I mentioned in bloghan 1 that there would sometimes be (what I am calling now) "special editions" of bloghan whenever something really funny or really sad happens. And while the event that this pertains to happened 23 years ago on this day, I feel strongly enough and confused enough about it to want to talk about it. There won't be any tier list, or song of the week, or really any sillier sections. This is something else. Just a section for background, a section for my thoughts, and a section to say "goodbye for now."
23 years ago on this day, four commercial aircraft were hijacked in US airspace. I'm sure everyone reading knows about 9/11, and some of the things that happened during it and happened after it. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were hit by two of those airplanes, as was the Pentagon by another, and the Capitol building was supposed to be hit by the fourth if it weren't for the actions of the passengers who were not meant to be bound for that particular landmark. This tragedy is often described as a turning point for America: a day that changed everything, and changed everything forever. The turmoil in its wake brought about many things in our world: new laws, new wars, increased strife, and many other things got dredged up, such as renewed waves of nationalism across the USA. It's not the politics or the deaths that got me thinking about the tragedy so much though.
It was all the humour I've seen around it.
Reels, shorts, presentations, videos, clips, images, edits, there's just so many. I don't see one every day, but I do see at least 2 a week. So many jokes, so many memes. Any fictional character that has any sort of moment in an airplane will eventually be pictured careening into one of the towers. An innocent, well put together presentation on if there are more doors and wheels, that slowly transitions into discussing planes, and what they did, bringing up 9/11. Short videos of people showing how they do things in 2024, then going back in the years until eventually they show themselves in 2001 reacting to the second tower being hit. There's just so much of it out there, and some people send that stuff to me in droves. And some of it is clever, when you don't expect it to be. Some of it is more of a classic bait-and-switch. And sometimes, in the moment, I smile. I exhale from my nose. I laugh a bit.
But that being said, there were still 2977 victims that died that September day. Real people, who had jobs. Who woke up that morning, most going to work, some planning on taking the bus back when the work shift was over. Those are things that I do. Those are things I did today! When you think of that number, then think of the person behind each number, it's sobering, really. And a feeling of awfulness can set in, maybe for a couple of seconds, maybe for longer. Questions come into my mind. "How could I be impressed with how well the community of the YouTuber "Schlatt" manages to surprise him with 9/11 jokes, and not instead disturbed, given all the death and injury that occurred?" "Did I really just laugh at that one frame of Chika Takami from 'Love Live! Sunshine!!' flying a plane in a gag from that show, because the person who posted a screenshot of the scene on Tumblr included a picture of the smoke billowing into the sky from the second plane's impact?" Then it gets less specific, and more into the general sense of what's going on. Was it wrong of me to enjoy those jokes, and to even crack my own? I feel guilty for doing it, but should I? And also, why does so much of it get posted? Why does it seem that this generation of people born after 2001 joke so much about it? These questions are really what I wanted to discuss here.
I think the first thing I have to tackle is why there's such a proliferation of 9/11 jokes and memes and edits. The most likely answer in my eyes is just time. The people making these memes weren't born or were very young back then. The impact of that day didn't really hit them, so there's not as much of a connection, and you don't feel as much guilt about making light of the tragedy. This isn't to say that everyone is like that. I know for sure that there are people in that age bracket who denounce making fun of deadly events like 9/11, and I don't want to outright dismiss them. Another thing is just the general drift of the humour you typically see on the internet from that younger age group: a drift towards a darker sense of humour. The last big thing I think contributes to the sheer amount of 9/11 jokes you see is just the result of social media amplifying that which is controversial, liked, and shared. Tumblr is the only social media where I've actually seen people be critical of making fun of the death of thousands, and I think that's a result of the userbase of Tumblr generally having more people who are more proactive about practicing social justice and activism, more people who like to virtue signal (different from that first group), and Tumblr not having that great of an algorithm. Even then, the majority of 9/11 related posts I saw today on Tumblr were jokes, memes about things crashing into two parallel vertical objects, people wishing each other "Happy 9/11!" So, not being connected to the event, the humour of the new generations, and the way memes spread seem to me to be the factors that lead to all this.
