ONE
YEAR LATER
The
ruins are gone now. The last of the incomprehensible pile of rubble
that was the World Trade Center towers has been cleared away for
months, though the tourists still come and gawk. They leave their
tokens of sympathy and grief along the wooden viewing ramps. Dessicated
flowers, molding teddy bears, photographs of the dead; great,
ink-run sheets, with now indecipherable sentiments and signatures,
hanging off the chain-link fences that surround the site.
Behind
the fences and the ramps, men in hard hats are busy laying down
long, seamless slabs of concrete, smoothing over the jagged wound
in the ground. They are propping back up the crumpled subway tunnels,
the damaged sea wall; the whole, immense labyrinth of piping and
wiring, sewer mains and fiber optic lines, air ducts and steam
valves and electrical cables that lie beneath the vertical city,
and make it run.
The
city aboveground is stalled right now, on the related questions
of what to build on the site, and how to honor those who died
there. As for what to physically replace the Trade Center towers
with, the little men who owned the buildings and who run New York’s
Port Authority produced six proposals, all of them remarkably
similar—all in the same dreary, dehumanizing style that has
become the defining characteristic of modern architecture. Four,
or five, or six glass and concrete boxes, fifty to sixty stories
apiece, all built around a blank space, grudgingly left open for
some sort of memorial.
Fortunately,
there was an outbreak of democracy. A few raucous, public meetings
sent the authorities scuttling back on their drawing boards. They
seemed genuinely amazed at the negative reaction to their plans,
which only shows how successfully they have isolated themselves
from the people they claim to represent. Within hours of the World
Trade Center’s destruction last September, New Yorkers were
feverishly constructing totemic images of them in Manhattan’s
Union Square Park. Like the possessed characters building images
of mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they built
their own twin towers out of wax and wood, out of wire and paper,
and any other material at hand. It has been obvious from that
moment on that what the people want is, if not the towers themselves,
just as they were, every inch of them, then something of incandescent
beauty. Something that will speak to the world of our pride, and
our defiance.
Just
how to honor the dead is a thornier problem. Our civic leaders,
perhaps chastened by the fiasco over the design proposals, now
do not even trust themselves to come up with any appropriate words
for the memorial services scheduled for the one-year anniversary
on September 11. Instead, various politicians are planning to
recite the Gettysburg Address.
Maybe
it will be appropriate after all. Never will Lincoln’s words
be more apt—that the world will little note nor long remember
what is said here, but that we will never forget what was done
here. It is the firemen who still live in our hearts, and nothing
the politicians say, after all, can measure up to what they did.
The way they walked into the burning towers without hesitation
was the most courageous act by any civil servants since the firemen
of Chernobyl went out to extinguish the burning reactor. They
will be with us always, the long lines of men in their black-and-yellow
coats walking stoically into the burning buildings.
Yet how best to remember them? Our public commemorations these
days are either mawkishly sentimental, or superficial, or both.
There are, to be sure, two new memorials to past catastrophes
within a few blocks of the World Trade Center, a Holocaust museum
and a tribute to the victims of the Irish potato famine. Yet these
were not erected so much as expurgations of grief as they were
dutiful reminders to remember. The stories they tell are meant
to tell are of atrocities inflicted by foreigners upon other foreigners,
from which the survivors fled to make a happier life for themselves
and their descendants in America.
The
fact is that we Americans do not much live in the past. We have
no Field of Crows, no Battle of the Boyne; no fountain of the
blood of the martyrs to adorn our downtown. Yes, we have our own
atrocities, our own dark episodes that we should remember. For
better or worse, we do not.
What is most remarkable about New York one year after September
11, 2001, is how little has changed—how quickly the dreadful
events of that day have receded from our conversation, our public
consciousness. There are still a few more American flags out than
there were before. We are concerned about our troops in Afghanistan;
about whether the Bush administration will decide to invade Iraq,
or whether the fighting in Israel and Palestine can be contained.
Some of us worry about the measures the Bush administration’s
radical, right-wing attorney general, John Ashcroft, has taken
to combat terrorism, including his recent claim that the federal
government now has the right to ignore the principle of habeas
corpus if it chooses to do so.
Yet
none of this really preoccupies the average New Yorker. The economy
is in a slump, but it’s the same for the rest of the country.
There is a city budget crisis, but then there usually is. And
all the while, new skyscrapers are still going up everywhere;
the streets are still filled with tourists, and real estate prices
are—somehow—higher than ever. No one is fleeing to the
countryside.
I
suspect that a deeper fear does lurk just around the corner of
most New Yorkers’ unconscious. One more terrorist attack—and
not even with a nuclear "dirty bomb," or a biological
weapon, but simply a suicide bomber, or one man with a machine
gun—and everything could change in a hurry.
