Ground Zero Flashback: September 2001

NEW YORK -- Ten days after 9/11, a clown finally appeared at Ground Zero, fully costumed with red-nosed regalia, trying to cheer gas-masked disaster crews and thousands of visitors who are circling the smoldering rubble that encases almost 3,000 bodies.

Camera-snapping tourists, tambourine-banging Christian evangelists, grimacing survivors and other people are flocking to see the jagged, smoldering pyre of World Trade Tower wreckage.

Pundits grimly predict no one will ever again care about "Britney Spears's navel" or other "frivolous" pop-culture ephemera.

Other Americans are buying and selling memorabilia of the iconic World Trade Center transformed into small desk accessories, spoons, refrigerator magnets, keychains, paperweights and other souvenirs which were mass-produced before the horror.  

In the bleak aftermath of the surprise atrocity, the tacky trinkets of the two towers now appear like foreboding twin tombstones.

Retail priced.

Some people on internet are selling gruesome shrapnel purportedly from the site, including damaged stop signs and anything else which displays charred scars.

Other people are hurriedly printing postcards and posters of the towers on fire, and selling them on sidewalks near Ground Zero.

One man is holding a few shards of broken glass and plaster from the imploded towers, and considering whether or not he should take it.

Next to him, a woman bends down and picks up small scattered pieces of sharp concrete from the scene of squashed, gnarled, tangled wreckage.

Hundreds of people jostle to take photographs of Ground Zero while armed security forces, police, firemen, and emergency personnel work in the smoky canyon of the pulverized skyscrapers.

Troops wearing gas masks against a smoldering acrid stench are allowing the public to stroll within a few blocks of the obliterated site.

As a result, thousands of dazed, mournful people are wandering the surrounding area, silently strolling down streets walled by gigantic buildings, as if attending a massive urban funeral.

The huge buildings are deserted due to a lack of electricity and other infrastructure.

At the core of the devastated financial district, troops in camouflage uniforms guard emergency workers, but also offer the public choice viewing opportunities.

"Folks, take a picture and move on, please," a police officer says, ushering the sidewalk-bound public.

Tourists and residents bathe Ground Zero in a rippling white strobe of camera flashes.

Some people wear newly minted, souvenir T-shirts illustrated with the World Trade Towers and a U.S. flag.

A young man wears a T-shirt illustrated with a gun, warning:

"Welcome to New York Osama bin Laden.

"Duck motherfucker."

One man's professionally printed T-shirt says: 

"America Under Attack. I Can't Believe I Survived."

Instead of window shopping, people wandering lower Broadway are photographing window displays of shoes and other items encased in thick white ash, like artifacts preserved in a surreal 21st century Pompeii.

Countless people use their fingers to write revenge-filled slogans and victims' names on the windows and walls of the ash-caked buildings.

The most miserable view of Ground Zero is seen from Liberty Street where people can see the World Trade Center's huge lattice-like vertical beams stab upwards through wafting smoke.

Onlookers jostle to angle their photos to include three things: the wreckage, an American flag in the background, and a line of U.S. Army soldiers in the foreground.

"I got my body armor on," says one chatty, unarmed National Guard trooper, unbuttoning his shirt to expose padding.

A visitor tells him, "A reporter came up to a woman wiping the ash off a car, and he said to her, 'Oh, is this your car?' 

"She pointed to the ash and said, 'No. These are my friends."

Amid the otherwise solemn mood, Black evangelists are banging tambourines and shouting promises that Jesus can save people at New York's Alive Chapel International where "cripples get healed" and other "miracles" are performed.

A group of Mother Teresa's nuns from India -- clad in their traditional white saris bordered by blue stripes -- are handing out a "prayer for the canonization" of the Albanian-born Agnes "Mother Teresa" Bojaxhiu, who died on September 5, 1997 in Calcutta.

An Irish woman, ignoring the missionaries, points to where the World Trade Center's twin 110-story towers once stood and says, "Up there, they were jumping out of the windows. 

"It's too horrible to even think about."

Asked if she is a tourist, she replies: "Just for the day."

Wherever people meet, they invariably talk of the 9/11 attack and swap tales of what they were doing at the time, how they reacted, and why lifestyles, culture, and civil rights are rapidly mutating throughout America.

"They thought I was dead because I was down there, real close, when the towers collapsed," one journalist says at a pool table in a Lower East Side bar.

"I just ran for my life, but I couldn't outrun the cloud of debris raining down.  

"I was scared. You didn't know how big the pieces would be, and what would hit you."

An optimistic graphic designer, sipping beer, replies:

"These things come in cycles. Now it is bad. But it'll be OK soon. But at a new level. 

"It's like Japan after World War Two. Japan came back and rebuilt itself" -- after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 56 years ago, killing more than 300,000 people.

Others predict more assaults inside America, with future acts even more deadly.

Fearing a chemical attack, thousands of people in New York City are buying gas masks, priced around 85 dollars each.

Officials belatedly went on television to calm residents, and said gas masks would only be protective if people wore them all the time, because news of an attack might appear only after a biological weapon had already been unleashed.

Advertisers meanwhile are unfurling U.S. flags above their clients' logos and proudly splashing them in newspapers, magazines, and on street signs.

The flags are reverently portrayed among eloquent prose about the value of life, the tragedy of loss, and how America will endure and unite.

Shops display posters demanding:

"Wanted Dead or Alive, Osama bin Laden, For Mass Murder in New York City."

The posters, which show Mr. bin Laden's smiling, big-eyed face, were published by the New York Post.

