Sultan Knish
In the first few years it seemed as if they were still there, stark
lines rising into the sky, tall shadows falling on the streets, a
missing space that your eyes filled in without even thinking. You walked
past, and your eyes said, "Of course they're there. They're always
there" and for a moment you saw them as they were, grey ghosts of steel
rising above the rubble. You saw the city as it was and then you
remembered that city is gone.
Manhattan, that far down, is a lonely place. It is not a human place,
but a huddle of buildings where men and women commute to and from, its
stores are there for office workers to shop at, its sidewalks go dark
when the trains head out to New Jersey again turning it dangerously low
rent. That is what made the pretense of a Ground Zero Mosque, in a
neighborhood where you can hardly find enough Muslim residents to start a
game of Buzkashi, so nakedly dishonest.
But the site has always attracted its share of exploiters. On a good day
you can see South American and African vendors peddling commemorative
patriotic knickknacks and on a bad day the Truthers show up howling
their contempt for the site. Tourists stop by and pose for snapshots
with their families. Office workers walk by without thinking. The site,
like the towers, is just something that's there. And lately even the
vendors and Truthers hardly bother showing up anymore. Like so many
others, they have already moved on to exploiting the next tragedy and
the next outpouring of grief.
The neighborhood had grown less grim over time. The 99-cent stores and
shops selling used clothing have given way to cafes and chain stores.
The months during which the entire area was closed down, in part or in
whole, took its toll on local businesses, but over time they bounced
back. And so has the city.
Tonight and the night before as the towers of light cast blue beams
across the sky, we remember but memory is a destructive medium. Each
year the memories grow fainter. At lunch counters people ask each other
where they were that day and exchange stories. But the stories grow
fainter each year and the memories of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
or stumbling through the ash or handing out sandwiches to rescue
workers have grown dimmer too.
This was the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. How many people are
still moved by that date, how many less so than were in 1822 or 1862?
The anniversaries that we hold on to are the ones that mean something to
us. And what does September 11 mean to us? What did it mean to us
eleven years ago and what does it mean to us now?
The fundamental narrative of war is, "We were attacked and we fought
back." It's the same story for everyone regardless of how true it may
be. But it is mostly true in this case. We were attacked and we tried to
fight back. But we weren't attacked on September 11. We were attacked
long before then. That was just the date when one of the attacks got out
undivided attention and the enemy elevated itself above a petty
nuisance.
To walk through the darkness toward the towers of light is to pass
through a city of shadows. In a stray glimmer of light reflecting from a
storefront or a puddle you can still see the old MISSING posters and
see khaki trucks tearing apart the street asphalt. You can still see
glimpses of a city that was still reeling from the incomprehensibility
of what had happened to it. It isn't reeling anymore, instead the
incomprehensibility has become routine.
New York City is used to tragedy. Terrible things happen here all the
time. The oldest photos of the city show the same stunned faces, the
legs lying in a puddle of blood, the gawking children and the police
frowning at something we cannot see. And relentlessly the blood is
washed away, the tears are dried and the city moves on. September 11
left behind more blood, more broken legs and more frowning police than
ever before... but the ashes have still been dumped in a landfill, the
tears dried and the city moved on.
September 11 has become a tragedy and tragedy is an experience, not an
explanation. It is a bonding experience that gives way to catharsis. The
dead are mourned, the grief is expelled and the horror of it takes on
the faint silvery tinge of memory. It is no longer what is, but what
was. It is not how we live now, but how we lived then. There is no
longer a need for answers and that for many is also a relief.
"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York
City is itself a detective story," Agatha Christie said. That detective
story is one that most people who live here have given up on solving. It
is a trademark of the weathered New Yorker to meet the odd and
inexplicable with a shrug of the shoulders. Everything is strange but
the strangeness is the point. We are all living in a postmodern
detective story with no solutions and no need for them. Not only are
there no answers, but even asking the question is an invitation to
ridicule. There are no truths here, only shadows.
In Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot arrives at the solution
by realizing that only in America could such an unlikely collection of
characters have met.
By America, he means New York, and the city is still the ideal place to
find unlikely characters. There is still a murder to be solved here and
the suspects come and go in the streets below. The crime did not end
with the murder of 3,000 people and the destruction of two towers and
several lesser buildings around them. New schemes of mass murder are
hatched every day across one river or the other. Maps are studied,
charts are drawn up and the tools of the trade are gathered up by the
latest man who would be Bin Laden.
New York cannot move on, neither can the country, because the murderers
are still on the loose and what happened on September 11 was not an
isolated incident, but part of a pattern of attacks taking place in a
clash of civilizations. New York, the crossroads of civilizations, is a
natural target for the attacks. New York is to the world what Mecca was
to Arabia and the new Mohammeds are eager to do to it what Mohammed did
to Mecca.
The crowds will cheer the hundredth time they are told that Bin Laden is
dead, but the man in the turban was irrelevant long before he was
killed in his hideout, and the Muslim Oilsphere is full of wealthy sons
looking to lead a war against the West. Bin Laden is dead, but his
backers are very much alive, and the drone attacks that kill Al Qaeda
leaders don't touch their money men in the Oilsphere. The clerics who
teach young Muslim men about the glories of martyrdom have little to
worry about from drone strikes, unless they help them plan those attacks
a few times too many.
This is a conflict of ideologies, a collision of cultures and a war that
for the enemy encompasses the religious and the racial, that is nothing
less than a primal battle against the Other. And where better to wage
that war than in the places where others meet others every day? What
better target than a World Trade Center for a violent ideology built on
merchants turned robbers and robbers turned merchants?
In a city where everyone is different, it can be difficult to understand
that the attackers were motivated by those differences. Their war
against us, at a primal level beneath ideology and faith, is an attack
on people who are fundamentally and incomprehensibly different than they
are. Islam is xenophobia written into scripture, a long chain of
conquest, subjugation and cultural destruction by desert nomads who know
how to drive a sharp bargain, but have never been anything more than
the jackals sniffing around the ruins of greater civilizations. It is as
natural for them to attack us as it is for us to wonder why we were
attacked.
Americans hold the peculiar belief that life need not be a zero sum
game. That we can learn from other people without turning them into our
subjects. That we can make more of something instead of stealing from a
finite amount that someone else has. That is the great creative power of
American exceptionalism. It is a transcendent force that turned a land
full of refugees into a world power brimming with technological wonders.
New York, that strange part-Dutch, part-English, part-Everything-Else
city, runs on the creativity of the impossible. Starving artists,
aspiring actors, failed musicians, real estate mavens without a dime and
brokers trading thin air. This is a city that always seems on the verge
of total anarchy and destruction. It is the city that filmmakers
repeatedly choose to destroy in alien invasions and other catastrophes.
And yet it is the city that keeps going on that strange half-mad
creativity of making things happen.
For Islam, the game is strictly zero sum. If American civilization
thrives, then their civilization is shadowed. If people are happy here,
then their own happiness is marred. If there are two towers in New York
City, then that takes away from the glory of their civilization. Islam
is the bitter beggar forever looking to steal what it cannot have,
worrying over the imaginary history of its own greatness and cursing the
upstarts in the streets of a foreign city for taking what was
rightfully theirs.
The American who shares his good fortune with the rest of the world
cannot understand that there are some people who would rather steal than
accept a gift, who would rather destroy than build and who would rather
drown the world in darkness than accept someone else's light. With
difficulty he might accept the existence of a small number of people who
think this way, but the notion of a civilization built in this mold is
too obscene an idea for him to accept.
As with so many other strange things that wash up in the concrete
streets of a strange city, it is easier to leave the mystery unsolved,
to let the blanket fall back over the clash of civilizations and go on
forward. It is the way that things have always been done in the city and
as twin rays of light bisect the sky, they remind New Yorkers of their
own fortitude, and not of the enemy waiting outside the light.
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