Cracks in the Mosaic
And theories.

September 18, 2001 2:00 p.m.

ill 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.