Last-ish Thoughts

I haven’t posted any last thoughts on the 9/11 anniversary, because I’ve had a very hard time settling on some. That’s not to say I don’t have any — I’ve written several drafts, and thought of more. But they seem either too negative or too unfocused. What do I want to say about this? What statement would be useful, for me or anyone else?

The bottom line, very generally, is this: when it comes to our response to 9/11, I don’t think we, overall, have done it very well. From the earliest days, when our national leaders were amazingly absent and only Rudy Giuliani seemed to have any concept of just diving in and doing what was needed, to this past Sunday, when the public was excluded and the organization around the site was simultaneously heavy-handed and utterly chaotic, this event and its ongoing aftermath seem to have become an excuse for emotional porn and jingoism more than anything else.

Betty Bowers, the fabulous satirist who bills herself as “America’s Best Christian,” had it right when she said, “Most of the media commemorations this week have been harrowing tales intended to evoke tears (emotional porn), which flatter the survivors with how much they feel, rather than honor the victims with how much they lost." When a friend shared this quote with me it made me realize how deeply I’d fallen into that trap, myself, and it helped me break free of it, for which I’m grateful.

I’ve always been pretty disgusted with the public discussion about rebuilding the site. By enfranchising so many discordant, uncollaborative, and deeply biased voices, the process has seemed to play on and enflame sentimentality over healing, and to look back at those who died in the Towers rather than allow any look forward to what would really benefit the city and the nation in coming generations.

The fact that the construction process is so hidden from public eye also seems like a huge failure — all people want to do is see into the site, see what’s going on there and try to square the new view with their memories of what it used to look like. But the construction walls shut us out utterly, and in the one public space (a pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway) that allows a partial view of the Memorial, security guards yell at anyone leaning against the wall to take a photo and chase children away. Out on the all the streets surrounding the site, policemen yell at anyone who pauses to take a picture or try to see in, although there’s very little traffic to block and no obvious security concern. It all seems ridiculously secretive.

But having said that, I now officially lay off. I’m interested to see what the site develops into and how it looks when it’s finished. All those trees and that huge open space in the middle of such a dense urban area is definitively a good thing. And the pools and fountains do look impressive. At some point, the whole place will become normalized, just part of Manhattan’s layout, and the police will relax about it. So let’s wait and see.

Meanwhile, I can’t say the anniversary events gave me anything in particular. But I’m still extremely, unhesitatingly glad I went. I feel a sense of separation, if not exactly closure, and that is a good thing. The site has moved on. And so, much to my own surprise, can I.

Maybe someday I’ll have a better, clearer, wiser perspective about the experience of 9/11 and how it fits into the rest of the world. That hasn’t happened yet. But I’ve decided not to cling to it anymore.

Today

So… today was about remembering, not reliving. That was a good start. Phil and I overslept, but I wasn’t worried about that because I had a strong sense that trying to get anywhere near the site while all the official events were still going on was going to be both impossible and misery-inducing. So we went later. And that was fine.

Things did not start completely smoothly. When we left our hotel, we made a stop at Starbucks (excruciatingly slow, for some reason, but I’d had no access to coffee at all, so this was not optional) and then had a long, difficult time on the subway to get downtown. We got off at West 4^th Street, where my train got stopped on 9/11, and walked down, as I did then, to Tribeca and my old place of business from there.

I have to admit that, although the first moments of coming up out of the subway and seeing the Towers is burned into my memory, and although a few other moments from the trip are also clear and unforgettable, I don’t really remember most of it at all. I did remember the blocks south of Canal, but not from 9/11 itself. Those are the streets I walked for some days and weeks after, when the subway didn’t run any farther and we had to show ID and other paperwork to get through the checkpoints at Canal. In those days, that southern tip of Manhattan was spooky, like a post-apocalypse movie. There was no traffic on the streets except for the occasional emergency vehicle, and many of the buildings were empty. Businesses were closed and lots of the residents had evacuated.

