Non-fiction

No one has been able to ignore the recent destruction of the World Trade Center. The media is full of information on it, whether the latest findings from the FBI, another pronouncement from President Bush, or "human interest" stories about the tragedy. What I haven't seen, though, is an outside insider, if you will — an ordinary New Yorker (if that isn't too much of an oxymoron for you), close enough to smell the fires but far enough not to have been an active participant in the drama. I think I am one of those ordinary New Yorkers. Elsewhere in America, I might stand out: an artist/technologist with a background in corporate strategy, complete with body piercings and tattoos. Where I live, an area of Manhattan called the East Village, this is rather routine.

The East Village happens to be situated on the northern edge of the region of the city closed in the wake of the disaster. This put me too far away to be in the thick of the events with the CNN newscasters and the like, but close enough that the recovery effort directly impacted me and my neighborhood.

In the hours and days following the destruction of the World Trade Center, I sent out a series of e-mail messages to friends and family. Eventually, those messages became this essay. It isn't a story of a personal tragedy or even a family tragedy (despite the fact that my parents live in Washington, DC and work at or near likely target sites). For that I am thankful. But being so close to it, and yet apart, I have been able to see the horror of the attack, a reflection from the future of the possible war to come.

The view from the roof of my six-story building is amazing. At 10am, it was a three-thousand-foot tall dark grey thunderhead covering all of the Financial District and stretching across the river to Brooklyn. Now it is a long stream, maybe two thousand feet in diameter, stretching from where the World Trade Center used to be up into the air over City Hall and over the river to Brooklyn. It is perhaps a thousand feet off the ground.

Most buildings in my neighborhood still have two or three people on top of them watching the cloud. Some have run extension cords out their windows and up to the roof to run radios or TVs. Most have cameras (one guy next door had a Hasselblad medium-format, a woman had what I'd guess to be a 200mm zoom lens on a 35mm SLR).

In fact, noticing people watching from the rooftops was how I first realized something was up. I'm not a morning person and woke up about 9:30. I remember tossing and turning earlier. I looked out my bedroom window, which faces north, and saw people on rooftops, fire escapes, in windows, all looking south. I didn't see anything in the street or in the school across the street. I assumed there was some fashion shoot or something on a rooftop I couldn't see.

I had resigned myself to not knowing what they were looking at, until I checked my e-mail. I am writing a book for O'Reilly and my editor wrote saying he'd heard what had happened in New York and was I okay?

"What happened in New York"? This baffled me. What was he talking about? So I hit a news site and saw "Plane Crashes into World Trade Center".

I read the headline a second time. No, I hadn't read it wrong the first time. I clicked to read more, but the site was unresponsive. I threw on some clothes, grabbed my keys, and ran upstairs to the roof.

And saw the smoke.

I could see it before I even got all the way out onto the roof, before I would have been able to see the WTC, had it still been standing. I had this brief feeling that I must be seeing a scene from a disaster movie, because there was no way I could be seeing this.

A gigantic cloud stood upon all of Manhattan south of me.

I couldn't see the WTC, but couldn't believe they had been destroyed — all I had was the single headline and the view from my roof. Was the WTC hiding in that dark cloud? I didn't know.

I don't know how long I stood there. It seems like one unreal moment, but I know I went back downstairs and came back up more than once, if for no other reason than I know I sent email to my editor and got my own camera. I'm sure I must have spent an hour up there, but it remains in my mind as a single unreal moment.

A colossal black cloud, perched on Manhattan.

I've seen it on video now, and it doesn't compare. On video it has no depth, no detail, no scale. In person, it was an entity, a slumbering thing across the city.

Some of public transit is opening up selected subway lines, and I've seen the occasional bus, too. However, most streets are now essentially empty except for emergency vehicles. Sirens are still the main thing to be heard, except when they're drowned out by patrolling fighter planes.

Usually you can't see the fighters, but you can definitely hear them — loud enough to impede conversation. When you do catch a glimpse of one, you realize it isn't where you expected it to be from the sound. A small black dart far ahead of where you thought it would be, clearly flying close to or past the speed of sound.

Almost all traffic in the East Village is foot traffic. The sidewalks are nearly as full as a Saturday night. Oddly, most people seem to be heading south, towards the disaster. I can only guess that they're trying to get home to points south or to Brooklyn. Occasionally, someone will have brought out a radio to play on the sidewalk, tuned to NPR. This attracts a loose crowd of twenty or so people standing far enough away from each other that they don't have to talk to anyone. I don't think anyone knows what to say, so no one says anything — everyone listens.

