{"id":808,"date":"2012-09-08T19:11:30","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T19:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=808"},"modified":"2012-09-08T19:11:30","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T19:11:30","slug":"political-call-and-response-and-the-falling-man-who-still-haunts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=808","title":{"rendered":"Political Call and Response and The Falling Man Who Still Haunts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>The Falling Man photo by Richard Drew<\/em><\/p>\n

Pundits generally agree that the Democrats made more hay with their convention than did the Republicans. I agree — Bill Clinton especially picked off GOP allegations against President Obama like so many ducks in a barrel, and Clinton and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and a number of other speakers often worked the classic American gospel call-and-response dynamic as if this was a massive Sunday Baptist service.<\/p>\n

Actually the best such line came from former presidential candidate John Kerry: \u201cAsk Osama bin Laden if he\u2019s better off today than he was four years ago!\u201d Kerry, of course, is also the Vietnam veteran whose heroic war record was distorted by Republican stooges in the 2004 campaign\u2019s Swift Boat farce, framing him for supposed cowardice.<\/p>\n

As for Mitt Romney, the best hard-nosed take on him I\u2019ve read is Matt Taibbai\u2019s in the latest Rolling Stone: <\/em>\u201cMitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.\u201d 1<\/p>\n

But for the electorate to understand this opponent, Democrats needed to fire up their base and engage their often fractional culture. Tapping into the call-and-response dynamic was very smart because it may also be a way to allow the coveted undecided voter in — by eliciting a response. At seems to me, undecided voters need to sense that someone speaks\u00a0to them and\u00a0values their opinion.<\/p>\n

Some of those undecided voters are surely nonreligious. That\u2019s part of the risk of using the call and response, in the context of a nationally televised convention, because it is so associated with religious ritual. I recently had a conversation with an atheist neighbor who has an aversion to any cultural reference with religious association. I mentioned Jesus Christ and the Golden rule as a good fundamental way to live one’s life without any excess trappings of religious dogma. He said \u201cas soon as you say Jesus Christ\u201d you are implicitly approving the religious impulse that feeds into all the extremism we suffer from, the kind that led to 9\/11. That\u2019s the stance of New Atheist writer Sam Harris, this man’s new guru.<\/p>\n

This seems a needlessly negative stance that disavows all the good that religion has produced through the millennia. Of course, the stance is also very understandable, given the evil, horror, tragedy and trauma that fateful day\u00a0produced.<\/p>\n

The excellent 2006 documentary on 9\/11,\u00a0The Falling Man <\/em>happened to run on a cable station concurrent to the final night of the Democratic convention, a reminder of the event\u2019s upcoming anniversary. So I switched between the documentary and PBS’s convention coverage. The Falling Man<\/em> brought home, in harrowing and poetically chilling human terms, the crux of that tragedy. It focuses on the investigation, especially by Esquire<\/em> writer Tom Junot, into the identity of the man who jumped from an inflamed room in the World Trade Center — in a photograph which has become perhaps the tragedy\u2019s most iconic image.<\/p>\n

The photo was taken at 9:41 AM on September 11 by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. The image also inspired, among other fictional attempts to address this subject, the novels Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close<\/em>\u00a0by Jonathan Safron\u00a0Foer (also a recent film) and Falling Man<\/em> by Don DeLillo.<\/p>\n

It also brought to mind an anecdote at the Democratic convention about another type of man — a\u00a0 fallen man, of sorts — related by Georgia Rep. John Lewis, himself a minister and a long-time civil rights hero, who walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He delivered one of the most genuinely moving and perfectly understated\u00a0moments of the whole political season:<\/p>\n

A few years ago, a man from Rock Hill, inspired by President Obama\u2019s election, \u201ccame to my office in Washington and said, \u2018I am one of the people who beat you. I want to apologize. Will you forgive me?\u2019\u201d I said, \u2018I accept your apology.\u2019 He started crying. He gave me a hug. I hugged him back, and we both started crying. This man and I don\u2019t want to go back; we want to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

