It was not the way I expected to start my morning two Sundays ago — with a terror alert. But that’s what I and other Washingtonians had to deal with as we went about our business that day.
Law enforcement agents solemnly inspected vehicles for explosives around buildings that housed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as streets in the business district and on Capitol Hill. There were police patrols citywide to guard against attacks on other targets. Homeland Security issued an identical alert — known by its color, orange, one rung below the highest level — for the financial services sectors in New York, citing the discovery of “remarkably detailed intelligence” that Al-Qaeda operatives have been plotting to blow up sensitive buildings, such as the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup Tower in midtown Manhattan, with truck bombs.
Not a warning to trifle with for Washingtonians and New Yorkers who, between them, saw roughly 2,800 people perish in their two cities three years ago. How did a great many people, whose judgment I respect, react to the alert? In a word, cynically. I took the subway that morning with Clifford, a fellow journalist from my neighborhood, whose office is adjacent to mine at the National Press Club building in downtown Washington. “Humbug!” Cliff sniffed when I asked what he made of this latest alert and whether he worried. “I’ll you simply, this government’s obsession with alerts doesn’t pass the smell test, for it’s no more than an exercise in election-year politics, and we press folk are indirectly complicit by going along with the administration’s fearmongering tactics.”
“No question that we do, in post-Sept. 11 America, live within the realm of terrible possibility,” suggested a colleague at the office during a coffee break, “but this new, dangerous force in our lives, this so-called Islamist terrorism, has actually rendered us captive to irrational fear and a resort to Orwellian pronouncements by our leaders. I’m convinced that the presence of a clear and present danger is overstated.” Another colleague, a writer in his early sixties who had taught journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, chimed in, somewhat meditatively: “You know, it’s difficult to conceive of the notion that a big power like the US is shaken by one man, but there you have it, Bin Laden is being honored, in however unintentional and perverted a way, by Bush’s preoccupation with him.”
In the evening, I took a Palestinian friend from the West Bank, currently visiting Washington for post-doctoral research, to a production of “Carmen,” his favorite opera. “Oh, come, come now,” he said, when I asked him if he felt dread walking the streets of the city. “I’m from Palestine, remember? Dread is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. It clings to us like a second skin. We’ve learned to live with it without being torn from our essential purpose as human beings.”
“And, yes,” he added, “I’ve learned to love Carmen too, that gypsy, anarchist and seducer, that addict of freedom with the rose in her teeth and the castanets clacking over her head, mocking death to the end. We claim her as our own, you know. She’s Palestine, see?”
Well, we’ll let slide a bit of colorful Arabic metaphor here. Much later that night, at Angles, a watering hole whose owner, an Irish-American, calls a “saloon” (a hip, left-wing, Democratic saloon, to be sure, with posters all over declaring “Out of Iraq Now”), the patrons will have no truck with the president and his terror alerts, whatever color they are designated.
“Bush is harming our nation with these shenanigans, all designed to win him votes in November,” said one. “I reckon it would be best if he and his neocon freaks left for Iraq and ran for office there.” I don’t agree, as the conventional wisdom has it, that President Bush has been waging a battle against the English language.
He was on the ball, for example, when he said in a speech at the White House last week: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