What vehicle traffic there is comprises almost exclusively emergency vehicles — everything imaginable. Ambulances, of course, and police cruisers, but also the sporadic oddball — a taxicab with a flashing red light filled with cops. There seem to be a few civilian vehicles which drive erratically around, irritated and honking at the numerous pedestrians. I have no idea what they think they're accomplishing — clearly they're stressed out but it doesn't seem like they're trying to take action in this disaster so much as they seem annoyed that terrorists interrupted their schedule and all the pedestrians must be specifically impeding their important driving.

When people do talk, every conversation you hear is about this. Every single one. Standing in the pedestrian flow on the sidewalk, you hear the murmur of people, pairs, threes, walking purposefully and talking quietly about "Oh I have a friend that just quit working there" or "I was at that subway stop just this morning. Do you think it has collapsed?"

The smoke seems to be reduced in volume somewhat, but it is still the only sight in the sky (which is otherwise blue and cloudless). I heard a homeless man crossing the street: he looked up at the cloud and mutter "What the hell is that?" Guess he didn't have a radio....

[ During the school year, my daughter Zooey lives with her mother in Providence, Rhode Island. She lives with me during the summer. Throughout the year, my ex and I alternate weekends and holidays, usually meeting halfway in New Haven Connecticut. I e-mailed this to her mother's account. "Nannie" and "Papa" are my parents, and hence Zooey's grandparents. They live and work in Washington, DC. ]

Dear Zooey,

You may have heard the news that the World Trade Center here in New York fell down after airplanes crashed into it.

It is very sad, but unfortunately it is true. Some not-nice people stole the airplanes and crashed them on purpose, and it has killed lots of people. There has been smoke in the air all day from where the World Trade Center buildings used to be. You might remember what they looked like - two very tall buildings that looked exactly the same. Now they're just rubble.

An airplane crashed into the Pentagon, too, which is very near Nannie's office and right next to the mall where we often go shopping in Washington. You probably remember driving by the Pentagon. The Pentagon is still there, but it has a big hole in one side. Of course, that still leaves it four other sides. Nannie and Papa both had to leave work because people were afraid more airplanes might crash into important buildings.

New York is kind of strange now, because there are almost no cars except for ambulances, lots of people are walking around, and the only airplanes are jet fighters like the ones we saw at the Intrepid aircraft carrier.

But Dad is okay, though the telephones are not - I haven't been able to call anyone. That's why I wrote you this email instead. I'll call as soon as I can, but in the meantime, you can send me email back if you want to.

I love you Zooey, and I will talk to you as soon as I can.

Daddy

I just got back from the roof of my building where I tried to sketch the smoke from the WTC. It's an amazing sight, stunningly beautiful in a horrific way, the way an erupting volcano or a torrential flood is beautiful. It is a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse made real, galloping in a storm cloud across the sky. But it is not visibly about terrible energies released all at once, even if that's what caused it. It is slow and tranquil, yet constantly moving.

It has risen higher in the sky now, I would guess it goes up a mile or more at its highest height. But unlike a cloud, you have a tangible sense of its size. It floats between buildings downtown. A fog bank would do that too, but a fog bank is not something you can generally see the whole of all at once — if the fog is close enough to see, then it goes to the borders of what you can see. Fog becomes just a differently colored sky.

This thing is not just a slightly different sky. It stands out in the sky. You can't miss it, even from street-level. It stretches the width of Manhattan but from the roof you can see it all — the whole thing. A meandering black, gray, white mass across a third of your field of view. And because it is otherwise a gorgeously clear day, you can see all the details of all the buildings between you and it. I know that City Hall is a big building. But underneath this mass, it looks like something that should go with a little teeny model train.

It is quite literally awesome. Gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh, made from flesh. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen and it is the funeral pyre for thousands.

Everyone is going on about how shocked everyone is, or how hard the rescuers are working, or how much blood donations are needed, or how the US should retaliate in force, or how the US should not retaliate in force. But the beauty of the sight is stunning. You can't see this on TV. On TV you get grainy video "LIVE" from the scene, grey with ash, flashes of light from ambulances. Insistent with the rush of adrenaline and the pressure of ratings. You get a person-scale view of a geographic-scale event. You get a corporate-filtered view of an event that damaged corporations world-wide.

I wish I had a view camera, 4x5 or even 8x10, the kind Ansel Adams used, just to capture the light playing through the smoke. I expect sunset will be spectacular.

I hope to see something this beautiful again someday.

Hopefully, next time, it won't be the Four Horsemen.