Today there were plenty of people, mostly in groups and couples, as you’d imagine. And when we got down to Duane Street, where I worked, things began to feel more meaningful. I stood on the corner of Duane and Greenwich and took pictures. This is where I stood and watched the first tower fall. On following days, this is also where every news organization in the world would set up and broadcast their reports. Remember all those talking heads with the smoking site and seven-story pile of debris looming behind them? They were all shot on Greenwich Street, three doors down from my place of business, Real Pilates.

Things today went downhill after that. At first, we couldn’t get within three blocks of the site, and when some of the barricades eventually came down, we still couldn’t see much. For all the organization that was in evidence — police with wands manning barricades and checkpoints, paths and wayfinding for the families and others who’d been invited to the morning’s ceremonies — there was also remarkable chaos. The police didn’t seem to know what was happening, and nowhere was there any information about what places were accessible, how to get anywhere, or what would happen later.

And then, of course, there were the protest groups, which I go off about in a different post. Heavy sigh there.

The thing that was missing today was any sense of community. There’s more to say about that, but, again, it must wait for a longer post or no one will ever read this one. I’m glad we went, and I want to go again and try to see something of the actual plaza that’s at least partly there now. Those are the positive takeaways of today. But I also feel pretty completely excluded from the proceedings, which is what I’ve felt at most of the significant moments of the redesign and rebuilding process ever since 2001. That’s the more negative takeaway. But it does make me think that perhaps I need to let go of this place and this event to a greater extent, as it’s clearly let go of me. Sad, but perhaps, in the end, a happier choice. Stay tuned for updates.

All the Wrong Messages

Anger, violence, and war may or may not be intrinsic to human nature. But judging from the crowd around the World Trade Center site today, exploitation is unavoidable.

I didn’t even care about the tacky hawkers of souvenir “mementoes” and picture books and the like. Their sort of commercial exploitation is clearly inevitable but also pretty easy to ignore.

The ones I mean are the ones who have specifically fastened onto the events of 9/11 for their own narrow ends: the conspiracy theorists; the bullies-for-Jesus; the mean-spirited guiltists who want to throw all responsibility for the attacks on us, the US people, as if it were a justified response to our leaders’ ill-advised Middle East policy in earlier years.

The nadir of the breed, of course, is the absolutely execrable Westboro Baptist Church, those self-proclaimed upstanding Christians who marked this event with off-key singing and garish signs which read things like, “Thank God for 9/11.” I ask you. Thank God? Why? Because, in spite of being the omnipotent creator of the universe, He gets off on killing people in horrific ways and wanted to send us a message about gays, abortion, or possibly our shameful Constitutional acceptance of belief systems other than the Westboro Baptist Church’s? The logic is impenetrable, the message nothing but a bunch of anti-Christian, hate-filled bullying.

But, while these human cockroaches are so far outside the mainstream and so pathetic that they’re easy to condemn and dismiss, what struck me today is that all the other groups leaching on to this day were not really any different. Really, much as I disliked George Bush, he did not orchestrate the attacks. Neither did a secret cabal in the CIA or a secret cabal of Jews. The world has not committed a terrible sin by focusing on the fall of the Twin Towers and ignoring the other buildings that were destroyed that day and in the weeks following. Our desperation for jobs in the current economy is not rooted in the attacks. And really, the final, bottom line lesson of 9/11 is not, “America needs to pray.”

All these messages were shouted, held up, or otherwise used to bludgeon us as we made our way around the site today. We were both disgusted with all these people. And there’s not much more to say than that. A national disaster is bad enough on its own. We really shouldn’t have to get beat up and bullied all over again by people who see it only as a means to their own particular ends.

The Day Itself

It is now September 11. The day itself. Ten years ago by this time in the morning, the attacks had already happened. We were struggling through chaos and confusion down there, both internal and external.

Late last night, I experienced a sudden, fleeting, desperate need to cancel this whole thing and have nothing to do with the anniversary today. I wondered what I was doing here and what I expected to happen. And why, in heaven’s name, I’d come.

The answer is, I expect very little to happen. I made the decision not to go down at the actual time I did in 2001, but to get a little more sleep and go later. I wasn’t at the site when the planes hit and didn’t want to be there to mark the time the buildings fell now. With no disrespect meant to any of our fellow-mourners, those particular remembrances are a little lurid and depressing, and when I went down for the first anniversary to hear the bells toll and the names read, all I felt was a sense of heaviness and frustration that there wasn’t any catharsis or help in it.

