PLEASE, I would like you to very much send me the 9/11 flipbook to add to my collection of historical mass-death (and/or torture) novelties and party favors. Recently I’ve collected the Floating Citronella Garden Party Hindenberg, the Abu Ghraib Joy Buzzer and matching dog collar, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Inferno (self-igniting! Complete with 500 exploited garment-worker figures that fling themselves from the windows of the burning building with battery-operated SPRING-SHOT ACTION ®).

Please send me the 9/11 flipbook so that I may remind myself that the 21st century is already THE WORST CENTURY OF ALL TIME, even worse than the SHOCKING 20th century. And as everyone knows, things can only get worse!! (I’ve enclosed an additional $4.95 shipping and handling so that you can RUSH ME my 9/11 flipbook... before it’s too late!)

When I receive my 9/11 flipbook, I will lie, telling people it was manufactured in the troubled days immediately following the attack, in the DAYS WITHOUT IRONY, when many artists and writers and journalists were afraid to represent the events in any way that could be conceived as unpatriotic, inappropriate, or, even, disrespectful of a befuddled American president. I will flip the flipbook for friends and neighbors, fraudulently, allowing them to marvel at it, this relic of subversion, an underground expression available from a time when only weeping and gnashing and war and souvenir T-shirts and faux-bronze replicas of the World Trade Towers were deemed acceptable modes of grief, and grief and anger were the only acceptable modes of HUMAN RESPONSE. In my hands, the flipbook will become an expression of great quizzicality. At cocktail parties (I’m FAMOUS for my cocktail parties), I will stop the book mid-flip and say, “the world was one way here,” then I will flip the book forward, fluttering the paper plane into the building, “and it became something else in this instant,” but will I be being only melodramatic? Or did what they were saying back then turn out to be true, that the world really did warp, our rose-colored glasses tinting eternally into a definite, queasy shade of Pepto? Irony, as it turned out, did not die, it barely even catnapped, and though now it seems we went weeks and weeks without a Letterman monologue, we didn’t, it was merely days, time all accordion-like in our recall, events flipping forward and back, in fast-forward and slo-mo.

PLEASE send me a 9/11 flipbook so that I can sell it on eBay, along with the page reserved for my essay, to any interested parties. Perhaps a corporation would like to place an ad on my page (most likely one of the pre-explosion pages, a happier time, when the plane had not yet hit the tower, and the possibility of such things never happening still existed, a time more appropriate to enjoying a Bud or to buying the world a Coke, the advertiser sublimely and subliminally coaxing you to indulge in its products by tapping into those neurons that still retain the spark of that moment, the milliseconds before the plane crashed, when we thought, if we squinted hard enough, or watched the horror through our fingers, that what was certain to happen wouldn’t really happen, no matter how many times we had already witnessed the collision). The transaction will then become MY 9/11 art, a conceptual lesson in commerce and tragedy, in art and irony, the artist as both merry court jester and moral scold, all in one easy-to-interpret package.

Or I might prefer to keep my 9/11 flipbook entirely unflipped, or someday I might flip it and never stop, watching and re-watching, sickened and confused, unspeakably mesmerized; with each and every flip, it’ll feel like it always feels, every time I see the images, the shock never deadening, not even with repetition. It’ll feel like those moments when mortality sometimes asserts itself, a reminder of the presence of death like a dip-in-the-road rush in your gut, those moments when our comforting unconscious relinquishes its death-grip on our self-defense mechanisms, silencing the lullaby that trills perpetually in our skulls, and for that moment we feel that unsalvable fear, well-aware of our brains and other feeble organs all housed in a fragile cage of deteriorating bone and thin skin. But then one day when I flip the flipbook forward, the plane will miss its target, and the tower will stand defiantly, the building’s good ol’ American stick-to-itiveness on full display, all lives saved, our worst fears yet again, miraculously, for the millionth time, unrealized.

Timothy Schaffert
http://www.timothyschaffert.com