I finally have dial tone, but every call gets a "trunk busy" signal. At any store in the neighborhood, it's a 50/50 shot whether their credit card machine is working. Some people are evidently able to make cell phone calls, but I have yet to have any success. E-mail remains my communication mode of choice. Full props go to my ISP, who've not only kept the network running but sent out e-mail explaining how they were coping and what to do if you couldn't get through on customer service.

I've just come back from a couple hours writing in "Cinema Classics" - the small art-house theater two doors down from my apartment building. Rather than their usual music, they had a TV on. I got to see all the morbid footage they've been airing, like the second plane flying into the WTC, somebody plummeting to their death from the WTC, and the collapse of the towers. This was not cheery. Rudy Guiliani, New York's own enfant terrible mayor, has closed the city south of 14th street for tomorrow, which means no subways, no mail, and no traffic on the streets.

I was supposed to show up for jury duty.

Manhattan is oddly quiet. No traffic. The occasional siren. Few pedestrians. I imagine tomorrow should be strangely restful.

The night sky is clear and sharp. You can make out the roiling grey of the smoke which is still covering southern Manhattan. It's just a little bit lighter than the deep blue of the sky. There's a lone star or planet visible twinkling above the smoke - I would guess it is Mars, because it appears slightly pink, it is quite bright, and it is in the southern sky (not the western sky, which is where I'd expect to see Venus after sunset). But the street lights make it impossible to see any other stars that might correlate that guess.

Only later do I realize the pointed relevance of Mars hovering over this sign of war.

The smoke at night looked like a slow-motion film of waves on a beach at night. If you've seen the film "Koyaanisqatsi" then you know what it looks like.

Most people in Cinema Classics seemed to advocate immediate lethal retaliation, preferably directed at Bin-Ladin and anyone else of comparable ilk. At the time, this troubled me for its racist assumptions that it must be a Muslim attack, with a complete lack of evidence to support any conclusion. Tuesday evening, all I had seen on the news was so sketchy it could just about as easily been four skilled Americans upset with "The New World Order" who didn't quite realize films like "Fight Club" were satire. Beltway think-tank analysts made noise about "obviously a well-funded, very large organization."

Everyone seemed to be ignoring the fact that Oklahoma City was two goofballs with too much fertilizer who never the less managed to kill hundreds. The conclusion was foregone — Arab terrorists.

George "My Daddy's Coat-tails" Dubya Shrub's first speech didn't do much to allay any of my worries. The common sentiment now seems to be that he's handling this crisis well, but I can't help thinking that his handlers are handling this crisis well, not him. Like Dan Quayle before him, the Shrub is a veritable fount of malapropisms, spoonerisms, and just plain mistakes. Everyone is in awe of his supposed reaction to the crisis, but condemning terrorism is like choosing Microsoft software for your office — no one gets fired for that.

As near as I could tell, the speech's content was essentially nothing, the equivalent of shouting "We're mad and we're not gonna take it!", and its value was solely in providing the appearance that he is in control. And he finished it with a biblical quotation.

Is his quote of Psalms any different from the Taliban quoting the Quran?

The Shrub makes a big deal about his administration (and by extension, America) being "faith-based" — a fairly obvious euphemism for "Christian" or perhaps "Judeo-Christian." The majority of its citizens may be Judeo-Christian, but that doesn't make America Judeo-Christian any more than the majority of its citizens being female makes America female.

Why does this get me so worked up? Okay, the man is religious and draws on that in a time of crisis. That's fine for a person but for a nation it leads towards a place we don't want to go.

Jihad. Holy war. Crusade. The worst of all possible wars, as if any war could be "good."

Manhattan south of 14th Street is closed. No vehicles except emergency vehicles, and the occasional person on a scooter or a bicycle or roller blades. Pedestrians are everywhere, of course. Some drag suitcases north, towards 14th Street, apparently desiring to travel, though exactly where they're going and how they're getting there, I'm not sure.

Sirens are less frequent. Now, more unusual "emergency" vehicles are showing up, such as several empty busses heading south with a police escort. There is still the occasional ambulance, but not many. Rudy Guiliani has apparently asked for 6000 (that's six thousand) body bags. The radio claims they are filling refrigerated tractor-trailers with bodies, but as yet the list of confirmed dead is only eighty two.

Tractor-trailers filled with corpses. Six thousand body bags. Mountains of rubble that are taller than the building I live in. Yet the streets are quiet.

