The Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand's *Dateline* magazine

Fourth Quarter 2001


by Richard S. Ehrlich

A clown finally appeared at Ground Zero, fully costumed in red-nosed regalia, trying to cheer gas-masked disaster crews and thousands of visitors who circle the smoldering rubble that encases more than 3,000 bodies.

Pundits, meanwhile, predict no one will ever again care about Britney Spears's navel or other "frivolous" pop-culture ephemera.

Respected human rights author Nat Hentoff, however, warned of new repression against any Americans who criticize the U.S. war against terrorism.

He said it could become an updated version of the witch-hunting, anti-communist "McCarthyism" of the 1950s.

"Continued terrorism could also easily return us to the era of the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, who rode high and recklessly on the esteem of much of the citizenry -- and a significant portion of the press," Mr. Hentoff wrote.

"It could happen here again, especially with the Left so riven by its own wars of identity politics -- and meager regard for its internal opponents' free speech -- that it might be difficult to organize a united front against resurgent McCarthyism," he added.

Other intellectuals said new books and movies will be altered to reflect America's new, grim "reality" in a land suddenly splashed wall-to-wall with U.S. flags amid repeatedly broadcasted chants of "God Bless America."

Worried about the new mood in this diverse, rapidly militarizing nation, terrified people are disguising themselves or changing their behavior to avoid being targeted.

"Tomorrow when I go out, I will be wearing a nice red turban, white shirt and blue pants, our national colors, walking proud as a peacock, smiling at people I love and live with in our great country," wrote Narinder Singh, in Lenexa, Kansas.

Mr. Singh, a member of the Sikh religion, said he was donning red, white and blue because he feared neighbors would blame him for the suicide pilots' destruction of the World Trade Towers and Pentagon.

"Am I ashamed of myself, my ethnicity or my faith? Am I afraid of my fellow Americans? Did I commit a crime of some sort?" Mr. Singh added in a letter to the New York Times.

In Dallas, Texas, Caroline Adams wrote to New York's liberal Village Voice newspaper to disagree with someone's criticism of President Bush. Referring to the critic, she suggested, "perhaps he'd be happier in Afghanistan."

The Village Voice headlined her letter: "A Load of Kabul."

Other Americans started buying and selling memorabilia which portrays the World Trade Center, including desk accessories, spoons, refrigerator magnets, keychains, paperweights and other souvenirs mass-produced before the horror.

In the bleak aftermath of the surprise atrocity, the tacky trinkets of the two towers now seemingly appear to rise like prophetic, miniature twin tombstones.

Some people went on Internet to sell gruesome shrapnel from the site, including damaged stop signs and anything else which displays charred scars from the explosions.

Other people hurriedly printed postcards and posters of the towers on fire and sold them on sidewalks near the crash site.

One man stood staring at his hand near Ground Zero where the towers imploded into squashed, gnarled wreckage. He held a few shards of broken glass and plaster, apparently considering whether or not he should take it from the scene.

Next to him, a woman bent down and picked up small scattered pieces of sharp concrete and disappeared into the milling crowd of thousands of people along Broadway who jostled to take photographs of Ground Zero and the armed forces, police, firemen and emergency personnel working in the smoky canyon of the pulverized skyscrapers.

Wherever people meet, they invariably talk of the terrorist attack and swap tales of what they were doing at the time, how they reacted and why lifestyles, culture and civil rights are rapidly mutating throughout America.

"They thought I was dead because I was down there, real close, when the towers collapsed," one journalist said.

"I just ran for my life, but I couldn't outrun the cloud of debris raining down. I was scared. You didn't know how big the pieces would be and what would hit you."

One optimistic graphic designer, sipping beer at a pool table in a Lower East Side bar said, "These things come in cycles. Now it is bad, but it'll be OK soon, but at a new level.

"It's like Japan after World War Two. Japan came back and rebuilt itself" after U.S. forces dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 56 years ago, killing more than 300,000 people.

Others predicted more terrorist attacks in America, with future acts even more deadly than the suicide pilots' assaults on Sept. 11.

Fearing a chemical attack, thousands of people in New York City bought gas masks, priced around 85 dollars each.

Officials went on television to calm residents, and said gas masks would only be protective if people wore them all the time -- because news of an attack might appear only after a biological weapon had already been unleashed.

Some mothers worried about the effect of the violence on their children, including a nine-year-old boy who witnessed one of the planes smash into a tower and later exclaimed it was more exciting than viewing it on television.

Advertisers quickly unfurled U.S. flags above product logos in newspapers, magazines and on street signs, and printed eloquent prose about the value of life, the tragedy of loss and how America will endure and unite.

Others harkened back to the defeat of Nazism. Germany's Hamburg Chamber of Commerce said in a full-page New York Times advertisement: "We never forget your help and support in rebuilding our city after World War Two. We want to reciprocate."