Globing the globe : September 11 and theatrical metaphor

In the mediatised twenty-first century we have all become audiences to world events and to political players who "strut their brief hour upon the stage and then are gone"; the postmodern condition, so it seems, collapses our perception of actual people and events into their representations. Through repetition, presidents and prime ministers become caricatures of themselves while the carefully cast and scripted scenarios of Big Brother and Survivor are presented to us as reality. One of the great overarching metaphors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – theatrum mundi – is enjoying a resurgence in our own age. Like our Renaissance predecessors, we have found that the terminology of actor and role, reality and imitation, audience and stage is useful in describing our complex interactions with this mediatised world. But what happens when an event with the magnitude and sheer spectacularity of September 11 is described in similar terms? Does using the theatrical metaphor in this instance, as my epigraph suggest, "transfigure" or "soften" the "horror" of these events?