Smoke from the smoldering embers, and how Rock and Roll can't save us anymore

by Kurt Hernon

"They fucking did it man," the cracking voice said. "They finally fucking did it…those sick fucking bastards." I heard Lucas swallow hard, drowning a sob.

"Christ Lucas, I know," I replied. Under his muffled bellows Lucas ran a streak of his best language off. I held the phone to my head and stared at the television as that damn airplane hit that tower again…and again…and again. My thumb pressed the button that hangs up the phone, cutting Lucas off in the middle of a mournful "motherfu…" Then that goddamn plane hit the building once more.

I felt nothing. Squeezing the television remote with my thumb, I saw it again, from another angle. That same plane…that same building. Still more channels, more angles. More planes, more buildings, more explosions. All of them the same. And still I felt nothing.

Surreal they called it; and this was surreal manifestly defined. If only they could have known about this sort of thing when they made that damn word up: surreal. They should have known about it, but they never could have imagined the word being used for something like this, I am sure. Fuck, I started to wish I didn’t even know that goddamn word. I wished I could demolish it, like that building, instead of that building. Give me the people in those planes, in those buildings, and I’ll hand over that subtly horrible word. Let the fucking word suffer – not human beings. Surreal - stripped forever from existence.

I drop the TV remote on the floor. As the batteries dislodge and scatter across the floor I head to my dank basement on a mission. I flips on a few lights, head to my computer desk, and grab the two tattered Webster’s paperback dictionaries that sit resting against a stack of cd’s.

S, S, S, get to the goddamn S’s..S, S-a, S-e, no, S-i, no, S-o, S-t, S-u. Ah-ha! Here we are, surreal. Tearing at the middle of the page, I try to get that miserable fucking word out of my life – out of our world. Surreal. Oh fuck it! I claw at the entire page tearing it apart, ripping it out of the book, and crumpling it until I felt my fingernail grinding into my palm. A half dozen other pages came floating out behind it.

I finally gather myself as the ringing of a phone breaks my pathetic internalized hysterical trance. I stare down at the black receiver and find a heavy sight fighting its way out of my chest. I just won’t answer it. Dropping the dictionary onto the desk, I lumber up the basement stairs, winding up right back where I didn’t want to be - in front of my television. That damn plane and the goddamn building were at it again. I finally realize that I am angry, probably for a lot of reasons, but right now mostly because I feel nothing. Not one single minute of the horrifying video is real to me. A silent plea rages within me somewhere. Feel something you cold-hearted bastard! But I cannot. Not a single shred of what my eyes see can make any of these scenes become reality for me. I just want to fucking break something.

Many people have asked me over the course of the past thirty-six hours or so about my thoughts regarding this insane and unyieldingly abhorrent terror that rained down from tranquil blue skies to pour its evil destruction upon the unsuspecting and innocent human beings who just happened, by a cosmic cast of the die, to be in devastation’s way. And I, a supposed man of words, have found that I have nothing, not one word, to say. Not because nothing can be said (although that becomes a serious consideration), but because the surrealism has yet to diminish. Perhaps, it never will. Quite frankly, just thinking about what I should think, what I should have to say, how I should feel, has stirred something in my consciousness that I’d never have copped to before, but at this moment I am embarrassed and I am frightened by the fact that I have indeed been completely and irrevocably desensitized to this sort of horrific scene. The relentless video of that airplane colliding into that building haunts me, but for reasons frightfully indifferent to the clear and devastating tragedy. My intellect, the very core of my common sense, tells me that this is an unspeakably ghastly event that unfolds before me, yet my emotions, that broad humane quality of our being, remains unresponsive. I’ve seen it all before. I’ve seen it all my life. On TV and in films, I have seen mass destruction. In fact, I have seen this sort of tragedy faked at least a dozen times in my life, if not more, and I fear that it truly has numbed me. Anesthetized my feelings to this sickening point where if I am not directly involved, if the unspeakable doesn’t directly affect me or my closest loved ones, then the experience is not real. And this, more than anything else, scares the living shit out of me.

Desensitized. That’s the word for it. And I, for the first time in my life, understand and believe in the power of the word. As a firm and ardent believer in parental responsibilities - because this was, where music, movies, and art in general are concerned, a debate about the youthful exposure to mature and highly graphic art - desensitization used to be a debate I scoffed at. The numbing of minds was, in fact, so connected to adolescence that there was no debate in my mind. Adults should supervise, not censor.

But what happens when horror casts it blinding ray into the eyes of the supposedly mature adult psyche and the adult mind discovers that it cannot process what is clearly an atrocious and terrifying vision as it is? What is it that leaves the conscience certain of the anguish occurring, but the heart cold to it?

And there it is again; the airplane, the building, the lives, the horror... I can hardly make it real in my mind. It’s just another movie. It’s just another special effect like the many you have seen before. There are no people, there is no pain; there is only this false vision.

But the plane is real.

And those are oh-so-God-have-mercy-on-them real people.

Pain, horror, anguish, and suffering – all real.

No matter how many times we’ve seen it in pretend, this must be real – now.

I reach for the phone to call some friends, but I don’t have the heart to talk. I wander around the house for who knows how long. Pacing from room to room. In silence. Deafening silence. Hearing my pulse coarse through my ears – a maddening metronome, the core of life’s beat. Silence…and more silence. I know that music is my only chance at escape. The silence grows louder. And I know it’s gonna take a long hard listen to erase my mind this time around. The throb of my own blood pounds POUNDS against my eardrums, trying to bury the horrible silence. I grab a disc, one that feels right because I have to know I can still feel something. I close my eyes and lean heavily on the opening roar of Husker Du’s New Day Rising, as though it might just be the last best hope for my sanity, and praying to whatever God may exist and one who might listen that this caterwauling song will ride the rails of its fury and slowly transform into the strand of truth that I so desperately need right now to cling to. And nothing…nothing at all…seems real anymore.

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