The Politics of Consolation: Memory & the Meaning of September 11 by Christina Simko (review)

In the weeks following 9/11, anyone challenging the official, jingoistic narrative of why 9/11 happened and what it meant was met with ferocious indignation across the media landscape and on the streets of New York City. Infamous rapper KRS-One dared voice an unpopular opinion and was lampooned for it. He said that he was sick of hearing that 9/11 was an attack on all Americans. When he, as a young "New Yorker," went down to the financial district in Lower Manhattan, he would be chased away by cops and pushed toward the subway with instructions to return to the poor neighborhood where he'd come from and leave the rich white folks alone (Melnick 2009, 95).

Native American academic Ward Churchill went a step further. He described the victims in the Twin Towers as "little Eichmanns" who had long made themselves rich and fat on the suffering of people in the third and developing world at the stroke of a keyboard (Churchill 2003). It was no surprise that the attacks on Churchill were shrill and based on an embarrassing misunderstanding of the true horror of what had transpired both during the Third Reich and in Lower Manhattan on that "sunny Tuesday" (Versluys 2009, 3).

As I was reading Christina Simko's book, I found myself searching for the irony. Here was something vital being attempted: a rigorous, close reading and account of what Simko calls the "Politics of Consolation" that goes to the heart of what it means to remember events while also living and working in the United States. My initial inability to find the irony left me feeling uneasy. There were accounts of supposedly inspirational speeches and events that theoretically defined what it means to be American. All of the usual suspects were there. Lincoln at Gettysburg. Kennedy on the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. Pearl Harbor. And now Bloomberg at Ground Zero. But where was the outrage? Where was the obviousness of the horror and indifference from the political elite that has most characterized what "The USA" has come to mean for people holding powerful grudges throughout the world?

I didn't really find irony, but I think I found something better. With calmness and ferocious scholarly insight, Simko's book leaves you feeling very uncomfortable with how the politics of consolation has come to define the twenty-first century, an era that is synonymous with terror, disaster, crisis, and widespread fear and anxiety. Her account takes a path that I am not accustomed to seeing in scholarship of this kind, which is typically fiery and argumentative and which posts demands that we must change as a society or be hoisted on our own petard. Rather, Simko says "this is us." We'd often rather feel better than do better things. We want to be consoled, so improving the world will have to be perpetually postponed unless consoling ourselves can overlap with doing good things (and these things should and do overlap in complex ways).

Chapter two refers to what Simko calls the "civil scriptures." It is a metaphor that cuts deep. At its most basic level, it points doubly to the puritanical and the religious in US politics and society. I say doubly because religion is ingrained in the United States literally and metaphorically. The United States is perhaps the most Christian country on the planet, and this makes opaque much in political, cultural, and social life that should perhaps be more transparent. As a metaphor, a religious response is what public life demands. Situation "A" demands response "B" and conclusion "C." Simko traces this to puritanical ideals and the belief in early denizens of the United States that they were God's chosen people in the nation that is the home stadium for the Protestant ethic.

What's amazing about this book is that Simko achieves all this, and sparks strong emotions in the reader, without collapsing on judgmental...