rambling 9/11 walkabout

At 8:46 am today on this gorgeous Sunday morning, September 11, I walked south along the banks of the Hudson River, about 1.5 miles away from the World Financial Center. It seems difficult to be optimistic about the future of Ground Zero, given how very Byzantine the rebuilding process has become. And the lack of clear leadership and clear goals for Ground Zero is mirrored on a national level, which is obvious in the stultifying disarray we've seen after Hurricane Katrina.
In yesterday's Times, Nicolai Ourousoff brilliantly summarized where we stand four years later. We have a design for a Freedom Tower that is more of a fortress than a symbol of freedom rising. The memorial plans are in a state of chaos; and the proposed Freedom Center has gone from burlesque to travesty. When your governor insists that freedom of expression will be strictly controlled at the Freedom Center, you know that what Thucydides warned about over 2400 years ago in The Peloponnesian War regarding the battle over Corcyra has come true: "To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings." And mirrored on a national level, we have a Pentagon-inspired Freedom Walk, for which the unregistered will be subject to arrest along the tightly controlled march route. Freedom, it seems, isn't free.
But there is no sudden crisis of leadership; it has been with us all along. The EPA failed us in the days and weeks after September 11, failing to adequately monitor the air or the workers at Ground Zero. Too few citizens were registered by the federal government to be monitored over the coming decades, and we really have no idea if the cleanups of apartments in lower Manhattan were even effective or just too late in removing particulate matter. In short, government improvised, and failed miserably, just as it did lately after Hurricane Katrina. If New Yorkers have re-learned any useful lesson four years after 9/11, it is to be prepared: because no government, whether local, state or federal, will be there for the masses of the poorest and the neediest in their darkest hour. While New York City now has outlined an evacuation plan in case of a Category IV hurricane, probably PATH, Amtrak and Metro-North would be the most effective means of getting out of the city, assuming the tunnels weren't already flooded or that terrorists hadn't laid waste to our-still woefully underprotected mass transit systems. (If you want to call my bluff, go visit any station or tunnel of your choice on an early Sunday morning and take pictures of whatever you like. No one will be awake to question you.) And heaven help us all if there is an ABC (atomic, biological, chemical) attack here, because the Health Department can barely even keep outbreaks of sexually-transmitted diseases under control in the best of times. (Crystal meth, anyone?) And as for the strategically-located shelters throughout our city where we could evacuate to in case of mass disaster, New Orleans has taught us it would be better to swim the Hudson and risk drowning than repair to a public shelter.
Our still-open wounds are failing to heal, and frankly our only consolation has been the massive amount of building taking place elsewhere in the city. Ourousoff is right that Santiago Calatrava's train station "may end up as one of the most glorious public spaces to rise in New York since the construction of Grand Central Terminal." Curiously, the other most interesting buildings of note are also largely glass confections: I am now walking past Richard Meier's three glass towers between Perry and Charles Streets, and I am also thinking of Calatrava's proposed funky glass condominium at South Street and the Austrian cultural forum. Of course, a Category IV hurricane would likely wreck all the above buildings except the Austrian cultural forum, fortuitously located in Midtown well away from the rivers. So perhaps these are the metaphors for our collective psyche: fragile and easily breakable. And our fractured superego as evidenced by Ground Zero and our inability to come to reasonable collective decisions of its future? Perhaps we should ask Richard Serra to place one of his beautiful torqued ellipses at the site; these mammoth rusting hulks of steel so symbolize our former greatness of the 20th century, now eclipsed by the new age of Homeland Security.
We waited nearly four years to see the transcripts of EMT, police and fire responders on 9/11, and having read them in their entirety, I still walk away with a sense of deep dissatisfaction. Our first responders did not have adequate communications gear then, and I question if they even do now. Where are all the billions for homeland security really going? Nothing written above in rage is meant to denigrate or dishonor the victims of 9/11. In fact, a truly patriotic response in loving memory of the dead is to question the fools who have risen to power in these troubling times. For they misdirected hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and dispatched their cronies from Halliburton and Blackwater Consulting et al—whether to Afghanistan, Iraq, or New Orleans—as this great nation begins to bankrupt itself in the name of security. I won't mention names, but some have grown vastly wealthy from the new homeland security state, having quickly traded in their credentials for mega-consulting stints. Whether yesterday's closure of Baghdad airport by private contractors who complain they have not been paid, or the continuous chaos at Newark Liberty airport (your only liberty there is to bring your own lunch), we New Yorkers have been the face of struggle for the past four years. Ask Alaska's senator Lisa Murkowski, whose daddy is the governor there. She got a full barrel of pork, $223 million for a bridge nobody wants to connect Gravina to the thriving metropolis of Ketchikan, population 8,000. And we beg for funds to upgrade our aging East River bridges, which in one day carry more passengers than this Alaska bridge will likely carry in 50 years.
Indeed, we live in the age of information technology, but a large part of this administration's stated goals have been to follow the Grover Norquist mantra, to "starve the beast". So be it: Mike Brown of FEMA is the poster child of just where back-scratching, incompetence, and résumé inflation get you in this administration: right to the top. A man who hasn't got a qualification to save his life returned home to Washington after being summarily demoted by Homeland Security chief Chertoff, in his own words to "walk my my dog and hug my wife and, maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep." Of course, the residents of lower Manhattan on 9/11 and countless thousands since Katrina struck would have really enjoyed such a luxury. Veteran news commentator Daniel Schorr, who recently turned 89, reminded us this morning of the other famous former failed president who rode to power by actually successfully preparing for the 1927 Mississippi flood: Herbert Hoover. And like Hoovervilles before him, Bush now enjoys the dubious distinction of having today's 9/11 Bushville camps named after him. Societies are judged by how they treat their poorest, and whether the innocent victims of 9/11 or of Hurricane Katrina, we are failing them all. As I finish writing this, it is precisely 10:48 am, the time of the plane crash in Pennsylvania. Both towers had collapsed by then.

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Posted on 9/11/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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