an appendix celebrating his predecessors–the comic broadsides that were already mythical when I was growing up: Krazy Kat, The Katzenjammer Kids, Bringing Up Father, Little Nemo, Hogan’s Alley. These are the figures that tumble across the sooty ghost towers on the book’s cover.
Art Spiegelman found another perfect image, too. He describes the search:
The pivotal image from my 9/11 morning–one that didn’t get photographed or videotaped into public membory but still remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids several years after–was the image of the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized. I repeatedly tried to paint this with humiliating results but eventually came close to capturing the image of disintegration on my computer.The aerial firebombing of the twin World Trade Towers was so traumatic that most people won’t use words to describe it. They take refuge in euphemistic numbers. Then they use those numbers cut through with a slash to slash our history into before and after. The time before fear. The time of fear and skulking in which we now supposedly live. But the true shadow under which we live is the dark cloud of towering ambition. As Speigelman notes in his introductory spread:
I had anticipated that the shadows of the towers might fade while I was slowly sorting through my grief and putting it into boxes. I hadn’t anticipated that the hijackings off September 11 would themselves be hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a war recruitment poster.When the government began to move into full dystopian Big Brother mode and hurtle America into a colonialist adventure in Iraq–while doing very little to make America genuinely safer beyond confiscating nail clippers at airports–all the rage I’d suppressed after the 2000 election, all the paranoia I’d barely managed to squelch immediately after 9/11, returned with a vengence.
Under cover of this darkness, this state of panic in which we are encouraged to cower, our democracy is being stolen from us, in the name of protection, of national security. Once we gloried in sunshine laws and a freedom of information act. Now we have a government that says public documents cannot be entrusted to the people or even the people’s representatives. Once we could count on law to protect our liberties. Now people are arrested and jailed in secrecy, without counsel, without recourse. Even their families do not know what has happened to them. Once we were free to criticize and ridicule a president who was merely the servant of the people. Now we are called to account for undermining the dignity of the office, for not showing respect for The Leader, no matter what he does. The more young people he sends to die, we are told, the more we must show respect for their killer, lest those dead appear to have died in vain, which means more will be sent to die. And intellectuals conspired in this destruction of freedom: the time of irony is over, they said. Henceforth we are sheep. Sheep who will not even bleat.
To the everlasting shame of the American publishing industry, which, come to think of it, has gone from shame to shame to shame in the shadow of the Bush administration, this book was not initially published in the United States. It had to be published abroad by a “coalition of the willing” in Old Europe, led by Der Zeit. Only later did an American edition find a publisher.
As he searches for a way of comprehending the violence of the hijackers and the violence of the culture around him, Art Spiegelman also finds love and belonging. “Y’know,” he says in a sequence of four cels, “how I’ve called myself a 'rootless cosmopolitan' equally homeless anywhere on the planet? I was wrong...I finally understand why some Jews didn’t leave Berlin right after kristallnacht.”
And, for all the horror, he also discover that the living must go on.
On 9/11 time stopped. By 9/12/01 clocks began to tick again. But everyon knew it was the ticking of a giant gime bmb. Still even anxious new yorkers eventually run out of adrenaline and–boom!–you go back to thinking that you might live forever after all.But then, on 9/4/02 “Cowboy boots drop on Ground Zero as New York is transformed into a stage set for the Republican Presidential Convention, and Tragedy is transformed into Travesty.”
Posted by CKR for PLS.