SEPTEMBER
11, 2001
9:30 AM
A
friend awakens me this morning with the news that the World Trade
Center had been bombed. Far from being startled by the blast,
I was still sleeping peacefully when he called from Connecticut.
The
first thing I notice as I staggered over to the television, phone
still groggily in hand, is that it is another beautiful, late-summer
day. Just outside our fifth-floor window the sun is shining off
the thick green leaves of the ailanthus theret—he scraggly,
insistent tree that is so emblematic of New York, an Asian transplant
that takes root here everywhere it can, fighting its way up through
the smallest cracks or holes in the pavement.
Then
comes the torrent of images on the television screen. The spectacle
of the burning towers. The image of the airliner, like some cheap
special effect in a movie, steering right into the southern tower.
Even more unbelievable, a little while later, the shots of the
towers actually collapsing into plumes of dust.
This
juxtaposition persists all day—the disorienting contrast between
the serenity of my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan,
and the horrors that keep pouring in through the TV. I suppose
this is not a new phenomenon in our media-saturated world but
it seems particularly strange when the disaster is happening just
five miles away, in the same city, on the same island.
11 AM
My wife and I go out to vote in the city’s mayoral primary—only
to be told that the election has been postponed. This is something
new. No American election of this magnitude that I know of has
ever been put off, for any reason—not even during World War
I or World War II, or our own civil war.
Yet
all around us life goes on more or less as usual. In Brooklyn,
my sister-in-law tells us, burnt birds’ feathers are dropping
from the sky, but the wind is blowing the other way and here there
is no physical sign of the catastrophe. No acrid burning smell.
No dark smoke and debris filling the sky. I walk down to the Hudson
to try to catch some glimpse of it but even here I can see nothing
out of the ordinary—the disaster hidden entirely around a bend
in the slow—moving river.
There
are only a few, subtle indications that something was wrong. Two
small movie theatres have shut their doors—yet all the local stores
and restaurants remain open for business. Outside a youth hostel
at 103rd Street foreign students huddle together, looking slightly
apprehensive. There are notices up for a prayer vigil at the cathedral
of St. John the Divine, and it is announced that the baseball
game scheduled for Yankee Stadium tonight has been canceled.
Here and there, people stop to talk about the news in low voices,
or passed it on through their cellphones. Others look up whenever
a military jet shrieks through the clear blue sky—all the thousands
of planes and helicopters that usually pass over us grounded now.
There is even a small group of people clustered around a TV in
the window of a local appliances store, which is something I have
not seen since the 1960s. America is lousy with televisions now;
are they standing there for the company?
Most people, though, still seem to be going about their business.
Taking their children to school and daycare, shopping for dinner
and running errands. I feel that they looked a little stunned,
a little more somber than usual, but this may simply be my own
projection. I am old enough to remember the assassinations of
the Kennedy brothers, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and
this reminds me so much of those times. Both Kennedys, as I recall,
died on beautiful, sunlit days, and there was the same feeling
of unreality—the same, schizophrenic split between the easy rhythms
of American life and the horrific events taking place somewhere
else.
Back
then I was a child, though, living in small, suburban towns, and
it seemed that everything happened somewhere else. Now, here I
am, almost at the epicenter—and all there is to do is to answer
phone calls and e-mails from friends and relatives, asking me
if I am all right. I am very grateful for their interest—grateful
that my wife and I are all right, and that as far as I know we
have no loved ones in any danger, but there must be something
more I can do.
2
PM
I
walk a mile uptown to a hospital, to try to donate blood. But
there are already so many volunteers that they are turning people
away, telling them to come back tomorrow, or later in the week.
That’s all right. I’m sure there will be many more calls for blood
in the days ahead.
Downtown
Manhattan is sealed off and much of our subway system, which never
closes, is shut down. There is nowhere to go but back to the television
set. We are shown the collapsing buildings, the plane slamming
into the southern tower, again and again. Now we are told a third
building—a mere forty-seven stories—is on the verge of collapse.
What
a propaganda coup this is for whoever is responsible! We have
been reduced to stage scenery at a performance of the Grand Guignol—targeted
for this attack mostly because its symbolism will be immediately
recognizable around the world.
The
irony is that New Yorkers have never much considered the World
Trade Center towers to symbolic of the city—not as we do
the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty, even the
Chrysler Building. The towers were only some thirty years old
and another modern architectural excretion, ugly and overblown.
(In another irony—perhaps—they were built on the site
of an old Arab enclave known as “Little Syria.”) They
were simply office buildings, and places for tourists to gawk
at the views, and eat at the pretentious restaurant near the top
of their 110 stories.
