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(RE)MAKING SACRED GROUND: AMERICAN NATIONAL MEMORY
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(RE)MAKING SACRED GROUND: AMERICAN NATIONAL MEMORY AND THE
MEMORIALIZATION OF 9/11

By

Anthony James Kolenic III

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Department of American Studies

2007

ABSTRACT

(RE)MAKING SACRED GROUND: AMERICAN NATIONAL MEMORY AND THE
MEMORIALIZATION OF 9/11

By

Anthony James Kolenic III

In the wake of any tragedy those affected by it attempt to recreate their various
disrupted identities. The same process is at work on a communal level; a group of
affected individuals connects to a larger social identity through the perceived sharing of a
particular quality, attribute, moment or tragedy in their past. This reclamation of
communal identity is especially true for many religious groups and can extend to an
entire nation; both believers and patriots use a past that is perceived as shared, creating
community through a common memory. In the months and years following the attacks

1‘", 2001 , a number of Americans attempted to reclaim values and a

September 1
community that they largely perceived as having been attacked. To do so, a number of
material responses were employed both officially and informally, as was a pull to both
localize and nationalize the events as large in scale and particularly American.

This thesis uses three lenses to examine the material responses that have reshaped
the American national memory of the event: spontaneous shrines, official memorials, as
well as consumer relics and commercial rituals. Using these three analytical sets in
conjunction with some close reading of images, material culture and popular religious
analyses, this thesis aims to study the ways in which those material responses are used as

a means of recreating a community that represents those characteristics that are used to

define the American nation in a post-9/ll world.

To Giselle, for her unending support

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of pieces needed to fall into place for this study to be completed. It has
taken many forms over its course, and involves a number of moving elements that have -
at times — been hard to peg down. I would like to thank my committee — Dr. Amy
DeRogatis, Dr. Ann Larabee, and Dr. David Stowe — for their patience and guidance
throughout; Dr. DeRogatis has seen the framework unfold over the course of a number of
years and acquainted me with the methodological bases I tackle here. Dr. Larabee has
been pivotal in making drafts come to life and resonate where the rubber meets the road,
so to speak. And I am grateful to Dr. Stowe for his providing me a space in which to test
and work through a number of the meta-questions that inform and guide this study. I
would also like to thank my partner, mother, father, grandmother and sister, whose care,
patience, interest and nurturing has been central to both this study in a number of

interesting ways and my formation as — I would like to believe —— a worthwhile person.

iv

PREFACE

While formulating this study I received some extremely important advice: no
matter what, let the research inform your conclusions, not the other way around. In one
sense, it is necessary to work into a framework with some decisions made; what can one
find out if she has no direction or interest? But in any field, particularly one as
interdisciplinary as American Studies, one must follow this advice despite the attraction
of doing otherwise. I was fortunate enough to have great people guiding me along the
way, but the mixture of methodologies employed also guided me.

Analyzing the way that post-9/1 1 American nationalism borrows a sense of
sanctity from religious expressions that have weaved their way into American popular
culture through memorialization processes is not a cut and dry task. The conjunction of
material culture studies in Religious Studies and American Studies is a wonderful site for
using close reading techniques to explain the acts of mourning and celebration that have
cropped up in recent decades in the form of spontaneous shrines.

While researching the literature on material culture as well as the literature
regarding American national memory it became clear that there was another interesting
intersection; much of the academic work on material culture is concerned with the
cultural expressions present in everyday life, and much of the work done on national
memory, by the very nature of the scholarship, is concerned with the cultural patterns and
trends that weave through time and attempt to explain cultural trajectories and
phenomena. I believe I found in this space — incorporating pieces of American popular
culture, American popular religion, disaster studies, and other fields — a way to use both

the artifacts as everyday expressions and as parts of larger cultural patterns at work.

Framed by both a religious and civic millennialism, which — interestingly —
inform each other, and historical and contemporary geo-politics and transnational
conceptions, 9/11 is an academic site that is particularly challenging to work with
because in some senses it is still happening. Its public history is a peculiar one, with the
political history of the event becoming increasingly classified instead of becoming more
accessible to scholars and the populace in general. What I present here is a material

history of what we are left with as it happens, and hopefully a partial explanation of why.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................. viii
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1
INFORMAL SHRINES, THE AGENCY OF GRIEF, AND THE CIVIL SANCTITY OF
9/11 ................................................................................................... 10
The Agency of Grief and Informality ........................................................ 14
Sacred Expression and Defining the National Community .............................. 21
CHAPTER 2
FORMAL COMMEMORATION, AMERICAN IDENTITY, AND SANCTIFYING
PLACE .............................................................................................. 29
The Technology/Body Relationship and Official Responses to 9/11 .................. 32
The Sacred and Impersonal at the Pentagon Memorial .................................. 35
The National Martyrs of Flight 93 .......................................................... 4O
Reflecting Absence and Reaching Heaven at the World Trade Center ................ 42
CHAPTER 3
SACRED CONSUMERISM AND THE RITUAL COMMUNITY CALLED NATION
........................................................................................................ 50
American Relics and Popular Culture ...................................................... 54
Buying Memory Rites ........................................................................ 60
CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 7O
FIGURES .......................................................................................... 73
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 91

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: “Venice, California.” Religion and Material Culture: Spontaneous Shrines. 10
December 2001. Dr. Ivan Stresnki. 2003. www.shrines.ucr.edu ............................. 73

Figure 2: Green, Steve. Barr, Christina. Close Up of Yellow Clogs Left by a Mourner

from Holland. The September 11 Documentary Project Collection. Library of Congress.
American F olklife Center. 07 May 2002. afc2001/Ol Szphl98 ............................... 74

Figure 3: “Union Square.” Religion and Material Culture: Spontaneous Shrines. 10
December 2001. Dr. Ivan Stresnki. 2003. www.shrines.ucr.edu ............................. 74

Figure 4: “IN MEMORY of the Delivery Boys Who Died.” Cooper, Martha. Labor Arts
MISSING Exhibit. Labor Arts Incorporated. 2002.
http://www.laborarts.org/exhibits/missing/missingexhl .cfm ................................. 75

Figure 5: “World Trade Center, NYC 2.” Religion and Material Culture: Spontaneous
Shrines. 10 December 2001. Dr. Ivan Stresnki. 2003. www.shrines.ucr.edu ............... 76

Figure 6: “World Trade Center, NYC 12.” Religion and Material Culture: Spontaneous
Shrines. 10 December 2001. Dr. Ivan Stresnki. 2003. www.shrines.ucr.edu ............... 76

Figure 7: “Work Gloves, Candles, Cards and Flowers on a Shrine in Front of the
Firehouse on West 3 1 st Street.” Cooper, Martha. Labor Arts MISSING Exhibit. Labor
Arts Incorporated. 2002. http://www.laborarts.org/exhibits/missing/missingeth.cfm... 77

Figure 8: “Poetry Left at Memorial.” Green, Steve. Barr, Christina. The September 11
Documentary Project Collection. Library of Congress. American F olklife Collection.

September, 2001. afc2001/015:ph037 ........................................................... 77
Figure 9: Untitled. Smialowski, Brenda. Getty Images. 10 September 2002 ............... 78

Figure 10: “Pentagon Memorial Park.” Pentagon Memorial Fund.
http://www.pentagonmemorial.net/renew/default.aspx. 18 December 2006 ............... 78

Figure 11: “Flight 93 Crash site Memorial.” Kirby, Doug, Smith, Ken and Wilkins, Mike.
www.roadsideamerica.com. 16 April 2007 ..................................................... 79

Figure 12: “Flight 93 National Memorial.” Paul Murdoch Architects. Flight 93 Memorial
Project. http://www.flight93memorialproject.org/press.asp. 16 April 2007 ............... 79

Figure 13: “Tribute in Light.” Thom, Dave. 16 March 2002.
http://www.tgeneva.com/~davethom/ ........................................................... 80

Figure 14: “Reflecting Absence.” Arad, Michael. Walker, Peter. World Trade Center
Memorial Fund. 2007.

viii

http://www.buildthememorial.org/site/PhotoAlbumUser?view=UserPhotoDetail&PhotoI
D=45 l 28&position=2&AlbumID=5467 ........................................................ 80

Figure 15: “Rendering of the Freedom Tower and Reflecting Absence.” Lower
Manhattan Development Corporation. http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/ 16 April 2007.81

Figure 16: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.” Rosenthal, Joe. The Associated Press. 23

February 1945 ....................................................................................... 82
Figure 17: “US. Marine Corps War Memorial.” De Weldon, Felix W. National Park
Service, Washington DC .......................................................................... 82
Figure 18: “Raising the Flag at Ground Zero.” Franklin, Thomas. September 11, 2001.
The Bergen Record. September 12, 2001 ........................................................ 83
Figure 19: “Raising the Flag.” Mathews Bronze.
http://plaquesandletters.com/patriotic_tributes_l.htm ......................................... 83
Figure 20: “5th Anniversary World Trade Center Commemorative.” The National
Collectors Mint. Directors: Barry Goldwater Jr.
http://www.nationalcollectorsmint.com/product2. j sp?path=-l l1699&id=4689 ............ 84
Figure 21: “Subway Token Gifts.” http://www.everythingnyc.com/nycaccessories.html.
© 1999-2006 NY Minute Enterprises, Ltd ...................................................... 84
Figure 22: “The Sun.” Spektor, Alex (2002). DLibrary of Congress. Gift of Bolivar
Arellano Gallery. Prints (144) ..................................................................... 85
Figure 23: “World Trade Center.” Dir. Oliver Stone. Paramount Pictures, 2006 .......... 85

Figure 24: “American Skin.” Hyman, Jonathan. Time Magazine. Pg. 88. September 5,
2006 ................................................................................................... 86

Figure 25: “Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.” Rollins, Sonny. Milestone. August 30,
2005 ................................................................................................... 86

Figure 26: The 9/1 1 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks.

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. July 2004 ............................................................. 87

Figure 27: “World Trade Center Anniversary Sweatshirt.” The Gift that Travels With
You. NYCwebstore.com. 16 April 2007 ........................................................ 87

Figure 28: “2005 9/11 Tribute Calendar.” National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial
Fund. Gift Shop ..................................................................................... 88

ix

Figure 29: “9/11 FDNY and Flag Pins.” NYCwebstore.com. 16 April 2007 .............. 88
Figure 30: “Snow Globes of New York City.” NYCwebstore.com. 16 April 2007 ....... 89
Figure 31: “NYC Skyline Patriotic Snow Globes.” NYCwebstore.com. 16 April 2007.. 89
Figure 32: “Coexist.” Stampandshout.com. 16 April 2007 ................................... 90
Figure 33: “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Moore, Michael. Sony Pictures. 2004 ....................... 90

Figure 34: “9/1 1, 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis, Foreign Oil Sponsors Global Terrorism.”
GeekLefi.org. http://geeklefi.org/tshirt/9_11_oil/ ............................................. 90

INTRODUCTION

Making Memory and Sanctifying Community

In the wake of any tragedy those affected by it attempt to recreate their various
disrupted identities. This reclamation of ideals, values, and various other markers
associated with the self is a largely idiosyncratic process of deciding what that individual
does and does not value. The same process is at work on a communal level; a group of
affected individuals connects to a larger social identity through the perceived sharing of a
particular quality, attribute, moment or tragedy in their past. This imagined community1
is built out of the reclaimed values, associations, relationships, ideals and identities at the
same moment that individuals begin reclaiming their own identities. And whether or not
these ideals or characteristics are true of the imagined community is far from important; it
is the idea of a shared commonality that makes this potentially vast group of people a
community.

This reclamation of communal identity is especially true for many religious
groups and can extend to an entire nation; both believers and patriots use a past that is
perceived as shared, creating community through a common memory. The question
becomes, “Which past”? Often it is a past that never really existed; in many cases it is a
“golden age,” or a nostalgic conception of a time, space, or place that is much more an
imaginative creation than a reality.2 Defining this shared past, however imagined it may

actually be, is negotiated through a number of expressions. In the wake of 9/1 1, however,

 

I Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
New Edition. London and New York: Verso.

2 Both Thomas Tweed in his study of Diasporic religion and Frederic Jameson among many other theorists
of postmodemity navigate the role of the recreation of space and temporality in both individual and
communal memory, creating a nostalgic past that shapes and influences the present.

it was contested largely through memorialization, including individual physical
testimonies of perceived pasts that build a communal memory. The material
representations of these communities become artifacts of changing individual and
communal identities, and of norms and practices that define those identities. The process
of memorialization shows the tension between ritualization and change over time, as
standardizing through ritual is in direct contention with differences in expression — even
within the same “in” community — and changing communal responses to new
environments or events. If the creation of a collective memory is the same thing as the
creation of a basis for a collective identity, than it is possible to map corresponding
changes in that identity through events and practices in a perceived shared history that
determines perceptions of communal memory.

In the months and years following the attacks on the Pentagon, the World Trade
Center and the unknown destination of Flight 93 on September 11th, 2001, a number of
Americans attempted to reclaim values and a community that they largely perceived as
having been attacked that day. To do so, a number of material responses were employed
both officially and informally, as was a pull to both localize and nationalize the events as
large in scale and particularly American. Following a number of decades that brought
with them extreme technological innovation as well as a series of disasters
(contextualized by both religious and civil anxiety over the looming end of the
millennium both in the US. and across the globe), 9/11 was marketed as the beginning of
the new world when in fact it bore many similarities to the old perception of disaster.
Countless public officials from the US. government and various other institutions also

discursively shaped it as the event that was to define a generation of Americans, much

like World War 11. And yet the tribute websites, the spontaneous shrines, and various
other civil responses both formal and informal are being dismantled, taken down, painted
over, and left to rot. There appears to be a bookend on some of the meanings placed on
this event and individuals’ memory of it, with ripples still moving through political,
religious, and popular culture.

The events of 9/11 were inherently global and yet - compared to other national
and international tragedies - arguably small in scale: of the roughly 3,000 individuals
who died, roughly 25% of the victims were not US. citizens, and the victims of the
attacks represented 115 nations. Compared to other recent disasters like the tsunami in
Indonesia/Sri Lanka/Myanmar that killed 286,000, and the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat,
India that claimed 30,000 lives, 9/11 is not a particularly large-scale disaster.
Interestingly, however, this relatively small-scale set of attacks aimed at a perceived way
of life shared by many western nations that occurred on American soil has been framed
as a large-scale American tragedy by those who hold stakes in the nationalist
construction of the memory of 9/1 1.

