It’s not enough to say "my sentiments exactly" in response to Speiglman’s comic project, In The Shadow of No Towers, since this blog has to be at least 300 words. The theme that rings most true throughout the text is the government’s, in tandam with the media’s, "hijacking" of the atrocity, and its departure from the actual and experienced pain of the victims and survivors by repetitiously employing cinematic coverage of the images of the event, which removed the tragedy from the real and replaced it with a fantasy world akin to that of movies and video games. Personally, I was living in San Diego California at the time, and as I walked through our living room to the front door for work at 6am, my father sat motionless in front of the T.V. He had the same look on his face, one of excrutiating effort to suspend his disbelief, as he has when he watches a traumatic war movie or documentary. Of course, when I meant to simply glance at what he was entranced by on the screen, I couldn’t look away. I didn’t have to suspend disbelief; I simply couldn’t believe that what was happening in New York and at the Pentagon was real. I believed for the first few minutes and probably, for the following few days, that what I had watched on television that morning was fiction, a new rendition of Executive Decision where the inherently evil Arabs succede in their plan of terror, an add for a videogame, anything but real. (While the media had projected images of Arabs and/or Muslims as terrorists prior to 9/11, a ploy that implicates that all Arabs and/or Muslims are potenital terrorists, it only got worse after the event.)
While Speiglmen indicts the U.S. government for hijacking the fear of the American public to go to war in Iraq in several of his strips, he also addresses the nation’s preoccupation with Hollywood. In the strip on page 2, the artist/comic suggests that American’s can no longer see beyond Hollywood. With the two towers on top of Speiglmen and his wife’s head, the towers being out of sight to the person with the tower on his/her head but visible to the other if he/she is observent, they are blinded by a Collateral Damage billboard with Arnold Swarzenegger’s head on it. Not only is the implication heavily ironic since the movie is about a ‘Veteran Firefighter’ who looses his wife and child in a bomb blast and then becomes an assassin or terrorist, in which case the billboard functions prophetically, but as the caricature of the author is preoccupied with trying to understand what’s really happening beyond the Hollywood banner, he and his wife are attacked and spanked by a caricature of an Arab Muslim, at which point, the towers on each of their skulls falls. (Perhaps this strip relates to Speiglmen’s insistence on the glowing bones in the North Tower just before it fell?) Speiglmen literally cannot see the towers falling behind the billboard, which suggests that the artist and by extension, the collective consciousness of America, are so preoccupied with film, media, and other spectacular diversions from reality, that it is impossilbe to comprehend real tragedy when it happens since we’re all so used to being detached from it when experiencing its simulation on screen.
Throughout the text, the author is simply trying to digest the experience as a New Yorker present at the time of the catastrophe. "Time stood still" and he conveys that it really felt as if Armagedon or the Apocolypse were on the horizon. DeLillo’s essay, "In the Ruins of the Future," is also obsessed with the essence of time, and he describes the clash of civilizations represented by 9/11 as being a matter of time. "The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past" while the West, currently spearheaded by the hyper-technological United States and the internet, live "permanently in the future." The terrorists, according to DeLillo, desire a premodern state of existence in which religion governs their perceived right to self-determination, which is a state of existence that the modernizing Western powers want ousted, a U.S. preference that appears to based more so on economic reasons than moral. For DeLillo, time stood still on September 11 because the premodern struck the modern "to reduce the world" and to bring about their vision of its return to an earlier time, ironically, with the hijacked technology of the West. Both works acknowledge that September 11 didn’t just come out of nowhere, and neither author subscribes to the simplistic notion that terrorists are psychotic animals without any objective but to senslessly kill. While DeLillo argues that the terrorists of 9/11 are reacting to global modernization, particularly their forced modernization, Speiglmen asserts that the U.S., particularly when under ‘the dictatorship’ of Administration’s like the current theif, G.W., are just as guilty of terrorism (terrorism of its own citizenry psychologically and peoples of foreign nations physically) as those the U.S. government accuses of terrorism- "Equally Terrorized by Al-Qeada And by His Own Government," Speilmen and many others, such as myself, are disollusioned by the violence and victimization of ‘innocents’ perpetrated by both nations and non-state groups.