Context

I was in my apartment, waiting for the phone to ring, when the sudden thunder of a passing airplane shook the building. Seconds later, there was (I think) a distant boom, and then a woman started screaming in the street.

We live on the 16th floor of an apartment complex close to NYU. I ran out to our cramped terrace, which faces east, and looked down into Mercer Street, where she stood screaming, screaming, and other people too were staring south.

I turned and looked where they seemed to be looking—looked south, down Mercer, where I thought I’d see an airplane crashed into the street. Yet there was nothing odd down there; just the ordinary hum and twinkle of the morning traffic, and the bright blue sky above the lofts and office buildings south of Houston. And yet she was still screaming, and there were others shouting, and all were standing frozen, facing south. So I leaned out over the railing, leaned out so I could see around the southeast corner of my building, see a little further to the west, where everyone was looking.

There I saw, a mile away, the World Trade Center, the foremost tower with its face ripped open—a broad black gash where there had just been several gleaming storeys. The gash was oblong, tapering off at either end, its outline clearly indicating the complete and permanent departure of a large jetliner. There were no flames, there was no smoke that I could see. Just that gaping rip across the top of the facade.

Like everybody else, throughout the day I watched the whole thing on television—endless replays of that first crash, and of the second plane’s amazing near-decapitation of the second building, and of each tower’s swift disintegration, all those images far more explicit and spectacular than what I’d seen directly by the simple light of day. And yet what haunts me still is that plain glimpse of distant damage, and very few of those clean TV images. (There was one TV image that I wish I hadn’t seen—of some man jumping off one tower, arms and legs pinwheeling desperately in his last moments.) The sight of that black rip in the actual skyline was disorienting in a way no televisual could ever be.

That glimpse almost knocked me over. Out there on the terrace I had to work to catch my breath, gripped the warm railing for dear life, glanced down again at Mercer Street—maybe to assure myself that that part of the landscape was still whole. And then I leaned and looked again—the gash too was still there, yet all around it the great city seemed to bustle normally. But that normality itself already seemed abnormal. In the foreground just a block away, immense above the southwest corner of Mercer and Houston, a flirty brunette giantess was kneeling in a sable coat (and nothing else): "CHRISTINE PERRIN" it said above her. Her body facing the catastrophe, her left hand pointing toward it casually (her right hand gripped her naked knee), she glanced back over her luxurious shoulder, one eye coyly visible amid her lank dark tresses.

Ordinarily, it would have been an easy thing to read the pleasurable invitation of that barefoot babe in her caressing fur. But juxtaposed against the mutilated tower, the come-on was grotesque, an eerie parody of chic enticement. There she was, pointing at the wreck and winking back at us, as if the devastation was a good excuse for one more headful of fantastic sex—as if the horror at her fingertips was some conventional memento mori, like a tidy little skull, and not the scene of an apocalyptic crime or accident, where many people (hundreds? thousands?) were just then being incinerated.

But at the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking any of that. My head was empty. All I thought about her was that she looked strange down there—all wrong. Mainly I felt sick.

I tried CNN, but at that early moment there was only advertising. Then the phone rang—I’d been waiting for it when the plane roared over. Wisconsin Public Radio was calling for an hour-long interview arranged the week before, on product placement. We were set to talk about Fay Weldon’s bizarre decision to produce a novel for Bulgari, the high-end jewelry firm—a plan that, at the time, appeared to represent the ultimate in mercenary tastelessness, and that therefore would have made for an enlightening public chat, if untold thousands of New Yorkers hadn’t just been killed, or murdered, several blocks away. I told the show’s producer what had happened, and asked him if we couldn’t cancel, but he hadn’t heard the news ("Wow!"), and was thinking only of the show, and of how "disappointed" folks would be if I didn’t speak as advertised.

And so I grudgingly agreed to deal with product placement—not because I’m such a trouper, and not because I cared at all about the subject at that moment. (I knew I couldn’t concentrate.) It was mostly out of fear that I performed as if it were a normal day, when what I wanted to do most—also out of fear—was bolt from the apartment, and find my wife and sons, who were uptown with friends. (Stupidly, I figured that they hadn’t heard the news, and that I’d tell them when I saw them.) Later, I heard other people’s stories of absurd commitment to routine—like the old friend who, walking from his place in Battery Park, saw the first plane hit the tower just blocks away, and whose first concern was that he might be late for his appointment with the dentist. (His daughter was in school, their dog was up in the apartment.) Such business-like behavior was no act of anti-terrorist defiance, but itself a terror-stricken effort, quite unconscious, to deny what was both obvious and unbearable.