What is gained through creating 9/11 as an American disaster is an inroad for the
reclamation of faith in American ideals, mission, and institutions; the degree of control
this permits allows citizens to cope, institutionally, and regain faith in, reaffirm, and
defend that which the imagined community perceived as having been attacked. And in
the case of the memory of 9/1 1, shaped as a national event, the beginnings of some
imaginary communal boundaries of who would be “in” and who would be “out” was
(re)created.

“American ideals” are virtually impossible to define, and any attempt to do so

would largely be an exercise in futility. But what is certain is that it can be determined
what some people believe them to be. To continue this process of recuperation and
reaffirrnation of technology, consumerism, and democracy — among many other
characteristics that are used to define Americans at the institutional level, yet do not
account for the continually changing face of the American landscape — the “in” members
of this community of mourners further defined the boundaries of the community that
stemmed from this collective memory, this shared past, by imagining the bonds of their

community with a sacred imagination.3

The purpose of all memorialization is to create a usable past in hopes of creating
a meaningful present and after 9/11 it also serves to give this imagined community moral
agency — the expression of which is arguably lacking in American secular life. This
process has been at work in other facets of American popular culture: David Chidester
writes, “Like a church, Major League Baseball institutionalizes a sacred memory of the

past that informs the present.”4

To see the process at work, one must look no further than
at the relationship between the ideologies that this post-9/11 imagined community
supposedly represented previous to that day and the material artifacts that represent those

alleged shared ideals in its wake.

This thesis uses three lenses to examine the material responses that have reshaped
the American national memory of the event: spontaneous shrines, official memorials, and

consumer relics and commercial rituals. Using these three analytical sets in conjunction

 

3 This sacred imagination is much like a religious imagination or a civil religion, but it is not
institutionalized. Rather, it is a sacred reinvestment in and reaffirmation of those institutions. Because it is
transitional and pre—institutional it is also temporary.

4 Chidester, David. “The Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca-Cola, and the Potlach of Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Theoretical Models for the Study of Religion in American Popular Culture.” J oum_al of the American
_A_cademy of Religion. Vol.64, No. 4, (Winter, 1996). Pg.745.

with some close reading of memorials as well as material culture and popular religious
analyses, this thesis aims to study the ways in which material responses are used as a
means of recreating a community that represents those various, contested, inconsistent ——
though often institutionalized — characteristics that are used to define the American nation

in a post-9/11 world.

The first of the three lenses through which this process of using sacred expression
gives secular functions and institutions more meaning is concerned with the construction
of informal and spontaneous shrines. Spontaneous shrines can be accumulations made by
the many, or individual shrines made by a few or even a single person. And these
informal, highly personalized memorials in response to 9/11 are texts that act as
testimonials of what individuals value and of that with which they identify in response to
this highly nationalized tragedy. The builder is merging her own testimony, often the
identity of the fallen individual to whom the shrine is a tribute in many cases, and the
nationalistic meanings associated with the builder’s identity. Through these various
informal material responses to 9/11 a sense of sanctity is afforded the builder, the shrine,
the site of the shrine, and the values represented through the memory that is constructed
to further define this “American” community. And in that sense the building of a
spontaneous shrine is also a performance of “Americanness,” often a prescriptive display

of grief and nationalistic meanings with a generally reverent context.

These shrines are responses not only to the events of 9/1 1, but are also implicit
rejections of formal methods of commemoration, of the traditional, commercial fimerary
rites or govemmentally sanctioned forms of commemoration that have, in the last few

decades, come under attack as inauthentic. This relatively new search for completeness of

human expression of grief and authenticity in the mourning process is an attempt to
reclaim individual agency in tragic remembrance from the various institutions and
standardized processes of mourning that have been so prevalent through the modern
period in American history. Ironically, this process, it will be argued, is itself a means of
standardization that norms the diverse material responses to 9/11, and in some cases these
informal shrines are even reclaimed or reinvented by formal, governmental or
institutional commemorations.

The second lens through which this thesis analyzes the use of civil sanctification
for the reification of communal boundaries and simultaneous creation and reclamation of
“American values” is through the formalized, collective commemorations that occurred
in honor of 9/1 1. Formal commemoration ceremonies and memorials are the official,
permanent responses with a clear set of ideals that is purposefully impersonal and often
employs imagery that is both obvious yet vague. This chapter is committed to the
relationship between place, collective memory, and the formalized commemorative
choices that reflect, recreate and inform that relationship. This thesis argues that the
institutionalization of public mourning space for formal commemoration usually entails
an attempt at impersonalization and a permanence of values and community that is not
usually attempted in the informal shrines. Looking at the purposeful contest of ideas of
what to build at the World Trade Center site, for example, this study is invested in the
relationship between the means through which the institutional reclamation and definition
of values took place — like competition as democratic practice and a sanctification of it as

a means of giving these practices more meaning - and the ends that they create.

Lastly, the consumer goods that sprung out of 9/11 are also material attempts to
recreate a community with boundaries defined by particular, institutionalized “American
values” infused with sacred context. The market plays a large role in determining and
tracking what Americans value. Consumer markets that have sprung up in response to
9/11 are comprised of goods that — in most cases — lack subtlety, and therefore lend
themselves to be used for fairly clear purposes by those who purchase them. Operating
much like religious relics or other material expressions in American and world religions,
goods that can be purchased in honor of 9/ 11 are also a means through which
participating community members can elect to count themselves among those that have —
if in a small, commodified way — participated in the event, and therefore can use it as a
means of identification for themselves, as well as participate in redefining what it means
to have experienced that event or identity.

All of these material expressions, it will be argued, are sites where “American
values and practices,” understood as those official characteristics recognized in so many

99 6"

political speeches — like “freedom, justice,

99 ’9 ‘6

“sacrifice, capitalism,” “democratic

process,” “individualism,” and the ever elusive “liberty” - borrow the context of sanctity
to give that American, nostalgic collective memory of 9/11 more meaning, which serves
to inscribe that same sanctity into the institutions that were threatened by the attacks of
9/11. This is a means of deciding who is “in” and who is “out” of the American national
community, which further closes the scope of the community itself while simultaneously
reifying and privileging particular responses and groups over others.

The iconography and rituals of mourning have created a culture of maintaining

sacred space and time surrounding 9/11, including a directed space for expression of

national morality. When the City of New York has its annual commemoration and
literally connects heaven and earth with ghostly beams of light in the twin towers’ stead,
it is using a sense of sanctity borrowed from religious imagery to elicit a solemn
nationalist response in which there is an expectation of actions, thoughts and behaviors.
The many other memorials to the event at large also negotiate identity and contest
meanings of the event in personal — religious, psychological, gendered, racial — and
nationalist terms. Some see 9/11 as an instant in an eternal battle of good and evil,
coming off of a memory of the Cold War and a sense of American mission. To some it is
a political crisis, to others a religious war, and still to others it is a negligible event that,
all told, personally affected very few people compared to other national tragedies around
the globe in the last century. Yet, memorials and shrines remain ways of setting
standards, norming, ritualizing, processing, and mourning that take on religious
significance because — in the case of post-9/ 11 nationalism - they borrow the sense of
sanctity and structure of expression from religious practices to make otherwise profane
space sacred.5

This thesis is an attempt to prove that beyond simple patriotism, even through a
reinvention of the personal or individual in hopes of representing or searching for a new
authenticity — represented here through the material responses to 9/11 — citizens and
consumers are participating in the standardization and institutional reclamation of that
which this massive, varied, national imagined community perceives itself as representing.
And the creation of that national memory, whether it be by an individual or through a

large-scale formal commemoration, is necessarily doing service to the institutionalized

 

5 Blade, Mircea (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: A Harvest Book,
Harcourt, Brace and World Inc.

collective identity, inscribing sanctity into otherwise profane places, imbuing secular
functions and institutions with sacred meaning, and using the context of popular images

of sanctity to define the boundaries of this national “in” community.

CHAPTER ONE
Informal Shrines, the Agency of Grief, and the Civil Sanctity of 9/11

“These things do not mark the death of the nation or patriotism; on the contrary they
mark a tremendous effort to reconstitute the nation and the citizen’s faith in it.”6

The days, weeks and months following the attacks of 9/11 brought with them a
number of material forms of mourning. This chapter focuses on the processes behind the
creation of informal, often highly individualized spontaneous shrines and collections of
personal items placed at various sites. These things — symbolic, simple items belonging to
grievers, sympathizers, victims, and loved ones — range from photographs to religious
symbols, to stuffed animals to flowers, to ad hoc representations of the Twin Towers
themselves and everything in between. These informal, spontaneous shrines were
constructed on every continent on the planet in response to 9/11, both in honor of the
event and of the individuals from around the globe who were killed in the attacks.7

The various reasons each item was placed is not something that can be known, as
it would require knowing every identity of those who placed items and the identities of
those they mourn, as well as the inner workings of those countless relationships. But it is,
nonetheless, possible and necessary to put forth what those intentions may have been,
given the recent literature concerning spontaneous shrines and memory.8 It is likely that
these informal commemorations, these spontaneous shrines, are material testimonies of

grief for an individual or the event at large, a way of remembering, honoring or recreating

 

6 Hass, Kristin Ann (1998). Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

7 About 25% of the nearly 3,000 victims of 9/11 were not American citizens.

8 Kristin Hass, Ed Linenthal, and Colleen McDannell and others have recently laid the frameworks for
potential intents behind the construction of spontaneous shrines.

10

the identity of an individual and the moumer’s relationship with the victim through the
giving of a “gift,” or perhaps even to put forth an image of what grieving is supposed to
look like as a performance for others outside of the commemorated relationship or
identity. The intent differs with the nature of the spontaneous shrines; some shrines are
built as personal testimonies entirely constructed by an individual for another individual
or in relation to a larger event, whereas others are accumulations of memorial goods or
items that are placed within a space by numerous individuals, each item representing the
relationship between, or memory of, an individual or many individuals. These various
forms of spontaneous shrines and the processes at work in their erection will be examined
here in the context of 9/11.

The building of spontaneous shrines bring with them a number of dynamics that
reshape the construction of memory but two main themes appear that define the role of
the builder, namely: a self-sanctioned sense of sacred time, and the ability to make
secular space into sacred space. Both of these dynamics present in the identities of the
builders of spontaneous shrines are made possible through the “agency of grief,”
particularly in terms of a tragedy like 9/11, which the moumer/builder is afforded.9
Further, these informal shrines are representative of a search for authenticity on the part
of the builder/mourner, taking mourning out of the hands of institutions or anything
resembling a sanitized, purposefully impersonal attempt at commemoration, but it will be
argued here that this search for authenticity as well as the content of the shrines
themselves serve the very sources of that perceived inauthenticity. A recent study

suggests that:

 

9 Clark, Jennifer and Majella Franzmann (2006). “Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making
of Roadside Memorials.” Death Studies, 30: 579-599. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. Metapress.

11

The modern construction of roadside memorials may be a specific

expression, perhaps, of a bigger phenomenon, a current groundswell of

disregarding institutional forms that once sufficed for the crisis moments

in life. More than ever, people are beginning to take religion and meaning-

making out of the hands of the government or established religious. While

memorials and shrines may have existed by the roadside during periods of
higher religiosity in the past, the renewed interest and attraction in their
construction currently cannot be argued to have the same context. Those

who construct memorials now often speak of not finding meaning in the

rituals of conventional religion and see their memorials either as an

alternative or even in outright opposition to conventional religion. '0

Indeed, even the American media and other institutions — the very things that
allegedly norm and standardize — have commented on the impersonal nature of formal
commemoration, the most recent example being the news media’s simultaneous scrutiny
of, and participation in, the general pageantry of the ceremonies following the passing of
former US. president Gerald R. Ford.ll The search for authenticity — evidenced here
through the spontaneous shrines as a form of grief, commemoration or mourning in
response to 9/11 — is arguably a rejection of the institutionalized formal modes of
commemoration, in favor of forms that give the griever more direct control.

The ways in which American understandings of commemoration, mourning and
memory are formed are the result of a number of influences; the Cold War, the Vietnam
War, American religious and general millennialism, civil religion and many other factors
shaped the history leading to 9/11. But, again, the very institutions and mass-cultural
icons, indeed components of the worldview they represent and the histories and identities

created by the history of the latter half of the 20th century themselves are being rejected

through this informal mode of commemoration or mourning, and are also actually being

 

‘0 Ibid., Pg. 581.
” Gerald Ford Remembered; Firestorm Erupts Over Saddam Execution. CNN: Newsroom. 02 January
2007. 3:00pm. March 22, 2007.

12

recovered and reified through the rejection of them and the building of the informal,
spontaneous shrines. Despite the attempt to reject the worlds of meaning created,
standardized, and sanitized of personal, diverse responses that is implicit in the creation
of a formal shrine, the informal and personal nature of the spontaneous shrine is often
betrayed by its content, and serves only to reify that which it rejects, often displaying
signs of allegiance to nation, religion, capitalism, democratic practice, and other tenants
of institutionalized American culture.

The relationship between memory and placement of 9/ 11 spontaneous shrines is
also of interest. In the case of roadside shrines or even the Oklahoma City bombing,
spontaneous shrines were constructed at the place of disaster or tragedy.l2 In the case of a
roadside shrine, the memorial to the crash victim gains sacred authority because it is
often placed very near, if not on top of, the site of death or tragedy and is most often built
by a griever or group of grievers. This proximity is what gives the otherwise public,
secular space a new sense of sacred authority, at least to the griever. In the case of one
mourner, the relationship between the memorial she built and place is particularly

6“

transcendent: the memorial is very bittersweet for me,’ said Kendra’s mother. ‘It’s
where my daughter’s life here on earth ended and her life in heaven started.’”l3 But the
informal shrines to the events and victims of 9/11 were constructed across Manhattan, let

alone the globe, which calls into question the relationship between commemoration and

place.

 

'2 For more on memory and the Oklahoma bombing, see Ed Linenthal’s The Unfinished Bombing:
Oklahoma City in American Memory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

'3 Clark, Jennifer and Majella Franzmann (2006). “Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making
of Roadside Memorials.” Death Studies, 30: 579-599. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. Metapress. Pg. 585.

