DAY FORTY SEVEN:Oct. 27:
There were no cheers in Mudville tonight. The Yank were slaughtered in the Sunbelt, and heads are hanging low in Gotham today. It's been wonderful imagining what a Yankees victory in the World Series could mean for New York: it is not pleasant to think of defeat.
Defeat in baseball is one thing - in attempts to stop terrorism it is quite another matter. It is difficult to see a future of sustained threat in the city, of seemingly endless assaults on our individual and collective safety. Each large event brings traditional joy, tinged with fear that precisely because it is a time o New York celebration it will be targeted: the World Series, next week's New York Marathon, Halloween.
Yesterday morning I bumped into a friend, who happens to live in my building. In attempts to provide her children with "normalcy", Liz was out with her little boys, both of whom were dressed in Halloween costumes, heading to a party. The older of the two, six-year-old Damon, has become something of a celebrity in this town, his face having graced the cover of New York magazine. On September 11 Damon had just arrived at his first grade class in P.S. 150, located in TriBeCa, when the first jet slammed into the World Trade Center tower. On the cover of New York magazine Damon's dark brown eyes peer over the top of a drawing he did, depicting what the students of P.S. 150 witnessed, from a distance of only six blocks that day. Two tall buildings are in the picture. One has a huge black hole in its side, out of which pour flames. And a jet is flying towards the other. Written on the side of the drawing, in the awkward script of a first-grader, are these words: "Butt it was 9-11-01 Real. Damon".
Liz says life has been a never-ending series of minute obstacles and snags since that terrible day when she raced frantically about New York trying to find her evacuated six-year-old and her endangered reporter husband. For reasons he cannot explain, little Damon drew Stars of David on the wings of the jet. Now Liz, who is Jewish, is under attack from the Anti-Defamation League for being the mother of an anti-Semitic child. Damon's relocated school is far from convenient for a Brooklyn-dwelling working mother: the entire grammar school now convenes in a cafeteria in Greenwich Village. A final coup de gras for Liz: she works for Bloomberg Reports, and her boss is the Republican candidate for Mayor.
While Liz and I caught up, standing on the sidewalk at our Brooklyn corner, a gust of acrid, icy wind nearly swept us off our feet. In a second, having regained our footings and assured ourselves that the boys hadn't been buffeted, Liz and I shared a now-common Brooklyn Heights look: we grabbed our coats tightly against the near-freezing chill, and we scrunched our faces against the terrible acrid odor the gust carried from Ground Zero.
I have often written of the stench, but I am sure for those of you who haven't been in New York since September 11 it is impossible to appreciate. Tonight I shared a wonderful, warm evening with dear friends from California, two of whom I have known deeply for well over twenty years, and worked with a radio station KPFA in the late 1970s. All of them commented on the stench, noting how disturbing it was. For a few hours they experienced what we who live along the river have felt for more than six weeks. It is hard to describe, really, because the odor hits the senses on a visceral level. Walking about the neighborhood late tonight, sharing the now-tragic view with my California friends, the scent suddenly reminded me of two-days-after-Christmas, some six years ago. Good friends had barely survived a fire that had engulfed their upper eastside apartment building, having been rescued, cats in hand, by hook and ladder. The next day I helped them scour the wreckage of their home, searching for any clothing or articles worth saving. The smell was dreadful, and upsetting in a subliminal way. Manoli took all their undamaged clothing to an industrial cleaner, who worked on the fabrics using top-of-the-line products. But weeks later we always knew when Lars and Manoli entered a room: we could smell them.
It's the same smell that drifts constantly past our nostrils today. It is an odor that psychologically says, "Something is wrong." Because the redolence is there, unease never yields. One's guard never lowers.
And, of course, it doesn't help that at the same time somebody is sending weapons-grade anthrax through the U.S. mail.
Tonight's dinner conversation focused on the question of whether, in any way, America is culpable for the horrors visited upon her. Beyond the historical - the Crusades, Christian atrocities in Midevil Arabia, support for Israel, bolstering corrupt regimes for the sake of petroleum access, decades of failed U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world, poverty and inequity - we could not find a way to say, "We deserved all of this." On the contrary, as New Yorkers we feel defiled, attacked, dishonored and deeply wronged. That is why we feel quite comfortable waving American flags right now, and, within humane limits, supporting military actions in Afghanistan. For New Yorkers the issue is remarkably simple - someone came into our house, slaughtered our family, destroyed the house, stole our money and called the acts righteous. We want the perpetrators caught. We want justice. Some among us want more: revenge.
