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A Tale of Two Media:Tragedy and Images
For me, the images down here will be the barges that chugged out of Battery Park carrying corpses bound for vast New Jersey morgues, the smoke and smell and noise, the gaunt and hollow-eyed looks of the cops and firemen digging desperately for their buddies with their bare hands, the relatives on their knees praying all over the place, the video of the couple jumping off one of the towers holding hands, crushed police cars and fire trucks, many with bodies inside, the distant figure on the water everybody said was the U.S.S. George Washington, an aircraft carrier sent to protect New York harbor, and the soldiers with machine guns that are guarding major roadways and airports.
Big stories like this now are covered two ways -- online and off. The former draws millions to websites like CNN's and USA Today's, and new kind of sites like this one. Bloggers and others put up sites so that people could describe what was happening in their own words. People in apartment complexes and news sites posted accounts, and looked for relatives and housing.
As interesting as the Net is -- some of the best and most graphic video of the tragedy was popping up all over the Web -- and as idiosyncratic, the dominant medium when stuff like this happens is still TV, by a wide margin. Hour by hour, TV culls and culls until it finds a handful of quickly familiar images burned into our national and global consciousness. In our time, somebody has a videocam aimed at everything all the time, and within minutes the pictures show up everywhere, on television and the Net. Almost nothing is our culture goes unrecorded or unobserved any longer. The immediacy was as astonishing as the images were unbelievable.
By nightfall, CNN, MSNBC and the networks were moving away from the dramatic video and the indescribable scenes of wreckage and carnage and calling in the policy wonks and propellerheads who hide out in Washington caves until something like this happens. The focal point of all the airtime then shifted from the devastation in New York to the parsing and analyzing of the political, governmental and intelligence communities. For future reference, that may be a good time to turn off the tube and get online, the medium of individual stories, feelings and experiences.
When things like this happen, TV, much more than the Net or the Web, reveals whether leaders rise or fall to the occasion. Mayor Guiliani of New York clearly rose to the tragedy. President Bush, sticking to his cautious sing-song monotone, fled to various bunkers and seemed to shrink throughout the day. Guiliani got bigger by the hour. Defying advice that he hide out until the shooting stopped, he rushed to the scene, was nearly killed, calmed the city down and took charge of the clean-up and rescue. Bush got on his best suit and stuck to the prompter. At least that was the image that TV brought of us of these two very different leaders.
If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says. The damage is not describable, and surely hasn't been captured on TV. There are dead firemen, cops and office workers all over the rubble, everybody is saying, and the dust is so thick even the cadaver dogs are getting sick. Five techs with thermal imaging probes were retreating uptown, their sensitive equipment almost useless in the mud (caused by water poured on the still-burning fires) and smoke and dirt.
The buzz from the cops and reporters standing around is that the death toll will be horrible -- between two and three thousand -- but nowhere near the much higher figures feared yesterday. It seems that many people did get out, calling wives and cops from their cell phones as they went, as did some of the doomed passengers on the hijacked planes. (And a number of the people buried under the towers are still calling for help on their cells. Others got calls from spouses and friends telling them to get out.)
Across the street, a group of structural engineers were reassuring reporters that the towers collapsed of their own structural weakness, the steel melting from the fires, the buildings designed to collapse inward -- rather than fall down -- to save lives.
With their usual hubris, reporters and politicians were promising us that everything was going to change. But if the attacks demonstrate nothing else, it is the folly of that kind of thinking. Terrorists change too, and for all the high-tech equipment pouring into Manhattan, sometimes there isn't a thing we can do to stop them.
Like most of us, I sometimes wonder if Katz's articles shouldn't just be modded "0, Troll" and ignored. The statement that George Bush "fled to various bunkers and seemed to shrink throughout the day" is rather disingenuous and short-sighted. Bush was evacuated by the Secret Service, doing exactly what they're trained to: get the President out of harm's way and into facilities where he can receive C4I (command, control, communications, computer, and intelligence) data and coordinate a response.
I live less than ten miles from Offutt Air Force Base here in Nebraska. None of us were surprised when it was announced that Mr. Bush was brought here after releasing his taped announcement at Barksdale AFB; the headquarters for US Strategic Command is here. Data from satellites, human intelligence assets, and news media could be easily collated and presented to the President by the staff in the "rabbit hole," the STRATCOM underground command post.
President Bush wasn't hiding or fleeing. He was doing his job: managing the country's business in the best possible manner. Just because the mayor of a city was brave and/or foolish enough to endanger his own life doesn't mean the President of a nation has that luxury. Losing so many thousands of individuals is terrible enough; having to attempt to manage that response and simultaneously transition power to a new President because the last one got himself killed is infinitely more so.
