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.”
Business as Usual
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.
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.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 27
