A Paradise Built in Hell (35 page)

This spirit of brave resolve and deep attention, this awakened civil society, seemed to alarm the Bush administration, which immediately took measures to quell it. Bush’s initial dumbfoundedness, slow reaction, and flight all over the country constitutes one form of elite panic; his administration’s anxiety to dampen the surge of citizenship was another. People were encouraged to stay home, to go shopping to stimulate the economy, to keep buying big cars, and to support the wars, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. The “America: Open for Business” campaign equated consumerism with patriotism, and a torrent of red, white, and blue merchandise issued forth. By the following summer, the administration would suggest that people spy on their neighbors, sowing suspicion and divisiveness, while failing to supply practical training to cope with disasters. They constantly spoke of more terrorist attacks, of a vulnerable nation, of terrible things that might happen, spoke with a certainty designed to inculcate fear and with it obedience. The preposterous five-color terror-alert system was created, and during the several years afterward, the United States, as anyone passing through an airport was routinely reminded, was almost continuously on “threat level orange.”

The government emphasized that only armed men and professionals were ready to respond, though the only effective response that fateful day had been by unarmed civilians on United Flight 93. They seemed desperate to push people back into an entirely private life of consuming and producing. And despite the extraordinary atmosphere of those first weeks, they largely succeeded in destroying the disaster atmosphere of courage, improvisation, flexibility, and connectedness. Government officials and newly minted terrorism experts began to air endless scenarios for destruction by sophisticated means, from dirty bombs to airborne biological warfare, despite the lack of evidence of intention or ability by Al-Qaeda to use such means. The attacks had been carried out with box cutters, after all (and the largely forgotten anthrax attacks that soon followed turned out to be committed by someone with privileged access to the United States’ own bioweapons labs). Soon enough every place from the Golden Gate Bridge to New York City’s Pennsylvania Station was patrolled by men in camouflage with automatic weapons.

In contrast with many previous disasters, the public itself on the streets of New York was not treated as an enemy. Elite panic manifested elsewhere. The adminstration demonized anyone who remotely categorically resembled a terrorist, by ethnicity, country of origin, or religion, and the human and legal rights of Middle Eastern men vanished as they were kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned without charges or rights. Victims included American and Canadian citizens as well as immigrants, and soon after 9/11, men and boys seized in Afghanistan and other places around the world. The Bush administration in an unprecedented move claimed that neither domestic nor international law protected these prisoners and introduced a new era of torture, lawlessness, and unrestrained executive power unprecedented in American history. As with events such as the Great Kanto Earthquake, citizens were sometimes inspired to take justice into their own hands, and intimidation and assault of people associated with Islam and the Middle East followed. An equal and opposite reaction of individuals and organizations arose to protect these people and their rights.

In a sense the Bush administration made its own disaster movie, with the United States as victim, the government as John Wayne, and images and narratives fulfilling all the clichés and familiarities of the genre. Most notable, of course, was the fighter jet that delivered Bush, after a dramatic 150-mile-per-hour landing, on the deck of an aircraft carrier shortly after the war on Iraq was launched. Though he was not the pilot, he swaggered in a flight suit with a bulky crotch to announce major combat operations were concluded before a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” As the war spiraled out of control for years afterward, they must have regretted the image, but in those early days, questioning the administration was a dangerous thing to do. Like Giuliani, they had taken back the mandate of heaven the disaster might have snatched from them, and it would require a far larger disaster to rip it from their grasp, four years later. But in those first weeks and months, they were riding high. (Of course, Al-Qaeda collaborated on the movie clichés, supplying the Arabian fanatics, the opening spectacle, and the flowery language of jihad as global war.)