13

And lastly, the informal, commemorative act of building a shrine, in light of the
nationalistic context of 9/1 1, takes on a tone of sacred expression. The secular working of
American society has a history of being treated with a certain sanctity, stemming largely
from the sense of mission that has been so central to the formation of American
nationalism since the nation’s inception. This civil religious use of sacred expression will
be examined as an attempt at the simultaneous construction of a community to reaffirm a
particular identity as well as a reclamation of those values considered “mainstream
American” -— even through intentionally non-institutional means -— when those values
represented by institutions, whatever they may be, are perceived as challenged, as is the

case in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Part One: The Agency of Grief and Info’rmality

The use and view of time to the builder of a spontaneous shrine is much different
than that of the viewer or builder of a formal commemoration. The agency grief is
afforded comes, perhaps, from the sympathy one is expected to feel for the mourner, but
more likely it is a feeling of experiential ownership of a tragic event; it is a set of rights
the moumer feels he or she owns simply because he or she is in the process of mourning,
and the moumer lays claim to an experiential proximity to the tragic event. It includes a
claim to sacred time when it comes to the process of mourning, though this is not without
its limits.'4 According to the agency afforded the grieving party building the spontaneous
shrine, that individual constructing the spontaneous, informal shrine is the only one who
is capable of knowing when the shrine can be taken down or when the grieving has

passed. It can take years, and in some cases it never happens; accordingly, the informal

 

'4 Ibid., Pg.587.

14

shrine is usually maintained, honored, and claimed as sacred by the builder over a
potentially vast amount of time. In most cases, however, the grieving individual or party
works within a self-regulated period of time.'5

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries American religious culture saw a certain
denominational structure reshaping the practices of other religious traditions, and come to
define American understandings of religious practice and what constitutes “religion” in
the American context. This tension is played out over and over as traditional religious
practices meet liberal society in America, as can be evidenced through the various waves
of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth centuries as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.16
The role of time and grieving that was previously prescribed by religious tradition has,
arguably, been denominationalized in the American context. In other words, the
individual agency that accompanies America’s generally decentralized packaging of
religion may inform this freedom of time afforded by the agency of grief by putting the
ability to make choices of sacred time into the hands of individuals instead of keeping the
prescribed roles as defined by religious traditions.

Another feature of this unique sense of temporality afforded by grief is that the
informal shrine is expected to change over time. This stands in stark contrast to a formal
commemoration or memorial, which is — by definition — meant to lock a standard or norm
into a state of timelessness; the formal, impersonal memorial is meant to represent a long-
standing set of truths that are supposed to define a people or group over time. Contrary to

this is the informal shrine, which is, instead, an artifact of mourning, of a relationship

 

IS -
lbtd.

'6 Flake, Kathleen (2004). The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot,

Mormon Apostle. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

15

between the griever and for whom the moumer grieves, as well as the griever’s memory
of that individual/set of individuals or relationship to the tragic event.

The personal is intrinsically tied with the ephemeral essence of the informal
shrine, as the spontaneous shrine is not meant to preserve ideology through time in a
permanent way, unlike formal commemorative acts; it is meant to change, and when the
time is right, to be dismantled. The question of when the time is right, however, is one
that differs depending on who decides to answer, as well as on the frequency of public
use of the newly sacred space in its shared, secular context. Indeed, some shrines are built
in public places that are used regularly, or in places that pose dangers to the public, thus
causing passersby, agencies, or public authorities to dismantle them and end the material
artifact of grief prematurely, at least in terms of the temporal authority afforded the
griever.

This sense of sacred time — sanctioned through the act of grieving — is inseparable
from the sense of sacred space when it comes to informal, spontaneous shrines. The
agency afforded grief makes public — and often, private — or secular space open to
mourners, who feel they have a natural or human right to transform that space, because of
the relationship between memory, grieving and place, into sacred ground. One study of
this suggests that, “mourners assume the authority to construct a memorial for private
purposes in a public place for as long as they need it there. They are willing to take grief
out of the confines of the cemetery and beyond the emotional and spiritual boundaries of
the church, to construct for themselves a new sacred place fully recognizing that this

process is open-ended and only those who grieve know when it is time to stop.”'7

 

'7 Clark, Jennifer and Majella Franzmann (2006). “Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making
of Roadside Memorials.” Death Studies, 30: 579-599. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. Metapress. Pg. 583.

16

Indeed, this grief—sanctioned claim to sacred time and space for the building,
assembling or accumulating of a spontaneous, informal shrine was put to the test over
and over in the wake of 9/1 1. One particular case illustrates this dynamic quite well. The
New York Times printed a story on November 8‘“, 2002, about the systematic dismantling
of a collective spontaneous shrine that had accumulated on the fence of St. Paul’s Chapel,
near the World Trade Center site in the months following the reopening of downtown
Manhattan. The cluttered shrine was comprised of t-shirts, ballcaps, jerseys, flowers, and
various other personalized materials; each item purposefully placed there, each
representing an identity or relationship.

The New York Times article states: “The job is delicate, both physically and
symbolically. Two men in Windbreakers worked in silence yesterday, peeling worn T-
shirts like skin from the iron bars, passing a knife back and forth for the tough knots.”18
These men were employees who worked for St. Paul’s, and their slow dismantling of the
spontaneous shrine had a mixed reception from community members, but no report was
gathered from those who contributed to the site of mourning: “One day a week, workers
will clear away memorial tributes on 10 feet of the fence, five feet on each of two
sections.”19 Reactions from residents of the neighborhood ranged from shock at the pace
that it was being dismantled to relief because of the “eyesore” the memorial accumulation
had become.

These reactions reported in The New York Times are representative of different

attitudes toward the sacred time and space to which these mourners lay claim. The article

states that some neighbors were concerned with what would happen to the materials. Like

 

'8 Wilson, Michael. “St. Paul’s Chapel Near Ground Zero Slowly Dismantles 9/1 1 Memorial.” New York
Times. 08 November 2002, nat. ed., see. b: 6.
‘9 Ibid.

17

many dismantled spontaneous shrines to 9/11 or other fairly recent tragedies, the
materials that comprised the shrine were carefully removed so they could be saved for a
museum display or archives. There is a relationship between the informal and the formal
here, which, ultimately, betrays the sacred temporality afforded by the authority of grief,
ironically for the sake of preserving the authenticity represented by the informal, personal
spontaneous accumulation or shrine. Even if moved a hundred yards, the informality,
personal sanctity, and authenticity of the structure or items is forever lost, and the
archivist then plays the role of recreating the meaning of the content, the informal shrine,
within the context of formality. This is a peculiar process: is the shrine itself what is to be
saved, or the articles that comprise it? And what of the relationship between place and
memory in these circumstances?

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the formal commemoration
committee had a unique answer for this question: the spontaneous shrine that had
accumulated on a fence, as well the fence itself surrounding the disaster site, was actually
incorporated into the formal commemorative structure. Included was also a section of the
fence that moumers/visitors/grievers could continue to attach items to that would be
cleared, saved, stored, and displayed at a later date. This created an almost living
memorial, but it also has a dramatic effect on the informality and personal intent of the
spontaneous shrine. Though it encourages the necessarin impersonal display to be
personalized, this, arguably, still disrupts the sanctity of the time afforded the griever and
particularly the role of informality that is supposed to be expressed through the
spontaneous shrine. The incorporation of the process of informal shrine making itself into

the formal structure also suggests an institutional reclamation of the mourning

l8

community’s newly sanctioned authenticity, making the placement of an item on the
fence at the formal structure — in the end — a relatively hollow act.

The reverence with which the St. Paul’s employees dismantled the spontaneous
shrine to 9/11 that had accumulated on their property in Lower Manhattan in 2002 is not
universal when it comes to reactions to and treatment of spontaneous shrines that are built
by others, despite the fact that they were taking down other people’s sacred expressions
of mourning or commemoration. There are numerous accounts of roadside shrines that
have been dismantled by road commissions because they are technically a safety hazard,
or simply replaced by safer, standardized structures. Cases also exist of a replacement of
informal, spontaneous roadside shrines with formalized, official memorials, which is an
institutional response to the fairly recent trend of informal shrine building and recognition
of individual tragedy:

Official memorials are uniform in style, size and purpose, and secular in
orientation. They are regulated, static and intentionally lacking of any
form of individuality. They are rational, organized, theorized responses to
road trauma, an attempt to regulate and regiment, perhaps even to
capitalize on the memorial impulse to serve a public end by promoting
road safety and regaining control over the roadside. That such markers are
not the same as personal memorials erected by family and friends is borne
out in South Dakota, for example, where some official death markers were
subsequently decorated with flowers and had crosses planted at their bases
as a sign of ownership, or indeed an assumption of control from the
state... Government authorities generally see the roadside as an open
public domain, not one to be assumed as a mourning space and argue that
roadside memorials create a safety hazard... In Maryland, Virginia and
Washington, for example, memorials are illegal but are generally not
disturbed. In Thousand Oaks, California, memorials are permitted for only
30 days, after which they are removed. In Atlantic City, markers on the
expressway are there for ten days only and families must have permission
and a police escort for their erection. In some cases, however, government
authorities are very sensitive to memorial makers. In Victoria, Australia
the state transport authority, VicRoads, tried to contact all memorial
makers along a 50 kilometer stretch of road before undertaking major
repair works. ‘We are keen to talk with families who placed these

19

memorials,’ said Kevin Fox of VicRoads, ‘to make arrangements for their
storage, protection or relocation in accordance with family wishes.20

And much in the same way that the replacement or defacement of these
spontaneous, informal shrines undoes the sanctity afforded by the agency of grief, the
disassociation of place and spontaneous shrine is of interest in the case of 9/1 1. This is a
rather strange development, as the reason that the authority is granted to grief and thus
the sacred transformation of secular space on the part of the grieving builder is tolerated
is because of the relationship between memory and the actual place at which the event
took place. But in the case of 9/ 11 not only were informal shrines built all over
Manhattan, they stretched across all of New York, the nation, and even across the globe.
Given the nature of these roadside shrines, the focus on the fence after Oklahoma City,
the religious roots —— leaving articles of faith at holy locations or religious shrines — of
spontaneous shrine practices, or even the individualism celebrated, mourned, and reified
by the placing of items at formal commemorative memorials, like the Vietnam Veteran’s
Memorial, this disassociation of place and shrine is, indeed, unique. What happens when
the site of informal commemoration — the spontaneous shrine — is disassociated from the
place it is commemorating?

Figure 1 is a spontaneous shrine built on September 11, 2001 in Venice,
California. The regular items are present; flowers, pictures, an American flag, and other
personal goods. Also adorning the edifice, serving as a backdrop, are the words
“America” and “Believe.” Further, a mantle appears as a part of the structure. The
mantle, a classic symbol of “home,” may be claiming ownership of the identity of the

victim who is commemorated here. In the absence of the traditional relationship between

 

20 Clark, Jennifer and Majella Franzmann (2006). “Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in the Making
of Roadside Memorials.” Death Studies, 30: 579-599. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. Metapress. Pg. 582.

20

place and memory — placing or erecting the shrine or object at the site of death or tragedy
— this shrine represents a different kind of bond between memory and place, emphasizing
the relationship between this fallen individual and this specific location, whether it be the
building or Venice, California, in general. This is also true of a number of other shrines
across the globe; shrines erected in Germany are often mourning a German individual, for
example, as next to the United States, Germany lost the most citizens in 9/11.

This can be seen in Figure 2 for an individual who, ostensibly, had a relationship
to Holland; the left shoe actually has the words “New York” and “Holland” written on it,
advice on the right shoe; “Be Strong... Live Free,” and - finally — the name of the
individual on the inside of the shoes. The placement of the name on the inside of the
shoes is greatly important; that is where the body of the individual, his or her feet,
symbolically stood, which connects the viewer to this individual in a very personal way,
and clearly attaches this individual to a Hollander identity. This focus on the individual
location and connection to place in these cases is not connected to the homeland, the
native location of that individual’s identity, not simply citing the space of

commemoration in terms of the tragedy.

Part Two: Sacred Expression and Defining the National Community

The personal, informal shrines built in commemoration of individuals were
indeed built to create an authentic means of mourning that could be highly individualized,
and non-sanitized or standardized, as those who build informal, spontaneous shrines
implicitly view formal commemoration at least to a degree. This perceived authenticity

and individuality gives the viewer a sense of a claim to the sanctity — and a communal

21

participation in — of the event that the shrine represents. If viewed this way, the shrine is a
doorway or an invitation for the viewer to participate in the authentic, sacred community
potentially created out of these memorials; the individual that is being commemorated is
transformed from a victim into a national martyr, into a communal idea of belonging into
which the viewer/audience can enter. The shrine gives the victim’s death a meaning, and
the viewer decides, given the content of the shrine and the extent of the use of the
victim’s perceived identity, what that meaning is. This creates a sense of participation in
a community of interpretation but it also creates a distance between the intent of the
builder, as well as the builder’s representation of the victims’ actual identity and the
meanings placed upon the shrine by the various viewers.

A community can be created out of the shared activity, the shared sanctification of
otherwise secular space, and though the viewer is not building the shrine, the viewer is
implicitly part of that community of participation, and consequently the interpretation of
ideals and identities represented by the shrine. Further, this community is quite possibly
the same one represented by the institutions and values of which this search for
authenticity through spontaneous shrines is an implicit rejection. In this way, the
standardization of the meanings of these shrines — through the interpretive community’s
act of viewing and placing value — is natural, and reifies the values represented by
American institutions. The very same values that were perceived as attacked are recouped
through these material, sanctifying, public representations of grief.

A clear example of this would be the process of creating an accumulation-based
spontaneous shrine. In the case of 9/11, this can be witnessed through the afore

mentioned shrine outside of St. Paul’s Chapel, at the World Trade Center site itself, at the

22

site in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, or at the Pentagon. The relationship between the
object and memory is easily identified: “This capacity of the object to act as a perpetual
source of recollection is particularly the case when the memory triggered is of a friend or
family member who has died... Objects are also left on the city streets at the site of
crimes or on roads where accidents have occurred. They serve not only to remember the
dead but to jolt the viewer into recognizing the reality of violence and danger?” In this
sense, the builder intends the shrine to be a performance of grief to send a message, to
communicate. This means many things, but one of them is for the shrine to be a reminder
of the real violence that took place, and in the case of 9/11 this move is an attempt to
create a community of people who have experienced the event (and the viewer of the
shrine experiences it simply through viewing/participating in the shrine). This creates a
sacred community, and also reclaims some of the American values that have been
perceived as challenged.

