I’m not quite sure how to start this, how to start writing about wrong. I’ve always had a problem calling people on their mistakes—perhaps out of some attempt at courtesy gone wrong, perhaps because I’ve witnessed so many odiously pompous people take pride in shooting others down, perhaps because I was insecure, perhaps to avoid unnecessary offense. But something in me has snapped, one drop too many has fallen into the bucket, and I think just letting wrongdoers and wrongsayers off the hook may be a thing of my past.

First, in a recent conversation about text in art, a grad-level professor asked me if I’d seen “the stones at the Metropolitan Museum with triangles and circles carved into them, the oldest writing in the world, that are actually a recipe for beer.” I replied, “Sure, the cuneiform inscriptions pressed into clay tablets,” as that happens to be one of my favorite galleries in the entire museum. He replied, “No, they’re actually hard little stones with a symbol writing system.” I’ll readily admit that I’m guilty of occasional nitpicking, but that’s just really wrong, especially coming from a sculptor. Anyone who carves stone or has worked with clay should be able to figure out how those marks were made. The crazy part about this exchange is that I didn’t call him on his mistake; beyond a gentle attempt at a more in-depth description of the objects, I didn’t try to prove my point, and didn’t insist when he added emphasis to his error.

Second, a translator colleague of mine whose work I’m reading over had rather innocently mistranslated the Italian word sellino as little saddle,  instead of bustle. Granted, sellino can mean both of those things in English, but that’s where context comes in. If an author is describing a scene set in the late nineteenth century, in a well-to-do neighborhood, in the center of an undeniably urban metropolis where the silhouettes of women can be seen against drawn curtains at nightfall, is it more likely that these women’s profiles are distinguished by little saddles, or bustles? Yes, this is worth a good laugh, but it’s also wrong, and by extension it’s wrong of this man to call himself a translator. I’ve seen and respected his work before, but the sellino slip-up is one of too many such mistakes in the text I’m reading now. The original is a beautiful series of stories, I’m honored to be reading it, and I therefore find it dishonorable that anyone would take it on when it’s so clearly beyond his capabilities.

“How categorical of you,” you’re probably thinking. That’s right, categorical indeed. These are two relatively harmless instances—no one’s dying, no one’s even suffering. But these things pain me, and I really think they are important. See, it’s a slippery slope. It could be argued that these aren’t matters of right and wrong, and are instead a question of imprecision. But they’re imprecisions I can’t deal with because, as I see it, these people approach their professions with imprecision, which implies that they neither respect nor love what they’re doing enough to care about getting it right.

I like how Wikipedia looks at the term: “A wrong is a concept in law, ethics, and science.” The bit about law mentions conscience and morality; the paragraph on ethics names wrong as the opposite of right, and includes the words relativist and behaviour, opening up an enirely different can of worms; and the science entry includes Wolfgang Pauli’s phrase “not even wrong,” a fascinating critique of unfalsifiable hypotheses and experiments if ever I’ve heard one (even better coming from the man who had so much to say about elementary particles). At the bottom of the page are some links that make an interesting little poem of sorts:

See also

Right
Evil
Goodness and value theory
Justice
Victim

Categories: Philosophical terminology | Core issues in ethics | Law | Philosophy of science | Scientific terminology

So I’ve resolved to stop being so inert when I hear such things. In part, it’s just my job; I can’t let mistakes slip by into work I’m responsible for, and I prefer to associate with people who take similar responsibility for what they do. More importantly, though, the accumulation of my passive non-reactions has reached such a level that I can no longer excuse myself as unsure. Of course, I’ll probably still defer to professors and older, wiser folk, but the little voices in my head will be saying what I don’t have the courage to. As soon as I finish typing this I’ll likely revert to being the same old  meek, amenable communicator (or non-communicator, as the case may be), but at least in type, and thanks to your kind patience, I can take issue with these tiny, elementary wrongs.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be seen here; thanks for reading.

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense

The account of Dominionism given in Kingdom Coming, featuring a massive umbrella of Christian fundamentalist organizations united in their drive to establish a theocracy in the United States and by extension the world, sounds like a very depressing story. This is at least what every review I’ve found says: the reviewers who agree with Michelle Goldberg call her vision chilling, and the few who do not say she is excessively alarmist.

The truly chilling thing about Kingdom Coming is that it’s actually fairly mild and optimistic. Goldberg pauses every few pages to say that no, the United States will probably not become theocratic, because of the strength of its laws and Constitution and legal system. And she concentrates only on local fundamentalism, without talking about its mutually-reinforcing connections to warmongering and state surveillance, both staples of totalitarianism. She suggests that the gradual discrediting of American neoconservatism will lead to a resurgence of a more populist brand of fundamentalism, complete with Populist-style anti-Semitism. However, apart from that she says nothing about the intersection of neoconservatism and fundamentalism, except for one remark toward the end about a war between Christianity and Islam.

In fact, the most worrying future trends are the ones the book spends little to no time on. The formation of the Dominionist front is crucial to expose, and so is the stealth network of would-be theocrats: Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism, Ralph Reed’s comment about painting his face and operating under cover of darkness, the wink to the religious right inherent in Bush’s “compassionate conservative” comment. The book’s greatest success is in documenting that network without lapsing into conspiracy theories.

But at the same time, it is just as important to explore the analogy between Dominionism and other totalitarian ideologies further, and quoting Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is not enough. The United States has a democratic tradition, but it also has a tradition of ignoring civil liberties whenever it’s at war; now that the view of anti-terrorism as a protracted war has taken root among most of its people, liberal democracy is in especial danger. And while Goldberg is right that most Americans may not want a Christian Taliban, most Germans never wanted the Holocaust, either—most never even voted for the Nazis in free elections.

To look at the prospects of a totalitarian ideology, it’s good to look at the factors that raise one to power, and, separately, the factors that keep one afloat. Economic depression certainly helps extremists come to power, especially if liberal democracy is seen as the source of the problem. The most plausible depression scenario in the United States revolves around defaulting on the debt; this will likely be viewed as the fault of excessive government spending, but the popular solution will likely be gutting social spending rather than raising taxes or curtailing military spending. Alone such a scenario would favor corporatists rather than fundamentalists, but not only are the two groups mutually reinforcing, but also the poverty that will ensue will be a breeding ground for religious evangelism masquerading as charity. Religious charities use poverty to their advantage everywhere in the world; that’s how Hamas and Hezbollah are not right-wing fringe parties in their respective nations.

Goldberg does in fact mention this scenario in passing, although she takes it in a somewhat different direction: she posits a more domestically-minded fundamentalism building on economic populism. This is plausible, but is not how totalitarian governments came to power in countries with strong ties between corporations and conservatives: Germany, Italy, Spain. Her scenario fits a grassroots communist-like movement better, and one of the most important things to realize about American Dominionism is that it’s anything but grassroots.

The other issue, war and its effect on civil liberties, is even more important to any discussion about Christian fundamentalism. Right now, the United States only tortures or imprisons without trial people who it thinks might possibly look like Islamist terrorists. Under an explicitly Dominionist government, this national security apparatus can easily expand to disenfranchise and imprison people of the wrong sexual orientation or active in the wrong political movement.

But when I say Kingdom Coming is optimistic, the single most critical point I’m thinking of is not Goldberg’s neglect of some of the broader angles concerning conservative fundamentalism. Rather, it’s the repeated assertion that no, it cannot be that bad, because the Constitution will still protect freedom. Ironically, the book itself contains ample of evidence why it won’t, documenting the rise of the “Christian nation” myth. And yet, it doesn’t make the requisite conclusion that just like Hitler never abolished the Weimar Constitution, which remained in effect until the end of World War Two with few Nazi amendments, so can American theocrats rise to power without repealing a single word of the Bill of Rights.

In one of the articles I once read about Christian nationalism, I saw a reference to a quote that went roughly, “We can pass unconstitutional laws faster than the courts can overturn them.” Unfortunately, I don’t remember who said it and in what context. But from Kingdom Coming and other articles, I can tell the American right’s sentiments are rarely that explicit; in most cases, it will claim to defend the Constitution, even while it pushes to abolish its self-enforcement mechanisms, especially judicial review. And so far, it has been doing a fairly successful job at that, considering that separation of church and state remains a sham, and the federal courts are still not protecting homosexuals from discrimination.

Indefinite totalitarianism requires three things: a motive, or a suitably totalitarian ideology; a means, or a modern state apparatus able to surveil and thereby oppress its citizens; and an opportunity, or a crisis of democracy abetted by lackluster opposition. Pessimistically, the United States has Dominionism, the national security  state, and the Democratic Party. Kingdom Coming understandably focuses on the motive, which is why it’s so detached from the means and the related issue of warmongering. Its greatest naïve optimism then lies in understating the degree to which the Dominionist movement has the opportunity to advance.

The internationalist note the book finishes on begins with an excerpt from an interview with Iranian secularist Marjane Satrapi, in which she says, “The secular people, we have no country. We the people—all the secular people who are looking for freedom—we have to keep together. We are international, as they are international.” While an international coalition can easily backfire—in Europe, even one-superstate liberalism is ailing, let alone one-world liberalism—an intranational one can be robust.

A good optimistic note to end any discussion of American religious fundamentalism on is this: if it continues advancing, it will reach a tipping point, so that it will be easy for secularists to use its fascism as a wedge issue. The Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, and the rest of the Dominionist organizations in the US are strong, but they can’t achieve anything without allies. The smart anti-fascist will deprive them of these allies by using such historical examples as Nazi Germany to drive wedges into the heart of the conservative coalition. The motive and means of totalitarianism will remain, but this active opposition can greatly diminish its opportunity.

The United States spends 15% of its public monies on education. Yet more of its gross domestic product is spent on providing and consuming private education. It is, in all, a tidy sum.

The overall results, though, are not very consoling. A new report issued this week by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and funded by the Ford Foundation, Pew Trusts, and Atlantic Philanthropies shows that educational progress is stagnating. Here are some of their findings:

• 14% of people under 25 have no high school degree.
• 25% of U.S. 15-year-olds score so low on academic skills that they are unlikely to be able to undertake any studies beyond high school.
• Though 3 in 5 U.S. young adults enter either a junior college or four-year college or university, the number of college graduates in 2003 is equal to only 33% of their generation. Two-thirds of the current young generation, in other words, is not getting a college degree. This proportion grows slightly – to 39% — if one adds in young adults with junior college associate degrees.

The report concludes that the United States no longer leads the world in access to and attainment in higher education. The nation’s overall performance, in a word, is average.

Why? Clearly poor primary and secondary education is a cause. As the report notes, a big chunk of young U.S. adults is effectively eliminated because they drop out of high school or have inadequate skills. Given that many other countries have higher high school and college graduation rates, American youth are not hitting some God-given limits on their educational potential, but are rather under-achieving for reasons of local circumstance.

What are they? Financial need, for one. Another report, this time issued jointly by the Congress and the U.S. Education Department this past Friday, September 22, reports that between 1.4 million and 2.4 million young adults will not earn college degrees in the next decade for lack of funds. These young adults, qualified by the study as academically prepared for college, come almost exclusively from low-income families. Doing a little seat of the pants math, if they went to college, they would increase their generation’s college participation by between 10% and 15%.

Income differences really count. Richard Kahlenberg in the March 10, 2006 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education reports research showing that 1 in 2 students from families making $90,000 a year or more went to college, while only 1 in 17 students from families making $35,000 or less went to school.

As low income in the U.S. is often related to race, many of these potential students are no doubt African-American and Latino. The gap between minority student and white student attendance in four-year colleges suggests this is likely. Consider that 2001 U.S. Education numbers reveal that 37% of eligible white students attend college, in contrast to 26% of African-American and 15% of Latino students. As bad as the figures are for white students, minority students trail much further behind.

