A Dyke A Broad #49 The 9/11 Edition
A blast from our September 11 past. Including photos from my roof.
Hello from Paris, Once Again!
I’ve got terrorism on the brain, or at least the French media does. They’ve focused a lot on the current trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris that killed 130 people and wounded almost 500. They’ve also had a slew of documentaries about the twentieth anniversary of September 11.
I skip past them. We lived in New York at the time, and after seeing the planes strike the World Trade Center on the news I went up onto our rooftop with my little camera and watched the smoke from the burning buildings rise into an incredibly sunny sky.
It seemed unreal when they fell. Impossible, too, that Ana had rushed downtown to cover the attack for The Gully, the online magazine we’d been co-editing for over a year.
It took her a terribly long time to get back home.
Whenever the anniversary rolls around, I try not to think about it too much. Maybe because the results are still so much with us. Or because every year politicians make their pilgrimage to New York where they wave their insidious flags and build their cynical policies on all those dead bodies, New Yorkers from across the world, plus Afghans, Iraqis.
The only people I despise more are all those self-anointed Lefty sages who, while fragments of the dead were still being extracted from the rubble, immediately proclaimed that we deserved it. “We”? Which “we”? They said the same after the 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in which the “we” who died turned out to be a lot of children of color at a day care center. In New York the “we” that deserved it was mostly a lot of modest immigrants, messengers, secretaries who got to work early. There were also the firemen, of course, a lot of them died. And, yes, some middle-management and bosses, maybe even a stockbroker or two. So what? Does anybody anywhere deserve that?
Fuck those pious assholes. Nobody gets what they deserve. Not the good. Not the bad.
Anyway, here’s what Ana Simo and I both wrote for The Gully that week, twenty years ago. It holds up pretty well.
New York Faces Terror
by Ana Simo
NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. Thousands of people were running north this morning on Centre Street, fleeing a gigantic ball of black ash and fire released by the first collapsing World Trade Center Tower. I was one of them.
The fiery cloud came at us from the sky like a giant asteroid in a cheesy sci-fi movie — we were extras in a cheap remake of "Independence Day" or "The Day the Earth Stood Still," the role, if you stop to think about it, that every New Yorker was born to play. Terror struck us in a grandiose, clichéd way — as we always knew it would, if it would at all.
Unreality helped us keep our heads cool and our mouths shut. It was a purposeful, focused silence honed by years of negotiating these intrinsically mean streets (Giuliani and Disney notwithstanding). Even now, as night falls, the babbling Babel remains preternaturally subdued, at least south of 14th Street, where only wailing ambulances and cop cars are allowed and, up to a certain point, pedestrians.
As the day comes to an end, the media will inevitably begin to spice up their rehashed coverage with tales of mayhem and chaos in Lower Manhattan. There is a horrendous story of carnage under the WTC rubble, where thousands are dead or dying. But that's a different story: mayhem and chaos are the business of those who flee and survive, and I saw none of that this morning, even when we thought we were running for our lives.
When terror rained on us this morning, we, New Yorkers, reflexively put on our deadpan subway face. Maybe a little softer than usual at the edges, allowing others into our emotional periphery, but still not breaching our mutual privacy (we know people are dying nearby, we know we could be next), but icily alert at the center (we're exiting at a lonely subway station in the middle of the night.) It's our very best civic face. It'll see us through.
Watching the Twin Towers Fall
by Kelly Cogswell
NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2001. I was standing at the yellow police tape on Hudson Street, staring at the billowing clouds of smoke coming from the wreckage of the World Trade Center a few blocks south, when a middle-aged New Yorker told me she'd seen the first plane hit the north tower.
"We were just a few blocks away, over there," she said. "The plane flew directly over our heads and right into the building. Then flames came out. It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. I just started screaming and couldn't stop. I think my husband was embarrassed."
He shouldn't have been. Everybody on the streets was stunned in their own way by the terrorist attacks here and in Washington. Walking downtown this afternoon, I saw a woman sitting calmly in a cafe sipping coffee. She looked perfectly normal except for the tears streaming down her face. People slouched on stoops, or gathered around car radios, and in bars. Every now and then someone glassy-eyed and grey with dust would pass you walking uptown on the sidewalk, and you knew they came from the heart of the disaster.
Even fifteen or twenty blocks away the air was thick with dust. Five or so blocks away, you had it in your eyes and mouth. The cars were covered in ash and grit an inch thick. Ambulances appeared on the horizon in swirls of white dust devils. There was a blazing sun and blue skies in one direction, and in another huge black poisonous clouds.
