The 9-11 Journals

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

In the Shadow of Giants

One year ago today, I was frantically e-mailing and calling people I love to make sure they knew I was okay and that they were okay too.

In the meanwhile, it’s become clear that our national security agencies are a joke. Not only do they passively not communicate with one another, they actively refuse to share information. They’re also sorely lacking in analytical thinkers and linguists. (Guess why? Fewer liberal arts grads! Duh!)

We’ve had a domestic terrorist copycat sending around envelopes of “weapons-grade” anthrax spores that have killed a couple of people. We’ve bombed what little was left of Afghanistan, allegedly chasing al Qaeda out of their refuge there, but not actually killing anybody important. (The one truly good thing to come out of that was the freeing of Afghanistan’s women from imprisonment, starvation, slavery, and human rights abuses under the Taliban.) Doing so, we’ve alienated much of the Arab world, that which wasn’t already alienated.

We’ve also had to endure simplistic and ridiculous Cold War rhetoric from Dubya, who has named an Axis of Evil, reminiscent of both the Axis powers of World War II (but not so clear-cut) and Ronald Reagan’s comic book Evil Empire. We now have, or will shortly have, an Office of Homeland Security. Heil Dubya! No, wait—wrong century. Welcome to Amerika.

On top of all this, the economy has gone down the toilet. A coupl of months after the attacks, Bayard let me go because there were just no ads. Nobody was hiring, many of the dot.coms were dot.gone, lots of folks out of jobs. I’m getting by with AKRF okay, but I’m out of health insurance right now (and
had to cough up $112 for a month’s supply of Claritan), since Aetna dropped the International Women Writers Group because they didn’t fit the insurance company definition of a “group.” How, I’m not sure. Even if they'd kept us on, the premiums had jumped from $250/month when I started two years ago to more than $400/month this year. Must be all that 9/11 trauma and PTSD counseling costs they're getting hit with.

I’m really a little afraid for the city, we’re so much in the hole. I’d hate to see it slip back to what it was in the 70’s and 80’s. I might have to leave, then. Although, oddly enough, a survey says that more people want to stay here now than did during the boom 90’s when crime was so bad. Drive-bys scare us, but terrorists don’t. Yay us!

The week leading up to the memorial services at Ground Zero, where all nearly 3,000 names of the dead were read, one by one, has been a media circus of mind-numbing proportions. I’ve done my best not to look at any of it. I’ve been increasingly jumpy and apprehensive the closer the anniversary’s gotten, and came down with a cold last week, in part because I think I was stressing more than I realized. Last night, finally, I had a little meltdown, and I’ve been iredeemably sad all day.

I know I’m not the only one. Mel called me last night to let me know Dave was home and wouldn’t be flying today, which made me feel better, and she sounded pretty subdued too. Around midnight last night, I sent out a copy of “Jacob’s Ladder“ to most of my friends on e-mail. I’ve only gotten a few responses, which doesn’t surprise me, considering I gave everybody the out of not reading it. One from Elizabeth, which I quote in full, as it seems rather heartening:

Thank you for the poem. You must explain to me, as I have not seen very much about Ground Zero—did they have searchlights there? I have to say that this anniversary seems to [have] affected the young thugs I teach. They are more moved and touched than by the minute’s silence we hold for Armistice day in November for the millions who died in the World Wars. We were all told to hold a minute’s silence in class today at 1.46 our time. The kids kept reminding me. It seemed somehow one good thing from all the horror that our young people who seem so desensitised to violence and so blase about the plight of others were keen to show their respect and support to those who died and to those who continue to suffer from the consequences.

Would that it had changed the world as we were told it would. If anything these events seem to have made people more entrenched. We in the UK are even closer allies with you in the US and the hardline Muslim fundamentalists are just as, if not more, filled with hate for the ways of the West. When will we learn what the legacy of hate is?

I shall think of you with your public readings—how astonishing that sounds. To have a voice and something worth saying to the world—now that is something you have to stop the madness. I in the meantime will return to trying to educate the great unwashed, the philistines and barbarians of the East Midlands!

My love to you—glad to know you are still safe and well and the muse is still with you.

Elizabeth

Paul says this in his email, pretty much summing up how I’ve been all day.

Flee,

…didn’t think I’d be as emotional today as I am! I “lost it” several times in the car this morning - on my way to work. The second moment of silence, a tribute to the second fallen tower, really got to me! Like you, I’d like to put it behind me, but can’t. There were too many people that died to ever forget about 9-11!

…hope all is well!

Love,

Paul

And Steven, at work today, managed to voice the thing I’d been thinking all day, how you want to say “Happy 9/11” just to acknowledge it, but obviously that’s just not right. What do you say? “Unhappy 9/11”?

But I nearly had the real meltdown on the train on the way home tonight. Canal Street, W Train: Young guy, early 20’s, blond, in great shape, full of life and the certain immortality of that age, gets on with a beautiful and very expensive mountain bike. As we’re going over the bridge, I notice he’s wearing a Fire Department T-shirt. Not only a Fire Department T-shirt, but one that says “1st class 2002—In the Shadow of Giants.”

Gah.

Saturday, September 14, 2002

I Spy

They've caught Mohammed Atta’s old roommate, the alleged 20th hijacker who supposedly helped plan the attack. Atta’s become the one-man focus of fear and hatred in the past year. You never hear about the other hijackers, just him.

