The Time of Our Lives
Page 26
I think he’s back in style. And none too soon.
Welcome back, Duke.
And once again: Thank you, men of Sept. 11.
Time to Put the Emotions Aside
Tomorrow begins the post-9/11-trauma era.
The Wall Street Journal: September 11, 2002
Rudy Giuliani said the other day that he wasn’t absolutely sure the next morning, on Sept. 12 that the sun would actually come up. When it did, he was grateful. And so we are today, as we mark the anniversary of the day that changed our lives.
We are all busy remembering. A friend in Washington emails in the middle of the night yesterday: She cannot sleep because jets are roaring overhead, and because this is the anniversary of the last time she talked to Barbara Olson. Another email, from an acquaintance: “Last year this time we were comforting each other in instant messages.” Most everyone is getting and sending these messages.
I thought it would be flatter, this formal time of remembering, and not so authentic. Days that are supposed to be rich in meaning often aren’t. But people seem to be vividly re-feeling what they experienced a year ago, and being caught unaware, mugged by a memory. Last week a friend was telling me where he was, and in the middle of the telling a sob rose from nowhere and cut off his words. Yesterday on CNN Rosalynn Carter seemed taken aback by welling tears when she was asked how she had explained terrible events to her children when they were young. She told them, she said, that bad times didn’t mean God wasn’t there. Bad times meant God was weeping, too.
Washington is marking this day with patriotism and a certain martial dignity. New York is approaching the anniversary with solemnity and respect. We are immersing ourselves in the trauma to free ourselves of the preoccupation. The great words of great presidents will be read, and some schoolchildren will hear the Gettysburg Address and the Preamble to the Constitution for the first time.
A company of bagpipers will cross the Brooklyn Bridge, retracing the route of the hardy firemen of Brooklyn who roared across the bridge toward Manhattan a year ago this morning. Sirens blaring, they craned their necks to see the smoking ruins of the place where they would make their stand. For six months after that day, bagpipes were the sound of New York in mourning. They were played at all the funerals. None of us in New York will ever hear their rich and lonely wail in the same way again.
* * *
What we are doing is taking a last hard and heartbreaking look at what happened last year. In time we will put the memories away, pack them away in a box with a pair of old gloves, and a citation and a badge, and some clippings and pictures. This is what Emily Dickinson called “the sweeping up the heart.” She said it was “solemnest of industries enacted upon earth.”
But before we put it all away, there is a story to remember. There was a glittering city, the greatest in the history of man, a place of wild creativity, of getting, grabbing and selling, of bustle and yearning and greed. It was brutally attacked by a band of primitives. The city reeled. We knew what to expect: The selfish, heartless city-dwellers would trample children in their path as they raced for safety, they’d fight for the lifeboats like the wealthy on the Titanic.
It didn’t happen. It wasn’t that way at all. They were better than they knew! They saved each other—they ran to each other’s aid, they died comforting strangers.
Then the capital city was attacked, and there too goodness broke out. And sleeping boomers on planes came awake and charged the cockpit to keep the plane from hitting the home of the American president.
And then the mighty nation hit back at the primitives, and hit again.
This is, truly, some story. This is not a terrible thing to have to tell our children. It is a warm story. But now a certain coldness is in order.
* * *
The sun rises tomorrow on the new era, the post-9/11-trauma era. We will make our way through the next year without the wild emotional force of 9/11 pushing us forward. We can be cool now, and deadly if need be.
This can be the year when we find Osama bin Laden. This, the next 12 months, can be when we deal the death blow to the Taliban, for this drama will not even begin to end until we have laid Osama and Osama-ism low. This is one case in which justice and vengeance are intertwined.
This is the year when the president and his advisers will or will not make the case, as they say, on Iraq. The president thinks a key part of the war on terror will be moving against Saddam Hussein and liberating Iraq from his heavy hand. But if Mr. Bush is to make the case it will not be with emotional rhetoric, with singing phrases, with high oratory. It will not, in this coming cooler time, be made with references to evil ones. All of that was good, excellent and Bushian the past passionate year. But now Mr. Bush should think in terms of Sgt. Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
“Saddam is evil” is not enough. A number of people are evil, and some are even our friends. “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” is not enough. A number of countries do. What the people need now is hard data that demonstrate conclusively that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which he is readying to use on the people of the U.S. or the people of the West.
If Mr. Bush has a good case, he will make it and the people will back him. If he does not, he will not convince the American people that blood and treasure must go to this endeavor. The people must believe, as Mr. Bush does, that their children are endangered. There was a time—I think it was Sept. 10, 2001—that Americans may not have been able to accept such an assertion. That time has passed.