This trip is not about re-living. It’s about remembering. And, even more than that, it’s about what’s there now. September 11, 2001, itself, is un-recapturable. The state of mind, the lost-ness, the drama are over. I’m going to see what’s been built, to commemorate the new thing that’s been created, and plant it in my mind to replace the gaping hole that was there.

The thing about deaths — even deaths as horrible and obscene as those of bin Laden’s victims in the World Trade Center — is that they don’t get lessened by time, but they do get established. Those deaths happened. They are part of folklore and story and memory and legend now. The world would be a better place if they hadn’t, and if all those people had been allowed to live peacefully, to work through their day on 9/11 and come home afterward. But since that didn’t happen, perhaps ten years later, we’re here to finally say goodbye.

Stay tuned. We’ll see what happens.

Different Views

My friend Elaine, who is among my most reliable and thoughtful readers, sent me a link to a blog written by her cousin, Jim Forest, who lives in Holland but visited New York shortly after the attacks on 9/11. His observations on how the US had changed, the mood in the city and across the country, and what Americans were thinking and talking about then, is fascinating, insightful, thought-provoking, and beautifully compassionate. I recommend it.

For the record, Jim's trip was to Red Bank, NJ, where his son lives. Phil grew up in and around Red Bank. I didn't know how many people from Red Bank died in the attacks. Phil tells me his parents went to memorial services daily for weeks. His brother worked the ferry back and forth as an EMT. Even when I think that day is all in the past, some other aspect I hadn't heard about or thought of always seems to pop up.

One of the good examples of this is Jim's blog. I encourage everyone to read it and discuss.

The Great Bird of Disaster

The day is, as they say, fast approaching. In fact, it’s tomorrow. The weather’s not quite as good as it was in September ten years ago, but it’s good enough; this year, however, there are cops and military all over, watching for signs that someone might want to commemorate the 9/11 anniversary by destroying even more lives.

Phil and I saw a police barricade outside Times Square last night. I told him about the news I’d seen that two “credible informants” had passed word that terrorist organizations, including, possibly, al Queda, would be attempting an attack on Sunday. Law enforcement groups had zeroed in on two rental vans and were trying to find them all across the country. They suspected the vans might get packed with explosives and used as car bombs.

I made some flippant remark that coming to New York for this anniversary could get us blown up. But Phil pointed out we could get blown up anywhere, at any time. Or killed in an earthquake in our own deeply unstable city. Or suffer any of innumerable other terrible fates. He wasn’t being negative when he said this. He was just stating the simple truth, that life is not safe or predictable. It never has been, and, given our ‘round-the-clock drama fixation on CNN, MSNBC, and all the others, any belief that any of us is constitutionally exempt from such fates has become culpably naïve.

In a sense, this statement hearkens back to my own “we’ll never feel safe again,” moment as I watched the smoke and flames billow from the Towers. That was the death of my own innocence, I guess. But it does not indicate that doom and gloom are inescapable. Recognizing that there’s no ultimate safety is not the same as saying that tragedy is right around the corner.

You might think horror was inevitable, judging from what we see on the news and in our violence-loving entertainment. You might assume that nearly all of us will meet violent ends and that tragedy stalks every life. It doesn’t, and the fact that we could be the victims of some kind of horror doesn’t mean it’s likely that we will be. The world is a big place, and you and I are very small individuals. And the number of horrors that happen in any given lifetime is limited. There is no reason to think that something bad is going to happen to Phil and me, even here in New York on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. And there is every reason not to give in to fear.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open tomorrow morning, just as I do in every public place, when traveling, or anywhere I go. But I’ll still go where I want to go and do what I want to do, within reason. If the Great Bird of Disaster swoops down, well, I guess I’ll deal with that then, hoping to stay clearheaded and smart about how I do it. It’s worked so far.

Hate

Let’s talk about hatred. How often do you remember being told as a child not to use the word “hate.” “Hate is a very strong word…” the chant usually began. And then we were told that we didn’t really mean it.

In the case of Osama bin Laden, I mean it. I mean it without apology. I’m not even sorry about that, although I suspect the pre-9/11 me would have been horrified at the very thought.

