by Simon Schama
The media, reaching for one of their war-horse clichés (the other being sports), were quick to chorus that what happened was beyond the imaginings of the most feverish disaster movie. But the truth is that if the script of Bloody Tuesday had been offered to a studio, it would have been turned down not for the scale of the horror, but for its failure to supply identifiable villains. America’s only usable analogy, Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, is on everyone’s lips, on the streets and in the news studios. But there was no rising sun – nor for that matter a crescent moon – painted on the fuselage of the airplanes which slammed into the World Trade Center on Tuesday. Their markings belonged instead to United Airlines, whose corporate logo welcomes passengers to ‘The Friendly Skies’.
Franklin Roosevelt bunched up American anguish and fury in his big meaty fist and smacked it out again as a war launched against an identifiable foe. The high-voltage energy on which American culture runs could be harnessed right away on concrete, practical work. Enlistment lines stretched round the block. Rubber and aluminium drives got under way. Trepidation surrendered to resolution. It was all very clear-cut; the way America likes it.
But this time the go-and-get-em American responses are scrambled by the terrifying diffuseness of the threat and the inconvenience of the enemy not being any sort of discernible nation state. ‘Should the President and Congress make a formal declaration of war?’ asked one CNN correspondent last night to another. ‘Against whom, exactly?’ he reasonably replied. She wasn’t listening. ‘But shouldn’t we declare war?’ she repeated, pointlessly. ‘How about carpet-bombing everything between Jordan and Nepal?’ one of my downtown friends who had seen the towers collapse in front of his eyes sardonically asked a belligerent comrade-in-suffering. ‘Well, yes, that might take care of it,’ was his reply. America, as Alexis de Tocqueville noticed in the mid-nineteenth century, was founded, and runs, on impatience.
Allied to impatience and impetuousness, de Tocqueville thought, was an uncompromising individualism, the American religion of self-sufficiency before which any sense of community would always have to yield. And you would suppose that if self-interest is a national cult on this side of the Atlantic, New York, the Look-at-me metropolis, would be its cathedral. But you’d be wrong. Foreigners – especially perhaps Britons who, on the basis of very little first-hand experience, still think of America as some sort of petulant child liable to throw a thermonuclear tantrum when denied its ice cream – always get New York, not to say the rest of the republic over which they used to fly en route to a ski-lodge in Colorado or the Golden Gate Bridge, wrong. This is a loud city all right, but decibels have nothing to do with decency, or the lack of it, and in the ten years I’ve been here, I’ve seen countless acts of spontaneous humanity that belie New York’s reputation for callous narcissism.
In our first winter here, we managed to blow a tyre in the midst of a snowstorm, right under the George Washington Bridge, the neighbourhood which at that time richly merited its reputation as the crack capital of the Western world, and with the burned-out hulks of what once had been cars ominously decorating the roadside. But the cops who came to our rescue not only asked what they could do, but went ahead and changed the tyre (perhaps instantly sizing me up as someone seriously challenged in the jack-and-lugnut department). Since then I’ve seen ordinary New Yorkers go out of their way to help out people who were ill, lost or distressed in street, subway and park.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that this is the real city of angels. It’s just that it’s a city where people want to be doing, and if good is what has to be done, it gets done. So if there was any doubt that New York wouldn’t be able to ‘take it’ on the chin like blitzed London, or that its citizens were too pampered a bunch to respond to catastrophe with anything but a panicky stampede to save their designer-label jogging shoes, it ought to have been laid to rest, first by the grieving calm which characterised the city and then by the outpouring of mass volunteerism which followed hard on the heels of the inferno. So many lined up quietly to volunteer for anything they could be called on to do that they had to be turned away. Lines formed round the block, waiting for hours to give blood; even when, to everyone’s sorrow, there seemed to be precious few to give blood to.
We already have our local heroes and 300 of them are dead – the firemen, police and paramedics who were on the scene attempting to get people out of the World Trade Center when the towers fell on them. Their graves are the twisted remains of fire engines, shrouded, like everything else below 14th Street in a thick pall of grey ash, much of it dense with asbestos. Entire ladder companies disappeared in that holocaust.
Even to card-carrying liberals like me who have sometimes had misgivings about his red-hot temper, Mayor Giuliani changed overnight from Mussolini to Mother Teresa, appearing everywhere, often putting himself in harm’s way, to comfort the distraught, encourage the exhausted and, perhaps most important of all (especially at his press conferences), to tell the truth. A more inspiring example of common decency and instinctively practical humanity in public life you could not possibly imagine.
In glaring contrast, George Bush has yet to show his face on the island of Manhattan, lest a sooty cinder or two land on the smoothly shaved presidential chin. New Yorkers, who don’t take kindly to being stood up, especially at times like this, are beginning to sound as though they might want to land something else, for all their initial basic instinct to rally round the flag and the man who is supposed to embody it.
Nor has the presidential performance on television been exactly Churchillian. Instead of bringing a traumatised country together as a family, united in shared grief and fortitude; instead of evoking the spirit of American trials past and how the republic has endured them, Bush (or his speechwriters, who need to get out of the East Wing and into the back yards of the bereft) has depended on warmed-up platitudes inherited, like much of the National Security cabinet, from the administration of Poppy and Reagan.
