A Paradise Built in Hell (34 page)

Of course masculinity mattered most in this narrative if warfare was the answer to the attack and the source of safety in disaster (at least if masculinity equals belligerence and militarism). The scramble on the part of these leaders was in part to avoid the obvious fact that the attacks had been neither prevented nor prepared for, despite many warnings to the Bush administration and the previous attack on the Twin Towers. Though the attacks were highly localized and killed a lot of internationals as well as Americans, they were almost universally read as an attack on the nation as a whole, as a successful symbolic act. This is one of the reasons attention immediately strayed from the citizens who responded so effectively to the question of how the nation, or rather its government, would respond. The 9/11 Commission uneasily summarized, “The existing mechanisms for handling terrorist acts had been trial and punishment for acts committed by individuals; sanction, reprisal, deterrence, or war for acts by hostile governments. The actions of Al-Qaeda fit neither category. Its crimes were on a scale approaching acts of war, but they were committed by a loose, far-flung, nebulous conspiracy with no territories or citizens or assets that could be readily threatened, overwhelmed, or destroyed.”

War too was a familiar story that people slipped into, a way of asserting nobility, potency, and purpose in the face of a disorienting and destabilizing attack. All William James’s comments about militarism and romantic violence in his “The Moral Equivalent of War” were relevant. People yearned to sacrifice, to join, to be part of something larger. War was the mode they knew. Army enlistment went up. The war on terror seemed profound to many who fell into wartime’s conformities, even if terror was not something you could declare war on, even though what most people were feeling before the administration began its campaign of inculcating fear was almost anything but terror—grief, outrage, numbness, an urgent need to help, empathy, questioning, but not much sheer terror. Terrorism expert Louise Richardson comments, “In responding to the attacks on 9/11, Americans opted to accept Al-Qaeda’s language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to Al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities relative to their own. There is no doubt that the sheer spectacle of the crumbling towers certainly appeared consistent with a view of cosmic warfare. But in point of fact, three thousand casualties, in a country long accustomed to more than five times that many homicides a year, might have elicited a more focused and more moderate reaction.”

The federal government had also failed dramatically. Nineteen men armed only with box cutters were able to attack the symbolic center of American economic power and strike the administrative heart of the mightiest military the world has ever seen more than three quarters of an hour later. The only successful defense that day appears to be that of the passengers of United Flight 93. As their own plane was hijacked and they were forced to the rear of the plane, they began to make phone calls to spouses and parents and to airline and telephone administrators. Family members told them of the attacks on the Twin Towers, and they surmised that their plane was also intended to be used as a bomb. In the small amount of time they had, they gathered information, decided to thwart the terrorists’ aims, made collective decisions on strategies to take back the plane, and in some cases said their good-byes, knowing that their deaths were almost inevitable. It was an astoundingly fast collaborative improvisation. They then staged an attack on their hijackers that may have forced the plane into a crash landing in Pennsyvania rather than allowing it to become the fourth missile attacking a significant target. The media turned the counterattack into another triumph of machismo, though nothing suggests that the female flight attendant preparing boiling water to throw on the hijackers was less brave or instrumental a part of that effort than the male passengers who also communicated their intent to attack. The only person known to have to struggled against the hijackers inside the cockpit was also a woman, probably a flight attendant.

Nearly three years later, the
Washington Post
wrote, “A painstaking re-creation of the faltering and confused response by military and aviation officials on Sept. 11 also shows that the fighter jets that were scrambled that day never had a chance to intercept any of the doomed airliners, in part because they had been sent to intercept a plane, American Airlines 11, that had already crashed into the World Trade Center.” The
Post
cited a report that concluded, “The jets also would probably not have been able to stop the last airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, from barreling into the White House or U.S. Capitol if it had not crashed in Pennsylvania.” And it goes on to quote that report: “ ‘We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93,’ the report’s authors wrote, referring to an apparent insurrection that foiled the hijackers’ plans. ‘Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction.’ The stark conclusions come as part of the last interim report to be issued by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete a final book-length report by the end of next month.” A somewhat less speedy decision-making process than that of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11.

One of the most incisive critiques of what happened that day came from Harvard professor Elaine Scarry, who looked at the ways that the vast military machine failed and the small band of passengers succeeded. (She had previously written eloquently about torture, aviation, and other subjects.) She raised the question of nuclear-strike capacities that were supposed to make the country able to respond within minutes and the way such speed had long justified an administrative branch and military that bypassed more democratic decision-making processes: “By the standards of speed that have been used to justify setting aside constitutional guarantees for the last fifty years, the U.S. military on September 11 had a luxurious amount of time to protect the Pentagon.” She points out that two hours went by between when the FAA discovered that planes had been hijacked and the Pentagon was struck, almost an hour after the first tower was hit. And she reached distinctly anti-institutional conclusions: “When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other, operating in a civil frame, is distributed and egalitarian. Should anything be inferred from the fact that the first form of defense failed and the second succeeded? This outcome obligates us to review our military structures, and to consider the possibility that we need a democratic, not a top-down, form of defense. At the very least, the events of September 11 cast doubt on a key argument that, for the past fifty years, has been used to legitimize an increasingly centralized, authoritarian model of defense—namely the argument from speed.” The mainstream narrative crafted from the ruins of September 11 did not recognize the enormous power of the unarmed public or the comparative helplessness of the world’s mightiest military and of centralized institutions generally. Bureaucracies, as Quarantelli points out, do not improvise readily.