Something is going wrong at the colleges too. The proportion of four-year college students who graduate within five years of entry has slid from 55% in 1988 to 51% in 2001. Private schools are holding up this rather dismal percentage, for the graduation rate in public colleges and universities is much worse and has declined noticeably more. In 1988, 48% of public students graduated within 5 years; in 2001, the figure had slipped to 42%. These figures were reported by the American College Testing Service in 2002.

Colleges are expensive, and their costs have risen relentlessly since the seventies, as I reported in “Forget the Pigskin and Follow the Money,” an earlier column here at 3QD. It now costs $11,000 a year for tuition, room, and board at public colleges, and over $25,000 a year at private schools. To be sure, colleges, universities, the federal government, and banks, provide scholarships and loans in apparent abundance. But resources are being out-run by rising costs and student inability to pay the rest of a very large bill. Federal Pell grants that provide actual money instead of loans for students coming from low and moderate income families, cover about 15% of the annual student bill, down from 40% in earlier years.

As colleges have ginned up their little competitiveness race, they have diverted more of their resources into so-called “merit” scholarships. They now put over $7 billion into winning students away from other competitors, up five-fold between 1994 and 2004. Schools still award an enormity of aid based upon financial need – some $39 billion in 2004. Once more, however, Kahlenberg in the Chronicle notes that a Congressional advisory committee estimates that when expenses are balanced against the total financial aid package, a low-income student still faces an annual $3,800 shortfall that must be made up by her efforts or by those of her family. When family income is below $35,000, that can be just enough to discourage college entry.

The final economic clincher is that even as education costs rise, incomes for 2/3 of American workers have not grown since 1973. Here then, in higher education, is another place where the fundamental deficiencies of American economic life are being felt.

There is no gainsaying that the income advantage for the possessors of a college degree continue to grow. The Census Bureau reports that national median earnings for college degree holders was $44,000. College degree holders now make 72% more than persons with high school degrees, up from 68% in 1997. Certainly it pays to go to college, if you can pay for it.

This year’s report card shows that:

• Dramatic improvements are needed in primary and secondary education to increase college readiness.
• More resources must be devoted to student aid, and without exception, to those who by virtue of their family income are most in financial need.
• Colleges need to sort out why their costs run along faster than inflation, and have so for a good quarter century. Could institution-building and “competitiveness” have something to do with it?

Let’s learn from these tough lessons.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

                                                
Aboriginal languages

Aranda, Arrernte, Bundjalung, Dharug, Gindavul, Galmahra, Githavul, Gunditjmara, Kukatja, Lardil, Malyangapa, Ngangiwumirri, Ngunawal, Noonucal, Nyulnyul, Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, Thungutti, Walmajarri, Weerluval, Wiradjuri, Yankunyttjatjara, Yindjibarndi, Yorta Yorta, Yugambeh

Australian place names

Anglers Paradise, Boggabri, Bullamakanka, Burra Burri, Burrinjuck, Cape Tribulation, Coober Pedy, Dirk Hartog Island, Emu Plains, Glasshouse Mountains, Goondiwindi, Great Barrier Reef, Groote Eylandt, Gulargambone, Kurri Kurri, Mount Kosciuszko, Nurioopta, Orpheus Island, Puckapunyal, Surfers Paradise, Tin Can Bay, Tumbarumba, Wollongong, Yarongobilly Caves

Australian wines

Amberley Margaret River Chimney Brush Chardonnay, d’Arenberg Dead Arm Shiraz, Brokenwood Cricket Pitch, Chain of Ponds Corkscrew Chardonnay, Journey’s End McLaren Vale Arrival Shiraz, Milkwood Yarra Valley Chardonnay, Mount Langhi Ghiran Billi Billi Shiraz, Mount Mary Quintet Cabernet, Punters Corner Spartacus Reserve Shiraz, Tin Shed Melting Pot, West End Eternity Botrytis Semillon, Wirra Wirra Church Block

Bands and singers performing in Sydney

Arctic Monkeys, Death Cab For Cutie, Endless Summer Beach Party, Happy Hate Me Nots, Hooray For Everything, Honduras Milk Shake, Howling Bells, I Killed The Prom Queen, Kamikaze Supermodel, Kisschasy, Lime Spiders, Love Outside Andromeda, Midnight Juggernaut, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, Psychedlic Furs, Shy Impostors, Soma For Kinda, The Fiery Furnaces, Zombie Ghost Train

International stocks

American Power Conversion, Apollo Group, Auto Nation, Bed Bath & Beyond, Brilliance China, Cavalier Corporation, Commander Communications, Integrated Workforce, Intuitive Surgical, Marathon Oil, Monster Worldwide, Nippon Meat Packers, Oracle, PETsMART, Prudential, Spotless Group, Torchmark, Urban Outfitters

Paint charts colour names

Aged Driftwood, Autumn Bushland, Bare Bracken, Blue Antarctic, Charcoal Dust, Fireclay, Frosted Breath, Last Chance, Light Latte, Maritime Harmony, Mulberry Desire, Papaya Cream, Pale Vellum, Pearl Pink, Persian Plum, Powder Doeskin, Pure Milk, Rock Oyster, Soft Spice, Swansdown, Tanbark, Tea Biscuit, Teal Hedge, Texas Dust, Venetian Sea, Weathered Copper

Poetry magazines and ezines

Angel Exhaust, Barfing Frog, Bohemian Ink, Collage Bricolages, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Entropy Garden, Freebase Accordion, God Particle, Horror Wood, Ice-Floe, Jumping Cat, Lilies and Cannonballs, Many Moving Mountains, Nerve Cowboy, Otis Rush, Part-time Post-Modern, Quiet Feather, Red Chain, Scissorkicks, Tickled By Thunder, Unpleasant Schedule, Van Gogh’s Ear, Well Nourished Moon, Xconnects, Yankee Pot Roast, Zafusy

The much-anticipated film version of The Devil Wears Prada sparked numerous heated debates (and the occasional bloggorific rant) about its underlying themes and the potentially damaging subconscious “messages” it might be conveying to impressionable young girls. But the scene that caused the most howls of outrage was an exchange between Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and Nigel, the deliciously fey fashion editor of the fictional Runway magazine:

Andy: Doesn’t anybody eat around here?

Nigel: Not since [size] two is the new four and zero is the new two.

Andy: Well, I’m a six…

Nigel: Aha! The new fourteen!

This could hardly be welcome news to the average American woman, who generally wears a size 12 or 14 on the unadjusted scale. For many viewers, that scene encapsulated the frustrating disconnect between the fantasy worlds of the glitterrati in fashion and filmdom, and the stark realities of everyday people. But for me, it also answered a nagging question that had been gnawing at the back of my brain for awhile now: why is it so damned difficult to figure out what size I’m supposed to be when buying clothes? I’ve long suspected the fashion industry of practicing a “sliding scale,” shifting their sizing charts downward to accommodate America’s expanding waistlines — and, more importantly, to make women feel better about themselves (“Hey! Suddenly I’m one size smaller!”) so that they buy more clothes.

Apparently, it’s true: women’s clothing sizes in the US are being progressively “down-sized,” so that what was a size 8 in 1990 is now a size 6, and so on. One assumes the strategy works — unless you happen to work in the fashion industry and are hip to the Big Lie. However, I doubt there’s a broad master conspiracy afoot in fashion circles, with a secret cabal of sadistic, fat-loathing-yet-greedy designers reaching a consensus on what the new sizes will be and then foisting them on an unsuspecting public. I think it’s far more complicated than that.

For one thing, there is clearly no consensus. Even in the fashion world, sizing is inconsistent. My closet contains items ranging from extra small to large, and from size 4 to 8. Further complicating matters, I have one of those inverted triangle body types. So I generally wear size 4 jeans (the new 6!), but given the breadth of my back and shoulders, I’ve never worn less than a size 8 on top — which makes buying dresses a bit of challenge, especially since I’m also short-waisted. (Needless to say, I have learned to love the drop waist.) Short of custom tailoring, there is no good way to address this. But it would make things so much easier if the US fashion industry would just agree on a universal sizing standard and stick to it. Then I’d at least have a consistent framework in which to make the necessary adjustments my body type requires.

No doubt some larger people out there read “size 4 jeans” and immediately thought, “Shut up, skinny bitch! Stop complaining! What do you know about our pain?” I deliberately mentioned my specific sizes to elicit just such a reaction, in order to make my next point: I do feel that same kind of pain. The deeper, underlying issue at work here is our society’s unrealistic expectations regarding what a woman’s body “should” look like. Very few of us have the perfectly proportioned “hourglass figure” touted by clothing designers, regardless of what size we wear. Ergo, no woman is free of body image issues and the pressure to be thin, whether said woman is as full-figured as Camryn Mannheim or the same size as uber-waifs Kate Moss and Calista Flockhart — or, like me, somewhere in between.

So it’s something that adversely affects women of all shapes and sizes. The fashion industry’s admittedly ingenious marketing strategy shamelessly exploits the female insecurity and obsession with weight and clothing size: counting calories and minutes on the Stairmaster, measuring inches, assessing body fat percentage, and ruthlessly comparing all those “numbers” to all the other women in one’s social circle.  We agonize over the slightest extra ounce or inch. We beat  up ourselves, and each other, about it on almost a daily basis.

At least a solution to the practical issues concerning clothing sizes might be within reach, with the emergence of 3D full-body scanners that can take very precise body measurements. These are then converted into patterns from which garments are cut, hopefully one day making custom tailoring affordable and accessible to the general populace, not just to the fabulously wealthy. It’s already available to the well-heeled clientele of Brooks Brothers, which has been using a 3D scanner in its stores for the past three years. Lane Bryant stores in malls across the country began featuring body scanners in April 2005, and Levi’s, the Gap, and American Eagle Outfitters are also experimenting with the technology.

As cool as this is on the nifty gadgetry front, and as wonderful as it would be to be able to order custom-fit clothing in the future, the research application of the body scanner technology revealed far more interesting conclusions. Apparel product development specialist Lenda Jo Connell of Auburn University is part of a collaboration that uses 3D body scanners to study the shapes of American women. (The research is sponsored in part by JC Penney, Target and Jockey.) Over the last two years, she has scanned more than 6000 women, and found that only 8.4% of them had the standard hourglass shape. In fact, it’s the shape women are least likely to have. We are far more likely to have bodies in the shape of a rectangle, spoon, or inverted triangle (yours truly). It’s hardly shocking to be told that the fashion industry is out of touch with what “real” woman look like, but now we have some solid scientific data to back us up.

The fact that so many mass-market clothing manufacturers (as opposed to high-end designers) are interested in scanning technology — and are willing to put their money on the line by providing funding — indicates that their primary concern is not on foisting unrealistic standards onto American women, but on bringing the clothing they offer more in line with the fit customers might actually desire. After all, they’re in business to sell clothes and make money, not to start a cultural revolution. So where do the unrealistic expectations come from? Many people like to blame Hollywood and women’s magazines for concealing or air-brushing away the slightest imperfection in the women being portrayed, leading the rest of us to conclude that we, too, should look like that.

It’s hardly the entire story, but I think there’s some truth to that. That’s why I will be eternally grateful to actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who several years ago (at age 43) allowed herself to be photographed both dolled up for the camera in the typical actress-y glam shots, and au naturel. “It’s such a fraud, and I’m the one perpetuating it,” she said at the time of her own perceived perfection, with refreshing candor. She still looked beautiful (I thought) in the natural shots, but she also looked real: uneven skin tone, slim  and healthy but not perfectly shaped and toned, etc. Since then, she’s become equally outspoken about Hollywood’s obsession with cosmetic surgery, making a conscious choice to stop fighting the visible effects of her advancing years and allow herself to age gracefully. (The tragedy is that she also chose to retire from the big screen, depriving filmdom of her considerable talent.)

