Continua: Lessons from two books on books

December 21, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis
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All culture is conversation. — Neil Postman

Culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.
— Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about the end of the Gutenberg Age and the lessons we can learn from our entry into it. (It awaits a publisher.) In my reading, I very quickly saw that I would not be demarking eras—in fact, I warn of the perils of periodization, the hubris of the “modern,” the noxious journalistic conceit of writing “the first draft of history.” Instead, I sought continua across eras, for that is where the lessons lie.

I came to see that from the dawn of movable type, books were in conversation with each other: Luther conversed with the Pope in their books (and bonfires of them); Erasmus and his friend More held an ongoing conversation through theirs. With its mechanization and industrialization — with the birth of mass media — print lost the art of conversation. Now, in a connected world, we are attempting in fits and failures to relearn how to hold a conversation with ourselves. There is a continuum.

Among the delights of my research are the moments when I find books that I fancy are, whether they intend it or not, in a conversation with each other. Sometime ago, I found connections about cognition in Alex Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories and David Weinberger’s Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility. In another example, I constantly recommend to students that they read Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software with André Brock Jr.’s Distributed Blackness, for the first offers an oral history of the early attempts to create Black spaces online and the second is a sequel in time, analyzing the successful gathering of Black Twitter as a space for — in Brock’s delightful word choice — “jouissance.”

I just finished reading two new books by book historians I hold in the highest esteem and found connections between them.

Andrew Pettegree is the dean of book-history scholars. I have devoured many of his books — among them The Book in the Renaissance, The Invention of News, Brand Luther — and countless of his papers in the Brill series he edits and elsewhere. He and his colleague at the University of St. Andrews, Arthur der Weduwen, collaborated (for the third time) on a captivating new book, The Library: A Fragile History.

Matthew Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, another book historian, focuses on more contemporary topics. Aging nerd that I am, I loved his last book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. He has just written a new book, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage.

I read these two books together. One could say that The Library is about the past and Bitstreams about the future. But no. Rather, between them they present a compelling continuum in their examinations of the processes of creating, editing, publishing (or today we might say sharing), curating, protecting, and losing what is written, said, or made.

The Library begins, of course, at the library of Alexandria. When Richard Nixon went to Alexandria, he asked to see the library, which is a punchline for a few reasons, one of which is that no one knows exactly where the library was. I was struck learning that scale was the Alexandrian library’s mission but also its curse, for the hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls collected there would have had to have been copied before crumbling every century or two. The more the library collected, the more impossible that would have become. “The sheer size of the Alexandrian library militated against its survival,” said Pettegree and der Weduwen. I’ve been thinking a lot about scale lately, about how mass became the mission of media with industrialization, about the benefit scale brings online (enabling more people to speak), and about the curse scale brings (curating and moderating — or, as some would wish, censoring — is an impossibility at scale). The pursuit of scale — and its perils — is not new; it is a continuum.

As The Library makes clear, the reflex to save books was not immediate, and when it began it was a pastime of the privileged. One of the earliest and greatest collectors was Columbus’ son, Hernando Colón. (See Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.) Subscription libraries were a business model that would support much of publishing. When Benjamin Franklin and friends started their shared collection in 1727 it saved them money on their reading and established the Library Co. of Philadelphia. Public libraries followed and flourished, thanks in great measure to the support of Andrew Carnegie.

With mechanization — of presses, paper, and typesetting—books became so inexpensive that more could write them and anyone could buy them. That, though, frightened the elites — just as movable type had in its day and the internet does today: a continuum. For the masses could now read and, God forbid, learn and even speak. Pettegree and der Weduwen explore the moral panic brought on by the rise of fiction, the fear that it would corrupt the souls of especially women and children. Even to open the stacks to browsing was worrisome as surely readers without watchful librarians would gravitate toward dangerous tales. “Circulating libraries were denounced as purveyors of pornography and books of brain-rotting triviality.” Sound familiar?

