ABSTRACT
Jenny Edkins began to acknowledge what had been there all along, perhaps: an intense sense of bereavement, not for the loss itself, but the loss of the loss. No sense of the disruption to national invincibility and invulnerability that the events of September 11 seemed to represent, to some at least. No recognition of the direction in US foreign policy that a particular narrative legitimated. Jenny Edkins reminded of Michael Frayn's play about the building of the atom bomb in the 1940s the time when the surface of the earth immediately beneath the point of detonation of an atomic bomb was designated Ground Zero. Trees planted, earth leveled, the past and its remains neatly boxed into museums and repositories that one can visit or not as one choose. The museum is not open yet, but through the glass one can glimpse vast escalators moving underground, and iconic steel girders, rust brown, ribs of the old towers, preserved for eternity.