I see a connection here to The Falling Man<\/em>\u00a0as well. He\u00a0was, by most accounts, a well-liked and hard-working 43-year-old African-American audio technician named Jonathan Briley. Certainly there\u2019s profound irony in that a man whose race is historically the most reviled in America, rises to a job in the tallest building in America and then plunges to his death on the day of America’s greatest contemporary tragedy. Briley\u2019s sister Gwendolyn \u00a0saw the picture the day it was published. She knew that Jonathan had asthma, and in the smoke and the heat would have done anything just to breathe. . . .<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

So Briley became a new archetypal tragic American hero.<\/p>\n

His father is coincidentally a preacher who told Junot that he could not address the issue of his son\u2019s death in the photograph because his job is to tell people to go on, in the face of tragedy. That was something he was unable to do at that point.<\/p>\n

His sacrificed son can signify the black man who has come so far and his death an acknowledgment of the inhumanity that kept him down for so long.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where Lewis\u2019 call-and-response line resonated: \u201cBrothers and sisters, do you want to go back? Or do you want to keep America moving forward?\u201d<\/p>\n

More broadly, many people who have suffered and died through the last Republican administration signify those who most need just \u201ca fair shot,\u201d as President Obama put it.<\/p>\n

The Democrats clearly were willing risk of the call-and-response modality because the inherently inclusive dynamic of the gospel ritual is fundamentally American, and even reclaims some of the religious potency that Republicans and the far right supposedly command.<\/p>\n

The falling man who haunts us might even signify the 99% who have all fallen from where they were during the several decades of stagnating wages that led to the proliferation of \u201cthe working poor\u201d and subprime mortgage loans and corrupt business and Wall Street practices that led to the recession.<\/p>\n

I see the call and response as a reminder of the\u00a0bottom-line\u00a0political power of voting. As Obama said repeatedly in his speech, \u201cYou did this,\u201d which seemed a deft counter to Republican manipulation of an out-of-context Obama quote, \u201cYou didn’t build this.\u201d<\/p>\n

(For the record, he was talking in the latter quote about infrastructure, which government pays for most typically. He wasn’t talking about small businesses.)<\/p>\n

And as Lewis said, \u201cYour vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.\u201d<\/p>\n

So perhaps we can look back at The Falling Man<\/em> in terms of a stark beauty begetting spiritual truth. A blog comment by Marnie Watson O\u2019Brien on The Falling Man<\/em> documentary, put it this way:<\/p>\n

“I think the controversial photograph of the falling man is beautiful. He knew he was going to die, and the picture itself is so composed and calm compared to the chaos of that day. \u00a0It’s quite a stunning and beautiful picture, taken at face value. But if (Briley) could see the picture\u2026I don’t think he would mind terribly that if with his death someone happened to take a picture and it was a beautiful picture. At least one tiny, tiny good thing came out of his death and made people think. We can’t hope for more than that.\u201d2<\/p>\n

How tiny that abject figure must’ve felt, as he plummeted from the tallest building in the world. It also seems that in the ensuing decade that \u201ctiny good thing\u201d has grown into a large and potentially powerful good thing.<\/p>\n

At the end of\u00a0Foer’s\u00a0novel, the book includes a sequence of photographs of another of the twin tower\u2019s falling men. Yet as your thumb slips forward through these pages they become an old-fashioned flip-action device. But Foer arranged it so, in this action, the falling man\u00a0ascends.<\/p>\n

This may seem like facile symbolism, but it’s also a device that would likely appeal to Oskar Schell, the novel\u2019s pacifist nine-year-old protagonist. And it’s another way of looking at an indelible moment. Art, and even political stagecraft, may carry\u00a0tragic life to new possibility. Otherwise we\u2019re still left with a hole in our heart, as big as Ground Zero. Call and response becomes a collective healing process. Just maybe we can hope for more than what Mamie O’Brien suggests.<\/p>\n

1 http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/news\/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829#ixzz25p0Jo6X8<\/a><\/p>\n

2http:\/\/topdocumentaryfilms.com\/911-falling-man\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Falling Man photo by Richard Drew Pundits generally agree that the Democrats made more hay with their convention than did the Republicans. I agree — Bill Clinton especially picked off GOP allegations against President Obama like so many ducks … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-d2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":816,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}