After attacks, `hero,' `survivor' not just words

Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald

Published Friday, September 21, 2001

                            

            Amid the rubble, we've reclaimed the word “tragedy.”

            It no longer applies to the self-induced drug overdose of a rock

            musician. Or to hip-hop misogynists shot in luxury cars during

            internecine gunplay. The entertainment industry, on Sept. 11, lost

            proprietary rights to “national tragedy.”

 

            We've re-learned the definition of heroism.

            A grotesquely overpaid, overindulged jock, who might (if the team

            publicist arranged for TV coverage) make a half-hour stop at a

            children's hospital, no longer qualifies. Twenty-five points a game

            or 110 yards rushing or 60 home runs no longer defines “American

            hero.”

 

            On Sept. 11, a horrific dose of reality wrenched control of the

            language away from Hollywood and big-time sports. The trivialized

            terminology of a self-absorbed, celebrity-obsessed culture was

            hurriedly retooled for more serious work.

 

            The thousands who negotiated the stairway down the smoke-filled core

            of the World Trade Center towers and emerged moments before the

            steel buckled and 220 concrete slabs pancaked into dust and rubble

            -- they reclaimed the word Survivor from CBS. Fear Factor, with

            cameras rolling in an environment of contrived danger, becomes a

            vulgarity as we consider the horror factor of Madeline Amy Sweeney,

            the attendant on Flight 11, describing via cellphone the butchering

            by hijackers, then the airplane veering sharply toward Manhattan.

            “I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!”

 

            Calamity and catastrophe and cataclysm are no longer words just to

            be coupled with “special effects” on a movie poster. And when

            American troops brave the hideously dangerous Hindu Kush mountains

            of northern Afghanistan, the battles and blood and bodies will not

            be the purview of video arcades.

 

            Clear Channel Communications sent out a memo to its 1,213 radio

            stations that certain songs -- Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over

            Troubled Waters, Alanis Morissette's Ironic, Bob Dylan's Knockin' on

            Heaven's Door and 157 others -- may be “lyrically questionable” to

            listeners. Yet, for years these same entertainment conglomerates

            have been trivializing disaster and death and conflict and violence

            and sex without regard to societal sensibilities.

 

            On Sept. 11, when reality struck, the MTV generation, whose only

            previous notion of national crisis involved a White House intern,

            struggled to describe the injury and horror inflicted on this

            nation.

            They could only utter, in one interview after another, “It was like

            watching a movie.”

            But gradually, in ash-covered coats, real American heroes were

            revealed. Their uniforms smoked as they pulled survivors from fiery

            ruins. Their rubber boots melted to the skin of their feet. More

            than 300 firemen died as the towers collapsed. These heroes had

            worked for union wages. No signing bonuses.

            Un-Hollywood heroes were aboard Flight 93, the passengers who

            decided, in the face of death, to fight back, saving the Capitol or

            the White House from becoming the day's fourth paroxysm.

 

            But the events of Sept. 11 didn't create heroes out of wilting

            pansies. However obscured by the celebrity culture, they've been

            among us all along: firemen, cops, teachers, nurses, parents. Real

            heroes reacting to a real tragedy. On Sept. 11, we took back the

            words we needed to describe them.