My California dinner guests, living as they do more than 3,000 miles from Ground Zero, see things differently. They cannot share the anger and sense of defamation that now haunts New Yorkers' daily lives. They want to feel sympathy for the women and children of Afghanistan who are racing to escape the daily sorties of USAF bombs. They remember Vietnam.
So our conversation came to Alan's central question, "How is taking action, as an outside power, against the Taliban different from Vietnam invading Cambodia in the 1970's to bring down the ruthless Khmer Rouge, or Julius Neyerere's Tanzanian Army marching into Kampala to overthrow the monstrous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin?". Many American peace activists and leftists initially supported the Khmer Rouge, or rationalized their atrocities in Cambodia by harping on the Nixon Administration's military actions there. It became possible during the 1970s for some Americans to view their own country as responsible for the existence and activities of the twisted, genocidal Pol Pot regime. When Vietnam invaded the country, and Cambodia descended into more than a decade of civil war, famine and ongoing genocide, Americans came to accept that Vietnam's invasion, though it violated the sanctity of national boundaries, was, sadly, justifiable.
Having been in Tanzania and Uganda immediately following the Kampala invasion, and seen first hand the damage wrought by Amin's regime, I share a similar sense of justification for Nyerere's decision to invade. I recall "Mwalimu's" speech to the Organization of African Unity denouncing OAU's refusal to support his actions. The word "Mwalimu" is Swahili for teacher, and like the great scholar that he was Nyerere lectured his fellow African leaders, urging them to take their continent to a higher moral ground. It was their duty, in the post-colonial world, he said, to root out genocide and evil in their midst, never providing proof to the former colonial powers that in the absence of imperial rule Africa could not behave in a moral manner. To Africa's shame, Nyerere's message was rejected. And though he did not live to see it, I am sure that Mwalimu would have refused any attempts to assign major responsibility for the Hutu/Tutsi slaughter of 1994 to Belgium.
In the globalized world must nations share a common border in order for such interventions to be justifiable? As New Yorkers we want the perpetrators caught - period. If a gang crosses from several neighborhoods away, enters your area, causes death and mayhem it is not New York protocol to stand back and say, "Well, our gang won't get back at that gang because their turf doesn't border ours." It's a crude way of looking at things, of course, but a time-honored one in this town marked by three hundred years of neighborhood gang fights.
Ten years ago in Jordan the visage of Sadaam Hussein was adorned on everything from Taxi dashboards to earrings. Some industrious shopkeepers put Sadaam's face on watches, transforming Mickey Mouse timepieces into testimonies to Arab solidarity. As the Persian Gulf War was coming o an end I bought about 50 of these watches, intending to bring them home as souvenirs for my colleagues and friends. Most of the dealers were all too happy to sell their wares, particularly as I was paying with US dollars. But one man held back his sack of about a dozen Sadaam watches, stared me in the face and asked, "Are you buying these because you support the Arab Nation, or because you think they are funny?"
Caught me. He was the first Arab person I encountered in the war-torn region during those days who understood American irony. He knew that I was defiling their sentiment, that my intent was to mock or at least chuckle over their converted Mickey Mouse watches. And by so understanding, his support for Sadaam grew.
In the end, it seems that the New World we find ourselves in forces each of us, individually and collectively, to address very uncomfortable questions that are not easily answered using tired, Cold War-era forms of logic and analysis. Yes, there is irony in a converted Sadaam Mickey Mouse watch. There is hatred engendered by the mere presence of unveiled, female foreign soldiers on Saudi soil, in proximity to the most holy grounds of Islam. There is brutal repression under the Taliban regime that is probably an Afghan equivalent of the Khmer Rouge or Amin's Uganda. There are roots in our conflict that do, indeed, date to the Crusades. And there is a rival gang out there, raiding our turf and defiling our sacred grounds --- our skyscrapers, our national capital, our postal system, our daily lives.
So ended our dinner conversation. It wasn't an easy exchange, and it did not bring us to comfortable resolution. We are forced to mature, still more. To rise to new intellectual levels in order to grasp, politically, morally, ethically and personally, what has happened, what continues to occur both domestically and overseas, and how each of us can rationalize what we believe is "the right thing" in the post-9/11 world. As innocents perish beneath US bombs, anthrax kills more Americans, smoke continues to billow from Ground Zero and our economy worsens this will constitute the greatest moral and political challenge of our epoch.
If only the Yankees could beat the Diamondbacks: that, at least, is a gang fight we can cheer.
Be well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
