By Hubie and Bertie
A few of our nine lives ago, on 9/11, we cats were living in Shaker Heights, Ohio. We remember that on September 12 — or maybe it was the next day — The Cleveland Plain Dealer published this shot by photojournalist Richard Drew. At the time, as shocking as it was, we thought that it was the most important picture of the entire event. The newspaper, of course, got a lot of heat for it.
(Drew was no stranger to controversy, since he was standing right behind Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was shot in 1968. He got Kennedy's blood splattered on him, and continued taking photos even when Ethel Kennedy begged him to stop. "He has never not taken a picture," they say.)
The Falling Man has never been positively identified. Spike Lee explores the question in this weekend's installment of his documentary on 9/11 and the COVID pandemic, and leaves it elegantly undetermined. But it remains a conflicted topic of the World Trade Center attacks: How many people chose to jump rather than burn (the media disagree), and why is it still so taboo to discuss, speculate about, and look at?
If video and social media had been around during the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, we would have had the same debate, except maybe more so. Nearly all the jumpers in that disaster were women, since the Triangle employees were overwhelmingly female. There are pictures of their bodies laid out in the morgue after the event, but nobody took a photo of a jumping shirtwaist girl. Similarly, all the photos and videos we've seen of people falling from the Twin Towers are men.
Our sensibilities are weird and out of sync. We're eager to invade countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 (which is why we can't truly appreciate George W. Bush's speech from yesterday, because, you know, Iraq), and we excuse those that did because we buy oil from them. But we can't steel ourselves to look at photos of people falling 100 stories to their deaths? We cats will never understand it. And we HISS.
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