The Horror On A Beautiful Day

“Autumn in New York is often mingled with pain…”
“Autumn in New York,” by Vernon Duke, 1934

How the hell am I ever going to explain this to the young one?

I sat today on our front step and watched him dig in our garden with great effort, unearthing one of his Matchbox cars that he’d buried between a begonia and the green Vinca (this was a Woody wagon, circa 1962) so he could race it with a metallic blue Camaro of approximately the same era and size on the sidewalk.

It was at that point, with my mind temporarily on hold, that it started coming back to me (the words of actor David Ogden Stiers, who played Major Winchester on M.A.S.H and provided the narration for Ric Burns’ documentary, “New York: The Center Of The World,” summarize it all too well – they are blockquoted below):

“On a perfect, almost achingly beautiful late summer morning in September, a day of almost infinite clarity, referred to as 'severe clear' by reporters, the unthinkable happened. The center of the most powerful nation that hadn’t been attacked on its own territory in nearly 200 years would encounter a horror the like of which had never been seen before.”

I take a sip of coffee and read, in the Inquirer, about The Center of Peace, a small spiritual community in Philadelphia, which will hold its second annual Stand for Peace rally at 11 a.m. at LOVE Park, 16th Street and JFK Boulevard. I also read that the Agape choir will then headline a 9/11 peace concert at 8 p.m. at Irvine Auditorium, 3401 Spruce St. That concert will be opened by the Common Ground Community Choir, an interfaith, multicultural ensemble from Philadelphia and the nearby suburbs. Visiting Buddhist monks from the Drepung Goman Monastery in India will perform a prayer ceremony for world peace in the Philadelphia area also.

Such wonderful, hopeful gestures of healing and goodwill. Perfectly appropriate. Truly the best medicine.

There’s only one problem.

I still want to see everyone dead who had anything whatsoever to do with any of this (I know I state on this page that I don’t advocate physical violence against anyone. I’m making an exception here).

Everyone.

“In a little less than two hours, with an almost poetically horrifying symmetry, the symbols and instruments of New York City’s uniquely air-minded culture – skyscrapers, industrialization, and the mass media – would be turned back against each other in a devastatingly lethal effect.”

He looks up at me, since he notices that I’ve been staring off a bit sipping my coffee and not saying anything. I can only imagine the look on my face, since I can see a trace of apprehension on his own.

“Around 8:45 AM, the west side of Manhattan heard the piercing of a jet plane moving south down the Hudson River. Everything about its trajectory was wrong. Heading south along an airway normally reserved for northbound traffic, it was moving much too fast and close to the ground. Nearly 500 miles per hour at an altitude of just 900 feet, more than twice the speed allowed for aircraft that low.”

Mike Bane of Marsh and McLennan, Larry Senko of Alliance Consulting, Don Jones and Joshua Reiss of Cantor Fitzgerald (the whole goddamn company died that day also)…

And Don Havlish of AON…

Victor Saracini, the pilot of the plane that hit the south tower of the World Trade Center…

The entire “Windows Of The World” restaurant including most of the staff…

So many others…

“It took less than 90 seconds for American Airlines Flight 11 to hurtle the entire length of Manhattan Island. A little after 8:46 AM, the huge 137-ton Boeing 767 flashed across Canal Street to the north tower of the World Trade Center, and tore through the north wall of the tower between the 93rd and 99th floors, instantly killing everyone onboard and wreaking incomprehensible carnage inside the building. An observer noted that the building ‘took a hell of a punch,’ creating five vertical ‘sways’ that ran up and down the length of the entire structure."

“Dad, are you OK?”

I temporarily refocus and come over to play with him for a few minutes. I then busy myself by coming back inside the house and tending to the wash and feeding the cat. I continue performing these tasks, watching him from the front window.

Watching, and thinking about nothing once more. Nothing, but…

“At 9:02 AM, a little more 15 minutes after the first attack, millions of people in the metropolitan region of New York City and tens of millions more across the country and around the globe were staring intently at the smoldering skyline of lower Manhattan, when a dark shape (United Airlines Flight 175) appeared above the horizon of the New Jersey lowlands and came across the upper bay, over the Statue of Liberty, and it smashed into the south wall of the south tower.”

“A massive shower of paper rained down from the sky (we would later discover than many personal photos in the John F. Kennedy archive had been destroyed also), and, as columnist Pete Hamill recalled, ‘an amazing fireball came roaring towards Broadway’."

