Green Day’s album American Idiot will be remembered as one of the great post-millennial testaments of resistance. It captures the rage, frustration and stupidity of the 2000s, an era that has transformed war into an excuse to label and judge those who do not slot into specific narratives of family and consumerism.
Thankfully, Green Day, like Woody Guthrie, summons an alternative America of difference and defiance. When added to the films of Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald, and the words and speeches of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, debates about the limits and transgressions of American power gain texture and subtlety in this horrifying decade.
From this environment, Green Day wrote the song “Wake me up when September ends.” Many song lyrics have mobilized that month. It was the title of a pumped-up Earth, Wind and Fire track. (I know many of us are waiting for the Earth, Wind and Fire revival. Indeed, if Duran Duran can survive “Wild Boys” then anything is possible.) Belinda Carlyle offered her post-Go Gos “September Rain,” dashed with both melancholy and excitement. But what separates Green Day’s September from these prior fixations on these thirty days is a ruthless act of terrorism. Many principles of American history collapsed along with the buildings, concrete and metal.
Any mention of September is now compacted into the terrorist suitcase. It will always signify carnage, death and terrorism. Green Day was able to capture the regret and the confusion of a post-September 11 soundscape. It will remain their masterpiece.
The question emerging from these Green Day-inspired statements of American defiance is how do we construct a popular cultural alternative to – and in – Blair’s Britain? The Prime Minister’s sighing, tittering and earnestness has initiated syntactical skidding from the issues that remain of pivotal importance: injustice, inequality and discrimination.
Living in Britain and listening to British politicians means that I live with words like “facilitate,” “assist,” “dialogue” and – my favourite –”international community”. With all this facilitating, not many concrete outcomes are being determined. Through the assistance, definitive goals through governmental policy are not enacted. Via the dialogue, staunch debates about who is excluded from polite conversations are not being asked. Within this international community, not only is the United Nations decentred but there is a stylistic slight of hand. White Western Christians who support Israel cannot wear this designation like a proud t-shirt slogan. Instead the semiotic sludge of two impenetrable words – international and community – are used to construct a political order where ambiguity, history and context are not part of the discourse.
For Blair’s Britain, there is no anthem that has yet emerged to punctuate the journey away from 7/7. These popular cultural commentaries are increasingly necessary. With the failed attacks on British flights to the United States on August 10 this year, resulting in the close-to-closure of all airports in the United Kingdom, an interpretative gap is emerging between acts of terrorism and understanding terrorism. In the aftermath of the foiled plot, involving perhaps ten filled passenger planes and a predicted loss of life higher than September 11, confused questions emerged about how such a catastrophe could occur.
The British papers were filled with not only the usual Sun bluster, but pensive rhetorical questions. The Independent on August 12 featured three words followed by a question mark: “The Enemy Within?” In a disturbing temporal loop back to Margaret Thatcher’s miners’ strike, the headline noted that the would-be terrorists were born, educated and live in the United Kingdom. They have wives and families and hold conventional jobs: a taxi driver, a pizza delivery man, a used car salesman. The day after the foiled attack, the Daily Mail’s Deborah Davies affirmed that “Home-grown hatred is the greatest threat to our country.’ The Daily Mirror puzzled over “Suburban Suspects.” The post-September 11 political environment has not prepared British newspapers for such realizations. In an era of insiders and outsiders, freedom-loving people and terrorists, those who do not fit comfortably within such labels threaten to unravel the pristine fairy tale that has been constructed about democracy, Christianity, military power and modernity.
Home-grown terrorists. It is an odd phrase that disturbs the culture of blame that has displaced fear, hatred and violence onto “foreigners”. Because there has been no clear context or history established around the events in Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq or Lebanon, terrorism has remained a series of unspeakable acts enacted by madmen and extremists. While not justifying their actions in any way, it is important for the future of civilization, rather than “the international community” or “freedom-loving people”, that we all stop hiding behind labels, stop asking – with childish naivity – why people born in Britain would want to commit acts of violence against Britain, and think about the relationship between foreign policy, domestic politics and trans-national mediations of identity.
Three of the 7/7 London bombers were born in Britain. The fourth entered the U.K. from Jamaica as a baby. He converted to Islam as a teenager. It is easy to blame an al Qaeda training camp for bombs in planes and trains. It is far more complex to understand how newspapers, television and the web construct a virtual training camp, a matrix of motivation, method and result.
Luckily, while gripped by televisual footage and the intelligence reports dripping through press releases of the foiled terrorist attack in August, I was reading a book bought two days after my arrival in the United Kingdom. One year on from the event, I found John Tulloch’s One day in July in a quiet Eastbourne bookshop. I was relieved with this discovery. Tulloch is an important academic, a fine scholar and a great writer. Having worked in both Australia and the United Kingdom, I was hoping that he would ease my cultural translation between people and places. I did not know that political events within the fortnight would also offer a poignant and powerful commentary on the patches of foreignness, discrimination and fear within us all, wherever we are from and wherever we settle.
