Out of the ashes
By Karen Houppert

A few blocks from the World Trade Center, two elderly couples sit in the deserted courtyard of their senior housing project. No one is being allowed into this southern tip of Manhattan, but these older New Yorkers didn’t have to get past the multiple barricades staffed by cops and National Guard: they never left. In the eerie silence, the two men and the two women have casually parked themselves around a card table. They play gin rummy, blue dust masks on each of their faces.

Five blocks from Ground Zero sits the smashed and burned hulk of a car. Its color and make are no longer distinguishable but oddly, its front windshield is still intact. A half-inch layer of the chalky white ash that is everywhere here, on the streets, on the window ledges, on the rescue workers clothes, in our lungs, coats the car. Someone has scrawled on the windshield, finger in ash, "FUCK THE ARABS."

Only three blocks from the barricades that surround the World Trade Center disaster site, financial documents blow lazily down the ash- and rubble-strewn streets like tumbleweed in a bad western. In the midst of this, two sanitation workers methodically, ironically, make their rounds, emptying the mostly empty wire trashcans that sit on each street corner.

A surface peace. An undercurrent of violence. A reflexive desire for normalcy. The images butt up against each other as New Yorkers move from shock to...what? No one seems quite sure how to proceed. At first we wanted to do something hands-on. Hundreds of volunteers were turned away from the World Trade Center site, the blood banks, the hospitals, due to an abundance of help. Now, it seems that New Yorkers are following the rest of the nation, those who were quicker to move toward vengeance.

It’s an interesting place for us New Yorkers to be.

And there is a kind of wisdom in the warped reasoning of these terrorists. After all, they didn’t go after the Heartland, but attacked New York City. Yes, it was an attack on the pinnacle of capitalism, but the city is also the bastion of liberalism, capital of the "cultural elite" and home-base for much of the nation’s liberal press corps, purveyors and makers of public opinion.

This is a city where yeah, we’ve got our gung-ho patriotic elements, but it is a place where you’re more likely to run into a star-spangled gown on a Wig Stock contestant than a flag-emblem on a veteran. In my Park Slope neighborhood, people have had to dig deep for their symbols. Not a lot of flags tucked away in attics here. One hard-pressed household has taped a fourth-of-July placemat to its wrought iron fence. Another has cut out a Ralph Lauren ad. And everyone is walking around in the same Old Navy-Old Glory shirt they dropped five bucks for last Fourth.

And in the midst of such flag-waving, criticism seems at best petty, at worst, unpatriotic. Consider the way we’ve lauded Congress for suddenly dropping all partisanship as if agreement, not healthy debate, were the hallmark of democracy. Or the way we’ve sat by in silence while talking heads refer to the "inevitable" sacrifice of civil rights for safety. Or the way we lapsed into polite silence after Bush’s Oval Office speech directly after the attack instead of stating the obvious: It was devoid of passion, conviction, and empathy. It’s not like we expected the likes of Lincoln. ("That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.") Or even the likes of Bill Clinton who would have at least cried. In the aftermath of the USS Cole attack, Clinton spoke of dead "people," not demolished "structures" and told victims families, "We are all mindful of the limits of our poor words to lift your spirits or warm your hearts." And Clinton paid tribute to the diversity of the victims—the way Bush might have acknowledged the diversity of both the victims and the tireless rescue workers—by rallying us. "It must surely confound the minds of the hate-filled terrorists who killed them," Clinton said in October last year.

But Bush never named the World Trade Center in his first speech. He referred to the thousands of individuals who died as a tidy entity, simply the byproducts of "acts of mass murder." By way of comfort he gave us clunky rhetoric/propaganda: "Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America." And instead of solace, he offered only revenge: "[We’ll] find those responsible and bring them to justice."

Question is, will he be able to withstand the frenzy for revenge that he has helped fuel? How will he respond to a plummet in public opinion polls during any prolonged, top-secret campaign to capture bin Laden et al? Will a formal international tribunal satisfy the appetite of those fervent patriots, like the old man standing in front of the foreign legion club at the end of my street shouting to his friends: "Give me a fuckin’ F-16, I’ll go after those Arab motherfuckers." Will that constitute a flashy "war against terrorism?"

How do good governments work? You either have a wise and inspirational leader you trust or you have a well-oiled system that functions to check the marginally-competent leaders that sometimes slip by the populace. (Or at least the Supreme Court.) Sadly, we’re lacking the former and in danger of losing the latter. Even here in New York, bastion of liberalism, a critical skepticism seems subsumed beneath a shrill patriotism. A kind of guilt—survivor’s syndrome?—renders us incapable of resisting the lure of nationalism. Not so much because the rhetoric is compelling but because it seems, well, rude to point out it’s not.

In the absence of an alternate narrative, we join the indignant patriots. Our buildings have been leveled. Out of the ashes, a message: "Fuck the Arabs."

Karen Houppert, an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU, is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Nation, Salon, and Ms. She is also the author of "The Curse," a cultural history of menstruation, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1999.