I just saw the Oliver Stone movie “World Trade Center”. It’s been almost five years since the September 11 attacks and somehow I totally missed the whole story about ex-Marine Staff Sargeant Karnes who drove to the World Trade Center site and was the man responsible for finding trapped police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno. And what about Chuck Sereika, a former paramedic with an expired license who was one of the other rescuers first on the scene to help the officers?
After getting home from the movie I started looking up some things online. Following is a quote from an article that helps explain why I might have missed Karnes’s and Sereika’s contributions.
But it’s also clear Karnes is a hero in a smaller, less national, less public, less publicized way than the cops and firefighters are heroes. He’s hardly been overlooked—the program I work for, 60 Minutes II, interviewed him as part of a piece on Jimeno’s rescue—but the great televised glory machine has so far not picked him. Why? One reason seems obvious—the cops and firefighters are part of big, respected, institutional support networks. Americans are grateful for the sacrifices their entire organizations made a year ago. Plus, the police and firefighting institutions are tribal brotherhoods. The firefighters help and support and console each other; the cops do the same. They find it harder to make room for outsiders like Karnes (or Chuck Sereika). And, it must be said, at some macho level it’s vaguely embarrassing that the professional rescuers weren’t the ones who found the two survivors. While the pros were pulled back out of legitimate caution, the job fell to an outsider, who drove down from Connecticut and just walked onto the burning pile.
Even with an event as historically significant and massively televised as the September 11 attacks, I’m shocked at how much media – and society – control what we hear and what we ultimately remember. Maybe if it had been Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan the “televised glory machine” would have been more interested.
Intersting synopsis and analysis: “no comment” on whether the movie was good, bad or anything. It sparked your interest in finding out about two people and Glory be — Oliver Stone by proxy you found a sonspiracy to ignore the lessers and film the photogenic.
I have not been interested in seeing it and really, won’t. Unless there is some SIGNIFICANT part in it, I’ll not watch it. Couple that with Nicholas Cage, maybe in the forefront — if such a thing could be. Why did they hire any big names? Truly, there were so many thousands of people running, hundreds of people involved in the rescues and returning to order — there was no star, no ONE hero. I’ll pass.
And here we have the fire department multi-culturalized by the city, in lieu of actual events. The firefighters who raised the flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center were all white (and more than likely Irish, read: “Oh, Danny Boy”) BUT…
“More recently, we have seen ugly conflicts over political correctness and moral worth. A memorial statue of the three firefighters who, Iwo Jima-like, raised the American flag at the smoldering site, was redesigned to honor the city’s ethnic diversity, even though these firefighters were all white, like most of the Fire Department.”
Here’s the entire source, although I learned of it on some cable program:
http://cryptome.org/after-wtc.htm