The show began. For some time the host and I conversed about the dangers of commercialism—or at least it sounded like a conversation, although I wasn’t really part of it. Now CNN was on the story, and, while my mouth was talking, I was staring at the network’s image of the ruined tower (I had the sound turned down) as a fireball burst out of the side of the adjacent tower, which was mostly hidden by the first, so that it looked as if some burning rubble from the first explosion had somehow blown next door and caused another one. That’s what I then reported, anyway—to the radio listeners of Wisconsin, on the basis of what CNN was showing of an accident or crime that took place not far from my building. But then they aired some footage of the same explosion from another angle—showing that a second plane had hit the other tower. "That’s it," I said. "It’s an attack. This could be the start of World War III."

Although he didn’t buy that speculation ("Aw, gimme a break!" he chortled), the host did finally let us change direction, as listeners started calling to confirm my claims. For the next half-hour or so we talked about the implications of what happened; and while most of it escapes me now, I do remember saying that that catastrophic shock had suddenly made the subject of our prior exhange—and that exchange itself—seem ludicrously trivial. In the shadow of that horror, the whole commercial enterprise—the omnipresent loud campaigns, the petty longings and trite fantasies, the crazed idealizations of tomorrow’s garbage—now stood exposed as a colossal waste of time and energy. And with that horror resonating, even the critique that I had just been stammering now seemed irrelevant.

Throughout that hideous bright day, and through the week, there was no place anywhere for advertising. Even on TV it looked all wrong—if and when you stumbled into it, wandering briefly from the coverage to graze a bit out in the well-protected market districts of the cable universe, with their hermetic infomercials, TV reruns and old movies. But now the TV news itself was eerily spot-free, the horror having cast the kind of heavy shadow that all advertisers flee as if it were a cloud of anthrax spores. Against the vivid backdrop of such misery, any ad, however "tasteful," appears obscene; and so, at first, the newscasts came to us without the usual admixture of inane high-tech asides for AOL, Mercedes Benz, Paine Webber, Tums, New York Times, Depends, Saab, Total, Nortel, Intel, Kinko’s, Serevent ("Start taking fuller breaths"), Viagra, Staples, KFC and Prilosec, just to name a few. Thus, as you watched, and however grim the revelations, it was as if a grating background noise which had annoyed you for decades had simply ceased without your having noticed it. And, more depressingly, the proper spirit of real commerce was now missing from the streets of lower Manhattan. There was no traffic, other than the odd unmarked police car. Day and night, the southern sky was dark with smoke, and when the winds blew north the air would fill with a peculiar acrid essence of steel, concrete, plastic, glass, asbestos, carpeting, computer guts and "bone dust." People were meandering all along the quiet avenues and cross-streets, either staring shocked at where the towers had been or trying not to look as they pursued whatever business they had going; and the giant ads flamboyant on the sides of buildings along Houston Street and elsewhere toward the pyre—Yahoo, Altoids, Rockport, Calvin Klein—hung out there looking stupid and ashamed.

And there was, throughout that week, an odd collective tenderness, at least downtown, where the constant sight of that nightmarish smoldering gap, and all the other dreadful things that people had just seen or heard, imposed, throughout the streets and in those shops and restaurants admitting customers, the hushed civility of mourners. At the time it seemed that no one in this peerless shopping mecca would be buying any more, now that our mortality was in the air. It was this sudden climate that inhibited the advertisers—not just those locally headquartered, and therefore with their people grieving too, but also those out-of-town concerns not directly touched by the disaster.

But of course that mood soon passed. As the days wore on, there were occasional disorienting signs of a resurgent hucksterism—now pitched to take advantage of the situation. Over the first weekend, there was a bright ad on the back of the A section of the New York Times: a full-page-sized Old Glory in red, white and blue, with instructions for window display, and, underneath, the note that this fine patriotic item had been brought to us by the nation’s K-Mart distributors (who in their outlets were not giving flags away but selling them). The vulgarity stood out in that day’s paper, whose many other corporate ads, from companies Manhattan-based, managed not to beat the drum, but offered somber statements of condolence and remembrance. At that point, most advertisers were proceeding very carefully, so as not to stand accused of callous exploitation. The cleverest of them made their pitch obliquely—as in this very timely e-mail from the Sharper Image, which came to me amid the rising controversy over the abundant toxic smoke still billowing from Ground Zero:

Dear Mark,

For the first time ever—and for five days only—you can order our top-selling Ionic Breeze Quadra Silent Air Purifier at 20% off its regular everyday price. This is an exceptional value.

Of all the products we’ve ever offered, the Ionic Breeze Quadra delights me the most. It’s an air cleaner of outstanding, proven quality. It has no filters to replace, ever—a savings of hundreds of dollars. It runs on less than 15 watts, so you can save $150 or more in electricity bills every year. It reduces common household odors. Its graceful design is trim and lightweight. And best of all, it’s totally silent!

