9/11

Schweitzer presents a new edition of an autobiographical poem about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 followed by a literary essay expounding upon contemporary American politics.

With a nod to Dante—whose Inferno is a critical touchstone for this work—the author begins with a long narrative poem broken into cantos. In language both impressionistic and elegant (and, at times, verbose), the narrative takes readers through the horror of escaping the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. The imagery is evocative: “Sound snuffs light, ear drums rend / the safety lights emerge slightly blue to show branching fans of dissipating dust…”; “Free men and women pull in all directions; only these will be commensurate.” Schweitzer positions that world-changing day as the jumping-off point from which the ensuing essay portion, “Atmosphere & Alchemy,” springs, taking 9/11 as one of the inciting events for what the author characterizes as the dominant “totalitarian” politics and “surveillance capitalism” of the current era. The essay portion is not for the historically or academically faint of heart, as the author references figures from Lucretius to Herodotus to Jefferson without sufficiently outlining and contextualizing their philosophies, assuming readers will be equipped with the relevant background knowledge. While some of Schweitzer’s assertions are ideas that readers will have encountered before (he posits that big tech and government have used the fear of terrorism to commodify and thus eradicate our notions of privacy, for example), the perspectives of the philosophical figures noted above serve as convincing support for his declarations about 21st-century America. Or rather, convincing to a point; in Schweitzer’s text, these myriad references can read like statements of fact rather than interpretations of a given viewpoint, and readers would do well to remember that the author is but one person making one argument.

A well-reasoned treatise on the state of America in the 21st century, perhaps too esoteric for non-academics.