This attack closely affected the ‘cosmocracy’ of global professionals. We are the people who fly as if taking the bus. We are the people who rent our time to the Man in those tall buildings. This attack was against us.
Brightness falls
As the sad white plumes rose where buildings stood, and my American friend jumped over me to race to the toilet to vomit, my thoughts were fixed on the shattered lives of those who started their day at the gym, running into their meetings with their Java coffee, who by 9:20 were jumping from the eightieth floor. For my generation of refuseniks to ‘adulthood’, it was a sharp invocation to authenticity, a jab in the back, a rare call to personal action. It was a sudden realisation that we now live in a more dangerous era. The future can no longer be guaranteed.
For many of us, the fall of the towers ended our childlike faith, deeply embedded, that bad things never happen within sight of the Gap. I thought of my flirty conversation about the merits of linen boxers with the dark-haired woman at the Banana Republic store in the WTC underground mall while waiting for the shuttle to Newark last month. I wondered if she, with her belly-button ring and hair-flip, got out.
Gone is the blind faith in modernity. Gone, too, its promise of an extended zone of equanimity around all who religiously follow Sex and the City and ritually consume tall skinny lattes, the secret potion that keeps us safe from the bad things we read about in the ‘foreign’ section of the New York Times. Car bombs and rocket attacks on school children are unpleasant abstractions that don’t really affect our lives, or interrupt the search for the perfect brunch spot.
Mass death of the inexplicable, random kind that stalks the streets of Ramallah or Grozny happens outside the zone. It happens to other people. According to the dominant rhetorical tone and George W Bush, these people haven’t fully grasped the ways of ‘freedom’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘democracy’. They don’t shop at Banana Republic: their deaths don’t get the full measure of our outrage.
If you can’t rely on the solidity and moral weight of tall buildings, what can you rely on? They were supposed to be permanent totems to our achievements, to rational space, embodying logic and utopian aesthetics. As a culture we are ill-prepared to see modernity hollowed out. Some of the most viscerally disturbing images are those of destroyed police cars, shattered escalators and ash-strewn computer equipment, eerily reminiscent of the last days of Pompeii. We shudder at these images in same manner that we are appalled by scenes of the abandoned inner cities and unconsciously veer our eyes away from human physical disfigurements, or Ramallah. Can we veer our eyes away from downtown Manhattan in the same way?
Why not again?
Many of us had harboured a secret suspicion of planes for a long time. Although we’ve been flying for a century, there is something in even the most hardened frequent flier that is still a bit surprised by the gravity-defying hubris of getting a 747 off the ground. Strapped in, we silently will the beast into the air, and cheer inside when it levels off.
Do you remember the spate of Seventies mass disaster flicks, The Towering Inferno, Airport ’77? While big disasters have always been at the back of our minds, like nuclear war, they never happened to us; so they got shelved in the back of our collective psyches. They could be safely parodied in testosterone-fuelled feel-good films like Independence Day. After last week, I don’t know many people who will be able to ride an elevator or board a plane without a fleeting thought of what could happen. The impossible happened: why not again?
Only two degrees
The shock of the tragedy was evident on the streets of London. Though hardened by decades of IRA bombings, security threats and other calamities, cosmopolitan London was genuinely wounded. This feeling went further than abstract concern for professional confreres across the sea, or solidarity among twin bastions of hyper-capitalism. Many had personal connections to the disaster. Over three hundred British people died in the towers – most from the tight-knit London financial community.
Most people I know among this community had a friend-of-friend near miss, or missing story. The event put paid to Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s now famous ‘six degrees of separation’ theory: there were only two degrees between the victims and the voyeurs gathered in pubs and homes from Canary Wharf to South Kensington.
Many Londoners are more familiar with NYC than they are with Liverpool in England’s north; still more Britons, like most in the Anglophone world, owned a piece of the NYC skyline. It was part of their imaginary wallpaper, assembled through travel, film and a lifetime of exposure to image pollution.
