*Anniversary
Day
September
11, 2002
Lawrence, Kansas
A Final Glimpse of Unity on the Homefront
An
American
Day:
Still
Not Quite Ready to
Look
Away
USA
Today
* US on High Alert For Possible Terror Attack
and Telecasts
Lawrence
Journal-World
age 10,
“I am scared and worried, but I will not let my fear overpower me. I
love my country. I believe in my country, and I still have hope for my country.
I hope we will end this war wisely --- in a way where many innocent people will
not get hurt.”
age 10
“My family was in shock. We didn’t see a replay of the event on the
news --- we saw the actual thing happen on TV!”
Somebody misspelled “Jihad”.
People Want Politicians to Rise Above Partisanship
New York Times
We’re On a Spiritual Journey Here
No
Phony Anniversary:
Orange
Alert
“In
some pathetic way, I miss the realness of it all, “ one woman said. “People
were real, and now we’re back to all this petty politicking. Not that I want
another bad thing to happen, but something in me misses the kind of
When I’d gone to bed at 2:46 a.m. last night there hadn’t been any
anniversary terror attacks yet. I groped for my glasses on the coffee table and
I asked Janet, “Have there been any
attacks anywhere this morning ...”
It was somehow disingenuous --- me wondering about attacks. So close to
becoming a born-again cynic tomorrow and unprepared for my own mindset of
concern. It must have been the hour. I’m an artist. I like to tell people that
I get up at the crack of noon, but
I’m just bragging. Typically I’m out of bed by 8:45 a.m. and am slowly
getting to work by ten or eleven o’clock.
This morning I wouldn’t have the civilized time to recover, because in
only eight more minutes it will have been exactly one year since the first
hijacked terror jet hit the first building, killing the first of the 3025
victims. And for me, today would be a day of remembrance and a morning working
on my journal recording the series of tiny anniversaries of horror every time
today’s clock struck a nerve from last year. Anniversary moments drifting our
minds back to the horrible things we saw a year ago in that minute up on our TV
screens wherever we were in this world. It all got going a few minutes after I
sat down on the couch at 7:46 a.m. Central Time (2:46 p.m. Amsterdam Time) and
today wouldn’t end for me until the calendar flipped at midnight from the year
from hell to September 12, 2002.
At last, within sight ...
“Jeez,” I muttered to Janet, “I couldn’t be a suicide terrorist. I just couldn’t get up this early, not even for Allah ...”
Humor is a good way to ease back into cynicism and a good way to start any day, even this one.
Anniversary
Horror Clips:
Cope
-- Don’t Mope
During the day today I saw 160 Horror clips on the anniversary TV and aside from the memorial ceremonies in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania --- the TV continued yesterday’s jitters and once again freaked out all day with nervous Breaking News terror scares. Rattling viewers with new war anxiety in between the grim anniversary chatter. The Office of Homeland Security raised its alert level yesterday to High, reaching Orange on the terrorism alert color code chart. A High Risk of terrorism that (we’re finding out here at the homefront TV) brings with it special elevated high risk precautions including: armed stinger missile batteries deployed all over Washington DC; combat jets all over American skies, especially over New York City; and special force snipers on Washington rooftops with huge oversize binoculars guarding the White House and other strategic buildings.
“Television will be forever linked to the events of September 11, 2001,” one columnist wrote in today’s papers. Because of all those video horror clips and the sadistic role they played, and because today the TV set is the window on the anniversary for a majority of homefront Americans. The Breaking News Box that today just never seemed to stop breaking into last year’s horror with today’s brand new scary world ...
*BREAKING NEWS
About a terror scare in New York. About radiation being detected on a suspicious Middle Eastern-registered container ship approaching New York harbor.
About an incident at an Ohio State Supreme Court office tower in Columbus Ohio where a maintenance worker made a joke about, “Being here to install a bomb.” The joke didn’t go over well, and then chaos ensued for a few minutes in Ohio.
Times
of Remembrance:
Photos,
Flowers & Flags:
Ashes
to Ashes
--
Dust to
Dust
War is hell, and today was a big day in the history of global warfare. A chance to hear from the 95% civilized here who grieved for all the dead and commemorated them at a dark space on the calendar ...
A Circle of Honor was erected at Ground Zero. Down in that pit where all those tall buildings were once anchored. Bagpipers played and thousands of families held up pictures to the TV cameras of their loved ones killed in last year’s massacre.
