Saturday, September 11, 2004

3 Years Later

So. I'm sitting here in Dunn Bros. coffee shop working on my dissertation (chapter 4, if you're interested), and it suddenly occurs to me that it's September 11th. Huh. I mean, not that it should surprise me, what with yesterday being the 10th and all, but while I remembered that today was the 11th of September, I sort of forgot it was "September 11th," if you know what I mean. There are lots of other people posting on the significance of today (two excellent posts are here and here, and it would be arrogant of me to think I have anything new to offer on the topic. Nonetheless, I've been remembering what it was like that week back in 2001, and I thought I'd share some of those memories with you, O soon-to-be-teeming readers.

In the fall of 2001 I was an adjunct instructor in theatre at the College of St. Benedict, a tiny Catholic liberal arts college in a tiny town in central Minnesota. It also happens to be my alma mater, and the place where my dad teaches in the philosophy department, so I have some strong ties to the place. It's a great school, but it's also private (read: expensive), Catholic, and in central Minnesota. So, while the students there can be as varied as they are anywhere else, these are also not, by and large, the most urban, street-smart, pomo-ironic kids you're ever going to meet. A lot of Bennies are from priveleged, suburban, backgrounds, most of them are white, and the vast majority not only believe in god, but consider that belief to be a fairly important part of their lives.

The first class I held after the 9/11 attacks (I cancelled class the day of the attacks, like most of my colleagues), I was teaching The Oresteia to a group of theatre majors, mostly sophomores and juniors. The Oresteia, for those of you who didn't have to suffer through it in college, is a trilogy of plays written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus around 458 BCE. It's one of the foundational texts of theatre history, which means that students usually respond to it about the same way they'd respond to intestinal flu: nausea, headaches, and an overwhelming desire to sleep. Even the best translations take some effort, and at first glance most students think it is b-o-r-i-n-g. It isn't, though - like most classic works, it's lasted so long because it's really pretty cool. There's a lot going on in the trilogy - way more than I can summarize here - but one of the main threads is the cultural shift from a pre-democratic culture, where concepts of justice are limited to "an eye for an eye" kind of stuff, to a culture based on democratic principles of justice through the rule of law. Basically, the first play starts out with a murderous act of revenge, which precipitates another murderous act of revenge in the second play, and just when it looks like the whole story is going to get caught up in a vicious cycle of killings, the gods Athena and Apollo show up and bestow a court of law on mortals' asses, and - with the aid of some Jackie Chiles-style maneuvers on the part of the deities, our hero is acquitted of his misdeeds and the evil harpies of vengeance are converted to the happy domestic goddesses of Athens. Seriously, it's some crazy shit. But the point is that usually I have to practically turn cartwheels to get my reluctant students to see that theme in the play - and to see that Aeschylus, writing for the big play competition in Athens, maybe wasn't so stupid to create a trilogy that praises Athenian justice as the epitome of human achievements.

What was different about this class, two days after the 9/11 attacks, was that they got it. Right away. "It's like, they start out all killing each other and stuff, and then they realize that just gets you into a never-ending cycle, so like, then they change it to be more fair at the end." Not sophisticated anyalysis, ok, but they really got it. And more than that - they saw how it was still the issue. How, over 2000 years later, we're still dealing with the same crap. What is justice? Is it revenge? An eye for an eye, a bombing for a plane crash? Or is it adhering to some set of predetermined principles, with impassioned punishment dealt out to those who break the rules? If Osama wasn't justified in attacking us, are we justified in attacking him? And who gets to say? I tell you, it was the best discussion of The Oresteia I've ever had. Kids who were normally afraid to even have an opinion were defending their ideas with raised voices and flashing eyes. Students who usually didn't finish the reading were frantically flipping through the script to find a reference to support their position. The themes of the trilogy were really living for these students, and under the pretext of analyzing an ancient Greek text, we allowed ourselves to talk passionately about some of the most important questions of our time. It was ... amazing.

So that's my strongest memory of the events of 9/11. A tragedy of historic proportions resulted in one of the best classes I've ever had. And I have no idea what to think about that. I was fortunate enough not to know anyone killed in the attacks, though I have friends who had some pretty close calls. And, like most Americans outside New York and DC, I can't even imagine the trauma and terror of living in a city under siege. So under different circumstances I might feel differently. But in September of 2001, in a sunlit classroom in the midwest, I admit that I found some relief from despair at the human condition with the help of some idealistic students and a 2000-year-old Greek playwright.