Posted on 11/05/2001 3:06:20 PM PST by summer
The Atlantic Monthly | November 2001
NOTES & DISPATCHES
WASHINGTON, D.C.
What Auden Didn't Know
The things that stay in place
by P. J. O'Rourke
.....
On September 11, when the Pentagon was hit, Debbie Lehan, the operations manager at my apartment building, in Washington, D.C., and Damon Boone, the lead engineer, moved their cars out of the underground garage and parked them to block both ends of the building's horseshoe drive. Of course that was absurd—as if the terrorists had thought, "World Trade Center, Pentagon, and ... the place on Connecticut Avenue where Naomi Wolf used to live." But by noon all the building's children had been gathered home from school or day care. The children played in the empty half oval. Career daddies and career mommies hovered. The barricaded driveway was absurd, if one could keep from tearing up.
"Better to do something," Debbie said.
Damon unlocked the door to the building's roof. We could see the Pentagon on fire across the Potomac. "It makes me angry, scared, sad, all at once," Damon said. According to the theory of terrorism, it was supposed to make him paralyzed with terror.
The traffic on Connecticut Avenue was coming from downtown as if in the evening rush hour. But there was none of the usual honking at the District's unsequenced and haphazardly placed stoplights.
Downtown the cars were gone and the stores were closed. Police officers stood in ones and twos. On the corner of F and Fourteenth Street two businessmen, two bike messengers, and a panhandler were listening to the panhandler's portable radio. A tape of President Bush's first response to the terrorist attack was being broadcast. One of the messengers said, in the voice people use when they're saying something important, "After today things will never be the same." Then he seemed to have one of those moments that came to everyone on September 11, with jumbled thoughts alike in size but wildly mismatched in weight—pity, rage, how to get the shirts back from the dry cleaner. "Transportation in the air won't be as fast," he said in a smaller voice.
At the corner of Fourteenth and Constitution a policeman set out flares to block the street. The policeman took the plastic caps off the flares and tossed the caps aside with the decisive gesture of a man suspending minor public mores in a crisis. A young man on a bicycle stopped at the curb and said to me, "At least the grocery stores are open. But the trucks can't get to the stores. If it's going to be a big international war, I'll just fast."
The young man had a theory that the terrorism had to do with America's pulling out of the UN conference on racism in South Africa, but he was interrupted by a woman indignant that the portable toilets at the Washington Monument were still in use. "They don't know what I could be doing in there," she said.
The grass expanse in the middle of the Mall was deserted except for the homeless, suddenly homeless alone. Like everyone else, they seemed subdued, although they didn't stay subdued. The next day, at Eighteenth and L, I would see a ragged man in the middle of the street shouting, "I'll kill all of you people! I don't like any of you!" No one, including the soldiers who were by then everywhere in Washington, paid attention.
Michele Lieber, a lobbyist who lives in my building, had come downtown with me. Alongside the Mall snack and souvenir trucks were dutifully open. Michele asked a snack-truck proprietor if business was good. "Yes, of course," he dutifully said.
That day, for the first time in thirteen years in Washington, I saw no protesters. And hardly any were around on Wednesday. A reopened Lafayette Park would feature only an old woman with a sign saying WHITE HOUSE ANTI-NUCLEAR PEACE VIGIL SINCE 1981 and a middle-aged hippie on a similar anti-nuclear sleep-out SINCE 1984. The old woman was talking mostly to herself. "They provoked what happened," she said. The hippie was talking to two adolescent girls with piercings, discussing his pet squirrel.
On Tuesday afternoon even TV crews were absent from the White House vicinity. On Constitution at the Ellipse the ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran was on a lone stand-up, not saying much to the camera. A few people gathered around the TV crew, also not saying much. "We just got here from Slovakia and everything happened," a tourist said.
Michele and I had walked to the reflecting pool behind the Capitol before we saw any more tourists. A family in sports clothes was standing there looking baffled. I introduced myself to the father, and his first words were (one is grateful for not being conspiracy-minded) "We're from Slovakia."
At Bullfeathers, a restaurant on First Street, four or five televisions were on, their volume turned up. A congressman and his female aide were in the men's room, the only place quiet enough for the congressman to do a phone interview. The congressman was saying, "We will make the people who did this pay. It is awfully hard to defend yourself from people who have no respect for human life." He seemed to be pulling in two directions—as did the soldiers on the streets the next day, camouflaged for invisibility and wearing blaze-orange traffic-control vests.
At The Dubliner, a bar on North Capitol Street, two congressional staffers were talking. "The congressional leadership has been whisked off to 'an undisclosed location,'" one said. "As far as I'm concerned, they can keep most of them there." This touched on another theory of terrorism: that the organization of society can be attacked by striking organizations; that we can't organize things ourselves.
"Four Guinness," the first staffer said to the bartender.
"Time to take sides," the second staffer said.
"Time to turn sand into glass," the first said.
Ariel Sharon was on CNN. "This is a war between the good and the bad," he said.
On Monday night, September 10, I had finished an article for this magazine about Israel, a country that has been under terrorist attack for generations, forever, and where I had found daily life to be markedly free of the effects that terrorism is supposed to produce. On Tuesday I didn't want the article to be published. It wasn't grim enough. I was thinking (like bike messengers and everyone else), After today things will never be the same. Lines from W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" came to mind:
"Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth." By Wednesday I realized that I'd never known what Auden was getting at with that poem, except, perhaps, in "As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade." Apt enough, but "Where blind skyscrapers use / Their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man"—what's that crap? Or this: "Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages."
Anyway, Auden was one of the few Englishmen who, when World War II loomed, acted as Hitler would have Englishmen act: he ran away. In Israel waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes, and gossip, and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.
Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; November 2001; What Auden Didn't Know; Volume 288, No. 4; 27-28.
Love the line from the congressional aide: "Time to turn sand into glass." A trifle overstated, but about how I felt that night.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow,
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath,
Of the night wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
- Matthew Arnold, 1867
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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