At 8:46 a.m. (ET) a minute of silence was observed to honor the dead and to commemorate the time that the first screaming hijacked jetliner (traveling at 470 mph) hit the north wall of the north tower of the World Trade Center between the 94th and 98th floors. As Janet and I (in the final minutes of our old world) strolled down Huidenstraat toward the Amsterdam garden district looking for streetphotos, a cup of coffee, and a rest room.
CNN showed a lot of people in the Ground Zero pit crying and big firemen sobbing and hugging each other and a lot of FDNY caps, flowers, and flags.
New York City Mayor Bloomberg and New York Governor George Pataki recited Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought fourth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great (civil) war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war ...”
The flags were all lowered to half-staff. Cellist Yo Yo Ma began playing
and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (who’d lost hundreds of friends a year
ago this morning and who’d buried his mother just yesterday) began reading the
names of all the people who’d been murdered in New York on September 11, 2001.
All 2801 of them ...
At 9:03 a.m. (ET) the reading of the names paused, and a fire truck
bell rescued from the rubble was rung. That started every church bell of every
faith ringing in the city to commemorate that awful moment a year ago when the
World War III Terror War began for most of us. The unthinkable moment the new
American bloodlust was borne with that awful whole-new-world instant of clarity in the form of another screaming
passenger jetliner spearing 590 mph into the south wall of the south tower of
the World Trade Center’s 78th to 84th floors. An instant, as I wrote about
later in my journal, that totally disarmed me: “I could conjure up no words in that moment that could describe how
helpless I felt watching all that happen in front of my eyes up on that TV
screen. Shocked. Stung. Frustrated. Eerily put out upon and angry.
Instantaneously furious that my peaceful and prosperous post-Cold War world
I’d helped build (while I was still young and less cynical) was being turned
upside down right before my very eyes. Stunned into a virtual comma. Suffering
an otherwise unknown primitive and boiling rage.
Terrified at what it all meant.
Mesmerized by the success of the attack.
Traumatized by the horror of it all. Confounded and depressed by what I
knew it all meant. A mind-wracking ordeal in progress live on TV that was beyond
my ability to put into proper words. I was saddened, astounded, outraged and
distressed. I was mute with worry, and I didn’t know what to do next ...
A poem was read and the TV cameras showed great big men crying and hugging and looking confused, making me feel less alone in how much of last fall I spent grieving and kicking about in the sand.
New York Senator Hillary Clinton continued the reading of the names of the dead as huge American flags hung from every building surrounding the amputated space in the sky (along with a banner that read “We will never forget”) flapped around above her in the wind. As the TV cameras showed more shots of the families of the dead in the pit at the Circle of Honor handing out tissues and waiting for their loved one’s names to be called (names now being read by actor Robert Di Niro).
At 9:40 a.m. (ET) there was a minute of silence to commemorate the moment a year ago when the third jet hit the Pentagon. The TV switched to Washington DC to the grounds of an already rebuilt Pentagon building where families of the dead prayed as a huge American flag was unfurled where the horridly familiar gash had been put by the terrorists a year ago this minute.
The TV camera showed a group of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and President George W. Bush (with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at his side) giving a speech about the day, about last year, and about his resolve to never let it happen again. A missing-man fighter-jet formation broke the blue of the morning sky and set off a thousand waving flags on the ground.
At 10:01 a.m. (ET) the TV (back in New York) showed three bells being rung, and there was a minute of silence to commemorate the moment when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. The daughter of the slain chef at the Windows on the World Restaurant read a poem and then the reading of the 2801 victim’s names continued.
At 10:29 a.m. (ET) the reading of the names paused again and there was a minute of silence to commemorated last year when the north tower of the World Trade Center (the one with the radio and TV antenna) collapsed. More bells were rung and then Secretary of State Colin Powell stepped up to the podium in New York to continue reading the remaining names of the dead.
At 10:37 a.m. (ET) there was a
final minute of silence in rural Shanksville to commemorate the minute last year
when United Airlines flight 93 was wrestled to the ground in Pennsylvania by
American civilian warriors who reacted immediately on their moment of clarity,
relayed up to the airplane bomb by cell phone, taking the fight against terror
to the matte. Regular civilized Americans who got global justice in this
civilian war started in dramatic and inspirational form.
