Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2271

I suppose my I'll-never-forget-where-I-was recollections are pretty typical: a half-curious pricking up of the ears when they cut into the morning show on the radio with breaking news about a plane hitting the World Trade Center -- it sounded like a twin-prop or Lear jet -- and then the slow realization when the second plane hit that something bigger was going on. My editor called from London a few seconds later, and I switched on the TV. But, even in the midst of unprecedented forms of mass slaughter, humdrum routine goes on for the rest of us: I was having some furniture delivered that morning, and the guy interrupted me to ask where I wanted one of the pieces to go, and when I turned back to the screen only one of the smoking towers was still there. "What happened?" I said. "It fell down," the delivery guy shrugged, and ambled back to his work.

He was sort of right. It fell down, but it burned for another 100 days, as America's rage did -- for some. For others, it was already fading, the "day that everything changed" already lapsing back into the feeble passivity of one of those weird one-time-only "tragedies," after which everything goes back to the way it was.

What was taking place that Tuesday morning was, as a lot of people said, "unimaginable." But once it happened, once we no longer had to imagine it, my main memory of that day is of how quickly the mind leapt forward to encompass the new reality. When the second plane hit, it was obvious not just that this was no accident but also that it would be impossible to find two commercial airline pilots willing to fly, even at the point of a gun, their jets into skyscrapers. Which meant that, at the moment of impact, these flights must have been in the hands of terrorists who'd trained as pilots presumably for the purpose of this mission: They had acquired at least basic skills in a profession that would guarantee a good life anywhere on the planet; they could be pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers. But instead they went to pilot school to make one flight one time one-way, into a tall building.

And halfway across the world, on the streets of Ramallah, people filled the streets and cheered and passed out candy. They celebrated at Concordia University in Montreal, and in northern England and in Scandinavia, too, but I didn't find that out until e-mail from readers began coming through later in the day. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his colleagues followed events on the Arabic Service of the BBC. (Not all the BBC's output is in Arabic; it just sounds like it is.)

As the years go by, it's these curious examples of cultural interconnectedness that stay with me. "Interconnectedness" is the word used by the late Edward Said, the New York-based Palestinian grievance-monger and eminent America-disparager: A couple of weeks after 9/11, the professor deplored the tendency of commentators to separate cultures into what he called "sealed-off entities," when in reality Western civilization and the Muslim world are so "intertwined" that it was impossible to "draw the line" between them. National Review's Rich Lowry was unimpressed. "The line seems pretty clear," he said. "Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the West's idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam's idea."

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http://www.chicagosuntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn10.html