Reflections from
the Outer Boroughs of Ground Zero
by Marina
Rustow
September 12, 2001
I
returned yesterday morning from Long Island City, Queens, where I happened to
witness the collapse of the south tower. I have since remained in Brooklyn,
where an eerie calm prevails. The highways are empty, one hits a few traffic snarls
on the streets due to road closures, and there are people on bicycles
everywhere; about half of all vehicles, especially after hours, have flashing
lights or sirens. All day today folks continued to gather at the waterfronts
overlooking Manhattan, where many had watched the events unfold yesterday, and
a day and a half later, it was as if they were waiting for the smoke to be sucked
back into the buildings and the towers to rise from the rubble in reverse
motion. Lingering in disbelief, trying to accustom themselves to the new
skyline, attempting to absorb the human consequences of the altered view, like
so many teeth missing from a formerly winning smile.
The general
calm is even stranger when one realizes what's gone from the normal mix of
urban sounds: the white noise of air traffic, consciously registered only in
its absence, has been reduced to an occasional lone helicopter that makes the
head swivel upwards to check whether it's friend or foe. The skies have been
also eerily blue with a crystalline early-fall clarity, the clouds and humidity
grounded along with commercial airline flights. Clear except, of course, for
the now constant plume of beige smoke and dust blowing eastward from lower Manhattan. and yesterday afternoon on the waterfront
near Brooklyn Heights, a few single sheets of paper wafted down from the sky
above the East River to rest where we were standing: some lower Manhattan
office worker's files?
The eeriness
surfaces in other unexpected ways: outside a factory I passed on Union Street
in Brooklyn today, two trucks were loading up with metal caskets, perhaps an
everyday sight in these industrial parts but now assuming new and horrifying
meaning. A friend had visited from out of town over the weekend and with a
piece of scrap paper demonstrated a sophisticated paper glider technology; when
I returned home yesterday afternoon I saw the little airplane on my kitchen
counter and shuddered. Two friends and
I driving around Brooklyn in my car were momentarily frozen by the sudden
entrance, through the side window, of a loudly buzzing wasp, and as it exited
the window opposite and we relaxed, we all simultaneously realized the trivial
size and yet great symbolism of this small kamikaze and cracked a few dark
jokes in its honor that don't bear repeating.
New Yorkers
are said to lack in ethical instinct and civility what they more than make up
for in civic pride. Real New Yorkers of course know otherwise since the moments
of spontaneous fellow feeling are not rare, though they are memorable. The more
than ample supply of blood donors surprised no one here. And yet I feel somehow
also that the flow of volunteers was provoked in no small part by the flattery
of our being assured, in the most devastating way, that we really are the
center of the universe.
Anyone who has
lived somewhere other than North America or western Europe smiles with fond
bemusement when phone calls require seventeen attempts to go through, and it helped
the sense of perspective enormously to speak this evening with a friend who'd
lived through the civil war in Lebanon where road closures and power outages
were routine. That was today's reality here, making do with the various obstacles
while waiting to learn the magnitude of the casualties.
Yesterday's
was another reality entirely: the techno-porn of a news industry with neither
information nor cogent analysis, only the will to fill airtime. I deliberately
left the intersection in Queens where I'd seen the first tower collapse rather
than wait for the second implosion among the amateur videographers and other
oglers since it's not a sight I'd wish on anyone. And yet there it was,
broadcast over and over again in every Brooklyn cafe and bar, the vertical
wings of a jetliner slicing through so much steel and glass like a blade
through water; the slow motion collapse of an incomprehensibly large structure,
buckling, kneeling, and finally allowing itself to fall to the ground in
organized fashion, floor upon floor, vertebra by vertebra, like some Martha
Graham move. Do not be seduced by the elegance of this footage, I reminded myself
and others over and over again; after the tape cuts there is smoke and dust,
negligible tokens of the actual human damage. I recalled the CNN
broadcasts of airplanes over Baghdad ten years ago, green and purple lights
against the black sky belying the as yet unimagined horror on the ground, the obscene
euphemism of the phrase “collateral damage” concealing what we'd learn only
much later. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the aestheticization of politics is war
and the aestheticization of war is fascism.
To be
generous, perhaps the media can't help but aestheticize; such are the risks of
representation in two dimensions. It can, however, exercise better judgment
than to focus selectively on Palestinian reactions: if there was joy among
perhaps a dozen of those under the age fourteen, or even, to grant more benefit
of the doubt than is likely due, among some short-sighted and unstrategically
minded small segment of the population, where were the countless others who
understood immediately the setback the attack would represent for Arabs
everywhere if it had indeed been committed in their name? Where were those who felt devastated upon
considering the dimension of the losses, which contrary to American media
images included not only Americans but immigrants from every corner of the
globe? Reducing the global reaction shot
to football-match cheers -- as if war is ever anything but a negative sum game
-- blocks the mind from imagining that perhaps there are convincing reasons for
anti-American feeling among the various nations whose futures the U.S. has
altered irrevocably and generally for the worse. Robert Fisk wrote today in The
Independent, “Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000 innocent
deaths and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an
unspeakable crime. But they will ask
why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives
of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the
17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.”
Marina
Rustow is a doctoral candidate in History at Columbia University
in New York.
email: mr189@columbia.edu
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