In Times Square, New York's first post-9/11 anti-war demonstration brought about 2,000 shouting activists to a zone filled with spontaneous, poignant shrines to the dead.

Truncheon-wielding police in riot helmets are guarding the makeshift shrines.

One small shrine shows a picture of the green Statue of Liberty holding up her middle finger instead of a torch, above a caption warning: 

"We're coming, motherfuckers."

"It's martial law! Go home!" screams a shaven-headed man taunting anti-war demonstrators marching in Times Square on the evening of September 21.

Above the heads of the protestors and police, Times Square's larger-than-life, outdoor video screens are showing a looped "Tribute to Heroes" concert praising rescuers and others who perished in the attacks.

Those visuals appear above flowing electronic news headlines updating America's newest threat to attack Afghanistan.

Protestors' signs demand: 

"Who Will Profit From War?"

"Don't Fight Terrorism With Terrorism" 

"Get The Terrorist Out of The White House"

"Bush, admit to 60 years of White House manipulation of Mid-East governments, and then ask survivors of the deceased and the American people to support sending troops to clean up White House mistakes," demands a computer-printed paper handed out by New York City librarian Brad Campbell.

"It is embarrassing and saddening to turn on the TV and get a monochrome viewpoint with no acknowledgement of the complicity by U.S. administrations for the past 60 years," Mr. Campbell, 30, says in an interview while dodging police in and around Times Square.

"They talk of protecting the people, but all the while they are drawing up lists of names, carrying out raids and putting vast new Big Brother measures into place," stated a tract handed out by Joe Urgo, who says he is a Vietnam veteran and member of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the U.S.A. -- an obscure Maoist group.

"These imperialists -- who have perpetrated countless crimes and rained havoc on the people of the world through their relentless global exploitation and their military actions -- have created a situation where millions of people all around the world hate the government of the United States," Mr. Urgo's communist tract says.

"They want us to unite with them and wave their flag. No."

Daniel O'Connor, 55, is bellowing at stunned pedestrians via a hand-held, battery-powered Radio Shack loudspeaker: 

"This alleged war that is going to start, is going to make a lot of billionaires into multi-billionaires, and a lot of body bags."

"I am a Direct Action Network member," Mr. O'Connor says in an interview, referring to a vigorous anti-globalization group.

Nearby, a tall blonde woman is locked in a loud shouting match with a short Palestinian mother on a street corner.

The blonde woman hysterically laughs at Palestinian's fears that Washington might "bomb Taliban babies."

The blonde yells: 

"Why not? They are only going to grow up to be adult Talibans and attack us!"

The Palestinian mother mutters a curse in Arabic and departs.

"I'm an anarchist," Brenna Bell, a 26-year-old lawyer who helped organize the Times Square protest, says in an interview.

"It started organically. We knew the government was going to declare war. We don't have a name yet" for the organization which will lead the new anti-war movement, Ms. Bell says.

While receiving updates via a walkie-talkie strapped to her blouse, she pauses to implore arriving police reinforcements: 

"Please don't hit anyone! Please don't hit anyone!"

Charlotte Bormann, 31, an accessories designer watching the protest, laments:

"On 34th Street, there is table after table of T-shirts that say, 'bin Laden, Wanted Dead or Alive.' I think its revolting that they're making money off of a tragedy. 

"It's like a novelty for us."

Some distraught children told their teachers, "the birds are on fire," while expressing what they witnessed close to the towers.

The New York Post meanwhile published a commentary by Andrea Peyser, blasting "CNN war slut Christiane Amanpour" because Ms. Amanpour "spewed her bias" against the United States while analyzing the deadly attacks.

Others are harkening back to the defeat of Nazism.  

Germany's Hamburg Chamber of Commerce said in a full-page New York Times advertisement:  

"We never forget your help and support in rebuilding our city after World War Two. 

"We want to reciprocate."

Respected human rights author Nat Hentoff meanwhile warns of new repression against any Americans who criticize a newly unveiled U.S. war against terrorism.

Other intellectuals say new books and movies will be altered to reflect America's latest "reality" -- a land suddenly splashed with U.S. flags and broadcasted chants of "God Bless America."

Worried about the new mood in this diverse, rapidly militarizing nation, terrified people are disguising themselves, or changing their behavior, to avoid being targeted.

"Tomorrow when I go out, I will be wearing a nice red turban, white shirt, and blue pants -- our national colors -- walking proud as a peacock, smiling at people I love and live with in our great country," wrote Narinder Singh, in Lenexa, Kansas.

Mr. Singh, a member of the Sikh religion, says he is donning red, white, and blue because he fears neighbors might confusingly blame him for the Arab suicide pilots who destroyed the World Trade Towers and damaged the Pentagon.

"Am I ashamed of myself, my ethnicity or my faith?  Am I afraid of my fellow Americans?  Did I commit a crime of some sort?" Mr. Singh asked in a letter to the New York Times.

In Dallas, Texas, Caroline Adams wrote to New York's liberal Village Voice newspaper and criticized someone's hostility against her beloved President George W. Bush.  

Snapping back at the anti-Bush critic, she suggested, "Perhaps he'd be happier in Afghanistan."

The Village Voice headlined her letter: 

"A Load of Kabul."

*****

Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting news from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondents' Award. Excerpts from his two nonfiction books, "Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. -- Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York" and Ehrlich's newest, "Mindfucking DeepSeek: Pushing China's AI to the Extreme" are available at 
https://asia-correspondent.tumblr.com