dear Kyle Buchanan: buildings have fallen on other countries, too

So Kyle Buchanan at Vulture has a piece up which demonstrates that, a dozen years after 9/11, those events are still a permanent excuse for American chauvinism and self-centeredness. He dings the new Man of Steel (which I saw last night) and many others because buildings are blown up in them, and of course because no one was every hurt in a building collapse or explosion before 9/11, these filmmakers are abusing the memory of 9/11. Rather than, you know, titillating the sensibilities of boys who like to see things blown up, many of whom are too young to have any memory of 9/11.

His evidence that these are nods to 9/11 and not just imagery of building collapses, such as it is, is that debris fall on people, people get trapped in rubble, and everything gets covered in ash. Oh, and people run from the collapsing buildings, which you can sometimes shoot from the street, in order to capture the emotion on their faces. (I doubt a bird's eye view would do much, emotionally.) And that's about it: there are explosions, people get hurt, therefore it's all about 9/11, it's all about Americans, it's all about New Yorkers. I would personally say that every last detail mentioned by Buchanan is indicative  of building collapses and explosions in general, but then this is the power of the self-obsessed mind. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan might want to ask the people of Beirut if they are familiar with the concept of buildings being blown up. Or people in Aleppo, or in Belfast, or in Hiroshima.

9/11 continues to demonstrate the degree to which even supposedly cosmopolitan, progressive people are captured by a manic American self-centeredness. There's an insistence, still, that what happened to us was worse than what has happened to everyone else, that when push comes to shove, our pain rates higher than that of everyone else's. That's a profoundly American way of thinking itself, of course, folding tragedy into a narrative of competition. I truly long for the day when Americans realize that there is nothing inherently special or important about Americans, and that tragedy and terrorism have happened to many other people in many other places two. But better than a decade after September 11th, I'm not holding my breath.