9/11 and the calm metal instrument of Salvador Allende's voice ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 218th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Steve Almond, a short story writer and essayist from the United States of America, has reflected on 9/11 (‘The decade of magical thinking,’ in www.therumpus.net). At least on one occasion, he wrote down his thoughts. That was 12 years ago. A decade allows one to have what he calls a long view. So he could look back on the events that occurred on the 11th of September, 2001 from a distance of a decade. Steve Almond took a longer view or rather he imagined it.

‘Say you took the long view of September 11, 2001, the view from the heavens, the view of a compassionate celestial being. From up there, you’d see that approximately 150,000 earthlings died that day. Most of these deaths were caused by malnutrition and age-related illnesses, roughly 1500 were murders, hundreds more were due to civil wars. Also, 2,977 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.’

That’s distance that is longer than time and therefore offers greater perspective. Almond does much more. He abstracts himself from the incident, time and distance to talk about the morality of memory; the what we remember and forget, the why and why not, and, by extrapolation, what we ought to do about it all.

Every victim was mourned privately, he reminds us. Such mourners and mourning go unreported. That 9/11 was a spectacle that benumbed Almond’s country to the point that the vast majority of her citizenry found themselves mesmerised by what he calls ‘the raving of the demagogues’ whose demagoguery ‘provided cover for [their] own quieter, more subtle abdications.’

Almond says they were made to endorse the pursuit of ‘vengeance over mercy.’ Even the vengeance was misdirected; the benumbed citizenry were sold a lie about weapons of mass destruction that were non-existent. Almond was correct when he pointed out that the people of the United States of America, ‘were deciding – with the help of all that deeply feeling propaganda on our television sets – that the only human suffering that mattered was American.’

If there was memory and amnesia, savage urge and suspension of empathy with regard to September 11, 2001, how on earth could Almond’s America even remember the other 9/11, the one that took place 5,125 miles away and 28 years before where the hand of the tragedy-dispenser was unmistakably American and therefore, unlike with regard to the 9/11 of 2001, it could not be considered, in Almond’s words, ‘a narcissistic injury that [Americans of the US could] return to as a talisman of self-victimization’?

That 9/11 ‘happened’ a half a century ago. Steve Almond wasn’t seven years old then. I was almost eight. He lived in Palo Alto, California at the time, 5,913 miles from Santiago, Chile. I was in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 9805 miles away. I don’t know how Almond spent that day and I can’t remember how it unfolded for me. However, I do know that at least one child, probably around our age, living in Santiago, had felt happy.

He was happy, as he told the makers of the documentary ‘Chile: Obstinate Memory,’ because it was a holiday. More than 20 years later, prior to watching a documentary by the same team ('La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas’ of ‘The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People), led by Patricio Guzmán, many in the audience generally denounced Augusto Pinochet as a tyrant but also opined that had he not overthrown the president and government things could have been worse: ‘they were communists.’ The boy, a young man now, and in that audience, would have agreed.

Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile. On September 11, 1973, the military, led by General Pinochet, was ousted in a coup d'état supported by the CIA (acknowledged in 2000) with the full knowledge of the then US President, Richard Nixon and the United States government. Allende gave a farewell speech to Chileans on live radio, reaffirming his love for Chile and is reported to have killed himself with an AK -47 even as Pinochet’s men stormed La Moneda, the presidential palace.

'The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either. Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.' [listen to the full speech here]

That's hardly even a nutshell version of the political economic realities and Allende's heroic patriotism on behalf of the Chilean people. Anyway, after the screening was done, the audience went silent. The boy was asked about September 11, 1973. That’s when he said, ‘I was happy.’ He was happy, he said, because there was no school. Then he wept.

From the distance of time, that young man had exorcised the demagoguery that had quietly taken up residence in his mind and nurtured ‘quieter and subtle abdications.’

Centuries are owned by tyrants and demagogues. We can recover our hours, our moments of honour and integrity. As did that young man. As Steve Almond has so eloquently urged us all to do. And as did Salvador Allende, that man of dignity who loved his country and spoke his last words with the calm metal instrument that was his voice.

And that, thanks to the above-mentioned essay by Steve Almond, referred to me by my sister, Ru Freeman, when I told her that I want to write about Salvador Allende, is the thought I take away from that other 9/11 from half a century ago.

10 September 2023

9/11 and the calm metal instrument of Salvador Allende's voice

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