The Library ends recounting wars against books: wars of banning and burning and wars that destroyed libraries, demonstrating just how fragile they have been. (On this topic, I also recommend last year’s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge by Oxford Bodleian Librarian Richard Ovenden.)

As a bibliographer, Matthew Kirschenbaum seeks to discover, preserve, and study not just the product but the act of creation: the process. In Bitstreams, he begins by exploring the physical and digital archives of manuscripts of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The paper version was singed and almost destroyed in a fire in her home and so Kirschenbaum was permitted to view the remains on a screen. Also on screens, he delved into the contents of her outmoded plastic diskettes. That is how he reconstructs revealing moments of conversation between Morrison and her editor over critical choices of words. Next Kirschenbaum examines writing that was “born digital,” poetry written in Hypercard, and he finds that while the author’s words may be preserved, the choices and designs he made in fonts — the full experience of display — may be lost as machines and formats become obsolete. Many a bibliographer will argue that each copy of a book should be studied as a unique object rather than a copy for each one carries its own provenance and use and marks in the margins. (See Luther’s copy of Erasmus’ New Testament.) So, too, Kirschenbaum teaches that each bitstream — each representation of creation on different screens in different circumstances using different tools — is “never truly self-identical.”

The ultimate continuum I see in these books is about culture as conversation, to borrow from Neil Postman. For as a disciple of James Carey I see much of our world through the lens (the loudspeaker?) of conversation. Kirschenbaum writes about the processes of creation. Pettegree and der Weduwen write about the processes of selecting, saving, using, discarding, and destroying print in libraries. Together, they present an unbroken string from creator to reader, in the constant conversation of culture.

Libraries, then, can be as much about what is forgotten as what is remembered. In addition to everything else he does — which is awe-inspiring enough — Pettegree heads the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a grandly ambitious effort to create as complete a bibliography as possible of the first two centuries of print with movable type. This means tracking down not just books and artifacts in collections but also those that are lost to history, the ghost of their existence surviving only in references elsewhere or as lines in auction or estate catalogues. This struck me as a terribly depressing endeavor: finding that which cannot be found. But I was mistaken. When Pettegree and his USTC colleague der Weduwen presented their book in a conversation for the New York Public Library, I quoted Jean-Philippe de Tonnac (above) in a question, asking about the lessons they might recommend for the digital bibliographers of the future.

Pettegree answered that he and the USTC pay special attention to the “ugly ducklings” of print, the items that were so well-used in their day that they were worn to bits or that were so everyday that they were not valued enough to be preserved. For that tells us much about the choices that culture makes and the choices that make culture. “[N]o society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations,” Pettegree and der Weduwen write, adding that what they chronicle in their book “is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artifacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows.”

The great and founding book historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (who along with Thomas Pettitt of Gutenberg Parenthesis fame and Pettegree himself inspired me to embark on my book project) was attacked by some critics — some out of sexism and jealousy, I think — for focusing too much on the fixity of print. They accuse her of not recognizing how books, especially in the early days of incunabula, were riddled with error, of unsure provenance, and changed often. They say that she projected latter-day views of print on the past. I say the critics are wrong. Eisenstein frequently addressed print’s malleable nature. In a conversation I had with her, she did boast on Gutenberg’s behalf that his Bible had already lasted longer than any digital format would, and she was right. Yet as Kirschenbaum argues, digital bitstreams can be resurrected: “[T]he immolated edges of a manuscript are gone forever, carbonized and vaporized in a flash; the bitstream, if fixity and integrity are maintained, awaits only the imposition of the appropriate formal regimen to cauterize its internal cascade of relational disarray and rememory its pixels all anew.”

We risk projecting our contemporary expectations of print’s fixity not only on early publishing but on the early internet, expecting that since digits are all but free everything can and should be saved. No. Culture is conversation and some conversation is meant to disappear in the sky like the hot air it is; some is worth remembering and repeating, teaching and learning, copying and remixing. The Library and Bitstreams make clear that observing what society and its institutions choose to remember will tell us much about what they value.