I think it makes sense that some people were born after 9/11, that's just kind of a given considering the human race. I also think the social media aspect makes sense too, these algorithms are in place and work the way they do just so that our engagement is maximized, and so the ad revenue and data collection is too. But I think the second factor, the more profuse use of darker humour, warrants some more discussion. Why is it that this shift has happened? I did some reading, looking at news articles, and Reddit threads (just as unbiased as most American news sources nowadays!), and people seem to have reached the consensus that it's just that we feel like we're exposed to more tragedies, more frequently? I guess it makes sense, humour is used sometimes as a coping mechanism for tragic events, and if you're exposed to a lot of it, it gives you more material, more experiences to draw from. It still feels a bit iffy of a basis to me, but this whole bloghan is probably quite repetitive of current discourse surrounding why people joke about 9/11 anyway.
This brings me to another question. Why am I writing this? Why did I feel like writing about it, at all? I'm in that generation of people who wasn't born then, so I don't have any connection to the tragedy. My humour might be described as dark at times, depending on who you ask. And I am on a bunch of those social medias. Even given all that... I felt bad. I felt guilt over the times I joked about it. Reading that timeline, finding out about different people's last appearance, listening to 'Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),' it made me rethink the things I had been saying, that I had been joking. I've gotten a lot looser with the things I let slip out of my mouth, but when I tell a joke about my monitors being vertical and hanging a paper airplane between them... in the moment, it feels like a clever setup, and the coworkers around me react with a laugh or a fake gasp. Afterwards though, I don't feel as good as I do. So, I guess I'm writing this to get it all down. Writing it down somewhere helps me to collect all my thoughts on something, and I can go back and consider, re-consider, re-consider some more, and maybe come away with something new.
I think this whole bloghan is most appropriately described as less a justification or non-justification for 9/11 jokes, and it also isn't a research essay on how and why there's so much humour around 9/11, but more a self reflection on my own experience with said humour. As a bonus, it contains some empty assurances to myself to make myself feel better about all of it, pointing out all the external things that contributed to this state. However, I already know what my answer would be to "Are you inherently a bad person, and why or why not?" so I don't really think it's worth examining or recording the internal things.
The last thing I have left to lay out is if it's all alright. Should I feel all guilty and conflicted about all this joking, or am I overthinking it too much? I think it's possible to joke about the tragedy and feel bad about the tragedy at the same time, but I'm not asking if it's ok to feel bad about the tragedy itself. Rather, my guilt lies in the memeing. We could play the comparison game, but I don't think it's very useful. There's quite a large difference in severity, amount, and recency when it comes to 9/11 and things like COVID, like the various wars going on right now, so I don't believe it would be an effective thing to conjecture about. One could aslo consider how the tragedy completely changed the trajectory of how the USA interacted overseas, but I think other attacks elsewhere might also have done that. Hard to analyze that though, in a game of imagination you can literally make up anything bigger than the biggest thing, a similar problem to just outright comparing existant tragedies. Overall, it does not seem very useful to compare tragedies to evaluate if you should feel bad for making fun of one particular one. Some might approach it from the angle of "well, it depend on who you're joking with," but I still find unease in that. If I faced those 2977 people, and cracked a 9/11 joke, I think one might chuckle a little bit, but would I even dare to do that, granted that audience? What about to someone who was alive at the time, who lived in America but far from the crash sites? Could I do it then? Pursuing this question just brings me more questions, more dilemmas, and so much more nuance that I thought I would be digging up, but now I feel idiotic for not realizing that having this sort of conversation would mean spelunking into a cave packed full of the silly putty that is nuance. I am so used to carrying guilt around for so many things, but I was a bit surprised when I found myself experiencing guilt recently over these jokes. When it comes to the question of my feeling of this guilt, if I should feel that way for treating that specific tragedy as I have treated it, the truth is: I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. And I guess that's just how it's going to be, for a good while.
A bit of a heavy topic for bloghan 11, and I'm sure that some people read it with amusement in their eyes, some with anger, and at least one person taking notes, most probably. I woke up today, thinking about the tragedy, and how I've treated it in the past, and how I've treated in the more recent past. I went to work today, and while taking lunch, read up on a timeline of the events, and into some of the political context America was in before and after the attacks. I took the bus home, and thought about how things like airport and airplane security have expanded and evolved since then. Each of these things being normal things I do on a weekday. But what do you do when things can't go on as they were going on before? It's an experience that many go through, but I'm sure that those who go through a tragedy like this are the ones who have to find out the soonest. So then, what is the role of those who don't go through such a tragedy? What is considered proper treatment of that tragedy? Personally, I'm not so certain anymore.
- bubbler