The terrorists want us to believe the world has ended. We must not fall into their trap
STEPHEN GLOVER
those who are old enough remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot, so we will all recall what we were doing when we heard about the attack on New York. I was reading the controversial new book about Tina Brown and Harry Evans, which I had planned to write about for this column. Then my elder son rang me. Immediately Tina and Harry and their New York lives seemed wholly irrelevant to what was going on there now. Here was a story which was bigger than anything that had happened for years. It was so big that if you divided it by a hundred you still had a big story. A single human mind simply could not begin to fathom all the consequences.
Part of our difficulty was that we had seen it all before. We have witnessed the destruction of whole cities in films like Independence Day or Pearl Harbor or a dozen other late-night movies whose titles we cannot even remember. Had the perpetrators of this atrocity themselves watched such films via satellite in some hideout in the mountains of Iraq or Afghanistan? These haters of America, these despisers of the Great Satan. were in a sense prisoners of the popular culture they abominated. They shared the same implausibly grandiose dreams as the Hollywood scriptwriters, flying aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the same careless disregard for verisimilitude. But this was true, it had happened. Bad fiction had been turned into fact, and it was difficult to disentangle that fact from the pervasive legacy of Hollywood, to get a proper handle on what had happened, to assess it as reality rather than as a sequel to Independence Day.
It had to take place in New York, and not only because New York is where Superman and Batman invariably confront the forces of darkness, and where Orson Welles informs a credulous population that the Martians have landed. New York is the ultimate media city and this was the ultimate media event. All other considerations aside, the terrorists could not have staged their terrifying drama anywhere else. It had to be here. New York has the filmic history. It had the dramatic skyline and the World Trade Center; it could be depended on to provide better and faster live television pictures than any other city. Journalists seemed to be on the spot almost before it happened: Steve Evans, a BBC reporter, was actually in one of the two World Trade Center towers when the first plane hit. The next morning several British newspapers boasted that their man had been near the World Trade Center, or had just visited, or was about to. And if there weren't real journalists on hand to offer an account, there were plenty of surrogates with their home video cameras, whose tilting and reeling shots were broadcast exhaustively by the American networks, CNN, NBC, CBS and Fox.
I must have watched television for about eight hours and then, when I retired to bed, listened to the BBC World Service. Actually it was a bit of a relief, after seeing the two towers of the World Trade Center collapse a hundred times, to listen simply to words, but the next morning I immediately switched on the television again, and then devoured the newspapers. On the whole this was Fleet Street at its most professional and quickest, though I had noticed that my 'West End Final' edition of the London Evening Standard, bought at five o'clock in central London on Tuesday afternoon, had not found the time to produce a leader or leader-page article on the outrage, however perfunctory. As for television, events were made for it. CNN was the fastest, the first station to produce live coverage of the bombardment of Kabul via video telephone, though this turned out not to be US retaliation. But I didn't find the American channels any better than our own. If anything, the BBC and BBC News 24 (which at last came into its own) offered superior analysis. and BBC's Newsnight, rather than doing one-to-one interviews as American stations tend to, actually got a good discussion going that involved people who knew what they were talking about.
Although this is by far the worst terrorist outrage ever committed, staged in the media capital of the world, we don't, as I write, have any idea of casualties. President Bush speaks of thousands. but no one can be sure how many. The rescue is the one aspect of the story that has been shrouded in mystery, though I am sure this will change. I suppose it has been difficult for journalists to get close to the scene. Even if they have, it must have been impossible amid the chaos to add all the individual facts together, and make a lot of sense of what is happening.
How, less than 24 hours after American Airlines flight AA011 flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center, could we possibly get our minds around these unbelievable events? People assert that the world has changed and will never be the same again. 'Day that Changed the World', said the Sun's front page, is This the End of the World?' asked the Daily Star. No prophecy is deemed too extreme, no outcome is so dreadful that it cannot be sensibly contemplated. We are told that a world economic recession is now certain; that America will unleash some terrible retaliation barely short of a nuclear strike, and more outrages will ensue; that she will turn isolationist and leave Israel to its own devices, and the tender mercies of the Arabs.
Possibly these terrible things will happen, and worse, But we are in danger of reacting as these terrorist scriptwriters intend us to. They want us to believe that they have brought our world to an end. They are delighted if we act as though this is Independence Day or Pearl Harbor because that shows they have the power to turn American myth into American reality. They didn't just hijack four airplanes: they have also taken over and exploited America's obsession with Apocalypse, and her conviction, propagated by Hollywood, that everything will end in catastrophe. But actually American civilisation is not threatened. Western civilisation is not teetering on the brink. The stock market will recover one day; the terrorists may be caught; the show will go on. The terrorists have brilliantly manipulated the media to blind us to the truth that this is the most ghastly and heartless terrorist atrocity ever committed rather than the end of the world.
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