ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY...

…of a really bad day, here’s an essay I wrote about five weeks after the attacks. It originally appeared in the Tribune:

Surreal.

Most of us have probably heard that word more frequently in the last month and a half than we have in the rest of our lives. Once the term for a school of aesthetics, it’s now the word that people keep using to describe the sight of airplanes flying into buildings and New Yorkers fleeing as clouds of dust and rubble flood the streets behind them. We call such images surreal not because we haven’t seen them before but because we have, faked in countless movies—we call them surreal because, this time, they’re real.

But there’s another kind of surreal. There’s the kind in which medievel kinghts ride invisible horses to the clacking of coconuts, or get frisked by 20th-Century police. There’s the kind that fills a working class British diner with Vikings singing the praises of canned meat, or pits an extraterrestrial pudding against a Scotsman at Wimbledon.

As has been repeatedly noted, where we were and what we were doing when word of the terrorist attacks reached us is something we’ll always remember. I’ve got a story that I doubt anyone else can claim: When I heard, I was watching the opening credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And after I heard, I sat there and kept watching...and once again, Monty Python came to my rescue. People have been psychologically coping with the current crisis in many different ways. My way has been to watch Monty Python.

Let me explain. There was a critic’s screening of the recent theatrical release of the special edition of Holy Grail scheduled for the morning of September 11 (the DVD of this version came out on October 23 from Columbia Tristar). My wife gets to sleep in on Tuesdays, so when I got up to go to the screening that morning, I showered and dressed quietly, and didn’t turn on radio or TV. Driving to Harkins Centerpoint, with a CD playing instead of the radio, I vaguely noticed that the streets seemed quiet for a weekday morning, but even when I saw the electric sign on the Squaw Peak Parkway—“AIRPORT OPEN; NO FLIGHTS; ESSENTIAL TRAFFIC ONLY”—it somehow still didn’t register that something big had happened. Nor did I observe, until I thought about it later, how stricken and scared the kids working at the theatre looked as they let me in.

Only one other person was in the theatre, a friend of mine. As I sat down, he asked me “Have you heard any updates?” He quickly saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, and as the lights went down, he told me: The World Trade Center was gone, the Pentagon had been attacked as well, thousands were almost certainly dead.

I sat there stunned, staring at the movie’s opening scene, as Graham Chapman’s long-suffering King Arthur endures the sentry’s endless speculation on whether African or European swallows could carry coconuts to England. I briefly thought that it was inappropriate that I stay and watch one of my favorite movies—a wacky comedy no less—at a time like this. But something made me stay in my seat.

It was no longer the same movie, of course. The scene of Eric Idle dragging a cartload of corpses and calling “Bring out your dead!” wasn’t the same anymore. Watching knights on mission from God lop off the limbs of their enemies or employ the Holy Hand Grenade to destroy a lethal white bunny—none of it felt the same. But it didn’t feel trivial or cheaply cynical. It felt unsentimental, but warm and profound.

That weekend I bought my first DVD box set—the entire run of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on the BBC. I’ve been watching the half-hour shows obsessively ever since. Seen in its entirety, the series really seems like an amazing, almost Chaucerian achievement, among the finest things ever made for TV.

The violent, often gory slapstick doesn’t seem so blithe anymore, nor does the fierce awareness of the capacity of human beings to commit atrocities. Pythonesque organizations like the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Royal Society for Putting Things On Top Of Other Things now carry the echo of psychotic Taliban agencies like the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. And it’s jolting, now, to hear a candy in the “Crunchy Frog” sketch referred to as “Anthrax Ripple.”

As I’ve watched, though, it’s come to me: They’re showing us they world as it is. The violent, chaotic comic vision of the Pythons isn’t insanity, it’s clear-eyed sanity. It’s the real world that’s crazy; all the Pythons do is enable us to see it, and to see that it’s possible, maybe even necessary, to laugh at it. This, perhaps, is the true function of surrealism. And its true blessing.

On the other hand, here’s a quote from somebody not known to have been a Pollyana:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending his spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”—Howard Zinn