I didn't vote for President Bush, nor do I agree with all (or even a majority) of his other decisions. Nonetheless, to feel the need to criticize the man for doing his job is the mark of a small man indeed.
They that would sacrifice their
According to Giuliani, at least, they've been repeatedly testing air quality and "as you get beyond the epicenter of the recovery site, the asbestos levels in the air are either safe or nonexistent."
Giuliani press conference. (NY Times; registration required.)
Because if they were to do this, they would have to admit a number of things which would undermine the message they are trying to send, such as:
1. Osama bin Laden, the current prime scapegoat, was originally supported by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Most of bin Laden's associates, as well as the others associated with the Taliban regime, were trained and financed by the CIA.
2. If it was bin Laden, the bombing was in response to such things as: the bombing and sanctions against Iraq which may have killed clost to a million innocent civillians, the continued oppression of Palestinian civillians by Israel (recent death toll in the thousands, at least), and the destruction of a Sudanese pharmacutical plant by American cruise missiles, death toll unknown because a UN investigation was blocked by the US, but it was the primary source of vaccines and antibiotics for almost all of Central Africa, so it is possible the death toll is in the ten thousands. It would be difficult to acknowledge these things while at the same time clamoring for retribution against Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., because it would be clear that the attack on america itself was a similar act of desparate retribution.
But rather than explaining anything, the media seems more interested in rallying support for another middle eastern war, which will likely lead to further despicable terrorist attacks on america such as this one, AS WELL AS untold thousands of civillian deaths wherever the american government chooses to attack.
Oh yes, one more thing. The images of Palestinians celebrating in Israel you have seen on the news are most likely fake. In a manner of speaking, anyway. They are from 1991 and unrelated to anything going on currently.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
A UN inspection group found that well over 95% of the food and medical supplies were reaching Iraqi civilians directly. They reported it as one of the most effective humanitarian projects in history.
American oil companies use U.S. military and political force to obtain their oil. They do it in secret, using the State Department and CIA, to escape justice. In most cases only money is required to grease the wheels, but on several occasions we've provided all but the soldiers.
Neither side is right. They both must be stopped. Don't try to claim that "they" are somehow more "evil" because they attacked civilians, for the U.S. does that as well. What happened is an atrocity, but at least most everyone killed in Tuesday's attack died instantly. Iraqi children have been starving to death by the thousands for well over a year.
The terrorists are probably hoping that this will result in the American public pressuring our government to change some particular action. I believe they are, unfortunately, just as wrong as our government in believing that the starving citizens of Iraq are going to suddenly revolt against their leadership.
Most Americans not only don't know what our government does, they don't want to. The majority believe they have no say in what the government does, so the last thing they want is to learn of U.S. atrocities. They don't want to feel any more guilt or responsibility. They pay their taxes, and that means they don't have to think about all the terror that money buys.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
The whole fucking point of this article seems to be to criticize President Bush and the media. How utterly ridiculous.
I did not vote for Bush, nor do I agree with all his decisions, but this kind of bullshit article is entirely inappropriate during such a time of crisis. President Bush was being moved around by the secret service, it appeared the whitehouse was a possible target, should he have gone back to the whitehouse to be killed? No, he should stay the fuck out of Washington until the immediate danger is over, he can run the country from anywhere anyway!
Then you criticize the media as appearing distant, etc. I saw the whole thing on live television, when the second plance crashed into the second building, the reporters, camera man, and everyone else in the stupio screamed and started shouting. Some of the news networks STILL haven't run ANY commercials, the same reporters have been reporting for 2 days straight with almost no break, eyes are puffy, speach is slow, and they've put all their partisan political leanings aside and have simply tried to report on the fucking news, which is more than I can say for you!
Fucking ridiculous, and fucking inappropriate, please, Katz, STFU!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Why are there now areas within Israel where Palestinian Arabs are self-administered? Because of a US-mediated settlement between the PLO and Israel. Why are these areas now under "Israeli seige"? Because Palestinian terrorists, whom Arafat is either unwilling or unable to control, started blowing up Israeli civillians. Why did Israel take such a hard line against the Muslims within their borders in the first place? Does the year 1967 remind anyone of anything? (Not the main cause perhaps, but a symptom of why Israel has valid reasons for doing what they do, by their own lights if nothing else.) Nor has US support for Israel in recent years been either blind or unconditional. We have repeatedly insisted that Israel back off on reprisals to Palestinian terror, often clearly to the detriment of Israel's own self-interest, in the hopes that this time, just maybe, the cycle of terror will be broken. The terrorist groups instead have shown absolutely no interest in peace, but continue to escalate their activities.