* * *
There’s another area where coldness is called for. The folly of what is happening to our airline industry is due to a wet and weepy conception of what is fair. People are afraid to fly because they see what a politically correct joke our airline security is. Searching for every last toenail clipper, forcing 85-year-old people with walkers to stand spread-eagled as some oafish wand-wielder in a blue jacket humiliates them—this is absurd and cowardly. Let’s get coldly serious: Arm the pilots, fortify cockpits, man flights with marshals and profile passengers. We don’t have a transportation secretary who is willing to do these things. Someday when something terrible happens we’ll wish we did. Why not coldly remove Norman Mineta now?
Warm tears, honest remembrances, passionate tributes, giving credit where it’s due, absorbing 9/11, teaching our children what it meant and means: These are good things. And a little coldness starting at sunrise tomorrow: That will be good, too.
The Nightmare and the Dreams
How has September 11 affected our national unconscious?
The Wall Street Journal: July 19, 2002
It is hot in New York. It is so hot that once when I had a fever a friend called and asked me how I felt and I said, “You know how dry and hot paper feels when it’s been faxed? That’s how I feel.” And how I felt all day yesterday. We feel as if we’ve been faxed.
I found myself fully awake at 5 a.m. yesterday and went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. Now more than ever the bridge, with its silver-corded cables and dense stone casements, seems like a great gift to my city. It spans. In the changed landscape of downtown it is our undisturbed beauty, grown ever more stately each year. People seem to love it more now, or at least mention it more or notice it more. So do I. It’s always full of tourists but always full of New Yorkers, too.
I am struck, as I always am when I’m on it, that I am walking on one of the engineering wonders of the world. And I was struck yesterday that I was looking at one of the greatest views in the history of man’s creation: Manhattan at sunrise. The casements were like medieval arches; the businessmen with umbrellas like knights without horses, storming the city walls; and the walls were silver, blue and marble in the light.
And all of it was free. A billionaire would pay billions to own this bridge and keep this view, but I and my jogging, biking and hiking confreres have it for nothing. We inherited it.
The sun rose in haze, its edges indistinct, but even at 6:30 a.m. you could feel i
t heavy on your arms and shoulders. When I looked at it I thought of what Robert Bolt called the desert sun in his screenplay of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” He called it the Anvil.
* * *
As I rounded the entrance to the bridge on the Brooklyn side, a small moment added to my happiness. It was dawn, traffic was light, I passed a black van with smoked windows. In the driver’s seat with the window down was a black man of 30 or so, a cap low on his brow, wearing thick black sunglasses. I was on the walkway that leads to the bridge; he was less than two feet away; we were the only people there. We made eye contact. “Good morning!” he said. “Good morning to you,” I answered, and for no reason at all we started to laugh, and moved on into the day. Nothing significant in it except it may or may not have happened that way 30 or 40 years ago. I’m not sure the full charge of friendliness would have been assumed or answered.
It made me think of something I saw Monday night on local TV and thought to point out somewhere along the way. They were showing the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy, the slightly creaking old drama—It was slightly creaking when it first came out—about a young white woman and a young black man who fall in love, hope to marry and must contend with disapproving parents on both sides. It’s held up well. Parts of it seemed moving in a way I didn’t remember, and pertinent. Sidney Poitier, who has always brought his own natural stature to whatever part he’s playing, had a lovely kind of sweet intelligence, and everyone in the movie was physically beautiful, in the way of the old productions of the old Hollywood.
There was a bit of dialogue that packed a wallop. Spencer Tracy as the father of the would-be bride is pressing Mr. Poitier on whether he has considered the sufferings their mixed-race children might have to endure in America. Has he thought about this? Has his fiancée? “She is optimistic,” says Mr. Poitier. “She thinks every one of them will grow up to become president of the United States. I on the other hand would settle for secretary of state.” Those words, written 35 years ago by the screenwriter William Rose, may have seemed dreamy then. But in its audience when the movie came out would likely have been a young, film-loving Army lieutenant named Colin Powell who, that year, was preparing for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. And now he is secretary of state. This is the land dreams are made of.
* * *
Late Tuesday, on a subway ride from Brooklyn to the north of Manhattan, I resaw something I’d noticed and forgotten about. It is that more and more, on the streets and on the train, I see people wearing ID tags. We all wear IDs now. We didn’t use to. They hang from thick cotton string or an aluminum chain; they’re encased in a plastic sleeve or laminated; they’re worn one at a time or three at a time, but they’re there.
I ponder the existential implications. What does it mean that we wear IDs? What are we saying, or do we think we’re saying? I mean aside from the obvious.
I imagined yesterday the row of people across from me on the train, looking up all of a sudden from their newspaper, their paperback, their crossword puzzle book and answering one after another:
“It means I know who I am,” says the man in blue shirt and suspenders.
“It means I can get into the building,” says the woman in gray.
“It means I am a solid citizen with a job.”
“I am known to others in my workplace.”
“I’m not just blowing through life, I’m integrated into it. I belong to something. I receive a regular paycheck.”
“I have had a background check done by security and have been found to be a Safe Person. Have you?”
