That Infamous Day 20 Years Later

I’m hardly able to write about that day as its memory is still raw.  Also now with hindsight there is the realization it hastened what had already been underway:  economic and political forces tearing away our society from within.  Today we are left with things spiraling out of control and now we are even unable to come together to fight a virus that has claimed the lives of three hundred times the number of people who died on 9/11, almost as many American lives who died in all wars since the American Revolution.   We have a vaccine and the ability to impose mask mandates, yet corrosive politics and culture wars have weakened American resolve and unity, an attribute that was in full bloom during WW II and briefly, oh so briefly, after that fateful day of 9/11.

As I am so disheartened by the reality of what is and what might have been, not to mention, where we are going as a nation, I prefer to borrow and edit some of my prior writings about this day and its consequences, including a small portion of my book Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense.

World Trade Center Bicentennial 1976

Although it seems like yesterday, we all (of a certain age) remember where we were at that moment.  The only comparable instant in my life is remembering where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky.  We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers.  To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity.  Did this really happen here?  My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC.  They lost 685 employees on that fateful day.  Jonathan decided to take another job.  Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes?  Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day.  One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”  May we never forget:

“9/11/2001

By Chris Hagelstein

Terrorist troops and bodies strewn

in Twin Tower screams, destruction loomed.

News stations on a journalistic mission

under our Flag's lost transmission:

America's Death.

 

Judgement of Religious Decree

driving Boeing bombs with air fuel

circulating vultures from above the sea,

smashing their prey

on this plain sun-filled day.

 

Television digital debris rained on video,

Looping the same sequence of carnage.

The surgery of media controlled the flow

but the State of Blood remained unknown.

 

Prayers beneath each citizen’s eyes

were blessed wells now, for those who died.

No ceremony or speech could render a conclusion:

Those wired images played seemed like an illusion.

 

An Eye of some god was seeing us All

for each one's Blindness, was another’s Call,

and in the skies above Manhattan, masked in smoke

exhumed old gods of hatred and hope.

 

If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life,

It could not compete with what witnessed, I:

Buildings falling and heroes crushed:

As day burned to night

and life --- to dust.

 

Still, yet, in my hearts dismay,

Born here, I stand, no less bleeding

than those who survived this day:

For America is my body and my sea

executed on the stage of history.”

His poem is a first-hand emotional account of the horror and the hope.  This is how we all felt and I remember our country briefly coming together.  Unfortunately, Trump “remembers” it divisively, saying,” Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering….It was on television. I saw it.”

I give President Bush credit for going to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. less than a week after the tragedy to deliver a speech "Islam is Peace" to the American people and to reassure Muslim Americans.  It is the easy path to foment racial hatred after such an event as Trump did and still does, but Bush had a different message: “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.“

By the time President Obama was elected the economy was already deteriorating and political divisiveness, such as the rise of the Tea Party, was beginning to build to a crescendo and that’s about the time I innocently started my writing, more for personal reasons, but it quickly morphed into a mission to present the observations and views from the grassroots.  I’ve written it for 14 years now, albeit with decreasing frequency.

Since 9/11 I’ve deliberately avoided films, documentaries, non-fiction and fictional works about that day.  It and its consequences are just too terrible to relive.  But nonetheless, it was unavoidable that my reading would lead me to that day, this happenstance out of the blue.  And it was from an unexpected source, my favorite writer, John Updike.  What I didn’t know, but found out later, that he was visiting family in Brooklyn Heights, and watched the event unfold from there.  Typical Updike, his real life experience became conflated with his fiction in his last short story collection, My Father’s Tears.  

So it was with some trepidation when I realized that his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.”  The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety.  Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day.  One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to be a source of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegaard, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.”  And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.”  How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God?

 

Look to “Letters From An American”

 

When I began this blog it very quickly found its way into political matters.  Maybe it was the path of least resistance or the topic that most “needed” my opinion.  It led to my first book, Waiting for Someone To Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and the Decline of Sense.  Although I had to explain the mysterious title (Eugene Ionesco once wrote “as the world is incomprehensible to me, I am waiting for someone to explain it”), the subtitle, chosen during the reign of Trump, is self explanatory.

