---

I was certainly safe

Where was I, you ask? Freshly home from the very city now wounded and flailing, with the taste of hot dogs and bus exhaust still sharp on my palate, ooh-wah oo-wah cool cool kitty, the prodigal boy from New York City — yes, where was I on that fateful morning? On top of a mountain, as safe as any American could possibly be.

I was on the road that week, sniffing around some Woody Guthrie haunts in the Texas panhandle and then on my way to Denver to visit my pal David. In between, I stopped for a couple of nights, Sept. 10 and 11, in Kenton, Okla., to hike the Black Mesa. This is the belly of No Man's Land, where the silence is deafening, where there are no electric lines, miles and miles from any potential nuclear or terrorist target. I was staying in a bed and breakfast, which was really the ranch home of Vicki and Monty Joe Roberts. Vicki knocked on my door early that monring and said, "Tom, I think you should come out here and watch the news." I came into the living room just in time to see the second plane hit the second tower. Nothing computed yet, nothing made sense. My brain just went on red alert and told my body to shut up, sit down, and take it in.

Vicki and I spent the morning staring at the TV. People called her, and she cried into the phone, "We are under attack! The United States is under attack!" I rolled my eyes, thinking her more than a little hyperbolic. By about 10 a.m., though, I knew she was right.

The one moment I'll never forget as long as I live, and probably not for a while after that, was when the first tower crumbled and fell. I saw it start. We were watching Fox News, for some reason, and they had a camera trained on the towers. I saw the smoke increase around the impact point – but all the way around the perimeter of the building. My head raised off my hands, like a dog lifting its head off its paws when sensing danger. I inhaled and held it. It was like a bad move in Jenga, the blocks just crumbled down. My brain computed that one: The World Trade Center just collapsed. The World Trade Center just collapsed. The fucking building came down. The meaning of the moment was so awesome I couldn't make sense of it. I just cried. For the first time that morning, I cried, guffawed, hollered. Now it was serious.

Sitting around a B&B all day watching the dispatches come in, I had chances to record the blow-by-blows in the coverage in my journal. For whatever it may be worth, it's posted here.

---

Towers of babble

---

Checking in

Fortunately, the folks I know in New York escaped any direct harm on Sept. 11. I met mostly writers and artists, and they all live uptown. I knew no one wealthy enough to be in the financial district on a Tuesday morning. It took me several days, though, to complete my head count.

From the assistant director of my fellowship program at Columbia, Andras Szanto:

We in the office are all safe and sound, and several of the current fellows have made it in. So as far as personal safety is concerned, all seems to be fine. However the city itself is in a total mayhem. It hasn't really reached uptown yet, although Giuliani is telling people to walk uptown. So up here it is all eerily calm. There are people eating in the restaurants. It is a glorious sunny day - after a rainstorm of biblical proportions last night - and this perfect fall day makes it even more surreal. At first sight everything is normal: then you notice strangers hudddled around radios, students gazing at TVs in the cafes, lines at the bank for cash, a sign on starbucks saying "due to the terrorist attack we are closed today", a homeless man reciting the list of the day's unspeakable horrors. There are small strange differences that translate the larger horror into minute changes: for the first time, for example, the majestic gates of Columbia, just revently restored, have been closed shut.

From former fellow Adam Langer, who writes about books in the city:

I was probably about a mile and a half away when the WTC went down. Ever since, the city has been in sort of a daze--unsure of whether to exist in kind of a perpetual fear and mourning or whether to go back to business as usual. It's been a bit of both. Lots of people walking around with shellshocked expressions, others playing tennis and dining in cafes on Broadway. I took Wednesday off and went back to work part-time on Thursday. Don't know anyone directly from the attack, but lots of people who knows people. Beate and I walked on Wednesday night as close as we could get to the crash site (about Houston Street). Very eerie. All streets closed except for police vehicles, impromptu candlelight vigils. We'll see how the next week goes.

Bob Dumont, who lives across the East River in Brooklyn but works at the city library in Manhattan, started emailing informative and colorful dispatches immediately.

— We're just sitting here trying to take it in. When I was driving to Paul's
school this morning I was looking north and was hardly able to see downtown
Brooklyn through the smoke. Luckily it was clear right where the school is
since they're due east of the WTC and the smoke was drifting south and east
out over the harbor waters. We can smell it at our house but there's not
really any smoke around here. Casualties of course will be horrific. This
was primary election day in New York City for mayor and other local races.
That's been cancelled of course. Glad that Randy is okay. All we're getting
on TV is local coverage so I have to listen to the radio to what's happening
around the country.

