I used to commute into New York every weekday when the World
Trade Center was new. Those upstart twin towers dominated the
skyline like a double exclamation point in boldface type, and I
resented them for surpassing the legendary Empire State Building as
the world’s tallest. They didn’t strike me as worthy successors
to the Babe Ruth of the skyline: two long boxes, massive and
featureless, planted side by side. No personality, no wit, no soul,
no crowning spire to lure the next incarnation of King Kong. I hated
the way they dwarfed the classic Jazz Age skyscrapers of lower
Manhattan. Those vintage towers had grace and finesse, with their
artful setbacks, slender soaring shafts and jubilant crowns. They
were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and George Gershwin transformed
into masonry, perfectly clustered with careless panache. Now they
had been shoved off center stage, made to look skimpy and irrelevant
by a pair of hulking automatons. Imagine the architectural
equivalent of twin Arnold Schwarzeneggers, and you’ve imagined the
impact of the World Trade Center on the New York skyline of the
early seventies.
We gradually accept what won’t go away. I came to appreciate
the twin towers as I passed them every day on the bus into
Manhattan. I’d spy them from across the Hudson, glimmering
silver-blue in the morning light, casting angled shadows on each
other’s facades, the two profiles merging neatly into a single
silhouette as we approached the Lincoln Tunnel. I began to notice a
few touches of refinement: the beveled corners, the subtle
horizontal bands, the delicate vertical tracery of the windows that
became visible at close range. On a sparkling day, viewed from the
promenade in Brooklyn Heights, they added something to the skyline
approaching dignity and even beauty. You could see the twin towers
looming above the tricky streets of Greenwich Village or SoHo, and
you immediately knew which way was south. And so the hulking towers
became trusted sentinels, solid and reassuring. When we saw the
World Trade Center in the distance, we knew where we were.
Now we can’t be so sure. Who would have believed that these
twin pillars of American capitalism could crumble in the manner of
an imploded housing project? To watch them burn like a pair of
colossal torches, then to watch them fall with such sad dignity --
slowly and somberly, with the weighty vertical descent of a man
executed by firing squad -- filled me with wonder and sympathy and
mad rush of adrenaline. We were witnessing one of the most horrific
catastrophes in American history, with a human toll comparable to at
least three Titanics. Who would have dreamed that the monumentally
bland World Trade Center would become a haunted place, comparable to
the fields of Antietam or Shiloh?
I remember my first visit to the site of the infamous Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, where 146 workers died in a
conflagration not far from New York’s Washington Square. I went in
the evening and stood there alone, wondering at the huge loss of
life, imagining the screams and the flames and the plummeting bodies
seventy years before. That was the kind of disaster an American
could grasp: the loss of 146 souls seemed more than catastrophic
enough to our sheltered minds. The place was amply haunted.
Now and in the future, any one of us who visits the deserted
streets of lower Manhattan in the evening, over on the West side
where the World Trade Center used to stand, will be communing with
the ghosts of five thousand, our own contemporaries -- people who
watched "Friends" and drank Diet Pepsi and logged onto
America Online for a lighthearted chat. We don’t associate modern
buildings with ghosts, and we don’t associate people who watched
"Friends" with death. People like that -- people like us
-- shouldn’t be dead yet, and it infuriates us that they should
have been ejected from our midst at the whims of a few sullen
fanatics engaged in a chronic vendetta against America. We’ve had
no experience with holocausts on the order of Dresden or Hiroshima,
or the Nazi death camps, or the lesser-known Soviet and Communist
Chinese horrors, or the near-annihilation of the Armenians during
World War I. We hope we never come to know death as a fact of
everyday life.