Over the years, my writing interests changed and, in fact, I became downright cynical trying to write about our increasingly fractious body politic and as divisive voices swelled I mostly withdrew from the conversation.  Also, writing in the COVID era became oppressive.  All the theatre and live music we loved disappeared, and these acrid politics leaked into public health, one exacerbating the other. 

Still there are topics I just cannot ignore and although I know little about Afghanistan, I know who to turn to and that is Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who set out, in a way like I did, to write a “journal.”  There are vast differences, though.  She approaches each topic in a scholarly fashion, documenting her opinions, and is extremely disciplined, writing each day on Substack in the form of an email to her subscribers.  It’s free unless you want to post comments.  I’ve come to rely on her analyses as a source of the facts behind the events. 

Richardson’ posting about August 26 (see the entire entry by subscribing with your email address) is a fully understandable discussion, to the point, of the quagmire called Afghanistan.  Here is the essence of her argument as she puts it:

I confess to being knocked off-keel by the Republican reaction to the Kabul bombing.

The roots of the U.S. withdrawal from its 20 years in Afghanistan were planted in February 2020, when the Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban agreeing to release 5000 imprisoned Taliban fighters and to leave the country by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban did not kill any more Americans. The negotiations did not include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the time Biden took office, the U.S. had withdrawn all but 2500 troops from the country.

That left Biden with the option either to go back on Trump’s agreement or to follow through. To ignore the agreement would mean the Taliban would again begin attacking U.S. service people and the U.S. would both have to pour in significant numbers of troops and sustain casualties. And Biden himself wanted out of what had become a meandering, expensive, unpopular war. Letters From An American © 2021 Heather Cox Richardson

The devil is in the details so best that it be read in its entirety.

Meanwhile, I fear that the self righteous Republicans, who only recently were criticizing Biden for not withdrawing from Afghanistan sooner, will gleefully use this as a fulcrum to “steal” the Midterm elections.  On the surface it is a blunder of major proportions, not to mention the cost to innocent lives and more of our troops.  But as all things historical, retrospect with a political motive is a different lens than clearly seeing events as they unfold.  No doubt they (especially the Trumpublicans) will make hay while the sun is shining on their hypocritical countenance.  As usual, nothing tells it as succinctly and dramatically as a political cartoon, this one from the Palm Beach Post August 27.

 

“Freedom” for the Few at the Expense of All

 “(They) care little for our freedom, they care little for our aspirations and little for our happiness. No more! We can’t let it happen going forward,” Governor Ron DeSantis said recently at the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in Utah.  This is how he characterized “Faucism.” He boasted about Florida’s efforts to reject mask mandates, vaccine passports, and allow schools to reopen without masks.  He did not boast about Florida’s highest COVID infection and positivity rates in the nation.

 

DeSantis is commonly referred to as #DeathSantis on Twitter as he climbs over the bodies of Floridian citizens and the overwhelmed state’s health care systems in his blind ambition to be the Republican candidate for President in 2024.  He, along with other populist, Trump Mini-Me Governors, have taken the position that some basic precautions, such as returning to wearing masks, violate the “freedom” of their citizens to make a choice, not to mention getting the vaccination itself.

This absurdity has even embraced the distorted logic that we, the responsible vaccinated, are to blame for “disrespecting” the unvaccinated.

Can it be more than three months that I wrote a guest column on this very topic for our local Palm Beach Post?  And it didn’t change the world?

 

I’m no longer merely disrespecting “leaders” such as DeathSantis, but I am furious at him and other acolytes of the Trumpian vision, a transactional world where plutocrats can tap into populist sentiment and use it for their own benefit and not for the greater good.

