Mike Woods
Tall trees blooming
bright & terrible
Flowers falling
Grief the only harvest
Emails keep flowing in. Reader Sue Jenner recommends http://www.stratfor.com/, usually a pay site, but free post the bombing. “Their perspectives are quite different to what we are hearing from the media and various governments,” she says.
Today, contributors on the big picture are: David Davis, Tony Clayton, an Australian in New York City, Don Williams, KC Lee, Devindar Samra, Greg Newbury.
Then, Sean Richardson and our regular media watch columnist Jack Robertson comment on media matters.
David Davis, an Australian in Switzerland
I lived in Kansas City, Missouri for two years and count a number of Americans amongst my closest friends, one of whom works in Lower Manhattan.
I had a teacher at school who used to praise us for the “sense of occasion” he thought we had. At the time, I thought it was an unusual compliment. Later in life I have come to understand it.
I, for one, will not be joining any debate on whether or not America must take “some responsibility for” last Tuesday’s carnage of innocents.
What a pathetic debate.
Tony Clayton of Sydney, in New York City
I am a Sydneysider living in New York and have, as has all of New York, been through a very emotionally volatile week. Only just tonight have I been able to just think to hell with it and have a few drinks with friends where the main subject isn’t the WTC. Yes! we actually talked about trivial and inane celebrity spottings, a film someone saw, someone who managed to get a flight out of here – ooops, that was related to ‘it’ again. Change subject.
But really, it has been totally bewildering. On Friday as we were trying to normalise our behaviour, Mayor Rudy recommended I just had to go to the Union Square candlelight vigil, just one of many spontaneous manifestations of public grief and examination. The thousands of people there were very quiet, sitting or standing with lit candles, writing messages or singing.
The general plea was that more murder really won’t be honouring the innocent victims of Tuesday’s attack but the overwhelming feeling was that a military response was a given. People just needed to gather to express their fear for what we all expect is coming but also there was a widespread admission of complicity that America and the west has been nurturing this sort of terrorism for decades. What is a couple of thousand though when the rest of the world is baying for blood?
Then by Saturday people were back out on the streets, going about the regular activities of shopping, eating, meeting friends. So am I, and met with friends for that NY perennial, brunch at The Coffee Shop on Union Square. It could have been anytime anyplace. The waitresses were too beautiful, the crowd rowdy, the jazz band the essence of cool.
The strain shows though, the strain to try very hard to talk about anything but this disaster, the strain to try very hard and remember life that was normal, the strain to try very hard to forget those visions of horror that overwhelmed us all on Tuesday morning.
As we leave The Coffee Shop a marching band passes by – another manifestation of the public outpouring of emotion. They extract cheers from all the passers-by for no real reason other that they represent an American ideal and are making themselves heard. If yesterday was a day of quiet reflection then today is the day for noisy discussion, which surely means that public anger will soon be mounting.
But by today, Sunday, the sun is out and the clouds are not. Today is as perfect an autumn day as you could ask for. It is tempting to limit experience of this beautiful day to the view from the window. To go out and interact with it would be impossible to do without acknowledging the cruel labour that is still taking place in the wreckage downtown. But to stay blissfully uninvolved in the 17th floor apartment that thankfully faces uptown is still hard work.
I look down to our neighbourhood and remember I was down there staring in shock as fire & smoke replaced the towers. I remember how strangely remote my neighbours were. I was charging around with tears streaking my face and people looked askance as if something was wrong with me. Normal conversations were taking place between gossiping old ladies who just glanced towards the disaster that was unfolding as if they were looking down the station for an expected train to arrive. I think the enormity of it all has taking a while for people to be able to process.
I venture out amongst it anyway and it almost feels normal. I meet up with a friend from an Australia who came to NY for business on Monday and has been stuck here since and it’s great to get into a bit of good old Aussie disrespect and laugh at the pompous Americans for a bit of light relief.
The talk here of bolstering up all the infrastructure for resistance to terrorism seems so preposterous. So the western world has to operate from within a cocoon so that we can remain safe from an unknown assailant. Surely this is an opportunity to start again & with a different approach.
If there is military action against those that the US would have us believe are responsible for this, then the further killings are just going to strengthen their resolve and make more martyrs to avenge. Whatever we do to protect ourselves there will always be something left vulnerable, some way for fanatics to exact their revenge and if this has been planned since the failed explosion in 1993, then they sure are patient and can wait until complacency sets in to attack once more.
