Why art failed us after 9/11: trying to make sense of senselessness.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Culture and Reviews

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A DECADE AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the dust from that horrible day has mostly settled, literally if not quite figuratively. Builders are rushing madly to complete construction of the 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center, a giant middle finger flipped in the face of Al Qaeda and other wannabe slayers of modernity. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama signed the James L. Zadroga 9/11 Health & Compensation Act, which is designed to provide medical and mental-health treatments to first responders and survivors of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Osama bin Laden, the money-bags and mastermind behind it all, is dead, shot to death in what must be the grimmest-looking million-dollar compound in all of Pakistan. He is now resting comfortably on the floor of the Indian Ocean, the senselessness of his grand scheme plainly evident. How the 9/11 attacks might have led to a minimizing of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world or helped to reestablish ajihadist Caliphate is beyond comprehending. As the anti-authoritarian character of the Arab Spring suggests, Al Qaeda and its brand of Islamism was the weak horse all along; the group's most successful act of violence merely delayed its trip to the glue factory of history.

In New York the subway again rumbles under the scene of carnage, and up on the street traffic bustles all around the Ground Zero site as if it's just another construction zone. In the rest of the United States, the warm feelings for the Big Apple long ago cooled back to their chilly pre-9/11 temperature. In Europe and elsewhere around the globe, the memorable phrase of empathy used by the French paper Le Monde--"Nous sommes tous Americains"--is on nobody's lips after a decade of elective war and equally elective financial crisis, much of it instigated and underwritten by the U.S. government. The "new normal," a phrase invoked constantly after the attacks to signify a world forever at threat-level orange, is looking more and more like the old normal. The Department of Homeland Security's Life Savers-inspired risk rainbow has been replaced by a two-flavor advisory system ("elevated" and "imminent") that commands even less respect and deference than the Department of Agriculture's recently decommissioned food pyramid.

If we are getting over 9/11 in ways big and small, it's not because we have worked through the pain and the terror and the anger but simply because we are forgetting it ever happened in the first place. Within another decade at most, we will walk by 9/11 memorials the same way we stroll by the World War I cenotaphs installed in town squares across the country. Catharsis be damned; this is probably the way we always get over trauma. Repression and historical amnesia are among the most powerful tools God or evolution has handed us. "Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,/Shovel them under and let me work--/I am the grass; I cover all," goes Carl Sandburg's haunting poem about our inability, our unwillingness to remember. "Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:/What place is this?/Where are we now?"

Yet something still catches in our collective throat like the cloud of concrete ash and human soot that scarred the lungs of policemen and firefighters and school kids and office workers and restaurant help that day in lower Manhattan. There is still a need for memorializing, for processing an event into the familiar, contained, and ultimately comforting forms of art--poetry, music, novels, video, and other media of creative expression--to help us deal with an irrational, cruel world. If we can make art, however dark and sad, from the worst that befalls us, we can with-stand anything. This is one of art's great promises.

But art generated in response to 9/11 has been almost completely unsatisfying so far, despite game efforts by such creative geniuses as Bruce Springsteen and Don DeLillo. Too much of it has sought to replace the scene of violence and loss with superficial if heartfelt emotionalism or the pre-existing obsessions of the artist, a psychic flight to more manageable terrain. The senselessness of this heinous act has exceeded our ability to tame it into shape.

Among the first pieces of 9/11 art were two would-be rock anthems, Neil Young's "Let's Roll" and Paul McCartney's "Freedom," both of which failed to elicit much response from the still-in-shock audiences most likely to be receptive. (Despite being featured during the October 2001 "Concert for New York" and the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show, "Freedom" suffered the dual indignities of failing to chart at all in the U.K. and reaching no higher than No. 61 in Romania.) Like most headline-driven compositions, the songs suffer from a feeling of haste and a lack of reflection. Macca's "Freedom" is fully representative of the tuneless balladeering...