One Year Later
The banner headline on page one of that edition of the Herald-American screamed “JAPS RIOT IN U.S. CAMP.” The camp wasn’t an Al Qaeda-in-Guantanamo type of situation. It was a relocation camp, and most of the “Japs” held there were American citizens by birth.
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The Sun-Times put out a special section last Sunday jammed with solid and wide-ranging stuff: “We can never say ‘never again’” by Lynn Sweet, “Why America?” by Neil Steinberg, “Bridgeview’s Arabs cling to conspiracy theories” by Mark Brown, “When terrorists kill in the movies, the audience always survives” by Roger Ebert. There was much more.
The topic of the front page’s big story was 9/11’s gift to all of us–dread. It described what people with jobs in the Sears Tower have gone through emotionally in the last year. Most of the workers the Tribune introduced us to were women. Most had the willies. Some are happy not to work there anymore. This story went on for such length–it concluded Monday–that despite its touchy-feely aptness I began to wonder if the Tribune had lost its mind. Unhappily, it neglected the one question that surely has haunted its subjects: would the Sears Tower, a bound cluster of nine vertical tubes very differently constructed from the Twin Towers, collapse in a similar way?
Many of the dead could have been saved if only they’d called out for help or someone had knocked on their door–if, in short, they hadn’t been dying out of sight and out of mind. So Klinenberg, a young social scientist, decided to take a close look at why in Chicago so many were. It’s a subject, his book argues, that the media’s first rough draft of history didn’t do justice to. In the autumn of ’95 the Tribune began preparing a second draft, but according to Klinenberg, the paper lost faith in its project.
Klinenberg reveals this gulf as if it holds social significance. Maybe it does. But most reporters take it for granted, and if they don’t read their last story it’s probably because they’re on to the next one.