With every repetition of the fighting cliché, ‘Make no mistake’, the deeper the sinking feeling that neither he nor his administration has a clue about how to reboot their systems away from the comic-book obsession with ‘missile defence’ to actually protecting America from men with razor blades, box-cutters and Arabic flight-training manuals, much less an elementary degree in anthrax 101.
So instead of listening to cowboy pieties, or endlessly respooling video horror, or seeing in our mind’s eye those twin towers as phantom, 110-storey tombstones, we turn to those who do, miraculously, know what they’re supposed to say, feel and do: to Jeremy Glick who phoned his wife from the hijacked plane over Pennsylvania to tell her there had been a vote of all the men aboard to try to overpower the hijackers, even though they knew it would cost them all their lives, and who saved who-knows-how-many other lives by doing just that; to the son and daughter of one of the dead passengers letting themselves be interviewed on morning TV so they could appeal to the airlines to get their sister, marooned in London, back to the States for their father’s funeral; to the handful of politicians who know when to speak and when to shut up; to all those in this suddenly, shockingly loving town who understand, especially when they hear the word ‘revenge’ thundered out by talk-show warriors, that the best, the only revenge, when you’re fighting a cult that fetishises death, is life.
The Dead and the Guilty:
9/11 a year on
Guardian, 11 September 2002
For one afternoon, at least, it was grievously simple: Britons and Americans gathered, indivisibly, to mourn a shared massacre.
No terrorist attack in history had ever claimed more British lives: sixty-seven. So it seemed right that a dark Manchester drizzle was falling on Fifth Avenue on 20 September as mourners – and we were all mourners – climbed the steps of St Thomas’s church, a piece of pure Barsetshire dropped into midtown Manhattan.
The usual suspects filed in: the Clintons, Kofi Annan, Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki. But before Tony and Cherie Blair ar
rived, a side door beside the choir opened and the British bereaved walked in to take their pews at the front of the church.
At once the brittle stylishness of the city collapsed into pathos. They were Britain: shapeless tweed jackets with leather elbow patches; reading glasses by Boots; Jermyn Street shirts for the upper crust. They looked lost in calamity; lost in New York. Bravery masked some faces; jaws set; staring straight ahead, afraid to blink.
Others bore the unmistakable marks of helpless, uncomprehending sorrow: red-rimmed eyes; cheeks pale with distraction, or bearing layers of repeatedly and hopelessly applied make-up. During the service, heads would suddenly bow as if bent with unsupportable feeling. At no point in particular, shoulders gently shook. An arm would reach round to do what it could.
Body language was everything that day and that week. Words had never seemed so redundant; so incapable of carrying the weight of trauma. Explicitly acknowledging this, knowing that simply showing up counted for more than any eloquence, the Prime Minister kept it brief.
A gaping, blackened ground zero had opened inside every New Yorker (and everyone who had, through the catastrophe, become a New Yorker) and at the smoking core of the misery were, instead of words, images: spools of them, the ones you all know, looping mercilessly. The implausible glide into the steel; the blooming flower of flame; the slow, imploding crumple; the rolling tsunami of dust and shredded paperwork; the terrible drop of bodies, falling with heartbreaking grace like hunted birds.
Icons did the talking. The word means image, but also copy, and the iconology of 9/11, unlike the real thing which was utterly singular, drew on past images to guide instinctive response. Stored memories of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima (itself an organised photo op) prompted the shot of firemen raising the flag on the torn steel ribs of the World Trade Center; a phoenix in the storm of dun ash.
The flags shouted, howled, roared. Tied as fluttering pennants to the radio antennae of Jeeps, they conquered the suburbs, as if drive-by patriotism could of itself make things better.
But other icons wept. In the days and weeks after 9/11 the city was papered with home-made or office-copied posters, bearing photos of missing loved ones, a format hitherto reserved for lost pets. Some of them bore heart-rending pocket attributes as if their indisputable likeability (‘she smiles a lot’; ‘he has three-day stubble’) would jog memories, help find them, bring them back safe and sound.
Quietness spoke volumes. Long lines of blood donors snaked round hospitals and clinics. Cartons of bottled water for rescue workers rose in charitable ziggurats outside police stations and schools.
And when words did finally return, they came back first as inspirational chorale: Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ replacing ‘Take Me Out to the Ballpark’ as the anthem of the seventh-inning break when baseball fans get up and stre . . . tch.
In St Thomas’s too, on the 20th, nothing was sung more fiercely than both national anthems, the Clintons singing ‘God Save the Queen’; game Britons rising to the vocal and verbal challenge of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a song composed during the 1812 war in which we burned Washington and the White House.
Speech returned, haltingly, in two guises: information from the inferno and pieties from the government. Rudolph Giuliani, often flanked by his commissioner of police and the fire department chief (who, respectively lost 80 and 343 of their men), mastered the first genre precisely because it was, for the mayor, a matter of common decency and practical necessity.