Curtis’ courage in standing up to the horrendous pressures of her industry came to mind this past week with the news that the organizers of fashion week in Madrid, Spain, had banned too-thin models from their runways, based on the height-to-weight ratios used by the World Health Organization. Essentially, any model weighing less than 125 pounds would not meet the new Madrid criteria.  The decision caused a media firestorm, and this time the nayersayers weren’t lmited to the usual suspects (women’s health groups, feminist organizations, and the like), but included industry insiders. “What becomes alarming is when you see bones and start counting ribs,” Allure editor Linda Wells told the New York Times, adding later in the article, “Some of the models really are too thin, but that is such a tricky thing to say.” It shouldn’t be a tricky thing to say, which is why the Madrid decision is so significant. Concerns have been raised before about this, most recently with the “heroin chic” look popularized by Kate Moss in the 1990s. But it’s highly unusual for anyone to take the extraordinary steps of the Madrid organizers and address the issue outright.

Whether other fashion show organizers will follow suit, and whether these and other efforts will be sufficient to stem the tide of malnourished underweight models, remains to be seen. But it’s bitterly ironic that an industry whose main focus lies in promoting images of health and beauty is simultaneously fostering all manner of eating disorders and associated health problems behind the scenes. It’s nothing new or surprising, mind you — but it’s still bitterly ironic.  And now everyone is scrambling, once again, to cast blame: Is it “Society”? The designers? The fashion magazines? There are a mind-boggling number of variables contributing to the problem; it’s impossible to isolate any single one as the primary cause.

And to what extent can we lay partial blame on the models themselves, who willingly sacrifice their own long-term health as they strive to reach the industry ideal of a size 0? Yes, these girls literally aspire to be nothing, while many of their petite counterparts in Hollywood are striving to be less than zero. (Paula Abdul is reportedly a size 00, and the frighteningly emaciated Nicole Ritchie should disappear entirely any day now.) Some fashion industry insiders have defended the models being held up as exhibits for the prosecution as being “naturally slender,” but give us a break: no woman is “naturally” so thin that her ribs, hip bones, and shoulder blades jut out. Some of these ultra-thin models have so little body fat or muscle mass, they could be medically described as “wasting.” Small wonder the New York Times article quotes former model turned actress and fashion designer Milla Jovovich that the industry needs more rules and regulations when it comes to ensuring the health of its models.

It’s easy to blame the fashion and entertainment industries, but we must also take some responsibility for propagating negative attitudes toward food and weight ourselves.  We buy into the message, day after day, whether we’re directly involved in those industries or not. Andy Sach’s colleague at Runway magazine in The Devil Wears Prada, Emily, isn’t a model, yet she is perpetually on a diet, and at one point confesses her secret to stayng ultra-thin: “I don’t eat anything, and then when I feel I’m about to faint, I eat a cube of cheese.” Later she exults, “I’m one stomach flu away from reaching my goal weight!” What’s sad is that the intended satire is dangerously close to the truth: how many of us have heard women express envy that a friend’s illness has caused her to lose weight: “I wish I could have a tapeworm (or cancer), too, just for a week or so to get rid of those nagging extra 10 pounds!”

New technologies like the body scanner can help with our difficulties in finding our proper size and fit. And as Katie Couric recently discovered, we can still lie to ourselves and ensure flattering photos with some creative photo-shopping, or via the new “slimcam” digital camera from Hewlett-Packard, which can take away an entire dress size with the flick of a switch. But technology can’t save us from ourselves. So long as we continue to buy into the notion that “one size should fit all,” and punish ourselves accordingly for our failure to measure up to impossible beauty ideals, we will never be able to accept ourselves as we are, and see the beauty inherent in women (and men!) of all shapes and sizes.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette writes about science and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

I am most often described by those who know me as venerable, though I am not particularly old. Sagacious, Solomonic and wise are other frequently used descriptors. Once, a lady who lived above me in a beleaguered section of Oakland, California, and whose business it was to know these things, said that I was a judge of some kind in a previous life. This did not surprise me. I have felt myself, from a very young age, standing just above and a bit to the side, perceiving you in your true form, despite your efforts to conceal the raw nature of your soul. I am regularly called upon to settle disputes of all kinds, ranging from the picayune to the momentous, by those who know me and understand the depth of my comprehension, and by anonymous passers-by as well, who are overcome with sudden knowledge of the rarefied workings of my mind. I would make a fine Senator, Supreme, or delegate to the UN, but I would find the duties gravely limiting–to court the benighted electorate, to interpret a relic, to navigate the shoals of global bureaucracy. None of these interests me. Better to remain aloof, I say, a generalist. Better to be a wizard for the benefit of Everyman.

I am sexually adored by all who lay eyes on me, and frequently by those who do not. The blind make clumsy passes, tossing away their canes and leashes so that their hands may be free to caress. The developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed suffer spasmodic fits of desire when in my presence. Autistics are especially enamored of my voice, to which they pay unrelenting attention. Gay men queue at my front door, hoping to interest me in their society, and straight men forsake their wives and children in hope of brief union. Lesbians reconfigure their sexual identities when I pass them on the street, rending their clothes and falling to their knees. In fact, women of all ages and descriptions are powerless to withstand my appeal. I have been assaulted by crones, who employ their walkers to cage me, and by prepubescent schoolgirls, whose ceaseless screams of delight fill the streets after 3 pm.

Animals travel great distances to walk at my side. Dogs lunge and tear at those who would approach without permission. Cats submit their kill for approval, exposing their bellies as evidence of their submission. Birds nest below my window to raise their young in close proximity to my benevolence. Wolves cross mountain ranges to stand sentinel at my door, baying in harmonic fifths to mark my comings and goings. Insects, too, pay me their fealty: Ants construct their colonies at the foot of my stoop, and bees renounce the biological imperative of the hive to fly in formation in my wake.

There is a physical genius about me that captivates professional athletes, whose accomplishments become laughable when considered beside the potentials of my own muscle and sinew. I am known for my grace as well as my ferocity, for the force collected in the clutch of my fist, and for the kinetic beauty of my leaping form. Every major professional sport has petitioned me–not to participate, for that would obliterate parity, but for my talismanic presence, as an object of aspiration, an instance of superiority. Olympic teams from no fewer than 16 countries have requested my peak-performance expertise. Lance Armstrong credits me with every one of his Tour de France triumphs.

I have been offered fellowships at scores of major universities in the United States and Western Europe. Deans and Provosts clamber for my advice on organizational psychology, as applied in academic settings. Professors of English beg me to elucidate the subtleties of Beckett and Gaddis; Professors of Astrophysics humbly request my thoughts on the perturbations of orbiting bodies in distant solar systems. Hawking threatened to throw himself from his chair in a fit of pique at the shining light of my intellect.

I am a master thespian, flawlessly embodying the dramatic roles I undertake. Directors, shame-faced and desperate, request critiques of their conceptual frameworks, and feverishly take notes when I humor them with my insight. Actors weep for the sheer transformative power of pathos in my performances. Aesthetes are driven to suicide. Uta Hagen herself once dissolved into tears in the face of my one-man interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I am regularly accosted by mothers who would have their babies touched with grace from my lips. The maimed and deformed claw at one another in their seething masses, to enjoy the restorative powers of my healing hands. Holy men prostrate themselves on my doorstep, to resurrect their flagging faith.

I am 37 years-old, 5’9, with brown, wavy hair, almond-shaped eyes and an aquiline nose. My complexion is clear. My weight fluctuates between 165 and 170 pounds. I work out four times a week at Crunch, on the stationary bicycle, with free weights, and on the elliptical machine. My pectoral muscles are massive and mobile. My abdomen is corrugated.

DWM

ISO

SWF, 19 – 25 years-old, brunette or blonde, who enjoys films, walks in the park, chinese food, and margaritas. Education unimportant. Appearance primary. The surgically enhanced are encouraged to apply. Respond to box #3678. Your pic gets mine.

Thanx!

–Leonard.

[a bloody tip of the scalp to Joe Frank]

Today 3 Quarks Daily is exclusively devoted to original reflections on the attacks of exactly five years ago. We thank all our contributors. Their various pieces are listed alphabetically below by author’s last name (and linked) for your browsing convenience:

Eating Our Popcorn While We Weep, by Karen Ballentine

Brief Reflections on 9/11, by Akeel Bilgrami

Years of Bullets, Years of Lead, by Michael Blim

Alienation and Violence in Kashmir, by Shiban Ganju

September Song, by Ruth Kikin-Gill

Islamism’s Watershed Moment, by Alon Levy

Three Ways Out of Iraq, by Ram Mannikalingam

9/11: A fragment of Experience, by Morgan Meis

Whatever: A New York State of Mind, by Peter Nicholson

Empty Liquor Gift-Tins and the Horror of the Magyar Moment, by Jed Palmer

A Short Numerically-Flavored Rumination on 9/11/01, by John Allen Paulos

How We Became Important, by S. Abbas Raza

Remembering the World Trade Center, by S. Asad Raza

Perceptions: 9.11, by Sughra Raza

The Self and September 11, by Justin E. H. Smith

A Note on September 11 Fiction, by J. M. Tyree

Abbas Raza:

Would you say a little bit by way of reflections on September 11 five years later?

Akeel Bilgrami:

It’s hard to say anything about September 11 that hasn’t been said before, but some things need to be said again and again, so I am glad you’ve asked me this. In the first few months after that morning, I, like most other people, spoke an awful lot to friends and acquaintances about how we ought to understand that extraordinary atrocity. The great and spontaneous feelings of sympathy for the victims we all felt were expressed in words, in donations, in trips down to the devastated region to keep small shops and eating places going…. But after some months, I began to notice that many people, even including close friends, were quite incapable (actually that is the wrong word, I should say ‘unwilling’ since these are not helpless tendencies) of showing any parallel sympathy for the very much larger number of people being bombed and killed in Afghanistan –a far greater wrong because that invasion amounted to the virtually total destruction of an already parched and hungry nation. Quite apart from the moral disappointment one feels about this, one can take this chance to reflect (since that is what you asked me to do) in a more general way about our insensitivity to the suffering of people who are not in the immediate vicinity.

Perhaps the first thing to notice about ourselves is that we have tended to respond to September 11 or to the terrorist actions in London and other parts of the world, by simply saying that they are so atrocious and unpardonable that they could not be motivated by any serious political motives or any genuine grievance. But when this is not just too quick and reactive, it is at best obtuse and (perhaps more correctly) at worst, self-serving. The words on the lips of terrorists which complain of the American government’s actions in various parts of the world cannot be wholly beside the point and it is our responsibility to pay attention to them, even as we rightly condemn the terrorist acts as unpardonable. The fact is that the words of complaint and criticism on the lips of terrorists are on the lips of many millions of more people on the street, who are not terrorists at all, but ordinary Muslims who have no great love for the terrorists and in fact would be deeply opposed to them but for the fact that they feel that to be critical of them would be letting the side down and capitulating to America’s direct and indirect state- terrorist actions towards their own people for decades.

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanties at Columbia University.

Over the course of Italy’s search to understand its lengthy encounter with domestic terrorism, people began to characterize the period of its florescence and decline as Italy’s “anni di piombo,” its years of the bullet. In English, however, we have the opportunity to accept the direct translation, while adding a second sense of our own. “Piombo” is lead, the element.

These past five years have been the “years of bullets” for peoples subject to successive American wars in the Middle East, and the “years of lead” at home. Bush and his regime have put great lead sinkers in our pockets, and we are drowning in a pool of death, moral and political decay, and debt.

Let us take account of what we have done since 9/11, on this, its fifth “anniversary.” There is something about anniversaries that summons up a reckoning. Then there arises compulsion to cut time into periods. What has happened? When and why did it happen? Where are we now?

What Has Happened?

Between 42,000 and 46,000 Iraq civilians have died since the 2003 invasion, according to recent estimates.

2,260 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and 19,945 have been wounded. These figures are more precise.

