September 2001: Minneapolis

Living in the New America

The week of the 11th of September dragged like no other working week I have known. Arriving at work tardier than usual on Tuesday (having indulged in a little extra time with the ever blossoming Noah), I found phones ringing at empty desks and 30 people standing around the big screen television. A reality tv show to end all reality tv shows.

Each person was having their own individual experience of what was on screen - some only able to relate the scenes of planes crashing into skyscrapers to Schwarzeneger disaster movies; others, with a few extra years on their side remembering wars of the past and images of Vietnam and even London in the blitz; most contemplation being done in silence. But wait there's more - people plummeting like dolls from the upper levels. Eyes are covered - why would they possibly jump? Surely that's enough destruction for one movie - people grip the office partitions to make it all stop.

At 10 o'clock the phones ceased. A nation had just watched the impossible happen on their front doorstep. A nation that was delighting in reading about George Bush's revitalisation of the trillion dollar 'Star Wars' protective space umbrella project that would safeguard their infinite individual freedoms infinitely against terror and opponents of the American Way. Beaten by $3 Stanley knives.

By lunchtime Tuesday, most Americans had retreated to the security of their homes to watch the minute by minute unfolding of the nation's entry into a world where people die for the crime of being a citizen, believing in certain truths or voting the wrong way. As antipodeans running a business in a foreign country, we had to be sensitive to the tears and wide-eyed looks of uncertainty and send everyone home. Our tower block made business closure voluntary - with the Minnesota Government Center on one side, American Express HQ on another and the State Police HQ on the third it seemed prudent.

In my own naiive world I have to admit my first reaction to the footage was to wonder how someone had possibly stolen four empty airliners? It dawned on me by the fiftieth re-run that the planes were far from empty. It dawns on me now that I have flown on most of the flights and airlines that were hijacked that morning.

The fingers immediately began to be pointed at the Middle East. People rapidly forget that the last example of this kind of terror was perpetrated by a white American man, a US Army veteran who only a month earlier had been injected with a lethal dose of chemicals for killing hundreds of people in the bombing of a Government Building in Oklahoma.

Staff on their way home, waiting for the elevator to arrive at Level 35 mumble to each other, "what did America ever do to them to deserve this...?"

The CNN Nation is not generally alert to the other side of any story. With round the clock heart-stopping live action in 20 second sound and picture bites, how can you stop to analyze? Ask 50 people to describe the same scene or their feelings sure, but don't analyze. Coming from a country where radio announcers could take 40 minutes of prime breakfast radio to analyze the socio-economic impact of beer tax rising 2 cents a litre, it can be a little frustrating.

As the skyscraper implosions finally began to slow, hours of stories emerged to be told around individual tragedy, heroism and loss. The film is riveting, and as days go by the tourist video sold to the highest bidding media revealed even more shocking views of the events. You can all but see the plane emerge from the other side of that building.

Tuesday evening's viewing was a true-life drama scripted around saving the people who were trapped in the wreckage of the buildings. No-one knows how exactly how many were in the towers when they were hit, let alone when they fell 110 floors to self-destruction. The picture is painted of firefighters and construction workers tearing away at the 30 foot mountain of rubble in search of survivors. But not BUILDING survivors, as the nation was led to believe and hope for. These pictures were from 3 blocks back looking for survivors among the fire engines and ambulances that rushed to the scene that morning.

Three weeks later, the mountain of rubble at the true 'ground zero' is still 10 stories high, on fire and collapsing steadily.

It is hard to grasp the scale of skyscrapers like the Twin Towers. Each floor is an acre, stretching a city block each way. With much of that space taken up by dozens of elevators and the central skeletal structure, it still leaves room for over 250 people per level. Our US Bank building, the largest in Minneapolis houses around a 120 people per floor and rises less than half the height of the World Trade Center. When I worked in New Zealand, the black glass BNZ tower was a skyscraper, rising to less than a quarter the height and a fraction of the girth. Fifty thousand people work within 2 acres of flat land in Manhattan.

So what did America do to deserve this? On Wednesday September 12th my day was spent sitting with shocked staff members and starting to probe their anger at 'the moslems' for bringing a war that should rightly be fought on CNN in faraway fields, onto hallowed US territory. After Pearl Harbor, this is quoted as the first large scale incident of aggression on US soil in history. Damn the PLO-Taliban-islamites, we should kick their asses immediately by razing every shopping mall, skyscraper and financial center in Afghanistan.

