(Fwd) Eyewitness Account Of The WTC Attack: A Hard Rain By Jonathan Wallace

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

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Date sent:      	Tue, 11 Sep 2001 21:28:04 -0400
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From:           	Matthew Gaylor <freematt@COIL.COM>
Subject:        	Eyewitness Account Of The WTC Attack: A Hard Rain By Jonathan
             	Wallace
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From: jw@bway.net
To: freematt@coil.com
Subject: A hard rain
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 00:54:03 GMT

Every morning these days I take the subway from Brooklyn Heights to
the World Trade Center, where I catch the PATH train to Newark. I
arrived at WTC at 9 this morning, exited the subway and walked through
the long underground passageway to WTC One. Usually there is a
violinist there, and he often is playing the Godfather theme around
the time I get there. I didn't notice him this morning.

I could tell something was going on by the way people were milling
around, and by the unusual crush of people trying to exit to the
street up a staircase not usually so crowded. A uniformed subway
employee was standing there, telling us we could not proceed through
the door to the World Trade Center, and for a public official
directing human traffic, she was unusually hysterical: "There are
terrorists....go back that way," gesturing towards the subway. And
most of the crowd started off obediently back towards the trains.

At that moment the people going up the stairs began running down the
stairs back into the passageway. I decided to go upstairs, against the
flow, partly out of idiot curiosity, partly because if something was
happening I felt safer in the open than in a tin can in a narrow
tunnel.

On the street, I could see that WTC One was burning from its upper
stories; curlicues of paper were floating down, glittering in the
light, an eerily beautiful and incongruous effect. I saw people
running past, some of them crying, as I stood immobilized, watching
the flames.

Then there was an explosion, and fragments of glass rained down on my
head. I saw a huge hole in the roof of a building two blocks from
World Trade Center. I thought there were incoming projectiles of some
kind, missiles or mortars, and began running away from the burning
buildings, up Church Street to Chambers, wondering what would blow up
next. At some point, as emergency vehicles sped past with screaming
sirens towards the disaster, I concluded that the best thing I could
do was make a run for the Brooklyn Bridge and walk home to Brooklyn
Heights, so I headed that way down Chambers. My brain was clicking
over very quickly: the municipal buildings might be another target,
and I had to pass close to them to get to the bridge; or terrorists
might blow up a van in the middle of the bridge itself and try to
bring it down with the hundreds of people crossing it on foot,
escaping lower Manhattan.

There's another click that happens: fuck it, I could blow up
anywhere, I'm just going to do the best I can. I hesitated a moment at
the entry to the bridge,  watching the two towers burning, thinking
about the people who were dying and suffering there. A van, driven by
two Arab-looking men, proceeded slowly onto the bridge; I let it get
far ahead of me then started to walk, looking back over my shoulder
repeatedly at the burning towers.

Someone behind me shouted, "There are people jumping!" and I turned to
see a black dot, almost certainly a human dot, fall from the top of a
tower.

I was on the bridge about a half-hour. The lane into Manhattan was
closed to everything but emergency vehicles but the roadway to
Brooklyn was packed with cars, some of them stopping midway on the
bridge while the occupants got out to look at the flames. I heard a
bang and flinched around to see that a driver opening his door had hit
a motorcycle, throwing its riders to the ground; motorcyclist and
driver started screaming into each other's faces in typical New York
style--"You shouldn't have been white-lining!"--an expression I had
never heard before.

A few minutes after I got home I was watching live coverage on CNN as
World Trade Center 2 collapsed, then building 1 a few minutes later.

This afternoon a report that no attempt is being made to search the
wreckage of the building looking for survivors until the fires burn
out....Two hundred firefighters are missing, and 78 police. No-one
will even venture to say how many people total are entombed in the
wreckage tonight.

I went to give blood at an over-whelmed Red Cross center where they
sent us away and told us to come back in a few hours.  But when I came
back they had run out of supplies and closed, as had the other center
in the neighborhood.

I am watching the endless recycling of the same news on CNN. Where is
our government? With the exception of the White House counsel, who
gave a brief press conference, the only talking heads on CNN are
ex-government types; they found Henry Kissinger, but the President,
the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense are all in hiding,
perhaps in some simalacrum of the War Room from Dr. Strangelove:
"Gentlemen, you can't fight here, Its the War Room."

  Right now an expert on CNN is saying, "The plane was the bomb." The
terms of reference changed today. Planes are bombs, the World Trade
Center can fall, and the President is hiding. The police and
firefighters, who are supposed to rescue us, are standing by and
letting the flames burn out because it is too dangerous to go in.

I thought of Bob Dylan: the glass I picked out of my hair an hour
later was a hard rain.

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

I'm left with a few mixed, jangling thoughts. As I wrote in last
month's Spectacle, http://www.spectacle.org/0801/shield.html, why
bother building the National Missile Defense, a classic example of
fighting the last war, when the next war--the current war--will be
fought using our own planes as bombs?

I think that monsters exist among us. Considering how easy it turned
out to be to bring down the federal building in Oklahoma City with a
truckful of fertilizer, the only reason more people haven't done
something like it is because we have some sort of internal governor
that makes most of us not want to. And planes haven't previously been
used as bombs this way because people who could fly them were
restrained, possibly by this governor, and possibly by a stronger one,
the desire not to die. But the governors are weaker than they were,
while the technology gets stronger. CNN kept reporting that the Trade
Center buildings were built to resist a hit from a 707, but when 737's
and 767's were invented, there was no way to upgrade them.

But we are not unresponsible for the monsters; they are responsible
for themselves, certainly, as moral actors, but we did our part in
their creation. We funded and trained the Afghanistan resistance
against the Russians, who later turned on us; but more than that, when
we squeeze people and crush them, make them live in humiliation and
without the air and water, autonomy and self respect necessary to
sustain them as humans, we make monsters. Any chaotic outsider on the
margins can kill himself in order to take out others, but when the
first Israeli Arab fifty-three year old politician does it (as
happened last week) or the first pilot does it (as happened today) we
must take notice.

What happens next I don't really know, but I know what I fear: that we
will embark, like the Israelis and Palestinians, on a mindless spasm
of killing and counter-killing;  that civil liberties and freedom of
speech will be curtailed; that the president, with his powerful
backers, his deer-in-the-headlights look and his primitive philosophy,
will not see the line before crossing it, or won't care.

Getting out of Manhattan this morning, out from the shadow of the
burning towers, was like a walk in the park, compared to what I think
is going to come.

I tried to read this morning's newspaper this afternoon, but the
pre-bombing news seemed irrelevant, like news from twenty years ago.

[Note from Matthew Gaylor: Jonathan Wallace is a long time subscriber
to Freematt's Alerts, a NYC Software executive and publisher of The
Ethical Spectacle http://www.spectacle.org. ]


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