I make the point in my article but I will reiterate it.  One of the roles of government is to protect the public health.  It took years of battling over the “rights” of smokers to light up anywhere they wanted until, finally, there was an acceptance of long-standing scientific evidence that second hand smoke kills.  Imagine, public health laws went into effect to ban smoking in public places.  The “freedom lovers” finally learned to comply.  We don’t have the time to wait for them to comply with vaccinations and masking.  Stay at home if you think your freedom transcends the greater good!

It is true that the CDC’s messaging over the pandemic has not been on the mark at times, but all along they warned that unless herd immunity was reached, we ALL would be at risk for the development of a variant that could overwhelm the defenses of even the vaccinated.  Well, we are there.  And where is the CDC’s message on booster shots which seem to be inevitable?  The lack of transparency on the subject is distressing.  Where is the data on the inevitable effectiveness waning of vaccination? It is known that this decline is more substantial among the elderly.

We personally have been impacted by the “freedom” exercised by the lemmings (I wholeheartedly disrespect them) who listen to FOX-made-up truths and friends like DeathSantis.  We had planned a long delayed trip to visit friends and family (all vaccinated) in the northeast.  We made all our bookings in May as things had improved substantially by then.  We felt confident, finally liberated from quarantine prison. But as positivity rates rose to more than 20% here in Florida, and the culture wars over mask wearing and vaccinations raged, out of an abundance of caution we were forced to cancel those plans.

Perhaps younger people gathering in clubs, concerts, etc. don’t care whether they spend some time in the ER, but people our age have just so much time left and for us to be denied our “freedom” because of this culture and disinformation war is an injustice. 

But the truly upsetting statistic is the large number of the US adult population – about 30% who say they’ll never get vaccinated (compare to 8% in Canada, a civilized country).   Maybe deny them admittance to the ERs?  Tough it out!  Go to the Governor’s mansion?

This situation would be bad enough if we were talking about only the Delta variant and our poor response.  But long term the Republicans are positioning themselves as the dystopian party of the minority who can still exercise control.  Republican-dominated legislatures are passing laws to make it more difficult to vote and giving themselves the ability to override state election officials.  They are in fact making it legitimate to “steal the vote.” Until now, it was merely their self-propagated myth.

"Philip Roth," an Encyclopedic Biography by Blake Bailey

 

Cynthia Ozick, a fellow intellectual, a long time friend of Philip Roth, wrote THE review of Blake Bailey’s biography, Philip Roth.  She says that “its nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude.”  I was thinking Dickensian in its cast of characters and encyclopedic magnitude.  If Bailey’s biography is definitive, Ozick’s review of the biography is equally authoritative,

I’ve accumulated some ten pages of notes on Roth’s remarkable life and achievements from this biography, but to what end?  I still have that habit from college days: taking notes.  But looking them over, and having read Ozick’s review, I am tossing all that detail to simply mull about general themes. 

There has been much controversy regarding Roth choosing Bailey to write his biography, the general theme being one misogynist finding another.  This has been fodder for the cancel culture and to me nonsense, completely irrelevant to what Bailey has accomplished.  I addressed that controversy in this entry and although it makes reference to my Kindle edition, I successfully acquired the original clothbound edition, which has always been my preference reading this 2 to 3 pound tome (and taking notes!) mostly in bed in the evening.

From Bailey’s acknowledgements:  “[Roth’s] cooperation was honorable and absolute. He gave me every particle of pertinent information, no matter how intimate, and let me make of it what I would (after telling me, often exhaustedly, what I ought to make of it)….One lovely sun-dappled afternoon I sat on his studio couch, listening to our greatest living novelist empty his bladder [at a nearby bathroom], and reflected that this is as good as it gets for an American literary biographer.”    I think Roth would be pleased by the results, even where Bailey strays from what Roth might have wanted, by the sheer detailed shaping of his life, an ocean into which the reader is totally immersed.

