Shared Suffering

Posted on Friday, September 14, 2001 at 1:23 PM

The last few days, the Internet has brought us all the latest information (with a few bloopers) and some wonderful words of insight and opinion (with, of course, a few idiots).  Before I tell you what's on my mind, I would like to recommend almost any article this week on Slate but especially the following pieces, there and elsewhere.  I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, but I believe they are contributing to a responsible national dialogue.

Read what these folks have to say.  If, after you do, you aren't thoroughly sick of the topic, come back here and read the following piece which I just sent off for The Comics Buyer's Guide for the issue which goes off to press on Monday…

As I write this, crews are poking through the remnants of what were once the twin towers of the World Trade Center, looking for bodies.  It will take a week to ten days for this publication to reach you, at which time crews will still be digging through that rubble, looking for bodies.  Even if it takes two months for your copy to arrive, crews will still be pouring through the debris.

Some facets of our lives will be returning to normal.  We may occasionally go an hour or two without thinking of the thousands killed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01.  But, at best, the thoughts will never fully go away.  And things will never be "normal" again.

I don't know how I could have written about comic books or cartoon shows this week.  Four commercial airliners were hijacked, everyone aboard was killed and three of the planes plowed into buildings, murdering thousands more…

…and I'm going to write about who's stronger, the Thing or the Hulk?  Not bloody likely.

Tuesday AM, everyone was comparing the terrorist attacks to Pearl Harbor and, from the standpoint of moving us towards all-out war, that may turn out to be true.  Still, two critical differences hit me right off the bat.

One was that Pearl Harbor was about soldiers being killed on battleships.  It was, I'm certain, horrible and frightening, but it was removed from the lives of civilians, i.e., people who were not in the business of war, going about their daily lives.  Our parents and grandparents could not have possibly have thought, as you and I did Tuesday morn —

"That could have been me.  I could have been in one of those planes.  I could have been in one of those skyscrapers."

You thought that.  You're lying if you claim otherwise.  And you'll think it, the next time you have to fly somewhere or enter a large office complex.

The other difference is this: Pearl Harbor wasn't televised.

There was no footage of the Japanese Imperial Navy dropping bombs on the U.S.S. Arizona and, even if there had been, there was no television.  Our folks did not sit in their homes, in their pajamas, witnessing what we all saw on CNN Tuesday morning.

We saw it, not once but repeatedly — the jets flying into the buildings, as caught by every camcorder around.  After the eightieth viewing, I started switching channels, searching for one that would give me info without the incessant instant replays.  Each time I thought I'd found it, the screen would then change.

Sometimes, they'd cut to footage of the jets flying into the buildings and the buildings crashing down, while they continued the speaker's remarks as voiceover.  Sometimes, they'd split the screen and put the speaker in a little box and then, in the big box, they'd put the image of the jets flying into the buildings and the buildings collapsing.

Over and over.  Again and again.  From different angles.

I finally decided I might as well get used to it: We're going to be seeing it the rest of our lives — in our media, in our culture, in our sleep.

For a time, I tried radio, just so I wouldn't have to see it the eighty-first time.  I was listening to someone's too-graphic description when it hit me: This was how our parents and grandparents experienced Pearl Harbor.  On the radio.

I love radio but I've never fully bought the bromide that hearing something has greater impact than seeing it.  Radio, they claim, engages out imaginations and I suppose it does.  Still, Orson Welles in his prime could not have induced the horror and helplessness we all felt Tuesday morning, watching the planes hit, seeing the towers implode.  This was beyond all imagination.

If it leads to World War III or anything close, we ought to be even better girded than what some now call "The Greatest Generation."  When our Pearl Harbor occurred, we were there.

As always happens in time of calamity, our thoughts turn quickly from the problem to the solution: How do we make certain this never happens again?

