000ooo000ooo Baudrillard and Zizek

In reading articles from both Baudrillard and Zizek I could not help but think of the irony of September 11th for our country. On every level this event turned our culture upside down and our culture had rendered most of us unable to create a reasonable response to the events that took place. As was true of most of the consequences of World Trade Center buildings collapsing, I truly don't think the terrorists could fathom the full effect of what they were doing (they likely had no idea that the buildings would collapse after they were hit). However, this attack was something that our media and cultural value system could not handle.
First, there is the paradox of how accustomed we had become to destructive imagery and how much people seemed to almost enjoy watching the buildings collapse over and over again verse the lack of "actual carnage" we were shown on TV. Zizek describes how through years of disaster movies Americans have practically fantasized about an event such as this taking place: "Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with talk about the terrorist threat... the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about..." (223). Time and time again we have seen American landmarks and cities get blown up on screen. Why have these images been repeated so much? In a market generated by the need to make money, the only possible answer is that in some way, we like seeing these things happen. Given this, when this fantasy became real life, people wanted to keep watching it happen again and again: "When, days after September 11 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting on of the WTC towers... we wanted to see it again and again..." (232) Given our apparent love of destruction one would assume that we also liked to see blood and human destruction. However, Zizek explains that people actually prefer not to see this kind of footage. Although we are okay with seeing people this type of footage in Third World catastrophes, it is upsetting to see Americans being hurt - which is an interesting comment in itself. I think there are two reasons for this. First, we dehumanize people who live in Third World countries. It is not as upsetting to see them suffer physically because they are hardly people to most Americans. Second, media companies want to keep events like 9/11 in the realm of virtual reality for most people. We have seen images of buildings blowing up so much that they almost just seem like a real life extension of what we have already seen in movies. People want to see them because they feel they are experiencing real lives but they are not as upset by these images because they feel so familiar. However, if we saw images of "dismembered bodies.. blood... desperate faces of dying people" (232) the images would suddenly move from being virtual reality to reality and this would be too difficult for people to watch.