Senior Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
MINNEAPOLIS, MN (ANS) -- A tenet for most industries seems to be that it’s all about looking forward – invention, innovation, implementation. But for newspapers, and the media in general, it’s all about looking back.
On the eve on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States,www.stuffjournalistslike.com says, somewhat sarcastically in a post on Facebook, this “must be part of their (the media’s) winning business strategy.”
The website also says that, “Anniversaries are like scabs journalists can’t help but pick at.”
Lest I seem cynical, it seems to me that is ‘part and parcel’ of the job, and comes with the territory. Looking back either wistfully or mournfully is grist for the mill, and in some perverse way, provides job security for those of us in the media. I even have a book for journalists which highlights the great and terrible things that have happened on certain dates in order to help reporters pitch stories to their editors.
Stuffjournalistlike.com says: “Newspapers aren’t content with delivering just the day’s bad news. No, no, no. Newspapers and journalists are determined to remind readers of bad news year after year.”
It states: “Much like Hollywood’s penchant for sticking to sequels, editors and publishers think readers want to revisit the same story year after year. Just as people and communities try to move beyond these horrible incidents, newspapers think it’s journalists’ jobs to rehash painful memories. Anniversaries are like scabs journalists can’t help but pick at.”
According to Stuffjournalistslike, most journalists will have the opportunity to cover one, maybe two historic events early in their careers. “They would like to cover more such events but they spend the rest of their careers covering every anniversary,” it says.
The website continues: “Lucky enough to cover the worst bus accident in your small town? How about that workplace shooting spree? 9/11? Then your portfolio will be filled with anniversary stories of that event. Lucky you. Journalists and readers will get to relive the horror each year (most forget that journalists also witness these events). Sure, for the first couple of anniversaries journalists might actually care about updating readers on victims and people involved. How has the community moved forward? How have victims recovered? What have we learned? But by the third of fourth anniversary, journalists go into a jaded autopilot state of mind, calling the same sources, asking the same questions and even considering dusting off last year’s story and giving it a little updated polish.”
It adds: “And for some arbitrary reason, anniversaries that end in 0 or 5 are seemingly more important to readers and newspaper editors. So every five years after some horrible event, journalists have to exploit the situation more than usual, complete with a special section, new interviews with victim’s families and an extra shot of whiskey alongside their usual order of a double shot (anniversaries should be considered a workplace hazard for journalists). Occasionally, anniversary stories can be cathartic for both readers and journalists, but any positive side-effects are washed away when publishers attempt to take advantage of the public’s mourning and try to hawk a ‘limited’ anniversary special edition.”
Stuffjournalistslike.com concludes: “Journalists like anniversaries, well, because they remind journalists that not only do they write the first draft of history, they are expected to write the updated editions as well.”
I am tempted to ask how this fits into the American psyche, known for it’s eternally optimistic outlook?
After 9/11, searching for American optimism
Ted Anthony, assistant managing editor for The Associated Press, who writes frequently about American culture, in a September 9 article on the fate of American optimism inwww.aspenbusinessjournal.com , says: “Before the towers crumbled, before the doomed people jumped and the smoke billowed and the planes hit, the collective American memory summoned one fleeting fragment of beauty: a clear blue sky.”
Anthony writes: “So many of those who remember that day invoke that detail. Last week, New York magazine, which has been running a 9/11 ‘encyclopedia’ ahead of the 10th anniversary, added an entry for
'Blue: What everyone would remember first.’ It chronicled nearly a dozen of the ways that Americans recalling 9/11 anchor their looks back with a reminiscence of blue sky.”
Anthony says it is no coincidence that the power of such an image endures. “Blue sky is a canvas of possibility, and optimistic notions of better tomorrows - futures that deliver endless promise - are fundamental to the American tradition. In the United States, to ‘blue-sky’ something can mean visionary, fanciful thinking unbound by the weedy entanglements of the moment. Off we go into the wild blue yonder.”
But, says Anthony, the years since 9/11 have dealt a gut punch to four centuries of American optimism. “A volley of cataclysmic events - two far-off wars, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and, for the past four years, serious economic downturn - has worn down the national psyche. It's easy to ask: Is optimism, one of the defining pillars of the American character, on the wane?”
Anthony quotes Jason Seacat, who teaches about the psychology of optimism and hope at Western New England University: "Some of the really big challenges we are facing are really starting to sink in with people. You talk about that can-do spirit that used to exist, and it still can exist. But what I get a lot of is, ‘This is such a huge problem, and there's really nothing I can do about it.’"