440 non-Afghani soldiers, including 333 U.S. soldiers, have died in Afghanistan from many nations since the beginning of post-9/11 hostilities. The number of U.S. wounded in Afghanistan is 892.

No one is sure any more how many Afghani civilians have died since the post-9/11 war began, interest having dropped off after the 2003 Iraqi war.

2072 wiretap authorizations for foreign intelligence and terrorism surveillance out of 2072 applications were granted in 2005, double the number authorized a decade ago. Since 1993, only 5 applications have been refused. No one knows if this figure represents the total number of taps, given the veil of secrecy drawn over the anti-terror campaign.

The Bush regime has been tracking the phone calls of 350,000 people, both foreign nationals and citizen, that have been culled out of millions of telecommunication intercepts. It has now asked Congress for a law that will allow his government to do legally what it has been doing illegally since 9/11.

25 foreign abductions and renditions, slang for torture, have been documented since 9/11. Amnesty International believes that the final number of abductees will be in the hundreds.

The Congressional Research Office estimates that the cost of the war will have reached $320 billion by now. NBC says the war is costing $200 million a day. Joseph Stiglitz estimates it will cost $2 trillion when all is said and done.

Again, on Afghanistan, no one is keeping close tabs of late, but the war had cost as of September, 2005, $88 billion.

When and Why Did It Happen?

A hard one.

Some say, for very good reason, that it all began when Franklin Roosevelt on his way back from Yalta forged a secret understanding with the Saudi government to provide them with protection in exchange for their oil.

For Osama bin Laden, it was watching Beirut crumble under heavy bombing in 1982.

The first Iraq War in 1991 pretty much put the United States on its way to the present situation.

Bush on September 7 in Georgia says it all began when bin Laden issued a fatwa against the U.S. in 1996.

The 9/11 attack authorized American escalation.

Where Are We Now?

A harder question still. But it feels as if we have passed the mid-point of the play. Duncan and Banquo are dead, the last act has begun, and the prophecies pronounced. Bush’s Malcolm still lives, but Birnam Wood is yet far shy of Dunsinane. Our Macbeth still has blood in his eye: “The war on terrorism more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. And we’re only in its opening stages,” he said on September 7.

He seems like Macbeth to believe that more death still will save his position:

Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o’ertook
Unless the deed go with it; from this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o’ the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool…

Like Macbeth, there will be no pretty ending for our murderous, usurper king.

For us, occasionally vociferous, but mostly silent, even somnolent, the problem is graver. Weighed down by the heavy burdens of guilt, war crimes, disgrace, and economic ruin that threaten to sink us for good, we must stop thinking about 9/11 and start thinking about what went wrong and what we must do to make it right.

Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.
                              –Osama bin Laden, Time magazine, Dec 1998

We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
                              –George W. Bush, September 7, 2003

If I can have nothing to do with the organized violence of the Government, I can have less to do with the unorganized violence of the people. I would prefer to be crushed between the two.
                               –Mahatma Gandhi

Alienation breeds terrorism: so say the experts. Poverty, deprivation, subjugation, discrimination, illiteracy provoke alienation and violence. But, is alienation by itself enough prerequisite? From the example below it seems some other factors are at play. Two communities from the same gene pool and same culture have emerged differently after six hundred years of treading different paths in history.

Kashmir acquired its name after a sage Kashyap who reclaimed the water logged land and settled there with his people about 5000 years ago. Over succeeding centuries it evolved into a seat of Buddhist and Hindu learning and by 1300AD it was a place for scholars and not soldiers. The ethos was of compassion, acceptance and spirituality. Intellectual disputes were settles by debates. The sage was revered more than the king. Wise word was more persuasive that the sword.

And then Kashmir confronted its ‘nine-eleven’ in the persona of a brutal king in 1389AD. Sikander, a fundamentalist zealot, adopted the last name of ‘Butshikan’ because he hated idol worship of the Hindus and proceeded to destroy the culture, religion, music, literature and temples with impunity. Two choices on the table were: convert to Islam or die. Many chose death, some escaped and emigrated but the majority converted to Islam. By the time his reign ended in 1413AD — legend has it– only eleven Hindu Pundit families had managed to survive in the valley of Kashmir. Trained in the thoughts of Upanishads that, “Truth is one, the wise call it by different names” and hence “The world is one family” they were at a loss to come to terms with the notion that Islam and only Islam provided all the answers.

Over next six hundred years with sporadic exodus and attrition their population declined. Kashmir, which had a hundred percent Hindu and Buddhist population, became predominantly an Islamic state.

The Muslim majority of Kashmir has been ill at ease with the secular Indian constitution and has felt alienated for many genuine and perceived reasons. The corrupt politicians and the Indian security forces have added fuel to the fire. The simmer came to boil and culminated in the second ‘nine-eleven’ in 1989, six hundred years after the first: the start of current Islamic militancy. The choice for the Hindus was the repeat of 1389AD: leave or die. 350,000 Pundits were thrown out in a matter of months. Some, who were naïve enough to ignore history stayed back only to face plunder, brutality and murder. Exiled Hindu Pundits – 350.000 of them – struggled and suffered in refugee camps outside Kashmir.

This was the tragic end of an intellectual culture of 5000 years – but not the value system. Without money, food, housing, medicines, do you think they were alienated enough to become terrorists? Here is the answer: in the last seventeen years, from 1989 to 2006, Kashmiri Pundit community, having lost everything, living in subhuman deprivation has not produced a single terrorist. Not one. In fact, in the last 600 years they have not cultivated a single militant.

Here is the question: how is it, two communities from the same gene pool, same cultural background of 5000 years, both alienated for one reason or the other in the recent past, choose different paths to solve similar problems?

Therein may lay some answer to solve prevailing violent mindset of nations and communities.

We can bicker about whether 9/11 changed anything substantial in the politics of the West, but there is no doubt that in the Islamic world, especially among unassimilated Muslim minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, it really did change everything. The attacks, and the American retaliation in Afghanistan, will probably turn out to have been as definitive in the history of political Islam as the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Just as the Iranian Revolution produced a regime based on Islamism, catapulting the ideology into the Middle Eastern mainstream, so has Bin Laden’s attack made his ideology respectable among alienated Muslims, inspiring a small minority of them to commit their own terrorist attacks.

In 1999, Bin Laden was a wanted terrorist who could blow up relatively unimportant American targets and who was best-known to the CIA and other intelligence organizations. In 2004, he was a notorious figure who symbolized Islamism and anti-Americanism and who could inspire attacks independent of his own network. 9/11 was the work of Bin Laden’s people; the Bali bombing was the work of a regional affiliate; the Madrid bombing and the two London bombings were the works of local extremists inspired by Bin Laden but not affiliated with his organization.

Bin Laden’s own organization might have been able to carry out its own attacks instead of merely inspire them had the United States not crippled it in the months following 9/11. There is much to be criticized about the way Bush handled the invasion of Afghanistan, but it did in fact succeed in preventing Bin Laden’s operatives from striking. Its main failures were mishandling the political aftermath of the Taliban’s fall, and failing to achieve a psychological victory by killing or capturing Bin Laden.

Al Qaida has then become more of an ideology than a real organization. Bin Laden’s influence extends as far as his tapes go, just like a radical writer’s influence extends as far as his articles and books go.

Writing about 9/11 a year ago, I noted that post-2001 Islamic extremism didn’t work as a military hierarchy so much as as a university biology department, where every professor runs his own lab. In fact, a better analogy would involve an anarchist cell: the Jihadists may have leaders, but ultimately their cell structure is spontaneous, and although there is an overarching Islamistic goal, the immediate goal is to cause mayhem rather than achieve something concrete.

In fact, like anarchism, Islamism has specific goals. First, it wants foreign influence expunged from the Islamic world, especially American military presence but also Western cultural influence. Second, it wants to establish Muslim theocracies in Muslim countries. Third, it wants to subject Muslims worldwide to traditional religious authority. Some visionaries may look forward to a unified Ummah, or even to spreading Islam throughout the world, but most Jihadists have a distinctly local character.

Bin Laden’s distinguishing feature is his global outlook. Al Qaida the organization and Hezbollah are the only two Islamist terrorist groups that operate globally rather than locally. With the severe blow it suffered, Al Qaida is now forced to operate as a distributed network based on shared values rather than as a single hierarchy; however, it merely outsourced its global outlook to local groups.

However, this movement is still more about frustration and violence than about social change. This is what differentiates extremist groups that focus on welfare operations and gaining political support for reactionary legislation, such as Hezbollah, from extremist groups that focus on killing people, such as the Al Qaida movement. Social movements, even violent ones, tend to draw inspiration from events showcasing their own oppression – in the case of Islamism, the War on Iraq could be such an event. But in fact the Al Qaida movement’s main source of inspiration is 9/11, not Iraq; its defiant figure is Bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein. While the origin of this movement is largely in the oppression of Muslims in Europe, the focus is not so much on the oppression as on the fundamentalism it bred.

There is a reason all of these developments have only happened in the last five years. There was plenty of alienation around earlier, and both Britain and France have been harboring Islamist extremists for decades. But up until 9/11/2001, there was no inspiration for violent action, just as before Rosa Parks defied bus segregation, there was no inspiration in the American South for non-violent direct action.

Ordinarily, terrorism aims to engage in spectacular action in order to evoke fear among members of the terrorized group. This is especially true for factional terrorism, which cannot engage in large-scale massacres the way state terrorism can. In that traditional goal, Bin Laden has certainly succeeded, for Americans fear terrorism far more than social ills that kill an order of magnitude more people. But he has also succeeded in a nontraditional goal, in that he got a reputation of someone who could bring America down, and destroy its essential symbols. It does not matter that the actual attack was spectacular but did not kill that many people; when it comes to ideological grandstanding, perception is reality.

Still, in many respects, the 9/11 attacks did not completely change the character of Islamism. As I mentioned before, it remains primarily local. All Islamists hate the United States, considering it the symbol of all that is evil in the world. But British Jihadists evidently blow up the London Underground instead of traveling to New York and blowing up subway stations; even Iraqi Jihadists, including foreign fighters inspired by anti-Americanism, concentrate more on killing Iraqis of the wrong denomination than on killing Americans.

And two possible trends that would have made the attacks even more of a watershed moment did not occur. It was entirely possible for the attacks to scar not the vast majority of Muslims, but a near-unanimous one. In such a case, the focus of Muslim cultural identity in Europe may have been greater integration, despite Europe’s uniformly integration-discouraging governmental policies; any radical fringe could have then turned to non-violent direct action. I suspect a big reason this trend did not happen is Bush’s virulent response, and governments’ not cracking down on subsequent anti-Muslim hate crimes, but it could have also been due to other reasons, such as the lack of a civic tradition in Islam.

The other possible trend is massive radicalization. At present, the most biased neoconservatives say that 1% of all Muslims are Jihadists; the American response, combined with overt racism in Western countries, could have easily turned that number to 15%. The clash of civilizations fundamentalists on both sides have been hoping for did not happen, is not happening, and will almost certainly not happen. Even Samuel Huntington’s more denouement-based conception of a clash of civilizations has not materialized.

So in fact, 9/11 did not change the level of support Jihadi extremism enjoyed among Muslims. Its significance lies in changing the nature of that support, from merely hating the West and being drawn to fundamentalism as a reaction, to admiring and seeking to emulate Bin Laden. In that respect, it really did change everything in the Islamic world, for never before had there been a coherent violent Islamist ideology. Even if that ideology is still based on its believers’ cultural isolation and oppression, it is still an ideology that serves as inspiration to many extremists. And certainly, this is an ideology that only rose after the watershed moment of Islamism that was 9/11.

September in Tel Aviv is never easy. The heat competes with the humidity, and even with air-conditioning, it feels as if the weather is closing in on us. But in 2001 it wasn’t only the weather that was hard to cope with. A torrent of terror attacks all over the country contributed to the distressed and heavy atmosphere, and made it even harder to breathe.