When George Bush began to vocalise again, it was with the pieties served up by his speechwriters, confident that his Manichaean declaration of war on evil also answered a deep need in the American public for moral clarity, spiritual consolation and recovered nerve.
He was not wrong about this. The homilies, not to mention the Waynesque vow to hunt the bad guys down – a promise yet to be fulfilled in the case of the al-Qaeda leadership – may have made Islington cringe, but then again Islington was not under attack.
The European press began to squirm uneasily at talk of evil, as if a wine-and-cheese party had suddenly turned into a Pentecostal revival meeting, and looked nervously round for the exit sign. Some of us, more accustomed to the religiosity of American life, had, and have, no problem whatever with using the e-word.
If the calculated mass murder of 3,000 innocent civilians, from eighty countries, many of them Muslims, just ordinary working people going about their business on a sunny September morning, was not an act of absolute evil, then I have no idea what is. The more serious problem with presidential rhetoric was that the Manichaean struggle between good and evil, freedom and terror, was not just the beginning, but apparently also the end of any sustained attempt to articulate just what, in this particular life-and-death struggle, was truly at stake.
Some weeks later Bill Clinton, both at Harvard and in the Richard Dimbleby lecture for the BBC, made exactly that effort. For obvious reasons the ex-president, now a New Yorker, had been sparing with public commentary. But, struggling between prudence and thinly veiled exasperation, he emerged from silence, risking the wrath of patriotic blow-hards, to venture that a refusal to understand the roots of terrorism would be to guarantee its perpetuation.
Lest he be misunderstood, Clinton was also commendably clear on what the battle lines of the already bloody new century would be: the conflict between those who not only claimed a monopoly of wisdom, but the right to impose it on everyone else, against those who claimed neither. Put another way, the fight is between power based on revelation (and thus not open to argument) and power based on persuasion, and thus conditional on argument; militant theocracy against the tolerant Enlightenment.
Since the United States, notwithstanding the Pilgrims and the Great Awakening, was very much the child of the Enlightenment, one might have expected this case for tolerant, secular pluralism to be made in the most adamant and unapologetic fashion by the country’s leadership.
But the shroud of mass reverence which enveloped everyone and everything after 9/11, and which once again is blanketing the anniversary, has succeeded in making secular debate about liberty into an act of indecency, disrespectful of the dead and disloyal to the flag.
The notion that the parliament of tongues is, in fact, our best vindication wins few hearts and minds right now. The centrepiece of Public Television’s anniversary offerings was a Frontline documentary on how 9/11 had affected the religiosity of the nation.
The unsurprising answer is quite a lot. The steady drip of goodness and godliness (multi-faith, naturally) is a reminder of how impossible it seems, two and a half centuries later in America, for the magnitude of a calamity – in Voltaire’s case, the Lisbon earthquake – to prompt awkward questions about either the competence or the benevolence of the Almighty.
More than one of the widows of 9/11, though, has been heard to say that she no longer talks to God; she talks to her dead husband. For the most part, though, to say out loud (as a few courageous souls have done) that religious revelation – Judaic and Christian as well as Muslim, not least the notion of a paradise for the pure – is the problem, is to risk immediate and irrevocable patriotic anathema.
Deist scepticism is, I’m sure, too cold a comfort to wish on the distraught, a mere year after the slaughter. As therapy for the traumatised, Bruce Springsteen’s new hymnal, complete with gospel-choir backing and ringing with resurrectional themes of The Rising, will beat Candide every time. But the need to break clear from the suffocation of reverent togetherness is not just a matter of philosophical self-respect. The immediate future of the American Republic depends on it.
That the Bush administration would always prefer prayers to politics, avoiding at all costs debate, both within its own ranks and in the public arena, has long been apparent. Silence and secrecy, punctuated with disingenuousness, have consistently been its preferred modus operandi. (The problem with the Clintonites was something like the opposite: incontinent gabbiness.)
To this day, Dick Chene
y, the most padlocked of all the senior members of the administration, refuses, even under legal pressure, to disclose to Congress the substance of what was discussed in closed meetings with energy-industry executives, leading to the formulation of a policy which corresponded precisely to the needs of business, rather than environmental lobbyists.
So we should not wonder at the aversion to debate, for the United States Inc. is currently being run by an oligarchy, conducting its affairs with a plutocratic effrontery which in comparison makes the age of the robber barons in the late nineteenth century seem a model of capitalist rectitude. The dominant managerial style of the oligarchy is golf-club chumminess; its messages exchanged along with hot stock tips by the mutual scratching and slapping of backs.
The corporations from which the government draws much of its personnel, including its chief executive, and which, on taking office, boasted of their business savoir faire, have not, in truth, produced very much, though some of them, like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for creative accounting practices, have been past masters at converting political connections into corporate advantage and both into personal wealth.
The President himself owed his position at Harken Energy entirely to his name, and once there used it to get a stadium built from public funds for his Texas Rangers baseball team.
The Secretary of the Army, Thomas White – currently, one supposes, planning a war not a million miles away from a rich source of oil – was actually an executive of the spectacularly corrupt and incompetent Enron Corporation, whose implosion began the unravelling of scoundrel capitalism.