Self evident.

By Ani DiFranco. On So Much Shouting So Much Laughter. Righteous Babe Records, 2002. Also available, with lyrics, at http://www.righteousbabe.com/ani/l_ self_evident.asp.

I was on sabbatical September 11, 2001. At the time, I felt alienation from not being in the classroom, but finally I felt relief not to have to deal with the emotional and political complexities that event aroused in our students. Like all New Yorkers, we were hit hard. My colleagues watched the towers burn and fall from the fifth floor of our Queens campus; some students, scheduled for our Fall graduation, had died in the attacks; a number of students lost friends and family; male students with Muslim-sounding last names received letters calling them in for interviews. Colleagues sensitively dealt with the shock in their classrooms and The City University of New York, of which LaGuardia Community College is a part, held a teach-in on the political realities and ramifications of the event.

I missed this all, but a year later, during the Fall semester of 9/11's first anniversary, a student gave me a copy of Ani DiFranco's song/poem "self evident," with lyrics, and I taught it in class then and have used it ever since as my main reference for teaching the politics of 9/11.

DiFranco's "self evident" is respectful of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, but also critical of an American political history that helped produce and would ultimately exploit those attacks. On the one hand she sings:

   and the shock was supersonic
   and the smoke was deafening
   between the setup and the punch
     line
   cuz we were all on time for work
     that day
   we all boarded that plane for to fly
   and then while the fires were raging
   we all climbed up on the windowsill
   and then we all held hands
   and jumped into the sky

At the same time, DiFranco sings that the attacks were on the day that America

   fell to its knees
   after strutting around for a century
   without saying thank you
   or please

DiFranco makes many of her political points through metaphor. Actually, she opens her poem/song with the words "us people are just poems/we're 90% metaphor" and closes the work with

   10% literal
   90% metaphor
   3000 some poems disguised as
     people
   on an almost perfect day
   should be more than pawns
   in some asshole's passion play

In between this controlling comparison of people to poems, she describes the 9/11 victims trying to escape by "rushing down the throat of a giraffe" which is "part of a pair there on the bow of noah's ark." Liquor becomes the metaphor for how people dealt with the attacks as "the whiskey is flowin/like never before/as all over the country/folks just shake their heads/ and pour." She then shifts the image of the liquor that numbs to the liquor that celebrates as she toasts the victims of U.S. aggression: the people of "palestine/afghanistan/iraq/el Salvador" and continues with a toast to Native Americans, abortion nurses and doctors, and prisoners on death row. Finally, she turns the alcohol metaphor to a toast

   to our last drink of fossil fuels
   let us vow to get off of this sauce
   shoo away the swarms of commuter
     planes
   and find that train ticket we lost

DiFranco calls for the end of the American Empire and a refocus on the domestic needs of a country incapable of taking care of its own people:

   so it's time to pick through the
     rubble, clean the streets
   and clear the air
   get our government to pull its big
   dick out of the sand
   of someone else's desert
   put it back in its pants
   and quit the hypocritical chants of
   freedom forever

The student who initially brought me this poem dearly loved it and all that Ani DiFranco represents as a leftwing song writer and producer. Students since then have gained both a tribute to and a critique of the 9/11 attacks through my annual September use of the piece. As we enter another year of the Iraq War, this song/poem remains even more useful in explaining why we are there.

Leonard Vogt

LaGuardia Community College,

CUNY