By the hour, the whole country would tune in to the radio, to keep up with the latest events. A routine of twenty-four daily news broadcasts, on every possible wavelength. Being the computer geeks that we were, we usually topped it up with frequent glances at on-line newspapers, just in case some disaster had happened while we weren’t listening. And sadly, tragedies did happen more often than anyone had wished for.

September’s melancholy was a major reason why Erez and I decided to take a break from everything and set off to Barcelona. Sort of “when the going gets tough, the tough are going away” strategy. We booked tickets for September 13th.

Early afternoon at work, everyone in my design consultancy was busy as usual when someone shouted something about crazy happenings in New York and that we should turn on the T.V. It was hard to believe what we saw. Here’s a plane crashing into a tower. And another one. And the first tower thunders down, and then the second. And things changed forever.

The next two days saw me glued to the internet, with the T.V. as a backup, watching the harsh pictures over and over again – the plane-crashes, the collapsing towers, the falling people, the dust over the city, and the ashes in people’s eyes. And the words. Endless piles of words. Coming from the mouths of million experts who tried to explain what has happened, and why. I’ve learned a whole new vocabulary of terms and names in those days. Words I still wish I hadn’t known.

Meanwhile, all the flights were cancelled. We didn’t know if we’ll be able to leave on our vacation. It sounds cold and selfish, I know, but in a way, the horrible events in America just made it more urgent to get away from everything. To relieve the stress that until that moment was local, and from this point onward became global.

Two days later, at the airport, I wasn’t so sure about getting on the plane. It felt spooky, it felt dangerous, not the getaway I had in mind. Security measures, which are always strict at TLV, seemed more meticulous than ever. Endless queues stretched at the check-in counters due to delayed and cancelled flights, and confused passengers were everywhere. And inside, a sense of guilt was gnawing, eating away the excitement of the journey. Is it ok to indulge on a sunny beach while others are suffering in ashen cities? Am I immoral? And if I wouldn’t go, would it change anything in the worldly order? Maybe not, but it might have changed my life, as Erez proposed to me in Barcelona.

This year, on 9/11 we will be landing in Israel, on a short family visit before relocating from gloomy London, where we lived in the past year, to sunny California, which will be our next home, at least for a while. In Heathrow, each of us will be restricted to carrying only one small hand bag to the plane, and I will have to taste the milk I’m carrying for my baby, to prove it is not a liquid explosive.

When we’ll arrive, I don’t expect the weather in Israel to be any different than it was five years ago. Sadly, I also realize that nothing much has changed in the political climate either. We will drive away from the airport and into the city, while outside the car, the heat will continue to compete with the humidity, and though the air-conditioning will be turned on, we will still feel the weather closing in on us.

More than any other issue, it is the US invasion of Iraq that has separated the US from the rest of world after September 11th. It has also divided the United States internally, weakened its capacity to deal with the threat of extremist Islamic terror, and made a mockery of US power. While Guantanamo, Afghanistan, limits on civil liberties in the US, and the US acquiescence in Israeli bombing have set the US apart from the rest of the world, how many countries can really say they have not tortured prisoners, bombed innocents, imprisoned their own citizens without just cause, or over-reacted in their efforts to fight insurgencies and rebellions? However, other than the Soviet Union and Iraq, itself, no other country after World War II has had the power or the chutzpah to invade another, simply in order to remake it.

While the US Administration argues that Iraq is a part of the “war on terror”, most critics argue that it is at best distracting the US from dealing with terrorism, or, at worst, destroying its ability to do so. Still, it is hard not to be sympathetic to the project of a democratic pluralist Iraq, however much a mess the US has made of it. Is there a way, in which this US Administration, as opposed to some imaginary one with perfect information and ideal morals, could have achieved, or still can, a more stable Iraq.

Regime change without an invasion

All advocates of invasion also advocated regime change. But all advocates of regime change did not advocate invasion. So this administration could have mobilized a broader coalition, if it had actually implemented what was clear in its political rhetoric and official policy. It formally sought to end Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, but informally made it clear that it would not settle for anything less than regime change. The problem was the Administration’s insistence that regime change could only be secured through the barrel of a gun. There may have been another option.

Instead of invading on 20th March 2003, the US could have sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad with an ultimatum, two decades after his previous trip to Iraq as a presidential envoy of Ronald Reagan. Rumsfeld could have offered the following deal. Saddam Hussein agrees to an inclusive transitional government, grants formal self-rule to the Kurds, ends human rights abuses, cooperates against Al-Qaeda, and allows in UN inspectors. In exchange, the US would not invade Iraq. With the US forces poised to invade, it would have been an offer that Saddam Hussein would have found hard to refuse. But what if he had? There would be war, certainly no worse than what Iraqis face now. Even if he had stalled after accepting the deal, it would have been the beginning of the end of his autocratic authority.

A different beginning

Having invaded Iraq, what could the US have done differently? First the US could have prevented the looters from looting Iraq. A curfew combined with stringent measures, immediately after the invasion, would have stopped the looting and made Iraq safer. Second the US could have retained the Iraqi Army, an army of conscripts with no personal loyalty to Saddam Hussein, except for certain elite units. Third the US should have retained all former Baathists in professional positions, only “screening out” former Baathists who had committed abuses. Instead the US first expelled them all and then “screened in” former Baathists who had not committed abuses.

The result of such a “screening in” policy was that the entire professional class – university professors, teachers, doctors and engineers – who joined the Baath party simply to get a job were initially excluded from working. They then had to go through a cumbersome process to prove they were innocent before they got their jobs back. This took time, money, and energy on the part of those affected, and kept Iraq from using much needed local talent to reconstruct the country. These three policy decisions required neither new resources, nor prior planning. They only required sensitivity to the ground situation and a political understanding of how people behave under dictatorships and during transitions. Any one of these decisions could have had a significant impact on the post-war situation in Iraq. All three together might have changed the tide.

What can the US do now?

Now the US is facing terrorism, a tough insurgency and a divided Iraq. Bringing Iraq around would require breaking up the problem into three manageable parts. First the US can work with Iran to stabilize the Shia South. This would entail easing pressure on Iran’s civil nuclear program, lifting sanctions and engaging diplomatically, in exchange for better cooperation from Iran in reining in militias and monitoring the borders. Since Iran also has an interest in a stable Iraq over an unstable one, this is not an impossible deal to make. In any case it is unlikely that the UN Security Council will back the US on sanctions against Iran, so the US has little to lose. Of course, if it waits too long, it may also have little to offer.

Second the US can work with the governments of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and even Turkey, to help secure local autonomy and rights for Kurds within each of these countries. The pay off is greater stability in these countries, and more secure borders for all of them. The Kurdish regions in each of these countries, straddling many of the borders, then become better managed and policed, enabling a crackdown on the infiltration of men and arms to the Iraqi insurgency, rather than facilitating it because of unstable borders.

Third the US should negotiate with the ex-Baathist and nationalist insurgents in the central parts of Iraq, while isolating Al-Qaeda elements. This would reduce incentives for cooperation among the different insurgencies, and increase the likelihood of greater stability. To do this, however, the US would have to backtrack from a major plank of its policy after September 11th. It would have to concede that all terrorists are not the same – there are some terrorists you can and should actually talk to. And that Iraq is not just a central part of the war on terrorism, but a country facing a triple transition from Baath party dictatorship to multi-party democracy, US occupation to Iraqi self-rule, and Sunni Arab domination to pluralism. This would not be easy to do.

If this fails withdraw

The loss of international goodwill, the erosion of support in the US, the anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the anguish in Iraq, may make it politically impossible for the US Administration to take the above steps, even if it were ready to concede that Iraq may have nothing to do with the war on terror. This may leave the US, Iraq and the world with no option but a withdrawal from Iraq. Whatever its drawbacks, such a withdrawal is increasingly beginning to look like the least bad option available.

There’s an old theory that says experience in general is structured like trauma. Or, to put it another way, that trauma is merely a special or egregious case of what we suffer every day simply by coming into contact with the world. Much of what happens to us cannot be fully processed right away. It is simply too much. And so, experience gets packed away into memory where it sits, waiting for an occasion, intentional or less so, when it can be retrieved and dealt with. In this way of thinking, we are all a little like Proust, sorting through our vast store of barely acknowledged experiences and trying to make some sense of them the second time around.

It’s entirely possible five years after 9/11 to have a great deal of discussion about what the event really meant and what its repercussions have been. Simply pick up a newspaper or a magazine or turn on the television. But what has receded farther away, perhaps, is the actual experience of the day. That day barely exists anymore. This is well and proper in many ways, some traumas, some experiences, need more time than others. But it is also an odd feeling to know that such an intense experience does sit there latent, within us all, waiting to be tapped some day, like a kind of mental time bomb.

What I remember most about September 11, 2001 was the muted almost graceful way that the towers came down in watching them from the roof of a warehouse in Brooklyn. There was no sound. The flames and the smoke were distant enough that they were merely daubs of grey and licks of orange against blue. The sky was as blue and as bright as it has ever been. The city was as quiet as it has even been, waiting. Blue. And then, calmly, as if resigned both to the laws of nature and to the whims of human action that had conspired against it, the first tower came down. Something in the middle gave way and the top of the building seemed to slide down on itself, like a telescope. And in a few long, measured ticks of the clock it was gone. Just a plume of billowy cotton spreading out from lower Manhattan into the Bay.

Days later the smell of 9/11 became its main impression, an acridity to the air that everyone recognized but didn’t want to name. There was a burning in the eyes and a bad feeling on the skin. But the actual moment of the event itself was, for us in Brooklyn, like the very absence of sensation, a living abstraction and then a terrible waiting for the rush of experience to come crashing in again as it did the next morning when we woke up dumb, because we’d forgotten that all worlds are fragile and we’d forgotten that we were so very fragile too. And five years later we’ve forgotten all of that again, except here and there in little bits, when we remember.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Whatever is sufficient unto the human, with glories and miseries—freedom’s torch, the begging hand, aloneness; skyscrapers rearing with aesthetic delights not from a lesser god; acres of parkland where one can not just imagine (pace John Lennon), but have, Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’.

Of course, New York is magnificent, and New Yorkers know it, though naturally there are some who can only whinge about their magnificence. Citizens of Sydney, used to newbie enthusiasm over the city’s physical attractions, and far from immune to aren’t-we-wonderful self-glorification, know the real thing when we see it. From the Time Warner Center atrium to the trickling fountains at the Frick collection; up at the Cloisters, sequestered from development; down to the colossal energies of Times Square; at tony Park Avenue; through the empty space where the World Trade Center once stood, now waiting, yearning, for its Freedom Tower—Manhattan, Gotham City, stands, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island boroughs surrounding, an epic of social integration (‘Give me your tired, your poor’), a dazzling, perplexing, overwhelming city. With very expensive real estate. And with taxi and bus drivers whose skill in getting through the city’s ceaseless traffic can only be compared to the technique of great ballet dancers. Some long-term residents bemoan the changing character of parts of the city, but for the visitor it’s a case of: there doesn’t go the neighbourhood. Surely New York was never greener, cleaner or more attractive than it is now.

It might very well be a cliche to stand at the top of the Empire State Building. One does not run into Cary Grant waiting for Deborah Kerr, testing the limits of their affair to remember. However, the visual consummation at this height is quite something. Everyone who goes to New York should try to get there. Most New Yorkers will tell you to go on a clear day—you might just see forever—but I think it’s better to go after a rainstorm, when the clouds have partially cleared and are scudding across the sky, which is when I went. The crowds have dispersed and you don’t have to wait too long to get through the security checks. Then, up at that imperial height, where even Central Park is reduced to some olive spinnaker, you can see the whole fantastic panoply of the city lit by shadow and sunlight, the wind a bracing tonic against the tiredness that is likely to overcome you if you’re not careful. Don’t try to conquer too much of New York on your peregrinations. You won’t.

