Talk of the Town - Letter from Spain September 26 2001

I was in a department store in Sevilla when I got the news. First, my cell phone began vibrating. I pulled it out and read a text message on the phone’s screen from my friend Salvatore in Genoa. It said that America was under attack.

Salvatore, like many Mediterraneans, tends to make a drama of everything, so I assumed this was his way of telling me to call him immediately. As it happens, though, I was standing opposite the store’s television section. I turned and, moments after I did so, I saw the airplane crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center. Like many people who saw the image but had no context, I initially assumed it was a movie.

I remained in front of the TV for what seemed like an eternity, struggling to make out the Spanish reporting. Then I saw the tower collapse. I’ve felt like fainting only a few times in my life. I gasped, causing several bystanders to attempt to console me. Two of my longtime Internet friends work in the World Trade Center, and all I could think was that they had just died. I knew, certainly, that I had witnessed thousands of lives swept into the dustbin of history.

To be abroad, away from home, to not know any other Americans with whom to discuss what I am feeling, has been difficult. At first, we found one another in cyber cafes, everyone trying to get news on the Web, partly because hearing unbelievable events recounted in a foreign language makes them all the more unbelievable. And yet even when we found one another, we didn’t know what to say. There was so much to say.

Of course, there is the searing grief, the hideously disedifying spectacle of mass murder as theater. Within two days, one of my friends at the World Trade Center wrote me and reported that he’d escaped because he’d gone into work early to receive a field assignment. He was leaving as the first plane hit. His description of smoky blackness alternating with glimpses of strewn body parts, of fighting a suffocating panic and finally being led, childlike, from a landscape of ashes made me sob in the Internet cafe. Of my friend Peter, I have heard nothing. I loiter on the Internet, waiting to see his name pop up on IRC or AIM. But he has yet to appear. An economics wizard with a poet’s heart, Peter was always chastising me about my disregard of my “financial health.”

At lunch the day after, the cook came out to sit beside me at the bar and look at the pictures of the disaster in El Pais, the national newspaper. He turned the pages slowly, remarking on each picture, how it resembled this movie or that. With each picture, I felt myself grow more agitated. After a pause, he put his hand on my arm and said, “Whoever did this must pay, but it is true that America is no more.”

That realization, of course, lingers behind the rage that oscillates with our grief. Our illusion about ourselves has been destroyed, much as it was with the Kennedy assassination, and people want to go to any length to reclaim it. Despite my contempt for nationalism, I had to acknowledge, in my stunned horror, that I was a product of the culture’s indoctrination into the myth of American invincibility. I was even wearing an “ARMY” T-shirt on the day of the attack.

Here in Spain, as in much of the world, terrorism has long been regarded as the world’s primary problem. The Spanish president, victim of an attempted car bombing himself, was elected mainly on the promise to bring the terrorism of Vasque nationalists to an end. Paris was plagued with subway bombings a few years ago. A terrorist act occurs in Jerusalem almost every day. The IRA made terrorism a daily fact of life in the U.K. for decades. South Africa. Bosnia.

Americans need to understand that the world outpouring of support is not just an expression of funereal condolence. Nor, however, is it an endorsement of retaliation against Afghanistan’s people. It is very much an expression of empathy for our cruel induction into a global reality against which there really is no effective armed retaliation, since violent and irrational retaliation is the entire logos of terrorism itself.

So here, many of the Spanish lend you condolence and then, after they’ve tested your political position, they lower their voices and pray that America’s saber rattling will end, that George Bush’s dangerous bluster won’t end in terrorism against the Afghan people. Gently, they remind you that the U.S. has been bombing Iraq for 10 years, that this “war” began well before the attack on New York and Washington. You read this in more European papers every day.

When Americans do meet here, many express chagrin over the American media’s handling of the crisis. Seemingly given to their own saber rattling, commentators and editorialists have behaved like frothing robots, ostensibly ignorant of the bigger picture. It has been unbearable to tune in CNN and listen to language that seems programmed by Bush’s own speechwriters. Editorials in most U.S. papers read like essays by high school ROTC members.

Still, I feel sad that I am not in America to talk to my friends. At the same time, I’m glad to be outside the flag-waving maelstrom for now. Five thousand people have died and, from here, it looks like America would rather annihilate thousands more than deal with the terrible reality of its newly demonstrated impotence and fulfill the need to inaugurate a new world politics in the face of our well-demonstrated failure to achieve peace with weapons. Can we not bury the dead before we turn more people into corpses???