September 2001 Archives
After
“There are no words.”
It was only happening a couple of dozen blocks away, but I’d
come down from the roof, and was watching the World Trade Center attacks
on the television, just like the rest of the planet. The second tower
had just imploded, and the anchor on CNN said pretty much the only
thing to stay with me all day. There are no words: it’s impossible
to think, let alone write, the emotions and implications of something
like this.
I saw a lot of it from my roof, a lot from television, a lot just
riding around downtown Manhattan on my bicycle. The initial rush of
adrenalin when we heard that a plane had flown into the first tower
became unspeakable horror when we saw a second one do exactly the
same thing: at a stroke, we knew this was the most horrific terrorist
attack of all time. And then when things got worse by orders of magnitude
when the towers collapsed… there are no words.
Yes, New Yorkers will now live in the knowledge that they are vulnerable,
just like Londoners have done for years. But whatever has happened
in London just doesn’t compare to this. I worked no more than
three minutes’ walk from the World Trade Center for nearly all
my time in New York, and I know every street corner on the television
intimately. The Millenium Hilton (sic), Liberty Square Park, Vesey
Street, West Street – they look a bit like they do after a big
ticker-tape parade, only instead of being covered in celebratory paper,
they’re covered in the aftermath of tragedy and death. I spoke
to one friend today who told of a New York Post photographer who had
body parts flying past her on the West Side Highway; the guy next
door to me in my apartment building was on the 30th floor and, although
he got out fine, saw dozens of people either jump or fall out of the
80th story.
Rudy Giuliani has really come through today; when he gave a press
conference and announced that the fire chief and his deputy –
both good friends of his – had died, but at the same time kept
his eye very much on the bigger picture, he seemed a thousand times
the man that George Pataki, to his right, or George W. Bush, earlier
on the television, had. Far too many politicians, reporters, and pundits
have spewed far too many platitudes about evil and the loss of life;
most of us in New York aren’t going to be able to come to terms
with the magnitude of what has happened for a long time yet. I still
can’t believe that the World Trade Center isn’t there any
more, and it’s been a good 15 hours now since it’s been
gone. It’s not just a part of the skyline: it’s a part of
every New Yorker’s life. When you’re disoriented coming
out of the subway, you just look for the World Trade Center, and you
know that’s south.
Personally, I can’t think of any single deliberate event since
Nagasaki in which so many people died. I don’t know whether today
is going to change the course of history, but it certainly puts a
final full stop to the glorious decade of peace dividends and bull
markets that we had from 1990-2000. If this is the 21st century, I’m
not sure I want to sign on.
What today has done, though, is remind me of the value of my friendships,
and how good our life really is. To everyone I ought to have been
in touch with more recently, to everyone whose phone call I never
got around to returning, to everyone I should have spent more time
with (which is everyone I know, really): I love you all. Maybe we
need something unutterably bad to remind us of what is really important
and good.
Posted by Felix at 1:25 EST | Comments (0)
Magazine notes
New Yorker fact-checkers, where are you? In the big lead story in this week's issue, Jon Lee Anderson's profile of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, we find this:
World Bank or International Monetary Fund austerity packages in return for debt renegotiation are central to neoliberal programs.
I really don't have the inclination right now to go into the multitude of ways in which this is incorrect. But anybody with any knowledge of the subject would have told any fact-checker that there's no way that sentence should ever appear in a news magazine.
Vanity Fair runs its annual boring listing of the "50 leaders of the information age" (in fact, there are 64). The list includes five women (Meg Whitman, Marjorie Scardino, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and Paramount's Sherry Lansing) and three non-whites (Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Yang, and Sony's Nobuyuki Idei). Everyone else is a middle-aged white guy. At least we don't need to see another of Annie Liebowitz's equally boring photos of them all lined up at Sun Valley.
Posted by Felix at 1:28 EST | Comments (0)
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