Soon after 9/11, the broken nation of Iraq, which the United States had never stopped bombing since its first war there, was portrayed as a potent regime possessing “weapons of mass destruction” and intent on using them. While President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told Americans during the Second World War that we have nothing to fear but “fear itself,” fear, or terror, was constantly cultivated. Indeed, the war on terror became one of the great Orwellian oxymorons of the age: actually eliminating a tactic—terrorism—from the world was impossible, and the war the administration launched was not quelling but inflaming fear, or terror. Curiously, New Yorkers remained among the least terrified during the subsequent years, marching in the hundreds of thousands against the war on Iraq, voting against the Bush administration in 2004. Within six months of the attacks, the families of some victims founded or joined Not in Our Name, one of many antiwar groups that sprang up in the wake of 9/11. Within days of the attack, some were organizing against war as a response.

Many individual lives changed. Jordan Schuster, who had helped catalyze Union Square’s moment as a great public forum, chose to become an activist for social justice when he graduated and was still one when we met in 2007. Mark Fichtel, who was the president and CEO of New York Board of Trade, Coffee, Sugar, Cocoa Exchanges that morning, had a hair-raising, or rather knee-scraping, escape that morning, though a “little old lady” got him on his feet after he was knocked down by the fleeing crowd. Nevertheless, he was able to get home rapidly that day, “and actually within an hour I had talked to all my senior executives. We had a disaster recovery plan for the New York Board of Trade in place.” He got his organization up and running immediately. Six months later he quit his job, studied Islam for “800 hours,” and began to teach classes on the subject.

Tom Engelhardt, quoted previously, was a book editor and lifelong New Yorker in his later fifties when 9/11 happened. He found the news coverage so distressingly inaccurate that he began to assemble alternative versions from his own online reading of international newspapers and other sources and send them out to a handful of friends. Soon his commentaries atop these clippings grew into eloquent, impassioned full-length essays of his own, and he had hundreds, then thousands, of subscribers. Thus he began
TomDispatch.com
, which seven years later provided about three long political essays a week, half by writers he was already associated with—Chalmers Johnson, Jonathan Schell, Mike Davis—and others who found him or he found through his new life as an essayistic news service. The commentaries and reports were picked up by many other Web sites across the world and by newspapers from the
Los Angeles Times
to
Le Monde Diplomatique
. I contacted him about eighteen months after 9/11 with an essay on hope and history that I wanted him to circulate and became a regular contributor to
TomDispatch.com
. The site allowed me to speak directly to the issues of the moment and made me more of a political writer with a more far-reaching voice at a time that seemed to demand such urgent engagement. And its editor became a close friend. Such are the ricochets of history.

Many became more political, though the Bush administration’s response more than 9/11 itself prompted the majority. There was no one pattern of response, however. I met one couple who lived with their two young children in a beautiful loft apartment in a converted office building a block from the Twin Towers. They had fled that morning carrying library books and some recently purchased clothing to return to the seller. They had to stay away until the following January, when their house was finally purged of the toxic dust that covered everything from the French toast left on their breakfast table to the children’s toys, their clothes, their books, and everything else, and the infernal fires in the Pit had stopped burning. For many the disaster lasted for weeks, or for a few months. For this family, as for many of the forgotten residents in what was widely portrayed as a nonresidential business district, it lasted for years. By the end of it, the husband in this couple had become a pessimist who spoke of his grinning face in family photographs before the world around them collapsed as “innocent” and saw himself as suffering from PTSD. “I’ll never be happy again the way I was then. I’m always looking over my shoulder.” Uncertainty undermined him, but his wife came to embrace it.