If that experience doesn’t send you to your hotel room somewhat chastened, then I suggest a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art might. The collection there is so awesome in its range of paintings, sculpture, furniture, glassware, armour and ceramics, that one could not begin to do it justice in less than a year of visits. Here is a place so vast that you can make a wrong turn, expecting to be looking at Greek statuary, and end up in a complete Egyptian temple or, taking another staircase, suddenly be confronted by an entire Frank Lloyd Wright room. Well, one can only take in so much art at one time. It was amusing to see people, just like myself, wandering in a slightly hypnotised way through the galleries at the end of the day. We had experienced the phenomenon of nervous attrition by artistic masterpiece. That’s a danger not just at MMA. There are MoMA and the Guggenheim to see too, for starters. The David Smith retrospective was on at the Guggenheim when I was in New York, and it was exciting to be confronted by an oeuvre I knew little about. By the way, the tour guides in the museums are unfailingly instructive and knowledgeable. They teach you so much in the short amount of time they have, and most of their work is voluntary. 

When the gold curtain parts at the Met for five hours of great Wagner singing (Hampson, Heppner, Meier, Pape, Putilin in Parsifal) or you sit in The Belasco for Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, its socialism on the right side of the agit-prop dividing line, in the very theatre where the play had its premiere, you can experience a rare theatrical frisson. The grandfather in the Odets’ play throws himself off the roof of the apartment block in which the Berger family live—Ben Gazzara, the original Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, in a fine performance. The hopes of a lifetime perish with a terrible fall from grace. It struck me that we were living through a similar period the play represents. Our dumb celebrity culture, cynicism and irony, our know-nothing knowingness, is different to pre-War New York, but in other ways we are similar. The grandfather’s ideals are under pressure from economic reality, just as we know the reality of torture, war and starvation. New York should confirm us in our ideals too, or at least make us think very hard about what is left of our ideals. Hart Crane invokes the feeling that precedes insight so well in the ecstatic ‘Proem To Brooklyn Bridge’ from The Bridge: ‘O Sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, / Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.’ I felt these emotions, these links between architecture and human aspiration, many, many times. The Rockefeller Center, for example, no doubt, for some, a worm of predatory capitalism symbolising all that is worst in the oppression of non-Western cultures, struck me as entirely beautiful, its art works, murals and sculpures, from the Manzù door reliefs to the Swarovski crystal installation (but how are they going to clean it?). For a poet the world may be something like a rose, for the scientist something like a machine to be explained. The future must see the uniting of the rose and the machine in culture, in politics, if we are to at long last fulfil the hopes of grandfathers who gave up and jumped off buildings, or poets who disappeared on ocean voyages.

Parts of the planet may well be rotten to the core, but other parts are marvellous. Sure, New York has problems, the major one being the clear social and economic inequalities between some neighbourhoods. On a mundane level, theatre etiquette could do with some sharpening up—the cannonade of coughing I heard through Act One of Tosca was something to behold. But then there are wonders unlike anything else: the rooftop garden vista at the Metropolitan Museum, the Morgan Library with its unique manuscript and art collections (Anne, Branwell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë manuscripts, Mahler’s 5th, an Edgar Allan Poe story et al), approaching the Statue of Liberty at dusk.

True, there are neurotics, jackasses and wannabes about, but you get those everywhere. Repose can be found in many a quiet enclave, whether that be in any of the numerous bookstores, Bryant Park or in the reading rooms of the adjacent New York Public Library (the library had a superb exhibition on—French Book Art of artists and poets in dialogue—when I visited). On the other hand, if people about you is what you want, The Village Voice can tell you about hundreds of events to go to. New York also means jazz, dogs and food—for cheaper eats try the cheeses in Zabar’s or the hamburgers at Nick’s on the Upper West Side. If you’re cashed up, there’s always Le Cirque. Street fairs are a favourite weekend pastime. Large sections of Broadway, or other thoroughfares, are closed off on Sundays and filled with stands from all over, conspiracy theory booths happily mixing with the corn fritters and pashminas.   

However, in the end, you must come to the one defining moment in recent New York history that centres all journeys in this city, and all one’s subjective emotions. Perhaps it is foolish to look for the spirit of this city in one moment or defining event, but I think you can find that New York spirit in a number: 343. That is the number of firefighters and paramedics who died on September 11 as they tried to control the catastrophe. Every death then was tragic, as are all deaths brought about through violence. But what honour was accrued to the city through their actions. People say the ancient myths were an invention to explain the unpredictable behaviour of the gods, but on September 11 there Hercules fought Antaeus. The golden Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center transformed itself at Ground Zero into stupendous courage and heroism. How proud the relatives and friends must be of those who went to their deaths that day trying to save the lives of others.

Next time you hear about New York’s brashness, financial shenanigans, corruption, its callous disregard for your intentions, look more closely. Beneath the harsh surface lies the greatness of the human spirit, in all of its faltering grandeur.   

                                                                  *

            September 11, 2001

You will remember, under brilliant stars,
The shadows of the burning, falling towers,
The kindness and the malice we receive
Or give to others, fortune’s miseries.

What steadfastness eroded skin will keep
In its griefs, inexplicable;
Dark energy can gather for a killing
Though not all joy is taken by cruel dirt.

When it is done, quickly the darkness comes,
Blood and iron’s mistaken enterprise;
Immortal smiles on future summer nights
Shall hold to reason with grasped photographs.

Time may despatch your broken history
And bid the dead eternal recompense—
Their shades surround you in the morning light
Edging through this silence on the ground.

Written 2003

Line 9 references Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7

‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’

Lillias White sings ‘Manhattan’ here. 2′ 46”

Shannon has left me.

No, wait. That’s not right. It’s I who’s left her, and I did it a while ago, too.

I sit in a drab apartment on the third floor of a complex off vaci Utca (VAHtsy OOtsa) in Budapest. There is fabric on the walls–scored beige, thick and hard as amphibian skin–and two putty-colored easy chairs, straight out of Super 8, and a coffee table of black-lacquered particle board, and a glass-doored hutch against the wall, also black-lacquered particle board. The tone is set by the single sad decorative effort: two shelves of empty liquor gift-tins, carefully arranged in the hutch: Dewar’s, Johnny Walker Red, Beefeater, Absolut.

Budapest in 2001–surely it’s a different place now, fast as Eastern Europe is these days, fast as it was in those days–is a city so sexy its longtime residents have relegated their constant hard-ons to the drear of daily life. The women are blonde; they have enormous breasts; they wear thongs; and over their thongs they wear filmy tights or tiny skirts. The men are powerful specimens, tall and muscled and preternaturally confident. These men could crush me in the crook of their arm. They are the Dutch, they are the Danish, but unburdened by the weary sophistication–political, social, sexual–of Western Europe. They all must be unbearably good in bed.

And they have discovered the candied bliss of the American shopping mall. Sixty feet away from my front door, just across vaci Utca, is a pristine five-tier retail mecca, replete with indoor vegetation, multi-screen cinemas (a captain’s easy chair for every paying customer), and countless stores selling whorish outfits for pennies, for spare change, forints. Each shopgirl is a dream of womanly abundance. There are fantastic asses everywhere you look. And the eyes–they seem to invite. (Is it my imagination? Almost certainly it is. I am terribly lonely here.) There’s a TGI Friday’s on the north end, first floor. It is my favorite restaurant.

What I mean to say: Budapest is the perfect place to watch the end of the world.

And Shannon has left me.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively. In the case of love: a thousand miscast glances, the contemptuous homemaking demands of a tyrant (well-suited for a ’50s housewife in high heels), and a precisely limited sexual plan, designed for my pleasure, designed for my pleasure.

We are in Venice, the living, gasping, brackish museum, in a fabulous apartment, in a fabulous palazzo, terra-cotta roofs in every direction. But for me, I am occupied by flirting with the bar girl. Shannon is at my side, doing the International Herald Trib crossword. The bar girl has sensual lips, that priceless Italian insolence, and is pleased to fuel my fantasies. Meanwhile, Shannon ignores it as best she can. There is grocery shopping to be done, and she’s always on the look-out for a provocative blouse to interest me, and she is deeply in love with Venice. She thinks she loves me, too, but in truth I am only a conduit, a way to get her in. And for me, Shannon is a way, was a way, to get me out. Out of Bennington, Vermont, out of the Bush-addled United States, out of a life that bored me. And here we sit, in this Venetian bar, where the bar girl has just walked by and brushed her hand against my shoulder. That insolence, those sensual lips. I’d like to do terrible things to her.

Venice is a small town for expat Americans. When Shannon has taken all she can take, when my contempt, my wandering eyes, my fury at her insufficiency, at my insufficiency, peak, I must find a new place in which to decay. Budapest, Buda-Pest, city on the Danube, where the buildings proudly bear the bullet holes of 1956, where the women, the girls, twitch their bethonged asses like seasoned pros. Budapest is the place to be, baby.

I am inside my apartment, inside my hard beige walls, because my eyes, my fantasies, are bigger than my courage. I’d like to be a player, but let’s get real. I’m too sensitive, too diffident, too weak, to make the necessary moves. At 3 pm, I turn on CNN and watch massive death in real-time. I see the second plane. I see the desperate, brave suicides. I see the towers fall.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, unrelated to the other languages of Central Europe, and as one of the small number of modern European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European language family it has always been of great interest to linguists. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighboring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. [–Wikipedia]

Halál. Death.

I do not speak Hungarian. I cannot pronounce Hungarian. For days I wander the mall, the streets, staring at the newspaper photographs of fire and death, halál, captioned and headlined in a language of stacked consonants and inscrutable syllables. I speak to no one.

Two weeks later I move to a new apartment, farther south, away from the mall, the TGI Friday’s, the fulsome bodies of the girls of my sad little dreams. In my new home I do not get CNN, but Fox News. I develop a disturbing relationship with Bill O’Reilly.

The previous occupant of my apartment, the son of my landlord, has left a cardboard box of videotapes, which I sort through in a pathetic attempt to avoid the writing that is, supposedly, my mission. But they are all in magyar, all useless, all but one. It is unlabeled, black, anonymous. It is unmitigated hardcore pornography. It is an Italian import. There is no sensuality here, no insolence, only fucking. Only death.

Thank you, I say. Thank you, whoever you are. This is everything. This is enough.

Five years seems like such a long time ago. Among other things, both my parents were still alive. (Neither is now.) I was not yet married. I had never heard of blogs. I had never been to Finland (a regular destination for me in recent years because of my friend Marko). I had never been harassed by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. There was no Department of Homeland Security. And there was no Patriot Act, the most dangerous, destructive (of civil liberties) and retrogressive piece of legislation in memory, which now holds over every head in this country (specially Muslim and Arab ones) the dark threat of indefinite detention at Guantanamo, without charge or due process.

The thing I remember most clearly about the day of the attacks is speaking to my mother in Karachi at some point. It wasn’t a particularly substantive exchange, but it was nice to hear her voice, and a relief, I imagine, for her to hear mine. For days afterwards one went around as if in a dream. Nothing felt real. The atmosphere in New York City took a long time to return to anything like normal, and during that period one’s emotions remained unpredictable and turbulent. September 11th itself was, of course, the worst. By afternoon of that bright autumn day, my uptown apartment had become a makeshift refugee camp for a number of friends who lived near the World Trade Center, and who could no longer go home. At some point on that day, we all went out en masse to try and get a late lunch, only to find an eerie silence on Broadway. All traffic had been stopped in Manhattan. For some odd reason, the few people present were whispering to each other, if speaking at all. After a while, armored personnel carriers with uniformed soldiers began slowly rolling down the streets, while F-14 Tomcats circled overhead. People in civilian dress carrying submachine guns quietly appeared on the street corners. (Later, I learned they were FBI agents.) It was not clear then if there would be further attacks. One felt like one was in a war zone, and I was reminded of my recurring childhood nightmares after Pakistan’s 1971 war with India. Every little while, someone in our group would suddenly break into tears.

