Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Edward T. Linenthal . August 30, 2002

Read more of R & E's interview with Edward T. Linenthal, professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and author of THE UNFINISHED BOMBING: OKLAHOMA CITY IN AMERICAN MEMORY:

Shanksville is now part of a national historic landscape, and it will never, ever again be what it was -- just as Gettysburg not so far up the road will never again be a quiet, idyllic farming community. It is an incredibly eloquent place, maybe because I was unprepared for the power of that grove of trees where the debris field was -- an extremely compelling place that had not yet been framed by the media. At the World Trade Center, you know what to expect before you get there, because it's part of the visual spectacle. Television had never captured well the eloquence of that field in Shanksville, and I was simply stunned by it. The townspeople in Shanksville see themselves, I think, as moral stewards of this site and feel very strongly that they have to preserve, protect, and guard it for the family members, because they'll be hosting them for years and years to come.

Memorial issues are almost, by definition, razor's-edge issues. What do we mean when we call a place "sacred ground"? What happens to a site when 92 percent of the human remains that were on that plane will never be recovered? How do you deal with that? What about the landowners? What about zoning regulations to keep out commercialization? Do you open the site to the public? Should people other than family members be allowed to walk in the area where there will always be human remains? Or must the public be kept away a little bit? Who's supposed to take part in the memorial process? Who's enfranchised to think about how to represent what happened there to the wider public? There are all kinds of questions of ownership -- real ownership, symbolic ownership -- at all of the 9/11 sites, including Shanksville.

The wider national community believes that they, in a sense, "own" these sites too. [There are the] logistical questions when you have hundreds of thousands of people coming for major anniversaries. We can think about the first, the fifth, the tenth, twenty-fifth, fiftieth. These are signal anniversaries that we know from other historic sites. What's a small community to do? What about roads? Bathrooms? Directions? Where do people stay? There are compelling issues, both symbolically and also logistically, that people in Shanksville will struggle with for a very long time.

When I went to the site on a cold afternoon in December, there was no snow on the ground. I hadn't realized the extent of the debris field, and I hadn't realized that so much of the human remains were simply vaporized. This beautiful grove of trees was quiet and compelling, and the wind was blowing through them. The natural beauty of the site was such a contrast with the horror that had happened there. It made it difficult for me to put together the event and the site and took me back in many ways to some of the beautiful places I had been at in Poland -- killing fields that made the act of remembering even more difficult.

Sometimes we expect horrific events at sites that are ugly; the site will give us a kind of moral clue from nature as to the event. That doesn't happen often, and it didn't in Shanksville. It's a beautiful, beautiful area. It became clear to me immediately that this was going be a very volatile area, and that this was sacred ground, intimate ground, a burial place for people and yet part of the national landscape.

One thinks about disaster often when one thinks about big cities. We think about apocalyptic fantasies and disaster fiction and all that. It often happens in big cities. Even after the Oklahoma City bombing, people said, "This could happen in L.A. or this could happen in New York, but not in Oklahoma City, in the nation's heartland." The Pentagon is certainly a military site and, while unexpected in a most horrific way, it at least is a logical target for terrorism.

Shanksville is a rural area. It's peaceful. It's serene. It is a different kind of American story that has been largely overshadowed by the spectacle of what happened in New York City. Some of it has to do with the numbers of people killed. Some of it has to do with the fact that in New York City you have the playing out of apocalyptic fantasies. The fact that we call the site "ground zero" is very revealing. "Ground zero" is language taken from apocalyptic sensibilities at the beginning of the nuclear age. It's what we called Trinity Site [location of the world's first atomic detonation] in New Mexico. There have been apocalyptic nightmares about nuclear attacks on New York. E. B. White, in 1945 at the beginning of the nuclear age, wrote a breathtaking piece about the destruction of New York City by a power from the air.

You also had in New York, if not the death of the skyscraper, at least what some people saw as the wounding of the idea of human achievement by building higher and higher -- that maybe this is the end of that kind of work. You had the destruction of an American icon of capitalism. You had a sense of a big city brought to its knees -- the media spectacle. Of course, it's New York City, almost 3,000 people killed -- all of that lent a particular intensity to New York City and, frankly, a visual spectacle that you didn't have anywhere else.

[In Washington] you had the moving pictures of the wounded Pentagon building. But in Shanksville, all you had was a hole in the ground, and a hole in the ground that was filled in very quickly. There was a more subtle power, the power in the debris field, in the grove of trees, that doesn't lend itself to the kind of visual spectacle of the images of the World Trade Center with the plane[s] flying in and their destruction and people running away. You don't have that kind of visual imagery at either of the other sites.

