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In December 2001, I took the train up from Washington, DC (where 9/11 also happened) to do my American duty and go Christmas shopping in NYC. I visited the ground zero site, which was still being "unbuilt" at the time. When I was there, a father assembled his three children at the most open spot in the fencing surrounding the site, pulled out his camera and said, brightly, "Smile!" They did, and he took several pictures. I gaped at them in horror -- this sacred ground, this national wound, this tomb, it was a simple tourist attraction to them, something to go see in New York like Times Square or Central Park.
Less than four months had passed since the attacks when I saw that family have their "Kodak Moment." Since then 9/11 has been used for so much more -- the justification for an illegal invasion of Iraq, the backdrop of a silly run for the presidency by Rudy Giuliani, the alleged reason for an evisceration of our nation's Constitution -- that it hardly seems like such a horrifying prospect to see it be the basis of a monster movie. I haven't seen "Cloverfield" (having had a baby two weeks ago, I doubt I'll venture to the multiplex anytime soon), but it seems like the visceral visuals of the film, while causing an understandable reaction, are the least of our worries when it comes to the uses of 9/11. Abrams as a carny barker may cause a resurgence of unpleasant memories, but the uglier carny barkers -- those in the Bush administration and those in America who would blithely go along with their plots, telling their kids to "Smile!" when thinking about deaths of their fellow Americans (and other world citizens) -- those haunt our present and cast a pall on our future, and it is their plots and lazy evocations of 9/11 that should sicken us. A movie can be avoided more easily than the cost of war.
