terrorism

[Guest guest]

Got this piece from a friend in NYC, and found it very inspiring. I thought some

of you might want to read it.

 

Roberto

 

 

 

Eliot Weinberger

 

 

[some magazines in Europe and Latin America asked me to write on the Trade

Center attack, so I thought I'd send it along to friends. We're all ok here.

Much love-- Eliot]

 

 

 

 

New York: The Day After

 

 

 

__12 September 2001__: I write in the limbo between the action and the

 

reaction, knowing that the reactions and revelations to come will have

 

already turned these words into a clipping from an old newspaper at the

 

moment they first see print. This, then, is merely the record of a day,

 

some notes from a temporal and emotional limbo.

 

And it is written from a geographical limbo, for where I live in New York,

 

two or three kilometers north of the World Trade Center, is not the ruined

 

war zone that is appearing on television, but a kind of quarantine zone.

 

South of Canal Street, the buildings have been evacuated, telephones and

 

electricity are out, and the air is thick with rancid smoke and dust.

 

Between Canal and 14th Street, which includes my neighborhood of Greenwich

 

Village, only residents are allowed to enter- passing through a kind of

 

Checkpoint Charlie, manned by National Guardsmen wearing camouflage suits

 

and carrying rifles, slowly scrutinizing identification cards. There are no

 

cars, no mail, no newspapers; stores are closed; the telephones work

 

erratically. At least the air is clear. The wind is blowing south- everyone

 

has remarked how yesterday and today were among the most beautiful days of

 

the year- while friends downwind in Brooklyn describe their neighborhoods

 

as Pompeiis of ash.

 

It is, of course, impossible to know what the effects of yesterday's

 

horror will be; whether it will permanently alter the national psyche (if

 

there is one) or merely recede as yet another bundle of images from yet

 

another media spectacle. This is clearly the first event since the rise of

 

the omnipotence of mass media that is larger than the media, that the media

 

cannot easily absorb and tame. If the media do succeed, national life,

 

beyond the personal tragedies, will continue in its semi-hallucinatory

 

state of continual manufactured imagery. If they fail, something profound

 

may indeed change.

 

This is the first act of mass violence of this scale to occur in the

 

United States since the Civil War of the 1860's. (Pearl Harbor, to which

 

this has been frequently compared- hyperbolically in terms of consequences,

 

but not unjustly in terms of tragic surprise- was an attack on a military

 

base in an American colony.) We are now experiencing what the rest of the

 

world has known too often. It is the first time Americans have been killed

 

by a "foreign" force in their own country since the Mexican War of the

 

1840's. (And for Mexicans, of course, the war took place in Mexico.) And it

 

is the first genuine national shock since 1968: the assassinations of

 

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, followed by the riots at the

 

Democratic Convention in Chicago. Despite the incessant attempts of

 

television to fabricate disasters, no one in this country under the age of

 

forty has ever experienced any serious threat to the general complacency.

 

The personal ramifications are nearly limitless. 50,000 people from all

 

levels of society work in the World Trade Center and 150,000 visit it

 

daily. Tens of millions throughout the country and the world will

 

personally know (or know someone who knows) someone who died or

 

miraculously escaped, or they will have their own memories of standing on

 

the Observation Deck, looking out on New York harbor and the Statue of

 

Liberty.

 

In contrast, the second attack site, the Pentagon, is a forbidden zone, as

 

remote as a government building in Oklahoma City. Had only the Pentagon

 

been hit, there would have been days of hand-wringing over the "blow to our

 

national honor," but it too, like Oklahoma City, would have faded into

 

merely another televised image. The Trade Center, however, is very real to

 

a huge number of people; no sudden crisis, perhaps since the stock market

 

crash of 1929, has so directly affected so many people in this country.

 

This shock has been compounded by a kind of incredulous despair that, on a

 

national level, there is no one to reassure the citizens and guide them

 

into a future that has become increasingly uncertain. The election (more

 

accurately, the selection) of George W. Bush gravely and perhaps

 

ineradicably undermined confidence in what was the last sacrosanct branch

 

of government, the Supreme Court. Bush's response to yesterday's attacks

 

has now- and perhaps forever- destroyed the last bits of hope that the

 

Presidency would somehow mature him or bring to light some heretofore

 

hidden abilities.