As Americans go, I'm a Palestinian sympathizer. I'm an Orthodox Christian, within the same communion as the indigenous Christian Church in the Holy Land. Palestinian Christians suffer from all of the disadvantages of being Arabs in Israel even though they are not among the militants. I know very well that Palestinians have lived under conditions of oppression. But I'd have to be blind not to realize that the militant Palestinian factions brought most of it upon themselves and upon every other Palestinian, terrorist or not, Muslim or not, by their actions.
As far as Iraq goes, neither sanctions nor bombings would ever happen if Saddam Hussein would simply abide by the terms of the agreements he made at the end of the Gulf War. He would be able to end all sanctions tomorrow by doing so if only he hadn't proven repeatedly that his word can't be trusted for anything. I suppose the Jordanians don't much care that the reason the Gulf War happened in the first place was because of Saddam's sudden, unprovoked assault on a peaceful neighboring Muslim state. (And are 5,000 Iraqi babies really dying every day due to economic sanctions while Saddam rests comfortably in one of his many palaces? Even if it's true, how can it possibly be the fault of the US when Saddam clearly has the resources to deal with it, but chooses instead to spend them on militancy?)
Perhaps this is the beginning of the decline of the great American Empire.
They can but hope. I suppose it's useless to point out that the US doesn't really have an empire. If we did, our "client states" are the most unruly and disobedient of those of any empire in the history of the world. But I'm well read in world history, and I say that anyone who would provoke the US again ought to proceed with extreme caution. If the provocation is sufficient, the US just might be moved to create a genuine empire, if that's what it takes to make itself secure. Be very, very careful.
And the brethren went away edified.
Katz, this simply wasn't true. There were several news anchors and people around them full of real emotion, on the verge of tears. For instance Ashleigh Banfield on MSNBC (an incredible woman and anchor who should get a friggin' medal for her work), at the beginning of the terror she was almost crying and could barely speak.
And GW, bless his heart, was almost crying today too. For once, I felt like he was really my president.
There was a lot of reality on TV for once. Too much.
You have swallowed US bullshit propaganda whole. Learn to be a bit more skeptical, damnit! I trust individuals like Halliday who have staked their careers on these allegations rather than the vicious US government. How many times do we have to say Don't believe government propaganda without question. If they were killing children they wouldn't admit it, would they?
Now to the facts at issue. Iraq does not get enough supplies. For a long time the UK, France, Russia, etc. have been pushing for better targeted sanctions - all of them acknowledged there was a humanitarian relief problem. The US has up to now maintained its hardline stance. More info and analysis acan be found at the excellent CASI site:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/index.html
"if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998" Unicef, 12 August 1999.
"We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." Denis Halliday, after resigning as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998
Female Prison Rape in NY
I'm a first generation American. My parents were driven from Iran by this same Islamic filth (I'm sorry but I can't help but be prejudice, and feel hate for them all...Half a century ago the descendants of european immigrants went by the tens thousands to the homeland of their ancestors to rid the earth of a great evil. We must do the same, the battles will be fought differently but in the end we too shall prevail...Victory at any cost.
I appreciate your patriotism, but (IMHO) that isn't how America works. Here is my position, as posted earlier today on another site.
By The Numbers (a cross post)
2001 will doubtlessly go down in history as a year when thousands of Americans died because some people felt so strongly about their way of life that they were willing to die rather than change, and were willing to kill countless innocent bystanders in the process.
Except of course that "countless" is absolutely the wrong word to use here. One of the many things that Americans do quite well is count things--everything from hanging chad to corpses gets tallied and tabulated here. So we will in fact have concrete numbers to think about, eventually. Even before the year is out we will have good estimates to start thinking rationally about--thinking being another thing Americans are quite good at. We will know not only how many people they killed, but who they were and why they did it.
Drunk drivers, for instance, are expected to kill around 16000 people this year, give or take a few depending on how jolly the holidays turn out to be. While this is a horrid toll, it is quite a bit better than the 27000 or so that smokers will take out with second hand smoke--both because there are fewer of them, and because most victims of drunken drivers are spared the painful, lingering death of the smoker's victim. These are just two examples, falling between the somewhat larger numbers killed by (say) reckless driving in general and the slightly smaller numbers taken out (for example) by terrorists. But we'll count them all.
Terrible, surely. As Americans we can hardly hear numbers like this without asking ourselves the next question: what are we going to do about this?
