To have grown up here in Washington DC is to have known the children of spies and scientists and satellite image readers and war strategists. Abstract, abstracted people, symbolic analysts, silent about the precise nature of their work. “My former wives,” writes Jack Gladney, hero of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, “had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world – a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community.” Some of my friends’ parents commuted to Fort Dietrich to study military applications of poison. Others – like UD‘s father – drove to the National Institutes of Health to fight President Nixon’s war on cancer.
To have come back here to Washington after graduate school, to have spent my working life at four-blocks-from-the-White-House George Washington University, is to have made a lateral move, to have remained in a world of CIA recruiters and lobbyists and speech writers. White Noise takes place on a college campus, arguably the white-noisiest of wealthy, high-tech American locales, and indeed even an urban campus like GW is very white-noisy. Things tend to be smooth and hushed and abstract — the carpeted, geometric mid-rises, the light-jazz-and-laptops cafes, the calm precise Reagan-bound jets.
To have watched my students rush the White House at midnight on Sunday and raggedly sing The Star Spangled Banner was to have witnessed a breach in the white noise protocol. They were the first to arrive, my students, their dorms just down the block from Lafayette Park. They raced along the darkness of Eighteenth Street, shouting to one another, pumping their fists, conjuring flags from somewhere. From the fog of final exams they were lifted, by Osama’s demise, into a collective clarity having to do with justice.
Strange to think that my students were too young, in 2001, to understand what I understood, to do what I did. I lay down on my basement floor and I said out loud to myself Nothing to do but be brave. Because no one knew how much more punishment we were in for. Someone was trying to bomb us back to the Stone Age. (“They have gone beyond the bounds of passionate payback. This is heaven and hell, a sense of armed martyrdom as the surpassing drama of human experience,” wrote DeLillo in an essay published a few months after 9/11.) My students were too young to marvel at the unity Americans felt and expressed, all of us having been hit so hard. We didn’t know how to respond in the immediate aftermath, but we knew we loved this country, and we all wanted to say that. We wanted to be clear about this love, its particularities. DeLillo praised “the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York.”
They were too young, my students, but they took it in, just the way we did. And when Sunday’s story broke, there was a lot of emotion to let out.
Under the hum of white noise beats a perfectly functioning human heart. Even in the fog of Foggy Bottom.