Figure 3 is a spontaneous shrine that has accumulated in Union Square Park, New
York. This park has a history of social and political activism, and is controlled by the
New York City Department of Parks and Recreation as well as by the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority. A number of candles have been placed, presumably, by a
number of different individuals, as have a myriad of flowers, flags, images of the World
Trade Center, and various other personal and religious items. Like objects have been
placed near each other in groupings, which is no small detail. The predominance of such
like objects means that there is a common or accepted mode of grieving taking place in

which a standardized idea of what grief is supposed to look like is acknowledged.

 

2' McDannell, Colleen (1995). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pg. 39.

23

Further, the group of individuals who constructed, and — as of the date of the photograph
— continued to construct, this spontaneous shrine has created a community of mourners as
well as a collectively recognized, and carefully chosen, sacred space.

The anonymity associated with this personal act is a particularly complicating
element in the process of spontaneous shrine building and general accumulation.
Accumulations, particularly, are largely anonymous acts that really hinge upon providing
a viewer access to an interpretation of the identity of an otherwise silent and unknown
victim, and yet this is a personal act — by the shrine builder — that aims to send a message,
to connect themselves, the person the shrine is to (and in the case of 9/11, the event) to
the imagined community of which they consider themselves a part.

There is also a less communally reinforcing side to the performative aspects of
spontaneous shrine building. To the builder, the meaning of the spontaneous shrine is
intrinsically wrapped up with the individuality of, identity and relationship with the
victim, but to the viewer — despite the sacred community that is potentially defined like in
the example above — the meaning of the shrine built by an individual or group of
individuals to a victim is potentially far less personal, and far less sanctified. The viewer
sees the idea of the individual at work — not necessarily the individual him or herself —
and as such the personal becomes impersonal. In other words, the private act of
individual grieving or mourning is consequently made a public act by erecting a
spontaneous shrine or contributing to the accumulation of items at a particular public
location. As a result, there is a clear distance available to the non-participant in which this
public act is an impersonal performative gesture, meant to be seen, meant to be judged,

valued or discarded, and as such the authority potentially gained is lost. The intent

24

implies a message; a connection the builder intends to send through the shrine and
identity of the victim, to the larger community. But just as it can sanctify, it can also
profane and be seen as dangerous, annoying, disrespectful, self-serving, unnecessary, or
one of many other interpretations.

The shrine pictured in Figure 4 is meant to provide a frame of accessibility into
the identity of the individual commemorated here. The shrine-builder is making it known
to the viewer through religious, nationalistic and personal items that this individual — or
perhaps the shrine builder - is ostensibly tied to Mexico and Catholicism in some way
shape or form. It is less clear, however, if the American flag that appears is — as has been
evidenced through other shrines — a standardized gesture because of the victim’s
relationship to the events of 9/11, thus painting this shrine as both to the individual and to
the event at large, or if this individual had some connection to the flag or to the United
States in general. The flowers — a common theme throughout virtually all spontaneous
shrines — are also an inaccessible, if not standardized, gesture.

The physical memorial is often adorned with or comprised of personal
belongings, perhaps pictures or a religious symbol or set of religious symbols, as well as
other articles to define that person as a fallen individual. These are all things that
personally distinguish that individual, but to the viewer participating in the mourning
ritual who does not know these individuals a structural pattern of eerie similarity between
all of the shrines can be detected that, in effect, makes them anonymous and causes a
visual and interpretive amnesia of the individuality that is supposed to be expressed

through these shrines and memorials.

25

The necessarily public act of spontaneous shrine building also creates a
standardized idea of what a shrine is to look like and of individualized commemorative
practice in general. These spontaneous shrines, highly individualized to the builder, can
easily be described as comprised of virtually identical materials like stuffed animals,
perhaps religious symbols, flowers, photographs, notes/poems, clothing or other personal
goods that often belonged to the victim or to the builder. Idiosyncratic goods representing
a personal level of experience are inaccessible outside of the individuals aware of it, and
even then these items are contextualized by the many other recognizable symbols of
nation, religion, and family. The authenticity that the moumer/shrine builder strives for is
mediated through a number of, frankly, traditional or institutional symbols; the process
that is arguably a rejection of sanitized, corporate means of mourning is itself claimed by
institutions, representing norms or standards themselves. This personal and informal pull
is made impersonal, standardized, and almost formal again through this.

Figures 5-7 are three spontaneous shrines erected at the World Trade Center site
in memory if individuals who were killed in the 9/11 attacks. All three have the various
images, structures and items that are meant to personalize them, and commemorate them
as individuals. But, the pattern does indeed emerge: nationalistic, religious, and
standardized personal items are displayed. Further, the anti-institutionalism that is
implicit in the existence and erection of the personal, changing, temporary spontaneous
shrine is betrayed by its contents. These images, selected from a myriad of shrines to
individuals, are displays of American ideals and institutions; the police badge, the work
gloves, the leisure activity of golfing, the American flag theme that is prevalent in all

three of these images, the religious symbols, and even the inclusion of artwork from

26

children are telling reifications and reclamations of institutionalized American values,
performed through an attempted anti-institutional means of mourning. And though the
builder is attaching the identity of the victim to what he or she considers “good” or
“valuable” in society, whether it be family, nation, work, or religion, the builder is also
attaching the above individuals — through this shrine —- to socially prescribed ideas of
what is “good” or “valuable,” which galvanizes these particular values as sacred and
important in American society.

The same claim can be made for rhetorical shrines, like that pictured in Figure 8;
every statement in this spontaneous shrine is a quote, catchphrase, or prayer. The
distinction between informality and formality is blurred through the language and images
present in these shrines, and the individual represented is all but lost, only remaining as
an anonymous face for the meanings the builders ~— and consequently the viewers — attach
to them. The “Our Father” connects this individual to a larger community through a
religious institution, but also maintains a standard of faith, values, and generally accepted
forms of mourning.

In these various informal spontaneous shrines, whether they are spontaneous
accumulations or a targeted shrine in commemoration of an individual, the agency of
grief is clearly in play. The builder or individual who placed an item in commemoration
is transforming public, secular space into sacred ground, and through this gesture, is
putting forth a public claim to the victim’s identity, which has a number of ramifications
laid out here. Though the builder may intend it to be an expression of mourning in
commemoration of a specific victim, or is simply laying an item with many others as a

sign of reverence for the 9/11 attacks in general, it is a performative act that, in the end,

27

presents both an inroad to participate in a community that sanctifies these spaces and
communicates ideology through the identities of the victims, as well as a reification of
institutional “American” values — nation, family, religion, commerce — that were

perceived as threatened by the attacks of 9/1 1.

28

 

CHAPTER TWO
Formal Commemoration, American Identity, and Sanctifying Place

“Like many informal memorials, [we found that] narratives of the formal memorials for
the 9/11 events suggested that there was something sacred or holy about the site of the
tragic events.”22

With the increasing classification of the political documents that would inform
the public history of 9/11 one is left with a number of other types of responses that
comprise the public record, among which lie the already described informal shrines. The
authority of grief displayed in the previous chapter and the search for authentic means of
mourning that is also an implicit rejection of institutional mourning has a counterpart in
official commemorations. The governmental and official response reaches far,
encompassing a large set of reactions that have manifested themselves in the forms of
political rhetoric, debates and applications of new public policies (both domestic and
international), martial action in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq, endorsement of the air
travel business by the executive branch, and a number of sacred/civic commemorative
ceremonies. These are just a few responses among the many sanctioned by local, state,
and national levels of the US. government.

Of the many implications of these various official commemorations and responses
is the goal of simultaneously defending and defining all things officially “American,” and
the choices of what is commemorated — and how — standardizes and formally defines this

post-9/11 American identity. As noted in the previous chapter, formal commemoration

 

22 Damphousse, Kelly R., Kristin S. Hefley and Brent L. Smith. “Creating Memories: Exploring how
Narratives Help Define the Memorialization of Tragedy.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003. 05 October 2006.
<http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p107083_index.html> Pg. 22.

29

has a distinct sense of time, one that attempts to represent an unchanging, unwavering
identity. As such, to officially commemorate anything is inherently also an act of
standardization, and it will always contain a necessarily inaccurate representation of the
event and/or the community responding to it because —- despite the attempt to boil a
monument down to a few key ingredients that countless individuals can relate to - the

unchanging nature of the identity represented through the specific sense of permanence

 

I‘
exhibited in official memorials limits their ability to truly represent the plurality of
identities that define the American landscape. This emphasis on permanence in formal
memorials does, however, lend as sense of sanctity to the set of values, assumptions,
experiences and expectations that is held as “the” American identity. This sense of L

sanctity is employed as a means of garnering a connection between a specific, formally
sanctioned national identity — in some innate and meaningful way -— and a maximum
amount of individuals, comprising this national “in” community.

This chapter analyzes this process of “civil sanctification” through these official,
formally sanctioned memorials in response to 9/11, the goal of which is the reification of
communal boundaries and simultaneous creation and reclamation of “American values.”
These sacred images and forms of expression, relatively familiar to the American
populace, rely on contextual familiarity to recall a sort of institutional nostalgia;
memorials call upon familiar images in the popular mind to symbolically resonate with
holy or great meaning, and the use of sacred expression in the case of formalized 9/11
commemorations is no different; we recognize these images as meaningful, as important,
and when that holy context is borrowed by the state to define the nation, only the content

— not the sacred import thrust into the commemoration’s meaning — changes.

30

What is being built at the site of the World Trade Center is a telling choice of how
one concept of an American national “in” community has chosen to memorialize and
formally represent American identity, as is the open field in Pennsylvania. The
differences between these two memorial sites to the same event and the community they
both allegedly represent are astounding. But both are drawing on religious expressions
and a connection to place, whether it is connecting the heaven and the earth or leaving a
field relatively open as a sacred space. And both are telling of the constructed identities
that they are supposed to represent as well as the attempts to extend sacred space into
national memory.

The governmental claim laid to these spaces — the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, and the field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania — is an official attempt to make
sacred what was previously secular, perhaps profane ground:23 “In a society devoted to
the creation of profit through the exploitation of private property, the permanent removal
of property from the market — in order to become wilderness, national park or national
monument — is a major way in which Americans create and identify with what for them is
sacred. If the sacred is that which is not profane, then in the USA to ensure that a
particular object or parcel of land may never be bought or sold both signifies and
solidifies its exceptional and potentially sacred character.”24 This quote, as does this
chapter, suggests that the official setting-aside of place is an act of taking what is
otherwise profane and claiming it as sacred, even if the Pentagon and the World Trade

Center still operate as governmental and commercial centers, respectively. To do so, the

 

2’ Eiade, Mircea (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: A Harvest Book,
Harcourt, Brace and World Inc.

2" Sellars, Richard West and Tony Walter. “From Custer to Kent State.” Pilgrimage in Popular Culture
(1993). Eds. Ian Reader and Tony Walter. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: The
Macmillan Press Ltd. Pg.183.

31

official, formal material and - to an extent — rhetorical expressions called upon to
respond to 9/11, and the purposes for choosing those specific kinds of images, will be
analyzed here. Primarily, it will be argued that these sacred expressions — like beams of
light connecting heaven and earth in place of the World Trade Center, and the sacred
open field of Somerset, PA — are representative of a very particular conception of
America, meant to be representations of permanent “American values,” and serve to
define how these American ideals are to be perceived while simultaneously localizing the

disaster as American, binding the imagined American national “in” community.

Part One: The Technology/Body Relationship and Official Responses to 9/11

One of these “American” values that were challenged through the attacks of 9/ 11
was a general belief in technology as “progress,” which is a necessity when operating a
worldview that requires growth as a means of sustenance. Coming off of an accumulation
of late twentieth century failures of modernity and a transition into technological
revitalization, 9/11 came as a blow to a technology-based mindset that saw the twenty-
first century as a clean start, and a technologically new world.25 The relationship between
the human body — frail, imperfect, capable of irrationality, and temporary — and the
permanence and raw calculability of technology creates much anxiety in the human
psyche about the amount of harm that this unthinking technology can inflict, particularly

in a system that —- again — relies on a belief in that technology.26 Whether through art,

 

25 Larabee, Ann (1999). Decade of Disaster. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
2" lhde, Don (1999). Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.

32

literature or even consumer goods, this tension between technology and humanity has
been - and will continue to be -— played out over and over.

In its grandest scope, 9/11 is in many ways a product of asymmetries in
worldviews: one which relies upon and spreads technology for the purposes of creating
capital, and another — belonging to a specific subset of the Islamic faith — that denounces
the ends that these technologies are built for. Further, the attacks themselves utilized
these technologies; airplanes were used, as were interactive technologies as means of
communication between these specific terrorists. In the months following 9/11, the

construction of the planes was a site of technological anxiety, as the pilot bay was

 

accessible from the cabin with few too barriers preventing the hijacking of an aircraft. If
The buildings that were struck were also subject to technological scrutiny in the wake of
9/11. News media coverage at the Pentagon, a fairly low-to-the-ground building,
included in-depth reports of the thickness of the walls, the kind of impact that was made
and its effects. The World Trade Center towers were also under the public eye; with
many world citizens who were witnessing the events unfold on television, in person or
over some other medium wishing that the buildings had been truly “terror-proofed.” The
buildings had been targeted before, surviving a 1993 blast that killed six and injured over
one thousand. A granite memorial was erected that was destroyed on September 11,
2001, a fragment of which will serve as the centerpiece in the new memorial at the site.
And though there was much coverage of the faults in the technological aspects of
the structures and planes, there were a number of ways in which these technological
anxieties were alleviated by shifting blame to human error and faults in human judgment.

By refocusing the problems as ones that have answers and as human errors, anxiety of

33

technology was gradually lifted, which allowed for a reinstitution of belief in
technological expansion, a sort of lynchpin in the day-to-day operations within the
steadily globalizing worldview.

The airline industry itself took a hard hit from which it continues to recover: “To
be sure, President George W Bush sporadically called on Americans to volunteer in their
communities. But his appeals seemed largely symbolic, not connected to vital wartime
activities, even as Bush administration officials visibly puzzled over what to do with
volunteers. President Bush did not launch any big new civic effort, such as mandatory

national service for young Americans. Instead, for weeks after 9/11, his most prominent

 

appeals were commercial rather than civic. The Travel Industry Association of American
estimated that two-thirds of Americans saw the President starring in a television
advertisement calling for people to express ‘courage’ by taking more trips. And the
president repeatedly asked people to go shopping to stimulate the economy.”27 Indeed, in
a worldview that steadily increases privatization of life -— and often uses personal
technology to do so, like cell phones, mp3 players, new home construction practices that
separate place to be more private — the post-WWII American values that were stressed in
that period do not seem to fit the lifeways that define much of the consumerist, and rather
privatized modern American identity. Yet, these are the perhaps nostalgic images called
upon and given sanctity, to give a commodity driven culture meaning.

