Taboos Fade as Sept. 11 Recedes Into Past

In a cavernous room here a few weeks ago, 800 relatives of the Sept. 11 dead were shocked into silence when one of their leaders bluntly told them that some Americans consider them “a greedy pack of wolves” for criticizing proposed rules for a federal victims’ compensation fund.

A widow from Long Island with two young children clasped her hands and shook them in the air as Anthony Gardner, chairman of the World Trade Center United Family Group, continued speaking. “They don’t understand us,” she said to no one in particular. “They don’t know what we’re facing, a future with children and not enough income, nothing to keep us going.”

While it would have been unthinkable to criticize the bereaved in the days after Sept. 11, the sense of reverence surrounding the event is beginning to fall away for many.

Although there remains a great reservoir of emotion around the event and goodwill toward those affected, there are also signs that some people are becoming fatigued by references to Sept. 11. Humorists are back to satirizing the president and plumbing the worst attack in U.S. history for good jokes. The many Sept. 11 tributes--from the Super Bowl halftime show to the Olympics opening ceremony--are starting to wear on some.

“I’m not sure I would have felt this way in the fall, but I’m a little tired of these tributes, and do they have to be a part of everything we do?” said Ilana Smith, a Tenafly, N.J., housewife who had a living room full of Super Bowl watchers. Many of them groaned during the human reenactment of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. “That,” Smith added, “was over the top.”

In a recent column in Salon, an Internet publication, Daniel Harris complained about the “kitschification” of 9/11. The ribbons, commemorative quilts, flag refrigerator magnets and inspirational songs, he said, serve to silence “dissenting opinions.”

But while flag stickers are not exactly being peeled off car windows in Atlanta, Kara Cummings, an architect there, said she and her friends are not as focused on patriotism and Sept. 11 as they were just weeks ago. Rather, they’ve fallen back into ordinary life, going to malls and the movies again after a few months’ retreat.

“I knew people who worried about getting stuck in the dark with too many people they didn’t know, so they avoided the movies,” Cummings said. “Now they’re back.”

Certainly, terrorism and the war in Afghanistan remain burning issues. But now the day’s water cooler chatter is as much about Enron Corp., the economy and more personal concerns.

Culture Sped Recovery

Considering the hand wringing, paranoia and collective grief of six months ago, this return to normality has happened remarkably fast, experts say. The speed of modern life and the absence of further attacks have allowed many Americans to move on faster than many first might have believed.

Even most New Yorkers have eased back into life, riding subways they once fretted about and returning to office towers they had feared as targets. Only days after he was sworn in, the city’s new mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, rejected Rudolph W. Giuliani’s vision for a Sept. 11 memorial--and he caught surprisingly little flak for opposing his lionized predecessor on the matter.

“It’s our culture of fast and faster which tends to wipe out every product, every celebrity, every traumatization to make room for the new product, the new celebrity and new trauma,” said Marshall Blonsky, a professor of semiotics--the study of signs and symbols of culture--at the New School for Social Research here.

No one, Blonsky says, should expect New York police officers and firefighters to continue in their mythic roles. New York just could not be America’s teddy bear for very long.

“What we’re celebrating today . . . we’ll forget tomorrow,” the professor said. “That is what it means to be a culture of consumption, speed and surface.”

Venom against the victims’ families six months ago would have been unfathomable. But early sympathy has given way to public criticism reflected in about 8,000 comments posted on the Web site of the Department of Justice and in e-mails to the various family groups.

“What a bunch of crybabies,” griped an anonymous posting on the Justice Department Web site. “The U.S. government should never have agreed to compensation for them.” “The U.S. taxpayers don’t owe the victims’ families anything,” was another comment. “We did not kill their loved ones. . . . They should have had insurance.”

The federal victims’ fund was set up by Congress 10 days after the attack to compensate relatives for economic loss and emotional suffering, as long as they agreed to waive their right to sue. Some families said the fund’s rules were unfair and would leave many with nothing. They came together in groups to force change and now await a final ruling by a special master on how the money will be disbursed.

In the meantime, the solidarity among the families has begun to erode. One group leader quietly attributed the backlash against the families to the personality of another group leader who appears frequently on CNN.

“But don’t quote me,” he said, quickly. “In fact, never quote me again on the compensation fund. The complexity of it created a lot of controversy. Different family members had different objections, and I’ve had enough.”

Still, there are some lines that have not been crossed, some taboos that have not slipped away. Politicians, for example, criticize the events of Sept. 11 at their own peril.