In a recent post, I discussed the case of Niccolò Perotti, who made what is believed to be the first call for censorship of print in 1470, beseeching the Pope to appoint learned censors to judge and fix printers’ formes before they were duplicated. What he was really calling for was not censoring at all but instead editing; he foresaw the need for the institutions of editor, publisher, and librarian to assure quality and authority in print.

The institutions created for the age of print are so far inadequate to the networked world with its abundance of wonderful conversation. We should not expect the net to be edited any more than we should expect a barroom argument to be. We cannot expect — though many do — Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to be cleaned and polished like a slick magazine. We should understand the net for what it is: conversation, process, sometimes a library, sometimes a stream of bits disappearing into the past.

What institutions do we need then? That is what leads me to teach this course alongside Doug Rushkoff, in hopes that students might tackle such questions as Pettegree, der Weduwen, and Kirschenbaum (and Rosenberg and Weinberger, and McIlwain and Brock) inspire. How do we find what’s worth hearing? What editing and moderation of the public conversation should we wish for, demand, or permit? What could digital librarianship accomplish? What will we save so it may be used, studied, and built upon in the future? How do we rethink our models of content, product, and property and our laws of copyright to support collaborative creation? (See my proposal for creditright.)

Kirschenbaum begins Bitstreams asking this lovely question: “What is textual scholarship when the ‘text’ of our everyday speech is a transitive verb as often as it is a noun?” At the end he wisely declares: “[A]ll the data dumps in the world — 365 days of diffs — won’t get us any closer to total recall. The future of digital literary heritage will be as hit and miss, as luck dependent, as fragile, contingent, and (yet) wondrously replete as that of books and manuscripts.”

Disinformation is not *the* problem

December 19, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis
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Yes, disinformation is a problem. But by treating it as the problem, we can cause more: We give malign actors the attention that feeds them as we spread their messages. We defer facing society’s real ills. We ignore voices too long not heard. We present a distorted and dystopian view of reality. We delay building a better internet and society.

I’ve paid attention to disinformation myself. I’ve written about it and raised money to fight it. The war against disinformation is in good hands: see danah boyd’s Data & Society, Joan Donovan’s work at Harvard, the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta et al at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Claire Wardle at First Draft, and many more. 

I’ve come to see that the time has come to turn our monomaniacal media gaze to additional, more positive and perhaps productive strategies. Consider:

Ignore the trolls

Recently, Morning Joe began the day mocking “Dr.” and Trump lackey Rep. Ronny Jackson for tweeting that the Omicron COVID variant was a worldwide political plot. Joe Scarborough dutifully ridiculed the idiocy of it, and later that day Anderson Cooper did likewise. Thereby they gave Jackson precisely what he wanted: media attention and glory among his cult of anti-institutional insurgents for pwning the libs. 

Have we learned nothing in the last five years? Fascists will make up shit for the sake of making shit up so they have shit to stir. As I argued here, I don’t think even they believe most of it; they want us to believe they believe it. Their outrageousness is not news; it is a strategy designed to exploit the weaknesses in journalism to report conflict and the unusual. So stop. Ask whether there is any point, any value in repeating their lies and sick fantasies. If not, say nothing. Starve them.

In this time of abundant speech — which I celebrate, as so many communities too long not heard in mass media finally have their press — the key skill we must develop is not to point out or even debunk the bad but instead we must to learn to ignore idiocy as we amplify authority and wisdom. 

In 1850, just as steam-powered presses were enabling a flourishing of new publications, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine announced its intention to “place within the reach of the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.” That is what we need now: not services that expose us to the worst of the web and humanity but instead services that find and share their unbounded treasures, which most certainly are there: talent, expertise, diverse lived experiences that deserve to be heard. Build that, please. 

Focus on society’s real ills

Underlying the moral panic about the internet and its agues is the assumption that if we could just turn off Facebook or Twitter, everything would be OK. That is to assume that society was just fine before new technologies came along. That, of course, is delusional blindness — blindness to the racism, inequity, misogyny, lack of empathy and understanding, greed, and hatred that have plagued this nation for generations and centuries. 

