9/11: five years later
S. SHANKAR
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What has been achieved in the years since the Twin Towers came crashing down?
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Osama is still free, and the war on terror shows no sign of ending, even as the American public grows tired of their country's continued entanglement in ceaseless conflict.
PHOTO: AP
Macabre view: The twin towers will never rise over New York again.
FIVE years have passed since the assault on New York City by the ruthless emissaries of Osama Bin Laden on September 11, 2001. Before they were brought crashing down that fateful day, I could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center from the building in New Jersey in which my office was located.
As it happened, I was in New York that day, working at home, and so I did not stand at the windows of the building, as many of my colleagues did, staring at the macabre view of smoke billowing out from the buildings and over the skyline of the city itself, the very quintessence of everything modern for millions of people across the globe.
In the days immediately after 9/11, everything felt different in the urbane city. The 1990s were great years for New York — or rather, more accurately, the richest and flashiest of New Yorkers, those who flowed seemingly endlessly into Manhattan, driving rents and real estate prices up, up and up, so that the working poor and even the middle class were increasingly squeezed out of neighbourhoods, including those that they had in fact reclaimed to live in and, by their living, made liveable. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the divided city seemed to forget its divisions. Clichés began to ring true — all the city's residents were helpful neighbours, all its men were tall, all its women caring.
Tragic touch
And who could dare deny that it was so, that all this was indeed true? It is in the nature of events like 9/11 to make truths out of clichés. They sanctify with their tragic touch. No one who died in the attacks deserved to die, not in this way. Terrorism is indiscriminate in its violence; or, if you prefer, much too righteous in its notion of guilt and innocence. And because terrorism is so, it makes towering saints of its victims. People like to say there are two sides to every story. But when it comes to an event like 9/11, many behave as if there is only one — the side of the saints of 9/11.
The consequences of such onesidedness are great. To thousands of people in far-flung corners of the globe — in Afghanistan and Iraq and in other places — they are as great as the consequences were to the saints of 9/11. Thousands in these places (by now in far greater numbers than died in New York and elsewhere on 9/11) have already paid for that fateful day with their lives as the armies of Britain and the U.S. rain missiles and bombs from the sky.
A superpower goaded to vengeance is indiscriminate in its pursuit of the terror of war; or, if you prefer, much too righteous in its notion of guilt and innocence. Thus, more sanctity enters the world, only now on the other side.
The saints of 9/11 stand ranged against the saints of the torture cells of Abu Ghraib and the murdered innocents of Haditha and countless other villages and towns across the "New Middle East". These other saints too did not deserve to die, not in this way. They too are all without blemish now.
Who could ever do the grisly arithmetic here? What matchless accountant could ever balance this ledger book of tragedy to even a single person's satisfaction?
Five years after. New York is the same beguiling city that it ever was, imperial and self-indulgent and narcissistic and liberal and tolerant and welcoming, all at the same time. Immigrants flow into the new America as they did into the old, even as many Americans grow more and more vocal in their opposition to their arrival. Osama is still free, and the war on terror shows no sign of ending, even as the American public grows tired of their country's continued entanglement in ceaseless conflict.
Memorial
What has been achieved in the five years? In the arithmetic of saints the answer will always come out to zero. What we need is not arithmetic, but something else altogether. A memorial is in the planning for where the towers of the World Trade Center stood, but the towers themselves will never again rise over New York.
The hole at the heart of this great American city, for better or for worse the most potent symbol we have for modern civilisation, cannot be measured by the arithmetic of revenge. Nor can the hole at the heart of the "New Middle East" that we are being told is being born in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere in West Asia by the British and the American leaders.
Anniversaries and arithmetic are for remembering, which is important and necessary in its time and its place. But forgetting too has its time and place.
If Americans, and indeed all the good people in India and in the world at large, memorialise 9/11 today, can we tomorrow fail to memorialise the hundred tragedies — many the result of deliberate American policy in the pursuit of oil and other economic and political interests in West Asia — that led to 9/11?
If all we do is remember, when is there time to stop more tragedies, more occasions for bitter memorialising, from entering the world?
Multiply 9/11 by 5? Maybe you shouldn't.
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