My point, that there really aren't any skyscrapers in Afghanistan is beyond imagination. It isn't just your SUV and vacation-in-Florida lifestyle these people are bombing you for dammit. What did we ever do to them? Well, try $5b a year aid to Israel, much of which comes in the form of weaponry like the Black Hawk helicopters to keep the Palestinian problem under 'control'. Try the seven sisters of the oil industry in the 20th century, and their countless offspring in the decades since. An airliner shot from the sky over the middle east in a US training exercise error. Clandestine suport for wars and counter-wars to numerous to recall. All too much detail. I would get less blank looks concocting a story that because the Taliban live in the desert, they need to steal a really large number of Chevy Suburbans to get around, and since America has the most trucks...

More than once I am moved to wonder if this could actually be the most audacious Israeli plot yet? Or a Waco white supremacy act of madness? The Twin Towers are such an obvious symbol of money and power that even the psychotic teenagers who conducted the Columbine High School massacre last year figured them to be the ultimate target - their deranged diaries listed their ultimate plan as escaping the school grounds, hijacking a 747, flying across country and crashing into the North Tower.

One of the fundamental lessons in my life has been to understand and accept the existence of different 'world-views' (aka values, perspectives, ways of life, life-rules, philosophies, gestalts, methodologies, whatever word takes your fancy). Call it a benefit of a liberal arts education that pushed hard to make me understand that two people could see the same thing differently. That a fact was not a universal fact. Equally, that one world view might not be automatically superior to another. As a lesson it has served me well in working with different cultures and solving problems - more often working with people apparently from the same culture but with vastly different income levels.

America is a country with a world view so singular, dominant and indoctrinated that it is impossible for Americans to understand an act where a foreign soldier willingly suicides in an act of terrorism to better the state of the collective and become closer to god. Impossible to think through and explain why millions of people would refer to this nation as 'the great Satan'. The American dream of capitalism and individual freedom crosses cultural and economic boundaries like no other country I have visited - the US fundamentalist extremists don't even represent competing world views, they represent variations of the mainstream US world view. Think Ku Klux Klan and Timothy McVeigh. Think religious leaders claiming on TV that God allowed the September 11th disaster to occur because bible study was no longer compulsory in schools.

The closest they come to analysis is to identify the hijacking perpetrators as being psychologically disturbed madmen. The facts unfortunately fly in the face of this assumption - it is painfully apparent that these people passed themelves off as sane to universities, flight school instructors and landlords. A nation that cannot think through these complex issues is reduced to solving its problems in very simple ways. Perhaps nuking the bastards then administering Prozac to the world's less co-operative nations is the long term answer.

On a scale that stretches between complete freedom of the individual to complete devotion to the collective, the US certainly flies the flag for parties at the freedom end. A nation that values individual rights to the extent that drink-drive murderers escape punishment day after day as they have the right to an attorney being present before a blood sample is drawn (and said attorney has no time limit to get there), will never understand why a global collective based on politics and faith would organize to take on the world's superpower. Freedom includes the right to be free of having to think too hard about things.

There is little grasp of the rise of marginalised interest groups and religious fundamentalism as a major issue for the world to consider. First world and third world are apparently just finishing positions in the global human race, and the US already got the gold medal. The prize for being first was an island a long way from the rabble of the middle (and not so middle) east and minimal chance of invasion. I mean, the Japanese only got as close as Pearl Harbor and then we whipped their butts in the movie.

We are living in a country where the current president had been overseas once in his lifetime prior to election, and was quite proud of the fact. If you have 'travel' as an interest listed on your resume, it probably means you watch the Discovery Channel on tv. Terrorism is new here, but London has been without rubbish bins in the central city for years.

The terrorists were certainly well organized. Just when my Minnesotan colleagues began to comfort each other with "they'd never bother coming to Minneapolis", it was revealed that one of the pilots trained and lived in Saint Paul. Some of the terrorists have been in the USA for 10 years, and hardly fit the profile of fanatical suicide bomber with a truck load of TNT. At least 200 people have been identified as being involved in this current event - America has dubbed it 'The New War' but in reality its a very old war that has just moved to a new battlefield. That battlefield is slap bang in the middle of a nation that prefers the away games.

September the 11th has brought a new reality to the United States. First, this war is far from over, and it will not only be fought in the deserts of the middle east. There are acts of terrorism that can be perpetrated without the drama of hijacking planes and crashing them into capitalist icons. Poisoning, chemical warfare, a second hand nuclear device in the back of an SUV... Second, the timing of events has seriously exacerbated the existing fragility of the US economy, where consumers have been notoriously difficult to coax out of their shells into back to the Mall to spend their money (we are now down to 3% interest rates with no sign of behavioral change - how low does 'Greenspansan' have to go?).