A mass of people gathered there in that Pennsylvania farm field to wave
thousands of American flags and to sing God Bless America to the CNN cameras and
to the whole civilized world.
The TV camera switched back to New York and showed the Ground Zero pit
and the Circle of Honor (now filled with flowers and photos and flags) and then
the CNN commentator (not having said much during the solemn remembrances)
described how rays of sunlight were at that moment breaking through the
surviving skyline to Ground Zero and hitting the Circle of Honor just as the
last minute of silence ended --- and then a sudden wind (as if from the hands of
the Gods) picked up a cloud of Ground Zero dirt and enveloped the site and
everyone there in the moment.
The families, the friends, and the colleagues of the dead --- bathed in a
cloud of dust from that place --- in the sacred ashes of their horribly fallen.
I
watched the TV most of the rest of the day taking
anniversary notes for my journal. That’s how I ended up watching 160 video
horror clips. At one o’clock I went to the dentist to have a root canal (“What
better day for it,” I’d thought while making the appointment last month)
and later in the evening (when I could talk again) I called Alyssa in New Jersey
and Dad in Pennsylvania, because family is important, especially on a day like
today.
But mostly I just sat on the couch with a pen and a pad in front of the
anniversary TV doing Valium (for the post-root canal pain) and thinking about
how my journal about the first year of the World War III Terror War was about to
come to an end.
Over the spring and the summer as America’s interest (and my own interest) waned for the war, I occasionally wondered if the year-long mission researching the mess was worth the pain it took to stay dedicated to the task. That thought nagged me over the dull summer months. But just before going over to the dentist I drove downtown to the news stand where something occurred that revitalized the faith I’d had in myself when I launched the World War III Terror War streetphoto journal project in the first place --- a year ago today. While there I ran into a young woman (a Kansas University student wearing a Kansas Jayhawk Final Four basketball T-shirt) who was in the checkout line in front of me buying five different newspapers, two more than me. I bothered her to ask her why, and she said: “I’m buying them so ten or twenty years from now I can read them again, to remember how it really was to live in this time --- instead of whatever historians and the media tell me it was like by that time.”
I read an article about one survivor who for awhile on September 11 was
trapped inside the burning World Trade Center --- watching her horrific dilemma
on the TV set in a smoke-filled office, “Then
the power went off,” she said,
“And with it the TV. And it was a relief we didn’t have to watch anymore.
A relief ...”
And I also read a memorable Time Magazine essay by Ali Salem headlined: “An Apology From an Arab” in which he wrote: “...but beneath the terrorist’s claims is a sadder truth: these extremists are pathologically jealous. They feel like dwarfs.” Which is memorable to me because it came from a Muslim, and because it backed up my most troublesome theory I gathered while on the streets of the war --- that the terrorists caused all this mess because they had low self-esteem and criminal penis envy.
A truly sadder truth ...
Reading the
Names
of the Dead
This afternoon I decided I’d just ride the Valium haze by
reading the seven pages of the New York Times from the anniversary edition. The
seven pages showing the headshot photographs and listing the names of all 3025
presumed dead in the September 11 attacks. It took me hours because I was high
on narcotics and because I tried to look into the eyes of each of the faces, all
3025 of them. When I sat down to do this, I decided it would be one of my last
acts before I wrap up this streetphoto field trip through hell. In honor of the
people whose unspeakably sad deaths dragged me back into caring for this screwed
up world, this screwed up world that somehow managed to enrich me (a little bit)
along the way as it tore my heart out and suffocated me in a yearlong emotional
grinder. (I’m still reluctant to recognize the enriching part because the pain
still doesn’t seem worth the insight.)
I would have bet before I sat down to look into all those eyes in those
seven newspaper pages that I’d have ended up recognizing one or two of them
--- but I didn’t --- and I was glad. There were 15 Smiths listed (the most
common name) and there was even one man named Gary Smith, who represented all of
us Gary Smith’s out here who felt as if we’d all died with him in the
massacre as we watched TV on this day last year.