We hide behind many excuses to place blame on others, concocting syndromes like filter bubbles and echo chambers as classic examples of third-person effect: the assumption that everyone else is vulnerable to lies and hate but not us; we’re fine. Listen, please, to Michael Bang Petersen’s research, which finds that we do maintain echo chambers in real life and the problem is that the internet busts them, exposing people who already hate to the objects of their hate. Read, too, Axel Bruns’ exhaustive compilation of research in his book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which points to the conclusion that they are not. Let us ground our discussion of what’s wrong with society and the interventions we create in empirical research, not assumptions.

Before you cancel me or accuse me of canceling—which is the same thing — I am, of course, not saying that all of us are in every moment racist; don’t try that excuse. I am saying that if the last half-decade of insurgency and pandemic have taught us nothing else, it is that our society is infected with structural racism and inequity as well as hostility to education and if we do not address those causes every day in our journalism, in our teaching, and in our public discussion, then we are putting off the real work to be done. And then we are all to blame.  

Disinformation is real, yes. It is a tool of malign actors, true. But it is also an excuse to put off painful self-examination. 

Listen to the voices of experience

And how do we embark on that work? We need to begin by listening to those voices too long not heard who can tell us all about their experience of inequity, yes, but more importantly so we may include and value their contributions to our learning and public discourse. 

Last year, The New York Times crowned the heroes of COVID-19: all white men. Just today, the other Times, Rupert’s, featured data-crunchers as the “smoking-hot heroes” of the pandemic: all white men again. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Spend just 10 minutes scrolling through my Twitter list of 675 COVID experts and you will find countless women and women of color in science and medicine who are leading the war on the disease. 

Right under our noses are history’s greatest tools for listening — the internet and social media — and by concentrating only on their ills and woes, we forfeit the opportunity to hear those who enrich the public conversation. I’ve harped on this before: that journalism is the conversation and when journalists turn their backs on the voices they had ignored, they only extend the harm that journalism has done to so many communities and delay the reparations deserved. 

Journalism fancies itself a reflection of society but its mass-media mirror is cracked: it leaves out huge swaths of society; it presents a dark and dystopian view of the world but especially of life in those communities it fails to represent; it makes it money — just as the internet does thus far — on the corruption of attention and that colors its reality. We can build something better. 

Build a better internet and society

By concentrating only on the internet’s problems, the best we can hope for is a slightly less-bad internet. Or, if we mess up by intervening based on unfounded assumptions and fears, we can end up with a worse internet and society, one where our new freedoms are impinged upon to protect old, threatened institutions, like mass media. 

Instead, I want to see us take responsibility to build the internet and society we want. I’ve harped on this, too: We have time. The net is yet young. We still see its future in the analog of our past. We don’t know what it is yet. We — or more likely our grandchildren or theirs— will invent what it can be. Still, we should start now.

That is why I am teaching a course in designing the internet this spring, to convince students (actually, to have them convince themselves) that they have the power to take the net and make it theirs. This is not a technology course; it is most definitely a course in the humanities. I hope the students come up with audacious proposals for what the net can be, including ethical, moral, and regulatory regimes for what it should be. To build what they propose, we will need to shift resources and attention from exclusive attention on the net’s bad actors. That is why I write this. That is why I find myself drawn to others who want to talk not just about what’s wrong with the net but what can be built with it, by us, for us, humans. 

I will continue to support efforts to battle disinformation. But we must not stop there for there is so much more to be accomplished. 

Studying the internet

October 31, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis
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This spring at CUNY, my colleague Douglas Rushkoff and I will teach a course in Designing the Internet.

