I just picked up Art Spiegelman’s (of Maus fame) new book, “In the Shadow of No Towers”, a compilation of broad page comics about how he deal with (and is still dealing with) the events of 9/11. He and his family live on the doorstep of Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
I’ve just started to read it, but one paragraph from his forward resonated with me:
I had anticipated that the shadows of the towers might fade while I was slowly sorting through my grief and putting it into boxes. I hadn’t anticipated that the hijackings of September 11 would themselves be hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a war recruitment poster. At first, Ground Zero had marked a Year Zero as well. Idealistic peace signs and flower shrines briefly flourished at Union Square, the checkpoint between lower Manhattan and the rest of the city. That was all washed away by the rains and the police as the world hustled forward into our “New Normal.” When the government began to move into full dystopian Big Brother mode and hurtle America into a colonialist adventure in Iraq —while doing very little to make America genuinely safer beyond confiscating nail clippers at the airports — all the rage I’d suppressed after the 2000 election, all the paranoia I’d barely managed to squelch immediately after 9/11, returned with a vengeance. New traumas began competing with still-fresh wounds and the nature of my project began to mutate.
Amen brother! One thing I love about artists is there ability to explore themselves in the open. Therapy by exposure you might call it. “Here is what I am thinking. Here is what I feel. Think about that would you?”
