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News & Culture

LEAPS OF FAITH:
9/11.

COMIX 101:
Art Spiegelman at UCLA.

MEDIAEVIL:
An embarrassment of riches.

BORN TO SQUAT:
The Boss wants his web site.

SAVED!:
TopShelf Comics.

 

Leaps of Faith
TRAGIC SUICIDES OF 9/11

THE VIDEO OF TUESDAY'S EVENTS left us with images that burned into our cultural retina — icons that will now exist forever beside Zapruder’s film of JFK’s assassination, Nick Ut’s photo of a crying, naked Vietnamese girl, and the televised explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. One shot in particular was as elusive as it is powerful: that of people plummeting to their deaths from the doomed World Trade Center.
___America’s medium-of-choice broadcast live footage of the jumpers, but spared us the ad nauseam repetition of these images. In fact, they seemed only to resurface late in the evening — well past children’s bedtimes.
___Merciful, maybe. The damage to our collective psyche will run deep and manifest unpredictably — the millions of humans absorbing images and stories of the attack should be grateful for one less nightmare.
___But the restraint is also, perhaps, mistaken. We have a tradition of attaching gravitas to the words of the dying or condemned that arises, certainly, from sympathy, but also from the respect afforded one who has confronted his own mortality.
___By the same token, consider the attitudes of those who jumped. No doubt many reacted out of terror, an irrational response to an insane situation. But from witness accounts, there were some — including a man and a woman, hand in hand — who fell with deliberate composure.
___An assumption we can make about the people inside the Trade Center that day is that most were aware of the symbolism the building held. Most of the employees, too, were familiar with the failed bombing attempt seven and a half years ago. And as surely as shaking elicits fears of earthquake in Los Angeles, the thoughts of the Trade Center’s occupants turned to terrorists immediately upon the impact of the first airplane. Thus the act of leaping toward a voluntary terminus and denying the terrorist one life might have been a desperation-tinged victory of free will over determinism.
___We as a nation harbor a theistically driven prejudice against suicide. Maybe it’s that the ultimate escape from misery, an escape that represents the ultimate expression of physical self, denigrates the usefulness of spiritual soothing. Whatever the reason, in this at least, the Christian and Islamic religions find common ground. The prophet Muhammad said, “He who commits suicide by throttling shall keep on throttling himself in the hell fire, and he who commits suicide by stabbing himself shall keep on stabbing himself in the hell fire.”
I’d like to imagine souls falling, never reaching Muhammad’s fire but instead floating then soaring above an eternally pristine New York city skyline.