One woman compared the feeling she felt on seeing the reconfigured skyline to the shock we experience when we meet people missing their two front teeth. Londoners, well within range of the Gap, felt the irreversible violation of the “zone of equanimity”. They were too far away to smell the smoke at night, but their psychological distance had atrophied. They lived in the greater New York. Co-mingling with the general grief, fear arose: we could be next.
Fear of public spaces
I had my first experience of sudden mass panic on the Tube the other day. I exited a train and followed a crowd up an escalator when I felt the sudden, inexplicable desire to run for the exit. It’s difficult to work out the cause and effect; but either catching or starting a sudden wave of inexplicable fear, my fellow passengers raced alongside me, steadily increasing their pace in orderly lockstep as we neared the top, as if choreographed for a music video or a Woody Allen musical. No one elected to stand to the right. Exploding out to street level, a few of us exchanged visible sighs of relief, uncomfortable recognition of a shared event, and melted into the crowd.
Several friends reported similar incidents during their daily commutes – sudden airport paranoia, and even the unfit abandoning elevators for stairs. It all seems to be part of the after-effects, like the hypersensitive nervous twitch you get for days after finding a bug in your hair.
Fear of the unknown is the most pernicious. In the ‘war against terror’, most Americans are finally finding out what poor migrants and cosmocratic elites have known for years: the divide between the foreign and domestic is collapsing. Technology and travel have now sufficiently compacted space for citizenship to be an increasingly administrative term. We fear that our globalised systems are beyond policing by jurisdictionally limited forces, and too little understood.
Despite our search for a simple narrative, we know that the casting of Afghanistan or the more easily demonised Taliban in the role of ultimate villain is reductive. Our fear is more like the sort you experience on suddenly learning that someone close to you is an impostor, as with Kevin Costner’s duplicitous deep cover Russian agent in the cold war thriller No Way Out.
Our nervous ticks, and the conspiracy emails that spread about the web like competing viruses, confirm for us that the ‘enemy’ is within our sphere, clean-shaven, sitting at the next cubicle at the net café, booking his next killer flight on Expedia. SMS messages circulate, warning us to avoid particular areas of the city at particular times. The rumour of the week on the web? Terrorists are learning how to transport hazardous wastes from on-line study tools.
What am I doing here?
Back at Starbucks, in an urban postal area where residents receive their copy of the New Yorker more or less on time, the concern mounts. Most of the people I spoke to in days and weeks after the event expressed their desire to escape. Not the existential escape of a road movie, but a need to get away from the shadows of tall buildings, away from the claustrophobia of mass transportation and exposed public spaces. This desire for physical retreat, and the reflex to recoil from the crush of modern events back into the familiar, calls us back to family, the countryside and to our stockpiles of cultural nostalgia.
We are all re-calculating risks that we previously took for granted. Like the actuaries and insurance adjusters, many of us find ourselves making mental calculations, taking stock of our lives. Do I trust the subway? If they rebuilt the towers, would I work there? Any fireman will tell you that there is little anyone can do for an inferno above the tenth floor.
The re-evaluation is infectious; it spreads to other parts of life. Do I really want to live here, in this city? What am I doing, working so hard and sacrificing my personal life, when it all could end in a cloud of drifting ash? Do I really want to take that vacation abroad? Can I get out of that business trip?
Even the most hardened careerists feel the existential heat. A London hedge fund manager I spoke to started his career on the 105th floor of Tower 2. He admitted in hushed tones that he is contemplating moving offshore.
Un-kept promises
The new fear mixes with palpable disappointment and melancholy, the inchoate sense of being let down. For many of us, the shock of vulnerability exposed, of seeing random death and the fragility of our system in the same breath, felt like the moment we saw our father’s frailties for the first time.
A series of moments in the past year encouraged introspection: the professions whose legions occupied the towers and nearby buildings were still coping with the psychological fallout from the collapse of the tech boom and its exaggerated promises of a ‘new, new’ world. Promises of corporate authority inverted, and limitless opportunities for wealth creation, self-actualisation and professional freedom collapsed with the NASDAQ. Some, sensitive to the zeitgeist in the late summer of 2001, view the attack as the hideous capstone of this collapse.
