bitterfig

It’s been five years since the World Trade Center towers came crashing down. 

I lived in upstate New York when it happened, about six hours North and West of the city.  What I remember is it was a beautifully clear day, the sky was pristine blue, deep and pure and so clear. 

I was at work when it happened.  I worked at the satellite a county run Chemical Dependencies Clinic.  The two counselors who were on that morning, Sandy and Joe were both in with their 9:00 a.m. clients and I was messing around on the internet.  I had an addiction to cdbaby at the time but everything was downloading really, really slow so I gave up and did some actual work.  I didn’t realize it at the time but the computer must have been sp slow because the server (which all the country offices were on) was overloaded with people trying to get information. 

So the first I heard when a woman from the Addiction Education Foundation next door.  They weren’t part of the county and had their own computer network so they were playing an audio feed of the news.  It was just the first tower when I started listening and I heard when the second tower was hit, and when they came down.  Then the Pentagon was hit.  That really scared me because my brother, Jackson, was in Washington DC working at a downtown law firm.

I was really worried about my brother because there was a lot of bad information about fires and explosions in Washington in the area of the mall.  Jackson was okay.  They told everyone at the law firm to go home when the Pentagon was hit and he took the metro.  I had a fit when I heard that because I’d read the Haruki Murakami book Underground about the Tokyo subway gas attacks and at the time we really didn’t know what was going on and the planes could have been just one part of a larger coordinated attack.

Overall I think everyone was just stunned.  I know I didn’t cry, I don’t remember anyone crying.  Everyone was just shocked, not knowing what to say or what to do.  Nothing prepares you for something like that, nothing.  It was like a scenario from science fiction had suddenly come true.  Five years later I still don’t know what to say.  It still hardly seems possible that it happened.  The human beings could inflict that kind of destruction on each other.  I know things like this have happened before, I know it will happen again but that doesn’t stop it from being so wrong that they are unthinkable. 

bitterfig

As I mentioned in the previous post I went to a production of the Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins on Sunday.  Singing, dancing, all the major presidential assassins from Lincoln to Reagan- how could it not be brilliant?  I’ve wanted to see it since Sarah Vowell talked about the tender duet between John Hinkley Jr. and Squeaky Fromme in Assassination Vacation. 

I have a fairly strong background in American History (my father taught it for 33 years) but I was surprised at how ignorant I was about presidential assassins.  I knew absolutely nothing about the man who shot President Garfield, Charles Guiteau.  The only thing I knew about Leon Czolgosz who assassinated McKinley was that he was an anarchist.  I’d never even known about Giuseppe Zangara’s attempt on FDR’s life.  I knew Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Ford but I didn’t know another woman, Sara Jane Moore also tried to kill him.  And of course my knowledge of Sam Byck consisted of a review I read for the Sean Penn film The Assassination of Richard Nixon.  I have to see that movie now just to see if Sean Penn’s Byck wears a Santa suit like the one in the musical. 

The show was extremely funny, but I found myself feeling really uncomfortable a couple times.  During the first scene, when a barker behind a booth that advertises “Shoot the President, Win a Prize” started handing out guns my political paranoia kicked in but good.  Is it okay to say that?  Is it okay to sing that?  Is it okay to watch a show with a stage decorated with targets and pictures of presidents?  Then during John Wilkes Booth’s big death scene he was denouncing Lincoln for starting an unnecessary war for his own gratification.  He was in fact using making almost the exact same terms criticisms of Lincoln that I make of President Bush.  Golly.  Maybe Pa-Daddy’s right and I am a deluded radical. 

I was rather fascinated by Squeaky Fromme, not only because I’ve always had an undue interest in the Manson family but because the actress who played her totally had the Squeaky Fromme look in her eyes.  I was also very interested by Garfield’s assassin Charles Guiteau.  He was originally from Chicago (where I live now) and had apparently spent a significant amount of time at the Oneida Community (which is near where I used to live in Upstate NY).  Interestingly enough the god forsaken area I come from was a hotbed of religious radicalism in the 19^th century.  The Shakers were started in Albany; Joseph Smith found the golden tablets that became the book of Mormon near Rochester and near Utica there was the Oneida Community a utopian community where a very complicated form of free love was practiced.