Photographic Memory

David Plotz, in a column today on Slate, correctly calls NY Times columnist Frank Rich out on Rich's Sept 10 column. The subject of the discussion is the Sep. 11, 2001 photo of folks talking on the Brooklyn waterfront while, across the East River, smoke wafts up from the fallen World Trade Center towers. The photo, and Plotz's discussion, are here.

Rich's column uses the photo to discuss American apathy. He assumes the people in the photo have, because of their appearance in the photo, dusted themselves off from the tragedy and continuing on in everyday life. Rich writes that this is common to the American psyche. Plotz, in turn, wonders why Rich jumped to this conclusion. The people look rather like they are discussing the events that they have seen. For Plotz, the photo is an emblem of American democracy.

They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they're bored with 9/11, but because they're citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.

Ask yourself: What are these five people doing out on the waterfront, anyway? Do you really think, as Rich suggests, that they are out for "a lunch or bike-riding break"? Of course not. They came to this spot to watch their country's history unfold and to be with each other at a time of national emergency. Short of rushing to Ground Zero and digging for bodies, how much more patriotic and concerned could they have been?

I side with Plotz's interpretation. But more importantly, I applaud Plotz's last paragraph: "Rich and Hoepker and I have all characterized what these five people were doing and how they were feeling, but none of us really know. Wouldn't you like to hear from the five themselves? I would."

This is important because all the interpretations that Rich and Plotz offered are, in fact, what destroys our democracy--or more accurately, the willingness to lodge on to an unknown thing (be it a photo or an out of context line from a speech) an entirety of assumption and derivative conclusion (be it about the American psyche or the merit of someone running for office)...such willingness is precisely what weakens the deliberative democracy so important to our Nation. In other words, such willingness turns our citizenry into unthinking, unlearning, and all-assuming nincompoops that vote according to a thirty second TV advert.

It is our human nature to ascribe a context to a tidbit, and I do not advocate a life with no assumptions to fill the void of context. Otherwise, we'd be forever brains in a vat, or mini-Hamlets, refusing to act without a full knowledge of truth. However, we do need caution and vulnerability if we are going to go about with some intellectual responsibility. Caution to catch whatever bits of truth we can, and vulnerability to let us change our minds and grow.

Politics, I reckon, is where these two items are most lacking. Well, politics and gossip are maybe in a dead heat.