9/11 Editorials & Rhetoric

I chose the September 11 editorial published by the Los Angeles Daily News (http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_18870106). After searching through editorials through a few of the country’s biggest newspapers like those in the New York Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune, and even branching off into website news projects like the Huffington Post and New Haven Independent, I found a definite trend. Although these publications might not represent the entire scope of the political spectrum, I would say that for such a polarizing topic, almost all of these editorials focused on what are predominantly agreed upon as the facts: that many people were killed, that many people risked their lives in the rescue efforts that followed, and that the towers were intentionally attacked with the intention to hurt America. There are conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories, and many mentions of past censorship on 9/11 editorials from years past (see Ventura and the Huffington Post), but these have been kept to the side and discredited by main news sources, who are at this point so obviously trying for unity---throwing all their energy into the most popular take on the events of Sept. 11 today: that this was a shared experience and that the attack is as personal as we are American.

Something I liked about this article: her (the author’s name isn’t given, I’ve just assumed he/she is female) opening, which details the all-too-common series of events of seeing an airliner fly over the city, then suddenly “your mind's eye works out the angles, considers the awful possibilities. There is a moment when it seems the worst could be happening again, happening here - until the jet completes its loop and levels off, headed for a routine landing at LAX.” The reader is caught here nodding, and here she strategically takes her riskiest jump as the editorialist of this article: she asserts her own stock in how she has been affected by these events, all the way across the country. This idea of a shared experience and collective memory is re-iterated throughout the piece. Even though this seems to be her main point, she hesitates and fumbles every so often, making semi-biased word choices and claiming that this is the most national tragedy in our nation’s history, which creates a distance between herself and the reader. But she says everything with the best intentions, whether because of excited jumps in reasoning when she follows a particularly passionate train of thought, or when she redirects an old point (like her stating and subsequent re-corrections of why LA is assuredly safer than cities in the east). I think that, as a writer, she makes these grand, unifying remarks which are expected of this sort of memorial, and then proceeds down tangents which make these remarks applicable to her and everyone else in LA (such as how Hollywood and baseball season and tourism were all affected). In itself, this is not the most effective process in an editorial, we lose faith in her because she is losing faith in herself and her own opinions right in front of us by doing this. After tracking this back-and-forth between conviction and less-organized, hesitant side notes, I’ve been led to believe that she should have maybe stressed the latter part of this cycle more, and stuck to something closer to home. This way, these to-scale observations and thoughts would be less of a cause for debate, and would instead encourage a more open dialogue, which is just another casualty of terror. She had a perfectly comprehensible section on how Southern California was affected, although not her personally, just big businesses, but it was lodged between reflections of how relatively California was isolated from this, when all the disasters they are known for are natural, and therefore couldn’t quite measure up to this national, yet individually life-changing, event.

Her relationship with the subject was clear: it was the same relationship with the events of 9/11 that she worked so hard to prove we all share, wherever you live in this country and whatever your individual experience was, because we all have a story. Hers was one of fear and uncertainty, just these abstract emotions with nothing to pair them with except something 2500 miles away and the incidental fact that one of the flights had been bound for her area, if not for the attacks, and so some local victims would make these events more immediate and accessible for those Americans across the country, who were just a farther-flung extension of the target. Her relationship with the reader was one of complete and total abandonment of differences (except for suspect Muslim Americans) for her idea of the greater good (shared among the other editorialists), unity in the face of terror. She stressed the extremism and potency of the attacks, how directly they were targeted at absolutely everyone, her readers included. It was also one of realization: of both how large America is, how far the World Trade Center is from her office at Los Angeles Daily News, but still how connected we all are, in this brotherhood we never lost as we continued to grow.