I was struck, when I was working on Oklahoma City, with the similarity to September 11 in how immediately we respond to these events. We construct immediately, because of the horror of this atrocity, a way of making sense of this -- what I call a narrative of civic renewal: "Yes, it was horrible, but. �" "Yes, it was horrible, but this will bring us together." "Yes, it was horrible, but what about the heroism and sacrifice and courage of rescue workers, firemen, policemen, people who ran back into the building to save fellow workers and bring them back out?"

And we have to celebrate that, because they're the points of light in these horrific events. But there seems to me a kind of unsettling collective effervescence after these things -- they so subvert our bedrock convictions about good and evil, about justice, about the meaning of life, about how death is supposed to take place, about the meaninglessness of violence that these progressive narratives are tremendously important. But they're also only part of the story. Often we fixate on how these things bring us together when, in fact, they both bring us together and tear us apart at the same time.

You have communities that are brought together, and we must honor those stories. You also have communities that are torn apart by memorial hierarchies: Who gets remembered? How do they get remembered? Who gets remembered more intensely? How much money do certain people get? What kinds of memorials should we make? These are the questions that tear people apart.

The obscene comment of Jerry Falwell immediately after September 11 -- that gays and pagans and lesbians and the ACLU are to blame -- is not community building. Conspiracy theories arise, and the toxic impact of these kinds of events on the minds and spirits and the bodies of so many people lead these events to be unfinished for so long. There were psychological effects on children who, in Oklahoma City, watching TV alone in the first days after the bombing, saw over and over again the recycled images of the destroyed Murrah building. And to this day, child psychiatrists in Oklahoma City have told me these children will kick the walls of new buildings before they go into them to see that they're not going to fall down.

I've heard the same things are beginning to emerge in New York City, because children watched that recycled image of the plane flying over and over again into the World Trade Center. We aren't going to know for decades how this impacted the hopes, the fears, the sense of vulnerability, the sense of good and evil, the sense of justice of children.

Religious narratives and resources are mobilized to help people make sense of this. This was very clearly the case in Oklahoma City, and certainly in Shanksville and other communities after September 11. They are a way to try to put events like these (Hannah Arendt once talked about them as the "unbearable sequence of sheer happenings") into some kind of meaningful framework.

I understand the power of these religious narratives and how important they are in the restructuring of life. I remain skeptical myself that healthy human communities can be built on piles of murdered bodies. I think the corrosive effects of these events, the toxic impact of these events are enduring. September 11 will be unfinished for so many people, and we delude ourselves in creating a dishonest and disrespectful narrative when we try to use quasi-religious, pop psychology terms like "closure" and "healing process." What breathtaking disrespect to go up to the mother of a murdered child in Oklahoma City and say, "Well, it's now ten years later" (in a few years it will be). "Have you reached closure?" What could that possibly mean? That says something about our unwillingness to live with these events.

Someone once said that Americans want these events to be resolved and not endured, and I think that's very revealing. What does it mean to talk about a "healing process," as if there's this regular set of steps through which people move? This was not the case at all with family members and survivors in Oklahoma City. The event coils back on itself and erupts in different ways. People then move away from it; but a smell, a sight, a sound will bring it back. People live in an ordinary world, but then there's this other world that erupts.

Healing takes place for some people as they incorporate events like these into what people in Oklahoma City call "the new normal." If we know anything about the impact of violence, it is that there's no old self to put back together. There is only a new self to be reconstituted out of the resources that a person brings, and there is the impact of the event itself. A person brings them together. That's rebirth. That's creativity -- when people practice active grief, when they rebel against being labeled as "sick," as victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, as patients. People reacted against that by working for a victims' rights movement, by working for or against the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, by working for habeas corpus reform, by entering into the work of the memorial process. They were practicing a kind of active grief.

There's a long history of people marking sites of violent death with artifacts -- personal kinds of memorials of various kinds dating back, at least in our culture, to marking sites of Apache raids in the Southwest. Certain ethnic traditions in America have always done this. Now it's broader, and we begin to see spontaneous memorials -- people's memorials -- emerging in all kinds of sites.

The fence in Shanksville, which is removed from the actual site itself up on the hill, is very reminiscent of what happened after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated. People made that memorial their own by tracing names, by leaving things. And then what is left becomes historical evidence and memorial archive in its own right as it's catalogued.

I went through lots of the material at the Oklahoma City fence, and how revealing it was to see what people left there -- spontaneous leavings, planned leavings, individual leavings, corporate leavings. There, as in Shanksville, a tremendous amount of religious material was left. Why? Lots of reasons, and certainly among them is that religious symbols are part of who we are. To leave a crucifix or a Native American dream catcher or the prayer of St. Francis or a Buddhist text are ways of mobilizing religious resources to make a commemorative statement and to link one's own personal convictions with a larger story -- maybe to sacralize the site itself, to remove the toxic impact of violence. So it's no surprise that in Shanksville we see a tremendous amount of memorial leaving, and also in that leaving a tremendous amount of formally religious material. Religious resources are things that people turn to almost instinctively to try and contain the power of these events.