Students will propose and design a feature of the net they want to see. Some might start from the entrepreneurial perspective: a product, service, feature, or company. But I hope students will radically broaden their perspectives to design more: perhaps a regulatory regime, an ethical regime, a research agenda, a covenant of mutual obligation with the public for technology and media companies, a design agenda for equity and accessibility, business models built to avoid the corruptions we know, curricula, a warning from the past (about technological determinism or manifest destiny), archival standards, a manifesto for an open net, a constitution … anything. (Note that I did not list a metaverse, but if the students want to go there, they can.)

In the first third of the course, we will offer many readings — including the likes of Vannevar Bush, André Brock Jr., danah boyd, Charlton McIlwain, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Andrew Pettegree, Kate Klonick, David Weinberger, Ruha Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Axel Bruns, James Carey, Dave Winer, Marshall McLuhan— and much discussion examining the net and how we got here: lessons for good and bad. We will invite guests from other perspectives and disciplines: anthropology, psychology, African-American studies, Latino studies, ethics, history, psychology, technology. The students will work on their proposals through the term and will present at the end.

Our idea is to demonstrate to students that they have the agency and responsibility for the future of the net. Because the course is being taught at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I have a particular objectives for media students: to argue that the canvas for journalists and the service they provide is much wider than story-telling and publication. (I contend the net is not a subset of media but instead media are becoming — alongside so many other sectors of society — subsets of the network.) I also want to instill in journalists the reflex to seek out, learn from, and share work from academics who are researching key questions about the net and its impact — based on evidence. The students will find and share a work of research a week.

Doug and I come at this from different perspectives. I wrote the book What Would Google Do? Doug, a professor at Queens College, wrote the book Throwing Rocks from the Google Bus. Opinions may vary. But we end up on the same road: arguing that the net is not baked, that its present proprietors are not its forever owners, that we have the opportunity and responsibility to decide and design the net we want. We both want the net to be the province of humanity over technology. As Doug put it to me: “We just get there differently. I want less evil, you want more good.”

In the end, I believe that what we are examining is the future of society’s institutions, challenged and rebuilt or replaced in a new, networked reality. In my to-be-published (I pray) book The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I use this example:

The first recorded effort to impose censorship on the press came only about fifteen years after Gutenberg’s Bible. In 1470, Latin grammarian Niccolò Perotti appealed to Pope Paul II to impose Vatican control on the printing of books. His motive was not religious, political, or moral “but exclusively a love of literature” and a desire for “quality control,” according to Renaissance historian John Monfasani. Conrad Sweynheym, a German cleric who, it is believed, worked with Gutenberg in Eltville, and his partner, Arnold Pannartz, became the first to print a book in Italy, in 1465. Two years later, they moved to Rome, where in 1470 they published an edition of Pliny’s Natural History edited by Andrea Bussi. It was this book that set Perotti off. In his litany of complaint to the pope, he pointed to twenty-two grammatical errors in the book, which much offended him.

Perotti had been an optimist about this new technology of printing, having “once viewed as a boon to literature ‘the new art of writing lately brought to us from Germany.’” He called it “a great and truly divine benefit” such that he “hoped that there would soon be such an abundance of books that everyone, however poor and wretched, would have whatever was desired.” But the first tech backlash was not long in coming, for according to Monfasani, Perotti’s “hopes have been thoroughly dashed. The printers are turning out so much dross…. And when good literature does get printed, he complains, it is edited so perversely that the world would be better off not having the texts than to have them circulate in corrupt editions of a thousand copies.” Perotti had a solution. He called upon Pope Paul to appoint a censor, not to ban books so much as to improve them. “The easiest arrangement is to have someone or other charged by papal authority to oversee the work, who would both prescribe to the printers regulations governing the printing of books and would appoint some moderately learned man to examine and emend individual formes before printing,” Perotti wrote. “The task calls for intelligence, singular erudition, incredible zeal, and the highest vigilance.”

