WARTIME IN THE BIG APPLE
Taking it personally
I cannot but take it personally. I may have been living in
Paris for a dozen years, but I grew up in New York, and spent the
first twenty four years of my life there.
Or rather here.
For I am writing this in November in New York, in the front
room of an apartment on 9th Street and Avenue of the Americas--the
very room, looking out the very window, from which I was looking
out at a crowd forming on the avenue and looking south on Septem-
ber 11, 2001.
From my angle, I couldn't see the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center, or rather, as I was soon to learn, that they were no
longer there. I showed Dona Sadock, whose apartment it was and
is, the crowd forming on the street below, expressing my curiosity
at what they could all be looking at.
"Oh," she said diffidently, "they shoot movies here all the
time, no doubt just another one."
I called my agent to make an appointment, but I was told by
his receptionist that he wouldn't be coming into work today be-
cause of what had happened.
"What happened?"
And she told me.
And I dashed down in the street, into the buzzing, milling
crowd, looked south, and saw--nothing.
The familiar giant monoliths simply were not there, as if
Stanley Kubrick had commanded the set struck and ordered them
teleported back to Jupiter.
Instead there was an immense roiling rising cloud of dense
black smoke where they had been. And the smell. Even from these
several kilometers away, you couldn't avoid the acrid chemical
tang of it, and beneath that, the subliminal pheremonal odor of
the shock and anger of the dazed onlookers.
I dashed up to the apartment to get Dona, who already had the
TV on and told me that the area below 14th Street had been de-
clared a no-go zone to vehicular traffic, possibly a barricaded
zone to pedestrians as well.
Call it base instinct, call it survival instinct, and I was
far from the only one responding to it, I ran back into the
streets, looking for an open supermarket, of which there were
none. Only a few small stores were open, and they were already
clogged with people frantically scooping up what they could from
the shelves in a hoarding panic before it all disappeared, and I
did likewise. Toilet paper. Whatever canned goods I could grab.
Milk. Butter. Eggs. Bread. Packaged cheese. Whatever was still
left that I could lay hands on before someone else did.
That night we were out on the streets, and most people, at
least downtown in Greenwich Village, seemed to be gripped by the
same gregarious tropism, for there was a strange electric charge
in the air, the bars and restaurants were full, strangers babbled
to each other about the only topic there was.
Hard to explain why to anyone who has never been a New York-
er, but I was proud of the town that night. There's a T-shirt
that maybe comes close. On the front it says "I'm from L.A., trust
me." On the back it says "I'm from New York, fuck you."
That night that I conceived what should be rebuilt to replace
the Twin Towers: two new twin towers, higher enough than what had
been destroyed to be world's tallest buildings. Atop one, I'd
place a floodlit piece of the wreckage. Atop the other would be a
giant floodlit replica of the hand of the Statue of Liberty.
It wouldn't be holding a torch. Instead it would be holding
aloft New York's collective index finger, a mighty and eternal
fuck you to whoever and whatever so foolishly presumed that even
such a catastrophe could dull the edge and daunt the true spirit
of the Big Apple.
Taking it on The Tube.
Dona and I had lived together decades ago, broken up, gone
our separate ways, and this was supposed to be a romantic essay at
reunion. And it was. Though, of course, not as we had imagined,
let alone ever intended.
Strangely enough we had been sojourners in New York together
those decades ago during that other great national trauma, Water-
gate. We were there during the hearings. We were there when
Richard Nixon resigned.
There?
Sure we were. We were all there together, now weren't we?
We watched it all on television.
Dona and I huddled for hours and hours, day after day, before
the television set, within the barricaded zone, watching all that
was to be seen on a hundred or so channels of cable TV, which was
little else but coverage of the catastrophe and its aftermath,
waiting.
Waiting for George W. Bush to emerge from his seclusion.
Waiting for American retaliation. Waiting for the horrendous
body-count to be completed. Waiting for the next attack. Waiting
for something to happen.
But nothing really did.
Nothing really happened for the week that I remained in New
York after September 11. But every channel had 24 hours of air
time a day to fill and no one was interested in seeing anything
else. So every channel reported that nothing endlessly. The air
time, and therefore the public consciousness, was filled with
endless pronouncements by government officials saying nothing new
of substance. And with worse.
Even as early as the day after the destruction of the Tow-
ers, the perverse, mendacious, yet somehow admirable New York
commercial spirit had already filled the permanent flea market of
14th Street with merchandising tie-ins to the disaster. American
flags. American flag T-shirts. Posters of the Twin Towers.
Anti-bin Laden dart boards and toilet paper. And much more, as if
to say, this is New York, assholes, and when the bottom line gets
added up, as usual, we're gonna come out ahead.
But day after day, dozens of times an hour, the TV pounded
the image of the plane slamming into the second Tower into the
public consciousness, even using it as a station break logo. And
for lack of any other dramatic footage, milked coverage of the
disaster area, the despairing relatives of the victims, the gloom
and doom of it all, for all the air time it was worth. The politi-
cians, for want of the ability to give the audience the blood-red
meat of the retribution it craved, spouted patriotic rhetoric and
created and encouraged ceremonies of public mourning.