We look for the sacred in lots of places now. We consider ourselves a secularized culture, and the word "secular" makes some sense if you think of institutions not controlled by an organizational church. But I don't think there's been a secularization of consciousness at all. Everything from our fascination with certain sacred sites or relics, with the apocalyptic, with that which is beyond the immediate, graspable, or material says that the religious sensibilities in the culture are very, very, very strong. They may be located outside of organizational frameworks, but the religiosity of Americans -- be it in traditional faiths, in civil religion, in a patriotic orthodoxy, or a fascination with making sense of current events in the light of apocalyptic [events] -- is very strong and, I think, belies the notion that religiosity is fading in the culture -- both for better and worse, I would say.

My definition of a sacred place is a very simple one. Anyplace that's capable of being defiled is by definition sacred. You can't defile ordinary space. Anyplace that for a group of people is special so that a certain way of being there would be an act of disrespect means that that place is charged with a particular kind of meaning.

I tell my students, if they were sitting in the parking lot at K-Mart with a boom box, no one's going to really care. They might be irritated that the noise is too loud. But if they had a boom box at Gettysburg or in the grove of trees at Shanksville or in a church, a mosque, or a temple, it would be considered an act of defilement. Anyplace that is capable of being defiled is by definition sacred -- charged with power for some people.

When we talk about sacred space, do we mean humanizing space? Do we mean space that is charged in a way that enlarges our moral circle of "we"? Do we mean a space that is nurturing? Do we mean a positive, constructive space? What about the death camps in Poland? What about a place like Auschwitz? Are these places sacred, or are they charged with a kind of toxic, negative sacrality that is important and that transforms them, but that is a different kind of space?

People in Oklahoma City, when they talked about the footprint of the Murrah Federal Building, used the term "sacred ground" often. And by that they did not mean that their remembrance wanted to focus on the act of atrocity. Language is important here. These events are not tragedies, they're atrocities. Their loved ones died. They were murdered there. This creates a kind of intimacy with that space, It's sacred ground because the presence of their loved ones is there. The goal is to transform a site of mass murder into a commemorative space. Human beings make places sacred through their work. And a lot of that work is memorial work.

The World Trade Center site is very complex. I have no great insight into what should be done there, but I have an appreciation for the complex nature of the interests that are there. In Oklahoma City, you had one building -- although there were other buildings damaged, certainly, for blocks and blocks around. But the Murrah building was terminally wounded. You had several people killed across the street, but the Murrah building was the focus. There were three sets of remains in the building that couldn't be brought out for five weeks. Then the building was imploded. At that point, that ground ceases to be an open grave -- a particular kind of sacred place -- and becomes amenable to transformation -- to a historic site, a memorial site.

At the World Trade Center, you do not have that kind of opportunity, where all the human remains could be found. The people were vaporized, cremated, so there will be the symbolic presence, the real presence of infinitesimal amounts of human remains there, always. To my mind, this changes the nature of the site. Given the economic imperative, the cultural imperative, the transportation imperatives that are at work there, it seems clear that the whole 16 acres is not going to be venerated and left in whatever ways we would do that, maybe, at the field in Shanksville, where nearly all of the human remains will be in that grove of trees and, I think, will alter the terms of what can be done there and who can go there.

At the World Trade Center, you have a complex sacred site and some family members who feel very strongly that the whole 16 acres should be left as sacred ground. The first sentence of that argument would be, "An unprecedented act of terrorism on American soil calls for an unprecedented use of some of the most valuable real estate in the world." That would be the opening statement for someone who wanted to make the radical argument that all 16 acres should be left as memorial space.

What seems more likely is there will be power points within that 16 acres -- perhaps the footprints of the World Trade Center towers themselves. But even then, what do you do with the space around it? How does rebuilding pay its own architectural respect to the power of the events that happened there?

These kinds of transformative events -- Gettysburg, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center -- alter the nature of the space in very, very powerful ways. None of these places can ever be what they were before. How you go about negotiating that, making sense of that, working out the contentious issues -- are there sacred zones here? -- becomes very important. Does sacred space extend at the World Trade Center vertically as well as horizontally? We've already had a very eloquent example with the towers of light that, in a sense, sacralized, memorialized the vertical dimensions of the place.

We have, at the U.S.S. ARIZONA Memorial at Pearl Harbor, one of the most unique relics in American culture -- a tomb, a historic site, a grave, a tourist site, an underwater resource of immense power that sacralizes that area in a working navy base. Some sacred sites contain relics, artifacts so powerful that they alter the terms of what can be said or done around them. For example, there are people who think that the shoreside museum facility at Pearl Harbor, which tells in a very powerful but dispassionate way the story of the attack, is too close to the ARIZONA, that there should only be a language of commemorative respect within this zone of sacrality.

