Martyrdom and United Flight 93
Apr. 19th, 2006 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrI have been thinking a lot about martyrdom. A number of things have prompted this. I happened to pick up a book last night in the church library, as I was waiting for Fiona's confirmation class to finish, which recorded people's last words before death, including many martyrs' last words. Someone pointed out the recent anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, and I thought about Timothy McVeigh's burning passion, his conviction that when he went to his death, he was a martyr, striking a blow in revenge for the Branch Davidian martyrs. There is the Zacharias Moussoui trial, which I posted about previously. I was thinking more about his wish to be a martyr. I started thinking about Flight 93, since they ended the prosecution's case by playing the black box recording.
I have always wanted to understand the inexplicable, the point of view of the unknowable other that I cannot agree with myself. I know that Moussoui gloated as he listened to that recording of the last of Flight 93's doomed struggle. I remember in the weeks after that terrible day, our firm brought a human resources consultant to come in to talk to us about what happened that day. I remember I said during that meeting that I was reading the news compulsively, trying to understand. Trying to make sense. "Don't try," she said, "It doesn't make any sense at all."
But human beings hunger for meaning, to make a story that makes sense out of the baffling events of history. To understand the terrible, the unexplainable. We see that particularly with Flight 93. It was the one crumb of comfort we had in the midst of all that horror, and we claimed the passengers' heroism for our own. At least the terrorists didn't achieve all their goals. We rose up. We overturned their plans. We seized the day and saved the White House, or the Capitol. We died not as victims but as fighters. We did that.
I have thought about how American consoled themselves with the Flight 93 story. I have certainly seen how some have tried to use Flight 93 for their own purposes. President Bush tried to take the story and make it his: "Remember how the passengers decided to re-take the plane. They took a vote. They took a vote." [Insert speechifying about the virtues of democracy here]. Remember how he decided to co-opt Todd Beamer's catch phrase, "Let's roll"? [Which actually may be inaccurate: the September 11 commission tentatively concluded that he might have been saying "Roll it," meaning, roll the beverage cart forward to slam the cockpit doors.] I was angry at Bush for trying to take the passengers' heroism and drape it about himself, but I understood entirely his reason for doing so. Flight 93 was a powerful myth, and the President needed whatever tools of power he had at hand to help move a grieving nation forward. [Pity he chose to drive us forward to make war on a country that had NOTHING TO DO with September 11, but that's another post.]
Anyway, I had also read about and thought extensively about what the hijackers told themselves about martyrdom, when they planned their mission, when the leaders of Al-Quaeda talked about their mission afterwards. They were striking a blow for jihad. They were attacking the hated infidel. They were dying in glory. I know that the hijackers reasoned to themselves that the Muslims they killed in the World Trade Center (the ones they killed) would be counted by Allah as martyrs, too, to the jihad cause.
But I realized today that I have not thought much about what Al-Qaeda thinks about Flight 93. Do they see it as their failure? Do they look at the story of how those passengers rose up and wonder -- uh, did we maybe mistake what Allah thinks about all this? If we were right about all this, how did Allah overset our plans with this one flight?
No, I realized. When Al-Qaeda reads the transcript (and perhaps the Al-Qaeda sympathizers across the Middle East) they are not paying the slightest bit of attention to Todd Beamer praying the Lord's Prayer with a Verizon operator, or the desperate attempts of the passengers to ram open the cockpit doors.
No, they are too busy admiring how the hijackers, the jihadists, as they struck a blow against the infidels, died saying over and over Allah Akbar. It wasn't until today that I realized that both sides were laying claim to the myth for themselves, saying exactly the same thing about Flight 93: They died with a prayer on their lips; they failed, but they died fighting for Our Side.
The Flight 93 movie will be opening next week. The trailer moved me to tears (see it here, website is here).
Should I go see it? Should you?