Yet
their loss has come as a shock, there is no denying it. They had
seemed as permanent and indestructible as mountains—particularly
after the terrorist bombing there in 1993. We snickered then,
when it was reported that the perpetrators had walked a few blocks
away to watch, fully expecting that the single truck of liquid
fertilizer they had driven into a basement garage would bring
down the towers. How ineffectual they seemed, how backwards and
pathetic!
That feeling of invincibility has already vanished. A friend of
mine, who watched from a downtown street when the first of the
towers collapsed, told me that the people around him wept and
screamed. One man ran around in little circles, as if insane.
Then, within seconds, they all moved on, averting their eyes,
like people who have witnessed something shameful.
Like
any city nearly four hundred years old, we have suffered disasters
before. Devastating fires; a terrible, four-day riot during the
Civil War. The Triangle Factory Fire that killed 146 young women
in fifteen minutes. The fire on the excursion boat General Slocum
that killed 1,021 people—most of them German immigrants—and wiped
out the old Kleindeutschland neighborhood in an afternoon.
But
the death toll from these bombings promises to be at least ten
times that number. There may even be ten times the number killed
at Pearl Harbor, the only other significant bombing to take place
on American soil, when some 2,400 sailors and soldiers died. As
a city, as a nation, we are as vulnerable and shocked as we have
ever been.
6
PM
The scenes coming in from the networks grow ever more horrifible.
The camera follows a man while he falls sixty stories to his death.
Downtown Manhattan is covered in ash a foot deep, like some modern
Pompeii. Herds of people walking across the bridges into Brooklyn,
like so many refugees.
I
suppose we have been lucky to have been spared such scenes before.
So far, at least, we have reacted with a certain dignity and restraint.
A former secretary of defense did come on one network, demanding
that we “retaliate” against any nations known to harbor
terrorists—whether they are responsible for this or not.
Another station insists on repeatedly interviewing Tom Clancy,
the bloated writer of bloated techno-thrillers, including one
that featured just this sort of airborne attack. (Is he wondering
what this will do for sales?)
But
the streets remain calm. There are no hysterical outcries for
revenge, no panic. For the most part the television commentators
have been careful, loathe to do more than mention the major suspects.
There are no official assumptions—yet—that it is Osama bin Laden,
or some other Islamic group.
We
have been shown, over and over, a clip of Palestinians celebrating
wildly on the West Bank, ululating and tossing candy in the air.
I realize this is our television’s own form of propaganda, but
it is still disappointing.
Have
we really done anything to deserve such sweeping hatred? I suppose
that we have inflicted enough collateral damage of our own over
the years, in “strategic” air strikes against various
terrorists, or Baghdad. Certainly, there are plenty of us in America
who have our own qualms about the belligerency, the thoughtless
self-interest of George Bush’s foreign policy.
Yet
there has been nothing to warrant the likes of this—nothing as
cynical or cruel, nothing so contemptuous of human life. It is
terrorism, and one can think only of the terror the passengers
in the airliners must have felt as they plunged down toward the
towers—the terror of the men and women clinging from window ledges
sixty stories above the ground.
These
people were not soldiers or politicians, and while the television
keeps describing the area as the financial center of the world,
precious few of the dead were wealthy. Most were simply office
workers, or the people trying to rescue them. We are now told
that as many as 300 firemen—men whose lives are dedicated to nothing
but saving other human beings—may be dead, including their chief
and deputy chief.
But
only the number of dead is new. In the last attack on the World
Trade Center, the bombers managed to kill a pregnant woman, a
young Honduran man delivering sandwiches. This is the cold heart
of terrorism. If you have a grievance, anyone—anyone at all—can
be made to suffer for it. New York is the most cosmopolitan city
in the history of the world, and one of the most tolerant places
on earth, but that doesn’t matter anymore to the men who have
desecrated it than it mattered that, say, Sarajevo was a tolerant
place to the thugs who shot it to pieces.
The
room in which I am writing these words looks out on the small
inner courtyard of my apartment building. It is a hive-like place,
and as my neighbors prepare their dinners the smells from half-a-dozen
cuisines drift in through my window. I can hear people quiet conversing
in three or four different tongues, and somewhere there is a man
ringing small bells while he chants Buddhist prayers.
This
is not unusual, in this city. Like so many buildings in New York,
mine is filled with people who hail from all the ends of the earth—Sikhs
and Bengalis; Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Haitians; Africans
and Chinese and Slavs and Irish. As I write into the night, the
sounds and smells gradually fall away, but often I can look up,
into the little patch of sky visible above, and see an airliner
gliding silently by, far above. Not tonight. All planes are still
grounded. And I have never been more aware that to attack this
place is to carelessly drop a bomb anywhere into the world.
© Copyright Frankfurter Rundschau 2001
