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January
3, 2002
Walt Brasch
Exit
Cheney, Enter Ridge
Mokhiber
and Weissman
The
10 Worst Corporations
of 2001
Robert
Hunter Wade
America's
Empire Rules an Unbalanced World
Shahid
Alam
Is
There an Islamic Problem?
January
2, 2002
Ross Regnart
Patriot
Act Redefines the Mob as "Terrorist Associates"
John Chuckman
The
Republicans' Secret Plan X
David
Vest
Turn,
Turn, Turn
January
1, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Iraq's
New Year
December
31, 2001
John Absood
An
Alternative to War in Iraq
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
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By Alexander
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
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January
3, 2002
The Color of Survival, the Color
of Mourning at Ground Zero
By Jordan Green
The new ergonomically-designed subway cars in
New York City are all festooned with American flag decals. They
are shiny and unmolested in stark contrast to the irrepressible
graffiti and busy scratching of every surface in this city. The
flags receive a kind of diplomatic immunity as symbols of sanctity
in the new religion of national chauvinism.
I left New York City two weeks after
the raw cleavage that was September 11. This city, which embraces
transplants and dreamers from every corner of the earth seeking
a fresh start, cannot really belong to those who come and go.
It offers no love to transients, those with only half a heart
for its rigors.
Despite having worked with people who
lost family members in the World Trade Center attacks, I've resisted
up until now visiting the site of the cataclysm. I know well
the usefulness of this imagery in the prosecution of atrocities
against the Arab and Islamic world. I know the narrative advanced
by countless news report of this site as the emblem of a peaceful
nation's basic goodness, its secular (read "commodifying")
embrace of multicultural diversity, its blamelessness in the
suffering of the world.
Still, I had to make the pilgrimage,
like so many others, to comprehend the devastation and total
loss that occurred here--to come to grips with the horror that
human beings impose on each other through war. The unspeakable,
heretical question is this: can anything good come out of such
a deplorable act of barbarity? In the case of New York, the answer
is, Yes.
The people of this city have a look about
them that I've never seen before. It is a look of defiance and
resilience that says, "To hell with you, I'm still here.
I've survived." It's evident in the eyes of the elderly,
the infirm, and the economically-sidelined. It's in the furrowed
brows and wry grimace of beleaguered businessmen. At the same
time, in the expressions of lovers and strangers alike, there
is a new recognition of the small joys.
There is a richer, more spontaneous and
textured response to circumstances than I saw when I left. It's
in the sight of a trio of Korean evangelical Christians playing
gentle folk music and handing out religious tracts in front of
St. Mark's Bookstore. Some native eccentricity surely shook itself
loose in the weeks after the first jarring impact. Before September
11, a bloodless, conformity-inducing mood of privatized self-interest
had taken hold, pervading all levels of the class hierarchy.
New York City is anything but bloodless now.
In the first week after the attacks,
even as I ran a panicky inventory of acquaintances who might
have been lost, I remember having the guilty yet hopeful apprehension
of the city being on the verge of a new cultural flourishing.
Was this like the humbled and humanized Madrid that novelist
Jose Ortega y Gasset found himself in following the devastating
loss of the Spanish Empire in the 1898 war with the United States?
There is a great sorrow at Ground Zero,
to be sure. But there is also a tangible and discomforting air
of voyeurism, and a garish attraction to the visceral reality
of destruction. Then there are the street vendors hawking mementos:
American flags, framed photographs of the towers, and expensive
disposable cameras. Amidst the jostling and angling for view,
a cop shepherds tourists across the street with a brusque greeting
of "Thanks for visiting us, folks, and thanks for spending
money. Now get out." It is hard to feel much in these moments.
In truth, it is the upper class--and
by overwhelming majority, the white upper class--that is in mourning
here. It is patriotic Americans from Cleveland and Atlanta, western
European visitors, as well as the working-class enforcers of
the public order: firemen, police and military people. There
is a gray US Marine Corps sweatshirt with some dozen signatures
and the scrawled message, "we will never forget you,"
draped over the wrought iron fence of St. Paul's Chapel. The
makeshift shrines to the dead at Ground Zero are overwhelmed
by expressions of condolence and declared strength from representatives
of the military and police forces from across the country. This
is the essence of the site that is so profoundly dispiriting--that
our collective welfare is held hostage to a triumphal authoritarianism.
Although a significant portion of the
victims of 9/11 were working-class immigrants--custodians, restaurant
workers and others who provided the support staff for the city's
prominent commercial brokers--it is not they who are compelled
to brave the cold to pay homage. Immigrants and poor people have
known terror before. For every public housing project turned
to a free-fire zone by nihilistic narcotics entrepreneurs and
contemptuous police, for every Third World war zone militarized
by the proxies of American capitalism, for every month when the
abyss of eviction and unemployment loomed, the immigrant poor
have endured with quiet desperation.
Though there was no great outpouring
of national feeling, immigrants have fled the array of disorders
and depredations imposed on them by structural adjustment plans
and U.S. military incursions around the perimeter of the Imperium.
As former US Special Forces operative Stan Goff has written,
"A lot of the brown people I ran into, in the process of
securing Uncle Sam's favorable investment climates around the
world, never had any assumptions about the safety of the world."
The destruction of the World Trade Center
is not new in the pantheon of terrors.
Jordan Green,
a two-time resident of New York City, is an editorial and research
associate at the Institute
for Southern Studies in Durham, NC.
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