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anthrax panic has passed from New York to Washington, D.C. In New
York media people were the only ones at risk, though concern was
general. Our masseur told us last night that he overheard customers
in a health-food store asking what they could take to fend it off.
The sight of people asking health-food-store clerks for medical
advice is disturbing at any time, and calls to mind H. L. Mencken's
praise of quack doctors for culling the genes of the stupid from
the population. In this case, the peddlers of shark skin and Chinese
fungi acquitted themselves well, replying that they had nothing
specific, and you could only try to keep your immunity up.
Another vignette
came from Fifth Avenue in midtown, where there is one of those stores
selling cheesy Russian knick-knacks that, along with the Warner
Brothers outlet, are a sign of the decline of that great street.
The usual shill was out front, handing out leaflets, but no one
would take one. Now that would be a terrorist operation less sophisticated
than we have come to expect from al Qaeda; still, people weren't
taking risks.
The anthrax
panic strikes me as a delayed reaction to the horrors of September
11. Over the weeks, the grim fact that, in New York at least, there
were no bodies to recover, mourn, and bury, sunk in. The police
department did a splendid job of assembling urns with debris from
the killing ground and presenting them, with white gloves and bagpipes,
to the survivors. The anthrax scare was a third phase of response:
numbness, sorrow, then jitters.
Speaker Hastert's
decision to postpone the business of the House was surely an error.
Very few politicians, it seems, have natural coolness. Mayor Giuliani
has it, to an uncanny degree. President Bush developed it, after
a week. We await other instances.
At the same
time, we should extend to the Speaker the one-mistake waiver. These
are new circumstances — new, in the sense that this is a hot
world war, which is something that no one under the age of 60 can
even remember, and which no one younger than 75 has ever participated
in. It is also a war fought in the homeland, which hasn't happened
since Appomattox. Everyone is having his dry runs in public, and
should be judged accordingly. President Bush bobbled his first few
speeches; Mayor Giuliani, after a splendid start, almost singlehandedly
wrecked the New York political landscape. All the Washingtonians
behaving like schoolgirls will have a second chance.
We might also
remember how feckless political Washington, including some future
heroes, looked during an even greater crisis — the secession
winter of 1860 to 1861. The comments of the sons of Rep. Charles
Francis Adams Jr. who were with their father as the political system
fell apart, are worth reading now. Charles Francis Adams Jr. said
that "the unheroic was much in evidence." Henry Adams
recorded that the outgoing president, James Buchanan, was so worthless
that when a rumor of insanity appeared, stocks actually rose. But
Charles Francis Jr. (again) commented that, at the inauguration
in 1861, the handsome white-haired Buchanan looked far more presidential
than the rangy, hirsute rube/shyster lawyer who replaced him. About
the only person who looks good in their recollections was Gen. Winfield
Scott, the commanding general of the army, who spent inauguration
day posted on a sidestreet, in full uniform with his staff, in case
the rebels tried anything — and Scott was 74 years old.
Back in New
York, one friend reports that she is "not going to let any G-damned
little-d---ed fanatic tell me not to go in the subway." The second
epithet is not random abuse, but is based on the reporting of the
supermarket tabloid, which received the first anthrax. Was this
a de facto Pulitzer? Only the truth hurts.
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