Here are my thoughts on day two of the post-disaster era here in New York. Like Todd Gitlin, I have been observing and trying to make sense of what is happening here. Like Todd, I saw the familiar twin towers from my window suddenly, bizarrely, billowing smoke and flames, then eerily collapsing into horizontal rubble. The rubble of white dust and jumbled, now meaningless papers and castaway shoes, handbags, briefcases and mangled metal, continually reappears on all the television channels, under a thick pall of black, putrid smoke. This is now spreading across Manhattan, as policemen, firemen, medical personnel, rescue workers and journalists clamber through it.
I have seen rubble like this once before - some thirty or so years ago in Londonderry, after one small car-bomb exploded, laying waste the shopfronts into one street. I remember being overwhelmed by just that: the laying waste of the elements of people’s ordered and routine lives - their purchasable fruit and vegetables and clothes and newspapers transformed into undifferentiated rubble.
But this rubble is not only on a massively vaster scale. It has laid waste the lives themselves, on today’s latest reported unofficial estimate, to the lives of some twenty thousand people, in the space of one and a half hours. It will pose an immense disposal problem for weeks ahead. It is utterly unfamiliar to New Yorkers, and to most citizens of the United States. Terrorism was an abstraction here until Tuesday. Even Waco and the Oklahoma bombing – though they struck powerful emotional chords – were viewed by most Americans, and certainly by New Yorkers, as an agonizing but distant spectacle.
But terrorism in this country, and especially in this city, is no longer an abstraction – a political word, something we are committed to combating but which occurs elsewhere. The people of this city are all suddenly vividly aware of the meaning of terror, of being themselves terrified by atrocity on a mass scale. Stricken wives and daughters, recognisable as New Yorkers, hold out pictures of those they seek on television and people in the streets have drawn faces. I have spoken to people who, from close to, saw people waving and then free-falling from the top of the building. Hitherto they have witnessed terror only in the movies and on television and contemplated it as history. Until now they have largely been spared what other countries have experienced and incorporated into their collective memories – the British in both Northern Ireland and the mainland, the Italians, for example, in the painfully remembered anni di piombo. The time of terror as spectacle is over.
I would say that on day one, people were dumbfounded, numb, unable to respond to the catastrophe except by acting. And they have acted with extraordinary efficiency and calm and decency. The rescue work and firefighting and policing have been exemplary. People have queued patiently to give blood and to pick up newspapers – in short supply here in Lower Manhattan, which has been strangely quiet today, with all businesses and other activities shut down by request of the Mayor. Only now are they beginning to react. And the emotions are varied and contradictory. On the streets and on the television screen a whole panoply is displayed: quiet dignity, despair, fury, pride, prejudice, caution, fear and a sense of insecurity, resignation. What all these reactions will coalesce into in the coming days and weeks is, I think, genuinely unpredictable because it will depend greatly on how leadership, both in politics and the media, and at local and national levels, responds to and in turn seeks to influence public attitudes and feelings.
On today’s showing, I would say that the prognosis is both alarming and slightly hopeful. I fear that Todd may be too optimistic in stressing that on day one officials, news anchors and terrorism experts were careful not to exaggerate what they know about who committed the mass murders and focussed rather on disaster relief. Today, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden have been repeatedly invoked by experts and politicians, and the Israeli minister, Sneh, did not lose the chance to express the thought that perhaps now Americans would understand what the Israelis are living through, and support them the more.
The ultra hard-right Republican Congressman, Tom de Lay, spoke of embarking “by the grace of God on a righteous cause.” Democrat Congressman Brad Sherman has said that “We should go to war with Afghanistan and against the Taliban.” And the appalling, lowbrow, demotic Howard Stern, radio host listened to by huge numbers (and sometimes described as basically liberal in his attitudes), said on his show this morning that we should bomb two or three countries. When a listener, phoning in, asked what good it would do to bomb innocent women and children, he replied: “Do you call those kids dancing in the streets in Pakistan (sic.) innocent?” People of Arabic appearance have been physically assaulted, including Arab shop-owners and cab drivers, in Penn Station, Chicago and Brooklyn. The President’s speeches on television so far have been pathetic damp squibs, filled with empty homilies and hollow rhetoric. There seems little chance that he will rise to the occasion. One New Yorker whose opinion I sought on his speech, who had seen it, replied “What speech?”
On the other hand, Todd is right: Mayor Giuliani has been genuinely inspiring, running around in firefighting gear (I have heard many saying this, including fierce opponents of his on the left). Senators Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Governor Pataki have similarly struck the right chords with a public whose inchoate reactions need some effective articulation and channelling. What is certain is that from day two, we can’t yet discern to what extent and in what ways the post-disaster era has changed life in this country, and elsewhere. But that it has changed forever in profound and major ways, no-one here doubts.