September 13, 2001

A First-hand Account, with an Opinion, For Discussion

Sigh. This bit requires an explanation. I wrote this two days after the attack--long before I created Astonished Head--having spent most of that time watching the television: over and over again, the planes, the buildings, the dust. I had been there--right there, on television, somewhere in the cloud of debris. And at the time, I was also in a cloud of happy-liberal-think, deeply enveloped in the haze of American self-loathing perpetuated by academia, the media, and Intellectuals. I had inhaled deeply of the cynical skepticism that passed for real thought at the time, and still does in certain circles.

Hopefully, the rest of the writings on Astonished Head will offer a suitable corrective. There's nothing like showering the dust of the dead off your body to give you some perspective on things.

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I was in my office on the 39th floor of 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, about three blocks from the Trade Center, when the first tower fell. The floor heaved three times in quick succession. I knew that the towers were burning, because I had seen them earlier that morning. I also knew instantly that the horrible, gut-wrenching shudders were the impact of hundreds of thousands of tons of building hitting the street. I got out using the elevator—stupid, but fast—crammed into a car with twenty others. The two-story, glass-walled lobby of the building was in chaos: the glass looked as though someone had painted it dirty white; nothing at all was visible outside on the plaza. Someone briefly opened one of the handicapped access doors to the plaza, and a wind jetted a column of dust and smoke into the lobby. I tumbled down an up escalator to get to a street-level exit. I passed by a body as I left the building...laid out neatly on its back, arms at the sides. I thought at first that it was the body of a black man. It wasn’t. With the sort of morbid irrelevance that I suppose can occupy a mind in shock I realized yesterday that, because of its location and condition, the body must have been blown from a tower during one of the initial plane impacts. He had been flash-burned, thrown a quarter-mile, up and over my 60-story office building, and landed on the sidewalk in front of the William Street exit.

I ran toward Pine Street, using my shirt to filter out the white dust that turned to thick mud in my mouth, and headed for my bicycle, locked up on the side of the plaza. It was still there: every surface covered with two inches of the dust. I pulled my tiny headlights from my bike bag, affixed them to the handlebars and turned them on…they were useless in the white darkness. But I rolled blindly through the opaque dust cloud in eerie stillness, surrounded by choking white wraiths staggering away from that place. I didn’t see the sun for ten minutes, until I had passed under the entrance ramps for the Brooklyn Bridge, and even then, it was a pale white coin, barely visible through the thick, swirling air. But I made it to my girlfriend’s office, and together we walked the seven miles to my apartment in Queens, joining the pedestrian exodus from Manhattan over the 59th Street Bridge.

Since then, I’ve slept only because I’ve exhausted myself with long bike rides through a strangely quiet Manhattan, and by doing some relief work loading hundreds of bags of donated clothing onto trucks. Certain images on the television hit me like vertigo: the bronze statue of a man on a bench opening his briefcase (called “Final Check”), that I passed every day on my way to lunch, now dented and malformed atop a pile of rubble; the Brooks Brothers storefront I passed on the way to the Cortlandt Street N line subway stop, now a morgue; the Century 21 department store that didn’t have the right dress belt for me last Friday, now shattered and ruined. But what I have been thinking of most in the past two days, with increasing despair and anger, is this: America has not conducted itself with the commitment to unequivocal justice that most properly befits the keepers of the ideas nobly if imperfectly expressed within the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I saw, watching the one television station I could receive on Tuesday, a “terrorism expert” who told me that it was not America’s “relationship with Israel” that contributed to this event, but our status as the “symbol of all freedom.” That man, sitting there in his yarmulke, was not telling the truth, was protecting his own small, puny nationalism in the face of thousands of deaths on that day, and thousands before it. America, sitting here as the “symbol of all freedom,” has repeatedly and simplistically supported the unjust conduct of regimes and regime oppositions alike, in small places that are mostly insignificant to our complacent population, for many, many decades. We do so in secret when we can and—as in the case of Israel—with blatant, rhetorical disinformation or outright lies when we cannot. We do so because our support of the unjust actions of these groups and individuals expediently furthers the simplistic, shortsighted and—above all—morally vacuous goals of politicians and strategists who do not have the deep, honest courage that is required to pursue justice, at all times, in all places, whatever the cost to their individual careers. This courage requires the identification and condemnation of evil to be one act, simultaneous. No spin. No justification of “our interests” as more important than the petty atrocities of one of our client states or causes. It is justice that ought to be our overwhelming interest, but it is not.

The United States government has failed to uphold its professed standards of justice and freedom around the world. It has fostered a culture that has so sated the base desires of its citizenry, and has so crippled that citizenry’s ability to discover the true nature of our nation’s foreign policies, that as a whole we are unable to generate any sense of what ought to constitute the just conduct of a great and noble nation. Thus, we are appalled and bewildered when our continued support of injustice and evil results in numbing, crashing, choking evil in our greatest city.

This is not some simplistic “we had it coming” rant. This is not an excuse for the evil cowardice of the perpetrators. This is instead the simple, direct, and true observation that such profoundly inhuman acts do not occur in a vacuum. The United States of America has the opportunity here to search deep within its collective soul, and to constructively admit the deficiency of its moral character as an actor on the world stage. I have been watching, and waiting, for someone, anyone, to suggest that it is not our perfection that brought this day upon us, but our failures. So far, only Bruce Shapiro has had the courage to say so.

Tonight, in the foyer of my apartment in Queens, I can smell the stink of burning steel. The horizon is lit in the distance by a bubble of blue-white light that diffuses through rising haze. I went out, this evening, to find an American flag to attach to my bicycle, but the stores near here were sold out, or had only cheap versions—plastic, or square “American flag” headscarves. I didn’t buy one of those. I want a real flag, made of honest cotton and properly proportioned, to fly from my ride. Not because I want to unconditionally support my government, but because I want to support the citizenry, who are paying the price for my government’s lack of moral compass and genuine courage. Because I want to remember the stranger on William Street, who was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband or someone’s father, who never knew what was happening to him, or why.

But mostly, I want that flag on the bicycle that I rode out of hell because I desperately hope that our leadership has the courage to change the nature of our terrible world by changing the nature of the actions they take within it.

I fear…I am almost certain…that they only possess the brutish power to make it worse.

POSTSCRIPT, 07/01/03:

A few weeks after I returned to work, I realized that I should have been able to see the body on the sidewalk in this photo, which was taken between the fall of the first and second towers, and therefore after I had fled the building. But the body wasn't there. So I asked Juan, the photgrapher, about it.

A testament, I think, not only to my own ability to confuse myself, but to the unreal magnitude of that day.