Which Way to Normal, Jack?

Just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, our pundits and politicians starting talking about “finding closure” and telling us to “get back to normal.” Reminds me, oddly, of a cartoon (probably from the New Yorker) I saw in the late 1950s. Somewhere by the road in a desert, an Arab has unrolled his prayer mat and gotten down on his knees, performing his morning ritual. A husband-and-wife team of U.S. tourists in vacation clothes pulls up alongside him in a sparkling new gas-guzzling rental car. “Which way to Mecca, Jack?” inquires the husband.

That gag encapsulates this country’s blithe obliviousness to the rest of the world, and especially the cultures of the Middle East and the West’s relationship to them. This was manifested more recently in President Chauncey Gardener’s proposal to initiate a “crusade” against terrorism. Dubya’s seemingly unfeigned astonishment upon discovering that this word derives from “crux,” or cross, and has not only an etymology but a history, and that said history has deeply negative connotations to anyone whose culture suffered from the empire-building invasions of proselytizing Christian armies, should terrify all U.S. citizens. Clearly he wasted no time studying while at Harvard, and has wasted no time since. Bush may be nothing more than a figurehead, but I prefer my figureheads picked from the best of the herd. (No telling when he might actually have to make a decision on his own, and that’s when Osama bin Laden will truly have us by the short hairs.)

Of course, Bush’s “crusade” reference may have been deliberate. His repeated references to the forces of good versus the forces of evil make it obvious that he’s pursuing what he conceives of as a religious war. If so, he doesn’t stand alone in his derangement. Prominent fundamentalist members of the Christian right in this country promptly declared that feminists, homosexuals, freethinkers and the American Civil Liberties Union were to blame for corrupting this nation and bringing down the vengeance of God on America; another loony neo-con called for an actual crusade in which we killed the rulers of Middle-East nations and forcibly converted their populations to Christianity. We should probably put these dangerous fanatics in padded cells, so they don’t hurt themselves, and at the very least must certainly prevent them from frothing rabidly on radio and television and in the press and from their pulpits, bully or otherwise, henceforth. They could have a terrible influence on little children and on the adult childish, of whom this nation has no shortage.

Meanwhile, business took me to PhotoAmericas, a photo festival in Portland, Oregon. My friend Oop, driving me to the airport, asked how I felt about flying. I told her that I’d considered never flying again, but that the only alternative was to get right back on the winged horse, so to speak. And, I added, presumably security measures were now in place to prevent any new attack on commercial airlines. Yet at Newark International on the morning of October 3 I showed my picture ID — my passport — only once, when checking my luggage and getting my ticket at the Northwest Airlines counter. So I could have simply handed my boarding passes to someone else whose face and name and ID would not be verified even one more time before boarding that plane — nor even when boarding a second plane in Detroit after a layover there. I saw a couple of cops with handguns in the Newark terminal, and had to take my laptop out of its carrying case and send it through the X-ray machine by itself. Otherwise, from a security standpoint it looked like business as usual.

Portland was lovely as always — a sweet little town, with a terrific quality of life, good food and coffee and wine, delightful pubs, and great bookstores (especially Powell’s). I could easily learn to love it if I lived there. They were seeing off a volunteer delegation of some 900 Portlanders heading to New York during my stay, just citizens coming to visit and show support for and good will toward the Big Apple — that’s the kind of place it is. On my end, I got to hang with a bunch of colleagues I’ve known for years, a continent away from Ground Zero, and to talk shop for awhile — a much-needed distraction. The visible presence of National Guard troops with sidearms in the Portland terminal when I returned on October 8th proved reassuring, but security was not noticeably tighter, though by then we’d started bombing Afghanistan and were, to all intents and purposes, at war.

So I have to ask, which way to Normal, Jack? And which way to Closure? Rich, a fireman of my acquaintance who’s been helping clear the WTC site since the collapse, estimates that it’ll take another six months just to dig out all the rubble — which will end up as the sealer coat on the Fresh Kills landfill. My proposal: Make that the site for the city’s — for the world’s — memorial to this disaster. And, once it’s ready for visitors, put the signs for Normal and Closure on the roads leading up to it. Maybe someone will actually find them there.

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Following up on my previous columns concerning Rudy Giuliani’s obsession with “decency” and his ludicrous New York City Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission: Obviously, this crisis trumps all that, and I have to say that this city couldn’t have asked for a better mayor than Giuliani in its hour of desperate need. He not only rose to the occasion with courage and grace and even understated eloquence, but he redeemed himself in regard to what sometimes seems borderline racism by pointedly extending his protection to all the citizens of New York, especially the Middle Easterners and domestic followers of Islam among us — those who were most likely to become targets of mindless revenge. I’m proud of him; were he up for reelection, I might even vote for him.

But — despite his unfortunate and ill-conceived attempt to capitalize on his finest hour by having himself appointed Mayor for Life — he’s not. And whoever takes over for him has to cope not only with the rebuilding of New York but with the existence — and, I hope, the dismantling — of that ill-conceived “Decency Commission.” As reported in the New York Post late in July, New York City Comptroller and defeated Democratic mayoral candidate Alan G. Hevesi announced, “There’s three things I would immediately do” if elected. The first two? “Number one is bring down the barricades [at City Hall]. Number two is finish off the Decency Commission.” Public Advocate Mark Green has also pledged to eliminate this commission. I don’t know if Fernando Ferrer has taken a position on this issue yet, but I urge him to do so. Consider that also when you vote in November.

And by all means vote. Without intending to, thousands of people just died in an ongoing battle over (among other things) your right to do so. You owe it to them to step into the voting booth. Casting your ballot, not waving a flag, is what marks you as a citizen in this democracy.