The media coverage — itself the product of numerous technological marvels
working in synch — of the attacks of 9/1 1, the tanks, aerial attacks, and other martial

technologies that are broadcast into American living rooms are all reminders of the

 

27 Skocpol, Theda. “Will 9/11 and the War on Terror Revitalize American Civic Democracy?” PS: Political
Science and Politics. Vol.35, No. 3. (Sep., 2002). Pg. 538.

34

powers of modern technology, but are also a means of garnering and regaining national
faith in airplanes, in the abilities of technology, as the proverbial “bad guy” is hunted.
The media and the military, two of the major sources of technological use and
promulgation, are also official, formal institutions in American culture, though the media
has been democratized to a certain extent through blogging and other forms. To see these
forces in coordination after an event like 9/11 that certainly caused much anxiety about
the technology/body relationship is a means of making the role that they play in
American culture inseparable from the technologies employed. The severe fear of flying
and near death of the airline industry is itself testament to the unease with the power
technology can be harnessed for, but the answer, in a worldview dominated by
technocratic methods as a central characteristic of its operations, is — of course — a
technological one. So, in the case of the World Trade Center, the answer is not only to
have holes in the ground in memoriam, but to build a defiant tower that is nearly “terror-
proof,” to recalibrate airplanes to standardize a separation of cockpit from cabin, and to
use technology as a means of putting the American viewer into the sights and sounds of

the missions in Afghanistan and, subsequently, Iraq.

Part Two: The Sacred and Impersonal at the Pentagon Memorial

Official memorials, which take much longer to construct than informal shrines,
undergo a number of identity transformations while attempting to maintain a core set of
ideals or characteristics to maintain a unified sense of place and sanctity. Those in charge
of the memorial at the Pentagon site, feeding off of the popularity of the “beams of light”

that stood in the stead of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, initially chose to light up its five

35

 

corners as well. On the five year anniversary of 9/11, however, the Pentagon lit the skies
with 184 beams of light, the same number as there were victims at the Pentagon site
between both those on the plane and those in the Pentagon. This is a rather explicitly
sacred symbol, literally using beams of light to connect the earth and the heavens.
Further, including a beam for each individual is also a way of representing an upward
ascension against the night sky. The Pentagon Memorial has since undergone a
competitive design campaign to choose how to properly memorialize the site while
simultaneously reifying both the role of competition in the American system as well as
capitalist practice in general.

The Pentagon Memorial design (Figure 10) that was chosen through a memorial
competition, which continues to seek donations to complete construction, was officially
dedicated on June 15, 2006. According to the winners of the design competition,
Kaseman Beckman Amsterdam Studio, the 1.93 acre design:

Envisions a memorial that simultaneously affords intimate and collective
contemplation through silence within a tactile field of sensuous
experience. It sets out to permanently record and express the sheer
magnitude of loss through an architectural experience of a place radically
different than what we encounter in our daily lives. In this light, the space
itself serves as the memorial at all scales of experience and engagement —-
from within, driving by and from above... Each unit is dedicated to an
individual victim — its placement and place within the collective field a
unique instance. This highly specific and qualitatively objective
organizational strategy yields seemingly random results. The field is
organized as a timeline of the victims’ ages, spanning from Dana
Falkenberg, 3 years old, to John D. Yamnicky, age 71. While each
memorial unit locates itself on its respective age line, the units are then
organized by birth date along the age line... Personal interpretation is
further sparked by embedding layers of specificity into the orientation of
each memorial unit within the expansive site. F ifiy-nine memorial units
face one direction, 125 face the other — thus distinguishing victims on
board American Airlines Flight 77 from those who were inside the
Pentagon. When visiting a memorial dedicated to a victim who was in the
Pentagon, the visitor will see their engraved name and the Pentagon in the

36

same view. Conversely, one would see the engraved name of a victim on
Flight 77 with the sky. Though highly specific, this distinction is quite
subtle when deployed consistently throughout the site. It adds a level of
difference to the visual and spatial field, thus provoking visitors’ curiosity,
while simultaneously telling the story of those involved in the events that
took place here that day. Elegant in its self-supporting form, the memorial
unit is at once a glowing light pool, a cantilevered bench and a place for
the permanent inscription of each victim’s name. Using Computer
Numerically Controlled (CNC) technology common to the aerospace
industry, the cast duplex stainless steel memorial unit is easily mass-
produced and incredibly articulate... As the memorial unit grows out of
the ground, the stabilized gravel field is interrupted only by moments of
glowing light and water, and the engraved names float above these
moments... The western edge of the site is defined with the AGE WALL
— a wall that “grows” in height one inch per year relative to the age lines
that organize the site at large. As one moves deeper into the site the wall
gets higher — it grows from 3 inches above the perimeter bench (at Dana’s
memorial age-line) to 71 inches above the bench (at John’s)...
Experientially, this wall communicates the organizational strategy to the
drivers passing by on the freeway, while still allowing them to peer into
the site from afar.28

A number of themes appear in the above description accompanying the design of
the Pentagon Memorial. The idea of personalization itself is very present, and vividly
described above and built into the design itself. The technological uses as well as a
particular, permanent sense of time also accompany the design. The purposefiil
personalization of each unit is tempered by their identical construction and utter
standardization; there is a degree of personal interpretation that is prescribed in the face
of the highly qualitative — though seemingly random — design. Yet, the fact that the
memorial units themselves are benches — that glow and are easy to mass-produce, no less
— are not only symbols of impersonalization, mass consumerism and technological
reification, but also of sanctity. Further, the multitude of ways to experience the

memorial — driving by, aerially, by visiting it, sitting on the benches, or even over the

 

28 Kaseman Beckman Amsterdam Studios (KBAS). Model of Pentagon Memorial. Pentagon Memorial
Project, New York.

37

 

intemet - is both a way of reifying technology as well as allowing visitors to experience
the site’s sanctity from various degrees of relation and proximity; direct contact is no
longer necessary.

Technology is reified through a number of the design strategies: loose gravel
fields are hardened and ensured as safe through a process that creates a uniform surface.
The units are — all at the same time -- light, water, bench, marker of — to an extent —
identity, and easy to reproduce in mass quantities. The “Age Wall” is both symbolic
marker, ranging from three inches — the age of the youngest victim on the plane — to
seventy-one inches — the age of the oldest victim on Flight 77 — as well as a technological
strategy which allows drivers to engage the memorial (as well as those exposed to an
aerial view), while it serves as a barrier between the memorial itself and the delivery lane
that encroaches on the northwestern edge. The fact that these technologically defined
memorial units are quantitatively spread throughout the park but intended to look
randomly placed “grow” out of the ground and are intentionally surrounded by foliage all
indicates the attempt to make them, and the technology behind their construction and
design, natural.

The design elements that make the Pentagon Memorial personal — including the
sense of sanctity that the units and the site itself are imbued with -— while keeping it
somehow intentionally impersonal, are attempts to balance a record of the events with
imagery that a viewer can experience, participate in, and identify with. The elements that
purposefully personalize the site are comprised of units that commemorate each
individual, including their age and their tragic orientation as either tied to the plane or to

the Pentagon. These units are also benches, on which the visitor is intended to somehow

38

participate with the identity of the individual commemorated. The glowing “moment” on
which the name and age inscription rests is also a sacred representation of divinity or a
life-source, a memorial as much to the soul as the bench itself is to the body.29 It is also a
consistent theme of light equating sanctity from the prior identity of the formal
commemorative site, echoing the individualized beams of light that stood at the five-year
anniversary.

This narrative of the personal, however, is intentionally impersonalized by the
facelessness and permanence that persists in this memorial. Much like the Oklahoma City
Bombing Memorial contains the simultaneously personal and impersonal empty chairs,
as if waiting to be filled by the absence they call upon for their sense of importance and
sanctity, so too does the Pentagon Memorial sell the participant a sense of the personal,
the narrative of an individual. The memorial unit includes a name, a designation of
“plane” or “Pentagon,” and an age, beyond which the identity of the victim is wide open
for interpretation. It is unclear what meanings these individuals truly represent other than
those thrust upon them by the sheer design — both uniform and personalized as it may be
— and by the participant/viewers.

This facelessness, this impersonal, concrete, and permanent gesture boils
individuality to something that can be perceived, but not realized. In other words, the
idea of the individual, the personal, is felt, but is not there; the intentional lack of identity
is a means through which the participant/viewer of the memorial can enter into a world of

symbols, each of which carry a set of meanings tied more to the nation than to the

 

29 This imagery of glowing or of light representing the sacred, the divine or the soul flows throughout
popular culture, taking shape in many world religions, particularly Christianity. This familiarity with this
imagery and symbolism lends the popular recognition of such an image as sacred. This has been also
evidenced as a general sign of sanctity through the nineteenth century American painting style known as
Luminism.

39

individual victims. Claimed as a sacred space distinguished from the profane, this holy
ground is dominated by precision, by permanence, by a singular identity created through
the appropriation of the identity of the many, a site that uses the impersonal even through
the personalization of each virtually identical unit as a means to symbolize sanctity,
technological faith, and the concept of individuality on a plot of land that is intrinsically

tied to the governing body, extending a sense of reverence into the public sphere.

Part Three: The National Martyrs of Flight 93

The final target of the hijackers of flight 93 will forever be unknown, though
many believe it would have been the White House or another federal building. Crashing
into an open field in Somerset, Pennsylvania, however, was certainly not the plan. As has
been documented on a number of occasions, a small number of the 40 crewmembers and
passengers (not including the four hijackers) on the flight took it upon themselves to
overpower the hijackers in hopes of saving the potentially many more lives that would be
taken if they did not act.

The National Park Service and the Department of the Interior claimed the site at
which the plane crashed as an official memorial site shortly after. The identity of the
space, for the first five years, was that of a sort of formalized spontaneous shrine. Left as
an open field to demarcate the sanctity of place, the site called upon a number of familiar
images in American popular and religious culture. The role of nature as sacred is not

unfamiliar to the American landscape by any stretch of the imagination.30

 

30 This holds true for Native American identities, but also throughout the colonial period and American
expansion. The role of nature in religious revelation in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles has been echoed
throughout American religious traditions and popular culture as well as through non-westem or
monotheistic conceptions of the sacred.

40

The identity of this space as a formal, not-so-spontaneous shrine was made
possible by the addition of forty feet of fencing to accommodate the materials that would
accumulate, as well as through the archiving of many of the items (see Figure 11). The
rhetoric surrounding the temporary shrine attests to the peacefulness of the place, the
sanctity of it, and the difficulty one has to imagine that such a tragedy has taken place at
that site. With 130,000 annual visitors, the temporary shrine will remain up as the formal,
permanent shrine is constructed as long as it doesn’t interfere with construction.

The formal shrine (Figure 12), another product of a design competition, seeks
donations to come into fruition and is accompanied by a campaign slogan. Where the
Pentagon Memorial funding campaign’s slogan is “Remember. Reflect. Renew.,” the
Flight 93 Memorial Fund’s slogan is “A Common Field One Day. . .A Field of Honor
Forever.”3 ' A controversy surrounded the winning design causing it to be redesigned,
though it still contains many of the characteristics that made it controversial. The design,
which encompasses a vast area, contains a very large open “Bowl,” an entrance called the
“Tower of Voices,” and a space called “Sacred Ground.” The controversy surrounding
the winning memorial design suggested that the Red maples surrounding the bowl, with
an opening, directly resembled a Crescent, and the sacred ground, the star. The opening,
if traced around the globe, points directly to Mecca, and the four hijackers were counted
among the dead at the site.

Beyond this religio-political controversy, however, is a less obvious sanctity that
is rather explicitly called upon in the images and symbols chosen at this site. First, the

site mimics the natural landscape and the bowl itself is a sort of Kiva, or traditional,

 

3' Capt. S. Ruda, L.A. Fire Department, describing the crash site. This became the Flight 93 National
Memorial call to arms, so to speak.

41

round sacred meeting place used by Pueblo peoples for religious ceremonies. The
“Sacred Ground” area is the final resting place of those who died on Flight 93. It is
comprised of a black slate plaza with a number of niches and places to conduct
ceremonies or place items. This is the most explicitly ritually religious design feature not
encompassed in the controversy. The expectation is that visitors will use these spaces to
identify with the sacrifice a few of these individuals made, connect with them materially,
almost commune with them. This expectation is a way to use the concept of individual
heroism as a sort of focal point, or mantra, for civil religious practice. The “Sacred
Ground” area itself becomes a place for formally commemorating national martyrs,
praying to the idea of their last acts and identifying them as faceless yet somehow
embodied saints in American civil religion.

Finally, the “Tower of Voices” is the entrance and exit for the entire park. It is a
rather ethereal space, with forty very large, hung wind chimes — one for each of the
victims of flight 93 - that move with the wind, connecting the natural with the
purposefully sacred. The tower will glow at night time, with glass mosaics and blue
tinted areas, allowing — again -— the sense of light, of obscured glowing, to communicate a
sense of sanctity, giving the site more importance and claiming the space for sacred

nationalism.

Part Four: Reflecting Absence and Reaching Heaven at the World Trade Center
The term “Ground Zero,” like “9/11,” is a signifier for a number of meanings, the
original of which is lost, leaving an abstract cast of itself built out of the contested

communal and national memories and meanings placed upon it. The site of the World

42

Trade Center becomes simultaneously a pilgrimage site for civil religion — to which
many Americans and citizens of other nations travel — as well as a tourist destination.
Hardly the site of mourning it once was, despite the formal commemoration: “these days
[2002], visitors to the giant, gaping hole are no longer covered in any grimy coat of dust,
and only a faint hint remains of the burning stench that once pervaded Lower Manhattan.
Vendors selling rhinestone American flag pins are joined by vendors hawking ‘designer’
sunglasses. And for every cluster of tourists with disposable cameras or silver video
cameras, there is one New Yorker clutching a plastic shopping bag bearing the red-
lettered logo of Century 21, the discount department store across the street from the
World Trade Center (Gootman, 2002).”32

As noted earlier, September 11, 2001, was not the first terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center. The 1993 bombing, shortly before the Waco, Texas shootout with
the Branch Davidians and two years before the Oklahoma City Bombing, was
commemorated in granite, only to be destroyed in 2001. The initial chill of the images of
the planes hitting the towers has since lost some cultural pull. But the outpouring of
emotions in the moments, days, weeks, months, and even years after have — much like
the rubble at the World Trade Center site itself —- been slowly stripped away. At the base
lies a concrete set of meanings that have found themselves materially manifested in the
official commemorations at the site. The clean up of the site was not itself finished until
April of 2006, but for those five and a half years the site served —— and will continue to

serve until 2009 — as a sort of formal not-so-spontaneous shrine. Accumulations and

 

32 Damphousse, Kelly R., Kristin S. Hefley and Brent L. Smith. “Creating Memories: Exploring how
Narratives Help Define the Memorialization of Tragedy.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003. 05 October 2006.
<http://www.allacademic.com/meta/pl07083_index.html> Pg. 17.

