A Paradise Built in Hell (33 page)

Pat Enkyu O’Hara was the head, or
roshi,
of the Village Zendo, a Zen Buddhist center, when the Trade Towers collapsed. A calm older woman with short gray hair and an air of great and tranquil sweetness, she remembered some years later, “From that day, for a month it seems like, everybody was present to everybody. It was a transformation that was just striking, on the subway eyes met eyes that never would have. There was a camaraderie that was incredible, it was palpable, it was wonderful. And there was a kind of open vulnerability that people felt. There was this sense that suddenly, particularly with young people and people that have troubles with police often, that there was a changing in attitudes. These people in uniform were here to serve, and it was no longer the old-fashioned power imbalance, but it was something else. It was like they were the guardians, and that was so refreshing to see. It was a humanizing of the authority figures. And someone like Giuliani—if you were on the Left he was this monster figure, and suddenly he opened his heart and said that it was an unbearable situation, I think his expression was. That affected all of us because it showed humility and vulnerability, a side he wouldn’t often show.”

For Martin, the meals on the ship were “the heavenly banquet.” Roshi O’Hara found another, more somber communion in the very air of New York: “The smell didn’t go away for several weeks and you had the sense that you were breathing people. It was like the smell of gunpowder or the smell of explosion. It was the smell of all kinds of things that had totally disintegrated, including people. People and electrical things and stone and glass and everything. And the smell was just everywhere downtown. I remember talking to a group and encouraging them to experience the fact that we were actually breathing parts of other people. This is what goes on all the time but we don’t see it, and now we can see it and smell it and feel it and experience it. Yes, so we had this wonderfully open moment where maybe there would be some really good questioning about the world we live in and our responsibility for it and that kind of thing, and then it seemed to close down and get into a reactive, contracted state. If you can think of the ego, when it’s truly active, it’s very contracted, it’s a holding of ‘just me.’ And before that it had been: ‘I am also all these people. I am the mother of a policeman. I am the daughter of a fireman, I am all these people.’ And then suddenly there’s this contraction and I’m back into a reactive state. It seemed to take a few weeks as I recall.”

Nothing quite like this spectacle of sudden large-scale death had happened before in American history, but the immediate response has happened again and again, that odd mix of heaven and hell that disaster brings, that sudden shift into a deeper kind of life with urgency, empathy, and awareness of mortality. But if the popular aftermath was a festival of mutual aid, altruism, improvisation, and solidarity, then the institutional aftermath was elite panic at its most damaging. And that slower response largely overpowered the carnival of compassion that had taken place on the streets of New York.

E
veryone said that the events of that day were both unimaginable and like something out of a movie. It was an astounding spectacle. A Rand Institute analyst had remarked in 1974, “Terrorists want lots of people watching, not lots of people dead.” That was a year after the World Trade Towers had been completed, the year the movie
Towering Inferno
came out, suggesting how unsafe extremely tall buildings could be, simply for the evacuation problems they posed. (In the movie, people were evacuated from the roof; on 9/11, fleeing workers found that management had locked the doors to the roofs.) In 1981, the opening scenes of a science-fiction action movie,
Escape from New York
, actually featured a passenger plane hijacked by suicidal left-wing domestic terrorists who flew it past the Trade Towers and crashed it into another skyscraper. The Al-Qaeda terrorists had appropriated the destructive iconography of Hollywood and created a stunning spectacle that, by the time the second airplane crashed into the south tower, was already mesmerizing many millions. Bringing down the towers had been the goal even of the 1993 bombing. Eight years later, Al-Qaeda succeeded in creating spectacle and devastation far beyond their expectations. For weeks footage of the disaster would saturate almost all news media everywhere.