We might look upon Perotti’s call as quaint — not unlike Yahoo in the early days of the web thinking its librarians could catalogue every single noteworthy site anyone could ever make. The idea that a moderately learned if vigilant person could approve and correct all printing even out of Rome alone betrays a failure to divine the scale of printing to come. Yet one could say that rather than foreseeing the state censor, Perotti was envisioning the roles of the editor and publishing house as means to assure quality. He was looking to invent a new institution to solve a new problem, just as we must today. Fact-checkers engaged by Facebook and algorithms written at every internet company are inadequate to the task of assuring credibility of content, just as Perotti’s censor would have been. So what do we invent instead?

That is the question we will address in this course.

The course will be open to any CUNY graduate students from any discipline and, with approval, to undergrads and (if there is space) nonmatriculated members of the public (non-CUNY students can follow this link or DM me or Doug).

We hope this is a pilot for a much larger project in Internet Studies — perhaps a degree. We are also working with others on efforts to bring more attention to internet research: We plan to offer literature reads of prominent and current work to journalists and policymakers to inform their work with evidence (I’ll share a job posting shortly). And once COVID allows, we hope to bring together researchers to share perspectives on what we know and don’t know about the impact of the net, what questions we have yet to ask, and what data and access are needed to explore those questions. More to come, as I’m still raising funding for the work. (Disclosure: My school and center have received funding for scholarships and various activities from Facebook, Google, and Craig Newmark; I receive no remuneration from any tech platform.)

In the meantime, teaching this course alongside Doug will be a blast.

God made a social network

October 7, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis
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Chapter 1

1 God made a social network. It was called Earth. Even She could not be certain what would follow.

Chapter 2

1 For the longest time, or so it seemed to the people of Earth, She allowed them to roam free, to explore, to commune, to be social.

2 Then She decided they required limits to test. She gave unto them Community Standards. Yet the people disobeyed. They fought. They told falsehoods. They shared graven images of themselves.

Chapter 3

1 The people divided into tribes and religions and parties and nations and they fought still. They waged crusades and shitstorms against one another. They fought wars of thirty and a hundred and many hundred years over Her.

2 They invented arrows and guns, compasses and clocks and used them not to protect but to conquer.

3 But the people also invented pictures and paints, alphabets and presses and made so many wondrous things with them: worshipful art.

4 Their scribes and their Pharisees are always blind to the wonder. They see only darkness and doom, for they believe that they — not I — shine the light.

Chapter 4

1 In the heavens, in the Senate of the Gods, Zeus called upon the Lord to smite Her social network, Earth, and to silence it with configuration errors, for it had become a cesspool that runneth over with hatred and heresy, bots and bile, corrupting the children of Earth to commit fakery and finstas.

2 And God spake unto him: “O, chill, Zeus. Enough of your panic! Have you no memory? Can you not see that this is what my people have done through eternity with all their tools and toys?

3 “At the moment of invention the people are amazed at what they hath wrought: proud and boastful. Then they wield their implements to destroy, to claim power for themselves over Me. They are corrupted. They sin yet blame their tools for their folly.

4 “Finally, they write their rules and build their institutions to live together in peace with themselves and their inventions. Give them time.

5 “Verily, they cannot see that the problem is not in their inventions or in their earthly corporations and the solution is not in their law-givers or self-anointed saviors but instead in themselves.

6 “They, like you dear Senator, must learn again and again that the path to peace, via struggle, is freedom. Remember well that I did not cut down the tree of knowledge of good and evil but left it standing so that the people may learn from it still.

7 “I prophesy that they will just keep screwing up and then they shall figure it out. They are human.”

Chapter 5

1 And God shrugged.

Here endeth the blogging of Her Holy Thread.

Aftermath

September 10, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis

Yes, 9/11 affected me.

Arriving on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center as the first jet hit, I witnessed the second jet’s impact and stayed to report. I still cannot bring myself to speak of some of what I saw. A block from the South Tower as it tilted, I ran, debris smashing the ground all around me, in the utter darkness of a man-made midnight. I emerged covered in the detritus of destruction, a gray statue in pulverized stone.

