my glamorous life
episodes & recollections
#60 a ripple from the storm
My doctor may be among those killed on 11 September. I've tried three times to reach him, and all I get is the same eerily calm voice mail loop.
He is, or was, a gentle, compassionate man. He is, or was, a holistic healer who helped me and many others recover from ailments western medicine can't cure.
I write "is, or was" like it is normal to wonder if someone close to you is dead when you don't hear back from them.
In New York City, it is normal now.
Moments after the Twin Towers collapsed, American TV stations began running graphics that said: AMERICA UNDER ATTACK. Within hours, most had designed and edited interstitial films about the attack, complete with specially-composed soundtracks.
I've worked in creative departments most of my life, I've supervised productions, and I've had clients who worked in film and TV.
I can picture the overworked creative director in a news organization, choosing from different graphic treatments of AMERICA UNDER ATTACK: "Use a different font. Too fancy, too bloody. Show me something with the Towers."
I can see an overworked producer at a local TV station scanning footage of the firemen in slo-mo: "There, that one, where you can just see the tear in the fireman's eye. Use that shot."
What does it do to the souls of TV producers, to package tragedy as entertainment, complete with slick graphics and catchy theme lines?
What does it do to the souls of those who watch?
A few nights ago I dined in an Afghan restaurant in my neighborhood.
Some days after the attack, the owner draped American flags over the word "Afghan" everywhere it occurred on his restaurant's signage.
I don't know whether the gesture meant, "We are American, too," or "Please don't throw rocks through my windows."
All I know is that when I saw it, my heart broke.
So my girlfriend and I gave him our business.
There were tears in his eyes when we left.
A horrifying relativism colors my thinking as the damage from 11 September continues to ripple out across every aspect of our lives.
The terror attack crippled my long-time Internet provider, a small downtown business I stayed with as the web grew because I like knowing who I'm working with.
As a result of the attack, my little provider can no longer offer the DSL service I use to run my business.
The company that is supposed to take over my DSL account–the company that wired my studio for DSL–does not support Macs. My studio is Mac-based. My business was hurting before 11 September. Now it is that much more hobbled.
There is an Anglo Saxon adjective for the hit I'm taking, and that adjective applies in greater or lesser degrees to everyone in New York City.
I remind myself that I haven't lost a wife, a daughter, a son, a parent. I did not have to blanket the world's largest city in MISSING posters, desperately hoping that someone would call, that someone could tell me what became of the person I kissed awake on the morning of 11 September.
Much of America, and much of the world, has wrapped itself in the safety blanket of abstraction and guessing games. Who did this and why? How should we respond?
I don't blame anyone for thinking that way. It is necessary that someone figure out the whos and whys and what to dos.
But I cannot do it. New York cannot do it.
New York cannot think abstractly yet. New York is still smashed and grieving.