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COVER STORY: THE AFTERMATH
In Search Of The Soul
As it struggles to come to terms with the tragedy, the
US finds that it cannot dissociate itself from a wider world and rediscovers
Irving Berlin's most famous song
—By Ashok Malik in New York
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HOPE AND OLD GLORY: When New York's financial district reopened,
emotions ran high
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Like all great societies,
America is a mix of many moods. This diversity is reflected in the reaction
to the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. America is angry,
America is apprehensive; Citizen America is patriotic, Corporate Citizen
America is panicky. If the overriding question of week one was "Why
us?", the one going into week three is probably "What next?"
At the most basic level September 11 has made
Americans interested in their country and the world once again. The injury
done to the Manhattan skyline and to the Pentagon has scarred every heart.
Take Macon, Georgia, a city of 1,20,000-odd people 135 km from Atlanta.
Macon is America's Jhumritalaiya, as interior and insular a town as can
be. Its local newspaper, The Telegraph, sells 70,000 copies a day and
packs its columns with profound reports about the town's teachers.
On September 12, The Telegraph devoted its edition
to New York and Washington, Osama bin Laden and jehad-names, places and
concepts that had seemed far away. The paper doubled its print run and
sold 1,40,000 copies, more than one per town resident. Macon, the land
where nothing ever happened, had rediscovered America. So had the rest
of America.
Everywhere across the country, Americans are
waving the flag, flying it outside their homes, on their cars, wearing
scarves depicting the Stars and Stripes. About the only comparable fast-moving
commodities have been maps and books on Afghanistan. As a store owner
in Washington DC put it, "Everything on Afghanistan is gone. There's
absolutely nothing left."
Quoting Franklin Roosevelt from World War II,
President George W. Bush spoke of the "warm current of national unity".
For a man who till two weeks ago was seen as a struggling leader, Bush
seems a new man. A USA Today-CNN Gallup poll conducted on September 10
gave Bush a 51 per cent approval rating. By September 17, the figure had
climbed to 86 per cent. Rarely has so much been achieved by doing so little.
An astounding 88 per cent wanted retaliation
against the terrorists. You didn't have to wait for the polls to figure
that out. You could see it as you drove down the highways, passing dusty
trucks with only one word painted on them: "Revenge". It has
been a time of new biases for old. Joe Spaulding, a fast-talking taxi
driver in Chicago, was a little befuddled when his south Asian and west
Asian colleagues parked their cars on September 11, fearing trouble or,
at the very least, rude customers. They were back on the road the next
day but not before Spaulding had had an experience that, despite New York,
left him chuckling. "I'm a black man," Spaulding explained,
"and in my time white folks have done some pretty unfair things to
my people. So it struck me as funny when a white woman climbed into my
cab on September 11 and exclaimed 'Thank God it's you and not one of those
foreigners'."
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