Back to the Stone Age

When the call comes in Tuesday morning, just after 9, I answer with my silly voice. C, however, is frantic. She is yelling about something she has seen on the “Today” show on her way out the door. “I never watch the ‘Today’ show,” she says, gasping for a breath. Then she recounts the eerie shadow of a jumbo jet tracing across the New York skyline and into the World Trade Center’s south tower.

I had been one sentence into a CD review. Now the Internet is clogged. Within an hour several of us are across the street at the Whig & Courier pub, where the owner is grim-faced and preparing to open for the day, and Dan Rather’s bewildered narration hums in the background. The anchor is judiciously refusing to confirm an Associated Press report that the north tower has already collapsed—it’s hard to tell from the camera angle—when the south tower disappears.

Silence swallows up our end of the bar the way thunder and ash have swallowed up lower Manhattan. Even Dan Rather just stares.

Summoned back to the office, I am all hellfire. “Bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age,” I authorize, to no one in particular. (Gen. Curtis LeMay had famously wished the same fate on the North Vietnamese in 1964, a fact I will remember only later.)

I email M, who works uptown. She assures me she is safe. I confess that it is turning out to be a bad week to quit smoking and a bad week to have planned to surprise C in Iowa City. M replies:

i feel sick. don’t smoke by the way. for the first time in my life i’m glad we have a republican in the white house and i hope he bombs the shit out of those countries.

The remainder of the week is spent adjusting myself to the noise and the silence: the noise of the headlines (“Terror hits home,” scream both the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Press Herald), the noise of my own anger, the noise of the TVs, the radios tuned to NPR, the streaming video and strains of “God Bless America,” the noise of tears—and the silence that grips the office for days. Hardly anyone speaks.

Hardly anyone breathes.

From Iowa City, my friend S emails:

Life here has gotten weird after the terrorist attacks. International students were told by the International Student Advisors at Kirkwood College not to attend classes until the heat dies down. (T says he has a Middle-Eastern student in his class and things were very weird on Tuesday.) Sand n– has become part of the popular vocabulary again. People are grumbling over the loss of the Iowa/Iowa State football game. “Welcome to Jerusalem” I heard a New Yorker say after the attacks. Maybe that’s true in the Gotham City, but here it’s more like welcome to Selma, Alabama. The local newspapers, like many other newspapers across the nation, have come out with special extra editions and regular editions with inflammatory headlines. Everyone seems to have turned into a news junkie overnight. Several people at work took off Wednesday just to watch the news over and over again.

Meanwhile, the president calls for calm. He says the United States will not be “cowed.” “Our responsibility to history is already clear,” he declares. “To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

For the first time, the headlines scream war. I phone M, and she tells me that she is on Valium and unable to hold food down.

“It’s not necessarily an easy course (for newspaper columnists) to say let’s go to war,” National Review editor Rich Lowry tells the Washington Post. “It takes some righteous anger and conviction to say that. ... America roused to righteous anger has always been a force for good.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair appears on television fighting back tears, though not all Europe is of a mind. Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, observes: “For there is in American culture a fundamentalism no less strong than that of those who may have plotted yesterday’s carnage. The tendency to divide the world between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, the elect and the damned, is, ironically, one of the things that America shares with its most ferocious enemies.”

I decide to tell C about my plans to surprise her at the end of the week, a secret that until now I had guarded against very long odds. “Brendan, don’t come,” she says, sounding concerned and level-headed.

“I’m coming,” I reply, sounding anxious and pig-headed. “Things will be fine by the end of the week. And besides, isn’t there some kind of principle at stake here? We should be able to move about our own country, shouldn’t we?”

C scoffs. She’s not familiar with that particular principle, she says, but I know it’s less the principle than it is the need to move, to keep moving.

The president is back on TV. Referring to the terrorists still at large, he says we will “smoke them out.” He says, “We will rid the world of the evil-doers.” The network cuts to an interview with a man weeping uncontrollably over the loss of hundreds of his colleagues.

M is back at work and emails:

like everyone else i feel strange and sad and disconnected from what is happening even though it is so close by and evidence of what happened is everywhere. it bothers me how quickly there is nothing new to say, how trite we all begin to sound despite the fact that our world has been violently and irrevocably changed.

I copy her message and forward it to several of my friends, with a small addition: “My one thought is that we may be deceiving ourselves to say that our world has irrevocably changed. Other people understood that this was the world we all lived in. Just not us. Not until now.”

Replies my buddy W, a university instructor:

right so. as in the commentary early on stating that this was the “worst act of terrorism in the history of the world.” a sentiment that “totally makes sense” to classrooms of 18 y.o. middle-class american kids. but one which might be argued by those who witnessed 250,000 dead in the Dresden firebombing, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, or Rwanda, or Stalinist Russia, or the Pogroms of Poland, or the Holocaust, or any indigenous population anywhere on the planet.

the shortcut of instant mythos cheapens our language, and such language devalues our humanity.

i do not lend my support to any act which kills innocent people, i do not need nor want innocents to be killed, maimed, molested in my name, in the name of my country, in the name of my dead countrymen and women. and certainly not in the name of a flag.

Along the bottom of the television screen stretch the words, in red, white, and blue, “America United.”

I never tell my mom that I had, for a time, planned to fly to Iowa. When she calls on Saturday, she lets me know that Dad, who had been delayed for days in D.C. on his way back from a vacation in Ireland, has finally flown out of Dulles.

“The airport was deserted,” she reports. “The plane was half-empty, so he got bumped up to first class, which he enjoyed.”

Was he nervous about flying? I want to know.

“That man,” she scoffs. “He’s crazy. He said we can’t just stop leading our lives. I said, ‘Tom, yes we can. We have to.’”