43

informal shrines to individuals cropped up, again, being archived for later use at the
museum that will accompany the formal memorial.

Along with this mass, unofficial set of accumulations at the site were a number of
symbols that would appear during annual commemoration ceremonies as well as
throughout the year. Primary among these are the beams of light (Figure 13) and the use
of the American flag. The beams of light themselves, called “The Tribute in Light,” as
has been noted throughout this study, are a rather sacred representation. They stand in the
stead of their fallen physical forms, holy spirits ascending, connecting this realm with the
next. This symbolism is arguably largely Christian, but evokes a general sanctity that
works to identify and define a national community more than a specifically religious one.

The set of images is meant to act as an extension of sacred space to influence the
national memory of the event, and to draw individuals into a national “in” community.33
It makes one forget that the buildings were sites of international commerce, replaced by
the overwhelming tragedy and spectacle of the day, boiled down to a sanctity meant to
bind people together at a formerly profane space. This sanctification is further
institutionalized through the creation of the formal memorial.

The most publicized of the memorial design contests in response to 9/11 - which,
again, serves to reify the “permanent” individuality and competitive values of
institutional American life -— decided what would be built in commemoration at Ground
Zero. The winning design, created by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect
Peter Walker, is called “Reflecting Absence,” which began construction in 2006 and will

be officially dedicated on September 11, 2009: the eight year anniversary. Reflecting

 

33 Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, New Edition. London and New York: Verso.

44

Absence, chosen from 5,200 entries, will be accompanied by the memorial’s centerpiece,
“Freedom Tower,” designed by Daniel Libeskind, World Trade Center towers two, three,
and four, a museum, a terminal, and retail space (Figure 14).

The design is described as follows by the World Trade Center Memorial
Foundation:

The Memorial will consist of two massive voids with waterfalls cascading
down their sides, to serve as a powerful reminder of the Twin Towers and
of the unprecedented loss of life from an attack on our soil. The names of
the 2,979 who perished in the September 11th attacks in New York City,
Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, and the February 1993 World Trade
Center bombing will be inscribed around the edge of the Memorial
waterfalls. An eight-acre landscaped Memorial Plaza filled with more than
300 oak trees will create a contemplative space separate from the sights
and sounds of the surrounding city. The design is unique in its use of
ecological considerations, which exceed sustainability standards.
Complementing the Memorial, a state-of-the art museum will offer visitors
an opportunity to deepen their experience at the site. Accessed through an
entry pavilion designed by Snohetta, the Memorial Museum will help
facilitate an encounter with both the enormity of the loss and the triumph
of the human spirit that are at the heart of 9/11. Dynamic, interactive
exhibitions including artifacts and personal effects; a resource center,
contemplative areas, and innovative educational programming will convey
stories of the victims and recount the experiences of survivors, responders,
area residents, and witnesses. As visitors descend below the Memorial
voids, they will reach bedrock, where they can approach the slurry wall
and other remaining structures at the foundation of the site where the
tallest buildings in the world — a triumph of human ingenuity and
aspiration — once stood.34

As the description above suggests, one of the memorial’s purposes is to act as a
reminder of the lives lost and of the twin towers. But it also serves to project a sense of
sanctity, which is itself a means of defining the boundaries of a national “in” community,
lending a sense of spiritual import and defiant permanence to the images and values that

are contained in the memorial. The void’s that define the design of reflecting absence are

 

34 World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. 15 April 2007. <http://www.buildthememorial.org>

45

 

Im.a.r.wrn
.1

indicative of something missing, of lives and an American icon gone, with the rushing
waterfalls acting as reminders of the downward movement of the buildings themselves.
As has been seen before with the Pentagon memorial, names will be used to provide a
sense of faceless individuality. Whereas the builder of an informal shrine sets forth
messages through the identity of the person that the shrine commemorates, the simple
name embossed on a concrete monument — to the viewer/participant — is informed only

by the surrounding context and images. The setting aside of a contemplative space, like

_-.: .- ‘s-u-rfl

“Sacred Ground” at the Flight 93 Memorial, is a division of space meant to grant :9
participant/viewers a place to use this idea of the individual and the symbols around them E}

to experience sacred nationalism.

 

I
it»
C

Further, descending below the voids and waterfalls to the bedrock — a gesture
mirroring a call to go deep into one’s own core, one’s own depths, and a finality of really
experiencing the place and its meanings — affords viewer/participants the chance to see
what is called “The Slurry Wall.” This wall is a remaining structure from the actual
World Trade Center, a piece of the foundation. Acting much like contemporary American
ruins, encountering this object, this place, is a way to participate in the community it
represents and in the experience of its meanings. Participating in objects is a way of
experiencing the meanings of places and a way of maintaining a relationship and
memory. Pilgrimage — or in this case, perhaps even tourism — works much the same way.

As noted, among the structures accompanying the Reflecting Absence memorial
itself is Libeskind’s “Freedom Tower,” which has, like its counterpart in Pennsylvania,
been the source of much controversy and has undergone several redesigns (Figure 15).

Filled with symbolism, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has the

46

following to say about the updated design:

As with the original design, the Freedom Tower will soar to 1,776 feet in
the sky and serve as an inspirational and enduring beacon in the New York
City skyline. The Tower's design evokes classic New York skyscrapers in
its elegance and symmetry while also referencing the torch of the Statue of
Liberty... As the tower itself rises from its cubic base, its square edges are
chamfered back, transforming the square into eight tall isosceles triangles
in elevation. At its middle, the tower forms a perfect octagon in plan and
then culminates in an observation deck and glass parapet (elevation 1,362
feet and 1,368 feet — the heights of the original Twin Towers) whose plan
is a square, rotated 45 degrees from the base. A mast containing an
antenna for the Metropolitan Television Alliance (MTVA), designed by a
collaboration of architects, artists, lighting designers and engineers, and
secured by a system of cables, rises from a circular support ring, similar to
Liberty’s torch, to a height of 1,776 feet. In keeping with the original
design, the entire composition evokes the Statue of Liberty’s torch and
will emit light, becoming its own Beacon of Freedom. [Architect] David
Childs said, “. . .While the memorial, carved out of the earth, speaks of the
past and of remembrance, Freedom Tower speaks of optimism and the
future as it rises into the sky in a faceted, crystalline form filled with and
reflecting light.” In order to achieve a world class model of energy
efficiency and environmental sustainability, the Freedom Tower will
include: state-of—the-art energy conservation technology to reduce energy
demand; better interior “daylighting” and views of the outside for
occupants due to ultra-clear glass technology that also saves energy;
improved indoor air quality due to outside-air ventilation and use of
building materials without toxic materials such as volatile organic
compounds (VOCs); water conservation due to reuse of rainwater for
building cooling and irrigation; reduction of vehicular traffic via proximity
to public transportation and provision of facilities for bicycle commuters.
Environmental quality will also extend to construction of the Freedom
Tower... According to a report by the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation, the rebuilding the World Trade Center will generate $15
billion in total economic output in New York City and an average of 8,000
jobs each year for thirteen years.35

This telling description can be broken down into two portions: one symbolic and
celebratory, and the other technologically reassuring. The symbols present are the

obvious reference to the nation’s founding in the height of the building, the observance of

 

3’ Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. 2002. 15 April 2007. <http://www.renewnyc.com>

47

 

the original tower heights, the structural echo of the Statue of Liberty, and the design
element causing the antenna to emit light. Where the towers that were felled on 9/11 may
not have had an explicit identity outside of its commercial purposes previous to 1993 or
perhaps even 2001, the Freedom Tower — still holding world class restaurants, retail
space, parking, transit systems, and an unfathomable amount of office space — is clearly
covered in symbolism beyond simple patriotism, entering the realm of sacred
nationalism.

The lives lost that day are — again — used as a means through which to extend an

 

institutional sanctity into the American national memory. The light imagery atop the

 

tower not only ties it to the nation’s founding, but echoes the Statue of liberty — localizing
this as a New York monument as well as serving to try and make New York the
American city — and acts as a “beacon of freedom” while providing a religious “light in
the sky,” so to speak. This glowing antenna is a marker of the transition for the 9/11
victims while symbolically guiding the world community toward American ideals,
expectations and experiences. Further the sheer height of the tower, the choice to build
something taller and, frankly, shinier, is a rather defiant move, meant to guard against the
perceived erosion of American ideals.

The technological impulse both in the descriptions and construction of the
Freedom Tower and Reflecting Absence reifies faith in technology and reaffirms
technological innovation’s placement as “progress” a legitimate, permanent, expected,
and correct designation. The state-of-the-art museum — containing the artifacts from the
shrines -— promises to deepen, through technological means, the experiences visitors can

have. Participation in the experience of the place is only made possible by participating in

48

these technologies, thus aligning technological innovation with meaningful experience,
furthering its correctness and designation as progress.

The safety and environmental concerns expressed in the construction and
operations of the Freedom Tower are also rather telling. The Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center came under fire in the wake of both the 1993 and 2001 attacks, and public
scrutiny looked to technological flaws that could have been fixed, changed, made perfect.
The description of the Freedom Tower goes on to alleviate structural anxieties, as well as
staying in keeping with contemporary concerns about the environmental impact of
construction, particularly in an urban environment, all the while providing jobs for New
York.

These three formal memorials are heavily invested in impersonalized,
nationalistic meanings, borrowing much of their imagery and context from religious
expressions. Though place varies greatly from densely urban Lower Manhattan to the
federal urbanism of the Pentagon to the wide open rural field where flight 93 crashed in
Somerset County, PA, the national memory that is constructed out of these places and the
citizenry’s experiences and relationship to them carries a highly impersonal set of

meanings meant to imbue the values officially represented at these places with sanctity.

49

 

CHAPTER THREE

Sacred Consumerism and the Ritual Community Called Nation

“Trust and affection were, and are, cultivated through the making, buying, and giving of
material expressions...”36

If viewed with a religious imagination,37 as Ivan Strenski suggests, one can see
certain ritual practices accompanying the ideological structure of post-9/ 11 American
nationalism, as has been evidenced through the informal spontaneous shrines as well as
the formal commemorations in the previous chapters. New York City produced large
beams of light — a ghostly sacred expression — in the Twin Towers’ stead, connecting
heaven and earth in memoriam for the purposes of mourning as well as reifying values
and practices that were perceived as “American” and as attacked by the events of 9/1 1.
The Freedom Tower, “terror-proofing,” and other official responses to 9/11 are ways of
recouping faith in the ideals that were challenged through the attacks, including the
technology/body relationship. And as has been shown, despite the dip in sales in the
airline industry, it was not framed solely as a fear of technology,38 but “faulty human
intention,” that ends up being culpable for 9/11, thus reaffirming the institutional ideal of
“progress.”

Much in the same way that these official restorations in an “American”

worldview are ways of localizing 9/11 as a national tragedy for the purposes of creating a

 

36 McDannell, Colleen (1995). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pg. 50.

37 Strenski, Ivan. “Material Culture and the Varieties of Religious Imagination.” Religion and Material
Culture: Spontaneous Shrines. University of California, Riverside. 2003.
httpzl/www.shrines.ucr.edu/sources.html.

’8 There was much subsequent analysis of the structural integrity of the World Trade Center towers as well
as the reinforced doors to the pilot bay. So called “terror-proofing” has since been implemented, as have a
number of other technological measures to ensure safety and confidence in technology.

50

community and reifying the values that that community supposedly represents, so too are
the consumer goods that cropped up in response to 9/11 and this strange call to
participate in the remaking of identity. Commemorative coins, bumpers stickers, snow-
globes, commemorative plaques, pins, cufflinks and t-shirts are all ways of participating
in a communal ritual of ideological reaffirmation and belonging. Drawing from the work
of Ed Linenthal, Ivan Strenski, Colleen McDannell, Robert Bellah, and Kristin Hass, this
chapter looks to what will be termed “sacred consumerism” as an inroad for analyzing
the processes behind the commodified, purchasable responses to 9/11 that have cropped
up in the years following 9/11, as well as the construction of memory they convey. It will
be argued here that through sacred consumerism it becomes possible to be an “insider” to
the event and to the creation of the communal response. If viewed with a religious
imagination, one can draw the parallel that the foundations for a ritual community are at
work in these varied, purchasable, mass-marketed mobile memorial statements with the
purpose of maintaining a set of beliefs or ideas of sacred nationhood in response to 9/ 'l 1.
The material artifacts of this sanctification come in the form of explicit symbols
that were left in the rubble — like an intersection of the steel truss that was still standing
and was recognized as a Cross, murals and memorials that have various other explicit
world religious symbols, or even a bumper sticker that says “Lest We Forget,” extending
sacred time —- as well as implicit ones that borrow the structure and sacred context of
religious expression while the content remains nationalistic. These implicitly sacred
expressions of nationalism are particularly interesting because though, again, they do not
necessarily have any explicit tie to any one religious institution, it is from an “American”

understanding of the sacred that American nationalism gains sanctity.

51

This happens because there is a perceived void in the American secular
vocabulary of expression, failing to accommodate what its national practitioners consider
to be authentic meaning. This is part of the explanation for why American civil religion
exists. Americans, especially in the wake of 9/11, search for authenticity of identity,
whether it be a personal one or a link to a greater community. And imbuing the secular
functions of American life — especially ideals that the imagined community may have
perceived as challenged, like consumerism -— with a sense of sanctity is a response that
elucidates and reifies that search. That is to say, embedded in the day-to-day expressions
of American secular workings — like concepts of belief (which are not necessarily
explicitly religious in nature), sacrifice, justice, meaning, “appropriate” forms of civic
mourning or celebration — are structures that borrow a sense of sanctity to give secular
aspects of American culture more perceived, and communally recognizable, meaning.