Brunch today was pleasant, though the restaurant was busy. Most restaurants here are busier than usual for a week-day. I suppose it isn't really a week-day. Most stores (aside from grocers and drug stores), however, are closed. I had lunch at my daughter's favorite restaurant in the city, Veselka, a Ukranian diner on Second Avenue and East Ninth Street. It was packed, which isn't unusual for Veselka on a weekend, when the wait for a table can be a half an hour. Afternoon on a week-day it's usually quiet enough you can seat yourself. Not today.

The staff was harried, but no one seemed to complain or grouse about lines or waits. Some of the staff that know me came up and asked if everyone was okay in my family. One even gave me a hug. Even the cashier was nice — I didn't have enough cash for the check, as most ATMs are down, and of course phones are still bad so Veselka wasn't able to take credit cards. He accepted what I had in cash — less than half the check.

Outside again, I can see the smoke. It has turned north, now, and is going over NoLiTa and Greenwich Village towards Midtown. It comes about as far east as 2nd avenue. Lighter today, you could mistake it for a large, low cloud. Except occasionally you can smell it. And feel it in your lungs. Some people are wearing dust masks. I have a sty in my eye that swelled up yesterday afternoon — I presume it is caused by the smoke.

All around are signs of people doing their bit. These are the bits that are too small to rate a human-interest story during this catastrophe. But they're everywhere, these little bits. Laser-printed paper taped to light posts asking people to give blood. Flowers in front of the fire station (with some very exhausted looking firemen inside the fire station). I took a walk up to Fourteenth Street, just to stretch my legs, and was suprised by the crowd in front of the United Artists movie theater on Broadway at Thirteenth Street. It seems management has declared today "A Day at the Movies." No admission, and a free small popcorn and small soda.

The theater was crowded, but not too much so, and everyone was well behaved and civil. You paid if you wanted something to eat besides a little popcorn and a soda, but as everything else was free, what lines there were moved fast. A dozen people can only scoop out so much popcorn and fill so many cups at once, it seems, though they managed to remain pleasant.

It was utopian.

Everyone was polite and sympathetic and sharing news or else deciding what to see. People saw friends across the crowded concession area. Hugs were everywhere. I saw "American Pie 2", which, being a teen sex comedy, was a pleasant diversion for a couple of hours. It had nothing to do with terrorists or death. And it was packed with friendly people.

Afterwards, people walking from the theater told passers-by about the "Day at the Movies." They spoke glowingly of United Artists for doing it. In a city of $10 movie tickets, you never hear someone talk even pleasantly about a multiplex, much less glowingly.

I wish New York was like this all the time. Heck, I wish America was like this all the time.

It took a catastrophe to get people to simply be nice to each other. That gets me really depressed about the human condition.

And it was with this feeling in me that I walked the rest of the way up to Fourteenth Street. Not surprisingly, retail stores were all closed. A huge crowd of people was in Union Square. The street itself was bumper-to-bumper squad cars and fire trucks. At Fourth Avenue I decided to turn south and walk home. I had to cross a police checkpoint to do it. They were checking ID, to make sure you lived in the closed part of the city. Otherwise, you couldn't get through. About a dozen officers at each intersection.

This was definitely not the utopian part.

This was the police state part.

Back south of 14th, though, things were better again. Random people would tell you news — at least one of the hijackers has Arab citizenship. NYU students talk on cell-phones, apparently to parents: "Because I'd rather stay here where my friends are! They're important to me!" And the restaurants are still busy busy busy. And the liquor stores are all open.

Back at home, I did something I almost never do — I paid attention to broadcast media. I turned on the radio, having actually gone to the trouble to hook up the antenna. Bush is using the phrase "an act of war." Rudy is confirming his six thousand.

I'm expecting to hear of some country somewhere with a cultural history ten times longer than America's.

I'm expecting to hear rhetoric about "standing tall" and "being strong" and "fighting for this Great Democracy."

I'm expecting to hear soon about how that far-off country has been turned into a sheet of glass by the invisible black zig-zags of B-2 bombers.

I don't want to hear about any of that, but I expect the B-2's will be flying soon.

At least I hope it will be B-2's, because the alternative is worse. The alternative is a missile or ten from the Midwest carrying plutonium in hundred-pound job-lots.

Outside, you can't see the smoke as this gorgeous roiling entity anymore.

Now it is just a pale cloud, hanging over the head of the strange quiet utopia that is the East Village.

I can almost hear the hoofbeats....

