“Shame on them for doing that!” a white boomer said to me as I stood near the corner of Minor Avenue and Virginia Street looking at the tail of the decommissioned 747 that’s between two luxury towers in the Denny Triangle. She wore sunglasses and a coat too thick for the hot July afternoon. She was also pushing a pram with a small dog in it. “Think of the people who died in 9/11. It’s so disrespectful to them. How could they do this? A plane crashing into the buildings. It’s just unthinkable. And I have to look at it every day.”
I didn’t make the connection between the 747, which, when completed, might become a bar or music venue, and 9/11. I said to her, “But that happened way, way up there; this plane is very close to the ground.” She looked at me with suspicion and said, “Well, the planes fell to the ground, didn’t they?” I suppose so, I thought. Now she was pissed at me and the developers of Aero1200’s skyscrapers. Her dog, who looked like an Ewok, could tell I had upset their companion. I turned my back to both of them and crossed the street to have a closer look at the plane’s tail.
The truth of the matter is I’ve never had powerful feelings about 9/11, in part because I place nationalism in the same category as “village feeling.” which, as the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani put it in The Structure of World History, has its raison d’etre in xenophobia: the fear of strangers, of outsiders. Village feeling is the soil on which fascism can only grow. This is why so much noise has been made on the right about the mayor of New York City, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, attending the “9/11 remembrance at Ground Zero.” He is a Muslim and therefore a stranger and outsider. Those who destroyed the towers were strangers, outsiders, Muslims. The ideal person to lead an event that tightens, deepens, strengthens village feelings of this kind has to be white, male, hetero, and Christian.
As a foreign-born American (Black, African, agnostic), nationalism is a dead end because by its very nature it can’t be inclusive. This is why the patriotism of the left is always questioned, doubted, and distrusted: our political position is inherently cosmopolitan. Nationalism can only truly be the domain of the right because it demands that one (white, male, Christian) type not only be the default but also subordinate all others. Mamdani is not that type. Nor am I.
But what to make of the terrorist action that took place 25 years ago in Manhattan if submission to the village feeling is not an option? For this other kind of feeling, and one I feel powerfully, we must turn to Walter Benjamin, a great 20th century critical theorist who, being a Jewish intellectual, committed suicide in 1940 after failing to flee the Nazis.
In his posthumously published masterpiece, “Theses on the Concept of History,” he presents the Angle of History. Benjamin writes in these IX: “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
The catastrophe was there before 9/11; and it didn’t stop after 9/11: the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the Mumbai Attacks, the Norway attack, October 7, the destruction of Gaza and of Lebanon, the bombing of schoolgirls in Iran. Wreckage upon wreckage being hurled to the feet of history’s angel. This, I have been told by a number of Gen Zers, is exactly why they can’t fully appreciate the singularity of 9/11. The destruction they’ve seen on social media platforms such as TikTok has made 9/11 one among many catastrophes that have happened between then (when they were born) and now (the US is again at war in the Middle East).
Benjamin concludes thesis IX on this pessimistic note: “The angel would like to… awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.”
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