From the position of the next calendar year, the power of appeals to pathos seemed to have faded.  During Winter quarter, the UC Irvine newspaper announced that student polls indicated that campus life was back to normal.  Fears and anxieties had been quieted, so it appeared.  September 11th had become a political matter for the university, rather than a psychic one.  Organized teach-ins, debates, and guest lectures reinforced the idea that emotional reactions were a trivial part of the rhetorical experience of September 11th.

Perhaps the sounds and images themselves demand to be repressed: tortured flight attendants, farewell phone calls home from passengers, desperate office workers jumping out of windows, and the corpses of childhood protectors like firefighters and police officers.  Over a hundred concrete stories that had dominated the New York skyline had crumbled into an eerie cloud of white dust. 

What was not shown on television was somehow more disturbing that what was shown. On the West Coast my students weren't even entirely awake to see it; these images emerged out of the dreamscape of early morning consciousness.

For these undergraduates, the unit on "pathos" elicited the most in-class discussion and activity in the form of student projects.  For example, student Lindsey Carter developed a website about the rhetoric of memorials.