That night, we slept fitfully, gripped by the confusion of sadness, fear, anger. The next day, I managed to collect myself enough to send an email to friends and family expressing some of what I felt. I reproduce that message here:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

On that day, the only thing that I was, was a New Yorker. A New Yorker who loved his wounded city more than ever. And one whose only allegiance was to the sentimental cosmopolitan ideal that this city somehow still manages to embody even today. Probably because many people were still in shock and unable to say anything, this email was forwarded along and eventually ended up being one of those things that went around the internet in ever-wider circles. I received hundreds of appreciative emails in reply and my two little paragraphs were translated into various languages and published in newspapers. They were even read aloud by European political leaders at emergency meetings and hastily assembled conferences. People started asking me my opinion on what had happened, and along with all the other bewildering sentiments, I started feeling inflated.

A little over a week later, I found out that one of my close friends, Ehtesham U. Raja, who had so far been unaccounted for, had actually died in the World Trade Center. He had been attending a business meeting that fateful morning in Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the WTC. Again, while trying to recover from this blow, I received many messages of sympathy. And I liked it. And then I felt disgusted for feeling self-important through my friend’s death. It was at that time, while sitting one afternoon in our living room with my wife Margit, in the midst of this confusing tempest of fast-changing emotions, that I sarcastically spewed out (for catharsis) what could in a very generous mood be considered a prose poem. I readily admit that I am no poet, and perhaps there is a bit of what Vladimir Nabokov once rightly described as (something like) “the passing around of specimens of one’s sputum for inspection” about my making public for the first time now what I had written that day, but in the spirit of telling what this horrific event did to us New Yorkers, I adduce it here. Please be gentle in judging me:

How We Became Important

At first we were thrilled,

the way one is thrilled by thrillers.

It was a real-life action movie, and then it got better.

This was no small entertainment–no Amtrak derailment,

no mere collision of jumbo jets over Tenerife.

It was something bigger,

and it was right on our doorstep, just outside our window.

It was real.

ABC News went off the air and, being engineers,

we realized the thin hypodermic,

a transmitting antenna, was destroyed.

We felt clever, in the know.

We changed channels.

We called family members

in anxious, incredulous excitement,

but we couldn’t get through.

Well, yes. That made sense.

This was big.

And then we saw thousands perish in an instant.

In a brown cloud.

Live on television.

And we wept. (Later we would brag about this weeping.)

We inventoried important landmarks nearby,

wondering if we would be next,

but we knew it was fantasy,

a wish for the adrenaline rush of fire and heat,

a wish to be closer, still closer.

Of course, no one thought us important enough to kill,

but it was thrilling to make believe.

We climbed to the roof and watched the rolls of smoke and dust.

We identified F-14s by their double vertical rudders,

the overall silhouette of the Tomcat.

We spoke like admirals about carrier battle groups.

We ate lunch, marveling at the unfolding of History.

We lowered the pitch of our voices, became grave,

newly aware of our central role.

We made pronouncements about death and infamy.

We were lucky enough to be Muslims

(and from Pakistan, too),

and while others worried for our safety,

we knew that no harm would come to us.

All the same, we had become victims–

that most desirable status, that gift of our time.

Now we had sympathy, the ear of the world

for whatever we might like to spew:

hymns and elegies

professing love of this land;

our shock and sorrow, and our attempts to transcend them;

pious lectures about people and nations

outside America’s soft, imaginary borders.

We defended Muslims to Christians and America to Muslims.

We were virtuous, pleading restraint but never peace,

and we became terribly sophisticated in our politics.

We ate well and slept badly.

We dreamed of burning airplanes.

Soon enough our attentions turned to Eros.

Women liked our newfound moist-eyed sensitivity.

You see, we didn’t know if there would be a tomorrow,

and in any case we were too important now

to read fiction or write philosophy.

There was no time for the old things.

This was big.

And then, with our egos already swollen,

we discovered that a close friend had died with all the others.

A man eating a breakfast with a view.

A close friend, gone.

We couldn’t believe our good luck!

Not everyone could claim such moment.

Not everyone would receive messages of condolence.

We had only lived on the periphery of meaning before,

but now, when the landlady called to collect back-rent,

we would ask if everyone she knew was OK,

and hope, hope that she would return the favor.

Rent.

How trivial compared to the loss of our friend.

Yes, there was grief.

But how quickly our losses were recompensed

by feelings of centrality, consequence.

Overnight, we became astute and worldly thinkers,

with courageous and steadfast hearts.

We were potent lovers and sensitive friends.

We were sages and saints,

and wise.

We really thought we had become important.

New York, uniquely, inspires proprietary feelings in people who don’t even live here.  All over the world, I’ve noticed, people like to think of their cities in relation to New York.  Bostonians speak of the Boston-New York axis, Washingtonians of the Washington-New York corridor.  Los Angelenos and Chicagoans too.  The English consume a diet of newspaper stories claiming that “Swinging” London in “Cool” Britannia has finally surpassed New York in any of a number of areas: art, music, architecture.  (There’s no corresponding competitive discourse in New York media – I guess we don’t suffer from comparative anxieties.)  Even in my hometown of Buffalo, where New York City is often regarded as the great sinkhole of state monies, we took a secret pride in being co-members of the Empire State with N.Y.C.  These perceived affiliations and competitions are a way for other cities to append themselves to New York, to partake of its cultural gravitational field.  Paris is French, Tokyo is Japanese, but New York, to many, is a heterotopia floating off the coast of the United States. 

Manhattan’s grid, and New York’s prolific displays of maps of itself and its subways, streets, and configurations, make it an easy city in which to feel at home.  People produce cognitive maps here very quickly, feel comfortable navigating its terrain almost immediately.  This quality of ease, which is so different, for instance, to the impenetrable ball of yarn that is the map of London, is perhaps the origin of the pervasive sense of belonging experienced by New York visitors and residents alike.  No labyrinthine local knowledges prevent the first-timer from getting from Fifty-Third and Sixth to Twenty-Sixth and Tenth.  Perhaps that famous expression of fealty, “we are all New Yorkers now” should have been, “we are all New Yorkers already.”

I may belong to a minority in remembering the World Trade Center as a poetic structure, but the reasons I do have much to do with how it expressed these signature qualities of New York City.   Visually, the buildings gave the sense of a vertical grid, elongated just as Manhattan is elongated, with an avenue of sky running in between.  Unexpected views of them would often crop up, maybe when turning south from Houston Street onto Sullivan, or standing on the corner of Lafayette and Spring, or while driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike.  Emerging from the Brat Pack-era hangout The Odeon, way downtown, their almost ominous presence suddenly loomed over you.  A perfect visual metaphor, they towered over neighboring skyscrapers the way New York towers over its neighboring cities.  Dark masses illuminated by a bright grid, they signified New York.

I often think about how important it was that there were two of them.  One skyscraper, like the Empire State Building or the Woolworth, somehow remains a building, its mass of steel and concrete impossible to forget.  The twoness of the Twin Towers brought into being relations with the air, dramatized space.  The few places where one tower completely occluded the other (such as the pier leading to the Holland tunnel exhaust, off Spring and West Streets) were uncanny viewing points.  The one visible tower despotically oppressed, rather than symbolized, the city.  One tower was a fascist; two towers invoked psychology, doubleness, complexity.  And because the footprints of the buildings occupied two diagonally opposed squares, they almost always presented themselves to the eye as perspectival, one slightly higher than the other.  The aura of their unevenness brilliantly leavened their austere shapes.  They hovered.

As you approached the plaza, you always noted with pleasure the little arches near the bottoms of the aluminum facade.  These merest bends subtly recalled and paid homage to the Deco architectural landmarks of the city.  They conjured the relation of the Chrysler and the Empire State to the grid itself, represented as the endless lines that clad the trade center’s sides.  The optical illusions those shimmering lines made were almost arrogant: excessive on a building that already inspired vertigo.  For a time, the cavernous lobbies contained a satellite airline terminal.  The sight of those ticket counters was oddly right in buildings that, like airports, constituted entire worlds unto themselves, with the frisson of rocket ships or space stations.  The towers’ otherworldliness made them the unlikely site of a Wednesday evening club night at Windows on the World, frequented by Kate Moss and the rest of the New York glitter circuit of the mid-Nineties.  You’d wander around with a drink and then suddenly come to the windows, through which the shockingly faraway streets below gave a pleasing shock. 

For me, the World Trade Center was part of the given world.  It was finished the year before I was born.  I could never quite comprehend accounts of the debates about Yamasaki’s design choices, about the wisdom of his aluminum minimalism.  To me, they were already there.  They were a late articulation of modernism, in a romantic and slightly whimsical version.  And modernism was a credo whose modernity seemed unquestionable, if you take my meaning.  The good things about New York City for me were (and are) related to its embrace of what it means to be modern, to be in the present tense.  From my family’s decision to immigrate to the United States to my mother’s Audrey Hepburn haircut, my life has been dominated by instantiations of modernism, by dynamic faith in making things new. 

From the time of my first visit to New York, when we visited the WTC and I finally tasted my first long dreamed-of escargot, it never crossed my mind that the towers, along with plenty of other institutions of the postwar period, would prove impermanent.  How could what represented the present become past?  But like other seemingly permanent features of life, One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center now appear as stupendous legends that lasted for a short twenty-five years.  The gashes that appeared in the buildings, as I stared at them from Chambers and Church Streets, never looked anything other than fixable – it never occurred to me not to assume the towers were invulnerable until they fell.  Even the great, floating sheets of metal tearing away and drifting down from above, or the people I saw leap to their deaths, didn’t convince me that the buildings themselves might not make it.  Surely the emergent chaos those gashes represented could never defeat the entire order.  But it did.

On September 14th, 2001, I flew back to Buffalo on one of the first planes to take off from JFK.  The night before, Abbas, Margit and I had spontaneously sung “New York, New York” at the top of our lungs with a bar full of strangers.  There were about six people on board the Airbus, and I was seated in the first row.  I was heading to a high-school friend’s wedding.  I broke into tears at the sight of the smoldering wreck of downtown, where I still needed to pass a military checkpoint to return to my apartment.  I remember clenching my fists and somberly determining that no passenger would cross the threshold separating me from the captain, on pain of death.  As the flight progressed, it occurred to me that everyone else on the plane was extremely afraid of me. 

It is the world as it existed when I happened upon it that turns out to be the fleeting one.  I’ll be simply part of a shrinking group of people who remember New York with the World Trade Center. 

My other Dispatches.

Justin E. H. Smith

What could be more self-indulgent than to recount where one was on September 11? As if other people were not somewhere. As if being anywhere at all on the planet automatically made one a survivor. I survived September 11, as it happens, in an internet café in Berlin packed with smirking German hipsters, who could not wait to go find more hipsters, at a rave or at a squat, with whom to wax ironical about the day’s events and to recount with a smirk where they were when it happened, a whole six hours later. My grandmother survived Auschwitz: disguised since birth as a Swedish Protestant, she rode it out teaching elementary school in Minnesota. But she had the decency to stay pursed-lipped after the war. We on the other hand must carry on about where we were, what we felt and thought, as though that mattered. I am no exception.

The first thought I had when asked to write something for the fifth anniversary of September 11 was: Jesus. I must be really old. I was old then, and it’s been five years. I should probably start wrapping things up right about now. I don’t even have a will, let alone a legacy. I can’t seem to bring myself to think about such things. I just love life too much. I do not want to die.

I knew of course that what I was expected to produce was hard-nosed political analysis –I’ve managed to do it for Counterpunch— and here I was carrying on as though it was all about me. I would like to be a sharp political analyst, I truly would: on the one hand, the chickens of American imperialism came home to roost, but on the other hand taking innocent lives is never acceptable, etc.