The
people I talk to tell me that they have nightmares about nuclear
war, or that they look up in the sky whenever they hear a particularly
low-flying airplane. We find ourselves cringing at sirens, car
alarms, even nearby lightning strikes. Some friends I know have
adopted an attitude of living each day as it comes. One tells
me that he has lost his fear of riding his bike in Manhattan traffic,
and that at the same time he has taken up Zen meditation. Another
one has taken to going into grocery stores to stare at boxcutters,
where she wonders at how such a weapon could be used to kill three
thousand people.
I
know that for myself, I was walking downtown one night this winter,
returning from a party, when I smelled the oily stench of burned
jet fuel even though I was still many blocks from Ground Zero.
I was filled with a sudden, murderous rage against everyone who
had done this senseless thing, although it was months after the
crashes and I thought I had regained a certain equilibrium.
And
yet, we have adjusted. We obsess, just as we always did, over
our careers and our appearances. We worry over how to get our
children into the best schools, or if we should refinance our
co-ops. We live and die with our favorite sports teams, we rush
to the theatre or the movies, or the latest bistro. We plot and
finagle over how to escape the heat for a few days in the Hamptons,
or New England.
We
are shielded by our banalities. I do not say this as a criticism.
No doubt it is more profound to sit on a desolate plain and think
about God, but what kind of society would you rather live in?
The
enormous, all-encompassing organism that is Western media and
society has digested the assault on the Twin Towers, and has already
begun to place them in context. We had girded ourselves for holy
war, but Osama bin Laden’s little surprise, which was so
hideously spectacular, so gruesomely redolent of Hollywood disaster
movies, now seems to owe more to Freud than to Wahhabi Islam.
A family outcast, whose father was killed in a plane crash in
the United States, wreaks his revenge by crashing more planes
into office towers.
It reads like one more, outsized version of all those stories
of senseless mayhem we have already become inured to. Another
Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, the "trench-coat mafia"
in Columbine; those monsters who killed the children at the pre-school
in Scotland or the high school in Germany. Only another madman,
exorcising his personal demons by shooting up his school, his
office, a playground, a McDonald’s.
Like all those other stories it is horrible, horrible beyond words,
particularly for those who lost friends and loved ones. But for
the rest of us it fades. It becomes one more terrible story, written
off as the price of existence in the shiny, new, modern world.
In a hundred years, one wonders if we will even be able to distinguish
bin Laden from Ted Bundy or Charles Manson, or Hannibal Lecter.
Yes,
we should remember better. I spend plenty of time myself haranguing
our banalities, in my self-appointed role as writer and Disapproving
Intellectual. I am as disgusted as the next man by the seemingly
endless drek that pours out of American culture: the fast food,
and the awful television, and the need to make every movie into
an ever closer simulation of a video game. The McMansions filling
our suburbs, and the shortsightedness of our foreign policy; radio
shock jocks, and our indifference to the environment, and the
sort of education we give our children these days—
The
list can easily go on and on. Yet as Salman Rushdie, wrote less
than a month after the attack on the World Trade Center, in order
to present a viable alternative to the fundamentalist world order,
"We must agree on what matters…" His own list was
a wonderful combination of the great ideas and, yes, those small,
banal pleasures, that an urban culture also provides. It included
"kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement,
cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable
distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom
of thought, beauty, love."
What
speaks more eloquently to what is worth preserving in our life?
Riding back to my home in upper Manhattan one night in a taxi,
I was struck by the sheer, physical complexity of our life in
the city. I was doing what New Yorkers often do in taxi cabs,
which is to peer into the countless, lighted squares of windows
as they flash by and wonder—half in envy, half in pure curiosity—what
it must be like to live in this apartment, or that one; if they
have more room, a better view, or pay less rent.
But
for one moment I was stunned simply by how much there was of it—all
the warrens and back alleys, the shops and restaurants, all of
the thousands and thousands of people living cheek by jowl—and
most of it on land that was small farms or vacant lots just a
century ago. This inutterably beautiful, intricate way of life,
all thrown up in the course of a hundred years! No doubt, there
is much that is wrong with it. But so many people could not live
together, in such equanimity, without all the very human doubts
and desires, the self-centeredness and the tolerance and, yes,
even the wonderful banalities, that we may give vent to in a free
society.
This
is the idea of a city, and it cannot be banished with one bomb,
or a thousand. We refuse to be a mausoleum, thank you very much,
but our monuments are all around us.
© Copyright The Frankfurter Rundschau 2002