The mainstream story also tended to portray everyone remotely connected to the calamity as a traumatized victim. Once again, the language of a frail and easily shattered human psyche surfaced, as it had so influen tially before the aerial bombing of the Second World War. The powerful phrase “post-traumatic stress disorder,” or PTSD, was invoked, suggesting that everyone who survives or even witnesses an ordeal is badly damaged by it. The term arose from the politics of the Vietnam War, when antiwar psychiatrists and others wished to demonstrate the deep destructive power of an unjust and ugly war. As one British psychiatrist put it, the new diagnosis “was meant to shift the focus of attention from the details of a soldier’s background and psyche to the fundamentally traumagenic nature of war.” The risk for PTSD is far higher, unsurprisingly, for those who are already damaged, fragile, inflexible, which is to say that events themselves, however horrific, have no guaranteed psychic outcome; the preexisting state matters.

The term PTSD is nowadays applied to anyone who is pained at or preoccupied with the memory of a calamity, rather than only those who are so deeply impacted they are overwhelmed or incapacitated by suffering or fear. On September 14, 2001, nineteen psychologists wrote an open letter to the American Psychological Association, expressing concern over “certain therapists . . . descending on disaster scenes with well intentioned but misguided efforts. Psychologists can be of most help by supporting the community structures that people naturally call upon in times of grief and suffering. Let us do whatever we can, while being careful not to get in the way.” One of the authors of the letter told the
New York Times
soon after, “The public should be very concerned about medi calizing what are human reactions.” That is, it is normal to feel abnormal in extraordinary situations, and it doesn’t always require intervention. Nevertheless, an estimated nine thousand therapists converged on lower Manhattan to treat everyone they could find. The
Washington Post
called the belief that PTSD is ubiquitous among survivors “a fallacy that some mental health counselors are perpetuating in the aftermath of this tragedy.” It was another way to depict survivors as fragile rather than resilient. Kathleen Tierney remarked, “It’s been very interesting during my lifetime to watch the trauma industry develop and flower. The idea that disasters cause widespread PTSD is not proven, is highly disputed. It is also highly disputed that disaster victims need any sort of professional help to get better rather than social support to get better.”

A less well known psychological concept is “post-traumatic growth,” a phenomenon that applies to personal as well as collective experience. One of the major books on the subject explains, “Inherent in these traumatic experiences are losses such as the loss of loved ones, of cherished roles or capabilities, or of fundamental, accepted ways of understanding life. In the face of these losses and the confusion they cause, some people rebuild a way of life that they experience as superior to their old one in important ways. For them, the devastation of loss provides an opportunity to build a new, superior life structure almost from scratch. They establish new psychological constructs that incorporate the possibilty of such traumas, and better ways to cope with them. They appreciate their newly found strength and the strength of their neighbors and their community. And because of their efforts, individuals may value both what they now have, and the process of creating it although the process involved loss and distress. Groups and societies may go through a similar transformation, producing new norms for behavior and better ways to care for individuals within the group.” Trauma is real. It isn’t ubiquitous. And what people do with trauma varies. As Viktor Frankl remarked, “Often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.”

New York City was not Mexico City or Buenos Aires. Though individual transformations were profound, no great collective renewal arose from those extraordinary days of mourning, volunteering, and connecting. There was little language, there were few models for people to say
This is how life could be, this is what I desire my society to be;
society is what was strongest that day, stronger than individual human life, than professional skill, military might, terrorist rage, or government power. Curiously, no one commented on the ways that the old Hobbesian/capitalist models of competition had been replaced by an intense and creative cooperation, a marvel of mutual aid within blocks of Wall Street. Of course civil society was powerful enough to describe what had happened in Mexico in 1985 on its own terms; in 2001, the media and the government colluded in telling a very different story, one that harked back to the movies and their romance with authoritarianism and exceptionalism.

It was a national disaster in the sense that people across the country were drawn into an intensified present of questioning, openness, altruism, a pause from which many conclusions might have been reached, many directions taken. In a strange way, a lot of people valued the sense of urgency, solidarity, and depth, the shift away from an everyday diet of trivia to major questions about life, death, politics, and meaning. Or not so strange, if you regard ours as a serious species, craving meaning above all—as Friedrich Nietzsche once commented, “Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to trouble, does not deny suffering per se: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided it can be given a meaning.” The nation was poised for real change, for rethinking foreign policy, oil dependence, and much more. It was the classic disaster state of immersion and openness to change that Fritz had spoken of: “Disaster provides a form of societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalized patterns of behavior and renders people amenable to social and personal change.” It was as though the country hovered on the brink of a collective post-traumatic growth into something more purposeful, united, and aware, but the meaning of the event itself got hijacked, again and again, and in its place came all the cheap familiar stories.

It’s possible to imagine a reality that diverged from September 11 onward, a reality in which the first thing affirmed was the unconquerable vitality of civil society, the strength of bonds of affection against violence, of open public life against the stealth and arrogance of the attack. (These were all affirmed informally, in practice, but not institutionally, and they constituted a victory of sorts, a refusal to be cowed, a coming together, and a demonstration of what is in many ways the opposite of terrorism.) From that point, the people yearning to sacrifice might have been asked to actually make sweeping changes that would make a society more independent of Mideast oil and the snake pit of politics that goes with it, reawakened to its own global role and its local desires for membership, purpose, dignity, and a deeper safety that came not from weapons but from a different role in the world and at home. That is to say, the resourcefulness and improvisation that mattered in those hours could have been extended indefinitely; we could have become a disaster society in the best sense.