 

At the news of the attack, he left Florida, where he was visiting an

 

elementary school, flew to a military base in Louisiana, and from there

 

took refuge in the legendary underground bunker of the Strategic Air

 

Command in Nebraska. (A place I haven't heard about since my Cold War

 

childhood: there, we used to be told, the president and government leaders

 

would retreat to keep the Free World free when the atomic bombs fell.)

 

After a day of prevarication, Bush finally showed up in Washington, where

 

he read, quite badly, a five-minute prepared speech, answered no questions

 

from the press, and otherwise had no comments. As always, his face had an

 

expression of utter confusion.

 

Bush was later followed by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,

 

whose bizarre press conference, evoking the inevitable Dr. Strangelove, was

 

entirely devoted to security leaks. In a moment of national anxiety, and

 

with hundreds dead in his own department, Rumsfeld devoted his time to

 

complaints that during the Clinton administration people had become lax

 

with classified documents. He grimly warned that sharing classified

 

documents with those who are not authorized to see them could harm the

 

brave men and women of the American armed forces, threatened that anyone

 

sharing classified documents would be prosecuted to the full extent of the

 

law, and urged Pentagon workers to inform superiors if they were aware of

 

anyone sharing classified documents. When asked if the sharing of

 

classified documents had in any way aided the terrorists, Rumsfeld said no

 

and walked away.

 

No one has yet explained what exactly was on Rumsfeld's mind, but the

 

logic of George Bush's seeming cowardice has received some ingenious

 

explication. Today, administration officials claimed that the terrorist

 

attack was actually an assassination attempt, that the airplane that struck

 

the Pentagon was intended for the White House (but hit the Pentagon by

 

mistake) and that the plane that had crashed in Pennsylvania was somehow

 

supposed to crash into the president's jet, Air Force One. I happened to

 

watch these pronouncements on television with a group of 13-year-olds; they

 

all burst into derisive laughter.

 

In the postwar period, there have been presidents who have been

 

considered, by the right or the left, as the incarnations of evil (most

 

notably, Nixon and Clinton), but they were seen as evil geniuses. Bush is

 

the first who is universally recognized as a fool. (Even his supporters

 

maintain he's just an ok guy, but surrounded with excellent people.) That

 

in a time of national crisis- a moment when, amidst waning government

 

powers everywhere, government actually matters- the country is being led by

 

a man laughed at by children may create psychic wounds as severe as those

 

caused by the attack itself. It is no wonder that the response deep in

 

America, far from the actual events, has been individualistically

 

survivalist: a huge increase in gun sales, supermarkets emptied of canned

 

goods and bottled water, and long lines at the gas pumps. When there's no

 

government, it's every man for himself.

 

The perception of Bush's ineptitude has been further heightened by the

 

remarkable performance of New York's Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. I write this

 

with reluctance and amazement, having loathed Giuliani every minute of his

 

eight years as mayor. He has been an ethnically divisive dictator whose

 

ideology is, in his own words, "Freedom is authority. . . the willingness

 

of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of

 

discretion about what you do and how you do it." In this crisis, however,

 

he has become the Mussolini who makes the trains run on time. Unlike his

 

previous self, he has been completely open with the press, with whom he has

 

been meeting every few hours. Unlike every other politician who is filling

 

up television time, he has avoided nationalistic bombast and has limited

 

himself to carefully outlining what the problems are and what solutions he

 

is undertaking. Unlike Bush, he takes all questions, knows most of the

 

answers in detail or explains why he does not. Giuliani's expertise has

 

always been crisis management. His problem as mayor was that he treated

 

day-to-day government as a continual crisis to be dealt with by a kind of

 

martial law. Now that a real crisis has occurred, he has risen to the task.

 

The ruling myth in New York City in times of disaster or emergency has

 

always been: "we're all in this together." This is once again the case,

 

which Giuliani has recognized and turned to a general advantage. Unlike the

 

rest of America, New Yorkers have not assuaged their common grief with

 

nationalism and warmongering. They are not buying guns. In the largest

 

Jewish city in the world, they are not attacking the Arabs who run small

 

grocery stores in nearly every neighborhood. (Imagine if this had occurred

 

in Paris or London.) Instead, their response has been an emotional

 

outpouring of support for the rescue workers, firemen, medical workers,

 

construction men, and police. When a convoy of relief teams passes by,

 

people on the sidewalks applaud. So much food has been donated to them that

 

officials are now sending out appeals to stop giving.

