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NEW YORK, NY Welcome to the Terrordome
The rusted metal sign is still there, just down the block from our house, its colors fading but it message still clear. The arrow points to the padlocked basement door, and the words proclaim: "PUBLIC SHELTER, capacity 100." It looks older, more rustic somehow, than the one I remember from the hallway of my Manhattan apartment building growing up; the one with the familiar orange-and-black pie-wedge symbol and the words "FALLOUT SHELTER." That sign became a sort of family joke after a while: Stand here and you'll survive the nuclear blast! Step through that door and you'll be incinerated! I somehow assumed that the sign had always been there, erected along with the building in the 1930s; it wasn't until much later that I realized there must have been a moment when they were posted, millions of these little metal harbingers of doom going out nationwide to puzzled building managers and superintendents, who would have been forced to choose an appropriate spot to declare safe from the nameless terrors of the Cold War. Nameless terror is, of course, the watchword of the day: September 11 is upon us. Despite a brief, surreal attempt last year by George W. Bush to rename it "Patriot Day," there seems little chance it will ever be known by more than its date, joining the Fourth of July as the two U.S. holidays too infamous to be known by more than their dates. It's a day that is weirdly evolving into a national holiday of fear, where we all relive the terrifying days of 2001 - who are They, and what will They do next? - and think twice about going into the city, driving across bridges, leaving the house. There may be no reason beyond numerology to believe that terror is more likely to strike on this day - but, as my stepmother remarked last week when considering whether to risk the roads, "It's just harder to put out of your mind now." Fear and its accompanying obsession, of course: safety. Plenty of people have pointed out, almost since the moment the towers fell, that feeling "safe" in the way that Americans had grown addicted to is an alien notion to much of the world. One possible response would be to realize that the world is too small not to pretend we're not a part of it - but in the land of the gated community, we never tear down walls when we can build them up instead. And so we will again honor our dead with security checkpoints and armed National Guardsmen, who will do nothing to make anyone genuinely safe - if a bomb goes off in Times Square, what are they going to do, shoot it? - but do serve as reminders of our fear. As does the war - or the occupation, or the "rebuilding of Iraq" or whatever name it's going by these days. As noted repeatedly by September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows - named for a Martin Luther King Jr. line that "wars make poor chisels for peaceful tomorrows" - the War on Terror is making future terrorist attacks *more* likely, as Donald Rumsfeld himself admitted. In the calculus of terror, though, this is somehow beside the point - as if by exporting our fear to the faceless citizens of Kabul and Baghdad, we alchemically confer safety upon ourselves. Call it the I'm-Rubber-You're-Glue Doctrine. At a launch party on Monday for Peaceful Tomorrows' new book (which I've reviewed separately for inthesetimes.com), Ground Zero for Peace founder Meg Bartlett told of how she and her fellow emergency workers now spend much of their time dealing with fear - not fear of terrorism, but the more intangible, nagging terror of being told over and over that it is their job to keep this from happening again. It's an insane expectation - just as it's an insane expectation to look to 19-year-old to perform the same task by wandering the streets of Baghdad armed with heavy machinery. At the Peaceful Tomorrows event, Bartlett told a story of a fireman in her group. "There's something terribly wrong with the world," he told her, "when I'm not afraid to walk into a 102-story burning building, but I am afraid to tell my co-workers that I want peace." Happy Patriot Day, everybody. 
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Brooklyn TV options circa 11:37 am, September 11, 2002 |