Often you have artifacts that alter very much what can be done in these charged environments. So whatever happens in New York City, the issue of what is sacred space, how we honor it, how we engage, what we do with it -- this is absolutely a central question.

Memorials certainly do sacralize space and try to freeze in time the meaning of the event for the generation that is putting the memorial up. And memorials tell us an awful lot about the people who shape them -- usually more than they tell us about the event or the person being memorialized. Any memorial is already, by its very nature, a statement about the fear of forgetfulness -- "This cannot be consigned to oblivion, and so we're going to freeze the message."

Inevitably, there is not one message. Inevitably, memorials fall in and out of favor. They are intensely remembered and then often forgotten. Think about Grant's Tomb, for example. The Civil War generation would have been horrified to see the disrepair that the Grant Tomb fell into. We don't know how firm in our national memory the sites of September 11 will be. If we lose a city, or a good portion of a city, to a nuclear or biological or chemical attack, does that increase the significance of September 11 and Oklahoma City as early crescendos of domestic and then international terrorism? Or does it lessen their impact because of the higher body counts at other kinds of sites?

So memorials absolutely sacralize. Memorials also can give a sense of who really counts in these stories. Whom do the memorials memorialize? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the most eloquent memorials in our culture, because it allows people to occupy that space and think about the names on that wall across a diverse ideological spectrum. It's not a memorial that preaches at you. It's not a memorial that offers a single, totalitarian message about what you should believe about this site. It's a memorial that has, I think, accelerated the process by which we focus on names.

Perhaps there is a way these memorials are an act of protest against the anonymity of mass death in our time. We want to focus on faces, names, and stories -- to read the names on the wall, to go to Oklahoma City and read the names on the chairs, to go to the U.S.S. ARIZONA shrine room and look at the names of those who were killed in the attack, to read the public eulogies in THE NEW YORK TIMES of those killed in the World Trade Center. This focus on names and faces and stories is really a kind of protest against the anonymity of mass death.

I've thought about the relationship between the Oklahoma City memorial process and the September 11 sites. I don't think Oklahoma City is an exact template, of course, for September 11. But when I was in Shanksville with several friends from Oklahoma City at a town meeting on memorialization last December, it really became clear to me that what Oklahoma City has to offer is a very clear example of how people who wanted to memorialize this event struggled and engaged with a process almost immediately and moved in a really majestic manner.

When I first came into the memorial process, people would say, "I was there to argue for a particular kind of memorial, because I thought only that could really do justice to the memory of my loved one." "I want an angel," "I want a crucifix," "I want an eternal flame," "I want a grove of trees," "I want a reflecting pool," "I want a flagpole with the United States flag a thousand feet above the site."

And through the agonizing process of coming together, I must say, over a period of some years, they moved from these individualized versions of a memorial -- these competing memorial ideas -- to a larger civic sense of what this memorial means to our nation. What is the larger civic function of memorialization? That evolution, I think, was powerful.

Whatever is done with these sites, whatever kinds of memorial architecture are negotiated at these sites, I would hope not only that these memorials are going to be our first-in-place interpretation of the meaning of September 11 and the loss that we suffered but also that they will lead people to a more profound engagement with issues of violent death and sensitize people to that, working out of this event but moving beyond it. That, to me, would be a successful memorial process.

I wonder sometimes about the tremendous acceleration of our desire to memorialize so quickly -- this compression of time between event and memorialization of event. These events are not located securely at all in our history. We are not memorializing something that is there in the past or wishing to honor a dying generation of veterans or to remember something that has been forgotten. We wish to revise our memory of what happened. The language of memorialization has become one of the ways we locate these events in our historical consciousness.

Our urge to memorialize so quickly, I think, has another unsettling feature to it. I wonder if these events are so threatening to so many of our bedrock convictions that memorializing them is an illusory way of saying, "It's over. It's contained. We've memorialized it. We've understood it. We've drawn" -- and here's this troublesome word -- "lessons from it. Now we can put it away. We can put it on the memorial bookshelf and move on to something else."

I think there is a kind of psychic consolation in thinking about memorials as being the period in the tremendous agony that we suffer thinking about these things. If we can put it away and say it's over, it's very consoling. But we don't know whether it's over or not. And so, in a sense, we're memorializing in the midst. Oklahoma City was one event. It was contained. There were not lots of other large-scale terrorist attacks on government buildings. One can think about the Oklahoma City bombing and the memorial that emerges as an intense remembering of a single event.

We don't know yet what we are in the midst of or whether we have, in fact, absorbed the largest blow. And hence, memorialization is coming very, very quickly, and it may provide us with a much too illusory comfort that this is, in fact, over.

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