Three Things

1. Jonno is currently en route to Manhattan. So far as I know, he'll be staying with the minx, so he'll have access to email and stuff. I'm sure he'll want to see each and every one of you New Yorkers while he's there. Why not drop him a line and take him out for a drinkie-poo?

2. Politically, I find myself bouncing between the Left and the Right, depending on the situation I'm in. For example, at the gym the other day these two "hey-bruhs" were talking about the goings-on in the Middle East and the people dancing in the streets of Lebanon after Tuesday's events, and in the process they made more references to falafel vendors and nuclear weapons than I could count. Not only was I offended by their thoroughly racist, ludicrously facile politics, but part of me--the newly discovered Lebanese part of me--also took it as a kind of personal attack. Not that I was raised with a sense of Lebanese identity or anything, not that I've even met my biological father, it was just...what if I had? They just presumed their conversation wouldn't offend me 'cause I'm a white boy.

The very next day, I'm working out, and these two quasi-liberal homos are in the room, ragging on Bush and the fiercely militaristic, nearly autocratic stance he's adopted the past week, and I'm offended again. I mean, yes, Bush has been whiny, and he should probably can most of his speech-writing staff, but did anyone really expect him to behave differently? He's doing what he's go to do. Giuliani, on the other hand: now there's a pleasant surprise.

3. On a completely different note, I got a call from the adoption agency yesterday. Contact looms near.

~10:44 AM | link it, mary

Hmm. It seems the Bush administration--that is, W's administration, the one shrieking at Afghanistan as we speak--recently gave the Taliban $43 million. Apparently, W was trying to keep alive Ron and Nancy's ill-conceived "war on drugs," and forked over the cash in exchange for the Taliban's declaration that opium growing is "against the will of God." Bush et al. somehow felt such a statement would immediately stem the tide of smack flowing from the Hindu Kush into the veins of America's rosy-cheeked rock stars. Ironically, that gift made the US one of the Taliban's biggest financial backers.

The really funny part? The thought of W and his staffers flipping furiously through bank statements to see if the check's been cashed...

Link via Nathan.

~3:14 PM | link it, mary

"I want justice!"

Yeah, and I want a new president, but wadda ya gonna do?

~2:17 PM | link it, mary

Maybe I'm just a cynic, or maybe my job has made me too aware of the workings of the American political machine, but honestly: people who think it's possible for the US to avoid some kind of war or military attack somewhere in the world--likely Afghanistan at this point--strike me as patently naive. To be sure, in large part I agree with the level-headed and indisputably wise reactions some folks have had to these events, and I think lots of Americans see things similarly; I think the majority would rather see some sort of surgical strike to take out particular individuals rather than a full-scale war on an entire nation that, in theory, had nothing directly to do with this week's events. I mean, even my family--the bulk of whom are gun-toting Republicans from Mississippi, and therefore, my sounding board when I want to get a sense of popular American sentiment--understand it's a difficult situation we're in, with massively complex political ramifications. There are no simple solutions, and no matter what sort of military action we take, it can never begin to get to the root of the problem of anti-American sentiment abroad.

Nevertheless, we all know something will have to be done. It won't be done simply as an act of vengeance--though that's in there, too--but more importantly, as a political gesture. To save face with the world and with constituents across the country (note the single voice of dissent in Congress' overwhelmingly multi-partisan decision to authorize the use of force---a vote, essentially, of 518-to-1), our nation's leaders have to retaliate. Let's just hope they do it quickly, effectively, and with the full cooperation of the international community.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty cynical about that, too.

I wonder what Al Gore's thinking right about now.

~9:06 AM | link it, mary

More interesting than Falwell/Robertson's casual theological discussion of Tuesday's events and their implications is the superficially more reasoned text of bin Laden's fatwah urging jihad against Americans. ...Interesting and yet, completely bizarre.

In the end, no matter how measured, how rational either of these arguments presume to be, both are full of rhetorical acrobatics I can't seem to follow. But then, maybe if I possessed a degree of religious zeal, I wouldn't have this problem.

Link via megnut.

~7:41 PM | link it, mary

I can't believe what I'm reading. Oh, wait, I was raised Southern Baptist. Maybe I can.

What's truly amazing here is not their conception of goddess, nor is it the vast jumps in logic and rhetoric it takes to make such an argument. No, what's truly amazing is that two religious pundits who are so very politically active could be so completely myopic as to make such a decidedly un-savvy statement. Of course, wasn't it Falwell who preached against the Tinky-Winky Conspiracy? So again, why am I surprised? ...With any luck, this'll be just one more nail in their political coffins.

Thanks for the link, JB.

~9:38 AM | link it, mary

It seems like a pretty minor thing right now--I mean, heroism is heroism is heroism, right?--but still, it's kinda cool to know that a significant part of a massive terrorist plot might have been foiled by someone from our team. Yeah, yeah, I know: I'm making presumptions about the "queer community" and all. Too bad. I'm not up for debating it right now.

...I wonder if it'll ever come out in the major media (no pun intended). I mean, CNN did say that he'd called his mother from the plane, and that's a big hint, but, you know, most people need more than that.... Help us out here, Mr. Brokaw.

~5:38 PM | link it, mary

From all accounts, New Yorkers have come together in beautiful ways over the past 48 hours. People are aware of the fragility of others; they have followed Ms. Holzer's advice: they have turned soft and lovely, they have found ways to be very tender.

The one and only time I've been through anything nearly this traumatic, the same thing happened. There were about ten of us involved. We were emotionally, physically, psychologically raw, and we took care of one another. For a solid week, we gathered each night, had dinner, sat around the living room talking and reminiscing, holding hands, making one another laugh. It was a bonding experience that none of us would have chosen, but we went through it, and as horrible as everything seemed at the beginning of that week, by the end of it, we'd begun to function normally again. Our appetites weren't what they should have been, and we didn't quite feel like celebrating yet, but we'd built each other back up enough to face everyday life. A full week had gone by: we wanted to see other people, do normal things. So we did.

