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NEW YORK UNEASY
This Unnaturally Warm Fall
New York City, December 1st, 2001.
Greetings, friends! Yesterday, I saw a photo of New York City taken from "Ground Zero" on November 29th; a scene of now familiar devastation, scarcely changed from September 11, 2001. Scarred skeletons of parts of the World Trade Center were standing eerily askew, with the infernal, internal, inextinguishable fires burning on. The Times yesterday noted that the high ritual of a firefighter's funeral was becoming close to banal, with hundreds of repetitions occurring in the last few months. The New York City Police Department, with only 23 dead in comparison to the devastation in the Fire Department, was being required en masse to receive psychological counseling to relieve them from the stress of duties imposed upon them since September 11, 2001.
In Far Rockaway and in Washington Heights, the citizens are busy burying the approximately 260 dead from an air crash of an American Airlines airbus that went down on September 12, 2001, which was the official American commemoration of Veteran's Day. The cause of the crash is unknown, with no cause being, as the authorities say, "ruled out." After initial reports about the tail fin being inexplicably cleanly sheared off, looking in photos broadcast on the Internet as though it has been cut neatly and quickly by giant metal shears, respectable aeronautical engineers called the tail fin detachment "shocking," "stunning" and "weird." Then the aeronautical engineers, all with close ties to the government, have fallen silent and news reports of the investigation into the crash, which would have been deemed a terrible disaster had it not occurred in the shadow of the World Trade Center destruction, are sparse. Today it was reported that NASA had been called into to look into the problem of composition material degeneration. (The American Airplanes airbus was made of "composition materials" (which means layers of embedded plastic materials usually considered stronger and lighter than aluminum.) The public has been reassured that with increasing emphasis on airline safety, each airplane crash is caused by factors of a higher level of complexity,
and is usually unique or the first of its kind, so the fact that the "delamination" of the composition material of the airbus has previously never caused this kind of crash, is not a fact which the public needs
to be unduly concerned.
A woman in her nineties who in recent years never did much than get her hair done once a week in a
beauty parlor, suddenly died of anthrax in New Jersey, after a woman in her sixties in Manhattan, who was unmasked as an avid churchgoer, also succumbed to anthrax.
Four taxicabs inexplicably caught fire in New York City.
Airbus crashes, unexplained anthrax deaths, and a sudden rash of taxi fires may all
be -- and in fact, probably are -- unrelated. But the City remains in such shock from September 11, 2001 that questions aren't asked or answered. It seems to be more
than enough for us that two planes dove straight into our stolid towers on a lovely clear September morning and brought both of them down, bringing death and devastation to
the lower half of New York City. Out at the piers on the Hudson Rivers, which once serviced the surviving members of thousands of bereaved families, those families are
nearly all gone, gone to private grief and private adversity and private suffering. What has taken their place are the displaced workers -- those who lost their jobs when lower
Manhattan became a war zone. The City is struggling to help them, to find them new jobs as the recession takes hold. Coincidentally, the cutoff of welfare as we once knew
it, is occurring, the crime rate is increasing, as is the the number of the homeless.
Michael Bloomberg, a self-made billionaire, won the mayoral contest partly due to
nearly universal dislike of the Democratic candidate Mark Green, a former Ralph Nader associate. Green, an unabashed liberal, was also incurably abrasive and managed to
line up most of the local Democratic establishment behind his Republican opponent. Not that Bloomberg was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican; indeed, until his decision to run
for New York City mayor, he was a registered Democrat. However, the Democratic primaries tend to be sharp-elbowed affairs with borough clubhouse politics playing
major role. Bloomberg, a man who was too busy making lots and lots of money, never had time to master the intricacies of the Brooklyn and Bronx machines, nor the patience
to pacify the Manhattan liberals, and so simply declared himself a Republican and found a pleasantly open field for his mayoral ambitions.
Here reigns insatiable grief, with implacable families demanding returns of bodies that have vanished into thin air by the virtue of the explosions and hea t generated by the tankloads of fuel of two planes crashing into the World Trade Center. In Afghanistan, the fabled
Taliban have been quickly humbled, still retaining strongholds in the southern part of the country and capable of staging surprise uprisings when cornered.
In Afghanistan, American
troops are painted as bloodthirsty infidels who want military tribunals in lieu of supervised international law processes for suspected terrorists. Certainly, here in New York City, we are leery of giving the terrorist
leadership more trials on America soil. One need only to have sat through the trial of El Nosair, the Egyptian Muslim militant charged but not convicted of the assassination of
Meir Kahane, the American born Jewish agitator who was discharged from Israel for calling for the slaughter of Arabs as "animals." Although U.S. intelligence deemed El
Nosair to be the classic American archetype of the "lone gunman," it was later determined El Nosair was a different kind of archetype altogether. In fact, he was part
of the group that botched the blowing up of the World Trade Center in 1993, and members of the Muslim jihad that later botched that attempt sat intently as free men
watching El Nosair's earlier trial. Later, the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik" of the tabloids, was conducted in New York City, attracting only occasional
attention, despite the fact the sheik was was duly convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks. The fact that the sheik had never been successful probably
caused the disinterest and it was noted with satisfaction that Rahman drew a life sentence for his ineffectual conspiracies. Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's two sons have
now been captured in Afghanistan during the current war as members of the Taliban, and the sheik has become more famous in the bloody retrospective.
In the wake of the destruction in New York City, it now seems that each one of these New York terrorist trials seemed to create more notoriety and hatred in the Islamic
world as they proceeded, so one can almost sympathize with the Administration's desire to keep the trials far from American shores. Yet Attorney General Ashcroft, with
his wholesale roundup of Middle-Eastern immigrants and advocacy of rapid military tribunals of war criminals in Afghanistan, somehow fails to convince, and one hopes
that we are deterred from our own American military jihad that we will surely regret as history unfolds. Will we belatedly remember that our beloved "land of the free and home
of the brave" was created by Jefferson and Madison as well as by Washington?
In this unnaturally warm fall, in which the change of the seasons has hardly been
noticed because we have been charged with the accounting and burial of the thousands of civilians suddenly killed, the cleanup of a site that refuses to stop smoldering,
continues. While honoring those who attempted to protect us from evil, will we loose our moral bearings and become as amorphous, unprincipled, and primitive as the
enemy we are fighting? Will we become capable of walking into the night and assuming another identity as the winds of providence blow against us, as they have? If
so, more than American lives and Manhattan property will have been senselessly destroyed, and when the future is free of war across the ocean, what chapter in the history of democracy and decency will we leave our children?
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