1.
 
 

"Not a good day to have to go to the hospital!"" 

This was shouted by a man , wearing a baseball cap on Wednesday in Central Park, walking with
his wife.

A boy, aged   six? seven? I've never been good at ages   was riding a scooter, and fell off. 

The park is full today, and the sky is absolutely clear, except for a plume over downtown, 
that on another day would be mistaken for a cumulus cloud.  I have only watched the news for a
few minutes. 

People like me are bicycling.  Others are playing softball, or picnicking, and seem to be having
fun while a fighter jet flies overhead.  After the first few hours, I don't think it was willful
forgetting.  And besides, everybody knows. 

The boy fell off the scooter, and the man passing-by said,  "Are you alright? Not a good day to
have to go to the hospital!"" 

I interpret his ridiculous remark charitably.  It revealed that he, and we all, could not forget why
the park is full on a Wednesday, in the middle of September.

And even though it was nonsensical (the hospital? for a scooter-fall?), 
And even though I'm sure the boy was puzzled, 
it was probably not meant maliciously. 

Anyway the boy was okay. He brushed himself off, 
and his mother wasn't far behind. 
I think he did scrape his elbow. 
 

2.
 

Yesterday, the 11th, I went to work for no reason other than I had to get out of my house. 
Friends
had stopped off on their walks home, to drink and watch the news.  I needed to get out, so I biked
downtown along the West Side highway.

The plume of smoke was so large that when I saw it around 59th street, I assumed, even knowing
what had happened, that it was a plume of steam or smoke from some nearby building.
"Obviously that's not the smoke, this far away and this large."

I biked home from 14th Street and 6th Avenue, through a city almost utterly deserted. There are
fewer people out on the streets here than in Nablus, where 300 people danced in the street. My
first thought was for more murder.  I hope we don't act on first thoughts.

Everything was closed in New York except the 24-hour delis and the porn shops. These are open.
One 
of the porn places I passed had three or four guys up at the front counter. I wonder if it was the 
same way after Hiroshima in Japan. 

This war is Rome versus the Vandals. We are Rome for worse as well as for better. America is an
empire that, like Rome, copies other civilizations and produces pale, vulgar imitations of them.
We have paved the Earth with our roads. But do we really think the Vandals are better? They will
bring a new dark age, when freedom (which, yes, means rapacious capitalism eroding cultures) is
replaced with tyranny, but more importantly culture and growth is replaced with dogma,
ignorance, and repression.

At the same time, our decline seems inevitable. Our President, fraudulently installed, 
stammering, out of his depth, seems like the mad emperors of Rome as it, too, 
declined. Our loss of respect for art, and our relegation of 'values' to the most reactionary 
sectors of our community, also seems to evince decay. We've got kids running around with no 
reason to care. The Vandals' kids care. 

There was a thrill riding through an empty Times Square, the wrong way North on Broadway.
But it was a sad thrill.  The Morgan Stanley banner repeating only the message: "For information
on Morgan Stanley employees, call 1-888...." 

Everywhere you hear snippets of the same conversation. 
 
 

3.
 

September 13: another bike ride.   This time, the cloud over downtown is not eerie or ominous,
but tiresome. I want it to go away. I want to breathe clearly when I bike to my office. But it has
gotten worse, not better; except for when the wind comes refreshingly from the West, the smell
of burnt plastic and dust of gypsum is even thicker. I have a sore throat, but of course I would
never complain about it when five thousand people have died. 

After only two days, New York is mostly back to normal from Midtown north. Today, bicycling,
I nearly hit a pedestrian, who yelled at me and said that it was up to me to move, not him. The
absence of goodwill gave me joy. 

A thousand or so people in Union Square singing 'Give Peace a Chance.' I am ambivalent. On the
one hand, those are people who probably feel like I do most of the time. On the other, I don't feel
like them now.

Another group, which I joined, at 14th street and the West Side Highway: a hundred or so people
cheering on the relief workers heading south, or heading back up north. Some of the workers had
the far-off look of war veterans. Only one media outlet was present: Channel 2, from Houston. I
suppose this is not what Texans imagine New Yorkers to be like. Some of the banners: "NYC's
Spirit is Strong" "You are our heroes" "Thank You." I want to believe, and do actually believe,
that the show of support was unorchestrated. Most people are not inhuman bastards who want to
kill to preserve dead ideas. Most people want to help, somehow, but don't know how. Some came
up with this idea. Many of the relief workers waved back, or gave us the thumbs-up. After hours
digging through rubble and human remains, I hope some of us gave these people a bit of their
humanity back. 

It is now possible to take vacations from the tragedy. A movie, a conversation about work, a few
drinks. And then you re-emerge into the world outside the bar, the office, or the theater, and it
smells of smoke, and you remember what lies two miles south.
 

4.

September 19th: At my mother's home in Florida for Rosh Hashanah.

Everyone wants to possess this tragedy in some way. I feel an urge, when people ask if I 
knew anyone, to tell my friend's stories: of one who had his apartment destroyed, of another who
had an interview across from the World Trade Center, of another who suffered losses of many
friends. And I tell them as if they are, in some way, my stories.  My mother's friends want
eyewitness reports, and even more than that, I want to give them    even though I was on 88th
street when the towers fell, and watched everything on TV like they did.  What's more, I feel
here as though no one understands -- as though this has to mean more to me than it does to
them, because I am from New York. In truth, my life is not seriously disrupted.  But the way I
describe that mildly annoying dust and smoke in the air, it was like a noxious poison. Why this
urge to both dramatize and possess? 

Jerry Falwell said that the attacks were God's punishment for America's moral liberalism 
   for our tolerance of abortion, homosexuality, for the ACLU. Pat Robertson agreed with him. 
Everyone was outraged.  But they were partly right.  It's not Divine punishment, but it is
recompense for our culture of promiscuity and liberalism.  No one in Florida can accept that we
have a culture at all other than "freedom," loosely undefined.  I find myself in the same camp as
the terrorists and Jerry Falwell.  The war is about McDonald's, Hollywood, materialism, sensual
gratification.  I'm just on the side of those willing to fight for those things, even as I loathe them
more than my mother's friends.  I guess that's why Bush has had to put this war in terms of Good
versus Evil.  Most Americans seem unwilling to accept, or defend, the monster they've created. 
The products of free will are beautiful even when they are ugly.

Airports have changed.  The old Delta terminal is one of those Idlewild buildings that stand as
ambivalent monuments to the Jet Age. Its flying-saucer shape, like the more famous TWA
building's white swoop, evokes the boundless optimism of what air travel could represent in the
pure and innocent futurism of the 1950s. For years now, the high modern geometry of these
buildings has seemed quaint, a relic of the age of tailfins, and their scale, once grand, has long
been inadequate for the growing needs of commuters and tourists. After September 11, the whole
worldview they represent seems naive.  Part of the optimism of the modern airport is, implicitly,
a post-religious, post-cultural optimism: Air travel would bring us together, bring us into the
modern age. Technology, not God. But the 9/11 attacks was anti-modernism striking back.  Now
airplanes fill us with fear, and this place of cosmopolitan optimism is a battleground.  It's as if the
newsstand were forced to sell only Bibles.