 

New Yorkers- contrary to their image, but not so surprising to anyone who

 

lives here- have responded with a kind of secular __agape__, most evident

 

in the candlelight vigils and makeshift shrines of candles, flowers, and

 

photographs of the missing that are suddenly all over the city. Everyone is

 

out on the streets, subdued and silent in the shock and mourning, but

 

unmistakably there in the need to be around other people. Several times

 

today, friends and even slight acquaintances I have run into- people who

 

know that I don't live dangerously close to the Trade Center and that it

 

would be extremely unlikely that I would have been there- have hugged me

 

and said "I'm so glad you're alive." It is not a sentiment directed to me

 

as an individual so much as to me as a familiar face, a recognizable part

 

of the community of the living.

 

I fear that this communal love will not be repeated in America at large,

 

where the prevailing mood is already revenge. (Someone sent me an editorial

 

from a newspaper in South Carolina that warns "When they hit us with Pearl

 

Harbor, we hit them back with Hiroshima.") If Bush shows any leadership at

 

all, it will be in the name of war. He is surrounded by unrepentant Cold

 

Warriors who, in the days before yesterday, had withdrawn the U.S. from

 

peace treaties and the negotiations between North and South Korea, had

 

encouraged the nuclear buildup of India and (incredibly) China, are

 

obsessed with the science-fiction of the Stars War defense system, and,

 

perhaps worst of all, had abandoned the Clinton project of disarming the

 

stockpiles of nuclear weapons that remain from the breakup of the Soviet

 

Union. (It is only a miracle that one of those bombs was not on one of

 

those planes yesterday.)

 

Furthermore, ever since Reagan invaded Grenada- the only "war" since World

 

War II the U.S. actually won- it has become almost predictable that, when

 

the economic news is bad, the President will launch military strikes

 

(Panama, Iraq, Libya) as a domestic diversion and as a way to reverse

 

waning personal popularity. The Bush plan of cutting taxes for the rich,

 

increasing military spending, and sending everyone a check for $300 has

 

turned a huge government surplus which might have been spent on the

 

disastrous American health and education systems into a deficit; the

 

economy at large is a mess. This terrorist attack has occurred in the first

 

recession since Bush Sr. was president, and it is one full of grim

 

forecasts for the future. Bush Jr.'s chances for reelection- the primary

 

motivating force in American politics- have become dim. He needs a war.

 

And then there is the Curse of the Bushes, which is cowardice. Bush Sr.

 

bailed out of the fighter plane he was piloting in World War II and the

 

others on board died. Whether or not he was justified, he has been haunted

 

by the charge of cowardice his whole life, and the Gulf War was, in many

 

ways, his attempt to compensate. Even there, in the milieu of macho

 

militarism that he inhabits, he was considered a coward for not "finishing

 

the job" by invading Baghdad and killing Saddam Hussein. Bush Jr., like all

 

of the most militant in the government today, evaded the Vietnam War. He

 

too will feel the need to prove himself a man, and vindicate his father and

 

himself, especially after his initial escape to the SAC bunker.

 

Worse, Bush will be goaded on by the likes of Condoleezza Rice, one of the

 

most powerful and frightening people in the Bush administration. She is an

 

unlikely, almost unbelievable, incarnation of the Prussian warrior caste

 

ethos as an African-American woman: a body-builder and physical fitness

 

fanatic who keeps a mirror on her desk so she can watch herself speak, an

 

opponent of all forms of gun control, and one who, commenting on relief

 

efforts in Kosovo, said that American Marines were trained to wage war, not

 

deliver powdered milk. In the context of Rice, Rumsfeld, and Vice-President

 

Cheney, among so many others, it is terrifying that General Colin Powell of

 

the Gulf War and the My Lai massacre has become the last hope as a voice of

 

reason in this government. He may be the only one who knows that

 

Afghanistan-our most likely initial target- has always been a graveyard for

 

imperial powers, from Alexander the Great to the British to the Russians.

