United 93 Drumbeat Sounds In The UK
Observer columnist, Mary Riddell, loses her head in today’s edition over Paul Greengrass’s United 93 which has seen its UK release date moved up from the 1st of September to the 2nd of June.
In a commentary entitled, “For the sake of humanity, I urge you to see United 93″ (she can thank the subbies for that), Riddell gushes in the kind of full-blooded hard sell to which even PR flaks at Universal Pictures have yet to stoop (though maybe they egged her on, bought her dinner, sent her flowers, that sort of thing). Riddell buys the heroic myth of United 93 as if it were the actual result of an independent investigation and attempts to make the case that seeing this film will somehow stop the war drums from beating for Iran.
I’m not so sure. Since I grew up in a family that more or less took Cecil B. DeMille’s version of The Ten Commandments as gospel (despite Moses being confined to The Old Testament), I understand that Paul Greengrass’s film will now obscure if not totally eclipse any truth that might have been known about Flight 93. I would much prefer a thorough, exhaustive, independent investigation of these events before the “official” story is committed to celluloid. Though much has been made by others (including Riddell) about the film’s subtle criticisms of the Bush administration’s failures on that dreaded day, such a recreation cannot avoid the appearance of propaganda with the intent of furthering Americans’ notions of their own heroism, their psychological status as victims and shoring up flagging support for Bush’s ridiculous “war on terror.” (Add to that, support for the occupation of Iraq since, after all, a majority of Americans once thought that Saddam Hussein himself was responsible for 9/11. They can put that in the sequel.)
It’s a shame someone didn’t arrange a personal screening of the plucky, courageous documentary Loose Change, 2nd Edition for Riddell or point her towards The Scholars for 9/11 Truth website, both of which are cultural artifacts well worth investigating along with United 93, all three now indelibly associated with and representative of cultural and societal movements in complete resistance to one another: a quest for truth v. an acceptance of myth. As is typical of human behaviour, at this time with the emergence of 9/11 into the popular culture, people want to believe that the truth is done and dusted, that the truth about these events is “well established” in such a way that we can swiftly move on without looking back. Or, as Riddell opines in a breathless, breast-beating tone atypical of The Observer:
“In averting an attack on Washington’s seats of power, a handful of people shifted the course of history. And now, five years after they died, they are the ushers between their yesterdays and our tomorrows.”
How people like Riddell accomplish the trick of looking forward into a future informed by a murky, nonsensical past is beyond me. Sadly, she doesn’t share the details of this sleight of hand with us.
Instead, Riddell tries to use the depiction of the passengers’ actions on the plane as some sort of prescription for the kind of heroism and confrontation we ordinary folk now need to make in the face of a full-blown conflict between the U.S. and Iran. What she fails to see is how much this wishful thinking belies the more probable truth about that day. Even harking back to the more recent yet no less perilous time of Election Day 2004, we see that when faced with hard difficult choices, Americans are far more likely to buy into the status quo and continue their drift into a consumerist haze, aided by mood enhancers. After all, the U.S. is not currently known for its ability to protest, to step up to confrontation and speak truth to power. They are easily the most shameful self-proclaimed democratic society on earth, demanding little accountability from their “spend, spend, spend” president or congress (where the Republican senate leader’s solution to an epic problem is to offer a $100 payoff to the populace like he’s administrating the bank of a Monopoly board). They don’t even blanche at Bush’s Orweillian interpretations of “executive power” that remain unchecked and unbalanced, as if the so-called “greatest democracy on earth” (sounds like a circus, doesn’t it?) should so resemble totalitarianism. And they are put to shame by their own illegal immigrants (i.e., slaves) and very regularly by the populations of Eastern European and Latin American countries who know how to exercise their democratic rights far better than the most fervent “exporters” of democracy.
No, Mary Riddell. We don’t need to see United 93. To do so on your terms would only add credence to the myth and most likely accelerate another war. Some of us don’t need to see it to inspire or fuel our opposition. Rather than being the trigger for an uprising on both sides of the Atlantic against a U.S. foreign policy that looks set to attack and/or invade Iran, the fate of United 93 is far more likely to be availability in bulk for swift purchase by all “patriotic” Americans at their local warehouse club or Walmart, along with bottled water that, for all they know, comes from a toilet.