Sacred consumerism builds a participatory community — a community of
believers — that has experienced, if just through the purchasable and commodified
relationship to place/trauma, the events of 9/11. This sacred consumerism is potentially
what pulls an individual to purchase an item — a memory rite — that allows them to see
themselves as having participated in the community of those who have experienced the
attacks. This operates much like the purchasing or possession of a religious relic has
throughout the course of western history, creating a community — even if through a rather
thin proxy of experience — of those who have in some way, shape or form, experienced an
event: “Relics are objects of memory which speak to a community’s notion of holiness. . .. '

Relics are meaningful for a whole community of people.”39

 

39 McDannell, Colleen (1995). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pg. 41.

52

 

More concretely, sacred consumerism can be defined as an attempt to participate
in an identity or experience through the purchasing of perceived authenticity and

l40 of an item that connects an individual to a larger experiential

symbolic capita
community that is perceived as holy or somehow sacred. The nation certainly falls into

this category, and more specifically, those who have had tragic experiences. In this case,
a connection to either the victims or the greater event of 9/ 11 as a whole through shared

nationhood suffices in the minds of the participatory community.

Sacred consumerism is also a ritual of communal participation that localizes the

 

attacks as American. It reaffirms American consumerism, democratic practice, and the

images of patriotism that have circulated across the nation at least since WWII. These

 

items take on, in a nationalistic sense, the religious tone of a memory rite and define a
community of individuals who count themselves as true believers (even if they are
removed from 9/11 to the point that the only connection they have is through their sense
of nationalism and a purchased commemorative), mixing individual agency with
institutional agency.

In a societal structure that consumes myth, this search for authenticity of meaning
that is being traded back and forth between institutions and individual agency is a
function of nostalgia for a golden age, a period that exists only in the communal memory
but itself may have never occurred. It is this perceived shared past that is mobilized for a
meaningful present, and it is this perceived shared past — evidenced here in the cultural
politics of informal shrines and sacred consumer goods — that is also being created to

serve a nostalgic, yet arguably hollow, identity.

 

4° Bourdieu, Pierre (I984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.

53

But the purchaser connects him or herself to the identity of the fallen — who at
this point, barring the occasional personal relationship with an actual victim, are national
martyrs not individuals — and to the identity of the nation, purchasing a right to
participate in the reification and standardization of post-9/11 American ideals. Again, it
can be seen here as in the previous chapters that defining one’s self as part of the
community is simultaneously an act of defining what that community means, represents,
and values. And in the case of sacred consumerism, this chapter argues, individuals

literally purchase the “rite” to do so.

Part One: American Relics and Popular Culture

Beyond the historical use of necessarily religious relics that has persisted through
much of human history, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide ample examples
of the uses of material objects and popular imagery to define communities in America;
much work has been done on Victorian religious material culture and the ways that
religious objects were used in the home for fashion, symbolic capital, and the
maintenance of communal identity. One of the leading scholars of American religious
material culture, Colleen McDannell, identifies the link between objects and memory:

Religious objects assembled on the top of a piano or tucked in the corner

of a room not only serve as a bridge between the human and divine

worlds, they can also be objects of memory. Recent writing on memory

has emphasized its active, constructive nature. Rather than being a

storehouse from which images and feelings can be retrieved at will, it is

an imaginative reconstruction of pieces of the past. Through memory we

try to recapture an authentic past. However, since the past is changed

through remembering, we cannot truly remember it. Instead we look to
spaces, gestures, images, and objects to embody memory.... Religious

54

objects frequently serve as the materials reminders of significant events,
people, moods, and activities by condensing and compressing memory.41

If nationalism can operate like religion, as civil religion suggests, and can be
viewed with a religious imagination, than the above can hold true for nationalistic
objects. As McDannell suggests above, the object holds condensed meanings, a set of
values and reminders that are beyond the events themselves and are capable of evoking
the meanings ascribed by its possessor. These items, not placed at spontaneous shrines,
not part of a formal commemoration, belong in the home or on the body and are a
connection between the individual who possesses them and the experience of the event:
“Through its power to evoke memories, the souvenir begins to replace the event as the
focus of attention. .. The religious souvenir participates in the power of the original
experience.”42 So to is it in the case of civil religion.

The role of souvenir, situated above as religious, is a direct connection to place,
of the meanings and unique personal experience of the beholder. And though the
individual is connected to the event, and not consciously to a community of people who
have also tied themselves to the event, they are, however, investing in the commodities as
an act of symbolic capital, which requires acknowledgement by a greater audience. This
can be authorized through the individual identifying with the object because he or she
recognizes its symbols — indicative of its meanings - as values that are already
established, thus relating to a community’s interpretation, or for the presentation, the
performance that accompanies the display of such an item even if it is in the private

sphere defined as “home.”

 

4‘ McDannell, Colleen ( 1995). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pg. 39.
‘2 Ibid., Pg. 40.

55

In the late nineteenth century American Protestantism that much of this work
analyses, “Protestants elaborated a domestic ideology describing the sacred quality of
home and family life. Manufacturers accommodated the Protestant desire simultaneously
to sanctify and decorate their homes. They sold and marketed religious goods alongside
secular images. Victorian Protestants did not find the commercial marketing of religious

d.”43 A parallel can be drawn

images distasteful or profane. Fashion and faith co-existe
through the temporarily fashionable, if kitschy, sacred consumer response to 9/11.
Shortly after the attacks it seems as if the American flag was more prevalent than ever
before, as if shirts, advertisements, foods, and everything else was beyond simply “in
fashion.” Indeed, it seemed as if, beyond nationalism, the institutionalized grieving
process itself had become commodified, and people were literally buying it, making the
profane act of capitalism itself a sacred process of identity recuperation.

McDannell goes on to state that, “Christians use religious goods to tell
themselves and the world around them that they are Christians,” and “. . .Religious objects
also signal who is in the group and who is not. They teach people how to think and act
like Christians. They are used to lure, encourage and shock non-Christians into
considering the truth of Christianity. Religious goods not only bind people to the
sacred, they bind people to each other.”44 This communal, prescriptive understanding of
the role of religious objects is rather telling in light of 9/11 and nationalism. The
symbolic capital gained through the possession of these sacred consumer goods, the

performance of experience and participation in the events of 9/1 1, and the sacred

nationalism that followed, are the result of shrine building as a performative gesture, even

 

“3 Ibid., Pg. 57.
4“ Ibid., Pg. 45.

56

if the purchaser him or herself is the only audience. It reifies for that individual her
identity and the values she ascribes to the sacred national object.

These identities and their relationships to symbols and images, however, do come
from somewhere. An economy of images is present in twentieth-century popular culture,
providing a sense of familiarity to a number of the symbols present in the 9/11 mass-
consumer items. There is a history of American relics and familiar images that have
informed the American mind of what honor, patriotism, and civil sanctity look like.
Beyond the prevalence of the flag in American culture or other familiar symbols, there
are other kinds of very popular reminders, galvanizing a standard of what patriotism is
“supposed” to be.

Figures 16 and 17 are the Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of the Marine Corps
called “Raising the flag on Iwo Jima,” followed by the Marine Corps War Memorial,
respectively. The process of first representing an actual event through film is itself a kind
of replacement for memory and a creation of one for those not present, but the subsequent
repackaging and recontextualization of that image is another iteration of distance from
actuality, and somehow are rather famous reminders of the relationship between memory
and place. What is more, aside from the controversy of reposing that surrounds this
image, is that it is actually an image of the second flag to be raised atop Mount Suribachi,
which is yet another separation away from the reality that is perceived as represented
here. This image — used not only as a symbol of American identity and victory popularly,
but also as a stamp and in various other federal reproductions — is extremely familiar in

the popular memory and it is easy for a community of sacred consumers to use as an

57

informed reference of nationalism, of “American” values, of civil religion, and for the
recreation of reality in a memorialized form in the following images.

National images in American popular culture have existed, and taken on sacred
tones. Figures 18 and 19 are references to familiar images in the American popular
landscape. Unlike the image of the famous “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” and its
subsequent commemoration as an official memorial, the photograph’s reproduction,
entitled “Raising the Flag,” an obvious reference back to “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima,”
is actually a bronze plaque that can be purchased on the Internet and at a variety of stores.
It is also a gesture to localize the disaster as American.

In the case of these images, the maker of the plaque is trying to sell a set of
consumers the very idea of sacred nationalism itself, that this patriotism is to be heralded
in a sacred light, and that to revisit the meanings encapsulated in the Iwo Jima
photograph and Marine Corps War Memorial is a natural, patriotic act. A standard is set
to which consumers must respond and already the condensed memories, as McDannell
calls them, that are represented through the photograph are recontextualized as a
commodity, linking the relationship of place and memory to the act of consumption,
recovering consumerist values, perceived as attacked, as well as defining - and
institutionalizing — the collective memory of the events of 9/ 11 and the actions of some
individuals in its wake.

The company selling the plaques, on their tribute webpage, prefaces the display
of memory rites with the following, and rather intriguing statements: “On September 11,
2001, the United States became more united than in recent memory, due to the

coordinated attacks on American sovereignty, belief systems and very way of life. It was

58

a misled assault on all those worldwide who are committed to the precepts of freedom of
choice, equity of differing beliefs, and justice for all peoples. While there had been

”45 This statement does

precursory attacks, 9/11 is the seminal event of this generation.
well to localize the attacks as truly attacking an American way of life and American set
of values, and then connects those same values to the larger community of free,
democratic nations. In fact, the statement, unlike those of many other tribute sites,
acknowledges the ties to other nations as well as the previous and subsequent attacks, but
lands 9/11 as the disaster to define the generation. This is an important difference
because this statement is simultaneously a sales pitch as well as a definition of what
“American” ideals are, which are — after all — what are being sold. Difference, dissent,
and diversity in general are claimed as the standard in America, and the generation is
alleged as being defined by this event — experienced through this material good — just as
WWII was the defining event for that generation, as evidenced through the photograph
and subsequent memorial.

These instances of American popular culture that are reproduced and informed
by earlier works are parallel to other nationalistic symbols, patterned after what the
manufacturer or seller believe will conjure a particular set of values for the buyer/sacred
national participant to identify with, like a flag, eagle, I Heart NY, and a variety of other
nationalistic, potentially kitschy, purchasable symbols that operate as symbolic capital
and as a means of defining an “in” and “out” community, further standardizing the

institutionalized — and now, commodified — values that were perceived as challenged by

the attacks of 9/1 1.

 

4’ Plaques&Letters.com 2003-2007. April 16, 2007. http://plaquesandletters.com/patriotic_tributes_l.htm

59

Part Two: Buying Memory Rites

If post 9/11 American nationalism is viewed as containing a religious
imagination, it becomes clear that the buying and selling of 9/11 consumer goods can
serve as a ritual that further defines the community. Members of this imagined
community, potentially void of a cohesive identity, use implicit religious expression to
give the national memory of 9/11, and consequently American national identity, a sense
of sanctity. This happened through the creation of sacred national products —
purchasable, mobile memorials of a sort — that were bought and sold accordingly, letting
the market have a say in the sacred national identity, reaffirming and making sacred one
of the major American ideals that becomes challenged when 9/11 is viewed as a national
event: American consumerism. Through religious imagination it is also possible and
useful to view the buying and selling of 9/11 consumer goods as ritual participations that,
very similar to memorials, further define the imagined community.

But instead of the goods being necessarily tied to places — like memorial objects
placed spontaneously at a shrine site — the shrine, or relic, is purchased in the form of a
commodified good and the participant is, as Thomas Tweed suggests in his study of
diasporic religion, “translocated” because of the strong bond between memory and
place.46 Translocation is, in Tweed’s analysis, “the tendency among many first- and
second-generation migrants to symbolically move between homeland and new land...
These translocative and transtemporal impulses are expressed religiously in a variety of
ways in Diasporic religion. In religious narratives, diasporas remember and compose

tales that express attachment to the natal land, sacralize the new land, or form bridges

 

46 Tweed, Thomas (1997). Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

60

between the two.”47 Though his study is framed by Cuban Catholic diaspora and the
specific impulses that tie nationalism to religion and vice versa that accompany that
migration, if viewed less concretely it becomes clear that a parallel can be drawn with the
sacred consumer goods that appear in 9/11.

The role of memory in relation to place can be equated to the role of memory in
relation to experience, and if this is done within the bounds of post-9/11 American sacred
nationalism than the object can be seen as a means of moving “across” — trans — to the
experience of the event, tying into the identity of the participant who has tapped into, and
simultaneously created, the imagined communal identity. Speaking to this relationship
between place, experience and memory, Ed Linenthal states, “The goal is to become
transformed by the visit into someone who has ‘experienced’ the event.”48 And indeed,
the possession of these goods allows practitioners of civil religion to participate - to
experience — from varying degrees of relation.

In the case of 9/11 consumer goods, there are a number that contain an actual
piece of something related to the World Trade Center or to the Pentagon or the site in
Pennsylvania. In the specific case of the World Trade Center, as of the fifth anniversary,
pieces of the rubble had been sent to various public parks and museums across the nation
to invite citizens of each state to — in a very physical manner — participate in the sacred
community that is created translocatively by the relationship of place, memory and

participatory experience through an object.

 

‘7 Ibid., Pg.95.

4” Damphousse, Kelly R., Kristin S. Heflcy and Brent L. Smith. “Creating Memories: Exploring how
Narratives Help Define the Memorialization of Tragedy.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003. 05 October 2006.
<http://www.allacademic.com/meta/pl07083_index.html> Pg. 4.

61

Speaking to the role of purchasing as an act of Memorialization for Cuban
Catholic exiles in Miami at the Our Lady of Charity Shrine, Thomas Tweed states:

As at almost every pilgrimage site, varied reproductions of the central

image are purchased at the shrine to be worn on pilgrims’ bodies,

displayed in their cars, or niched in their homes. In that way, they not

only recall the journey but also embody, display, or privatize the national

patroness’s power to offer protection or inspire hope... Just inside the

central portal the Sisters of Charity or lay women from the confratemity

sell mass—produced souvenirs that are displayed on a simple formica-

topped folding table. And most of those artifacts — including photographs,

statues, prints, medals, shirts and prayer cards — are charged with

nationalistic significance, whether or not they explicitly allude to natal

place or collective history.49

The same implicit charge can be detected in consumer goods that have cropped
up in response to 9/11, only instead of a religious artifact containing implicitly
nationalistic symbols and meanings for sale on a fonnica table at the site itself, these
mass produced goods are nationalistic artifacts with implicitly religious symbols and
meanings and are being sold on television, the intemet, in chain stores as well as at the
World Trade Center site. The role of the religious souvenir, as described above, is to
connect the individual to place because that individual has actually experienced that place
and interpreted its varied meanings. But in the case of 9/11 consumer goods, the distance
between the event and where the souvenirs of the events can be purchased suggests that
the community of participants is rather liberal with their definition of “experience.” This
experience by proximity ethos suggests that the act of purchasing — made easier by the

intemet and various other technologies that replace face-to-face social interaction with

convenience — diminishes the role of civil religious pilgrimage in relationship to 9/1 1,

 

49 Tweed, Thomas (1997). Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pg. 105.

62

though thousands of Americans and world citizens do continue to visit the sites
nonetheless.

