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loops in motion
Monday, September 24 2001
When I got to work this morning, I found the internet connection and phones were down, so I immediately turned around and headed for home. There's actually very little need for me to go to the workplace at all, since I can do everything from home. The main reasons I go at all is to impose some order on my life, to lessen my distractions, to sit in an ergonomically-healthy chair, and to benefit from all the perks (coffee, tea, free bagel Fridays, etc.). Also, I genuinely like being in Manhattan.
In the light of recent events, I've been thinking about the relative vulnerability of the various subway lines. My preferred route to Manhattan is the IRT Red Line, but it seems to stand out as a possible terrorist attack for two reasons. One is that it crosses over to Manhattan beneath the East River through a particularly long tunnel. If your subway train were to be disabled by an explosion, you'd be facing a long, dark dangerous walk, if water didn't race in to drown you first. The second reason for its being a target is that it stops on Wall Street, and things related to Wall Street will always be high on any terrorist's hit list.
In terms of safety, the Q line is a much better (though less convenient) way for me to get to Manhattan. It crosses the East River above the water on the Manhattan Bridge. It's very doubtful a suicide bomber could carry an explosive onto the subway having enough power to accomplish anything worse than the destruction of a single car in the train.
To slightly decrease my chances of being a victim of terrorist attack, I came home this morning via the Q subway, which I caught in Union Square. I noticed when I was there that all the expedient paper and cloth memorials had been removed from the park and it had returned to something not too different from a state of normal.
I made the mistake of leaving CNN on the teevee all day long. There's very little "news" these days, but somehow CNN manages to string me along and keep me believing I'm actually watching news as it happens. It's a terrible distraction. And yet, CNN is also incredibly lazy. All sorts of things that I want to know are not being told to me; CNN is unabashedly complicit in the ongoing, unquestioning reign of deliberate George W. Bushesque no-nothing ignorance. For example, every now and then we're told how many tons of scrap have been removed from the site of the World Trade Center without ever being told how much was there to begin with. I imagine this has something to do with keeping the American public from becoming too disheartened. But I'm an adult and the world isn't a G movie. I deserve to know what is going on!
Judging from the fact that only about 250 bodies (out of a total of 6300) have been recovered, I can surmise that a similar fraction of debris has also been removed. But to really know what's going on here, I must consult web pages. My favorite World Trade Center reference estimates the materials in the World Trade Center weighed approximately one million tons. After Gretchen and I performed a little math with these numbers, we had the following figures:
- Weight of the World Trade Center materials: 1,000,000 tons
- Weight of a single floor of the World Trade Center: 4,700 tons
- Number of floors: 107 times two (214)
- Energy released with the fall of all floors: 12,000,000,000 foot-tons
- Energy expressed in foot-pounds: 2,400,000,000,000
Then I did a little research necessary to convert this into the energy in tons of TNT (so I could compare it to a nuclear explosion):
This gives me an energy release, just from the collapse of materials, of about 800 tons of TNT. That's a lot of kablooie, but it would make for a pretty small nuclear bomb.
Then there's the amount of energy released by the 22,000 gallons of burning jet fuel. I don't feel like doing the research on that. Here is someone who has worked harder on this than I have. He puts the energy released, including the jet fuel and the kinetic energy of the jets, at about a tenth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Thinking about this "war" America is about to fight with Central Asia and about the attacks being staged on American civilization from training camps in medieval Central Asia, I'm reminded that this isn't the first time the disorganized chaos of Central Asia spilled across the steppes and destroyed western civilization. Rome fell after being attacked by Germanic tribes whose origins were supposedly Central Asia. Later came Attila the Hun and then Genghis Khan. But every time a superpower has attempted to conquer Afghanistan, they have not only been defeated, they've been destroyed. I saw a very amusing chart once, done in the style of a football competition chart (whatever they are called), showing the outcomes of various wars throughout history. The Soviet Union fought Finland, The Soviet Union won. The United States fought the United Kingdom, The United States won. The United States fought Vietnam, Vietnam won. The Soviet Union fought Afghanistan, Afghanistan won. The grand championship, then, would be a showdown between Vietnam and Afghanistan.
At night Gretchen went out to dinner with her friend Deborah, another poet. I was working late via the virtual private network but eventually I was able to meet up with Gretchen and Deborah down at Moonies, Gretchen's favorite bar on Flatbush Avenue. I'd been drinking already and was more interested in food than anything else, so I went two doors down for a pint of Kung-Pow chicken. I found that a round of drinks at Moonies cost me $12; but due to the tits discount, a similar round cost Gretchen a mere $8.
Gretch and Deborah still had lots of poetry shop talk to get through, and I found it fairly interesting. They differed on what poetry they liked; while Gretchen found one poet "boring," Deborah disagreed, finding this poet's use of time dilation "brilliant."
On more accessible subjects, the "War on Terrorism" and the future of New York City, we were all in complete agreement. We find the public displays of me-too patriotism not just nauseating; we think it's being done for all the wrong reasons. Then there's the issue of language, an early and repeated casualty of this "war." Poets live by language, and for them to hear the terrorists, misguided though they were, reflexively characterized as "cowards" is enough to make them scream. These "cowards" are the guys who commandeered jet planes using only box cutters and flew them into skyscrapers. I don't believe even Rambo ever did something so devilishly brave. Americans, on the other hand, fight our battles from half way around the world with demonstrably less-effective robot-driven missiles. For the love of truth, who are the greater cowards?
I told Deborah that it was interesting for me to be living in New York at the time of its demise, something I sincerely believe I'm witnessing. But like the dinosaurs prior to the arrival of the asteroid, New York was actually already in decline on September 11th. The dotcom bubble had burst, the stock market was churning and purging like a hungover stomach. But now, with the immediate disappearance of 100,000 jobs joined by all the jobs that depend on them and the institutions weakened by the attack, combined with the huge losses on Wall Street, I think we're going to see the development of a negative feedback loop of greater and greater misery. I love New York and I hope I'm wrong, but I know it doesn't take much to set such loops in motion. Maybe some day there will actually be artists again in Soho.
In a conversation about gender and sexual preference issues, Deborah noted that while bisexuality has always been considered hot for women, for men it went out of a style with the coming of the AIDS epidemic. Faced with the possibility of contracting a lethal disease, women just didn't find bisexuality sexy anymore. She observed that the coming of AIDS neatly coincided with fade of David Bowie's career. Now, of course, people can take a cocktail every day for the rest of their lives and live healthy despite AIDS, so not only have they given up on safe sex ("So what, I might have to take a cocktail the rest of my life, I'm gettin' some tonight!"), bisexuality is gradually coming back into fashion for men.
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