There are no easy solutions but I'd like to throw out one probably-silly suggestion.  Forgive me for even mentioning the notion but could we perhaps care about this as much as we care about, say, partisan politics?  Or other peoples' sex lives?  For the last few weeks, my TV screen has been filled with a leering, huffy inquiry into the dating habits of an obscure Modesto congressman.

One of the nation's leading interview shows — with the jurisdiction and clout to interview anyone on any topic — is Larry King Live on CNN.  In the month of July, Larry King aired 21 programs.  Gary Condit and Chandra Levy were the sole topic of 15 of those shows, and they were discussed on several others.  That's an amazing amount of airtime when you consider that everything that is known, really known about the case could probably be summarized in under ten minutes, and that it really has little bearing on your life or mine.

Meanwhile…

In January of this year, a bipartisan Defense Department-chartered commission on national security recommended 50 steps that they felt needed to be undertaken in order to prevent domestic acts of mass destruction.  In its summary, the report proclaimed that, "the combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack."

How much air time on Larry King Live do you think has been devoted this year to this now-suddenly-hot topic?  (Answer: None.  Maybe if the terrorists were boffing interns —?)

How many articles in the press have there been?  How many televised discussions?  How many debates in Congress?

The commission pointed out an enormous problem.  How many hours did our leaders devote to implementing solutions?  (Answer: Same as above.  But you can bet every member of the House and Senate either issued a statement about Gary Condit or pondered how to sidestep the question.)

Tuesday afternoon, we saw the heads of both houses of Congress, Democrat and Republican, appear together on the capitol steps to proclaim solidarity and the set-aside of partisan divides.  "We must all work together," they said over and over, in so many ways.

It was a nice moment and a splendid photo-op.  But what I wanted to yell at my set was: "GREAT, GUYS!  BUT WHY CAN'T YOU DO THAT ALL THE TIME?"

Why in the names of Trent Lott and Tom Daschle do thousands of innocent Americans have to die horrendous deaths before we start acting like maybe, just maybe, we're all in this together?  Is it a sudden revelation that there are people on this planet who fantasize about killing a lot of Americans?

In 1996, we're now tragically reminded, Osama bin Laden issued a "fatwah" — a religious ruling urging Muslims to kill U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia.  Coming from a man who'd already presided over the murder of 18 U.S. servicemen in Mogadishu, you'd think that would have rousted our leaders to some action.

But no.  Our Congress and the White House spent most of 1996 hurling accusations at one another, staging an election that, at times, seemed to be only about Bob Dole's age and Bill Clinton's genitalia.

Then in 1998, Osama bin Laden announced a second fatwah, demanding savage attacks on American citizens.  As I recall, our leaders spent most of 1998 impeaching Bill Clinton.  That certainly made us all a lot safer.

In January of this year, when the above-described report was issued, it didn't get a lot of attention.  Did you hear a word about it?  I didn't, and I just did an Internet search that could find no mention of it older than about six hours.  However, in the first month of this year, we all heard plenty about…

Who President Clinton had pardoned…

The condition in which his staff allegedly left their offices…

And whether Democrats would sink George W. Bush's nominations as "payback" for past Republican torpedoes.

Three weeks ago, Osama bin Laden told journalists that his followers would carry out "an unprecedented attack" on the United States.  At least, that's what the London-based Arabic newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, is now saying.  Even assuming it's true, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference.  Three weeks ago, this country's attention was directed at the following outrage of vastly more importance…

When Gary Condit was interviewed by Connie Chung, even though we all knew he'd had an affair with Chandra Levy, he wouldn't say so in explicit terms.

We all knew he'd had the affair.  He'd told the police he'd had the affair and he admitted it to Ms. Chung in discreet lingo.  Connie then spent 20-24 minutes of a 30-minute interview trying to get him to say, "Yeah, I did her."  And because he wouldn't, our forums of public discourse — the news shows, the editorials, the chat rooms — were filled quickly with hatred of Gary Condit.

Hatred.  Some used that verb: "I hate Gary Condit."