He comes inside the house for some milk and decides to go back downstairs to watch Nick Toons and play with his Kinex™ and Magnetix™ toys for a little while, but not after I make sure he scrubs his hands first.

I was driving westbound on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and listened to KYW News Radio as all of this unfolded four years ago. I recall news announcer Harry Donahue as being more indignant than anything else at that moment, though I honestly can’t imagine how a TV or radio announcer would find the composure to handle themselves with something like this going on, and I believe that he did his job as well as he could. Of course, by the time I arrived at work in King of Prussia, PA, everybody knew and was watching the events unfold in conference rooms or their hand-held devices. Soon afterwards, our management held a meeting to make sure we knew the whereabouts of everyone who was traveling, and also to make sure the people visiting our offices called home to their locations so everyone knew they were all right.

“When the planes hit each building, the kerosene jet fuel ignited a fire instantly across multiple floors. The amount of paper in the offices sustained the fire long enough for it to melt the center steel building supports.”

“The second plane had struck the south tower at 9:02 AM. By then, the first teams of fire and rescue workers had already arrived at the foot of the north tower, and they met with horror and devastation that defied the imagination. There were corpses everywhere, along with the mangled bodies of men and women who had already jumped from the upper floors of the building, including the remains of passengers from Flight 11, some still belted into their seats.”

“The gaping black holes in the buildings where the planes had entered marked a stark dividing line between life and death.”

A year or so ago, I watched some footage shot by a French film crew run by two brothers who happened to be making a documentary on New York City firefighters at that time. I remember watching where they entered the north tower, and you could hear what sounded like gunshots, causing everyone to flinch, though it turned out that that was the sound of the bodies of the people who had jumped hitting the roof above them.

A little while after our company meeting to check on everyone’s whereabouts (when we were getting ready to go home, since our management – in an unusual moment of wisdom for them – realized that we weren’t going to get any work done in light of all that was going on), I remember that a real upbeat guy who everyone liked, a logistics business analyst named Cornee (I think he was Swedish or Dutch) came out and told us that the north tower had collapsed (again, some people had seen it live). His face was completely blanched and I thought his knees would buckle at any moment. I thought mine would too, actually. As I had almost arrived home, I heard that the south tower did likewise, watching the pictures of both soon afterwards.

All of the events of that almost unspeakable day have faded a bit. The sense of panic and desperation has certainly subsided. However, I cannot imagine that this day will ever again, in my life, be anything but permanently a time “out of joint” with everything else.

Also, despite what I think of Bush (especially in light of the bungling related to Hurricane Katrina), I do not believe that he knew the 9/11 attacks were coming. I believe that his administration ignored every imaginable warning sign (primarily from Richard Clarke) for three reasons: 1) The assumption from the prior Clinton Administration was that the next administration would assign the same priority to events that they did – with al Qaeda getting the Number One spot there – and as far as Bushco has ever been concerned, anything from Clinton was BAD; 2) Devoting resources to counterterrorism to thwart something like 9/11 took resources away from their number one priority, which was the invasion of Iraq; 3) A catastrophe like 9/11 fit into the conservative “Project For A New American Century” written by Paul Wolfowitz and others as a means that could be used to consolidate popular support for the Bush regime.

Also, I don’t believe they knew 9/11 was coming because Barbara Olson, wife of connected conservative lawyer Ted Olson, died when her plane hit the Pentagon, and if they were really trying to stage something, no one of their own kind would have been killed (she was also a popular TV spokesperson for the Repug agenda). However, a co-worker has suggested that Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania, and I think that is a very plausible theory (also, Rumsfeld made a slip of the tongue a few months ago that leads me to believe that that is true). Finally, it is a blight upon the conscience of all the nations of the world that, to date, no one has been convicted of these monstrous acts.

I notice that I haven’t heard from the young one for a little while, and since he’s in the house, I think this is a good sign. I feel that I can go on now a bit more and tend to what else needs to be done, since I’ve had my moment to reflect now, and I can, for a little while anyway, put aside the remembrances of four years ago, when I first encountered the horror on a beautiful day.

Update 9/15: Cenk proves my thesis that bin Laden is protected and will never be caught (at least, not by Bushco).

Update 9/18: I meant to include this with the original post for reasons that will become apparent as you read it.