The sounds of 911

I heard a song by The Calling this week, called I'll Go Wherever You May Go. It was popular back in the summer and fall of 2001.

Someone made a medley of a song (that one or another one) that played for a couple of days during the week after the 9/11 attacks. In the medley, they added actual recorded sounds from the 9/11 attack in the instrumental parts of the song. I remember it had the sound of the towers falling, people screaming, and frantic phone calls. Then it was removed from the air and I've never heard it again.

I tried to figure out what song that was at one time, I wanted to see if I could find it and hear it again. I tried googling it, and I carefully went through the pop charts of that summer to see if I could identify it. I think it may have been a copyright infringement as well as something that they thought was inappropriate - so it was never played again.

On 9/11 I listened to the news on the radio at work. I stayed at my desk and kept working. I called my brother, who was at home and asked him to record what was going on. That was before either tower fell. He recorded Fox News for some reason, and their coverage was very inadequate. They had a fixed camera somewhere in New Jersey, shooting across the water, and they never even zoomed in, just a long shot of smoke pouring off the towers. The commentators didn't even notice when the towers fell, both times, no comments. They just yammered on about nothing.

I missed all the visual things that are burned into everyone's mind from that day, the sight of people jumping, the chaos of the towers falling from up close, the people running in terror, and the dust and smoke. It's weird, I've watched carefully edited documentaries since then, but I feel like I didn't get to see what it was like for most people watching on TV. I don't know why I felt the need to stay at my desk. There was a crappy little TV in the conference room (actually still gets a signal by an antenna) that I could have watched with my coworkers.

We didn't experience the attacks, most of us in America (or the world for that matter), we watched it. If you didn't lose someone, if you weren't there or near, you were just a spectator. I don't think this means you can't appreciate the enormity of it, but it's all second hand. Here's a huge catastrophy and we actually had news cameras everywhere near it.

They scrubbed the experience, sanitized it, edited it. Are they trying to make it more palatable? More acceptable? Nothing can do that. Why not face it, why not be able to face it? If you can't stand to watch a real life catastrophe, how can you expect to understand it? What are we being protected from? Not looking doesn't mean it didn't happen.

That's not my point, though. I can't and shouldn't argue in favor of showing gory details, I don't believe we should always show everything in an unrestricted public forum over and over. But I personally missed part of the experience.

It's sort of like when I was in the Army overseas in Panama for 3 years. I've always referred to it as a cultural gap. I missed 3 years of American culture, like I had some bad binge drinking episode and blacked out. It's pretty much a blank slate. People describe it to me, I can read about it or look it up on Wikipedia, but I didn't experience it. From the start of 1987 to the end of 1989, I wasn't here. All that hair band, the end of the Reagan era, Max Headroom, and anything else that was in the popular culture or on the news is just a classroom lesson for me. It's a strange feeling.

I would like to find out what that song was and to hear it again. I'm not sure why.