And television covered that endlessly.
And the mood of the city began to change. Anger began to turn
to grief, defiance to melancholy. New York began to lose some of
its edge, some of its special spirit, and in the eyes of the rest
of the country as well.
New York had long been regarded by the rest of the United
States as a city apart, more European than true red, white, and
blue; a town that more than one politician had publicly wished
could be sawn off the rest of the country and sent drifting out
into the Atlantic Ocean.
But now New York had been the victim of the most devastating
attack on American soil in history. Many more people had died in
minutes than in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And they had
been civilians. And there had been television coverage. Endless
television coverage. Rudy Giuliani, the New York firefighters and
police, became national heroes. For the first time, the rest of
the country took New York to its heart.
But millions of New Yorkers, like Dona and myself, who had
lived through it, who had smelled the smoke and felt it on the
backs of their throats, were now getting the same images, sounds,
and reportage of what they had experienced first-hand that the
rest of the country was getting--second-hand via the edited virtu-
al reality of television.
And what they were getting was a flag-waving patriotism that
had never been New York's style. And what they were getting in
lieu of pay-back ass-kicking in true New York style was a long and
increasingly lugubrious wake.
CNN once ran a piece of self-promotion in which the President
of Egypt gazed at the camera with an expression of bemused wist-
fulness.
"It must be true," said Hosni Mubarak. "I see it on the
CNN."
Apocalypse Now Revisited
And so now here I am back again, less than three months
later; in New York, in Dona's apartment, writing this in the very
room I was in when the planes hit the Twin Towers.
The more things seem the same, the more they change.
And quickly.
Via the transformational power of wartime.
The wartime romance may be a hoary cliche, but cliches don't
become cliches unless they are built around a kernel of truth.
Dona and I were in the process of rekindling our old relationship
before September 11, but being thrust together into what had in-
stantly become a war zone, into the Ground Zero of history, cer-
tainly added intensity. Many, many babies were conceived during
the four days of the great New York electrical blackout of years
past, and I suspect six months or so from now, when the numbers
are added up and the birthdays calculated backwards, it will prove
that even more were conceived during the week of September 11.
As well as relationships started, ended, or transformed.
Like it or not, personal life becomes more piquant, more super-
charged, and consciousness itself is heightened when you're envel-
oped by war or what amounts to a war atmosphere.
It's not so much the fear, or the tense boredom of waiting
for what will or will not happen next, though there is that too;
it's the sheer charge of life at the center of destiny, at the
heart of the whirlwind.
The more things seem the same, the more they change.
And quickly.
Via the transformational power of television.
As I write this, the destruction of the Taliban is almost
completed, and by the time this is published, Osama bin Laden may
even have been captured. But there is no feeling of victory in
New York, no sense of closure.
It is still all but impossible to have a conversation with
anyone for ten minutes without it coming round to the events of
September 11 and their aftermath, but the aftermath now seems to
have taken on a more powerful life than the terrible event itself.
On the ride in from the airport, patriotic billboards are
everywhere, and the most prevalent slogan is: "United We Stand."
And so it seems. Big American flags fly from apartment houses
where they have never been seen before. Little ones fly from the
radio antennas of cars, taxis, trucks. People of the left who
previously would never have been caught dead doing so are wearing
American flag label pins. Patriotic flag-waving T-shirts, posters,
warm-up jackets, are everywhere. Patriotic underwear is even on
sale. And posters and postcards and T-shirts featuring the Mar-
tyred Towers abound. Last week, the New York Times published yet
another supplement on the aftermath in its big Sunday edition.
Indeed, such supplements, magazine articles, TV specials, seem to
have become a permanent genre.
"United We Stand."
But for what? Or even against what?
No one seems to know the answer. Hardly anyone here seems to
even be asking the question.
But to a son of the city who was there through the event
itself and the subsequent week's television coverage and who has
now returned two months and more later as an outside observer, it
seems that United New York Stands--within itself and with the rest
of the country--not for anything, not against anything, but in
grief.
Two months and more after the event, New York is still a city
in shock, still a city in mourning. Many, many people have told me
that September 11 was a great watershed in history, have compared
it to the assassination of JFK, believe that life will never again
be the same. On the surface, the city still rocks and rolls with
the familiar frenetic energy. Life goes on, but the old New York
obla di, obla da thereof seems to be missing.
This is not the New York I grew up in. This is not even the
New York I experienced in the week before September 11, 2001.
A great catastrophe has occurred. An unprecedented attack on
the American homeland. A huge number of people killed. Tens of
billions of dollars in damages. Scores of thousands of jobs lost.
And yet....
