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there be cracking in the gorgeous mosaic? The woman who used to
clean for us, and who still does sewing for my wife, came by for
the first time since the attack. She is an Indian Moslem from Trinidad;
her father died while making his second haj. She was shocked
by the events, and had experienced no rancor (she does not wear
a headscarf). Her family is about to move from East New York, quite
a grim neighborhood where they bought, gutted, and renovated a house,
to Richmond Hill, a better neighborhood. It is a very New York success
story. Everyone is saying that most American Moslems and Arabs (most
American Arabs are not Moslems) are more like her than the attackers,
and they are right. Mayor Giuliani and President Bush have made
the point repeatedly. But sympathizers, and no doubt actual helpers
of the attackers also exist. Finding them will require more intelligence
— in both senses — than the government has so far shown.
I got a call
from another friend who left Gotham for the boondocks in anticipation
of Y2K horrors. Those did not materialize, but now he feels belatedly
vindicated. Will black New Yorkers resent a $20 billion aid package,
directed chiefly to the man? I tried to tell him what he cannot
see from his outpost — the pathetic posters on every park fence
and light post, with a picture, some stats, and the words MISSING,
with the Trade Tower the person worked in. MISSING by now means
dead, as the papers elide from pleas for help, to memorials for
the departed. I told my friend that these are not all captains of
industry: they are mostly temps, secretaries, keypunch operators,
eager gophers, and associates scrambling up the lower rungs of the
ladder. And there are many, many dark faces. The money the big boys
brought in was money in their pockets too. So it will be with the
relief. Death has given a ghastly seminar in the workings of the
market.
Inquiring
of Catholic friends, I found that John Paul II had sent a passionate
telegram to President Bush the day after. "SHOCKED BY THE UNSPEAKABLE
HORROR OF TODAY'S INHUMAN TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST INNOCENT PEOPLE
IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE UNITED STATES I HURRY TO EXPRESS TO YOU
AND YOUR FELLOW CITIZENS MY PROFOUND SORROW AND MY CLOSENESS IN
PRAYER FOR THE NATION AT THIS DARK AND TRAGIC MOMENT….I BEG
GOD TO SUSTAIN YOU AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THIS HOUR OF SUFFERING
AND TRIAL." — IOANNES PAULUS PP. II
I have several
thoughts. We are the prisoners of what the media reports, especially
in hasty days like these. In moments of passionate dismay, we look
naturally for small problems, which appear to be solvable, or at
least can be compassed by our fulminations. Criticizing other people's
reax is an old opinion journalism standby, and comforting now. That
is why the temptation to spread rumors, and to offer hit-and-run
theories, should be resisted.
I still prefer
the Archbishop of Canterbury singing the "Star-Spangled Banner"
in St. Paul's Cathedral, even though he has many fewer legions.
We
will have a surfeit of theories soon. I heard one at lunch yesterday
— a meeting scheduled BWTC. My interlocutor and I sat in a
splendid new French restaurant, virtually deserted. His notion was
that Osama bin Laden did not want to do maximum damage, of the kind
he might have managed by releasing anthrax. He wants an aroused
enemy, so that in the struggle he can topple Arab regimes less holy
than himself. It sounded plausible. But what sense does it make
if Saddam Hussein is the ultimate begetter? Besides, how fine do
people slice these things in wartime?
Many
such theories will wing our way via television. Many New Yorkers
have already experienced a surfeit of the tube. I watched the cyclops
for 90 minutes straight at NR on Tuesday morning, then went
cold turkey, with brief relapses. My downstairs neighbor told me
of her withdrawal experience. She fell asleep on her sofa after
midnight, with the television on. When she woke, before dawn, it
was still on — and still giving exactly the same news as when
she fell asleep.
Certainly
we have had a surfeit of Cindy Adams, the New York Post's
gossipeuse. Mrs. Adams's column on Thursday was headlined, "Celebrity
Close-Calls." Only in Cindy Adams, kids, only in Cindy Adams.
The
moment of disaster was an awful purgative. But back will come all
the old faces, reconstituting themselves as our lords spiritual.
The new New Yorker, which I haven't read, will be offering
pieces by John Updike, Toni Morrison, et. al. Updike is a writer
I greatly admire; I have actually never read Morrison. But I do
not want any of their bulletins on the crisis. Let them digest it,
if they can, in their art.
Think what
trouble American artists have had with war. The Revolution produced
John Trumbull's paintings, but no literature ("Rip Van Winkle"
actually deals with Revolution, though in a very oblique way). The
Civil War gave us Whitman, and, years after the fact, Stephen Crane
and the statues of Augustus St. Gaudens (two of them — Adm.
Farragut and Gen. Sherman — in New York). World War I —
Hemingway. World War II — Eliot's "Four Quartets"
(but he was living in England), Pound's patriotic broadcasts (but
he was a patriot of fascist Italy). From Here to Eternity
is a great movie, but an awful book. War can be a subject —
think of the Iliad — but artists seem to need distance
to grasp it.
The
New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the last high temple of Freudianism
in the city, announced that they would have therapists in Barnes
& Noble stores, to help the perplexed. But will they say anything?
Meanwhile the
grief counselors have been held at bay. Perhaps the magnitude of
the disaster has thrown them off balance. They cannot swarm in and
take charge as they do in the aftermath of a high-school shooting.
New Yorkers,
as Woody Allen movies taught us, are famously neurotic, and involved
in their therapies. But the grief-counseling movement, it seems
now, is far more pernicious. It is a heartland thing, grown out
of bland Protestantism and watered-down twelve-step-dancing. New
Yorkers, it seems to me, are better than such nonsense. We can dig
in and twist ourselves into knots; or we bull ahead and tell the
world to get the hell out of our way. We don't want our hands held
by clueless whimperers.
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