The buying and selling of these consumer goods is a commodified ritual in which

6" ,9

those individuals who consider themselves part of the nationalistic American 1n
community can participate, particularly in the common theme of ownership, thus further
closing the range of the imagined community. This keeps the accountability of the
recreation of the identity of the imagined community in the hands of its perceived
members while simultaneously recreating and reclaiming a piece of that identity.

One particularly telling consumer good that represents this sacred consumerism is
the five-year anniversary commemorative coin produced by National Collectors Mint
(one of several 9/11 commemorative coins they produced), which is clearly imbued with
implicitly sacred meaning to give the community of consumers of nationalism moral
agency (Figure 20). The rhetorical accompaniment is no different:

Today, history is being made! To mark the fifth anniversary of September
11th, National Collector’s Mint is releasing a double-dated World Trade
Center Commemorative Coin. This groundbreaking non-monetary issue
will never be released for circulation...lt's truly unique, created using two
distinct struck pieces. First, the base is struck with gleaming buildings on
a frosted background. Then the inset of the Twin Towers is magnificently
engraved and fitted into the skyline on the face of the commemorative
with jeweler precision, able to rise up into a breathtaking standing
sculpture. The effect is dazzling - it is literally transformed into a standing
sculpture of the Twin Towers! The World Trade Center skyline is
lavishly clad in gleaming silver miraculously recovered from a bank vault
found under tons of debris at Ground Zero. To mark the fifth anniversary,
$5 of every 2001-2006 World Trade Center Commemorative order is
donated to official 9/11 family charities and memorials. The stunning
design of this magnificent September 11th memorial is a 15 mg. of 24 KT
gold and 15 mg. of .999 Pure silver clad tribute to all who were lost on
that fateful day. On the obverse, the luminous New York City skyline
featuring the magnificent Twin Towers gleams against a frosted
background, much as they shimmered in the sunlight that fateful
September morning. On the reverse, a powerful eagle, 5 stars to denote

63

the fifth anniversary and the plea, “God Bless America.” These
commemoratives may well be among the most historically meaningful
collectibles you will ever own.50

It is clear what is at work in the rhetoric and images selected for the promotion of
this coin. By using a religious imagination to explain the sacred consumerism
surrounding the events of 9/11 through goods like this coin, it becomes clear that the
appeal to create and define an imagined community is at work. The notion that history is
being made through this coin is not simply a turn of phrase; the purchaser is able to
participate in the making of history, own a piece of the experience of 9/ 11 — literally
represented by the silver that was mined from a vault below the World Trade Center —
and reaffirm American institutions and practices through an automatic charitable
contribution on the participant’s behalf as well as through the act of consumption, an
ideal that is rhetorically and officially reified here.

Further, the symbols of “American” values are present in the object itself; the
self—described defiance of the raised towers, the eagle and the stars are all prescribed
symbols that carry meaning for the purchaser, and include him or her in a community of
insiders. The “fateful morning” has been sanctified, as has the skyline itself. It is also
important to note that these commemoratives were dated for release on September 11,
2006: the five-year anniversary. This connection to time is even made sacred and falls
into the practices of civil religion seamlessly.

The memory rite in the form of a commemorative coin is not alone. There are
literally hundreds, thousands of goods that can be purchased; an extensive and

overwhelming sacred consumer market was built in response to 9/11. Another telling

 

5° 9/11 Commemoratives. 15 April 2007. The National Collector’s Mint. 16 Aril 2007.
http://www.nationalcollectorsmint.com.

 

64

example of this is the set of cufflinks pictured in Figure 21. After 9/11, much like the
silver mined from the vault beneath the World Trade Center rubble, purchasing a piece of
the experience — an actual relic connected to the event — was possible, and surrounded a
number of other identities into which the memory rite allows the purchaser to enter with
sacred nationalistic recontextualization and symbolism.

What is unique about the coin and these cufflinks is that they represent a rather
small fraction of the goods produced in response to 9/11; they actually contain pieces of
the rubble or actual physical relics of the event that can, even if in a small way, connect a
purchaser to the larger imagined community. But there are many, many more goods
produced that have no such material connection, and rely solely on the standardized and
communally recognizable symbolic, gestured meanings that are wrapped up in their
representations. Not the least of these is a famous collage of the faces of the individual
victims (Figure 22), called “The Sun,” mimicking a nineteenth century American form of
painting called luminism.5 ' But instead of a bucolic, natural setting in which a divine and
hopeful light appears, the faces are situated to represent the two towers, the sun shining
between them, and the rays of the sun completing a Christian Cross.

Among the many images for sale in the constructions of symbols, faces, and
ideals in Figure 22 is individuality. The purchaser of this sacred consumer good - “The
Sun” — is, much like the viewer of an informal shrine, participating in a constructed
memory of the individuality of the fallen victims. Through the contextualization above,
the individuals presented are simultaneously individuals and national martyrs: ideas. The

same can be said for the individual pull, the simultaneous commoditization and

 

5' Luminism was a popular American form of painting in the mid nineteenth-century, featuring a central
glowing image representing the divine as well as a general sense of progress, often tied to manifest destiny.

65

humanizing of individuals involved with which the purchaser can participate through the
film World Trade Center. The explicit, and central, Christian religious symbol —
borrowing an auxiliary sanctification from the luminist tradition — that is present in “The
Sun” adds a sense of the divine to the image, of meaning beyond simple patriotism that is
inextricably linked to nationalism nonetheless, sanctifying it along with the individuals
who literally construct the object. The World Trade Center Towers as well as the skyline
which they used to dominate are represented only through the human images that are, in
this case, for sale. And much like the repackaging of the photograph “Raising the Flag on
Iwo Jima” as the US. Marine Corps War Memorial, or of the photograph “9-11 Patriotic
Firemen” as a plaque that can be purchased, so too is the film, World Trade Center a way
to re-represent the attacks and re-inscribe individuality with sacred nationalism while
reclaiming American consumerism as well as reify the role of Hollywood, of celebrity
and the culture industry, which is another mainstay in American culture that was
perceived as challenged.

Two popular images -— particularly mobile ones at that — are the magnetic yellow
“support our troops” ribbon and the “I Heart NY” slogan found on t-shirts, mugs,
bumper-stickers, in snow globes, on bags, buttons, and a myriad of other locations.
Although the yellow ribbon does not directly respond to 9/11 its roots are there. These
images serve the purpose of promulgating a set of ideals that individuals choose to
identify themselves with and thus represent themselves by to others. This is usually a
public display, and like the informal shrines it is a performative gesture, conveying a set
of ideals that are reified, and are even expected to be acknowledged by the viewer, thus

eliciting standardization through — though distant — participation. Building off of this is

66

the multitude of tattoos that were purchased; commissioned artwork that literally puts the
purchaser in the position of embodying the experience, whether it be for the purposes of
grief, mourning, or honoring individuals or the events as a whole.

And still, the vast majority of sacred consumer goods in response to 9/11 are not
as personal or individualized as “The Sun,” the tattoo pictured in figure 24, the cufflinks
or even the “support our troops” ribbon. The vast majority of these items lack the
connection to place of the commemorative coin in figure 20, the individuality sold in
“The Sun,” or the individual commitment of the tattoos. Most are kitsch made sacred by
the very act of purchasing, of representing, of reinstitutionalizing because of the role that
sanctifying nationalism plays in the consumer responses to 9/11.

Figures 25 through 34 are just a fraction of the many, many different kinds of
items that are for sale in response to 9/11. Those who produce and sell those goods are
participating in a process of controlled ritualization and shaping of national memory.
Utilizing Linenthal’s consumptive narrative, one author stated, “Shelley Walker says her
gift shop, A Time to Remember, fills a need. People feel closer to the site if they can leave
with a ‘hearts of Steel Bracelet’ or a let’s Roll’ T-Shirt, she says. ‘I’m not trying to make
money on this,’ Walker says, moments after noting that people paid $3.50 for buttons she
bought for 65 cents (Assad, 2002).”52

The purchaser potentially interprets these goods very differently than the critical
viewer. To the purchaser these may be a way into a community of participants and an

identity — symbolic capital — as well as a sanctification and bolstering of ideals that were

 

5‘ Damphousse, Kelly R., Kristin S. Hefley and Brent L. Smith. “Creating Memories: Exploring how
Narratives Help Define the Memorialization of Tragedy.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003. 05 October 2006.
<http://www.allacademic.com/meta/pl 07083_index.html> Pg. 17.

67

perceived as challenged by 9/11. To the viewer these memory rites may be no more than
patriotic kitsch; items that hold their value in the sheer gaudiness of their construction, or
in the case of the music that sprung from the attacks, like the Sonny Rollin’s Jazz album
pictured in figure 25, just temporary artistic markets that are open because of this self-
imposed sense of obligation to publicly honor the victims and attacked values that were
perceived as “American.”

Even dissent has been repackaged, sanctifying self-criticism, claiming it for
American institutionalism as an American strength. Self-criticism, evidenced here in
figures 31 through 33, is even claimed by that which is criticizes, and is thus perceived as
an American value and strength. The set of symbols in the “Coexist” bumper sticker is a
particular telling consumer good, using world religious symbols to define its rather
cosmopolitan message (Figure 32). This packaging of dissent for the consumption of an
American audience is itself an act of consumerist ideological reclamation — made sacred
through the new meanings placed on the act of purchasing these products — as well as a
claiming of the act of self-criticism as an “American” trait, and as a means of
guaranteeing authenticity, as to not appear too ideologically lopsided.

The reclamation of these consumerist ideals, the democratic impulse behind them,
and even the commoditization of dissent in response to 9/11 are all ways of localizing the
disaster as American and of packaging the ideals that were perceived as attacked as
somehow sacred, represented through these items. Sacred consumerism can be seen here
as a practice of recouping and fortifying “American values” and practices themselves.
Rituals like consumer participation as a sacred national reaffirrnation of an ideological

imagined community, ritual shrine building, network coverage, citywide and national

68

commemorations are all expressions that form a usable past in hopes of creating a

meaningful present and future.

69

CONCLUSION
America’s Sacred Nationalism and Its Material Manifestations
“Absent organizational innovations and new public policies, therefore, the reinvigorated

sense of the American ‘we’ that was born of the travails of 9/11 may well gradually
dissipate, leaving only ripples on the managerial routines of contemporary U.S. civic

life.”53

In the immediate wake of 9/11 it was said to be the event that would define a
generation of Americans, and in some ways that has held true; martial, political, social
and religious responses continue to echo. But for the most part, it has failed to be the next
World War II, where the American citizenry was called to act and a number of public
policies were enacted to enable the American populace to do so. A discussion
highlighting this states that, “The American ‘public feels urge to act — but how?’ asked an
insightfirl article appearing in the Christian Science Monitor not long after the terrorist
attacks of 9/11 (McLaughlin 2001). ‘What Americans are being called upon to do -— live
normal lives — hardly seems heroic. Unlike during World War II, citizens aren’t needed to
roll bandages for GIs or collect scrap metal to make airplanes.”54

To live a normal life at the beginning of the twenty-first century meant something
rather different than it did in the World War II era; the public living, labor divided home,
post-war optimism, and perhaps more easily identifiable American identities were traded
for innovations in technology, increasingly private lifestyles, postmodemity, and a

popular culture dominated by memories of the cold war, a string of global and national

disasters, millennial apocalypticism, and the commodification of literally everything.

 

53 Skocpol, Theda. “Will 9/11 and the War on Terror Revitalize American Civic Democracy?” PS: Political
Science and Politics, Vol.35, No. 3. (Sep., 2002). Pg. 540.
54 Ibid., Pg. 540.

70

This non-heroic, normal twenty-first century American life, unlike in prior decades, also
includes an increasing classification of the political history concerning 9/11.

Indeed, many of the websites, like so many informal spontaneous shrines and
accumulations that stood in remembrance, are no longer operational: torn down. This,
and the lessening media coverage are evidence that the event of 9/11 is no longer with us,
and we have memories, both collective and individual, that created and continue to create
its meaning, but are not themselves a real record of 9/1 1. Perhaps nothing can be.

According to Richard Sellars and Tony Walter, “Any spilling of blood for one’s
country, whether by soldier, assassinated politician or peace protester, has the potential
for enshrinement. This is particularly so in the United States where symbols of
commitment to the nation are so important, due perhaps to the persisting fragility of
America’s bold experiment in individual freedom. The more highly valued, the more
vulnerable, are national ideals, the more may sacrifice for the nation be venerated — even
if it is contentious that the sacrifice was in fact in pursuit of those ideals.”55 This quote,
along with the distance between the actuality of the events of 9/1 1, the human ability to
perceive it, the memories it both individual and collective, and the meanings presented in
the memorials suggests that a process of trying to make meaning is at work where there is
a human — or perhaps societal — inability to perceive it. Late capitalist discourse and
theory suggests that there is an emptiness of action, a need to continually cycle out in the

frenzy of growth and consumptive activity.

 

55 Sellars, Richard West and Tony Walter. “From Custer to Kent State.” Pilgrimage in Popular Culture
(1993). Eds. Ian Reader and Tony Walter. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: The
Macmillan Press Ltd. Pg.185.

71

The American response to 9/11 was and is, in a sense — as it was argued here — an
attempt to make meaning out of a somehow shared event in a society that divides belief
from practice, myth from fact, and did so with a sacred imagination. This culture of tragic
remembrance has spurred a new set of practices, assumptions, suspicions and
commodities that were not present before; all in the name of extending sacred national
memory and morality, all borrowing the framework of religious expression, all stemming

from the creation of a nationalized community around 9/11.

72

FIGURES

 

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Fig. 7: “Work Gloves, Candles, Cards and Flowers on a Shrine in Front of the Firehouse
on West 3 1 st Street”

Fig. 8: “Poetry Left at Memorial.”

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Fig. 10: “agneoPentMmral Park”

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Fig. 12: “Flight '93TNational Memorial”

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90

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