Even before 11 September, we feared a global recession was inevitable. It was as if we were preparing to pay the toll for a decade of unsurpassed decadence. The global elite, like poorer migrants, felt particularly vulnerable. For those who live in the interstitial spaces between countries, with complex loyalties and identities, the infrastructure of frictionless international living had been compromised. Rapid airport security checks, on-line drivers license applications, and elimination of many border crossings had become a hallmark for progress.
We prioritised individual comfort over collective safety, driven by the hyper-inflated consumer expectations set off by a technology and service boom, helped by a prolonged absence of believable threat. Now we will all pay the price by surrendering, at least in the short term, the conveniences that allowed us to live in the illusion that we were consumers before citizens. Now we are neither. We are children, passive in the hands of our state. In dystopic fantasies, we envision pilots locked in batting cage cockpits and armed flight attendants, freed of their obligation to push duty-free items, ready to train their cardboard bullets on ‘shifty-looking’ passengers.
Rebuilding faith
The danger is that we allow the fear to consume the moxie, creativity, and faith in a new and better future on which much of our integrated global economic system is based. This faith allows for the complete, un-ironic ability to ‘go-for-it’ – the hallmark of American creativity, ingenuity, ability to take risks and consume on credit.
Increasingly our economy and culture is also dependent on ‘confidence’ among business and consumers – on our expectations, our hopes, whether we are in a good mood. Creativity and confidence underwrite global growth in ways that may become painfully evident in the coming weeks. The downsizing of the travel and hospitality industries may be just the first indicators of the full economic impact of our collective funk.
The service sector dominates the economy and provides the symbolic leadership for our culture. Intellectual entrepreneurs, creative professionals and bankers, lawyers, and the myriad of executives tied together around the world by a lattice-work of interdependencies require predictability, belief in the integrity of the system, and most importantly hope for the future in order to thrive.
After a three-decade hiatus, the state is back. Sometime around 10:00 EST on 11 September, moral power shifted palpably from the market back to the state. Up to then, the popular wisdom among the smart set was that, by and large, politics had become a branch of advertising. As the buildings crashed down, there was a new appreciation for public services in fire-fighters and police; a heightened acknowledgement of the need for military and intelligence services.
Wall Street bankers had been the self-professed ‘Masters of the Universe’. Many took particular pride in never having voted. But now they began to focus their rapt attention on the edicts of George Pataki, a previously obscure governor from upstate. Against the streaming video of devastation, markets seemed more unreal than they ever have. Never in the post-war period has there been such a strong moral mandate and resources for new public acts. Few now doubt that we need strong leadership to prosecute a long global campaign against the guilty and to restore public confidence in the infrastructure and integrity of our system.
Cast in an unfamiliarly paternal role, the state needs to use its resources to promote a better mood. As the mourning period ends, the viewer-as-consumer is invoked: get out and spend. But spending alone will not do it. The paralytic fascination with live broadcasts and regurgitative commentary is past; among my friends at least, a form of media withdrawal has set in. But despite appearances, ‘normalcy’ is not likely to resume unless symbolic acts are taken.
We need to go through the painful process of re-examining our lives, and their un-kept promises. But we must not ignore the importance of symbols and utopian ideals as a creative beacon for our culture. We need new monuments to our collective achievements, a greater humanism as promised in the architecture of the towers. I felt an indescribable sadness when I heard the rumour that, rather than reconstruct the bold originals, the WTC developers were planning four fifty-storey buildings. We may need military campaigns; but we need grand gestures just as much, that can stand out in their confidence against the judgement of the insurance men.
It would be an easy and fashionable compromise to eschew the over-sized rationalism of monumental architecture in favour of rebuilding the structures on a more human scale. These are important moments for the culture. We desperately need big statements to help restore the faith – more Charles De Gaulle or, dare I say, Steven Spielberg than Jane Jacobs. The only way to vanquish fear is through imagination.
