Page 260 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Public religious culture post-09/11/01 249

beyond its reach. We confront, then, the possibility of a new order of
sublime – suited to the technoworld of the postmodern – a relational
sublime. 46

Events of common suffering and vicitimization are, as we’ve seen,
dramatic moments of relatedness, with connection and commonality the
whole point. This is a dimension of the “new civil religion” that separates
it from received notions. On a level more related to the media, though, is
the simple fact that the experience is, in the first instance, one that is expe-
rienced through the media. 9/11 was instantaneous, real, and visual. In a
long and established line of such events, a “priesthood” of media figures,
including reporters and anchors, held important roles in the experience,
conveying important ideas about its meaning and providing a narrative of
its unfolding across time. As Dayan and Katz point out, this is a well-
established and long-accepted role, where conventional practices and
47
expectations are suspended for the sake of a larger purpose. The ritual
vocabularies through which the media narrate events like 9/11 have
become complex, routine, and conventional. While a detailed study from
this perspective remains to be done, there is evidence of one important
element of these conventionalized media narratives in Linenthal’s accounts
of the Oklahoma City bombing. Too quickly, he notes, voices in the media
began to speak of “healing” and “closure.” Whereas it can be argued that
such violence can never truly be healed, Linenthal contends, newspaper
columnists, television anchors and reporters all began talking of closure
for the events. 48 “Closure” and “the healing process” (a term heard
frequently in the local television coverage of the Columbine massacre) are
concerns of a priesthood oriented toward conventionalized rituals more
than they are concerns of journalists covering a process that might never
(as Linenthal argues) come to closure.
In Oklahoma City, at Columbine, and near the World Trade Center,
Pentagon, and Western Pennsylvania sites, the “democratic” claiming of a
role in commemoration involved the physical claiming of a location, typi-
cally a fence. 49 Fences surrounding the World Trade Center site and a
nearby church became the sites of spontaneous shrines filled with the
objects of the “vocabulary of memorialization.” Flags, poems, teddy bears,
news clippings, posters, banners, clothing, and more conventional para-
phernalia including candles and wreaths covered the site. Many of these
came from outside the US, a testament to the global nature of the events.
The notion that there is an evolving trajectory of such commemoration
is supported by the seeming emergence of such practices in smaller, more
localized events. For example, a tragic murder of a young shop attendant
in my home town stimulated a familiar response. Within hours of the
news, a spontaneous shrine appeared at the storefront where the killing
occurred. It grew and developed over the coming days, and contained