Amid the general corporate self-restraint, such random exploitative strokes were portents of a very different atmosphere. Likewise, to the initial wave of public kindness there were ominous exceptions from the start. This, of course, was only natural, after a provocation so enraging; and yet such rage seemed likelier the farther you were distanced from the site of the attack—mere fury being somehow easier for TV-viewers than for those who were immersed in the surrounding mood. (Thus soldiers who’ve known combat tend to be less hot for war than those who stayed at home and "served" by cheering at the screen.) On that day, some thirty blocks uptown, a friend of mine, out for an agitated walk, heard one man yelling at another, "They should have cracked down on this shit in Seattle!" Although as idiotic as it was heartfelt—jailing, or shooting, the cosmopolitan protesters in Seattle would have fazed Al Qaeda?—that outburst was shortly to be amplified by mainstream columnists, who asserted a continuum between a fast-food outlet trashed by adolescent communards and a faith-based suicide attack that murdered thousands. A few days after the 11th, up near 14th Street, I caught another flash of that scapegoating animus, although this time there were no political associations. I was on Broadway, just across from the beautiful memorial display on Union Square—an endless and heart-breaking palimpsest of home-made ads for loved ones "missing" since that day. Near the restaurant where I was bound there was a homeless fellow huddled in a doorway, shouting cheery bits of schizophrenic gibberish at the passersby. A pot-bellied shopper of some sixty summers, with a giant button of Old Glory on his chest, and in his hand a bulging plastic bag from (as it happened) K-Mart, came trudging grimly up the street; and as he passed, the sick man babbled at him. The shopper paused, looked back, and, before proceeding on his gloomy way, barked "Scum!"

Such mad belligerence seemed to spread, and of course not only in New York, as the president’s compelling definition of that mass murder as "an act of war" reverberated coast to coast, and at every level of society. Out amid the U.S. masses, dark-skinned persons nationwide—Arabs, Indians, Afghans, whatever—were singled out for acts of would-be retribution, much like the Jews in Germany, c. 1938, the victims variously hit with bullets, baseball bats, cars, spittle or just hateful words. Meanwhile, in (as it were) polite society, apparent dissidents of every sort were smacked with paranoid abuse, their words distorted or suppressed, by columnists and editors, teachers and administrators, big-time talking heads and White House spokesmen, as well as countless common watchdogs—much as it was here back in 1917. All that repressive wrath was weirdly intermingled with nostalgia, as we kept on hearing that "we" now had our epoch-making national ordeal, just like "the Greatest Generation"—as if those Islamic terrorists were comparable to Nazi Germany. Thus the firemen, cops and rescue workers at the site were often visually likened to that famed (and staged) photo of the G.I.s with the flag on Iwo Jima, while George W. Bush was hailed reflexively (and groundlessly) for his "Churchillian" eloquence; and Hollywood, encouraged by the White House, started planning to produce a lot of movies hailing U.S. pluck and innocence against demonic alien forces—much like the propaganda features of the early Forties, only costlier and even more dishonest. Whatever its comforts, such retrogressive fantasy was just a bit bewildering, since it was impossible to square with the near-universal anti-democratic mantra, "Everything has changed."

Having quickly dropped their early inhibitions, some corporate advertisers joined that desperate, backward-looking celebration, by putting out commercials piously belaboring our precious flag, our spacious skies, our enviable Volk of many colors. Some days, what with the solemn back-to-back memorials brightly punctuated by those expert mini-paeans to our yummy heartland, the TV spectacle itself appeared to be a great postmodern masterwork by Leni Riefenstahl. And yet the true hyper-commercialism of that moment was not manifest primarily by such commercials, or by the promiscuous application of the Stars and Stripes to sweatpants, neck-ties, baby pacifiers, beach umbrellas, running shoes, lunchboxes and bikinis (a form of festive desecration that John Ashcroft and his brethren somehow find acceptable).

Rather, the triumph of commercialism has been most apparent in the common notion that the noblest and most helpful thing that we can do, in these dark times, is go spend money. Locally, this injunction made some sense, as it was meant to drum up business for the many shops and restaurants that were now struggling to survive the devastation of downtown Manhattan. However, that civic-minded plea of Mayor Giuliani’s was at once absorbed into a general imperative that all Americans should go and shop wherever, for whatever, and do it now—the same imperative that advertising has been urging on us all since World War I. Now that the order has been reconfirmed by Pres. Bush, the petty gist of all those ads has been exalted to the level of a patriotic duty, quintessentially American, although it would have grossed out every signer of the Constitution. Certainly it seems perverse that such a notion should pervade a culture that obsessively extols "the Greatest Generation," forever marveling at their valiant sacrifice.