Lifelong Manhattan resident Tom Engelhardt wrote, “Only relatively small numbers of New Yorkers actually experienced 9/11: those at the tip of Manhattan or close enough to watch the two planes smash into the World Trade Center towers, to watch (as some schoolchildren did) people leaping or falling from the upper floors of those buildings, to be enveloped in the vast cloud of smoke and ash, in the tens of thousands of atomized computers and copying machines, the asbestos and flesh and plane, the shredded remains of millions of sheets of paper, of financial and office life as we know it. For most Americans, even those like me who were living in Manhattan, 9/11 arrived on the television screen. This is why what leapt to mind—and instantaneously filled our papers and TV reporting—was previous screen life, the movies.”

The U.S. media were intent on making the event far more like the movies, and in doing so the truth and the richness of what ordinary New Yorkers had achieved that terrible day were lost. Newsmakers described the response to the disaster as though it had been one of those disaster action movies in which what mattered was accomplished by masculine heroes. In the resultant stories, these uniformed heroes were exceptional, they were professionals, they were men of action, and most of all they were men. Lost in this epic version was the fact that most people effectively evacuated themselves from the towers and from the area without much uniformed assistance, and those who rescued others included unathletic gay men, older women executives, school principals, Hasidic Jews in distinctly unheroic outfits, a gang of accountants carrying a paralyzed coworker down sixty-nine flights of stairs, young men who stepped up while police were overwhelmed, homeless people, nurses, and chauffeurs. Everyone, in other words, as usual in disaster.

The public recognized what they ought to have known all along: that firefighters not just in New York or on that day make a living doing dangerous things with courage and aplomb, and that their job is as much rescuing people as putting out fires. And though the firemen were lionized, the fact that many of them were sent into danger without adequate communications equipment or coherent orders was deemphasized. As a former city detective working for the 9/11 Commission stated, “If anybody kept a record of which floors were searched, they wouldn’t have needed half those firefighters.” Sent up endless flights of stairs that warm morning carrying a hundred pounds of equipment and clad in thick protective outfits, some firemen were experiencing chest pains before long, some were lying prone, panting to recover from their ascent, given water by office workers fleeing without their help. Their chiefs had already determined that it was impossible to fight the fires, so there was no reason to carry fire hoses and other equipment. (And fire hoses were installed at regular intervals throughout the buildings.)

The 343 firefighters who died were brave and selfless, and many did help people evacuate. They were victims of terrorism but also of an uncoordinated, unprepared, and ill-equipped system. They viewed their own role with ambivalence and were uncomfortable with how it was mythol ogized. Ruth Sergel, a documentary filmmaker involved in the
This Is New York
photography project that arose from 9/11, said, “I know a lot of the firefighters were very upset that their stories—you know, they were telling their stories as honestly as they could, and then they felt they were being edited and presented as hero stories.”

The media also made a hero out of New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. He certainly filled the role of an action hero, striding fearlessly around lower Manhattan that day, dusted with the same pale stuff as the fleeing office workers, speaking boldly and feelingly, taking decisive action then and in the days that followed, later attending endless funerals and reaching out to the bereaved. On the one hand Giuliani seemed to have had, like so many private citizens in disaster, a moment of profound self-transcendence. The spiteful, self-serving, scandal-ridden figure was gone, and in his place was someone brave, empathic, inexhaustible, and omnipresent. But the old Giuliani came back soon enough to try to advance his own career on his performance and dismiss or suppress inconvenient facts about that day and his decisions before and after. He often lauded his own preparedness in creating an Emergency Operations Center, though that center was located in 7 World Trade Center and was quickly evacuated on September 11. The space was leased from a landlord who afterward became a major campaign donor to the mayor. Years earlier, his own advisers had fought his plan to locate the center at what even then they called Ground Zero.

As Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins put it in their book investigating Giuliani’s 9/11 performance, “Giuliani, however, overruled all of this advice. Rejecting an already secure, technologically advanced city facility across the Brooklyn Bridge, he insisted on a command center within walking distance of City Hall, a curious standard quickly discarded by the Bloomberg Administration, which instead put its center in Brooklyn. . . . Giuliani wound up settling in 1997 on the only bunker ever built in the clouds, at a site shaken to its foundation four years earlier by terrorists who vowed to return. It was at once the dumbest decision he ever made and the one that made him a legend. If the center had been elsewhere, all the dramatic visuals that turned the soot-covered Giuliani into a nomad warrior would instead have been tense but tame footage from its barren press conference room.” As the 9/11 Commission Report more quietly put it, “Some questioned locating it both so close to a terrorist target and on the twenty-third floor of a building (difficult to access should elevators become inoperable). There was no backup site.” Had the center survived to coordinate the response, many more emergency personnel might have survived as well.

Other things went terribly wrong that day, thanks to lack of preparedness on the part of the city during Giuliani’s reign, which lasted from shortly after the first bombing of the World Trade Center to shortly after the second attack. The 911 emergency call system was quickly overwhelmed, and operators without information on the disaster gave standard-issue advice to those in the towers who reached them—most often, to stay in place. They were unable to tell people whether the fire was above or below them. Many people were unable to get through to 911, were placed on hold, or were transferred to other operators who made them tell their stories again and again while time to escape slipped away. (The operators were often deeply humane in those conversations, but not helpful with practical matters.) The fire and police departments never transcended their old rivalries to work together, nor did they ever develop an information-sharing system or shared communications technology. The police had working radios and knowledge that evacuation was urgently necessary while the firefighters continued to plunge inward and upward with noble, fatal futility.

Afterward, many immediately recognized the terrible toxicity of the air from the pulverized buildings. Asbestos, heavy metals, burning PCBs, and plastics were all fueling a deadly miasma that those on and around the site would breathe for months. The Bush administration edited the Environmental Protection Agency reports on air quality to turn alarming science-based news into reassuring press releases, and Giuliani went along with the censorship and propaganda. It was a callous and deadly decision. Though safety experts made it clear that everyone on the Pile should be wearing a respirator and exercising other precautions against contamination, few fully followed those guidelines, and the city did not press for enforcement or other safety standards. Wall Street reopened six days after the attack, though the air quality there as well was terrible. When journalist Juan Gonzalez reported on some of the atmospheric dangers of lower Manhattan in the
Daily News,
six weeks after the attack, a deputy mayor called the newspaper’s editors to denounce the story. The firefighters were lauded as heroes again and again, but they were not protected, beforehand by a workable system and good equipment, or after, by sane health standards (and today they remain shockingly underpaid, so much so that many work second jobs and most live far from the places they serve). Many of the firemen and other workers on-site developed what was known as “Trade Center cough,” and for some it would worsen into serious lung disease and damage and a host of other health problems. Seven years later, more than ten thousand exposed people had sought treatment just at New York City’s designated treatment centers and the total number affected remain unknown.

Susan Faludi in her 2007 book
The Terror Dream
traces how the media rushed to portray the disaster as a triumph of traditional masculinity and to attack feminism. They found people to interview who suggested that the nation had been attacked not because it was strong—intervening in Middle East affairs, stationing troops in Saudi Arabia—but because it was weak and feminized. Pundit Camille Paglia told CNN several weeks afterward, “I think that the nation is not going to be able to confront and to defeat other countries where the code of masculinity is more traditional.” Faludi points out that though the terrorists were deeply misogynist religious extremists, many in the media were happy to portray feminists as somehow in league with them in weakening America.

A
National Review
article claimed that equal rights in the armed services had trumped “combat effectiveness.” Feminism had “slid further into irrelevancy,” said columnist Cathy Young. It is less clear how much the public, as distinct from their media, was truly influenced by this regressive narrative. Some did yearn for strong leaders, and Giuliani and Bush both benefited from that desire. Others disdained both; one woman who lived a block from the fallen towers referred to “Giuliani’s homoerotic death cult.” Women took decisive action in the minutes, hours, and days of the disaster, and men and women worked together closely.