[On Thursday afternoon, I received an e-mail response from my uncle, C. C. Conner. He presently resides in Houston, TX, where he runs the Houston Ballet, but before that he lived in New York City since law school. This is my reply. He gave me permission to use his words in this essay, and his original text is indented. ]

As I write this, it is the evening of September 14th. A Friday. Normally, I'd be on the train with my daughter, most likely watching Pokémon DVDs on my laptop. I'm not.

I'm back in Cinema Classics. They're showing Scorsese's "Raging Bull" but didn't get the delivery of the film (unsurprisingly) and so they are showing it on video.

Someone just walked in carrying a lighted candle.

I find myself in an uncomfortable position. My uncle's response frankly threw me for a loop. I deeply respect his opinion, and the undercurrent of "Aren't you willing to give your life for your country?" strikes close to home.

When I was in high school, I considered applying to the U. S. Naval Academy for college. In the end, I didn't. I went to Brown University, about as educationally far from Annapolis as you can get. I don't regret it in the least — I wouldn't have Zooey if I hadn't gone to Brown because that's where I met her mother.

But with two aircraft carriers off the cost of Manhattan, and the smell of war in the air, I have to stop and think. Had I gone to Annapolis, I might now be on one of those carriers, ready to blow another hijacked plane out of the sky.

Ready to kill a hundred innocents to save thousands more.

As sick as it seems, someone here observed that, had the planes missed the WTC, they might have had a much higher cost in life. Consider thousands of gallons of flaming jet fuel blasting up Fifth Avenue at the peak of rush hour.

Gouts of flame blasting through subway turnstiles.

Gas mains exploding and spreading the conflagration farther.

Dozens of buildings collapsing. Residential buildings with children in them.

Tens of thousands with burns roaming the street.

Images of Manhattan that could be photographs from Hiroshima.

I don't mean to minimize the tremendous loss of life at the WTC or at the Pentagon. It's a horror, a nightmare, but what scares me the most is how little it took. Right now, the news is citing nineteen people working over the course of perhaps five years.

A hundred person-years to immediately kill thousands, shut down international finance for days, shut down air travel in the U. S. for days, cause untold billions in damage (much less lost revenue from evacuations), and instill fear in a nation.

A hundred person-years of work isn't even a major Hollywood movie.

How little additional effort would it have taken for one of those planes to have a small nuclear device aboard?

What if one of the terrorists had flown a Piper Cub into Manhattan at the same time and dropped a carboy of anthrax onto the rescuers?

What if there are still deep-cover terrorists waiting to do exactly that?

How will the government respond? Regular police checkpoints like the ones on Fourteenth Street. Strictly limited tourist visas. Expulsion of non-citizens. Waiver of warrants for suspected terrorists, just like for suspected drug dealers.

I'm not suggesting that America shouldn't retaliate. I certainly wouldn't call myself a pacifist. I spent several years studying martial arts. I used to go skeet and trap shooting.

No, what scares me is the possibility of prevention. Most will think that the easiest way to prevent something like the WTC from happening again is to tighten security. At immigration checkpoints. At airports. At flight schools. At train stations. At stadiums. At major office buildings. At major stores.

It might make Americans feel better, feel that their Shrub is doing something.

But it won't work.

It will seriously hamper the freedom of Americans. And don't give me the old chestnut about those with nothing to hide being willing to be searched. That is, to be blunt, cow chips. Who decides what the watchmen search for? It's bad enough that carrying the wrong kind of plant can get you thrown in jail for decades.

It's times like this that I like to remind myself of how this country started. It was a group of iconoclasts that didn't want someone else telling them what to do, whether it was Ben Franklin refusing to wear a wig or Bostonians refusing to pay extortion on their favorite beverage.

The Constitution is a very short list of things the government is supposed to be able to do. The Bill of Rights is a longer list of things the government is most definitely not able to do. That is the core of American government. That is the bedrock of the freedom we are so proud of.

Please, please, let's stay Americans.

Let's remember what it is all for.

I posted this on slashdot.org in response to another comment which was calling for geeks to get behind the government and start doing their part. Generally, slashdot readers (or /.ers, as we often refer to ourselves) are rather libertarian and anti-government, so this comment, while perhaps normal in "mainstream" media, was unusual for slashdot. The comment I'm replying to is in italics and is indented.

Let me just start by letting everyone know I live (and am currently typing this) from Manhattan.

Me too. East 11th Street between First and Second Avenues. For those readers not so intimately familiar with Manhattan geography, that puts me a couple miles, perhaps, from the WTC (takes about 30 minutes to walk there). It also put my apartment inside the neighborhood Rudy Giuliani closed in the wake of the WTC attack.

I used to dislike cops. THey harassed me, the were disrespectful to me, and messed with my friends.