How about trying to seek some sort of dialogue to redress the horrific imbalance of communication and wealth between the cultures. All very delicate and naive but surely worth some effort, as the result of global policies since the establishment of Israel only seems to be resulting in escalating bloodshed.
It feels very good to write it all down and somehow get it out of this uncomfortable pit at the bottom of my stomach. We can only hope that the policies put into action in the ensuing days and weeks will achieve the absolute best for humanity, but the widespread fear is that the reaction will just be a perpetuation of the primitive ‘eye for an eye’ mentality.
From my perspective, possibly New York is not the best position to await those developments.
Don Williams in Woodford, NSW
As an older man in Australia I have come to feel and know a total cynicism about the dialogue our politicians disgorge. Their lack of prescience is monumental.
I dont like feeling like this. It scares me.
If I were a young man in Remalla .. I would feel and know the following :
1/ Israel ignores United Nations resolutions. The USA veto in the security council stops any hope we can return to our land and homes. The USA is helping Israel persecute my family and the other 200,000 displaced persons living in refugee camps like this one over the past 30 years.
2/ I see the surrounding political structures as run by US supported Caliphs, Viziers and princes accumulating enormous wealth from the petro dollar – while their Arab citizenry is poor and without voice.
3/ I live in a refugee camp. My parents have been here for 30 years.
4/ I have no job and can not foresee improvement in my future.
5/ My father points to the land we once owned … and the house my mother was born in – all now lived in by Israelis ….some of them from the USA. All of them have come for their religious “ingathering”.
6/ The local Mulah fills my ears with the only way to cope …. and the only way to feel worthwhile as a human being.
7/ I am smart and the world uses much energy … just a little alteration to its intended use and it is dangerous. … I can do it.
It’s night time again and my sister goes with my mother to the tunnel we have built. And I hear the Helicopters coming ………..
K.C. Lee
The world was horrified by what it saw happened on the 11th. But we must be careful as to how our thinking and emotions are influenced by what we see or more correctly, what we do not see.
Were we more shocked by the bombing of the World Trade Centre as compared to say, the My Lai massacre, Bhopal or Rwanda, the bombing of the Kurds and Cambodians ? I suspect that most of us were. Some may say that My Lai was small in terms of the magnitude of death and destruction. Some may say Bhopal was an accident. Some may say that Rwandans brought it on themselves. But when is whether something big or small dependent on the number of deaths or the magnitude of destruction – try explaining to someone who lost a loved one that his/her loss is no big catastrophe. Try explaining to someone whose entire village was bombed that their loss is insignificant compared to the World Trade Centre.
Is a party more aggrieved by the fact that their grief, loss and suffering is televised around the world ? Then who speaks for those whose grief, loss and suffering is not known to us ? Is someone’s death less significant when they are poor? Are the “uncivilised” less entitled to life?
The American are suffering and my sympathies are with them but they must not think that they are the only people in the world suffering. Because they are insulated from the world’s suffering, they do not know of the suffering of others. And when they suffer, they think that they are the only ones.
Americans cannot see why people hate them – they cannot see how people see them. They feel righteous indignance but are not aware that others see it as self-righteousness, double standards and hypocrisy. They think U.S.A. represents goodness, freedom and liberty and the greatest democracy in the world but they fail to understand the terrible consequences of the terrible means by which they employ to achieve these ends.
How do the Americans reconcile in their minds that it is all right that the greatest democracy in the world employs the worst totalitarian governments in the world as proxies or allies to fight and protect her interests…and not expect anything terrible to come of it when friends become enemies?
Despite all these failures, no nation or people deserves what New York suffered on the 11th. But it will become worse. Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind”. Is a worthwhile point to argue who started it, if at the end of it, we all die from it?
The Americans should ask why someone who used to be a friend is now their enemy before they start a vortex of war which will consume us all.
Devindar Samra in Ashfield, Sydney
I don’t understand why people don’t seem to be able to make the distinction between a criminal of a particular ethnic/religious background and everyone else of that background.
By the argument of most the callers to our shock-jocks, the people who hijacked those planes were Muslim/Arab so all Muslims/Arabs are to blame and should be vilified.
If I were to take that to that argument and extrapolate, all Catholics and Protestants are also evil and should be eradicated because of the actions of the IRA and Unionists in Northern Ireland. Worse still, all people of caucasian descent are evil because of the actions of one Timothy Mcveigh.
Where does it stop? When will we stop punishing both the guilty and the innocent?