In the immediate aftermath, I was afflicted with a heart condition, atrial fibrillation, which I live with still. In the longer aftermath, I have had two cancers, a respiratory condition, and PTSD certified by the World Trade Center Health Program as related to 9/11. It affected my family in ways I leave to them to discuss or not; they are not public, like me. 

Yes, 9/11 affected us, though we are fortunate next to our neighbors who lost loved ones and to the victims of the two wars that resulted. 

Immediately afterward, I recorded my memories of the moment. On most every Jahrzeit of the event, I have written about my emotions, recalling, even delivering a sermon. 

As this twentieth anniversary approached — a number that seems distant yet immediate — I have been struggling to understand my emotions and their meaning. And I find myself thinking not of 9/11 but of the other tragedies in America that are not accorded the somber remembrance and reflection of that single September day, but instead become political pawns and media spectacles exploited according to the benefit of others. 

I think first of the 667,528 deaths due to COVID-19, thus far. On March 31, 2020, I suffered my worst breakdown since 9/11 as the toll of the disease passed that of the attack — 2,977 — for we could see the terror and tragedy yet to come. Where will we build the memorial to the — God save us — million we may lose in this country alone, almost all gone needlessly? I am permitted my anger still at the perpetrators of 9/11, but we are told not to scold the politicians, the Fox faces, and the everyday people who perpetuate COVID’s murders through their reckless, careless, self-centered, illogical, ignorant, callous, evil disregard and contempt for the lives and well-being of those around them, refusing even to get a shot and wear a damned mask. Instead of somber reflection, I see the disease and its impact treated as an asset to be spent as governors’ tributes to the Trump era, as content traded for attention to commentators, as a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of politicians and media barons around the world.

I think next of the victims and soldiers who fought and died in the two wars that my country justified from 9/11. The day after, I was angry. I wanted retribution. I am permitted that emotion still. But I am also deeply ashamed of believing George W. Bush and The New York Times not just about weapons of mass destruction but about the hubris of America’s belief in its virtue and its manifest destiny to build democracies. I am sorry.

I think then of George Floyd and Black Americans waiting 400 years for a global movement behind the simple, self-evident cause that Black lives matter. Where are our memorials in every city and town to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and injustice? Germany has memorials to its crimes, sins, and shame, one in the center of Berlin. Where are ours? Where is our somber reflection of our worst sin?

I think of January 6, another day in infamy, but this terror came from within. I am shocked that we could have commissions, legislation, government reorganizations, years of contemplation, and wars of revenge over the perpetrators of 9/11, yet we cannot bring those who inspired and caused the insurrection on our Capitol to justice. 

I think of women in Texas who are having their rights to their own bodies ripped away from them by men in power and a Supreme Court put in power by those who for all these years exploited 9/11 for their political gain. I think of the trans and LGBTQ people who suffer discrimination and abuse. I think of children and other innocents still dying because of this country’s insane love of guns as a sick symbol of freedom. I think of the children of Flint who do not have safe water to drink. I think of the incarcerated, especially Black men, still in prison for selling a commodity that is now legal in many places and of the countless other injustices there. I think of the victims of fires and storms, of climate change, the anthropocene disaster we refuse to take responsibility for. I think of the victims of opioids, victims of malpractice, victims of greed. 

I think of the old, white men — and I am an old, white man — who hold onto power and who would rather destroy the institutions of democracy than share their fruits with those who follow. 

Yes, on this day, I think about how 9/11 affected me all these years. But I also think of our profound inability to prioritize our concern about other tragedies in our nation, of our inability to be self-reflective regarding our own responsibilities and sins, of the other causes of justice and equity around us that are too easily lost by my colleagues in journalism in the breaking news of the moment. Now 9/11 brings all those failures of ours — and mine — into sharp relief. 

Yes, on this day, I always recall the lives lost. I thank the first responders whose faces I still remember as some guided us to safety and some ran toward danger. I reflect on the blessing I have to have survived. But the day would be lost were there not larger lessons to learn. I regret that we have learned too few.