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world, they say, has changed, but not teenagers. My friend has a
thirteen-year-old daughter in a school in northern Connecticut.
She was told on 9/11 that New York had been bombed. (This is not
the only account I have heard of the idiotic conduct of out-of-town
schools. Ignorant of the geography of the city, they speak to their
charges as if the five boroughs had been Dresdenized.) My friend
called his daughter, who was hysterical. "Are you dead?"
she asked repeatedly, weeping. He was able to demonstrate that he
was not. Some hours later he called back. "Why are you calling?"
asked Miss Blasé. Just to see how you're handling the Holy
War, dear.
My trainer
has three children. His daughters, 14 and 10, have been devouring
the newspapers, but he said his six-year-old son "just thinks
some bad men did a bad thing." He's ahead of a lot of the columnists
in the newspapers.
Another
sign of returning normality. A young woman, leaning against the
fence of a chic small hotel, two blocks from my house on Irving
Place. The two short buildings it occupies were nineteenth century
prole housing, but they have been beautifully improved, and many
models stay there. As I approached, I saw there was a photographer
and his assistant in front of the young woman. A shoot was in progress.
There is no
shooting today. In a weird obedience to the calendar, the weather
has turned autumnal just as autumn is about to begin officially.
The blue sky turned grey, and it has been raining on and off, not
with summer-storm intensity, but with a nagging fall soak.
This has driven
away more than the professionally beautiful. During all of hell
work, one was struck by the smiling skies, and the smiling flesh
they brought out. As haggard firemen were raking up body parts like
leaves downtown, young women above 14th Street were displaying their
most beautiful parts. The winking navels were like a thousand charms
against the evil eye.
I have not
heard anyone discuss the role of sex in the war of the worlds, but
I think there is one. At first I imagined the killers almost as
H. L. Mencken might have: snake handlers of central Asia; rubes
who eat with one hand and clean themselves with the other. Such
would naturally look on Babylon with loathing, and express their
hatred in zealotry. In Paradise, the sloe-eyed girls with ever-renewed
virginity who are the warrior's reward would balance the account
of their deprivations here.
Then it came
out that some of the killers had spent the night of September 10
in a strip joint in Florida, getting lap dances. Soldiers have ever
done thus. That means, though, that the enemy is different from
my imagining. They are not outside what the Great Satan represents
of modernity, but they are in it too. They accept their mullahs'
condemnations of our sins, but they jump at the chance to sample
them.
What about
gayness? T. E. Lawrence did not bring homosexuality to Arabia. It
is a natural outgrowth of polygamous societies, in which powerful
men monopolize more than their share of available women, leaving
the shlubs to fend for themselves. Do the killer cults react to
the Gay Moment in the western world with a similar combination of
wrath and desire?
At the time
of the Gulf War there was a popular poster of a female G.I., wearing
brief fatigues and bandoliers, and holding a machine gun. That poster
was a thrill. For just that reason, it was an immoral poster. We
should be aware that our enemies are subject to the same temptations.
Mayor
Giuliani made his first mistake, in cracking the door to the possibility
of running for a third term, if the state changed the election laws.
He would win in a walk, but he should resist the temptation. Even
he will not be able to solve all the city's problems, and since
much of the heavy lifting is going to be done by the federal government,
it matters less who is in City Hall. The mayor should leave on a
high note, like DeGaulle after World War II, and bide his time for
a return. Or he should leave, period. He has already made himself
by far the greatest mayor in New York history. The only competition
would be DeWitt Clinton, and he helped the city most as governor,
by building the Erie Canal.
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