White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. had to apologize last month for saying that New York lawmakers’ efforts to get federal money for Sept. 11-related costs were like “a little money-grubbing game.”

Humor Salved Wounds

If some Americans are weary of flag-waving and the latest terrorist alert from Washington, the events are still present in their lives. For the sum of what went on was incomprehensible--the fiery attacks on landmarks, the anthrax scares that crippled the U.S. Postal Service, the war, the billions of dollars spent to fight terrorism.

With life that out of proportion, one way Americans sought to understand it was to find a way to laugh about it.

Political humor on the late-night TV shows is up 38% over pre-Sept. 11 averages after dropping by half immediately following the attacks, according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which monitored “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” “Late Show With David Letterman” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

Shows such as “South Park” and the late-night comics quickly made fun of a Dec. 13 videotape of Osama bin Laden talking about the hijackers. “Saturday Night Live” even included a few riffs about the tape that were slightly sympathetic to the suicide bombers and parodied the towers falling.

“It seems the time that elapses between catastrophes and comic takes on them grows shorter and shorter,” says Steve O’Donnell, a New York-based writer who has worked for Letterman and Chris Rock.

“It took almost 100 years for jokes to emerge about Lincoln’s assassination--as in ‘What did you think of the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’--and less than a decade about John F. Kennedy’s death.”

That said, O’Donnell says the smart-aleck “American spirit is not only condonable but actually is to be encouraged.” However, he has yet to hear “really tasteless jokes--no deaths of civilians or servicemen made light of.”

However, the commercialization of the tragedy began within weeks of Sept. 11 and has grown exponentially. Framed posters of the New York skyline featuring a ghostly image of the twin towers have tested the line between commercialization and commemoration. Now, every type of clothing article emblazoned with Sept. 11 reminders is being sold around ground zero. Infant bibs, socks, nighties, ski caps (in black and gray) come with “9/11-Ground Zero” on them.

Also, within weeks of Sept. 11, a race ensued to trademark the last known words of hero Todd Beamer, who was heard saying, “Let’s roll” on an in-flight phone as passengers prepared to confront hijackers on the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

A foundation set up in Beamer’s name applied for the trademark for “Let’s roll” but found itself in an ongoing competition with at least a dozen others that wanted to make money from his heroic words by putting them on T-shirts, sweatshirts and fireworks displays.

Jack L. Williams, 59, a contractor from Grosse Pointe, Mich., applied for the trademark on Sept. 24. He was quoted as saying: “I don’t care what your name is, it’s first in, first swim. It’s all about good old American capitalism.”

Perspective Is Everything

The speed at which the event has receded from people’s minds has a lot to do, in many instances, with how far they were from the scenes of destruction Sept. 11. The Rev. Debbie Little, an Episcopal priest from Boston who happened to be a block from the World Trade Center that day, said she is now living in a private world of worry as she walks the streets of her Cambridge neighborhood. Certainly, she has dear friends who have listened patiently to her story of near-death. But most people can’t relate to what she went through.

“I really thought the ground beneath me was safe,” she said. “I still think a lot about how that illusion was shattered.”

But she also knows there are people who were closer to the twin towers that day who are even more troubled than she is six months later.

“My terror is not as intense as somebody who was a half a block closer. This made such a physical and psychic imprint on people,” she said.

It’s not surprising then that people hundreds of miles away from the World Trade Center could not fully grasp the horror of nearly 3,000 people being killed in a few hours.

People in small Oregon towns found that they could feel connected to the event only by reading daily portraits of the dead in the Oregonian newspaper in Portland.

“These people are my children and my grown grandchildren,” Florence Bancroft, 71, of Portland wrote in January to the newspaper’s ombudsman after he announced the Oregonian would stop reprinting the mini-profiles that had first run in the New York Times. “Their stories help tie our country together across the expanse of our nation in a special bond.”

It may be that New York’s reaction to the catastrophe also helped the rest of the country get past the trauma. The relentlessly upbeat Giuliani drove many Americans back to their daily routines.

“New York was the strong widow saying, ‘Hey, we’re New York. It’s OK,’ ” said Tom Gilmore, a downtown Los Angeles loft developer who used to live in New York and wears cuff links that look like subway tokens as a reminder of his roots.

“If this tragedy recedes from the conscience of America because we’re strong, that’s OK,” he added. “If it recedes because we’re hardened or we don’t care, that’s not OK.”