Glory of Old Glory
Dust city.

September 14, 2001 8:10 a.m.

oday was the day the flags came out. New Yorkers are not normally a flag-waving bunch — Old Glory is not black, for one thing; those bright primary colors are so seventies.

The first collection was a row of six little flag stickers, hanging stiffly from the antenna of a van like fish on a line. The bottom flag of the column, and probably the one that hangs all the time, was the flag of Puerto Rico.

More flags appeared on lower Broadway. For the information of non-New Yorkers, by this I mean the strip that runs from 10th street, all the way down to Wall Street in one long straight, north-south swoop. It is bracketed by Episcopal churches — Trinity Church at the bottom, Grace Church, where Newland Archer was married in the Age of Innocence. The upper end of this strip runs through the territory of New York University, and it is lined with bars, restaurants, and clothing stores targeted at college kids. Most of these were shut, but one that was improbably open showed its mannequins, wearing bland Gap-ish fashions, and all clutching little flags.

Down Broadway in the distance the Woolworth Building (the world's tallest, many records ago) loomed in a grey smoky cloud. At Houston Street, a wide cross street, I ran into pairs of people clutching bunches of flags, which they were planning to sell for a dollar each. Some seemed to be bums taking on the task for a meal; others were ordinary bourgeois folk.

I swung into the East Village, the closest thing Manhattan has to a Bohemia (the real Bohemia has decamped to Brooklyn, driven out by rents). Here are students, slackers, pierced folk, unmelted ethnics. St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic church, a Polish mecca, visited once by Pope John Paul II, was flying the American and Polish flags at half-staff. No surprise there — this was Michael Novak territory, the southern and Eastern European Catholic ethnic. On First Avenue, however, there was a tiny deli, the size of large packing truck, whose owner had attached seven or eight to his newspaper stands. What was going on? When I went inside, he was talking with his cashier, in Arabic. Don't blame me.

The biggest flag hung across Third Street. It was three or four stories tall; it stretched from one sidewalk to the other. When I first saw it, my heart lept up, but as I approached I saw that it hung from the headquarters of the Hell's Angels. File it with the Department of Unsolicited Testimonials.

There were still more flags in Union Square, at the impromptu memorial I mentioned in my last posting. It has burgeoned considerably, and become an open forum for argument and speechifying.

The scene around the cement pedestal is still semi-religious and quiet. The ground was strewn with flags, candles, flowers, pictures of people, religious images of one sort or another. People sat or knelt, and meditated, prayed, or simply thought. One might smile at the crudeness and strangeness of it, but one would be wrong. I was struck with the evident devotion of many of the mourners. Perhaps they had lost friends. Perhaps, being young, they felt too nakedly. I may note in passing that the only church I saw with open doors was Grace Church.

Their meditating was not easy, for behind them raged a political discussion. The first interlocutors were two black men. One, the more voluble, was normal left. America had done wrong, America was run by its rich. His opponent, who turned out to be a Moslem, and who was three times his size, did not say much, but seemed to disagree with his analysis. Then other people, mostly white, joined in. In New York, the first to speak are always radicals of one sort or another — the environment empowers them. But they provoke other points of view, usually badly articulated and lacking in frameworks. An intense argument broke out between two college age women, one Lebanese — the wife, she said, of the large black man.

It was hard to follow, because there was a crowd, because there was a distracting soundtrack of unrelated drumming and singing, but because people's positions often made very little sense. People got sidetracked; they felt to compelled to emphasize compensating points, so as not to seem too extreme. They revolved around and around each other like tired fighters, clutching and punching their shoulders. I was also struck by the degree to which they tried hard to let each one have his say, and not simply to shout people down.

Feet away there was a more organized forum. A black man in suspenders and an unknotted paisley ascot was conducting a functional soapbox. He held a long thick wide cardboard tube, and gave it to anyone who wanted to speak. If someone in the crowd shouted an objection, he told them to wait for their turn to hold the tube. His assistant seemed to be a young Jewish man, probably a college kid, who said he hadn't voted for Bush, but that Bush was doing the right things (among them, in his view, not preaching hatred of Arabs). Several Arabs spoke, urging that hatred not be directed against them; almost all of them said the perpetrators should be punished, and expressed their horror of the attacks. One young man held up an American flag, and said this isn't perfect but it's the best we have in the world. After he finished, the most vehement of the Arabs and he gave a furtive, solidarity handshake. Most passionate was a young woman (a foreigner) who had worked in one the afflicted buildings. She said she had run, in her heels, to 61st Street (a distance of five or six miles). She wanted the trade towers rebuilt, and she said she would give all her money, beyond necessities, to do it. She had wanted a job, some employer had given her one; ion gratitude for this, she would never leave New York. General applause.

The speakers seemed to want 1) terrorist punished; 2) civilians not punished; 3) America to examine itself and its wrongs, at home and around the world; 4) New York to rebuild; 5) hatred to be checked. In short, a confused mass of contradictory emotions. But it is the job of leadership to instruct and inspire our emotions. W. arrives today, September 14. Is he up to the job?

Over the wild scene brooded the bronze Washington. It occurred to me that he was one of the reasons such discussions occur. He also fought in the last attack on New York.

Today was also the day the World Trade Towers came back. Back as the dust of their remains. The wind, still light, shifted to the south, and a fine mist moved uptown. It was stronger on the west side than the east. The sun still shone in a cloudless sky, so it was often not grossly visible in any one place. But it could be smelled. People wore surgical masks in protection (other people were jogging, sucking up lungfuls). "Dust in the air suspended/ Marks the place where a story ended./ Dust inbreathed was a house — …/This is the death of air."

We learned today that the workers tirelessly excavating this mound of debris would be finding very few bodies. The heat, and the crush of the collapse, it was thought, had obliterated them. The spot will have to be consecrated in some fashion.

As I walked through the dust up Broadway, I passed a monarch butterfly heading south. This is the season of their migration; they are often seen in the city, if you look for them.