September 11th

Tonight at the Spiegeltent we did a September 11th memorial show. Billy delivered a very moving sermon. He talked about how we see the towers fall over and over, but it is an evil without a cause. "They hate us because of our freedom," our leaders tell us, but that is why we are at war, because we are blind to historical and political relationships in this world. We are trusting these leaders to figure this out for us, and we have to stop doing that. We have to take responsibility for peace on an individual level, to find peace in the world, in our communities, and in our selves.

Slavoj Zizek, one of my favorite phiolosophers, makes some similar statements in his comment in the Guardian. A column like this wouldn't get within 10 miles of the NY Times, I don't think. However, to be fair, there was a reasonable Bush bashing editorial in the times and a slightly bizarre survey of radical muslim blogs, reprinting pictures of muslims praying while dressed up as Coca Cola bottles. But my top pick was this architecture review, also in the NY Times, of the newly designed towers to be built at ground zero. In it, Nicolai Ouroussoff says:

[The architects] emphasize their buildings’ transparency, a tired cliché for the openness of a democratic society. But transparency is not just about openness. It’s about voyeurism, exhibitionism and surveillance, the last of which is probably more relevant than “freedom” at ground zero.

After the performance tonight we all walked to the WTC site, threw paper airplanes into the site with the last words of people who died there, and sang the first ammedment song. I'm glad we ended on that song - as far as learning the lessons of September 11th an important one to me is that we can not let freedom of expression become a casualty of war. It was important for me to bring the message of the first ammendment into a space where so many opponents to the freedom of expression have paraded in the past days.