— Walking the dog in Prospect Park a couple of hours ago. Faint smell of smoke
in the air. Charred bits of paper scattered here and there. Wall of gray
smoke wafting from Manhattan towards Brooklyn. Clear blue skies to the north
and south. F-16's soaring overhead and disappearing into the smoke. Still
more fires burning and building collapses expected in other buildings of the
Trade Center complex. Casualties will be unfathomable. All I'm seeing is
local coverage on TV so I don't fully know what networks are reporting about
other events in DC and Pennsylvania.

— We're still sitting tight here as well. Heard Bush speak earlier. 23rd
Psalm and all that. Was wondering what he'd been up to today. Reading his
Bible on the airplane. Sarasota, Shreveport, Omaha. Some grand tour. And
Cheney sitting there in DC with his bum ticker. Colin Powell returning from
Peru. At least Mayor Giuliani was on the case.
Just talked to my sister. Her husband's son works at the Pentagon in some
sort of communications command over on the same side of the building as the
Joint Chiefs. He is okay and will be spending the night there in fact hard
at work as our government cooks up an appropriate response.
So far local hospitals have not been overrun with casualties because the
emergency workers can't get in there to get them out. Still too dangerous.
On our block live a couple of New York City firemen. Both of them are in
Manhattan on duty now. Early word is that about 200 fire fighters were in
the WTC when the buildings collapsed. Probably a lot of people got out but
there must have still been many inside and on the street below. Suttle
stayed in the World Trade Center Marriott when he was here and I went there
to meet him. We walked from the lobby of the hotel through the lobby of the
south tower and then out into the wide plaza towards downtown streets and the
Brooklyn Bridge. I hadn't been down there on foot for quite awhile but have
driven by there countless times as it's right outside the entrance to and
exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. I wrote a story long ago about a guy
who goes up on top of the World Trade Center to the public observation tower
and has a sort of false epiphany about what he must do to straighten his life
out. I guess he never will.
Alexandra's graduating class had their senior prom last June in the Windows
on the World restaurant in one of the towers. We talked to her this evening.
She said they had some sort of official gathering at school tonight in one
of the auditoriums that was so crowded she couldn't get into it. TV' s have
been set up in the campus center.
This is not the work of the Palestinians I'm sure. While they might be able
to blow up a pizza parlor Jerusalem or a disco in Tel Aviv, this is way out
of their league. For one thing they wouldn't have had the money to afford
the airplane tickets from Boston to LA. This was no doubt a high level big
time caper sponsored by Osama Bin Laden and friends.

— Rode the subway to work this morning, Thursday 9-13. Looking toward lower Manhattan there's still just a pillar of gray smoke and dust where the Trade Center buildings had once stood. All of the train through lower Manhattan except the "A" aren't running below 42nd St. Trade Center and all those surrounding buildings were built on land fill so the concern is with vibrations from the trains causing the other structures to topple.
Bush seems to have regained his stride a bit. But his role for now is largely symbolic. It was disconcerting to not know where he was on the first day and what was going on. No doubt the plane that crashed in Pa. was heading for White House or Capitol Bldg. Interesting discussion on CBS last night about possible role of Iraq . Osama bin Laden could be just a convenient boogie-man, impossible to track down in the mountains of Afghanistan. Former FBI director in NYC at the time of the previous Trade Center bombing was convinced that it was the work of Iraq. This latest effort would then be to finish the job of destroying the WTC and trying also to kill Bush the younger. Just one theory. Of course it now appears some of these guys learned to fly in this country so they might not have needed military training a sovereign state could provide. As Imus said about Bush, based on his record as governor of Texas you know he's not afraid to juice somebody. Hopefully whatever measures are taken they will be e
ffective. But this could be quite a long haul. And there is the fact that our crazies are just as crazy as their crazies, whoever their crazies are.
Library is open today 11-5. Lots of out of town tourists are here to use free e-mail.
Driving upstate tomorrow to pick up Alexandra for the weekend. She wants to come back to the city for a couple of days.

