Shocked to the core, Americans are still struggling to understand why September 11th happened. Elaine Lafferty reports from New York on the mood of a bewildered people
As she watched the collapse of the World Trade Centre from the roof of her apartment building in Greenwich Village, Alice Quinn knew her job that week would be intense. Her choices would be widely observed, analysed, become part of the Zeitgeist - instantly. She fretted and worried and pondered.
Alice Quinn is not a firefighter or a nurse or a soldier. She is a just a bit over five feet tall, actually, and been known to take a tumble from her bicycle when distracted. But the week of September 11th she became, like so many others, a rescue worker of sorts.
Ms Quinn is the poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine, arguably one of the premier stages for poetry and fine writing in the world. If ever poetry was needed it was now. But what would speak to this tragedy? What poem could she possibly choose?
As ash and the cremated remains of more than 2,800 souls rained down on her neighbourhood that day, Ms Quinn sat at her desk and began searching for a poem. Not Yeats, she decided, not a classic. Was there a new poem for such a moment? She reached over to a pile of submissions she had just read and she realised . . . there it was. She was startled. By Adam Zagajewski, a contemporary Polish poet thought by many to be the successor to Czeslaw Milosz:
TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD
Remember June's long days
And wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
The abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
One of them had a long trip ahead of it,
While salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere
You've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
In a white room and the curtain fluttered
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
And leaves eddied over the Earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
And the grey feather a thrush lost,
And the gentle light that strays and vanishes
And returns.
By March 2002 Try to Praise The Mutilated World had become the title of an event that drew 1,200 people out on a Wednesday night in New York to listen to readings by Susan Sontag, W.S. Merwin, and Robert Pinksy among others.
Fitting, this poetic declaration and call. Because Americans, and especially New Yorkers, were and are desperately trying to make sense of the world they inhabit a year on. They are trying to find something to praise in the world beyond America's national borders.
And that is not easy.
Life is different here. Elderly second World War veterans are stripped to their underwear by airport security. Nursing mothers are asked to drink their own breast milk if it is bottled before they board a plane, just to ensure a liquid poison is not being smuggled on. One national airline has declared bankruptcy, and several others are teetering on the brink.
Get over it, says Europe. Now you understand what it's like to be attacked, now you feel vulnerable just like the rest of us. And, Europe whispers just a little more covertly, isn't it about time you learned?
In France, an absurd and fact-free book called L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud) by a young man named Thierry Meyssan seriously suggested that the attack on the Pentagon was staged by rogue US armed forces.
Mr Meyssan suggests Osama bin Laden is a paid US agent. The book sold 200,000 copies and was a bestseller in France for 12 weeks.
It is well to keep that kind of thing in mind when it appears that Americans are growing more isolationist, more dismissive of Europe. It is not arrogance, or at least not solely arrogance.
There is a widespread feeling here that resentment of American world dominance in business and culture has grown so widespread, that the world's conspiratorial fantasies about the US are so far gone that America is, to put it bluntly, on her own.
"They hate us" is the phrase you often hear. After September 11th many Americans did ask: "Why do they hate us?" But the answer they found was not what many Europeans were hoping for.
Americans do not believe they are hated for their government's foreign policy. They do not believe the world hates them for their government's policy toward Israel.
They believe the world hates them because they are richer, more confident and more determined to succeed. They believe they are hated because, to put it simply, they are envied.
A French-English author, Nicholas Fraser, writes in Harpers magazine: "In the meantime, there is America-also incomplete but ceaselessly changing, a haven of dissonance and improvisation, a source of promise as well as danger. And now Europeans want to blame America for whatever appears to be deficient in European civilisation. They also hanker for a Europe somehow created in opposition to America, and superior to it. How else, indeed, is it possible to be European these days?"
This divorce, as some are calling it, between the US and the rest of the world is not a good thing for anyone. And from these shores, I can tell you, it is not a good thing for Americans. It has led to a kind of defensive, victimised and distorted thinking that quite frankly more resembles the confused logic of the civilian Serbs I met in Belgrade in 1999 than the usual bravado of Americans.
Without most Americans realising it, they have lost parts of their constitution to a zealot named John Ashcroft, who never had much regard for civil liberties and as head of the US Justice Department has used September 11th tirelessly as an excuse to trample whatever remains of them.
According to David Cole, writing in the Nation, the Patriot Act, passed by Congress, reduces judicial oversight of a host of investigative measures, including wiretaps, expands the government's ability to track individuals' Internet use and gives federal officials expansive new powers that are in no way limited to investigating terrorist crimes. It authorises, says Cole, an end-run around the Fourth Amendment by allowing the government to conduct wiretaps and searches in criminal investigations without probable cause of a crime. And that's just the beginning.
The federal courts are fighting back. Federal judges in three cities tried to open the secret hearings that kept 1,200 foreign nationals in detention. One judge called the detentions "a concept odious to a democratic society." The American Bar Association condemned them.
But Americans are in no mood to worry about anything other than their own safety. A Time magazine poll showed that 79 per cent of Americans believe an act of terrorism will occur on US soil in the next 12 months.
Alice Quinn, the New Yorker editor, sought several poems for the magazine's September 11th anniversary. They are telling, as usual. From one by Serbian poet Charles Simic called Late September...
The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.