And yet there is still more to the profound commercialism of this moment. Throughout the weeks since 9/11, then since 10/7, when the bombs began to pulverize the remnant of Afghanistan, the state itself has used the "war on terrorism" as a monstrous global ad—or, to put it more accurately, the "war on terrorism" is basically a vast commercial. Most obviously, it has been used to sell this president as statesmanlike, clear-sighted, careful, just, heroically composed, completely in command. (That he still lacks those qualities completely is more evidence of just how ad-like his alleged apotheosis really is.) Also obvious is the way this crisis has been used to sell the U.S. military as almighty and unerring—just as Desert Storm was used a decade back. At base, the familiar exploitation of this conflict by the White House and the Pentagon alike has ultimately less to do with politics per se than with the intake of the nation’s major advertisers, since both those institutions are primarily at the service of the corporations—which have, of course, been in command for quite some time, but whose domination has now reached the crisis-point with this regime.

Thus, in trying to fathom the profound commercialism of the state since 9/11, it is not enough to note that Bush et al. have used the terrorist threat to put their team on top. To grasp their deeply mercenary drive, we must read through the news as carefully as we would read the fine print on a pack of Prozac, or in the sales agreement at an auto dealership; for the items that reveal the most are largely covered without fanfare, if at all. Thus the White House used the terrorist attack to argue that the president must now be given "fast-track" authority to negotiate global trade agreements—because U.S. "national security" requires "free trade" (a claim accepted by the Democrats, who mostly voted aye). Likewise, just two days after the attack, the FCC’s Republican majority moved like lightning to "review" the last few rules prohibiting the corporate media from merging absolutely—an enormous favor whose unseemly haste was justified by Michael Powell, the top commissioner, on patriotic grounds. ("The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be extinguished," he said movingly. "We will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely.") Similarly, the GOP used the attack to push for "national missile defense" (which would have posed no threat to the attackers); to legalize oil-drilling in Alaska’s pristine wild-life refuge (ostensibly to make us independent of Arabian reserves); to pass still more huge tax cuts for the rich, and retroactive tax cuts for such corporations as GE and IBM (on the argument that such a gift will strengthen our beleaguered nation by "creating jobs"); and to maintain or accelerate deregulation of several other major industries (among them, incredibly, airport security). For their part, the Democrats used 9/11 to petition the FEC for an exemption from the legal limits on "soft money" contributions (their argument was too tortured for quick paraphrase), and voted for the $15 billion bail-out for the airlines (whose lobbying campaign was supervised by Sen. Tom Daschle’s wife).

We could go on, and note how much, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, the media corporations have suppressed or muted for their own commercial reasons—the need for special favors from the state requiring that they overlook, say, the close relationship between the Bush and the bin Laden families, or the handsome profits that the Carlyle Group, employer of the president’s beloved dad, soon realized from the "war on terrorism," or the business dealings of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or—not least—the truth about the recount of the presidential vote in Florida. Thus the media’s corporate interests have been served at our expense—as have the interests of the oil companies, the weapons manufacturers and the airlines, along with all those other mammoth players that, like Enron, always stand to make another bundle from deregulation here at home and all throughout the world.

It is an infuriating situation—not, surely, as infuriating as the crimes of 9/11, but bad enough to anger millions of Americans, whether they supported Gore, Bush, Nader or Buchanan, and even (or especially) if they didn’t cast a vote. The gradual post-war transformation of this country into an outright plutocracy is a development that few have failed to notice, and that has no champions other than the few who benefit directly from it. To sit and watch those high insiders always cash out with impunity is pretty galling to the citizens of a democracy, however much they think they’ve gotten used to it. And to the national multitude of window-shoppers, whether at the mall or watching their TVs, the full-time advertising is another, complementary provocation. Overseas, "they" hate us, we’ve been told, because "they" envy us all those delectable commodities that "we" have at our fingertips. That supposition surely tells us less about the foreign reputation of Al Qaeda than it does about ourselves: for it is we who always have our noses pressed against the glass. Even those of us who live in comfort are assured eternally that we have nothing yet, that we are nothing yet, without that next great buy, while our have-nots feed on nothing but those images. Judging from its quick resumption after 9/11, that fantastic pitch, it seems, will never end, no matter how compellingly we are distracted from it. Meanwhile, the audience keeps seething, its members hungering for some "closure" in a cinematic stroke of grand revenge against "the evil one" for what he did to us on that horrific day—an act of vengeance that may finally fail to mollify them, if and when it ever does take place.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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