This is as much a treatise on the art of writing, at least at the level that Roth wrote, as it is the details of his life.  His commitment to writing, except for brief interludes, primarily because of health, was absolute.  In his Connecticut home that meant from morning to late afternoon in his separate studio, with a brief break for lunch, usually with someone staying with him at the time, his wife, his friend, or his current lover.  Like Updike, who he generally admired although also greatly in competition with, he could compartmentalize his writing routine, leading to 31 novels.  I wonder whether he (Updike) worked with as much angst as did Roth.  While both novelists saw themselves as the leading writers of their generation, I see (in my mind) Roth with his shoulder to the plow, compared to Updike seemingly effortlessly toiling in the fields of fiction.  This is not to distract from the accomplishments of either, both capturing the American experience in their writing from different perspectives.  Yet, neither writer won the Nobel Prize; disgraceful. This had more to do with the politics of the Prize than it did with their work.

This biography spoke directly to me because of place.  Most of his adult life Roth lived on the Upper West Side of NYC and in Warren CT.  As fame and fortune mounted, he would buy up adjacent apartments and renovate his CT house to include a separate writing studio.  Roth’s roots eventually ran deep in Connecticut and the Upper West Side and I understand why, and can even feel it having lived in both places.

He was only nine years older than I am so the historical bookmarks of his life are indelibly imprinted in me as well.  As Bailey writes about Roth, there is a sensory recollection of the times we shared.  Even without this personal factor, anyone who reads this biography will be struck by its intimacy.  This is more than the story of a life well lived and of an extraordinary man, but one gets to know him like a good friend, accepting his foibles as well as reveling in his accomplishments.  It’s as if Bailey has positioned him as a protagonist in a novel, one with whom we deeply empathize.

His first wife, Maggie, tricked him into marriage through a fake pregnancy test.  She was a troubled woman who had two kids.  Roth was good to them.  His second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote a scathing memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.  Roth wanted a “corrective biography.”  He got that and more from Bailey.

He was a man who gathered friends, lovers, disciples, ex-lovers who became friends or enemies, a man of enormous magnetism.  They, and the mind of the writer, through his alter ego fictional character Nathan Zuckerman, were fair game in Roth’s fiction.  In his copy of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” he noted “Family as the maker of character.  Family as the primary, shaping influence.  Unending relevance of childhood.”  Bailey opines, “For him it was consummately so, and hard to say where one parent ended and the other began in the formation of his own character.”  He brought this into his literature and into his relationships, even sometimes acting as an ersatz grandparent to the children of ex-girlfriends

Roth was a man of titanic intellect and he did not suffer fools.  Yet he was a man of great generosity, serving as a mentor to other writers, a teacher, a supporter of Czech dissidents, and as a savior to friends (frequently ex lovers).  It was not unusual for Roth to open up his wallet, sometimes anonymously, to help friends, or people who helped him, with education or even living expenses.  Several were there at the end.  He sometimes expected friends who he considered his intellectual equal to be readers of first drafts of his writings.

His political leanings were decidedly liberal, although sometimes libertarian.  He cried when FDR died.  He lampooned Richard Nixon (even being mentioned in the Watergate tapes, Nixon saying to Haldeman: “Roth, of course, is a Jew.”)  Reagan did not escape his political ire, “a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap-opera grandmother…and with the intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical….American–style philistinism run amuck.”  He privately thought George W. Bush was the reincarnation of “the devil.”  He didn’t live long enough to suffer and comment on the entire Trump Presidency, but a New Yorker article quotes him saying that Trump was “ignorant of government, of history, science, philosophy, or, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English.“  Bailey comments that he liked to say “I’m eagerly awaiting my White House tweet.“

I’ve written before of his decision to stop writing, and his interview on that subject only scratches the surface of his thoughts on the matter.  

Blake Bailey’s work is an important achievement.  Is it biased?  Perhaps, but is admiration a biased position?  Bailey introduced me to nuances in his fiction as well as works I have still not read.  Roth was concerned about the decline of the American novel and rightfully so.  Who can ever take his place? 

The sheer size of Blake Bailey’s work, more than 800 pages with almost 90 pages of footnotes (much of it from primary sources) and index, makes it a veritable encyclopedia of Philip Roth.  It is a labor of love and faultless scholarship.