The Sounds of Silence: Foreknowledge, Miracles, Suppressed Narratives, and Terrorism-What Not Telling Might Tell Us
2009; Western States Folklore Society; Volume: 68; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2325-811X
Autores Tópico(s)Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
ResumoABSTRACT Focusing on recurring theme of foreknowledge, this article explores issues of selfcensorship, narrative suppression, and untellability in rumours and legends that circulated in United States, Canada, and United Kingdom, in reaction to events of September 11th. The research presented here explores identification of importance. of, problems with, and analysis of stories not told, particularly in context of intense fear and suspicion. KEYWORDS: 9/11, conspiracy theory, contemporary legend, foreknowledge, rumor On October 14th, 2001 , shortly after first American military strikes on Afghanistan, novelist Barbara Kingsolver published an opinion piece in Los Angeles Times entitled No Glory in Unjust War on Weak. She wrote: I cannot find glory in this day. ... I am going to keep pleading against this madness. I'll get scolded for it, I know. I've already been called every name in Rush Limbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, winner. I'm told I am dangerous because I might get in way of this holy project we've undertaken to keep dropping heavy objects from sky until we've wiped out every last person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of country to anywhere. I accept these gifts with a gratitude equal in measure to spirit of generosity in which they were offered. People threaten vaguely, she wouldn't feel this way if her child had died in war! (I feel this way precisely because I can imagine that horror.) I begin with this excerpt from Kingsolver's column, not only because of its overt anti-war message, nor because of its quickly achieved status as one of most forwarded opinion pieces on war, but because it is framed within a dialogue of censorship. As Kingsolver suggests, part of censorship problem is propaganda machine that makes it unpatriotic to be opposed to war, but silences left in wake of September 11th are numerous and complex, and censorship is both external and internal. War, terror and disaster, like so many other aspects of life, create a context for untellable narratives - a space where we are as likely to censor ourselves as we are to speak. This paper explores issues of self-censorship, narrative suppression, and untellability through an exploration of rumours and legends that circulated in United States, Canada, and United Kingdom, in reaction to events of September 11th. While ground for this analysis features stories told about those events, real focus of this article is on identification of, importance of, problems with, and analysis of stories not told, particularly in context of intense fear and suspicion. Using Labov and Waletsky's notion of tellability (1967), inverse concept of untellability, and more recent work on use of master narratives to fill interstitial gaps in un-narratable (Wycoff 1996; Lawless 2001; Shuman and Bohmer 2004), this paper explores present and absent themes, contrasting September 1 1th rumours with other similar narratives of war and disaster.1 Times of domestic or international crisis typically spark a proliferation of contemporary legends and rumours. During World War II, narrative tradition got so out of hand that United States government was forced to create rumour management clinics to prevent inflammatory stories from gaining credibility (Turner 1993). Similarly, terrorist rumours surfaced almost immediately on September 11th, and folklorists were there to collect them. Within a few days American Folklife Center at Library of Congress put out a quick for participation asking that the nation's folklorists and ethnographers collect, record, and document America's reactions.2 The Library of Congress explained in that call incredible value of a similar collection created sixty years earlier by Alan Lomax who, immediately following attack on Pearl Harbor, sent a telegram to fieldworkers in ten different localities across United States asking them to collect man-on-the-street reactions of ordinary citizens to bombing of Pearl Harbor and subsequent declaration of war by United States. …
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