Some countries have systems in place to deal with these sorts of problems quickly and effectively. Drink alcohol? We'll chop off your head. That certainly solves the problem of repeat offenders, and there is reason to believe that it acts as an effective deterrent. We, of course, aren't so direct. When an individual can be tied to a crime (say, a drunk driver) we deal with their behavior on a case by case basis. But whether a perpetrator can be found or not, we react like--well, like Americans. There really isn't another word for it. We install air bags, we segregate public places into smoking and non-smoking areas, we take myriad small steps to reduce the risks, to mitigate the damage, to solve the problem. We study it. We seek cures and explanations, predictive indicators and systematic risk factors. We debate. We argue. And above all, we seek to educate.
Some may call us wimps, others may call us civilized. In the long run, it doesn't really matter what they call us, because in the long run our system is phenomenally effective. Our wheels may grind slowly, but like the mill of justice they grind exceedingly fine.
True, there are always those who preach the extremes. Anyone with a radio can hear them--just fiddle with the dial until you find a station that's all talk (and I am thankful, little action). Or hop on the internet. Smokers should be doused with gasoline. Drunk drivers are doing us a service by culling those people too weak or stupid to get out of their way. We should use our military might to turn foreign countries into parking lots. All the fags should be sent to Haiti. Everyone should be required to smoke for a year, so they'll see how hard it is to quit. Drunk drivers were sent here by Satin. We should embrace Allah. Nuke them from orbit. Kill them all, let God sort 'em out. Everyone is gay, but most people haven't admitted it yet. The Blacks are behind this. Or the Jews. Or the Californians. Elvis is stalking me. Etc, etc.
The great thing about America is that we don't shut these people up. We don't have them shot, or locked away for decades. We don't even ignore them, really, although most of us don't act on their advice. Instead, we react to them like Americans always react to things. They get counted, along with the chad, along with the casualties, and their voices are weighed in when we consider our options, ground in the mill of public policy.
Which, as has been noted, grinds exceedingly fine.
-- MarkusQ
Thankfully i didnt know anyone who died, and I send condolences to those who did. The world trade center has been a part of NYC for as long as I can remember it shakes my sense of permenance to think of it gone. it is one of those things that is always there.
..was. the past tense still doesnt come easily.
I dont think that blood pays for blood. I am saddened
by the events last tuesday, and i am saddened by the events which I am sure to come.
It is a strange feeling to mourn for humanity. To feel that the human race has gone mad.
Perhaps it may help those who are angry to view this webpage. It might remind us all what makes us great.
http://spinster.org/~david
Many might think that this is too lenient a stance. That it is giving in to terrorism. But let us remember the words of JFK, words which very well have prevented WWIII.
"Let no one see an offer to negotiate as a sign of weakness, Let no one fear to negotiate, nor negotiate out of fear.."
just some thoughts.
--------------------- Turn evil by smiling.
While I like your attitude a lot more than that of all those guys running around yelling bloody revenge, I have a couple of problems with your post:
To start off, who exactly do you refer to as "the enemy"? If I read you correctly, the whole of the Islamic/Arabic world. Sorry, sweeping overgeneralization.
What's even worse is the total disregard for cultures other than our own your post shows - there is nothing inherently better in modern Western culture than in traditional Islamic culture (which was, as can not be pointed out often enough, a haven of learning and tolerance for centuries during which European crusaders lined their way to the holy land with corpses). Sure, there are extremists, and there's not the slightest reason to defend them and their sick actions, but these extremists are by no means a majority, and they are by far not the only thing that makes up Islamic culture.
I have a gut feeling that this sort of (sorry) cultural chauvinism is at the heart of much of the terror we have been witnessing during recent years...
frotz grue
Female Prison Rape in NY
If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says.
One has only to think of London under the blitz or the San Francisco earthquake to know that great cities can recover from great disasters.
According to seminal urbanologist Jane Jacobs, cities are inherently resilient to catastrophe. More damage is done by misguided urban planning.
The World Trade Center, as its name suggests, serves a national and international market. The demand for the products and services that the companies in the World Trade Tower provided is still there. Compared to the damage caused by hurricanes in Florida, the cost to rebuild is manageable.
If New York could thrive despite a crime rate that killed many more people than the terrorist over the last 10 years, it can survive this single event.
I suspect that the most lasting effect is that architects will reconsider the need for 110 storey buildings.
Perhaps the United States has been accused of acting like the global police department, but only for our own ends. It appears we can no longer rely on our own media to bring us news from around the world, because they don't. If you watch BBC television or surf the world's news websites, you will see a greater picture than the AOL/Time Warner machine is presenting to the majority of Americans.
Maybe it is time we wake up and start acting like part of a global problem.