She became an optimist, though her route there was circuitous. A political insider, she at first attempted to use all her contacts to figure out when the next attack would be, to be in control of what was happening. “And then all of a sudden one day I realized I just wasn’t going to know. The cloud lifted, I felt better. . . . One day it all went away and I don’t know why. I couldn’t control the environment and I wasn’t going to know. My neighborhood I had worked so hard to rebuild is a huge scar; I had my children thinking, half the people thought I was a freak, the other half thought I was a hero, which was also a problem. One night I sat down here and realized we had these incredible sunsets [where the towers had been] and everything was fine. The return to normal was a return to chaos.” She added that one of her “mythologies” had been “that I was born too late for a cause—and here I was given one.” The neighborhood organized to fight for its rights, for realistic safety standards, for compensation, and in doing so came together. She was a participant but not one who assumed public leadership or came to depend on that leadership for identity. She also suffered a near-fatal illness. After the two experiences, “I became a person of faith. You realize what horror awaits and are grateful it didn’t happen. Three thousand were murdered but 25,000 were saved. It was 3,000 and not 3,004, and we’re still here. I think it’s very easy to be compassionate when it’s abstract. People say it’s how people behave when things are bad that matters. But that’s easy. It’s how they behave when things are good.”

 

 

 

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were civil servants in abundance: firefighters, police, city workers, and volunteer civil servants converging to deal with failed systems. Citizens themselves were making the major decisions, from evacuating the Trade Center buildings despite the advice to stay put from the Port Authority to organizing massive relief efforts. While the Pentagon failed to act, citizens took dramatic action inside Flight 93, possibly because of the passengers’ quick collective decisions and actions. It was not only a moment of mutual aid and altruism but also a moment of participatory democracy at the forum in Union Square, at the dispensaries, impromptu kitchens, and volunteer efforts all over the city. People decided to do something, banded together—usually with strangers—and made it happen. It was anarchy in Kropotkin’s sense of self-determination rather than of chaos. It was also typical of what happens in disaster, when institutions fail and civil society succeeds. It demonstrated that both the will and the ability to make a vibrant society in the absence of authority can exist, at least briefly. Once they gathered their wits, the Bush administration’s most urgent campaign was not to take America back from terrorists but from its citizens. That campaign was largely successful.

In some ways that matter, 9/11 was an anomaly, and the refrain after it happened was that everything had changed. In other ways, it was a classic disaster complete with a revitalized civil society of rescuers, mutual aid, and public forums and with many forms of elite panic. If the people of Mexico had won the postdisaster contest of power against their government, or at least won significant battles, Americans lost most of the battles after 9/11 and got instead a militarized society with fewer rights and less privacy. If Argentines three months after 9/11 had made of a sudden economic disaster a chance for social rebirth, Americans missed the chance. The country’s romance with right-wing solutions was in full flower, and militarism, individualism, and consumerism drowned out the other possibilities. Argentina had been at the end of a long road of authoritarianism, repression, and foreign intervention when it rose up. The language to describe, let alone celebrate, what had arisen in the ruins of the Twin Towers was missing, and so was the vision of what role this mutual aid, altruism, collaboration, improvisation, and empowerment could play in a society free to invent and direct itself. The logic of wartime was used to inculcate a patriotism that was akin to deferential obedience. Civil society had triumphed in the hours and days after the attacks, but it failed in the face of more familiar stories told by the government and retold by the media, again and again. Four years later the balance would shift a little.

A
t the last minute, her daughter was unable to pick her up for the drive to Atlanta, so Clara Rita Bartholomew, a strong, outspoken woman of sixty-one, went into the closet of the house she’d inherited from her sister to escape Hurricane Katrina’s wind. She’d been awakened by the howling gale at six that Monday morning, August 29, 2005. She sheltered first in the bathroom, where she could see the wind rip chunks off the neighbor’s house, then in that closet, the safest place in the house. The gales died down, she left the closet, looked out the window, and saw the water was at the level of a nearby stop sign. A foot of water had come into her home, even though it was high off the ground. She was in St. Bernard Parish, next to New Orleans Parish, and in her parish exactly four houses would escape flooding. She didn’t know it at the time, but the levees had broken all along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. This man-made shortcut from the sea for commercial ships was nicknamed the Hurricane Highway, since it invites hurricane storm surges to charge in straight from the Gulf. As the water began rising up her legs, she pulled down the latch for the stairs to the attic and climbed higher.