Motherboard

The morning of 9/11 was a quiet, beautiful one. And for a little while after the roaring boom of something smashing into a building, it didn’t get much louder. The chatter on the newscasts that morning was idling, wondering, speculating. Video footage of a tower smoking for unclear reasons (an accident? terrorism?) was “Breaking News.”

And then, some clarity. Just some.

There is a vertiginous, haunted, unspeakable feeling I get watching those first TV news reports on the morning of September 11. Some are compiled in an excerpt from a hard-to-find DVD “September 11, 2001 – As It Happened – A Composite,” which is one of many audiovisual documents from a 9/11 archive called “Rhetoric of 9/11”. (The archive is produced by Michael Eidenmuller, a rhetoric connoisseur and professor at the University of Texas at Tyler.) It’s especially strange to watch videos like this on that madcap and messy YouTube, where we’re used to getting our videos cute and weird and funny, our news auto-tuned.

South Tower attacked. Excerpt from the DVD “September 11, 2001 – As It Happened – A Composite.”

When Flight 175 flew into the South Tower at 9:03 AM, a realization dawned on many of us that no amount of warnings or worries – and none of the martial chatter that summer, mainly about a missile defense shield to protect us from North Korea – had ever forced us to confront before. Terrorism had crash landed into America hard. The newscasters’ chatter about it, as it was happening, is a document of human incomprehensibility.

Virginia Heffernan described that critical moment recently, when “you can almost feel minds absorbing injury, cognitive immune systems springing into action and one of modern civilization’s master narratives being created.”

And then something happens. Some feeds show a plane burrowing into the south tower and seeming to exit as a fireball. Other feeds just show the fireball. On every network some version of “Oh, my God” can be heard. But no one curses, wails or goes mute.

Newscasters who have the southern view up on their screens report that “a second plane” — which a WB11 newscaster mistakes precrash for “a police helicopter” — has hit the World Trade Center’s south tower. Charles Gibson on ABC seizes the story from an eyewitness reporter he has been debriefing and guns it: “You could see the plane come in, just from the right-hand side of the screen.” Gibson, who suddenly morphs from affable “Good Morning America” host to war reporter, locks down the story. “So this looks like it’s some kind of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way in downtown New York,” he says.

South Tower collapse. Excerpt from the DVD “September 11, 2001 – As It Happened – A Composite.”

In total, 2,996 people would die, including nineteen hijackers, who took control of four airliners armed only with knives.

For all of the dramatic realizations that happened that day – ones that give some meaning to the idea of a “watershed moment”, that have burned the numbers 911 into a global collective memory – a very painful confusion lingered in the smoke. In the space of a few moments, the entire country, if not the world, changed. And we weren’t really sure how.

Watching that early moment of realization from this vantage point – seeing the shaky video, hearing the chatter of newscasters – is as compelling as it is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because it catapults us back to the edge of an epoch like a time machine, showing us an era when we seemed younger and more naive, when clouds had just started to coagulate on an emerald sky. Uncomfortable too because even as we promise never to forget, we want to so badly. And because, even at a distance of nearly a decade, even knowing everything we know, even having seen the many disasters and crises that would follow September 11, no amount of watching what happened and thinking about what happened helps us makes any more sense of it.

See, for instance, the doomed debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque”, a debate that is, according to a Taliban operative, “providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” (Thankfully the uploader has turned off the comments, presumably to prevent that inevitable stream of words that often answer confusion with more dangerous theories, that popular and sad Youtube pastime.)

For others of us, that difficulty of understanding what happened is perhaps why we may want to push the whole thing from our minds, to repress it and forget about it. And that is precisely why we need to try so hard not to.

See the Internet Archive’s Sept. 11 TV Archive, and read profiles of each of the victims of the attacks in The New York Times’ Portraits of Grief