A hard rain

[jw at bway.net]

Every morning these days I take the subway from Brooklyn Heights to 
the World Trade Center, where I catch the PATH train to Newark. I 
arrived at WTC at 9 this morning, exited the subway and walked 
through the long underground passageway to WTC One. Usually there is 
a violinist there, and he often is playing the Godfather theme around 
the time I get there. I didn't notice him this morning.

I could tell something was going on by the way people were milling 
around, and by the unusual crush of people trying to exit to the 
street up a staircase not usually so crowded. A uniformed subway 
employee was standing there, telling us we could not proceed through 
the door to the World Trade Center, and for a public official 
directing human traffic, she was unusually hysterical: "There are 
terrorists....go back that way," gesturing towards the subway. And 
most of the crowd started off obediently back towards the trains.

At that moment the people going up the stairs began running down the 
stairs back into the passageway. I decided to go upstairs, against 
the flow, partly out of idiot curiosity, partly because if something 
was happening I felt safer in the open than in a tin can in a narrow 
tunnel.

On the street, I could see that WTC One was burning from its upper 
stories; curlicues of paper were floating down, glittering in the 
light, an eerily beautiful and incongruous effect. I saw people 
running past, some of them crying, as I stood immobilized, watching 
the flames.

Then there was an explosion, and fragments of glass rained down on my 
head. I saw a huge hole in the roof of a building two blocks from 
World Trade Center. I thought there were incoming projectiles of some 
kind, missiles or mortars, and began running away from the burning 
buildings, up Church Street to Chambers, wondering what would blow up 
next. At some point, as emergency vehicles sped past with screaming 
sirens towards the disaster, I concluded that the best thing I could 
do was make a run for the Brooklyn Bridge and walk home to Brooklyn 
Heights, so I headed that way down Chambers. My brain was clicking 
over very quickly: the municipal buildings might be another target, 
and I had to pass close to them to get to the bridge; or terrorists 
might blow up a van in the middle of the bridge itself and try to 
bring it down with the hundreds of people crossing it on foot, 
escaping lower Manhattan.

There's another click that happens: fuck it, I could blow up 
anywhere, I'm just going to do the best I can. I hesitated a moment 
at the entry to the bridge,  watching the two towers burning, 
thinking about the people who were dying and suffering there. A van, 
driven by two Arab-looking men, proceeded slowly onto the bridge; I 
let it get far ahead of me then started to walk, looking back over my 
shoulder repeatedly at the burning towers.

Someone behind me shouted, "There are people jumping!" and I turned 
to see a black dot, almost certainly a human dot, fall from the top 
of a tower.

I was on the bridge about a half-hour. The lane into Manhattan was 
closed to everything but emergency vehicles but the roadway to 
Brooklyn was packed with cars, some of them stopping midway on the 
bridge while the occupants got out to look at the flames. I heard a 
bang and flinched around to see that a driver opening his door had 
hit a motorcycle, throwing its riders to the ground; motorcyclist and 
driver started screaming into each other's faces in typical New York 
style--"You shouldn't have been white-lining!"--an expression I had 
never heard before.

A few minutes after I got home I was watching live coverage on CNN as 
World Trade Center 2 collapsed, then building 1 a few minutes later.

This afternoon a report that no attempt is being made to search the 
wreckage of the building looking for survivors until the fires burn 
out....Two hundred firefighters are missing, and 78 police. No-one 
will even venture to say how many people total are entombed in the 
wreckage tonight.

I went to give blood at an over-whelmed Red Cross center where they 
sent us away and told us to come back in a few hours.  But when I 
came back they had run out of supplies and closed, as had the other 
center in the neighborhood.

I am watching the endless recycling of the same news on CNN. Where is 
our government? With the exception of the White House counsel, who 
gave a brief press conference, the only talking heads on CNN are 
ex-government types; they found Henry Kissinger, but the President, 
the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense are all in hiding, 
perhaps in some simalacrum of the War Room from Dr. Strangelove: 
"Gentlemen, you can't fight here, Its the War Room."

  Right now an expert on CNN is saying, "The plane was the bomb." The 
terms of reference changed today. Planes are bombs, the World Trade 
Center can fall, and the President is hiding. The police and 
firefighters, who are supposed to rescue us, are standing by and 
letting the flames burn out because it is too dangerous to go in.

I thought of Bob Dylan: the glass I picked out of my hair an hour 
later was a hard rain.

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

I'm left with a few mixed, jangling thoughts. As I wrote in last 
month's Spectacle, http://www.spectacle.org/0801/shield.html, why 
bother building the National Missile Defense, a classic example of 
fighting the last war, when the next war--the current war--will be 
fought using our own planes as bombs?

I think that monsters exist among us. Considering how easy it turned 
out to be to bring down the federal building in Oklahoma City with a 
truckful of fertilizer, the only reason more people haven't done 
something like it is because we have some sort of internal governor 
that makes most of us not want to. And planes haven't previously been 
used as bombs this way because people who could fly them were 
restrained, possibly by this governor, and possibly by a stronger 
one, the desire not to die. But the governors are weaker than they 
were, while the technology gets stronger. CNN kept reporting that the 
Trade Center buildings were built to resist a hit from a 707, but 
when 737's and 767's were invented, there was no way to upgrade them.

But we are not unresponsible for the monsters; they are responsible 
for themselves, certainly, as moral actors, but we did our part in 
their creation. We funded and trained the Afghanistan resistance 
against the Russians, who later turned on us; but more than that, 
when we squeeze people and crush them, make them live in humiliation 
and without the air and water, autonomy and self respect necessary to 
sustain them as humans, we make monsters. Any chaotic outsider on the 
margins can kill himself in order to take out others, but when the 
first Israeli Arab fifty-three year old politician does it (as 
happened last week) or the first pilot does it (as happened today) we 
must take notice.

What happens next I don't really know, but I know what I fear: that 
we will embark, like the Israelis and Palestinians, on a mindless 
spasm of killing and counter-killing;  that civil liberties and 
freedom of speech will be curtailed; that the president, with his 
powerful backers, his deer-in-the-headlights look and his primitive 
philosophy, will not see the line before crossing it, or won't care.

Getting out of Manhattan this morning, out from the shadow of the 
burning towers, was like a walk in the park, compared to what I think 
is going to come.

I tried to read this morning's newspaper this afternoon, but the 
pre-bombing news seemed irrelevant, like news from twenty years ago.

[Note from Matthew Gaylor: Jonathan Wallace is a long time subscriber 
to Freematt's Alerts, a NYC Software executive and publisher of The 
Ethical Spectacle http://www.spectacle.org. ]


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