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 ry
havoc! and let slip the appropriate dogs.
God knows,
there has been enough to feel depressed about these few days. One
of the lesser things has been the way these events have exposed
the terrible poverty of our public language. May I be the first
to say that George W. Bush's speech on the evening of the atrocity
was simply awful? All right, he's no orator; but surely he
could get some good writers. Those clunky, clanging metaphors! Those
moon-booted clichés! "These acts shattered steel, but
they cannot dent the steel of American resolve." Oy gevalt.
The legislature, of course, was even worse. Trent Lott declared
that it was "a very serious matter" that called for "an
appropriate response." I fancied for a moment that I could
hear the voice of Winston Churchill: "We shall respond appropriately
on the beaches, we shall respond appropriately in the streets..."
New
York loves a terrorist
Joseph P. Docherty
was a dedicated foot soldier in the international terrorist movement,
who may well have done his training in camps very much like those
the U.S. is now planning to assault, alongside men of the same cast
of mind as those who destroyed the World Trade Center. Doherty,
of course, was an IRA man, working under Gerry Adams's orders to
blow the legs off old ladies at bus stops in London and Belfast.
Caught while on the run in the U.S.A., he spent nearly nine years
in the Manhattan Correctional Center ("The Tombs") while
his attorneys, paid for by pro-terrorist groups in this country,
fought his extradition to the U.K. all the way to the Supreme Court.
These efforts failed, and Doherty was extradited in 1992. The fool
mayor of New York, under pressure from IRA shills in the city, who
are legion, ordered a street to be named after the killer. There
it is, downtown near the Tombs ... a short walk from the World Trade
Center. I like to think it is covered with white dust and illegible;
but if it is still there at all after the events of September 11th,
it will be a sneering insult to the dead.
Ill
wind
Thursday morning,
9 A.M., standing at the corner of the street with the mothers, waiting
for the school bus. "Can you smell something?" said one.
Several of us nodded. We had all noticed it: a very faint acrid,
plasticky smell at the back of the nose, just on the edge of perception.
We are 36 miles east-northeast of the World Trade Center. I guess
the fine particulate matter reached us overnight.
Security
no-brainers
It is now plain
that the White House was a sitting duck for those hijackers. They
could have flown a plane right into it, if they had been able to
find it while shooting low over the capital at 600 miles an hour.
I have often thought of this when in Washington, and I suppose millions
of other people must have, too. Looking at the White House, I have
thought: "Looks easy to fly a plane into it, perhaps with a
small nuke on board... Nah, they must have some sort of defense
in place against that." Well, apparently they don't. Isn't
anybody in the nation's vast security apparatus assigned to think
these obvious thoughts?
The
weasel under the cocktail cabinet
Every horror-story
writer or producer of scary movies knows that the trick of the thing
is to juxtapose the familiar, commonplace and comforting with the
wild, grotesque or bizarre — "The weasel under the cocktail
cabinet," as Harold Pinter said. I keep thinking of this when
I am watching shots of that vast rubble pile downtown. I have spent
most of my working life in business offices, and know my way around
them. I know the pleasures of settling in to a new desk: family
photos here, spare tie there, can I take a jacket hook from that
empty cube? Where's the copier? Uh-oh, they gave me a 17-inch tube
— can I change it for a 21? Now, there it all is, fire-seared
and covered with dust, all the familiar apparatus of my working
life, soiled and trashed and burned and dead. This should mean nothing
alongside a stack of corpses; but somehow it makes everything worse.
What
do you tell the kids?
I had the TV
on all day Tuesday, of course, but switched it off when it was time
to collect the kids. No reason to darken their sunny little minds
with such horrors. I picked them up at the bus stop, walked them
home, then let them out to play for an hour before homework and
music practice. Sitting down to dinner later, Nellie, aged 8, asked:
"Daddy, why did those men blow up the World Trade Center?"
How did she know about that? I asked. "I saw it on TV at Barbara's
house." Damn. Protect your kids? Yeah, try it. The culture
is everywhere, seeping in through any tiny crack. Like the war on
terrorism, this one has many small reverses, and goes on for years.
Boxers
or Briefs?
Suppose this had happened on Bill Clinton's watch. The following
interesting questions come to mind. (1) What shade of yellow would
his face have been on September 11th? (2) How many world sprint
records would he have broken heading for the nearest bunker? (3)
Does the President's Secret Service bodyguard carry a change of
presidential underpants?
Where
were the helicopters?
People in those
floors of the World Trade Center above where the planes hit
could not go down through the fuel inferno. They were driven up,
to the roof. Was it not possible, in the hour before the towers
collapsed, for helicopters to be got there to ferry them off? I
don't know, I'm only asking. I can see that with the heat updraft
and the smoke, it would have been awfully difficult, but would it
have been impossible? New York City is full of helicopters; you
see them all the time. Surely they could have saved a few?
The
day they killed New York?
Until last
Friday (!) I did part-time contract work — computer programming
— for an investment bank in New York City. This bank had three
full floors in 5 World Trade Center, one of the lesser buildings
in the shadow of the Twin Towers. Number 5 collapsed Wednesday,
having been fully evacuated right after the attack. Well, on Thursday
morning I got a phone call from an ex-colleague whose office had
been on one of the uppermost floors of that building. He was calling
from the firm's main data center in Princeton, New Jersey, to where
key systems people had been relocated after the attack. The point
of the call was to clear up a small technical matter I had left
un-documented before I quit, but of course I wanted to ask him about
IT. Had he been in the office when it happened? "Oh, yeah.
Sitting at my desk." How fast had he moved? "Real
fast. There was a rush for the elevators." Trying to recall
the geometry of the WTC complex, I said I supposed he had heard
debris falling on the roof. "On the roof? It was coming in
through the expletive windows!" How long did he expect to stay
in Princeton? "For ever, I hope. I don't want to work in New
York City again." Multiply that last remark by the entire headcount
of the securities business, and add in all the other businesses
— restaurants, stores, limousine fleets, travel agents, shoeshine
stands — that service them. Did the terrorists kill New York
City? Jonah has proposed rebuilding the Twin Towers as a simple
act of defiance. Nice: but will anyone want to work in them? And
if New York City is dead, did my little house here in the burbs
just lose a chunk of its value? It seems churlish to think such
things at such a time ... but you think them.
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