September 11, 2006
On September 11 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 PM EST Like John Steele Gordon, I was not in the city on 9/11. I was driving up to work, listening to NPR, which cut off while I was on the Major Deegan, just over the city line. I remember thinking that this had happened once before, when I had been driving up to work during the first attack on the World Trade Center, which had knocked NPR off the air. Then I put that thought out of my mind, until I learned of the attack perhaps half an hour later—my girlfriend called from Manhattan, before the phones packed it in. The bridges and tunnels were soon closed, and I only got back to the city the following evening. I did not know anyone who died in the attack; the son of someone I knew was killed, but I had never met him, also someone from whom I had rented a summer house, and similarly had never met. They were both people of whom I had heard a fair amount, and they became much more vivid after they had been murdered. John Steele Gordon reprinted what he wrote at the time, and I shall take the same liberty. This is part of what I wrote, a week or so later, in a publication called First of the Month: “A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches at NYU’s Gallatin school was fascinated to see some of her very hip undergraduates singing ‘God Bless America’ in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined 72 hours before. Maybe it helped to be able to smell the fires that were still consuming the dead—you could do this from Washington Square Park. At a college a bit over the city line, where the dead could neither be smelt nor, apparently, fully imagined, white ribbons instead signaled solidarity with those ‘faculty and students of color’ who felt unsafe in the face of American racist violence. “If one was in a jaundiced mood, that latter use of white ribbons was an implied assertion: ‘six or seven thousand murdered in an instant, among them the hundreds who died trying to save the others, the many more left grieving for them—well, how dare those thousands seek to dislodge our faculty and students of color from the pinnacle of the most piercing victimhood? What spurious moral claim do the dead and their mourners have the audacity to press, given the fears of these purer victims, who can sense the lynch mobs massing behind the dorms?’ But while there were no lynch mobs behind the dorms, within a couple of days, when around the country some people were murdered, and others were being harassed, it seemed less delusional, and the politics less mad. Solidarity with people one knows, who may need it, rather than with those already beyond all aid, was not an obviously foolish or wicked response—except that ‘feeling unsafe’ remained a less dreadful thing than being unsafe. One felt that latter condition ought to have excited more sympathy than seemed to be the case. “And after all, the people under the rubble were not beyond all hope within 36 hours, nor were their survivors. But concern (let alone just anger) for the dead, the missing and the bereaved seemed pretty perfunctory in the teach-ins, and in the faux-Left organs of opinion. The rhetorical sequencing became drearily predictable: a rather terse acknowledgement that this was an awful thing, then a long and leisurely trawl through the reasons why the country to one degree or another might have deserved it—or been imagined to have deserved it, by people who weren’t entirely crazy to think so. “From the faux-Left’s paladins, the Chomskys and the Pilgers, there was stronger stuff, or perhaps the argument was simply made with greater clarity: the awful thing done to us was not nearly as awful as the awful things we regularly did to them, to the Iraqi or Sudanese or Palestinian or Afghan or Vietnamese children: tu quoque, with bells on. Our direct victims were computed to total millions in these increasingly ingenious calculations, so six thousand, the initial number given for the American dead, wasn’t after all a very big deal; certainly not a big enough deal to rethink the dystopian narrative that has passed for history in this sturdy tradition. “At home, you generally had to hunt a bit to find this stuff—although it did at least break the surface in a couple of distinguished national magazines. Abroad, such tones could be detected in less obscure places. In the U.K., two quality dailies, the Guardian and the Independent, ran rather a lot of it. Two examples, selected from an embarrassment of riches, must suffice, one from the Guardian and the other from The New Statesman. The Guardian’s Charlotte Raven, insisting that ‘anti-Americanism’ remained irreproachable, compared the U.S. to ‘a bully with a bloody nose,’ which was a pretty simple extended metaphor: the World Trade Center was our nose, and the blood, less imaginatively, was our blood. Since a bully with a bloody nose is normally considered a very cheering sight, an outmatched but plucky fellow drubbing his tormentor against the odds—Tom Jones thrashing Flashman at Rugby—Ms. Raven’s laconic expression of distress over the dead seemed imperfectly convincing. “Over at The New Statesman, the leader writer conceded that while bond traders might be thought to have as much of a right to life as Iraqi or Palestinian children, we should remember that the bond traders, unlike the children, had been given a chance to vote for Ralph Nader but had declined to do so (at least in sufficient numbers to retain a strong argument against being crushed, asphyxiated or incinerated). While it seems that the actual social composition of the labor force at the World Trade Center was unknown to The New Statesman’s editorialist—she presumably wrote without having seen the color Xeroxes taped to the mailboxes and lamp posts all over town—one cannot be certain that among the scientific socialists at The New Statesman, those immigrant busboys, waiters, custodial staff and file clerks might have been a price worth paying for a crack at entombing or immolating a few bond traders—omelettes, eggs, etc. But this reaction was the harsher end of respectable printed opinion in North Western Europe. What was more common was what we heard at home, as well: We must seek to learn why we are so hated, and mend our ways. Complicity in violence done to the Islamic world, we are told, is consistently high on the list; if we cease to so offend, we shall cease to be hated . . .” Looking back on that, it seems irritable, but little if any of it seems wrong to me. It seems important to realize that while we may be hated because of our war in Iraq, we were also hated before that war began, by many of the same people. We are often reminded that Le Monde then editorialized “We are all Americans now.” So they did, although a lot of people had other reactions. Palestinians were filmed dancing in the streets, and a major Greek newsroom apparently broke into high fives when the news came through. Within a very short time the French reading public made a bestseller of a book arguing that we had ourselves blown up the towers. That remains a minority view, but a fair amount of comment over the last few years in effect suggests that people were so angry over our invasion of Iraq that they blew up the World Trade Center. In the long run, I do not think that implied argument is going to be very persuasive.
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