Anthony continues: “Welcome to the rest of the human race, some might say. Europeans, who can enjoy their fatalism, have been known to poke fun at American optimism. And why not? You could argue that the virus of optimism was spread to this continent by supplicants beguiled by the vision of a land that promised brighter futures - presuming you left the Old World to pursue them.
“Since the 1600s, when one of America's first Puritan leaders cast the society that would become the United States as a ‘shining city upon a hill,’ the notion that one can will a better future into existence has been a central thread of the American story. The Declaration of Independence enshrined as national mythology not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it - the chasing of a dream alongside life and liberty as the ultimate expression of self-definition.
“It took root. This became the nation where getting bigger and better was a right granted by God, where the Optimists Club was founded and ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ became a bestseller, where you could bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun. ‘Finish each day and be done with it,’ American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson exhorted. ‘Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.’"
Anthony says “that old nonsense, alas, has a way of loitering around and gumming up the works.”
He goes on to say that last year, as we began a new decade, a Gallup poll found that 34 percent of Americans were pessimistic about the country's future - the highest number at the start of a decade since the 1980s began. Numbers from Gallup's Economic Confidence Index late last month were the lowest since March 2009.
“Most tellingly, perhaps, a majority of Americans - 55 percent - said this year they found it unlikely that today's youth will have better lives than their parents,” he says.
He asks, “More anecdotally, when was the last time that popular culture produced a strong vision of an optimistic American future? We got those all the time in the mid-20th century, era of the World's Fair ‘Futurama’ and promises of jet-packing your way to the office in the morning. But the Jetsonian view of tomorrow has become quaint, and today forlorn narratives like ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes,’ the zombie apocalypse drama ‘The Walking Dead’ and Cormac McCarthy's ‘The Road’ dominate the American futurescape.”
Anthony says that in the weeks directly after 9/11, optimism seemed on the rise for a time. “The trumpet had summoned us again, and some people expressed a renewed sense of purpose. A high-stakes seriousness settled in. We spun tales of freshly minted heroes, gave blood, held benefits, told each other that hey, don't worry, things will get better. A national coming together and the accompanying resoluteness were, it seemed, feeding hope.”
"In an odd way, for all its tragedy, 9/11 reinvigorated the sources of American optimism at a very particular time," says Peter J. Kastor, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis. "The problem now is recapturing that."
“Today,” says Anthony, “politicians struggle to project the all-important optimistic outlook that will help them win elections and govern a cranky citizenry. Yet optimism is a must-have narrative for any politician looking to lead. And the most effective among them - the Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan - have built their images around optimism. ‘Morning in America,’ Reagan called it.”
Anthony quotes Political consultant Bob Shrum, who wrote Ted Kennedy's famous and optimistic speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention ("The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die"),and who says successful politicians deploy optimism as a tool to "expand America's vision of itself." The ones who endure, he says, "are people who help define and enlarge the American spirit."
Anthony says "the 'Audacity of Hope' president" used the theme Thursday night in his jobs speech to Congress after cataloguing employment problems and putting forward his solutions. "We are tougher than the times that we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been," Barack Obama said. "So let's meet the moment. Let's get to work, and let's show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth."
Not everyone finds salvation in positive thinking, Anthony says. He goes on to cite the cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich who wrote an entire book in 2009 on the country's excessive optimism. In "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," Ehrenreich assessed it this way: "Positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology - the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it."
Anthony says Ehrenreich identified an important point: There is a big difference between unfettered hope and the American brand of optimism. Hope, she asserts, is an emotion; optimism is "a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation."
He asks: "And what, after all, is more American than a conscious, supremely confident expectation that things will turn out OK? That if we visualize the future, and are simply American enough as we forge forward, bright tomorrows will happen.
“That may be the central challenge for American optimism at the dawn of the second decade after 9/11: figuring out how much of the dream should be about the clear blue sky, and how much should be about wrestling with the problems that percolate beneath it. A balance, in effect, between the promise of our tomorrows and the reality of our todays."
He concludes: “It's not like the future is going anywhere, though. It's been our comforting companion for too long, and blue-sky dreams have a way of clawing to the top of any American story. Even after 9/11 and the uneasy decade that followed it tested the optimism of so many, that's the thing about tomorrow: No matter what, it's still always a day away.”
