Security check – last word – social and political effects of attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon – Brief Article
Charles Kaiser
New York will recover, but the psychic damage to its citizens has probably been underreported, mostly because it is unmeasurable. In neighborhoods like mine, which are more than five miles away from ground zero, there was no physical manifestation of the World Trade Center catastrophe–except on the third day, when the winds suddenly shifted and the grisly fumes finally reached us for a few hours. But the fact that the injury was invisible (if you could turn off the television) only added to the sense of unreality.
New York will recover, but that centuries-old feeling of invincibility–a feeling bred by a 3,000-mile-long (theoretically friendly) continent on one side and a 3,000-mile-wide ocean on the other–is gone forever. Old-time New Yorkers have certainly been terrified before, especially in 1977, when a summer blackout plunged most of the city into darkness and an instant crime wave overwhelmed police and fire-men alike. But the casualties back then were negligible compared with this year’s one-day total of more than 6,000 dead, including what must be the largest single-day casualty list ever for any fire department in America.
The president and his cabinet have declared all-out war on the perpetrators. They may be right that Bin Laden is just as evil as Hitler, but it’s still going to be a hell of a lot more difficult to find him. Hundreds, if not thousands, of his followers have also made themselves nearly invisible everywhere from France to Florida.
Meanwhile, the rush to spend or misspend money on every conceivable defense initiative is threatening to produce many of the usual nonsensical results. If mass murders committed by maniacs armed with nothing but box cutters proved anything, it surely proved the utter futility of spending untold billions on a missile shield to protect us against rogue states with so-far-nonexistent intercontinental ballistic missiles. But according to The New York Times, that was not the first reaction of our esteemed lawmakers in Washington. Days after the Twin Towers were reduced to ashes, Adam Clymer reported that healthy financing for the missile shield was nearly certain because almost every elected official (except Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California) is too terrified to vote against anything that pretends to be related to the nation’s defense. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that the only other immediate beneficiaries of the apocalypse were manufacturers of bomb shelters and gas masks–and the authors of books about chemical warfare, whose titles surged onto Amazon.com’s best-seller list.
I was incredibly grateful that I still hadn’t left for Paris when the attacks happened. Difficult as it was to experience them at home, it would have been a thousand times harder to watch the whole thing unfold from a distance. When I did leave 13 days later, the humans operating the metal detectors at JFK seemed just as lax as ever. After that, the American Airlines crew did a fine job of pretending that everything was normal, except for the pilot, who issued a bizarre warning against lining up in front of the lavatories.
Sara Mosle is a fine writer who is working on a book about a natural gas explosion under a Texas high school, which wiped out most of the youth in an entire town. She told me that the attacks on New York and the Pentagon reminded her of the AIDS epidemic. I thought that was an apt comparison. Just as we did 20 years ago, we suddenly feel engulfed by a previously unimaginable form of terror. Only this time no one feels invulnerable because of a particular sexual orientation.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group