This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center that set off the 20-year war in Afghanistan (with a side trip to Iraq) from which the United States has theoretically been extricating itself. (Whether we will ever be totally out remains to be seen.) I was living in New York City on September 11 (Brooklyn actually, Carroll Gardens to be exact) while getting my MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. I wrote a first draft of this piece as part of a class I was taking with Christopher Hitchens, who soon after began using the term "Islamofascism" to stake out his position as a "left hawk," ultimately to advocate for regime change with the invasion of Iraq. (For my take on Hitchens, see my PopMatters review of his memoir, Hitch-22.) I updated the essay a couple of years later when Sherry Hendrick asked me for a contribution to Alley Culture AC News. It appeared in volume 6, number 2 in spring 2005 under the title "Fear Factor" and is reprinted below.
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Before dinner on September 11, 2001, I walked from my apartment in Carroll Gardens to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. Still dazed from that morning, I stood at the railing that overlooks the East River with hundreds of men, women, and children, watching the sunset over Manhattan.
It was nearing the end of a picture-perfect autumn day. The air was crisp, the sky a brilliant blue and nearly cloudless. There was nothing to suggest anything amiss but the hole in the New York City skyline where the Twin Towers once stood and from which an enormous stream of dark smoke now issued, billowing over the Brooklyn Bridge seemingly into infinity.
It was almost eight hours since the first tower collapsed; yet papers and other debris still fluttered down from above. A charred document settled beside me; I caught another in my hand moments later. Another came down behind me, and I turned to pick it up.
The first document was a foreign exchange letter between Citibank in New York and Bank of America in San Francisco, setting the currency rate in US dollars for a business deal going down in Australia. The second was a page from the balance sheet of an English automotive supplier, presented in pounds sterling as part of its Lloyd's of London proof of insurance certificate. I recognized these things as the mundane yet essential tools of empire, evidence of the global capitalist network within which New York City is a command center.
The third sheet gave me a chill. Through the scorched-brown tinge, I made out a webpage with information about an orthodontist practicing in New Jersey. Next to the doctor's name was jotted a note to look into whether it was the same person the note's author knew in high school.
Did whoever had written that note get out? I wondered. Did he or she have any idea what was happening at the time of the attack and in its immediate aftermath? What of the family and friends? What were they doing right now? Did they know anything more about the fate of this person whose perhaps last thoughts I held in my hand? In the flash of an instant, the day's global and personal implications crystallized.
Unease turned into dread over the next few days, not because I feared for my life; although, I did change subway cars one time when I noticed a gaunt olive-skinned man with a beard sitting across from me holding a backpack I could swear was ticking.
Rather, it was because the first order of business I heard Congress pick up when it reconvened wasn't to ask what the hell went wrong but to pass legislation protecting the airlines from lawsuits surely to result from lax security that let suicide pilots with box cutters get through undetected.
Even more unnerving was the President, who on TV vowed vengeance on our behalf while exhorting us to max out our credit cards as part of the newly declared War on Terror. But the War on Terror quickly turned into the Reign of Terror as compulsory nationalism replaced independent thought and the USA PATRIOT Act rendered notions like habeas corpus and due process quaint. As the first anniversary of September 11 drew close, Condoleeza Rice, then National Security Advisor, brought tidings of a fearsome new specter – Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud that could do more harm than 19 Jihadists with hijacked planes could ever dream of.
Through it all, the Homeland Security Advisory shifted between Yellow, a significant risk of terrorist attacks, and Orange, a high risk. We were encouraged to be ever vigilant, to take notice of and report any suspicious person, thing, or activity to the authorities.
In 1984, George Orwell writes about a country where perpetual war is used to foster hate and fear, allowing its authoritarian regime to control the domestic population. Is it paranoid to think that a collateral benefit of the Reign of Terror is to keep us in line while providing cover for tax cuts for the rich, giveaways to Big Business, and now perhaps a rollback of the New Deal to the days of the Robber Barons?
On November 3, 2004, I couldn't help noticing the pall that settled over Manhattan as people faced a reality more ominous than the one they awoke to on September 12, 2001 – where, in a strange land called Red State America, they so loved Big Brother they actually re-elected him.
Vince Carducci lives in exile on a small island off the coast of America.
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