I had no such direct personal beef with cops. I'm white. Aside from tattoos (pretty common in my neighborhood), I don't especially stand out as a trouble-maker. I had severe reservations on police behavior, based on ethical profiling, the spurious War on Drugs, and other abuses, but this wasn't based on anything police did to me personally.

I take it all back. All of it.

I don't. I'm more scared of cops than ever before. Perhaps you live in a part of Manhattan where didn't have to show a police officer your ID simply to take a right turn on 14th street to walk home. The prospect of police being given that kind of power at all is terrifying.

I have a new respect for all police in New York City since the attacks on the world trade center. They, along with the firemen all risked thier lives to help get people out of the buildings as quickly as they could. But, as you know, the building collapsed, trapping thousands (literally) of New York's finest men and women, who selflessly gave thier lives to help the rest of us.

I'm reminded instead of a scene in Ashes of Victory by David Weber. This is the latest in the Honor Harrington series of sci-fi novels. Honor has recently broken out of the worst prison planet known, taking more than 400,000 prisoners with her. Starting out imprisoned herself, with no access to equipment other than two shuttlecraft and short her own left arm and left eye. The Queen of Manticore (Honor's boss) and her Prime Minister want to give Honor the highest award for valor that she can.

Honor declines. Because everything she did was her duty. It was her job. It was amazing and heroic and spectacular, but it was nothing more and nothing less than her duty required of her. It was her duty to escape if she could. It was her duty to help subordinates if she could. So she did.

I don't mean to denigrate or reduce in any way, shape, or form, the efforts rescuers have put into the WTC situation. But bluntly, the police and fireworkers did exactly what they were supposed to. They risked their lives, but that's what they signed up for. For a while, police recruiting posters in New York had a line to the effect of "Most people wouldn't take this job for a million dollars. Some do it for a lot less."

Their heroic actions in rescue efforts doesn't mitigate or excuse abuses or crimes of the past. Does pulling a corpse out of the rubble make it okay for a cop to shoot a black man whose "gun" was his wallet?

Now, when I see a police man on the street, I smile at him. He is ensuring my safety, and the safety of others.

I smile too, but only out of self-defense. No reason to give them a reason to harass me.

Now, its our turn. Sure, the government may have "demonized" us before. But times are fundamentally different now.

Not in the way you mean, they aren't. Terrorists have been around for a long time. Robin Hood was a terrorist. The fact that "weapons" of mass destruction are a heck of a lot nastier now doesn't change the ethical basis of terrorism and how to deal with it.

No, the way times might be different now is that Bush has what many people consider legitimate cause to impose the equivalent of martial law, all with Senate and Congressional approval and encouragement. The Office of Homeland Security is a name worthy of George Orwell and Stalin. When I was young, I read 1984. Then I lived through the year and chuckled at the Apple ads spoofing IBM as Big Brother. Remember those t-shirts about "Win95=Mac84"? George Bush 2001 = Big Brother 1984 is too scary to let me sleep comfortably. And the ATA and the Office of Homeland Security help make it possible.

Don't think the death of bin Laden will be anything more than proof that Big Brother Loves You. There will always be terrorists and if terrorists justify totalitarianism in the Land of the Free, that totalitarianism will only go away with revolution. No Senator ever got re-elected for repealing anything except Prohibition. Today's politicians (or their handlers) understand bread and circuses too well for that. Just a couple of months ago, Bush was bribing most citizens with $300 checks.

I'm getting a little heated now, so I'm gonna shut up. But the logic is there. Look at the history and expansion of the War on Drugs and the potential for the War on Terrorism is, well, terrifying.

Tonight, six months after Nine Eleven, an art installation was turned on at Ground Zero. Twin beams of light going straight up, ten thousand feet into the sky.

Like the cloud of six months previous, I have a spectacular view from my roof-top. I can't see it from the windows of my apartment, which faces north, but standing on my roof, it towers so high that you have to bend your head back as far as possible in order to see the top. It is so bright it makes the stars even more difficult to see than they usually are in Manhattan.

As an artist myself, when Nine Eleven happened, I did my best to capture the essence of the cloud on paper. Alas, I don't think I succeeded\'d1the cloud was too staggering, a beautiful, colossus in the sky, and a tangible harbinger of war looming over Manhattan. It should be spelled with capital letters, as The Cloud. I expected to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping through it.

Video and photographs didn't capture this awesome majesty, this commingling of gorgeousness and massacre, that was The Cloud. And video and photographs don't capture the essence of the present memorial installation. It's too big. You can't see all of it at once, and the buildings of Wall Street give you a literally concrete comparison to make to apprehend its size.