I keep this hatred focused, even now, on bin Laden, himself. The lower level idiots who served his vision don’t deserve hatred, to my mind. They were deluded, pathetic cult followers who believed that their leader would save them from their own petty demons, as followers always are. Bin Laden’s immediate lieutenants who assisted with the planning don’t need to be hated — condemnation, certainly, but nothing particularly emotional.

But the man himself conceived of this, thought of and approved the idea of murdering thousands of people, of turning mechanisms of peaceful travel into massive weapons, and of making sure death came in the most horrifying package and form possible. He claimed to see himself as being at war with the US, as if that would justify his actions.

But not only was there no war, this attack was designed very carefully to be the opposite of strategic (in the sense of all those “surgical” attacks which are so carefully designed to take out only the most limited targets possible.) It was meant to be as unclean and horrifying as possible; it was meant, as we all know, to terrorize and to feed the massive twisted ego of its originator rather than to achieve any real political change. Its means and style were all about cruelty and torture: burning non-combatants alive in their offices; forcing victims to flee through windows hundreds of feet up in the air; entombing people in an inescapable skyscraper so that they would have to anticipate their own horrible death for moments or hours.

There is no justification for any of this in any religion (certainly not Islam, which has historically been marked for its pacifism), political theory, or sane mindset. The attack on the World Trade Center was an exercise in pure monster-hood.

And for that, I judge and hate Osama bin Laden. I used to pray, in the fall of 2011, that he would be captured quickly and that the US would reinstate public stoning for him alone. That probably sounds funny, but it isn’t meant to. I literally wish this man could have been executed in public, by the public. It would have been fitting, considering what he did to us.

Meanwhile, I cursed him. And I mean that literally, too. I’m not a religious believer, but I like all the Old Testament stories about people blessing and cursing each other. In blessings, they call out the attributes they see or want to encourage, they make what sound like prophecies but are really meant to be affirmations.

And in cursing, they call down all the fury of the heavens on their enemies. This is what I did, as a private expression of my own hatred when it boiled over to the point that I couldn’t contain it. I would declare, as if bin Laden could hear me, that God, humanity, and the heavens hated him. That the earth wept to feel his feet upon her. That the very air in his lungs burned with shame to be sustaining his life. That history, humanity, and the spiritual world would reject and spit on him. And that he would die, that he would submit, that he would be crushed like the bug that he was, spiritually.

His actual death, of course, wasn’t nearly as flowery, but it was satisfactory. Mostly, it is finished, and that is a good thing.

I don’t talk about this hatred often, because I expect people to try to talk me out of it, to preach to me about moving on and letting go. I think that’s ridiculous, even though I agree that living in a place of hatred is not the healthiest or most productive thing in the world. It is, however, a statement of what is — I believe my judgment of bin Laden is correct and appropriate, and to try to soften my feelings would betray and undercut that.

And I will say that I don’t trot out this little soapbox speech on hatred, even to myself, very often. And since bin Laden died, it has subsided because the actual feeling of it is no longer needed. It’s more of a memory now, as its object is no longer in the world among us.

But I’m not ashamed of it. I do not want to forget how horrible the man was or how unspeakable, vile, and inhuman the thoughts in his head were. I still wish he could have died publicly. I wish he could have been beaten to death with baseball bats by all the rest of us.

The Site

I’m looking forward to seeing the site of the World Trade Center. The last time I was there, it was still just a massive hole in the ground. Daniel Liebeskind’s ickily named “Freedom Tower” was not yet under construction, and the press was all asking what the hell was taking so long. Now, the Tower (mercifully renamed World Trade One and seeming to have hit a reasonable balance between super-high security and aesthetics) is well under way, the Memorial is about to open, and the site is apparently beginning to be recognizable as what it will become, instead of just standing as an endless reminder of destruction.

For the record, I hated the process of re-imagining the World Trade site, and I’m not crazy about the designs that have come out of it, at least as they look in the marketing materials I’ve seen. The process was too violently public, gave too much weight to too many unprepared stakeholders, and seemed, in fact, intended specifically to prevent anything wonderful from ever being designed at Ground Zero.