At the same time, there’s been an alleged terrorist cell busted up in Buffalo. Five American-born men, accused of giving material support to terrorists, whatever that means. I can’t help wondering if the men Dennis saw on the plane on his way up to Syracuse, the ones he was so vehement about reporting to the FBI, were part of it. Hearing about it made me remember how angry he was, when we were all sitting around talking the week after, at work, and how amazed and rather frightened I was by the transformation in him.

Yesterday, three medical students were stopped on their way to Miami, after a woman in Georgia overhead them in a cafe making jokes about 9/11. Two of them were naturalized citizens, all of them of Eastern or Middle Eastern background. Part of me wonders if that would have happened up here, or only in the South, as though bigotry doesn’t exist up here. It was an almost knee-jerk reaction to hearing a southern female voice describing what she’d heard the men say. What do you call that? Meta-bigotry?

I feel sorry for the men who were picked up, especially in the south. I don’t imagine they got a very nice reception. Or at least not the kind of reception that the nice white people who work at AKRF have gotten from the local cops and FBI when picked up for photographing, say, power plants, or waterworks for the Con Edison and Catskill Watershed projects, i.e., the “Sorry, we're just doing our job”
wink-wink nudge-nudge “we know you’re not really a terrorist” apology. I remember how glad we were that it wasn’t Mohammed who’d been doing the photographing. We might never have gotten him out again, Ph.D. or not, considering he’s from Egypt. Or Cathy’s sweet, sweet friend Rusi, from India. Or quiet, harmless, kind Adnan, from Pakistan, whom Marcia started calling Dadnan when his first child was born here.

The scariest part of this, for me, was hearing people in Times Square interviewed about whether they'd do the same thing this woman in Georgia did. Would they turn in someone who was making “suspicious comments”?

Every one of them said yes.

I hate this. I freakin’ hate this. It’s disgusting and evil to go around suspecting other people of wrongdoing simply because of their color and nationality. We never learn to stop doing it.

Sunday, September 15, 2002

Grand Reopening

All the subway stations that were demolished, destroyed, or damaged by 9/11 are reopening today, except for the 1 & 9 and A & C World Trade Center stops, which are now merely stretches of covered tunnel running beneath the site. This means the N & R Cortlandt Street station will be open when I go to work tomorrow, which is going to be really strange and a little eerie. I almost want to get off there and see what it looks like. I might be able to stand it now.

I’m still amazed at how quickly we’ve cleaned up. Such a contrast between this crime scene and mess the narcs left behind when they tossed the apartment downstairs. Our door still doesn’t close right.

I wonder if they’ll take down the flags?

Monday, September 16, 2002

Seeing Daylight

It’s creepy seeing sunlight at the top of the exit stairs in the downtown Cortlandt Street station. The exit is truncated, with two stairways leading onto the street, where it used to be a long hallway leading into the shopping mall basement of the south tower. Now it’s the edge of a big hole in the ground.

The flags are gone.

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Look Away

Apparently there’s a statue at Rockefeller Center that was originally intended as a memorial but has caused so much trauma that it’s now covered and in the process of being removed. I haven’t seen it, but even hearing it described on the radio, I don’t know quite what to think. I don’t like art censorship, or censorship of almost any kind, for that matter, although I understand the need for discretion in certain situations involving national security. I don’t always agree with who gets to decide the criteria in that case, or on the decisions they make, but I do understand that it’s a tough call.

Censorship of art is entirely another matter. It’s just wrong. The whole Robert Mapplethorpe debacle in Cincinnati? Shameful. Nobody held a gun to anyone’s head and made them look at those photographs if they didn’t want to. Same with our esteemed ex-mayor Giuliani trying to cut off the Brooklyn Musuem’s funds for showing art that might offend Catholics. I mean, I think the Pope can probably take it. And if it really torques God, He doesn't need Rudy’s help to do something about it.

I think part of the purpose of art is to challenge us to think about things differently, which means it isn’t always pretty, nor should it be—like the sculpture called “Nuclear War Head” I saw in the Chicago Institute of Arts that was simply an oversized, terra cotta head, mildly representational, pocked and burned and ravaged, toothless, bleeding, ulcerated, ugly and deeply powerful. The statue in Rockefeller Center sounds something like that: a representational life-size figure of a naked woman, falling from one of the towers head first, at the moment of impact.

I cannot imagine anything more horrific, more tasteless, more emblematic of what we went through, more shocking, more outrageous, more true.

Part of me wants the statue removed pronto. Part of me thinks the artist got it just right. Part of me thinks he was nucking futs to make something like that. Part of me wants to see it. I read at least two essays during the anniversary week about people jumping from the towers. One of them focused on exactly the same man I did in my poem, “Each Step is a Fall, Arrested.” That’s a powerful, awful moment.

Should people passing through that public space have to look at it every day? Probably not. But we saw it once and couldn’t look away. Now we can. Better to have that choice, and remember when we didn’t.

Saturday, September 21, 2002

Look Away, Part 2

Finally found a picture of the offending statue to get a look at it. It’s by Eric Fischl, called Tumbling Woman. I’m having a hard time finding anything offensive about it, at least from the pictures. Perhaps it’s one of those pieces that’s context sensitive. From this angle, the woman doesn’t even look like she’s falling, necessarily. It’s too graceful, too neat. I can’t see the expression on the face, which might really be the problem, but it doesn’t remind me of people jumping from the towers at all, especially since she’s nude. But it’s really the attitude of the body that doesn’t work for me in that respect.

Which is not to say I don’t think it’s a successful piece, or good art. But it leaves me indifferent. Funny. I wonder what I’m missing, what other people are seeing that’s so upsetting.

What an anticlimax.