The coincidence of the new Spielberg hit-tv series 'Band of Brothers' based on the D-Day invasion premiering 2 days before the Manhattan disaster is almost too much to bear. The US is going to be dragged back into arenas of war where loss of life is a fact of the job, not demerit points on the performance management report of a 4 Star General watching it unfold on the internet. Declaring war on global terror is a fairly tall order.

So as a resident alien it has become quite eerie to be in the USA at this time. The overwhelming urge is to flee the country. To where? To Europe, where a jet fighter can reach Rome from a base in Libya in 3 minutes? Where each country has an ongoing battle with their own fundamentalist faction using terrorist tactics to promote their aims - be it Spain, Macedonia, Belfast, London, Paris, Bosnia, Turkey, Italy, Sardinia, the Baltic states, or Germany with its neo-nazi revival. Not to mention coping with the refugees from everyone else's battles who bring among them peoples of many different beliefs and politics.

The bottom of the world, the places we refer to as home when asked by the inevitable American curiosity of someone who's 'not from around here', seem at face value fairly attractive and safe. They are hardly immune from the world's troubles however, as CNN and internet web sites in your face 24 x 7 would be there to remind you of what terror lay beyond the horizon. The problems of extremist behaviour in countries like South East Asia and the Pacific (let's not forget East Timor or Fiji) are not to be ignored either. Just how many soldiers are in the Indonesian Army?

Whilst our everyday lives are largely unnaffected by the crisis, getting around America will be a nightmare for the rest of the year. Coupled with my CEO's experience of seeing a pistol pulled by an angry passenger during a flight from SF to NY in December last year (resulting in an ear popping descent to Lincoln Nebraska, a major arrest drama but not a column centimetre of media anywhere as it apparently happens at least once a day!), I'm less keen than I was. Hijacking no longer means money, a getaway car and enough avgas to get the plane to Libya - it means you are buggered and have a date with a part of the US military-industrial complex. I take some heart from the fact El Al fly at all, and will happily pay more for a ticket to upgrade the $6 an hour labor currently staffing the security screening at 98% of US airports.

Having flown this week to Virginia, it reminded me of traveling 15 years ago when there were no e-tickets and gate-lounge check-ins. Two hours queuing to get a seat allocation and through bag and body search is just a fact of life. The sign at the metal detector gate at Norfolk airport (a major center for the US Navy) said it all - No knives, No Weapons, No Mace, No Jokes. For each of the first three it had been easy for the airport sign-maker to think of a symbol to contain in the obligatory circle with a slash through it, the international sign of 'not'. Clearly there is no international symbol for humor, as the last circle remained blank.

Attack and counter-attack will no doubt curtail a few other freedoms, and bring about some heavy debates about citizen's constitutional right to bear arms. A society obsessed with individual freedom may go to some extreme lengths to protect the freedom of some individuals over others - it is not beyond the realm that anyone of apparently middle eastern extraction will be rounded up and put in camps for the duration. Crazy? Ask the Japanese Americans who spent WW2 in confinement on US soil. Given the CIA's record of helping people disappear in South America in the last 30 years, so local practice is not out of the question.

For Lesley, Noah and I (who puff ourselves up with some kind of false pride at what 'global citizens' we are - for goodness sake we live in the international equivalent of Palmerston North!) it has all been a sobering reminder of how fragile that globe can be. I look at Noah and consider the emotions my parents must have felt at my birth in 1963 - a president assassinated, the threat of nuclear war, the Bay of Pigs, the Arab-Israeli crises and the emergence of Vietnam. I also consider my younger brother's generation who were born into the seemingly hopeless issues of environmental disaster, escalating nuclear tension, wars like the Afghanistan invasion by Russia and the IRA campaigns in London. No generation has been without these issues.

A lot of Minnesota people have hatched plans for escaping to Canada should gas attacks or biological warfare break out. In my opinion they are underestimating the difficulty of scaling up to 'top-dress' America (although crop-dusting, as they call it here, has been banned for 2 weeks now). Water supplies are diverse and closely monitored. CNN obsesses if there is an abnormal rate of ingrown toenails let alone Smallpox or Anthrax epidemics. Thus, for all its shortcomings, I am comforted by the astonishing resources that this nation can bring to bear on its problems, by the vast scale of both the geography and the economy, and by the way the people can collaborate and organize under siege. We'll stay put for now.

On a pragmatic front, our city location in Minneapolis does feel a little perilous - we are flanked by the Fed, the US Postal Service, the Minneapolis Police Station and the business district. With the humor that only an Anzac can bring to the tragedy of war, a couple of us are wondering if the nearby Target superstore might like to consider changing its logo in the near future.