The New York Times writer Dan Barry spoke of things so familiar to me in
the cover piece introducing the 3025 photographs and the list of names of all
the victims. He spoke in the lead about how those receiving body parts of family
members to bury were now considered “lucky,”
and even “blessed”. About the, “dead
looking back at us,” from all those pictures reminding us to, “Remember
Me.” Barry wrote eloquently about our “Impatience
with (our) sorrows” wanting to get beyond it like we always have before
but not being able to, because the weight of the grief was still too
overwhelming. He wondered, “Do we look
differently at death now? Are we more comfortable with the open secret of our
own mortality, or do we find it more terrifying?” and he wondered, “How have the simultaneous and violent deaths of (3025) people in our
midst --- filmed to ensure the constant reliving of it --- changed us?”
The essay was superb, and to critique what the writer didn’t
mention about death is absurd. He wrote his piece about our feelings about the
3025 victims, about how hard it is to accept, about how hard it is to heal those
scars of death cast upon us from the heart of madness itself. However, I’ve
felt the need throughout the year to take care not to ignore the other edge of
death that has translucently scarred us in this whole bizarre event, the sharp
edge of the bloodlust we felt for the death of the other, for the violent death
of the September 11 madmen. A bloodlust of revenge we were all forced to
confront. That we found in the end we were capable of excelling at. Especially
during the battle at the Tora Bora cave complex just before Christmas, where the
bombers bombed relentlessly and when most of us rooted for horrific fiery death
for the guilty --- a bloodlust drooling from the darkest parts of our American
soul. A bloodlust we’ve yet to be forced to confront or control.
How do we ignore that?
How can we forget so easily how we were forced to un-remorsefully clamor
for heads on sticks to revenge the horror? How many times did we go outside of
ourselves to fondly imagine the bombers killing those madmen with thousand-pound
bombs in their Afghanistan caves?
Sometimes it seems as if I’ve been living inside of an out-of-body
experience. Seeing and smelling Ground Zero for myself while it was still on
fire. Seeing the air war at Tora Bora from directly underneath. Linked (in the
most bizarre way --- sending off for my Pakistan visa) to the anthrax scare and
watching the whole September 11 attack on the television set in Amsterdam.
It seems out-of-body, but I have
streetphotos I took at those places to prove it was real. I have burns from
getting too close to the fire. I’ll never forget the smell of Ground Zero, the
embarrassment of the anthrax panic, the pain of September 11, or the bloodlust
of December on the red-line border on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box War Map.
Of watching that Taliban get away with his part in it as he escaped over the
border.
So when I dug into my Terror War portfolio and took out those
streets-of-the-World War III Terror War-pictures --- to see the result of the
evil of madmen attacking New York City, the weight of the war in the Afghan
refugee camps, the shock of September 11 on Amsterdam and Paris, the anger of
defeat in Taliban sympathizer’s eyes, or even the sometimes lighter
streetphoto moments I managed to capture along the way --- I get grounded pretty
quick.
That smell at ground zero.
I’ll never be able to get that stink out of my nose.
Never ...
And now I’ll just have to learn to live with those shocking video
horror clip images. The ones on TV. The ones in my streetphoto portfolio. The
ones burned for all time in my damaged mind’s eye ...
Just before midnight I went downtown to Paradise Cafe to celebrate the
coming of September 12 and to see a couple musician friends of mine (Billy
Ebeling and Rick Frydman) who were performing together there. Rick (who’s an
attorney when he’s not singing on stage) told me a story about a drunken
newbie hit and run driver who hit his parked car at his house while he and the
family were out of town on vacation. About
how a neighbor had seen the accident in the early morning hours and had jumped
in his car and recorded the drunk’s license plate number. About how Rick got
home a week later and found a message on his office phone machine --- the same
drunken newbie trying to hire him to defend him in a drunk driving charge. How,
of course, the drunk newbie never made the connection that the address where
he’d had the accident was the same address as the attorney he’d found in the
phone book.
We laughed.
That newbie’s problem was our good energy on this New Year’s Eve. And
it felt good to be insensitive, petty, and mean-spirited again with friends
instead of being obsessed with the TV, the war, and this screwed up world. And
just then, in the middle of the laughter, I glanced up and noticed what had
happened while we’d been busy having fun mocking the newbies:
“Hey boys --- LOOK --- its September 12th,” I exclaimed as I
pointed up at the clock on the wall above the Paradise Cafe bar that read two
minutes after midnight.
Three out of the four of us at the table said, “Thank
God,” in unison.
And you know what, I think this time we all really meant it ...