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Posted on 09/16/2001 8:26:36 AM PDT by LadyDoc

"Hardly Anyone Can Imagine How Sweet Life Was Before the Revolution"

By Ben Stein

There is a magnificent line from Stendahl that goes something like this: "Hardly anyone who is now alive can imagine how sweet life was before the Revolution." I keep thinking of it today, here in New York, the day of the mass murder by aerial bombing. I happen to be here instead of at Morton's, and it has been a horrific day.

I got here on Friday after a nastily botched charity event at which Dustin Hoffman sort of ruined my little plans by hogging the stage while reading to kids at the beautiful L.A. Library downtown.

It was a small thing, and I had no idea just how small it would come to seem. Henry Winkler and Laura San Giacomo acted like champs, as did Fyvush Finkel, so it really was fine.

My wife and I got to wait in the fabulous United First Class lounge. A kind hostess told us she thought my wife was the last well-mannered woman at LAX, and she may be right. On the lavish, very fine United flight to New York, I sat across from Caroline Rhea, who was her usual kind, intelligent, self-effacing self. She will do a great job taking over for Rosie.

When I got here, I did a tiny gag on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It got all screwed up somehow, but, again, I soon learned how tiny a thing that was. My wife flew back to L.A. on a nonstop American flight loaded with jet fuel. She arrived safe and sound, something we have come to think of as routine.

My wife flew back to L.A. and arrived safe and sound, something we have come to think of as routine.

On Monday night, my sister had a big birthday party, hosted by moi, in Brooklyn, on a barge on the East River facing lower Manhattan by night. We were eating, listening to a fine string quartet, looking out through an immense window at the brightly lit World Trade Center.

Lightning and thunder and sheets of rain fell, and the barge rocked wildly. Then the weather cleared, and I went out to an immense dock. A dry, balmy breeze blew. The sky was bright with lights. Cars streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge. Happy couples embraced in the wind, bathed in the lights of the Trade Center. This is a Wonderland, I thought, a paradise. This is happy, blessed America.

This morning in my hotel, I heard a boom at a little before 9. Nothing on TV. Smoke started to flood the sky far to the south of my hotel, the fine Essex House. I turned to AOL News. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then the TV went to nonstop coverage, then a second plane hit the second tower. And then yet another slammed into the Pentagon.

On Fifth Avenue, in front of the closed high-fashion stores, Americans look at the fires with hollow eyes, aghast. Then, rumors, false, of a car bombing at the State Department, right across from my home in D.C. Then the World Trade Center buildings collapsed. Then a missing hijacked plane and a crash on a farm near Pittsburgh and more smoke and sirens all day...and now it's After the Revolution, and much of the sweetness has gone out of our lives.

My longtime friend Nan, a direct descendant of John Adams, comes down to watch TV with me. We watch until we are restless, and then we go out. No cars are being allowed into Manhattan. The streets are crazily deserted. Americans on the street look somber and shellshocked, as if sleepwalking under ether. Nan and I go to a drugstore to see if she can get some of her prescriptions refilled without a prescription.

The pharmacist pounds his hand on the counter to express how badly he wants the U.S. to bomb the people who made the attack. "Now they know what it's like in Israel every day," he says. He fills the scrips grimly.

"I'm doing what I can to help," he says in new, wartime America. Nan takes them with extreme eagerness. I guess that's why they're called medicine. The air on the street is so thick with anxiety you can feel it like tear gas.

A block east, on Fifth Avenue, in front of the closed high-fashion stores, Americans look at the fires downtown with hollow eyes, aghast, alone. French tourists laugh and cackle and curse merrily in their language as if somehow all of that killing has happened to someone else--and I guess it has. (I feel sick, by the way, that so many Americans gave their lives to liberate a France that kicks us in the teeth every chance it gets.)

Nan and I walk down to a church at 54th and Fifth. A prayer service is to start in half an hour. We go into the Peninsula Hotel bar to have a soda. Four men and women are slamming down martinis and comparing how close they had come to being at the World Trade Center this morning.

The pastor does fine until he asks for prayers for the families of the terrorists. I am not holy enough for that level of sanctity.

One spectacularly drunk woman loudly shows us all her pass to get into the building. A Diet Coke is seven dollars. Why not, on the day the music died? Why not spend money and feel no pain?

At the service, perhaps 50 men and women sit in a space for a couple of thousand. They looked dazed. The pastor does fine until he asks for prayers for the families of the terrorists who caused the deaths. I guess I am just not holy enough for that level of sanctity. I leave.

I try to find an open Brooks Brothers, where I might feel secure. Unsuccessful, I head to McDonald's for a snack. A crazy woman is railing against blacks there for imaginary rudeness.

I tell her to shut up, and she screams at me and she says she will report me. "To whom?" I ask, but she doesn't answer. How blacks put up with crazy whites I do not know. They've been doing it for a long time.

Nan is a devout Catholic, so we go into St. Patrick's Cathedral at 50th and Fifth. They are doing a rosary, and I find the many repetitions of "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen," comforting. Nan lights a candle to a saint.

A woman comes into church wearing Prada covered with soot, literally gray like a coal miner. A woman comes into church wearing Prada covered with soot, literally gray like a coal miner. She dips her hand in Holy Water, crosses herself, kneels as she enters the pew, then kneels and prays for a long time. I am moved by how somber and serious the worshipers are and how seriously they take the service.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen"--over and over again. A lifeboat of calm in an angry sea. Londoners praying at St. Paul's during the Blitz. It's bravery and spirituality, but it's not what I would call a sweet scene. Admirable, but people look scared, and they should be. (By the way, wow, the Irish are a good-looking race.)

Outside, I run into a knot of policemen. They all greet me by name. I tell them how sorry I am for their losses. The police are a big family, and the firemen are their brothers, and they lost a lot of loved ones today.

The cops thank me, and tears come to their eyes. New York cops have wonderfully sweet faces. They are not movie star handsome like the ones in Beverly Hills, but they look sweet--like Irish altar boys. They get kicked and kicked, but they keep doing their jobs and getting killed.

Back at the hotel, I watch W give a short speech right on target. "It's good versus evil," he says, and he's right. I love that man.

Nan and I go to Trattoria dell'Arte for supper. Jammed. Loud, drunk people, maybe letting out some tension. Waiters and busboys drop glasses, wine bottles, ashtrays. We're all jumpy.

Then on carless streets, a kid is skateboarding along Fifth Avenue. We pass lots more cops with sad, drawn faces. "I hear we lost 200, maybe 300 of our boys," one of them says. He looks barely older than my fourteen-year-old son.

New York cops are not movie star handsome like the ones in Beverly Hills, but they look sweet--like Irish altar boys. We stop at the Peninsula bar and have a $7 Seven-Up, while some British tourists drink and puff happily on cigars around us. I guess they don't get it.

Fifth Avenue seems even more deserted after our soft drink nightcap. Down at the south end last night, you could see the World Trade Center brightly lit, a symbol of progress, prosperity, knowledge and community reaching up to the sky.

Now, there is just a void surrounded by a red smoky glow, as if hell has opened up to say welcome to the new dark ages.

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