I woke up this morning to the boom of the plane hitting the first tower. I didn't know what it was, and would probably have gone back to sleep, but there was a man's incredulous voice from the building behind me going, "Holy shit! Holy shit!" A minute later there was a woman's voice going, "Holy shit!" before dissolving into hysterical giggles.
I thought it was the usual New York domestic drama until I turned on the TV, and saw flames coming out of the top of one of the 110-story Twin Towers. Having seen "Independence Day" and all the other alien attack movies that flatten New York, it still just seemed like one more movie trick.
When the second plane hit, I went up on the roof and just stared at Lower Manhattan, trying to understand. There were ragged plane-shaped gashes in both Towers. Smoke trailed from them like candles. All the roofs of my neighborhood were lined with people, half of them with cameras. It was less voyeurism, than a sense that we better get this on film now, because it won't be true in the morning, and no one will believe us. It all seemed unreal, the hijackings, the attack on the Pentagon, even a Palestinian group taking credit.
When the first tower collapsed, everything fell from such a height it seemed to come down slowly, almost gracefully, like it was made of paper and flour. It was only then that I understood how there were thousands and thousands of people under the debris, ordinary people like me who turned up on time, skipped the Starbucks, and got this.
I also started thinking that their deaths, if they were truly at the hands of Middle-Eastern terrorists, will probably refuel the evil machine of revenge and hatred that killed them in the first place. Anti-Islamic sentiment may rise throughout the Western world like it did after the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover in Iran.
The cycle of retribution could scatter dead Muslims and Americans worldwide, giving the hawks in the Bush administration the opportunity to rise out of the ashes of the ruined economy, and push for a missile shield that couldn't have stopped these hijackings and bombs in a million years.
None of the dead on either side will just be dead sons and daughters, but all patriots and martyrs. The tentative Sharon-Arafat talks will probably be canceled. The primitive love-it-or-leave-it view of America will be in ascendance. No one will dare to moderate Israeli attacks on Palestinians. Bush will probably give in to demands to make war, though we weren't attacked by a specific nation. Instead, we will bomb phantoms and profiles.
Meanwhile, burned-up buildings continue to collapse here in New York, slowing the rescue process, killing hundreds of firefighters and rescuers, and changing the urban landscape forever. New York will survive, though. It always does.
Just hours after the disaster, people lined up at the hospitals to give blood for the injured. The usually irritable cops patiently answered questions in the heat and dust. There was a woman on the street corner giving out cups of water for free, as if we were running the New York marathon. Maybe we are.
This So-Called War
by Kelly Cogswell
NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2001. Fires are still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center. When the wind changes, if you are near enough, you inhale smoke, cement dust, and the scent of burned plastic. Rescue workers choke in it every second as they remove the steel mangled together with flesh.
If you're a New Yorker, especially living in downtown Manhattan, it's a horrible reminder. We're all trying to forget and remember at the same time. You have to forget enough to function, to be able to get to the grocery and back without crying, to get through a day of work, but you don't want this horrible thing to be only a blip on the national consciousness like the USS Cole. You want each of the dead to be mourned individually. You want justice. You want change--real national security and a smart foreign policy that doesn't leave the red rings of a target around our city.
What most of us don't want is more carnage. Maybe it would be different if the blame were clear, and there was something to bomb that would prevent this from ever happening again. But there isn't. A nation didn't attack us. Terrorists did. They have no borders, capitals, stockpiles, armies in uniforms that a couple of Skuds could wipe out.
Attacking Osama bin Laden's hoteliers seems redundant, a mere inconvenience for the elite Taliban. The ordinary person in Afghanistan is already abjectly poor. After a couple of civil wars there's hardly any infrastructure left to target. The only thing left to take is their lives, which their leaders already toss away like garbage.
In New York, we are sick of wasted lives. The checkpoints are gone, but cars are slow to trickle back into the neighborhood. The restaurants are only half-full. We are eerily polite. I have made my peace with the tourists a few blocks west that come with their Hard Rock Cafe tee shirts and video cameras. They climb up on fire hydrants and shoot the smoke, then buy postcards of burning buildings and more tee shirts saying "I Survived the Attack on America." We all do what we must to understand.
The usuals are back on the handball courts, but their shouts are muted, especially when the wind shifts.
Nevertheless, The World Goes On
Iranian women protest on behalf of Afghan Women
Great News from Mexico
Mexico's top court decriminalizes abortion in 'watershed moment'
“Historic! A leap forward for Mexican women…”
Of course access may still be an issue.
Abortion no longer a crime in Mexico, but most women still can’t get one.
That’s it for this time. I think I need to think more about that moment twenty years ago, and how it shaped our world, including dykeness and broadness.
Burntoutedly yours,
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