I fear for the world we are leaving our children when every action seems to be inducing an equal (and no less opposite) and reaction. We seem to be constantly going round this never-ending circle of violence, greed and selfishness.
War would only be playing into the terrorists’ hands because it justifies their actions. Perhaps we need to look at why there is so much hatred on both sides in the first place and then address the issues accordingly. Where are our leaders when we need them most to show us the enlightened way forward? Unfortunately the current sorry crop available are very much of the “Where are these people going? I must get to the front so I can lead them.” ilk.
Greg Newbury in Illawong, NSW
I have just visited some of the websites that some of your emailers have suggested we look at. The amount of hatred and violence that has been inflicted on so many innocent people around the world, and in particular the Middle East is just mind numbing (in fact very similar to the feeling I had while watching the New York City catastrophe unfold).
There is just so much “stuff” going down around this region that anything the American’s will do will not help or fix the problem of terrorism or the feeling of hatred that has built up over many many years. Far too much water over a long period of time.
Hatred and violence is rewarded with more hatred and violence, and this cycle is repeated exponentially. I am dismayed that the world has descended this far, I am certain that we have passed the point of no return.
Sean Richardson
To Clarence Oxford in The end of multiculturalism? I’d disagree that McGuinness et al should be muzzled. Certainly they’re desperately confused. We’re used to the literary right in Australia engaging in abuse-as-policy. Any article by Ackerman, McGuiness, Salusinszky etc will basically consist of the words “tree hugger”, “loony”, “Chardonay”, “latte”, “aboriginal industry” and of course “un-Australian” arranged in a different order. Concepts such as cause and effect or logic are notably absent, as they hilariously claim the intellectual high ground.
Still, the rest of us don’t want to turn into them. It is utterly disgusting that McGuinness is trying to take advantage of the recent attack to silence Australians who disagree with him on domestic social or economic policy. In Saturday’s piece he equates anyone who doesn’t vote One Nation with the terrorists.
The morality of this position is obvious to all of us over-educated loonies of the chardonay sipping aboriginal whaling industry: it’s Paddy who’s seeking to make political mileage from these murders. But remember the mileage he is going for lies in silencing his critics, and editors should not be pressured to adopt his un-democratic ideas, even against himself.
A far better outcome would be for some writers of moral courage, like Robert Manne, to be published more often and in the tabloids too. In terms of the balance of opinion piece writers, the populist far right always cries underdog, but the opposite is obviously the case both in print and on radio.
No, I won’t hold my breath either. Now I’m just waiting for Imre to blame the Australian Democrats, no doubt motivated by Uniting Church fundamentalism.
MEEJA WATCH
Such a thing as the bestial truth
By Jack Robertson
It’s gut-churningly symmetrical that CNN is defining the coverage of this tragedy.
CNN – both in technology and methodology – was born during the Gulf War. The round-the-clock, slightly surreal, video-heavy, instant-analysis tenor of media coverage that we are seeing again is a concerted but I suspect futile attempt to sustain what has long been an imperative of the media – a hunger for both proximity to and clinical detachment from the diabolically symbiotic pas de deux between Humanity’s intensifying appetite for anarchy and our impulse to rationalise it even as it’s unleashed.
From New York, we’ve seen both magnificent reportage – courageous American journalism at its very, very finest – and, increasingly now, bewildered chatter tending understandably towards an ‘explicable’ over-simplification. Still, to date in my view, the journalists in New York have been majestic.
But reportage has changed forever, too, and I hope to Christ for the better.
Like almost everyone else, I watch those jets ploughing into the buildings over and over again, with a mixture of awe and disbelief. And as a child of this Meeja Age, many jumbled thoughts arise as this nightmare unfolds. I’ve thought about Tom Clancy and American Pyscho, Towering Inferno and Godzilla, Jerry Springer and Oprah, Reality TV and Manufacturing Consent, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and Superbowl, Triumph of the Will and Schindler’s List and Wall Street and Dr Strangelove, JFK’s assassination footage, John Laws both spruiking for and then sneering at the banking sector, the Balibo Five, the Munich Post, Walter Kronkite at Khe San, Scuds falling on Tel Aviv, night-vision helicopter gunship footage of the carnage along the Basrah Road, Kate Couric and her off-sider doing Good Morning America from Homebush Bay, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’, my own Webdiary rants at the ‘Free’ Market, that crumpled Mercedes in the Paris underpass, the white bronco on the LA freeway, the lone tank-stopping hero at Tiannamen Square, burnt American airmen lying in the Iranian desert after the failed rescue attempt in 1979, the Omagh bombing, John Travolta’s Hollywood career rescued by Tarantino’s sexy, smacked-up hitman riff, the lucratively-hateful lyrics of Eminem, the latest brutal Playstation games, some of the sick WTC jokes you can already read on the Net, the ubiquity of camcorders, international currency traders adroitly upping the net worth of my own superannuation equity on the back of some breaking foreign bank, frantic mobile calls from hijacked jets leaving posthumous messages on answering machines, real-time satellite images of SAS assaults in faraway deserts, on and on this bewildering, relentless assault on our collective Human capacity to distinguish linear time from temporal blurring, reality from fiction, revealed bestial truth from ‘REVEALED!! BESTIAL TRUTH!!!!’.