But you never know how these things are going to turn out. Maybe the actual plan and new buildings will work wonderfully in person. Having something there again is pretty wonderful in itself, and the fact that much of it is bright, open public space can hardly be bad. In the beginning, it seemed that sentimentality was the only voice that held any sway in this, but with any luck the reality has moved past that. There is hope.

The site has certainly gone through radical stages of evolution in this past decade. In the days before 9/11, I knew the World Trade Center well. I remember watching a 60 Minutes story about its opening when I was a kid, and so the first time I ever visited New York it was, of course, one of the places I went. I rode up to Windows on the World and looked out, disappointed at how flat and uninformative the view turned out to be from so high, yet awed at the same time by its undeniable monumentality. That was pretty emblematic of my feelings about the whole place, come to think of it. It was monumental, impressive, on such a huge scale that it demanded awe. But it was also unbelievably dull architecturally, full of the worst excesses of latter day brutalism, absolutely cold emotionally and dull aesthetically. I spent a fair amount of time there, both on visits and in the first couple years I lived in New York. I always wished I could like it better, but even without liking, I was drawn there.

On the ground level and underneath, it came much more alive as a transit center. I traveled through it frequently — daily, for almost a year when I lived in New Jersey, and for frequent business meetings before and after that period. I hung out at the Borders on the plaza’s northeast corner — in fact, I applied for a job there at one point — and I resolutely bought sandwiches and ate out underneath the Towers when I was in the neighborhood.

For a long time after 9/11, we weren’t allowed anywhere within sight of Ground Zero, and I wanted desperately to see it. The site had become a ghostly void in my mind. I could see the old things — the plaza, its central fountain, the Borders building, the stairs up and down and into the PATH train station — but I knew they were all gone. Or, at least, most of them were gone. We heard some of the lower levels were relatively intact, and the lower buildings, like where Borders had been, still stood in the news footage. What did it look like? What was its new identity? What picture could replace the dead one in my mind that I knew was a gone-forever illusion?

On the first day West Broadway was opened again to pedestrians, I went down and looked. The number of people like me was huge. We stepped slowly, keeping our places, moving along a construction sidewalk on the west side of the street. I’m reminded now of climbing up through the Statue of Liberty, innumerable people climbing stairs one after the other, moving like ants, quiet, industrious, intent on getting up, getting through, looking, getting out. On West Broadway we stared. We were nearly silent. We all waited, practically holding our breaths, for the few seconds when we’d be able to see down a cross-street, catch a glimpse of the site itself, see the wreckage with our own eyes. Learn what it looked like. Get to know its new identity.

The storefronts on the opposite side of the street were all ash-covered. They looked like old movie sets, as if we’d been let into a defunct backlot to see some old New York Street where movies we half remembered from our childhoods had been filmed, had seemed magical. Now everything was sort of broken, some windows were boarded up, but many more still looked as they had before the Towers fell — just covered with ash, grayed out, dead and frozen. The street looked nothing like a ruin, nothing like a bombed-out neighborhood. It looked fake, pristine but abandoned. Smaller than normal.

And the site was black and broken. Broken teeth-like steel beams, the broken, black mouth of the hole where the plaza had been. The stacks of debris still surrounding it on all sides. Broken. Ruined. So broken and so ruined it demanded whole new definitions of those words. Black as an evil king’s land in a dark, scary fairy tale. Broken as a bomb site, as an earthquake aftermath, as destruction made manifest without hope of redemption or compromise.

A few years later, a clean, windswept plateau with busy workers hauling, clearing, making way for new things while the PATH train trundled efficiently through again and commuters poured in and out. A well-done fence with remembrances printed on it, information making sense of the whole thing, giving the place’s history from mid-century through original development and to death and destruction. Sidebars for the birth of Battery Park City and the whole new downtown the Trade Center had wrought.

And now? What? We’ll see. The beginning of the new thing. New place. With ghosts, or without, I wonder?

given a voice, too much The design process identified too many stakeholders and pandered far too much — and to far too much political purpose — to sentimentality and survivor groups whose needs certainly needed to be addressed by the City but who had no business whatsoever getting involved in what is, at base, just a great big development project.