911 Culture by Jeffrey Melnick

Author:Jeffrey Melnick
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Of course by the time the novelists got around to the falling man, journalist Tom Junod had already published his long piece in Esquire (2003) on the actual person in the famous picture by Richard Drew. Part detective story, part meditation on what we want to see in the wake of 9/11, Junod’s piece (now also a video documentary) opened the door to numerous novelists and visual artists interested in testing the “jumper” taboo. A year earlier, sculptor Eric Fischl got the message that his work in a similar vein was premature, at least according to audiences. The mounting of his sculpture “Tumbling Woman” (see Figure 5) in the lower concourse of Rockefeller Center around the first anniversary of 9/11 was met with almost unanimous disgust and the sculpture was soon covered up. Fischl tried to promote the idea that his sculpture was meant to capture the feeling of floating and all of the ways that this might resonate for New Yorkers a year after 9/11, but to no avail.

The line of people who jumped to their deaths during that awful morning of September 11 appeared as a tragic expression of American democracy: a racially and economically diverse mix of bond traders, restaurant workers, and administrative assistants waited at those windows for their chance to escape the punishing heat and suffocating smoke. But when Hurricane Katrina hit in August, almost 4 years later, that heartbreaking vision of equality promoted by the World Trade Center jumpers was washed away by the more compelling vision of the inequities of race and class featured in media coverage of the flood. The democratic appeal of the rising and falling narrative, mostly about the intactness of white families, could not be sustained once Hurricane Katrina revealed the realities of Black suffering in America.

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