For a previous generation, the question, “Where were you standing?”, meant not just an instant temporal association — the JFK assassination — but also the evocation of a zeitgeist. Whether one subscribed to the Oliver Stone school of the paranoid Leftist fantasy or preferred Don DeLillo’s postmodern treatment of this curtain-raiser on the age of conspiracy, one knew that few moments in history can go a long way toward embodying History. This is what Auden meant when he spoke of the “menacing shapes of our fevers” being “precise and alive.”
At 31, I hope that I won’t live see another “Where were you standing?” moment to overwhelm the sight of two planes screaming into two skyscrapers, which then collapsed in on themselves, and on many people, producing a yawning cloud of pulverized metal, concrete, and flesh. For my part, I had finished a few days earlier an internship at a hedge fund (remember those?) at 100 Broadway, which is catty-cornered from what we now call Ground Zero. The E train I took every morning pulled right into the World Trade Centre subway stop, and so the fact that I wasn’t “standing” at all at 8.15 in the morning on September 11, but rather sleeping, was a matter of chance.
The market was already in decline that summer and my friends’ job offers on Wall Street were being rescinded with severance packages. The starkest memory I have is of a South African arbitrageur straight out of Tom Wolfe pointing to the painting on his office wall showing a bull and a bear dancing around a forest bonfire. “See thit, Mike? Thit explains iverything.”
It’s only now, ten years on, that I realize that I never once bothered to look up upon emerging from underground into the shadow of two giant beams of glass and steel. The Chrysler Building in midtown was designed in the 20s to resemble an automobile of the future. The Twin Towers always struck me as sleek bullet trains hurtling into the sky rather than “scraping” it. You were meant to feel small and provincial and left-behind in the presence of those buildings.
The surreality of New York City the week following 9/11 hasn’t been adequately captured by cinema or literature, although the Stones and DeLillos have had their ways with this hyper-mediated event, too. Maybe life was too three-dimensional to be dramatized. A film covered everything: a grey dust which lingered on shop awnings for a twenty block radius, but also an emotional film of fleeting universal empathy. Generation X types greatly exaggerated the death of irony, but it was the satirical weekly, The Onion, then newly transplanted from Wisconsin to Manhattan, that managed to hit every register without seeming crude or tasteless. Point: “We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage.” Counterpoint: “We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage.”
I walked around the Financial District about a fortnight after the attacks. Old Glory now draped the facade of the New York Stock Exchange (so much for dancing bulls and bears). Marines with machine guns patrolled the streets on foot and in jeeps, although the mood was less one of martial law than of post-apocalyptic gloom. “Are you okay?” was the question traded between perfect strangers who may have noticed a traumatized expression on the other. Some decidedly weren’t okay (how quickly the shrinks started in with their adverts about “9/11 syndrome”) whether because they narrowly survived or knew people who didn’t. Others were keenly aware, whatever their knowledge of international politics or Islamic fundamentalism, that the 21st-century would be vying for the 20th’s record for bloodshed and enormity.
Pessimism and bathos seem to be the chief characteristics of this past decade. The color revolutions that swept the Caucuses have almost all been reversed, as has Lebanon’s cedar variation. Marx is back as a prophet and sage, except to the Communists of Cuba, where private property has been introduced, and China, where the fascism of the boardroom prevails. The Kremlin once again hosts an inscrutable autocrat who believes that the fastest way to get rid of a problem is to get rid of the person causing it.
The United States has waged another cold war, with frequent flashes of heat, against a stateless syndicate that wants to make a medieval desert and call it utopia. Al Qaeda is, thankfully, minus its popular chieftain but not its enduring ideology or its capacity to inflict harm and misery on a large scale.
Washington has also fought three conventional wars in the Middle East which have toppled three tyrannies. The Taliban have been driven from the Afghan capital only to be fought again, then approached for “reconciliation” by the superpower that drove them away. Saddam Hussein has been hanged and replaced by a parlous sectarian democracy in Iraq held together by an evaporating foreign military presence. Muammar Gaddafi is now in hiding somewhere while his kitsch pleasure-dome luxuries have become trophies for hardscrabble Libyan rebels whom everybody hopes will turn out all alright.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has got a nuclear bomb and an intelligence agency more loyal to the enemies of the West than to the agency’s Western financiers. Iran wants a nuclear bomb and has got a president that dresses like a hardware store clerk but thinks like a demigod. Bashar al-Assad will leave Syria in haste or in a box, but not before plunging his already broken country into a state of civil war. The one MENA country that looks to be interesting in the long-term is Egypt but only because it’s set to become the failed experiment of a Islamist movement that’s been waiting 80 years for a turn at the laboratory.
And the century is just entering its adolescence; the hormonal age. On second thought, the likelihood is high that we’ll have another “Where were you standing?” moment yet.