Here is an interesting editorial upon the question. By all accounts, it is an extremely respectful treatment, made with the full support of the passengers' families, done by a director, Paul Greengrass, who has done a good job with very difficult emotionally-fraught work before, notably "Bloody Sunday," a documentary-style drama about a 1972 civil rights march in Northern Ireland in which 13 people were killed. The studio has said that they will donate 10% of the opening weekend gross to the Flight 93 memorial. [Edited to add: here is an article about the pains that the movie makers took. The pilot and co-pilots were played by actual United pilots. Two of the five flight attendant actresses were actual former flight attendants. Ben Sliney, the head of the FAA's Command Center on that day, who was actually reporting for his first day of work at that job on September 11, played himself, as did other FAA workers. Here is another article about the politics of making the film.]
Should it be seen? There is the temptation to use that story, even perhaps twisting it a little in the process to enhance the passengers' heroism, because it is so desperately powerful, resonating deeply in the gut. Offering us the seductive consolation of vicarious heroism, too. Example: The movie's slogan is, "Forty people sat down as strangers. They rose up as one." Which is very powerful, true. And yet, if you can manage to look at it coldly as a claim, that is probably not true. We don't know if indeed all the passengers voted to attack, and there were probably at least some that weren't rushing down that aisle, but cringing back, doing nothing more than hoping desperately that somehow, against all odds, that others would save them and they would survive.
And yet, and yet--there were still those who fought, knowing that hope was slim to nonexistant. You who have read my journal for a long time know how I love Lord of the Rings. One of the things that Tolkien admired most about Anglo-Saxon culture was the courage that they honored in battle, that rises up when all hope is lost. He wrote about that in the tale of the battle of Helm's Deep:
Read a fuller account of the story of Flight 93 here.
[Poll #713397]
And for further thinking on this, I recommend that you go re-read the chapter "Foregathering Song" in Diane Duane's novel Deep Wizardry. That is absolutely the best artistic response I ever saw to the story of Flight 93. Written sixteen years before it happened.
I have always wanted to understand the inexplicable, the point of view of the unknowable other that I cannot agree with myself. I know that Moussoui gloated as he listened to that recording of the last of Flight 93's doomed struggle. I remember in the weeks after that terrible day, our firm brought a human resources consultant to come in to talk to us about what happened that day. I remember I said during that meeting that I was reading the news compulsively, trying to understand. Trying to make sense. "Don't try," she said, "It doesn't make any sense at all."
But human beings hunger for meaning, to make a story that makes sense out of the baffling events of history. To understand the terrible, the unexplainable. We see that particularly with Flight 93. It was the one crumb of comfort we had in the midst of all that horror, and we claimed the passengers' heroism for our own. At least the terrorists didn't achieve all their goals. We rose up. We overturned their plans. We seized the day and saved the White House, or the Capitol. We died not as victims but as fighters. We did that.
I have thought about how American consoled themselves with the Flight 93 story. I have certainly seen how some have tried to use Flight 93 for their own purposes. President Bush tried to take the story and make it his: "Remember how the passengers decided to re-take the plane. They took a vote. They took a vote." [Insert speechifying about the virtues of democracy here]. Remember how he decided to co-opt Todd Beamer's catch phrase, "Let's roll"? [Which actually may be inaccurate: the September 11 commission tentatively concluded that he might have been saying "Roll it," meaning, roll the beverage cart forward to slam the cockpit doors.] I was angry at Bush for trying to take the passengers' heroism and drape it about himself, but I understood entirely his reason for doing so. Flight 93 was a powerful myth, and the President needed whatever tools of power he had at hand to help move a grieving nation forward. [Pity he chose to drive us forward to make war on a country that had NOTHING TO DO with September 11, but that's another post.]
Anyway, I had also read about and thought extensively about what the hijackers told themselves about martyrdom, when they planned their mission, when the leaders of Al-Quaeda talked about their mission afterwards. They were striking a blow for jihad. They were attacking the hated infidel. They were dying in glory. I know that the hijackers reasoned to themselves that the Muslims they killed in the World Trade Center (the ones they killed) would be counted by Allah as martyrs, too, to the jihad cause.