Today, I wonder what those people say about the conspirators who destroyed several blocks of New York City and murdered thousands of our friends and relatives.  What term adequately conveys the Condit-haters' (presumably) stronger feelings about the hijackers?

Maybe we should reserve the word "hate" for special occasions — say, for when innocent men and women are brutally and deliberately killed.  Remember that when you "hate" the next Adam Sandler movie.

I am not suggesting that we ignore trivial matters — I make my living off trivia and, God knows, always will.  I am not even defending Condit who, for all we know, may have committed a crime that warrants some amount of our anger.  But as I write this, there's not a shred of evidence that he did, and the amount of anger and interest seems to me, at the very least, premature.  And, worse, distracting.

There's nothing wrong with trivia just so long as someone, somewhere is paying heed to the important matters.  In this country, we expect that of two groups of people: Those who run the government and those who report on them…

Our elected officials and the press.

We have a saying in super-hero comic books: "With great power comes great responsibility."  No, the people in those two groups probably could not have told us what a few dozen madmen would do Tuesday morning.  The chilling advantage that terrorists have on us is that they are willing to do the unthinkable; the kind of thing that we, as reasonable people, cannot conceive of anyone ever doing.

But our representatives and our reporters could have told us something was likely to happen.  That commission knew.

We could have started the process that has to begin now, sadly after the fact, of how to combat suicide attacks on American soil.  We need to tell our elected officials, "Hey, fellas!  Spend a little less time on stained blue dresses and flag-burning and trying to gin up scandals about one another, and a little more on things that get innocent people killed."

Today, watching TV and roaming the Internet, I see America at its best and worst.  I see it sad, I see it shocked, I see it angry.  I see people who are so out of their skulls with rage that they probably resemble the kind of person who would seize the controls of a Boeing 767 and fly it into the side of a building.  I see people who are so scared, they're deciding which civil rights we can well do without.

As the initial trauma fades, it gives way to reminders of how good we are, how good we can be: Folks queuing up for blocks to donate blood, strangers comforting one another, businesses opening or closing their doors as best serves their communities, acts of heroism among the rescue workers.

We need to cling to that America and not to the aspect of our national character that divides us into two camps and lives to destroy the opposition.  For now, our leaders talk like leaders but, just a few notches down the food chains, you already have Democrats trying to figure how to pin this on Republicans, and Republicans trying to fathom how they can use this against Democrats.

You have people who hate Bill Clinton trying to jury-rig some way that this is his fault, and those who hate George W. Bush whipping up arguments that he's culpable.

You have those who favor the so-called "Star Wars" missile proposal arguing that this proves we need it.  You have those who oppose it arguing back that this proves it won't help.

It's that way on too many Internet sites that advocate strong positions: For gun control, against gun control; pro-choice, pro-life; lax immigration; no immigration; even gay rights versus its opposition.  I don't think the last jet had even crashed before some of these factions started spinning, asking themselves, "How can we use this to advance our cause?"

Well, I'm no better than they are.  I'm going to try and use it to advance my cause.  My cause is that we need fewer causes taken to the extreme that they pit us against one another, and divert our attention and resources from real enemies.  We all just saw what a real enemy can do.

My cause is that we embrace that we are a great, intelligent and compassionate nation.  It's a sin to abandon the compassion and to funnel all that greatness and intelligence into trivial, partisan squabbles and "gotcha" politics and journalism.

The number one function of government was defined by Gouverneur Morris and the co-authors of our Constitution.  It's to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

Tuesday morning, we got None of the Above.

We can blame it all on this season's Foreign Madman and his insane, fanatical followers and, of course, they deserve every condemnation now being heaped upon them.  They must be — they will be — tracked down, slaughtered, put on trial, martyred, executed, whatever.  Some of that, I hope and suspect, will occur before this reaches you.

But in the long range, the way to prevent the next Foreign Madman is for the United States to try something novel: Being united.

And it shouldn't take what happened Tuesday to make that happen.  It just shouldn't.