The pundits are proclaiming September 11, 2001, as the day that
changed America forever. "Forever" is a pretty powerful
word, and I’m sure its widespread use is premature. But I’d
guess that the recent Age of Irony has been dealt a shock from which
it will be difficult to recover. It was a merry time to be alive if
you were a bourgeois Baby Boomer at large in our republic. It was an
age marked by a kind of boutique sophistication that really didn’t
spring from authentic American roots. We fussed over restaurant
meals that featured balsamic vinegar and capers and all manner of
herbed meats. (We called it "New American Cuisine" but it
really seemed more like a variant of Northern Italian.) We adopted
drop-dead postmodern attitudes that trickled down to us from the
French. We practiced detachment and moral relativism. We began to
drink espresso and latte; we were distancing ourselves from the
bowling alleys and split levels of postwar American culture, the way
newly minted sophisticates distance themselves from their hopelessly
square parents with the Buick in the driveway. We’d make an
occasional allowance for a great "retro" diner or a Rat
Pack retrospective, but it was all done with finger-quotes slicing
the air -- a sense of irony that marked us as superior to our
surroundings, at least in the presence of kindred spirits. We
Boomers had abandoned the America of Lincoln and Will Rogers and
World War II for a pseudo-European ambience that attracted us but
never really suited us.
Recently, just before the attack on America, it seemed we were
starting to respond to the old verities again. The flourishing
"Greatest Generation" industry pandered to our nostalgia
for a time when you always knew who the good guys and bad guys were.
Articulate traditionalists like Jedediah Purdy were gaining an
audience. Now, in the wake of the attack, you can expect the
movement to grow wings and soar proudly.
Ever since the disaster of September 11, we’ve been reading and
hearing hand-wringing reports on "America’s loss of
innocence." Nonsense. We had lost our innocence way back in the
sixties, when the sun-dappled serenity of Beaver Cleaver’s world
suddenly gave way to the unholy squawks of rock stars and radicals,
assassins and Antichrists. Anyone remember Charles Manson? Anyone
care to review the vocabulary used in American films of the past
thirty-odd years?
No, the terrorist attack hasn’t put an end to American
innocence; I submit that it has actually shocked us back to
innocence. We’ve suddenly awakened out of our Seinfeldian
detachment and ennui (so hip, so smirky, so fin-de-siecle);
in its place, we’ve unleashed a revival of red-white-and-blue
fervor unseen in this country since General Eisenhower returned
triumphant from his crusade in Europe. Flags wave proudly from our
front porches; we talk about justice, evil, self-sacrifice and other
archaic concepts that would have seemed alien to most of us just a
week before the disaster. And it’s high time. I’d hate to see
the proverbial pendulum swing toward cheap jingoism, but we were a
society in need of awakening, and the terrorist attack seems to have
galvanized our collective energies. I wouldn’t mind seeing a
return to the fundamental selflessness, courage, simplicity and
neighborliness that characterized the old America at its best. It
will be a hard time for cynics, but then such a society would
probably give us less to be cynical about. I know I wouldn’t mind
sacrificing some of my cynical edge to live in a society that truly
earned our respect and affection.
A final word about the fear that seems to have entered our minds
like a burglar sneaking into our house by night. To see the twin
towers of the World Trade Center collapse before our eyes was
fearsome enough. And no doubt most of us feel apprehensive about the
attacks that are almost certain to come. Will the terrorists strike
the U.S. Capitol next, or Independence Hall, or the Statue of
Liberty? Will they target the Empire State Building, once again the
monarch of the New York skyline? Will they take aim at Old Ironsides
or Mt. Rushmore or even Disney World? Will they try to spread
plagues more virulent than their own fanaticism?
Let them try to destroy this country. Tragedy has firmed our
resolve and helped us recapture some of the essential qualities that
made us Americans in the first place. Fast-track pre-schools and
fruited meat entrees seem strangely irrelevant now. More than ever,
our minds and souls are safe from attack. Terrorists can tumble the
buildings around us, but they’re powerless to destroy what’s
inside us. Our souls are stronger than steel and concrete. As long
as we’ve built them on solid foundations, they’ll survive any
assault the terrorists can devise.