Since that seventh day, that Saturday, I haven't really spent time with many of those folks. I mean, sure, I'd see 'em on the street, see 'em at the corner bar. But it was as if they'd forgotten the closeness we'd developed over those seven days. Maybe they just didn't want to relive it all. Maybe they moved on faster than I did. I still remember it as a beautiful shining week when things were clear: we knew what was important and what wasn't.

Hold on to your memories of now, take pictures, make notes, because--fortunately and unfortunately--things will return all-too-quickly to the way they were before. Or, again in the words of Ms. Holzer: "Savor kindness, because cruelty is possible later."

~1:07 PM | link it, mary

Finally: word from Julian...

Sorry for the silence. Been busy looking for an in-law who is likely not to have survived. It's been quite an odyssey. While it does not leave me hopeful about him, the kindness and care of every person I've encountered has astonished me. How New York will ever recover is a mystery to me, but if it is ever to do so, it will be because of New Yorkers themselves. Choire is posting almost hourly, though. (He lives across the street.) Also, my internet access is limited at best. This is part of a bulk emailing that I hope will go through. The scene here is simultaneously surreal, nauseating and oddly beautiful. Despite that, however, I recommend that you not visit for a while.

~5:08 PM | link it, mary

I stopped watching TV a long time ago. We don't have cable, so all I've been able to see in the past 24 hours has been network news. Even the WB--virtual home for America's detached, unflinching, jaded teens--bumped their regular programming in favor of ABC's coverage of the events. Flipping through the channels, it's the same broadcast again and again, with slightly different hairstyles: Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings repeating and repeating and repeating and the news is always the same. Or it gets worse. I can't listen for a little while.

I've tried to console Jonno, but it's hard, since I'm not exactly sure what I'm consoling him about. (I must be shaken, too, if I'm ending sentences in prepositions.) So far as we can tell, all his friends and family are okay--some were physically and emotionally closer to yesterday's events than others, some were pretty distraught, but technically, they're all okay. His apartment, his neighborhood, it's all still there, too.

Ultimately, the pain he feels--and that many of us feel--is as nebulous as the as-yet-unnamed perpetrator of the attacks. It doesn't exactly stem from an "Attack on America" (despite what the media would like us to think); I mean, if the Superdome had been attacked, or even a major airport, it probably wouldn't have mattered nearly as much. In the same way, the pain doesn't precisely stem from an attack on Jonno's hometown, either. What is it, then?

Personally, I think it's two things. First and foremost, it's the massive loss of human life, civilian, lives, bystanders, played out on the internet, the radio, and of course, national television. No matter how heartless or disaffected or distant or world-weary people pretend to be, it is impossible to watch that footage of a passenger plane slamming over and over and over into the side of a densely populated office building over and over and over and see people clinging to the sides of the building and falling off the building and trying in vain to jump 100 stories to safety and both buildings collapsing and knowing that hundreds of resue workers doing their job were crushed alongside the very people they'd come in to help...there's no way of seeing that and not identifying with those faceless people, those dots falling through the sky, the implied dots looking unbelievingly from the windows of their airplane moments before impact, the intensity of fear that must have struck each and every one of them. There is no way to watch that and not have a physical, visceral reaction. The news media know this, know that the trick to telling any story--news feature, commerical, or feature film--is to make the audience identify with your characters; if you can do that, they'll watch indefinitely. Ergo, there's a reason they only flashed occasionally to the Pentagon, where hundreds of people likely died, but none of them on camera. We identify with Hamlet, we watch 'till the story's played out. Same principle here.

I also think Jonno's particular grief--and mine, in a way, and that of our friends in the city--stems from the sheer suddenness and magnitude of change. The city's environment has changed forever, both physically and symbolically. Those compass points marking the southernmost limit of the shining borough of Manhattan--of invaluable importance to me and everyone else who's ever been to New York and stepped out onto the street from an unfamiliar subway stop and said, "Oh, well that's south, home is this way."--they're gone. The center of the Western world is unmarked.

Or is it? I'm guessing that that great void, that yawning nothingness, that stretch of gradually-clearing sky once eclipsed by two world-famous landmarks, will still function as a guide. Like the city's own phantom limb, we will be able to look to the horizon for some time to come and know that that's south, because that's where the World Trade Center once stood.

On a more practical note, all of you wanting to give blood, skip it for now; apparently, there's more than enough to go around. Give funds instead.

And for all of you non-webloggers in NYC who haven't emailed me yet, do so now, dammit. I think you're all okay, but confirm it.

~8:38 AM | link it, mary

For those of you in NYC, it's not just you: life's surreal everywhere this morning.

Catholic town that it is, New Orleans' church bells have been ringing non-stop for the past ten minutes. It's kinda creepy. And the streets are oddly quiet. And George W. Bush has been moved to Louisiana for safety's sake. I guess that's one thing in our favor: when it comes to major targets of terrorism, no one thinks of Louisiana.

It's all like a big-budget Bruce Willis/Sylvester Stallone/Arnold Schwartzenegger film, right down to the sprawling terrorist conspiracy. But as we've known all along, Bruce can't win every time.

~12:18 PM | link it, mary

Since it's now our patriotic duty to 86 the cell phones for a while, I've been racing through the blogs, making sure all of you NYC-area folks are ok. So far, so good.

P.S. He hasn't posted anything yet, but we've had word from Chad that he's okay.

~11:32 AM | link it, mary

Holy.

Shit.

~7:34 AM | link it, mary