Some topics just stifle all that analytical acumen and cause me to regress into infantile self-absorption, unable to write about anything other than myself. My hope is that I will get away with this by lacquering it up with essayistic style, and claiming membership in a venerable tradition. Montaigne got away with it, some will respond, only because in the 16th century the self was a new and exciting discovery. Today it is old news. And yet, today, I carry on.

A long time ago, in that phase of life when infantile self-absorption was not only tolerated but celebrated by fawning adults, I lived in a white-trash exurb of a mediocre Western city. There were cars on jacks and mean-ass dogs on chains in front yards, people hung sheets in their windows instead of curtains, and there were no structures over two stories high. I imagined that cities consisted in rows of buildings as high as the World Trade Center, stretching out beyond the horizon in all directions, with tubular, glass bridges connecting them all at their very tops, for those who preferred not to use jet-packs.

But then I was taken on family vacations to the supposedly shining cities of the American West, and I saw empty lots between buildings, with broken glass glistening amongst the weeds, and plastic six-pack holders, and weeds pushing up even between the cracks in the sidewalks. No, Sacramento would not cut it, not even Los Angeles, and not even that supposedly exceptional Western city, San Francisco. I resolved by the age of eight or so to move to New York, where I would spend the rest of my life 110 floors above the earth, never again to descend to that terrestrial sphere where the dirt and the plants and animals, and the feral human rejects drifting across the great wide West, were condemned to live out their days.

On the day we moved out of my childhood home in the white-trash exurb, into a condo in a lower-middle-class suburb, I scrawled the lyrics to Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Halber Mensch” on the inside of a bedroom closet, with a magic marker, and added a hammer-and-sickle and an anarchist ‘A’ for good measure. It was 1987, and I was 15.

I arrived in New York in 1994 and left, unwillingly, in 2000. I went to the top of the World Trade Center only once, with Klaus, visiting from Berlin. He wanted to see Gary Kasparov playing against Deep Blue. 1997, that must have been. My sole visit to the 110th floor I had once hoped to inhabit was to witness a showdown between man and machine, a popular pastime among the curious ever since the Mechanical Turk made its debut in 1769.

On September 9, 2001, I set out from my miserable little college-town amidst the cornfields of southern Ohio, whither the great Metropolis had cast me once I finished my Ph.D. at Columbia. I drove to Chicago to fly to Berlin, via Paris, for a conference devoted to the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. On the way I passed right under Sears Tower. It looked shabby and old, and I remember thinking: that thing’s going to have to come down sooner or later. Structures like that can’t just go on forever. Is there anyone, I wonder, who will be able to see to its demolition?

I arrived on the tenth and installed myself in Pamela’s Kreuzberg apartment. She introduced me to her new boyfriend, and at every opportunity I suggested to her that she could not be serious. We had a punctilious drink in a nearby bar, the three of us, and she announced that I would have to make my way back and let myself in. The two of them had plans.

The next day I decided to skip most of the afternoon sessions at the conference in order to read the New York Times at an internet café near the Zoogarten Bahnhof. When I arrived, there was a widescreen TV in the café showing scenes of smoke and carnage. My first thought was: nothing to worry about. That must be somewhere really far away and irrelevant. Somewhere really fucked up, where this kind of thing is normal. Then I saw the NYPD vehicles. The hipsters who ran the place were watching and making jokes to one another. In the news report I heard the verb einstürzen. I was more surprised by that word than by the images it accompanied. That was among the first German words I ever learned, having been a card-carrying hipster myself and having throughout the eighties sought out the hardest-core German industrial music available in the California exurbs. It means ‘to collapse’, and is used in connection with buildings and other large structures. Einstürzende Neubauten had presented themselves as anarchists and nihilists, back in the eighties, but certainly not as fascists (and ‘Islamofascists’ were not even on the radar), who would have liked to have seen it all collapse.

I rushed back to the Leibniz crowd at the Technical University a few blocks away. Best of all possible worlds my ass, I thought. I had always found Voltaire an obnoxious wiseacre, all-too easily taking jabs at Leibniz’s Theodicy without having really made any effort to understand it. When Leibniz said this was the best of all possible worlds, he didn’t mean that it was great or anything, he meant that it was the maximal set of compossible individuals, some of which must, being different from one another, by definition also be worse than others. Hence evil. I felt in an instant that I had just had my own Lisbon Earthquake, and could no longer fault Voltaire for his pessimism. But still, the Leibnizians were my people, and I, like everyone else at that moment, needed some company.

On the program for that afternoon was a meeting of all the various national Leibniz societies, of which there are more than you would think: Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, Argentine, Spanish, American (but not, I probably don’t need to mention, Iranian, Afghan, or Libyan). The representative of the Chinese Leibniz Society was up first: he droned on for at least an hour about his group’s growing membership in a monotone ideally suited to some Central Committee report on crop yields in Xinjiang. Then the American representative got up and calmly said that, because our minds were all, no doubt, elsewhere, he would be brief with his news. Next came the Israeli. He wasted no time in telling all of us a thing or two about terrorism. One would not think that a business meeting of national Leibniz societies could turn into an occasion for a fiery political speech, about freedom and its enemies, about the importance of defending civilization against those who would like to see it all collapse, etc. But our Israeli colleague managed to tie it all together. He said that Leibniz would agree with the opinions he expressed, and that it would be a fine gesture to issue a press release to the Berlin media affirming our disapproval, as Leibnizians, of flying planes into buildings. Two days later, in Der Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Morgenpost, there it was: in German, English, and French, a press release denouncing, in the spirit of Leibniz, terrorism. Leibniz, I note in passing, is rightly credited with being an early visionary of a united Europe. He thought the religious wars of the early 17th century could best be avoided if the Catholics and the Protestants were to team up and invade Egypt together.

That night I went out to a bar with Pamela and her new boyfriend. I bought an evening tabloid from a vendor: ‘Zehntausende Tote’ read the headline. There were pictures of bodies falling from the tops of the Towers, pictures we don’t see much anymore. Pamela showed us pictures of her own from a recent birthday party she threw for herself at Windows on the World. I got drunk on whiskey. We talked, naturally, about New York. Her boyfriend had never even been there. He couldn’t relate. I imagined that under the circumstances she might just send him home so that the two of us could give each other a bit of succor.

When I was 13 or so I taught myself to stage bicycle accidents. I would ride to sorority row at the local university and, with great athletic force and balletic precision, would crash my bike on the front lawns of the houses with the Greek letters where the girls were congregated on the front porches. They would rush down to see to my well-being. They didn’t know me, but their collective solicitude had the effect of something like love.

But no, Pamela sent me back to her place, and went back to his with him. No matter. I had the mass media to keep me company: two TV’s, a radio, and the internet. I turned them all on at once. Local German news channels on TV, the BBC on the radio, and the New York Times online. ‘U.S. Attacked,’ read the headline. On the BBC I remember hearing interviews with passengers whose plane en route to the US had been rerouted to Halifax. An elderly British woman said something like: “Well I suppose we’ve got a free visit to Nova Scotia, haven’t we? It’s a lovely city, my niece tells me. I shall have to pay a visit to the aquarium.” Next they asked an American man what he was feeling. “They’re gonna fuckin’ pay,” he replied. “We’ve just gotta go over there and fuckin’ nuke ‘em.” Most of the opinions I’ve heard expressed since then amount to variations on these two themes.

I had to spend a few extra days in Paris waiting for trans-Atlantic flights to resume. There were US embassy officials at Charles de Gaulle, wearing badges around their necks, expressing what passes for official compassion to Americans trying to get home, but calling us “sir” and “ma’am” far too much to seem sincere. On my first day in Paris, after some hours of futile jockeying at the airport, I took the RER into town to find Anna in her attic studio off the Boulevard Hausmann. She was American, and I hoped she’d be good company. As it turns out, she was in New York attempting to get her French work visa renewed, and would later regale me with tales of great inconvenience. So I did not find any company, but I did see the flowers and banners along the length of the Seine, announcing “Nous sommes tous des américains.” I saw these with my own eyes, though I know it’s hard to believe. By the 16th or so, flights had returned to their normal schedule and those of us who had been stranded were being squeezed in for departures. I left Paris on the 17th. There was a false and forced sense of good cheer on the plane. I sat next to a man with a Tunisian passport, and we were exceedingly nice to each other. On descent into Chicago, the pilot pointed out to us that those on the left side of the plane could catch a spectacular glimpse of the Sears Tower.

I am terrified of flying, and have been since long before the events. My terror is existential and not statistical, and no amount of data as to the relative safety of flying will make any difference. It just feels wrong. It is something we should not be doing. Never do I feel more alone in the universe, more abandoned, than when I am in a plane, and it is that much more awful when we hit a little patch of rough air. This of course is the point at which self-absorption begins to border on insult to the memory of the dead. What the passengers felt on September 11, skimming just above the Hudson at 600 miles per hour towards God knows what, could only have been infinitely worse: the ultimate abandonment, the ultimate absence of love.

Which brings us back to Montaigne and the controversial art of carrying on about oneself. Some philosophers say that the self is a relatively recent invention, and that back in the good old authentic days real people had no need for it. I don’t understand this claim. It seems to me any fanatical cave-bear worshipping hunter-gatherer, no matter how un-modern, is still going to be able to think: too bad the mammoths trampled my brother. Then again, at least they didn’t get me.

It seems to me that those who demonstrated five years ago how ready they were to die and to kill would have liked to return to that imagined primordial era when the self did not matter, but only something somehow higher. It seems to me also for that very reason that our massive response in the form of self-absorbed chatter about where we were, and how the events inconvenienced us, might be more profound than it lets on. It is a response to a well-known pronouncement from a cave in Tora Bora. It says: no, I love life more than you love death. Go ahead and hate your life, but I do not want to die. I am a self-absorbed coward, who gets sick with fear in the faintest of turbulence, and I believe in nothing bigger or higher than my own little bubble of a world. I believe that all deaths are meaningless and regrettable, and especially mine. Death leads to nothing on the other end, and the good for each of us consists in avoiding it. The good of the world, in turn, is best seen to by maximizing the number of people who have no hope for reward in the afterlife, and who value bodily and structural integrity, boringly, over the splattering of guts, including their own, in the name of transcendent principles.

Blixa Bargeld, the idea man behind Einstürzende Neubauten, is in his forties now, and has put on quite a bit of weight. Even back in the early nineties, the anarchist feminists I used to know out on Warschauer Strasse, Silke and Heike and Ines, considered Blixa a bloated bourgeois sell-out. They preferred Donna Haraway, and music informed by the ethos of the Cyborg Manifesto. (It’s too bad I had not yet met Haraway back then, and could not tell them that the cyborg professor’s main preoccupations are in fact dogs and baseball.) They imagined themselves ‘posthuman’. One of them, who had been a high-school exchange student in Kansas some years earlier, enjoyed recounting to the delight of all how fat and stupid (how merely human) Kansans are. They squatted unclaimed flats in the former East Berlin, knitted their own socks, and posted a chore board on the fridge so that everyone could sign up to do their part. Daunted by the work expected of me, I stayed for two nights and then checked into a Best Western.

The girls imagined a radically different world, not one where all the Best Westerns would collapse, but at least where the guests would all be non-paying, and would provide their own maid service. They wanted to bring down the system, and then use its buildings. They disdained the boyish need to blow things up. Bargeld, for his part, never blew anything up –the thing about collapsing new buildings was just a symbol, you see– but instead went into theater. He now cites Bertolt Brecht, who hoped to see rivers of blood spilled for the creation of a better world, and who wrote the lyrics for a Kurt Weill song later transformed into a McDonald’s commercial (“It’s Mac Tonight,” sung by a styrofoam crescent moon wearing Ray-Bans and a tux and seated at a grand piano), as his model and inspiration.

**

[Justin E. H. Smith will be going on book leave for the next few months. An extensive archive of his writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]