(As I write, they’ve been talking about Pearl Harbour on CNN, but I can’t tell whether they mean the real McCoy or the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster. Several Hollywood films with awkward resonances have already been pulled from cinemas. Just now, CNN is running a summing-up of the last day or so, too – explosions, survivor soundbites, Presidential grabs, bitter tears, all complete with a syrupy, unnervingly John Williams-esque score.)
It’s as if all the most awful events and images of the twentieth century – fact, fiction, everything in between – has returned to haunt us, coalescing in one awful episode which in a way already seems ‘inevitable’, even at this obscenely short remove. All over the Western world, the Meeja is calling it a ‘loss of innocence’, and who can argue?
Yet it’s also ‘merely’ a terrible shattering of the comfortable Media Paradigm by which we in the West have contrived to protect our thinking and feeling Human selves from the truth of what we’ve occasionally got up to ourselves, an understandable (perhaps even necessary) philosophical sleight-of-hand based on cutting-edge media technology, determined irony and much nonsensical academic theorising about ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ and ‘power paradigms’. It’s been a mode of public conversation which has slowly inured us all against the terrible reality of bombs and guns and the banal bestiality of violence. It’s been evolving by default ever since the first images from Vietnam tried briefly to penetrate the quietude of our living room consciences, and we ultimately couldn’t bear to do anything but reject it out of hand.
I write all this with an awful, dawning sense of personal complicity and a sick, heavy heart. Whatever the ins-and-outs of all this, the frightening fact is that none of us should ever be able to watch footage of our Hero Fighter Pilots bombing a foreign city in the same way again. No journalist must ever accept a filthy, lying term like ‘collateral damage’ without bellowing in rage at the smug spin doctor who tries to sell it, either. That’s our media’s crucial vocational obligation from here on in – to damn all bullshit on our behalf, loudly and aggressively and the instant it is heard in the briefing rooms. This is going to be critical in the coming weeks, and for us all. Otherwise the nukes might come out.
Now I’m listening to Steve Lieberman interviewing Phil Noyce, who directed the adaption of Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger. He’s in New York, and he’s talking about his experience of the terrible day: ‘It didn’t seem real,’ he is saying. ‘It was like one of my own movies.’ The movie analogy has been a defining refrain. Well, as Noyce knows, the first rule of any movie screenplay is that no character does anything without a motivation that is credible, at the very least to them, anyway. This includes the bad guys. It would be madness to criticise anyone for concentrating so far on ‘what’ has happened at the expense of ‘why’, and there is also justification for concluding that, in the end, maybe there is no ‘why’ here at all, either. Some acts defy comprehension. In a sense this must remain one, lest we all cut our wrists in nihilistic despair.
But the simultaneous reality is that if we in the First World really want to protect ourselves against this sort of nothing-to-lose savagery, then we have no choice but to unleash the full force of the supreme Human intellect – ruthlessly and clinically – on that very question. If you prefer, forget about ‘why’. Instead, ask how? How – by what progression – does such hatred ferment? And what must we do – and NOT do – to break the cycle?
Because in the free and open parts of the globalised world, the only other option for us all will be to erect our barbed-wire fences and hire our personal security guards, and wait in fear for the bestial truth to come for us, too. It may be in the form of an Osama Bin Laden or it may be as a Timothy McVeigh; it might be a Martin Bryant or Idi Amin or Jim Jones or Charles Manson. It may be a Christian-born animal like Adolph Hitler.
But unless we in the West also face up to the bestial truth that lurks within ourselves, unless we coolly examine the role we are playing in this helter-skelter charge by humanity towards anarchic oblivion, then no matter how many individual terrorists we manage to ‘hunt down and punish’ – however righteously, with whatever due care and justification – the bestial truth is ultimately going to consume each and every last one of us.