In part, I think this size is part of what makes the piece successful. It is ten times bigger than the World Trade Center towers were, a visual representation of the icon that the WTC had been and has become\'d1the icon was bigger in the mind of Americans than the reality ever could be, no matter how staggering the view from the top. While the WTC was the tallest building, it was an icon to the American Way of Life as telling as the Statue of Liberty. The towers of Kuala Lampur tarnished that icon through simple phallic size. But like the executioner of a martyr, Osama bin Laden has, perhaps unintentionally, buffed that icon to a mirror sheen that will never be tarnished again. Ironic, that so many analysts fear that bin Laden himself will become a martyr figure.

Another aspect of the installation's success as an art piece is its pure, elegiac simplicity. Two beams of light, mimicking the towers themselves, a perpetual flame akin to Kennedy's in Arlington Cemetery, only thousands of times larger. Like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, this simplicity enhances the emotional impact. It strips away any emotional manipulation a memorial might try to make, letting the viewer experience their own personal grief at the tragedy. The stark simplicity is easily described, easily communicated to another person. I think this aspect lets the viewer at least begin to understand the grief of other viewers, even of the families of victims, in ways that no amount of prime-time news documentaries ever could. It is the simplicity of the void, of the hole where nearly three thousand lives used to be.

The size and the simplicity are both eloquent and audacious, but an art teacher of mine once joked "If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it shiny." Later, he was making an installation that consisted of a thirty-foot polished brass ring, twenty feet in the air. I jokingly suggested he was trying to cover his bases by making it both big and shiny. He replied, "I want it to be big and shiny and good." Clearly, the piece at Ground Zero is big and shiny. Is it good?

For the most part, I must say yes. It is too replete with symbolism and too stripped of commercialism. The light is a clear metaphor for the flames that burned for a month afterwards\'d1flames whose smoke you could smell in the air. It is there, dominating the landscape, and yet not there, something that an airplane could fly through with no harm to anyone.

And it doesn't state the obvious. We don't need to know that it was an attack on America. We don't need the bathos of the posters everywhere in Manhattan showing a big American flag behind the WTC. We don't need the patriotic jingoism of an "Axis of Evil," a phrase as pure propaganda as anything from World War II or the McCarthy era. We don't need t-shirts of bin Laden being sodomized by an American missile, much less by George Bush. Those are all attempts to deal with the anger, but that anger is driven by fear, fear that what happened to the individuals in the WTC on September 11th could happen to us.

That fear is quite genuine. I know it, because I smelled the smoke. I felt the ash in my eyes. If even a small nuclear device was smuggled into Manhattan and detonated, I'd most likely be dead. Had the planes missed the WTC, they might well have exploded up Fifth Avenue at rush hour, spewing thousands of gallons of flaming jet fuel across a hundred blocks of commuters and families at two hundred miles per hour. The death toll and chaos would have been worse.

But hitting back won't make the fear go away. It's simply a band-aid for the anger, anger which itself comes from the fear. And if the band-aid doesn't fix the fear, the anger will still be there. The fear will still drive the desire to strike back, even blindly, at anything that might remotely be a threat. Hitting back blindly will only increase the fear other countries already have of the U.S., which will drive more anger like the anger that drove bin Laden to orchestrate something as staggering as Nine Eleven in the first place.

I think the installation at Ground Zero is almost completely a sincere effort to work through the grief of the tragedy, and by addressing the grief, soothe the fear it created in many Americans. But only almost. You see, a friend came to visit me tonight, late, nearly midnight. I asked if he wanted to go up to the roof to see the memorial on its opening night, while recognizing that he probably got a pretty good view from the George Washington Bridge. He noted that he would have gotten a good view, except that it was turned off at eleven.

In an upper-level art class, you generally assume that something a fellow student put in a piece was put in intentionally, not through lack of skill or lack of thought or lack of resources. You are expected to make the piece work within the constraints you have, no matter how those constraints got to be there.

I have to assume that the artists' intent was that the memorial turn off every night at eleven. One might argue that this is intentional symbolism by using the date as the time, but the symbolism would have been more powerful had the time chosen been eleven minutes after nine. No, eleven at night appears to have a much more pointed symbolism: the end of Prime Time.

Extinguishing the lights at the end of Prime Time every night might be taken as a metaphor for the end of the old America, the America before Nine Eleven. But that metaphor is too cute, too much of a pun, to fit with the elegiac simplicity of the rest of the piece and be the sole reason for turning off the lights at that time. No, I think it is more literal than that. It turns off at Prime Time because the Media and the Public turn off the tragedy at the end of Prime Time. If it isn't on TV, we don't pay attention to it.