Time to leave 9/11 behind
E.J. Dionne Jr., in September 7 opinion article for www.washingtonpost.com , says: “After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. As a nation we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself.”
Dionne says that reflections on the meaning of the horror and the years that followed are inevitably inflected by our own political or philosophical leanings. “It’s a critique that no doubt applies to my thoughts as well,” he writes. “We see what we choose to see and use the event as we want to use it.”
Dionne, who writes about politics in a twice-a-week column and on the PostPartisan blog for the Washington Post, says that as the country marks the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a collection of cartoons about the attacks and their aftermath, “…does nothing to honor those who died and those who sacrificed to prevent even more suffering. In the future, the anniversary will best be reserved as a simple day of remembrance in which all of us humbly offer our respect for the anguish and the heroism of those individuals and their families.”
Dionne states: “But if we continue to place 9/11 at the center of our national consciousness, we will keep making the same mistakes. Our nation’s future depended on far more than the outcome of a vaguely defined ‘war on terrorism,’ and it still does. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies.”
Dionne says: “We asked for great sacrifice over the past decade from the very small portion of our population who wear the country’s uniform, particularly the men and women of the Army and the Marine Corps. We should honor them, too. And, yes, we should pay tribute to those in the intelligence services, the FBI and our police forces who have done such painstaking work to thwart another attack.”
Dionne states: “It was often said that terrorism could not be dealt with through ‘police work,’ as if the difficult and unheralded labor involved was not grand or bold enough to satisfy our longing for clarity in what was largely a struggle in the shadows.
He continues: “In the flood of anniversary commentary, notice how often the term ‘the lost decade’ has been invoked. We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home — on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.
“This is not ‘isolationism.’ It is a common sense that was pushed aside by the talk of ‘glory’ and ‘honor,’ by utopian schemes to transform the world by abruptly reordering the Middle East — and by our fears. While we worried that we would be destroyed by terrorists, we ignored the larger danger of weakening ourselves by forgetting what made us great.”
He concludes: “We have no alternative from now on but to look forward and not back. This does not dishonor the fallen heroes, and Lincoln explained why at Gettysburg. ‘We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow this ground,’ he said. ‘The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.’ The best we could do, Lincoln declared, was to commit ourselves to ‘a new birth of freedom.’ This is still our calling.”
Nearly 30 years ago, I came to the United States as an immigrant from Great Britain, to start a new life, seeking that ‘shining city upon a hill’. I was attracted by the ‘can do’ mentality and the seemingly eternal optimism and ‘upward look’ I found in Americans I met in my homeland. That’s what made me want to move here.
In 1995, after being here 13 years, I became an American citizen because I wanted to be part of the 'grand optimism' I had seen and the indomitable spirit Americans seemed to possess. This characteristic seemed to help bolster my own Christian faith.
My prayer for my fellow Americans is that you will once again look to the Heavens from which our Salvation comes and find that eternal optimistic spirit reborn in you in a personal relationship with your Creator through His Son Jesus Christ.
Picking at the scab won’t make the wound heal any quicker -- it will only make it bleed more. Give the wound time to heal and move on with your “hand in the Hand of the Man Who Calms the Sea.”
He has promised to lead, guide, guard, provide and protect. And he will heal our wounds if only we let Him.
| ** Michael Ireland is Senior Correspondent for ANS. He is an international British freelance journalist who was formerly a reporter with a London (United Kingdom) newspaper and has been a frequent contributor to UCB UK, a British Christian radio station. While in the UK, Michael traveled to Canada and the United States, Albania,Yugoslavia, Holland, Germany,and Czechoslovakia. He has reported for ANS from Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, Jordan, China,and Russia. Michael's volunteer involvement with ASSIST News Service is a sponsored ministry department -- 'Michael Ireland Media Missionary' (MIMM) -- of A.C.T. International of P.O.Box 1649, Brentwood, TN 37024-1649, at: Artists in Christian Testimony (A.C.T.) International where you can make a donation online under 'Donate' tab, then look for 'Michael Ireland Media Missionary' under 'Donation Category' to support his stated mission of 'Truth Through Christian Journalism.' Michael is a member in good standing of the National Writers Union, Society of Professional Journalists, Religion Newswriters Association, Evangelical Press Association and International Press Association. If you have a news or feature story idea for Michael, please contact him at: ANS Senior Reporter |
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