— As I usually do on Thursdays after work I walked from the Library at 42nd and 5th Avenue downtown to the Second Avenue station on the "F" line which I board and ride the rest of the way home. On these walks I always see something I have never seen before-- as anyone usually does when taking a walk of any length in New York City. Yesterday as I approached the Empire State Building, closed to tourists until next week, and the surrounding streets closed to traffic, with the result that cars in the immediate vicinity were gridlocked in every direction, I noticed a big yellow cab of a semi pulling an enormous trailer behind. This was something you'd expect to see on I-40 but not on 34th St. The trucking company was "Prime Inc." of Springfield, Missouri. Looking out the window of the cab on the shotgun side in utter amazement at the scene was a little miniature dachshund. The truck pulled through the intersection and on the back of it I read a decal saying "Without Trucks America Doesn't Work." It was on this part of 5th that I noticed the first of the home-made missing persons flyers that have been put up. Watch any of the networks for the full story on this. This first one I encountered on the side of a pay telephone was for Giovanna (Genie) Gambala, an employee of Cantor-Fitzgerald, 27 yrs. old, 5' 6" tall, brown hair brown eyes, last seen on the 103rd floor of WTC 1. There were numerous others that became more and more frequent as I got closer to the Armory at 26th and Lex. which has been set up as a sort of missing persons central. In the immediate vicinity of the Armory which is between Herman Melville Square and Bernard Baruch Way, aka 27th St. and 26th St. were Red Cross Workers, National Guardsman in fatigues, people milling about, the lights from TV cameras, and of course everywhere plastered on every street lamp and mail box and pay phone flyers for so many people. There was a fence! along the south side of the armory that was covered over entirely with these flyers. People were also handing out official NYPD missing forms as well.
... Downtown in the E. Village there was a gigantic 3-story flag strung between the tenements on E. 3rd St. between 1st and 2nd Avenues, aka The Hell's Angels block. Their NYC headquarters is there along with a bar where they hang out. Also on 2nd Avenue and 2nd street there was a smaller flag hanging on the building which houses the A. Provenzanna Funeral Home. I've passed by this place of business many times and its usual patrons always appeared to be the friends and relatives of Puerto Rican homicide victims.
Anyway I had arrived at Houston St. and 1st Avenue. People from out of town always ask why it's pronounced "House-ton" instead of "Hews-ton" like it is in Texas. They usually attribute it some kind of New York City contrariness-- an unwillingness to go along with the program. Actually it's of Dutch origin and Houston St. was here long before Houston, Texas existed or Sam Houston was even born. I got on the train and went home. There was still that big cloud to the south where the Towers used to be. The train was pretty crowded. I didn't get a seat.

Dumont also sent a long piece chronicling a walk through Manhattan several days after the attacks. He's an astute observer and a fine writer.

Another friend, Tulsa resident Richard Stathem, my yoga instructor, sent a page he'd written in response to the attacks, something that triggered in his mind – a natural, hopeful comparison.

---

Poetry in motion

A poem sent to me by a friend a few weeks after the attacks:

Oh Osama Bin Laden
You Son Of A Bitch
May Your Balls Develop
A 7 Year Itch
May Your Pecker Be Twisted
In Such A Manner
That Your Asshole Whistles
The Star Spangled Banner.

---

Exhuming McCarthy

A junk email I received recently, advertising services pulled straight out of 1952. Anti-communism was so effective in dividing the country because communists were virtual phantoms – ghosts that were out there, somewhere, and you had to be ever-alert. Suspect your neighbor! Suspect everyone! Stay at home! Don't go out! Only communists have fun! Everyone is your enemy! It's no way to run a human race, and those sentiments are creeping back in with a new enemy: the wily terrorist.

From: be@smarter.than-you.com
Date: 17 Jan 2002 21:47:37 -0000
To: thomas.conner@tulsaworld.com
Subject: Is your neighbor a terrorist?

Before 9/11, that would seem like a silly question.
But the world has changed, and in order to protect
ourselves and our families, it's more important than
ever to know a little more about the people we deal
with on a daily basis. Who knows what dark secrets
might be lying just around the corner?

Find out if your new nanny has a criminal record, or
if that new date of yours has a past that you should
know about. Make sure your business partner doesn't
run off with your assets, and keep your family and
friends safe from harm!

http://www.ultimatespy.net

When you need to know, NOW.