The book is evocative when read as a straight memoir of a man who survived an act of terrorism. He was present at “underground zero.” His words have bite and edge. Yet he also writes beautifully. Throughout his career, whether he has researched Doctor Who or cultural risk, there is a measure and economy to his prose that has enlarged his reading audience beyond scholars and their footnotes. His word picture of the moment the bomb exploded captures the twisting of metal and the loss of perspective.
Everything turned a horrible, urine-coloured yellow. The carriage seemed to be distorting, being pulled and displaced as though it were a flat, rubberized photograph that someone was yanking at the sides. I heard no sound.
This book is not simply a presentation of what happened to John Tulloch on July 7. Actually, the bombing itself fills very few of the pages. It is the consequences of those explosions, first to himself and then to the police force, through the tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician shot point blank in the head because he was “assumed” to be a terrorist. Tulloch does not settle with the diagnosis of injustice. Instead – through an analysis of media images in which he often featured – he provides an explanation and context for 7/7.
The parts of the book which made me audibly gasp or physically shake my head emerged when Tulloch discussed how his photograph, stumbling out of Edgware Road station bloody, concussed and swollen, was used by a series of newspapers and televised broadcasts. His face became a justification for any action or law – no matter how dictatorial or corroding of “freedom-loving people” – so that such bombings would not be repeated.
The extraordinary moments of One day in July occur in the second half, where Tulloch has recovered sufficiently to attempt to intervene in the way his images are being used. A Professor of Media Studies at Brunel University, and with a career researching cultural risk behind him, there was probably no one better qualified to be discussing the role and place of terrorist images in the news and popular culture. The idea that he was actually in the event and present in the photographs that he was describing added one of the most poignant and remarkable feedback loops and interventions in the history of media studies.
His treatment by News of the World left me needing to put the book down and go for a walk. The rewriting of his words, the invention of testimony and the pushy and aggressive behaviour of a journalist towards a man recovering from the impact of bomb was horrifying. But as I read these pages, I kept reminding myself that John Tulloch has a brilliant mind, is well-educated and understands how the media works. If he was treated in this way, then none of us have a hope in “managing” or “handling” the tabloid press.
He did have successes. In his “attempt to project a slightly different image – as both citizen and professional – beyond that of helpless victim,” the journalists started to deal with him differently. They realized that a media academic was being interviewed, so his role in “the story” became more complex.
Once he was commissioned to write One day in July for Little Brown Publishers, he had the ethical duty to inform reporting journalists that their behaviour, questions and commentaries were to be the basis of his research. Tulloch became one of the few people who was not only part of a media story, but had the ability to answer back.
It is also the resonant and small details of his academic life that add both light and humour to the darkest of stories. In the aftermath of the bombing – in the darkened and destroyed carriage – he was looking for his belongings. In the midst of chaos, he wished to re-establish his routine of writing a research proposal and paper. He stood up after the bombing to look for his bag.
My cabin bag contained my computer memory stick, with not only my research for two full years on it but also a PhD report for a Colombian student at the University of Ulster whom I was supposed to be examining in two weeks’ time. If both my cabin bag containing the memory stick and the laptop were lost, all was lost of my everyday professional life.
The desire to continue business as usual at a time of physical and personal vulnerability was remarkable. But it also stressed what made 7/7 different from the other terrorist events. The 9/11 victims were with their workmates. The Bali bombing casualties were with their friends and families on holiday. The 7/7 men and women were lone travellers on their way to work. This individualised response of isolated commuters adds isolation and fear to this act of terrorism.
While Green Day has given us a sonic path to “end” the structures and strictures of September 11, John Tulloch’s One day in July provides a testament to understanding terrorism. The event is not the story. Through his courage in not only rebuilding his body and life after the bombing but offering a shape and context around a day, he has provided a lesson in not only personal integrity, but public service. Using his intelligence and skills, he has opened up terrorist media to media studies scholars.
Nearing the end of the book, Tulloch addresses his comments to Mohammad Sidique Khan, the man who carried the explosives into the Underground carriage on 7/7.
He declared that “I don’t accept the label of innocent victim that the media want to give to me, any more than I accept the label of mindless psychopath they give to you.” It is his active probing of labels that makes this book not only important, but an urgent political marker of this time. When I bought the book, I hoped that Tulloch would help me translate a life from Australia to Britain. After reading it, I realize he is helping all of us translate our lives beyond blame, hatred and fear, and into analysis, thought and respect.