And yet York was in much worse economic shape in the 1970s
and 1980s than it is now. And in cold hard objective terms, the
white collar jobs lost in the destruction of the Twin Towers will
be outnumbered by the blue collar construction jobs gained in re-
building on what is now the most valuable empty plot of real
estate in the world. The cynical and ruthlessly pragmatic old New
York would be licking its chops and wheeling and dealing already.
Yes, six thousand people died in an historic instant, but
lesser cities than New York (and to a New Yorker all cities are
lesser cities than New York)--Sarajevo, the London of the Blitz,
Leningrad under Nazi siege, among others--have endured worse and
gone on even while it was happening with more of the old New York
spirit than New York itself seems to be showing this time around.
In emotional terms, the Twin Towers, two huge but otherwise
architecturally undistinguished glass boxes, were never loved by
New Yorkers while they stood, were never spiritual or esthetic
sigils of the Big Apple like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire
State Building, or even Rockefeller Center and Yankee Stadium.
Yes, there is a huge hole in the financial center. But why
should there be such a hole in the heart of the city?
"It must be true," said the President of Egypt. "I see it on
the CNN."
And therein, I believe, lies the tale.
I myself was there in the flesh. I myself was in the street a
few miles away scant minutes after the Towers fell. I participated
in the hour of hoarding. I walked south towards Houston until I
could no longer breathe the acrid air. I lived for a week after-
wards in the No-Go zone.
But what did I do most during that week?
What millions of other people in the city did.
What the whole country did.
I watched hours and hours of television.
It that sense, it was indeed like the assassination of JFK.
There was hardly anything else on the air. Television immersed the
entire nation in a communal experience. That experience was rela-
tively short and it had a dramatic structure with a closure. The
assassination itself, the killing of Jack Ruby, the funeral. And
it was centered on a man, not a city.
But we in New York were watching what we had experienced and
were still experiencing in the flesh as presented by television to
the entire nation. As crafted and spun for the entire nation. On
virtually every available channel. For a week and more. And to
some extent, it is still going on as I write this.
Smaller wonder that even for the people who had lived through
it in the flesh in New York, the TV version became the experience.
We too, in terms both of hours and the endless repetition of the
same images, the same public pronouncements, the same endless
processions of talking heads telling us what to make of it, saw
more of it on the tube than in what the naive would call
"reality."
And until the bombing in Afghanistan began, all this air time
that had to be filled, and therefore all this coverage, had no
real story to tell. President Bush was semi-incommunicado for
days. No meaningful counteraction was being taken. All there was
to broadcast was recapitulation of the terrible event and its
aftermath.
Finally, Bush declared "a war against terrorism that would go
on until the last terrorist was eliminated." But this was an
impossible goal, a definition of a state of war that could go on
forever, with no achievable concrete goal, no reasonable defini-
tion of payback and victory, and therefore no point of closure to
even move towards for New Yorkers.
The politicians blathered, likewise the talking heads of the
media. A period of mourning was declared. There was a week with-
out baseball or football. Candlelight vigils. Interviews with the
relatives of victims. An endless and endlessly televised national
wake that went on and on and on, and that, in somewhat attenuated
form, goes on still.
What this did for the United States was to bring the nation
together to "stand united" in patriotic fervor. But what it did
for the Bush Administration, and therefore to the United States
was to silence any dissenting voices, not even by government edict
but as a national reflex action. A TV anchor who mildly criti-
cized Bush's craven behavior of the first few days was fired. Save
the American Civil Liberty Union, little outrage dared to speak
itself when thousands of people were detained without proper legal
procedure, without even being publicly identified. Behind this
pixelled smokescreen of patriotic grief Bush was able to temporize
while his approval ratings soared simply because he was the Presi-
dent.
What this televised national mourning on its behalf seems to
have done to New York is dampen the contentious, ironic, hard-
edged, survivalist, ass-kicking, entrepenurial spirit that made it
the Big Apple, the closest thing planet Earth had to a capital
city.
Television meant for the country at large ended up selling
New York the politically useful image of itself--New York the
victim, New York the city in mourning, New York the grievously
wounded metropolis. Boo-hoo-hoo!
Call me a hopeless romantic, call me a hard-boiled cynic, or
just call me a son of the city as it was before it was turned into
the TV version of itself, but I believe that the pre-September 11
New York--or rather the pre-media version--would have puked at the
very thought of itself as the lugubrious star of such a sob-sister
series.
But maybe there's a ray of hope in the old ironic New York
style. For now the popular and heroic Rudy Giuliani, a mayor the
city came to love, is gone, and maybe he was part of the problem.
It's just not natural for New York to love its mayor.
He's been replaced by Michael Bloomberg, an utterly inexperi-
enced millionaire who refused public financing so he could buy the
election with $50 million of his own money. And the town certain-
ly has reason to be nervous.
But perhaps that's just what the city needs now--a mayor who
New Yorkers can distrust, can hold in contempt, who can become the
butt of really nasty humor.
I'm the mayor you elected. Trust me.
Give us a break, will ya! We're New York. Fuck you!
It could be just what the Big Apple needs to get back to
monkey business as usual.
end