THERE’S MORE THAN ONE KIND OF “FORBIDDEN” THOUGHT: So Salon’s little “Forbidden Thoughts of 9/11” piece, and the letters it printed in response, have found both defenders and furious attackers. The defenders make some good points (here’s Radley Balko’s take), but in the end the piece sucked, in my opinion, because it refused to make judgments, and ultimately provided a false and damaging context.

What Salon refused to do was to differentiate between different types of “forbidden” thoughts. Take sick humor, which is a fairly standard way of coping with disaster. Even within that subcategory of “forbidden thoughts,” though, there are gradations. Some people (for example, many New Yorkers who could see the smoke from their bedroom or office windows) made sick 9/11 jokes because they desperately needed to be reminded that they could still laugh. They needed a sense of power over the attackers, and laughing at it gave them that sense. They needed to distance themselves from the attacks, and sick jokes are nothing if not distancing. They already had their faces rubbed in the horror; they needed a break. But when people who are already distanced from tragedy make sick jokes about it, I’m a lot more troubled. There’s often (not always, but often) a degree of willful callousness, patting oneself on the back for one’s ability to “distance” oneself from a tragedy that never came close enough to touch. There’s a whiff of self-imposed, self-congratulatory alienation–I’m not one of those flag-waving idiots! I’m “forbidden”! I’m cool! I’m the voice of the suppressed!! There’s no hard and fast rule for this stuff, nor should there be. But there is a difference, perhaps based on whom you empathize with. Do you joke about 9/11 because you need to, or because you can? Is it gallows humor, or is it just another way of showing that you’re better than other people?

Salon did the standard, incredibly annoying thing of classing wildly dissimilar thoughts and impulses and expressions as ‘forbidden.” This is how we get idiotic art–it’s “shocking”! Because some great art is shocking, we start viewing shock value as a characteristic of good art. Because some “forbidden” thoughts should be aired, we start thinking that all forbidden thoughts should be aired. But sometimes, you know, a thought is “forbidden” or hidden because it, well, sucks. Nobody needs to know that you’re a complete jerk. Some of the people who wrote in to Salon seemed to understand that many “forbidden” thoughts are just repulsive, and they added disclaimers or framed their letters as confessions rather than self-congratulation. I’m cool with those people; I think that’s fine. But other people seemed to think that instead of revealing the inner darkness that all of us hide–the thing that loves to watch car wrecks, the thing that looks out at the world and wants to destroy–their 9/11 thoughts were indictments of patriotic hypocrisy, or somehow worth sharing simply because I had this thought! There’s also a gross undertone of praising oneself for doing what one knows is wrong–I had the courage to be a $#@! I had the courage to talk about it! Aren’t I the coolest? Also, I’m so damaged and callous–feel sorry for me! But I’m still courageous!

Ugh. Some things are “forbidden” for a reason, y’all. If I went around saying every fool thing that popped into my head… well, I don’t think it would be “therapeutic” (one of Salon’s many lame excuses for its piece), and I don’t think it would be “seditious” (give me a break, how self-aggrandizing!), and I don’t think it would be an act of greatness, or humanity, or virtue. And I don’t think it would be cool.