DAY TWENTY ONE:Oct. 1:
Yesterday's many frightening statements by Bush Administration officials on the Sunday morning talk shows seem to have scared the bejeesus out of New York City. The public seems genuinely terrified. It hasn't been helped by demonstrations on both local and national TV of proper use of gas masks and antibiotics. The implication, clearly, is that individuals both can and should protect themselves. Both are false messages.
It reminds me of the Persian Gulf War, at the outset of which the world was told that Sadaam Hussein had specially modified SCUD missiles armed with chemical and biological agents. As investigations long after the war would reveal Iraq did, indeed, have an extensive CBW program and has tried to mount such weapons on missiles. But I discovered idiocy throughout the Middle East was the norm in response to the threat. Israel, for example, passed a law mandating that all citizens carry shoulder cases 24 hours a day, inside of which was a military grade gas mask. At the sound of an air raid siren everyone was required to don their masks, and keep them on until they heard an all clear alert. These mask kits were not, however, made available to visitors (such as myself) or to tens of thousands of Arab residents of Israel.
During my second air raid I raced to the roof of the tallest building in Tel Aviv, U.S.-purchased gas mask in hand, and found several television crews busily filming a SCUD missile arcing over the city. None of them, of course, were wearing their masks. But when the reporters from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, BBC, and all the other major networks in the world got on live TV following the SCUD landing every one of them donned his or her mask. Disingenuous drama. Clearly, as evidenced by their off-camera behavior, none of these reporters actually believed that the masks would offer a darned bit of protection should Iraq's missiles carry chemical or biological agents their way, as the compounds thought to be in Hussein's arsenal were all skin penetrable. Why wear a mask if the darned stuff is going to pass right through your skin?
That no doubt explained why next door Jordan, sitting under the air space of each one of those often misguided SCUDS, made no provisions for gas masks. Once one crossed the Allenby Bridge all semblances of personal protection disappeared.
I am fully immersed in bioterrorism coverage for Newsday these days, and I find it a daily conundrum. It is most uncomfortable to each day walk a razors edge, wondering how much information to publish, how much to withold. The very idea of holding back anything is usually anathema to my profession, but "usual" isn't an operative word in the midst of so much panic. I do wish some of my colleagues in the media would temper their words. But, of course, it is hard to blame the media when the Chief of Staff of the White House is wildly claiming that a biological attack "is imminent".
My Danish colleague, Poul Erikson, tells me that there is now talk among members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee of awarding a journalist or news organization for "accurate reporting". My god, it's come to this! So terrible is the quality of journalism worldwide that the Nobel committee imagines awarding what ought to be merely the gold standard to which all media aspire: accuracy.
The most moving media account to date has to be "Under the Veil", an independently produced British documentary aired on CNN. The female reporter and her crew risked their lives repeatedly earlier this year to cover the Taliban regime from the inside. Using hidden cameras, a lot of fast talking and courageous assistance from the Afghani underground journalists the team managed to smuggle out tape of executions, veiled women forced to beg, rather than work, their starving children laid upon the ground before them as evidence of their need. The documentary starkly reveals that the Taliban have a lot less to do with Islam than with something more reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like the screaming Maoists students of the 1960s, the Taliban have laid down absolute, and irrational, rules, deviations from which can be fatal. Denunciations are public, and require no evidence to allow a woman to be dragged into the Kabul soccer stadium, an automatic rifle placed to her head and, as captured in their film, a shot fired with such force that her brains fly out. Seeing the soccer stadium used as the Taliban's place for collecting a publicly executing deviants sent a chill of memory up my spine: Chile in the 1970s.
In comparison politics New York style seems awfully tame, even silly at times. Giuliani's manuevers to maintain power beyond his rightful tenure continue. Having appeared on "Saturday Night Live" over the weekend, and addressed the UN General Assembly today Rudy's ego is simply beyond describable bounds. He will not go softly into that night at the end of his term.
Meanwhile, at Ground Zero the digging continues. Today more than 100 members of Congress came into town to watch. No doubt they, like anybody who sets foot down there, are stunned beyond expression by what they saw. Over at FEMA headquarters the crews of rescue and emergency responders are emotionally overwrought. After days of finding no survivors, the rescue dogs went berserk, sinking into acute depressions. Some of the firefighters hid themselves in the debris, so that the dogs would have the joy of finding somebody. A friend of mine has volunteered as a massage therapist for the rescue workers, even doing back and leg massages on the dogs. He says the animals come in so wound up that they start whimpering during their massage in a sort of canine version of what the human rescuers do. With them, my masseuse friend says, the pattern is always the same. They tromp in from the field, dump their gear, shower, and Email their spouses. Then they silently come in for massages or chiropractic adjustments. At first they say little beyond, "It hurts here and here and here."
"But after about fifteen minutes, as their tissues release, they start pouring it out," my friend says. "They can't stop talking. Sometimes the things they talk about are so gruesome I get nauseated."
And at the close of each individual session, my friend says, the burly, tough men stand up and, often with tears in their eyes, say over and over again how sorry they are for the people of New York. My friend tells them that all of Gotham is grateful for their heroism and hard work, but the men never seem to register on that. They have seen more fof the horror than we have, so they better know than does New York's citizenry what a sorrowful event this really is.
For most New Yorkers the visual impact of the horror is now possible to ignore, as they do not see Ground Zero in their daily lives and the desperate shrines and Missing Persons signs have been coming down from most of the city's walls. Not so for those of us who live in proximity to the site. The smell is becoming horrible. When the wind blows into my neighborhood my first thought is, "Uh oh, I've shorted out an electrical outlet." It's hard to know what exactly we are inhaling, but it is certainly unpleasant. The rains, fortunately, keep the odiferous emissions to a minimum.
The contrasts between New York's four newspapers are growing starker. The New York Times is full of stories about how inconvenient life is in the suburbs or the Upper West Side these days. They even have run lengthy pieces about grieving families --- wealthy folks who knew noone in the buildings but are upset, nevertheless. The Post has reved up the Rupert Murdoch scream machine, sabre rattling even when noone can say where the sabre ought to rattle. The Daily News is struggling to find a comfortable place between tabloid screaming and good, level-headed reporting. And Newsday, I'm happy to say, has found its voice. It now asks who will care for the grieving immigrant families, what authority will force Giuliani to comply with New York law and how the world community can keep millions of Afghan refugees alive this winter.
I must now dash off to teach Columbia University students. That, it seems, is "normal".
Stay well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
