CJ Buchmann's List: Moving Past September 11

• Now that's the America we remember: a place with abundant leisure for nitpicking, navel gazing, euphemizing, minesweeping the culture for hidden affronts to tender sensibilities, and gently ministering to bruisable psyches. "
• The novelist Barbara Kingsolver published a piece in the Los Angeles Times pointing out that two years ago an earthquake in Turkey killed 17,000 innocent people in a day, and suggesting we might want to rethink the idea that the lives of our citizens are "more worthy of grief and less willingly risked than lives on other soil."
• The note found in the suitcase of the hijacker Mohamed Atta said that "the time of fun and waste is over." Maybe he was simply alluding to the hijackers' un-Islamic last nights of vodka and lap-dances.
• who thought our culture was getting a mite decadent, but now that we're a nation at war, every little bit helps.

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• As dubious as the notion of America in lock step is the idea that Sept. 11 marked the end of the America we used to know.
• According to that NEWSWEEK Poll, only about a third of Americans think it "very likely" that another, similar terrorist attack is imminent.
• Only a third say they feel even "somewhat" less secure where they work or live.
• It's possible that we now live in Pod America, a terrorist-infiltrated police state in which all familiar things and people are actually alien replicas. But more likely it's the same old place with the intensity cranked up: two thirds of Americans say getting back to normal makes them appreciate their lives more.
• he and his wife, Sheryl, lived in Battery Park City and she worked across the street from the World Trade Center. After the attack, they packed up and hightailed it across the Hudson. "It's not the same for you," Campbell said in a quaking voice as he phoned in his resignation. "We're from the Midwest."
• anyone considering getting a passport and just bailing entirely needs to reflect that last week in Switzerland--Switzerland!--a gunman walked into a regional legislature and killed 14 people. So there goes that.
• Francesco Fiorillo, a high-school teacher in Ossining, half an hour upriver from New York City, says he won't go near a subway, "not unless I see armed security guards there, preferably police, and if not police then the National Guard." What's his problem? His wife, Rose, who works in Manhattan, had just come up out of a station when she heard the plane hit Tower 2.
• Olivia Lopez watched that same tower collapse from a few blocks away; since then she's scarcely left her home across the river in Jersey City. "To go to a Yankees game or a Mets game, I would just feel anxious. I'm nervous in my own bedroom."
• But isn't Becky Boyd of Roswell, Ga., overreacting when she says she's not going to any more Atlanta Braves games because "there are crazy people out there"? Plumb silly.
• One Manhattan pharmacist reports that he's dispensing twice as much Ambien as before Sept. 11.
• But news leaks out about what almost happened: a thwarted attack, details unspecified, on Boston. Crop-dusters, as that farmer in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" put it, "dustin' crops where there ain't no crops." And rumors zipping around the Internet: the supposed "Klingerman virus," on sponges sent to the unsuspecting in blue envelopes.
• points out that President Bush himself has appropriated the apocalyptic vocabulary in his public rhetoric. "He has a vision of total evil and total good."

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• If a nation really did have a collective psyche, right about now America's friends might suggest that it could possibly be time to, you know, maybe see somebody about this?
• ecurity and surveillance heightened, free speech strongly discouraged.
• A president's press secretary warning that Americans "have to watch what they say." (And when that line was left out of the official transcript of his remarks, a spokesperson for the spokesperson explaining it was a "transcription error.")
• Unemployment at a nine-year high and an economy, soaring a year ago thanks to the dot-com bubble, now officially in recession.
• Maybe it's time to get away for a little while?
• Ever since Sept. 11, America has been doing all the things it can remember from World War II, whether the real one or the Tom Hanks one: standing united, flying the flag, praying, God-blessing itself.
• First comes the period of solidarity: blood giving, alms giving and the kindness of strangers.
• Then people reverting to their old routines, their old personalities, burdened with new information and in a changed environment.
• But of course the notion of a national psyche, of a collective mood--of "America" itself, really--is only a metaphor: a subjective averaging-out of hundreds of millions of psyches in hundreds of billions of moods, as registered in poll results, news reports, Internet rumors and, above all, what people say when they're just talking.
• The "mourning" everybody talks about is all too real for the loved ones of the people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the airliner that went down in Pennsylvania; for more than 99 percent of Americans, it's necessarily more abstract. Supposedly we're all New Yorkers now, yet even New Yorkers who live or work above 14th Street in Manhattan didn't experience the same disaster as people downtown.
• People all over the country report that they're spending more time with their kids. Even America's racial divides seem to be papered over. "From what I can sense," says Sherrie Baver, director of Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at CUNY, "people are coming together and identifying as Americans." Unless, of course, you're Arab-American.
• Those UNITED WE STAND placards and bumper stickers attest to the hopes of the people who display them. But as Sept. 11 gets farther away, the divisions become clearer.
• Poll shows 88 percent of Americans still approve of the way President George W. Bush is handling the situation
• since only 64 percent support military strikes against terrorist targets overseas that would risk civilian lives.
• Just 7 percent think Bush has gone too far already in restricting civil liberties,

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• ‘My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,’ said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. ‘As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all.’ If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world’s conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.”
• how much, since 9/11, we’ve become “The United States of Fighting Terrorism.”
• I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.
• 9/11 has made us stupid.
• But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.
• Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness.
• Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”
• ’d love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can’t keep chasing that rainbow this way.
• We used to be the gold standard. We aren’t anymore. Last July, Microsoft, fed up with American restrictions on importing brain talent, opened its newest software development center in Vancouver.
• We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy.

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