But I realized today that I have not thought much about what Al-Qaeda thinks about Flight 93. Do they see it as their failure? Do they look at the story of how those passengers rose up and wonder -- uh, did we maybe mistake what Allah thinks about all this? If we were right about all this, how did Allah overset our plans with this one flight?
No, I realized. When Al-Qaeda reads the transcript (and perhaps the Al-Qaeda sympathizers across the Middle East) they are not paying the slightest bit of attention to Todd Beamer praying the Lord's Prayer with a Verizon operator, or the desperate attempts of the passengers to ram open the cockpit doors.
No, they are too busy admiring how the hijackers, the jihadists, as they struck a blow against the infidels, died saying over and over Allah Akbar. It wasn't until today that I realized that both sides were laying claim to the myth for themselves, saying exactly the same thing about Flight 93: They died with a prayer on their lips; they failed, but they died fighting for Our Side.
The Flight 93 movie will be opening next week. The trailer moved me to tears (see it here, website is here).
Should I go see it? Should you?
Here is an interesting editorial upon the question. By all accounts, it is an extremely respectful treatment, made with the full support of the passengers' families, done by a director, Paul Greengrass, who has done a good job with very difficult emotionally-fraught work before, notably "Bloody Sunday," a documentary-style drama about a 1972 civil rights march in Northern Ireland in which 13 people were killed. The studio has said that they will donate 10% of the opening weekend gross to the Flight 93 memorial. [Edited to add: here is an article about the pains that the movie makers took. The pilot and co-pilots were played by actual United pilots. Two of the five flight attendant actresses were actual former flight attendants. Ben Sliney, the head of the FAA's Command Center on that day, who was actually reporting for his first day of work at that job on September 11, played himself, as did other FAA workers. Here is another article about the politics of making the film.]
Should it be seen? There is the temptation to use that story, even perhaps twisting it a little in the process to enhance the passengers' heroism, because it is so desperately powerful, resonating deeply in the gut. Offering us the seductive consolation of vicarious heroism, too. Example: The movie's slogan is, "Forty people sat down as strangers. They rose up as one." Which is very powerful, true. And yet, if you can manage to look at it coldly as a claim, that is probably not true. We don't know if indeed all the passengers voted to attack, and there were probably at least some that weren't rushing down that aisle, but cringing back, doing nothing more than hoping desperately that somehow, against all odds, that others would save them and they would survive.
And yet, and yet--there were still those who fought, knowing that hope was slim to nonexistant. You who have read my journal for a long time know how I love Lord of the Rings. One of the things that Tolkien admired most about Anglo-Saxon culture was the courage that they honored in battle, that rises up when all hope is lost. He wrote about that in the tale of the battle of Helm's Deep:
"The end will not be long," said the King. "But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap...When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm's horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride then with me, son of Arathorn? Maybe we will cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song--if any be left to sing of us hereafter."I am sure Todd Beamer would have followed Theoden. And Tom Burnett, Jr. And Mark Bingham. And Jeremy Glick, brandishing his butter knife. And Cee Cee Lyles, flinging her pots of boiling water. The LA Times article linked above reasons, then, that for our culture, the Flight 93 movie is like the ballad, the song, that Theoden longed to have told of his end, after his death. Understanding it that way, I think I can go see it. [Remembering, however, that as far as the other side is concerned, we're the orcs.]
"I will ride with you," said Aragorn.
Read a fuller account of the story of Flight 93 here.
[Poll #713397]
And for further thinking on this, I recommend that you go re-read the chapter "Foregathering Song" in Diane Duane's novel Deep Wizardry. That is absolutely the best artistic response I ever saw to the story of Flight 93. Written sixteen years before it happened.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-20 04:23 am (UTC)I'm very ambivalent about seeing the movie because I pretty much expect it to be filled with Hollywood bull-shit and flag-waving and tear-jerking and political posturing in some position or another. Maybe it'll be much better than that; that would be a good thing.