Posted: 10 Sep 2013 09:52 AM PDT
For a while, the eyes
still seemed to see them there, perfect straight lines rising into the sky,
an empty space on the horizon that your mind filled in without even thinking.
You walked past, and thought, "Of course they're there. They're always
there" and 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.
New York, the old
grimy bustling city, has made way for two cities. The Bloombergian city of
the yuppie toting a bag of organic groceries to her Citibike and the
miniature Detroits of housing projects and endless grievances.
The old imaginary city still exists in the countless movies being filmed on
every block where space aliens, monsters and superheroes regularly rampage
past stereotypical cabbies with Brooklyn accents, but that city is fading
away.
The tourists flock to see the shadow of that city which lingers on like the
shadow of the towers.
On September 11, Ground Zero was New York. Today you can see Mexican and
African vendors peddling commemorative patriotic knickknacks made in China
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.
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. People ask each other where they were that day but the
stories grow fainter each year and the memories of walking across the
Brooklyn Bridge, stumbling through the ash or handing out sandwiches to
rescue workers have dimmed.
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 covering every face and
dark trucks filled with grim men tearing apart the street asphalt. You can
catch glimpses of a city reeling from the incomprehensible.
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, legs lying in a
puddle of blood, gawking children and stern cops 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 legs and
more frowning police... 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
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.
Most
people who live here have given up on solving the city's detective stories.
The weathered New Yorker is expected to meet the inexplicable with a
shrug of the shoulders. Everything is strange, but the strangeness is the
point. Everyone is living in a postmodern detective story with no solutions
and no need for them.
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 collisions of characters.
There is still a murder to be solved 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. 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 men who during the day sell papers
or drive food trucks.
The murderers are still on the loose and what happened that terrible day 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.
Bin Laden is dead, but the Muslim Oilsphere is full of other wealthy sons
warring against the West. His backers are 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 can rest
easy. They can even open up a mosque at Ground Zero.
This conflict of ideologies and collision of cultures is nothing less than
the perpetuation of the great Islamic crusade 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 for some to
understand that the attackers were motivated by those differences. Their war
against us is an attack on people who are fundamentally and incomprehensibly
different than they are.
Islam is xenophobia written into unholy writ, a long chain of conquest,
subjugation and cultural destruction by desert nomads who know how to drive a
sharp bargain, but despite their claims of golden ages and scientific
discoveries, 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 and then destroying them so that they can never get it back.
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, flailing poets, real estate mavens without a dime and
brokers trading thin air gamble on the impossible. New York always seems on
the verge of total anarchy and destruction and yet keeps going on in that
strange half-mad creativity.
For Islam, the game is zero sum. If American civilization
thrives, then their civilization is shadowed. If people are happy here, then
they cannot be happy. If there are two towers in New York, that detracts from
the glory of Islamic 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 the glory 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 some difficulty he might accept the existence of a small number of
people who think this way, but an entire civilization built in this mold is
too obscene an idea.
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.
Outside a shadow war is waged with drones and hackers, spies and journalists,
men in mosques speak quietly of terror and other men listen over the phone.
There is little truth in this shadow war, but in some moments the light
pierces the darkness and those who have forgotten why we are doing this,
remember. And then they remember to forget.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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