Fin Keegan

One of the best dramas ever produced by television has just ended in a hail of ambiguities.

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

We were newly-minted parents, living three miles from the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001 we saw, from our Brooklyn bedroom, the Twin Towers smoking black in strangely equal plumes and then, loudly, unbelievably, vanishing.

Before they fell, with the second plane having already hit, I went out to buy water and supplies. Our Polish neighbour, a refugee from the war, stood in a smock and hairnet on her stoop. Bewildered, she stared up, over the facing row of brownstones and trees, at the pair of now-chimneys and their pitch-black exhalation.
     She had been laundering in her basement all morning: her industry made of our respective yards a telling contrast. “What has happened?” she asked, both vowels and consonants still shaped by a long-swallowed-up Middle Europe.
     I told her that fires had broken out: nothing about the planes, the express intent connoted by a second strike. How to tell her, of all people, that a new and dreadful chapter of human history had just been opened before our eyes? But I should have–and also assured her of the supplies I was getting for ourselves and the baby.
     At the store Ling, the Malyasian shopkeeper, and I pooled our information. Behind me a child, standing with her mother and little brother, burst out crying: their father worked at the World Financial Center.
     We worked to persuade her that it was the adjacent World Trade Center that had been hit. We all knew, the child as much as the mother and wife, that he was, in any event, gravely endangered.
     A few days later, through smoke swirling in massive arc lights, I saw up close what the titanic forces of hatred had unleashed on our city: savage minds had twisted like pipecleaners the mighty steel and concrete–and confidence–of downtown Manhattan.
     And since? Only a poet could come closer than Peggy Noonan has:

For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I’d see a picture in a newspaper and I’d experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I’d hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there. This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar–jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered

Quote: Peggy Noonan The Storm Before the Balm Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005