 

 

Whether or not yesterday's attack leads to some kind of ground war or

 

politically safer air strikes, and whether or not they in turn lead to

 

further terrorism here, something profound has indeed changed. It is not so

 

much a loss of innocence or security, as a loss of unreality. Since the

 

election of Reagan in 1980, many now refer to the U.S. as the Republic of

 

Entertainment. It's quite true: less than half of its citizens bother to

 

vote, but nearly all will dutifully line up to buy tickets to whatever

 

blockbuster film has been hysterically promoted. (Films-particularly those

 

this past summer- that no one actually enjoys, with huge box office sales

 

the first weekend and little the following week. ) Reagan, as everyone

 

knows, was the master of transforming Washington into Hollywood, with his

 

photo opportunities and careful scripts. Bush has taken this one step

 

further: whereas Reagan's scenarios were advertisements meant to promote

 

what he was doing, Bush's are often heartwarming television vignettes that

 

are the opposite of his actual policies. Thus we have had Bush in the

 

forest extolling the beauty of the national parks, while opening them up

 

for logging and drilling, Bush reading to schoolchildren (as he was

 

yesterday) while cutting the budgets for libraries. Or, my favorite Bush

 

moment: a speech he gave to something called the Boys and Girls Clubs of

 

America, a community-service group, calling them exemplary of what makes

 

America strong and free. The next day, his administration completely

 

eliminated their government funds.

 

For the last twenty years, Americans have been living in a constant

 

assault of media images, with a continual escalation of sensationalism-

 

much as the Romans had to pour fish emulsion on their food to bring some

 

taste to palates deadened by the lead in their water pipes. Violence has

 

become grotesque, comedies depend on increasingly scatological stupidities

 

which are mistaken for transgressions, adventure films have abandoned

 

narrative to become theme parks offering a special-effects thrill a second,

 

corporations manufacture revolutionary rappers or angry white-boy rock

 

groups, television turns the death of vaguely remembered celebrities into

 

national days of mourning and the forecast of routine storms into dire

 

warnings of potential disaster, and produces an unrelenting stream of

 

Wagnerian tragedies out of the misfortunes of ordinary "real" people.

 

Of the many indelible images of the Trade Center attack, the one that I

 

think, or hope, will have a permanent effect is that of the plane crashing

 

into the tower. It was immediately perceived by everyone- it couldn't help

 

but be- as a scene from a movie, one that even, by the second day, became

 

available in different camera angles. America, as it has often been said,

 

has become the place where the unreality of the media is the reigning

 

reality, where everyday life is the self-conscious, ironic parody of what

 

is seen on the various screens. But what will it mean when the realization

 

sinks in that this ultimate simulacrum, the greatest special effect ever,

 

led to the very real death of people one knows and the destruction of a

 

place where one once stood?

 

Perhaps yesterday's attack will sink into collective amnesia, and we will

 

return to the disaster movies and the late-night television comedians who,

 

not surprisingly, are statistically the major source of news for most

 

Americans. For the moment, it is difficult to imagine a return to media

 

fantasy as the opiate of the people. It has been telling that the

 

television news, so accustomed to hyperbole, hasn't a clue how to deal with

 

this story. They have produced it as television: dramatically lit, extreme

 

close-up interviews with the relatives of victims, MTV-style montages set

 

to music, handheld cameras following police and firemen in the manner of

 

"reality" police shows. But unlike everything else that has appeared on

 

television in decades, this story has a personal meaning to millions of its

 

viewers. Despite the best efforts of television itself, this is something

 

that so far has resisted becoming just another television show. Humankind

 

can only bear so much unreality.

 

Meanwhile, the stories filter in of people I know slightly or well. A man

 

who died in the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. A man who

 

had a meeting at the Trade Center, but arrived twenty minutes late. A woman

 

who was working on the 82nd floor of Tower 2, saw the plane hit Tower 1,

 

began running down the stairwell, was below the floor where the second

 

plane hit, kept running all 82 flights of stairs, and emerged unharmed. A

 

photojournalist who had covered the wars in the Balkans and the Middle

 

East, who heard the news, rushed to the scene to take pictures, and

 

vanished. A woman who had stayed home sick. The high school students, two

 

sisters, who had changed trains in the subway station below, ten minutes

 

before, and continued on.

 

This morning, CNN had a banner that read "MANHATTAN VIRTUALLY DESERTED."

 

My son looked at me and said, "Hey, we're still here!"

 

 

---Eliot Weinberger