It saddens me that such a commentary on the American Public is so apt. I wish it were not true, but most people are apathetic, despite the raging anger at Osama, the Taliban, and Afghanistan. That anger is fear disguised, a fear we would hide under this week's episode of whatever is the season's Must-See "Survivor" or "Ally McBeal" or "Friends."

With the continuing growth of the Internet, and its growth as a news medium in and of itself, the notion of Prime Time is somewhat hackneyed. It still drives major segments of the media industry, but Prime Time should not be the governing factor in when and how we deal with the Four Horsemen galloping down our streets amidst napalm, cluster bombs, and bunker-busting pocket nukes. Unfortunately, it appears that it is.

When The Cloud was in the air, I had hoped that my vision of the Four Horsemen riding through it would not turn to a literal truth of war. Sadly it has, with little indication that it will stop any time soon, even with the apparent defeat of Afghanistan. Countries that are part of the "Axis of Evil" are being lined up on the chopping block. Pakistan and India are rattling the saber even louder than when they were testing nukes and medium-range missiles. Israel and Palestine are once again at each other's throats, any hopes of peace strewn in the ashes of a car bomb and a death squad.

I fear that America is losing sight of how this country came to be. It arose from terrorist actions like the Boston Tea Party. It arose from a desire for self-rule. It arose from a conviction that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." If America is to live up to these ideals, America cannot use force to assert its will on the unconsenting. America must show the world that the American Way is the best way for all people that follow that path, whatever their geopolitical nationality. Punishing those that choose not to follow that path denies the right of self-rule that is part of the foundation of the American Way.

This is a distinctly different point from punishing those that cause direct harm—i.e., self-defense. Most animal trainers will tell you that negative reinforcement, i.e., punishment, is rarely necessary. If it is ever used, it should be immediate and brief, and directly linked to the harmful action—i.e., self-defense. It's easier and more productive to show the dog how to behave rather than whacking it for misbehavior. Whacking the dog for any infraction just makes the dog angry and neurotic. Whacking the dog for an unprovoked, violent bite is self-defense. The dog learns that biting causes pain to itself, not that pain is liable to arrive no matter what it does.

I'm not trying to claim that international relations is equivalent to animal training, though my cynical side enjoys comparing the collective intelligence of some bureaucracies to that of a small trained animal. No, I'm making an analogy, that the U.S. of A. is better served by showing other countries the benefits of the American Way, not by forcing them into it.

How might we do this? The potential for symbolism around Nine Eleven is great, as demonstrated by the twin towers of light. Having recognized the grief inherent in the site, we should turn that grief, that tragedy, that death, into something new and vital and very much alive. The site of the WTC should become a city in itself, a jewel of prosperity and beauty within one of the biggest cities in the world. An arcology, a city in a building, rising from the rubble as high as the present beams of light. A monument, not to death, but to new life, with families, schools, museums, shops, offices, art, gardens, babies, everything, in one concentrated tower of grace. A very concrete and very real demonstration to the world that the American Way is the way of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Not with flags and fireworks and pop stars singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" during an over-produced Super Bowl half-time show filled with the most expensive commercials on the planet, but with actual Life, actual Liberty, and actual Pursuit of Happiness.

Some would say such a building would be a target. But Manhattan as a whole is already a target. Washington, D.C. is a target. The Pentagon allegedly has a plaque in the middle of its courtyard labeled "Ground Zero"—I've never seen it, but it was the talk of the playground when I was growing up in DC during the Cold War. Los Angeles is called the Babylon of the West, a target for puritan fanatics of any stripe. Oklahoma City was and is a target.

Any American city is a target, but this should not deter Americans from standing up and build something even more audaciously American than the World Trade Center. The American Way is not the way of ducking your head. It is the way of signing your name on the Declaration of Independence so large and so bold that King George will never need his spectacles to read it. If America is to lead the World to Democracy, to just government by the consent of the governed, it must be the impossibly bright beacon ahead, not the black leather whip from behind. Coercion is not consent.

These days, I hope that the grief, anger, and fear arising from Nine Eleven can be transformed, Phoenix-like, into a new icon for New York City, for America, and for the world. An icon of life and beauty. Unfortunately, I fear that this hope will meet with the same fate as my hope that The Cloud was not a sign of war to come. I fear that eleven o'clock approaches, and that all the lights will be turned off.