---

Words up

Few events in my life have forced me to struggle with language as much as I have after 9/11. Words are my bread and butter – I make a decent living stringing them together – but in the aftermath of those impacts, I was reminded how limited language is for expressing this magnitude of horror and empathy. How do we put this on paper, in our mouths, in our stories? I mean, look at the victims and witnesses back in September, breaking down on live TV, unable to get past obvious marker words such as "indescribable" and "unspeakable" and simply falling silent or breaking into tears – not describing, not speaking. Shocking, horrific, terrible, yes – and they all seem like superlatives now, to blunt to break the bubble of real understanding in this case. Bush zeroed in on the word "evil," a good buzz word from his religious upbringing that clearly denotes the whole of all unpleasantness in human society. But the issues involved are reminders that the lines aren't as clear as mere good and evil and that this situation was a human affair, messy and tangled, lacking any obvious supernatural intervention. A senator called the attacks "dastardly," which seemed to invoke moustache-twirling villains in Wild West melodramas, not crazed, dirty zealots. The San Francisco Examiner, which can get away with these things being the underdog in a two-paper town, had the best headline on Sept. 12; in enormous, screaming type above a photo of the burning towers – the only word on the page outside the flag – the front page cried, "BASTARDS!" Bravo to them for getting that off our collective chest.

Many of the words used sounded antique. Describing the deeds as "nefarious" rings of Gilbert and Sullivan. "Despicable" sounds Victorian, and "infamy" was stale even when FDR used it to describe Pearl Harbor in 1941. The hijackers were quickly dismissed as "faceless cowards," as if the worst thing they did was to behave dishonorably. Cowardism hardly explains the suicidal fanaticism, too. Even the word "tragedy" seems too small to contain 9/11, the word having been overused on the front page of tabloids for decades in describing the most trivial of matters.

So how do we engage ourselves in a 21st century war when the language to describe its context still stems from the 19th?

---

History lessons?

I would love to have been a mouse in the corner when Baby Bush talked to George Sr. about the situation. Did he ask for help, or did he avoid dad's advice, considering much of the blame here can be laid at George Sr.'s feet?

It's amusing but certainly troubling to examine the historical loops being retreaded in this brave new war. The Soviets tried to take over Afghanistan years ago, but much to everyone's surprise the tough Afghanis fought back with outdated weapons and ... actually started whipping the Soviets' butts on occasion. Seeing a prime opportunity to humiliate our old foe, the U.S. started funding and supplying the rebels. And they won! The Soviets pulled out, justly humilated.

The problem was – so did we. Instead of continuing our support of the Afghanis, we pulled out, too, dropping them cold and leaving behind a country in shambles, with no economy to speak of and an infrastructure beaten to hell. We just used these people for our own power play, then dumped them. Vicious warlords quickly filled the power vacuum, running the country like a series of Mafias and oppressing people with unusual skill and brutality. The citizens, furious that the U.S. had abandoned them and angry at the new abusive leaders, thus welcomed anyone new who would offer stability and safety.

Enter the Taliban, needing a new base of operations and all too willing to cater to a population unhappy with Western ways and desperate. Not that the Taliban was so much greater at governing, but hardline conservatives – of any religion – can at least come into a situation like this, knuckle down, and provide the illusion that the way to nirvana has been reclaimed. Bin Laden then had a new refuge, and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

Moral to this story: obey the commandments you speak of haughtily at church. Don't use people. Clean up your own mess. Take care of the populations you take for granted. Goodness could have so easily triumphed over evil here, before the evil had even taken root.

---

The war on Gonzo

Ensconced in his mid-Colorado hideout – where he keeps himself locked up with a bunch of TVs, which is why his journalism has gone to hell – Hunter S. Thompson, once a hero as I aspired to this low trade of journalism, issued this missive following the attacks:

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit
the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I
was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed
irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation
coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the
history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco
earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were
slaughtered in one day.

The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000
lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight
Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable
Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher.
Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class
disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear
missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New
York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four
commercial jetliners.

They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines,
piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious
about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and
Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with
fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly
destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade
Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for
Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no
mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At
War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious
hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla
warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.
Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we
know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with
All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling
precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into
the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense
system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing
to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently
primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the
World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless
strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will
be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe
Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the
Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for
WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed --
for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All
he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he,
the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil
industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and
clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the
guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will
ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no
credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden
to blame for the tragedy.

OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about
the Five Ws of this thing.

The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has
already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes
from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid
to The Enemy.