I wonder if unemployed people on the train look at the tags around the other people’s necks and think, Soon I hope I’ll have one, too. I wonder if kids just getting their first job at 17 will ever know that in America we didn’t all used to be ID’d. Used to be only for people who worked in nuclear power plants or great halls of government. Otherwise you could be pretty obscure. Which isn’t a bad way to be.
I work at home on my own and do not have an ID. But I am considering issuing myself one and having it laminated at the local Hallmark shop. It will have a nice picture and a title—President, CEO & CFO. I will wear it on the subway and when I get home I will hold it up in front of my doorbell, which I’ll rig so when I swipe the tag my front door pops open. Then I’ll turn to the friends I’m with and wink. “I know people here. I can get you in.”
* * *
A month ago there were news reports of a post-Sept. 11 baby boom. Everyone was so rocked by news of their mortality that they realized there will never be a perfect time to have kids but we’re here now so let’s have a family. I believed the baby-boom story and waited for the babies.
Then came the stories saying: Nah, there is no baby boom, it’s all anecdotal, there’s no statistical evidence to back it up. And I believed that, too. But I’ve been noticing something for weeks now. In my neighborhood there is a baby boom. There are babies all over in Brooklyn. It is full of newborns, of pink soft-limbed infants in cotton carriers on daddy’s chest. It is full of strollers, not only regular strollers but the kind that carry two children—double-wides. And triple-wides. In the stores and on the streets there are babies cooing, dribbling, staring, sleeping. I see them and feel a rush of tenderness. I want to kiss their feet, I want to make them laugh. Kids are always looking for someone to make them laugh. The sight of any dog can do it. The sight of another baby can do it. The sight of an idiotic adult covering her eyes with her hands and moving her hands away quickly can do it. I would know.
I don’t care what anyone says, there have got to be data that back up what I’m seeing: that after Sept. 11, there was at least a Brooklyn baby boom.
* * *
A dream boom, too. The other day I spoke with a friend I hadn’t seen since the world changed. He was two blocks away when the Towers fell, and he saw everything. We have all seen the extraordinary footage of that day, seen it over and over, but few of us have seen what my friend described: how in the office buildings near the World Trade Center they stood at the windows and suddenly darkness enveloped them as the Towers collapsed and the demonic cloud swept through. “It was total darkness,” he told me. But the lights were on. They stood in his office wearing wet surgical masks. They couldn’t go out, but inside their building the smoke worked its way into the air conditioning. So they turned it off and stood there sweating and watching on TV what was happening two blocks away.
Did you see those forced to jump? I asked.
“Yes,” he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.
Have you had bad dreams?
“Yes,” he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.
I thought about this for a few days. My friend is brilliant and by nature a describer of things felt and seen. But not this time. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist. Are your patients getting extraordinary dreams? I asked.
“Always,” he laughs.
Sept. 11 related?
“Yes,” he says, mostly among adolescents.
I asked if he was saving them, writing them down. He shook his head no.
So: The Sept. 11 Dream Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I’m not sure why. I think maybe down the road I will try to write about them. Maybe not. I am certain, however, that dreams can be an expression of a nation’s unconscious, if there can be said to be such a thing, and deserve respect. (Carl Jung thought so.)
To respect is to record. There is a response function at the end of this column, and you can use it to send in your Sept. 11–related dream—recurring, unusual, striking, whatever. (If you are a psychiatrist, send as many as you like—without identifying your patients, of course.) I will read them, and appreciate them and possibly weave them into a piece on what Sept. 11 has done to our dream lives and to our imaginations, when our imaginations are operating on their own, unfettered, unstopped, spanning.
I Just Called to Say I Love You
/> The sounds of 9/11, beyond the metallic roar.
The Wall Street Journal: September 8, 2006
Everyone remembers the pictures, but I think more and more about the sounds. I always ask people what they heard that day in New York. We’ve all seen the film and videotape, but the sound equipment of television crews didn’t always catch what people have described as the deep metallic roar.
The other night on TV there was a documentary on the Iron Workers of New York’s Local 40, whose members ran to the site when the Towers fell. They pitched in on rescue, then stayed for eight months to deconstruct a skyscraper some of them had helped build 35 years before. An ironworker named Jim Gaffney said, “My partner kept telling me the buildings are coming down and I’m saying ‘no way.’ Then we heard that noise that I will never forget. It was like a creaking and then the next thing you felt the ground rumbling.”
Rudy Giuliani said it was like an earthquake. The actor Jim Caviezel saw the second plane hit the Towers on television and what he heard shook him: “A weird, guttural, discordant sound,” he called it, a sound exactly like lightning. He knew because earlier that year he’d been hit. My son, then a teenager in a high school across the river from the Towers, heard the first plane go in at 8:45 a.m. It sounded, he said, like a heavy truck going hard over a big street grate.
* * *
I think, too, about the sounds that came from within the buildings and within the planes—the phone calls and messages left on answering machines, all the last things said to whoever was home and picked up the phone. They awe me, those messages.