Ground Zero, An Alternate Reality

Just as America opened its Ground Zero memorial and shifted into the second post-9/11 decade, Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission appeared and was quickly hailed as the finest work to date that directly considered the attacks and their aftermath.  Since I was about to visit the Ground Zero site and meet the memorial architect, as I mentioned in the last blog, it seemed ideal to read the novel at the same time.  I did have some concern that the fiction would pale before the encountered reality.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

As many of you will already know, The Submission takes place several years after 9/11.  The New York jury selecting a memorial design from a number of anonymous submissions chooses one – a walled and treed garden quartered by shallow canals -- by a young architect with the ominous name Mohammed Khan.  The controversy that ensues, and its effect on a number of characters, together with Khan’s ultimate choice, make up the rest of the book.

Obviously, we already know the actual designer and design.  Most of us have seen it, if not in person, then in the media.  We also know that a different conflict over a nearby Muslim community center occurred during the construction of the new memorial. And unlike such subjects as “if the South had won the Civil War” or “if Germany had won World War II,” the World Trade Center story is still living history to all of us over the age of twenty.  So how can a counterfactual novel, coming so close upon the reality, help but seem either derivative or wildly implausible?

I can only share my own experience, which might best be compared to one of those “young woman at her toilette or an old crone?” or “goblet or two profiles?” optical illusions.  Despite my knowledge and actual presence at the site of the reality, my mind easily slipped between what I knew had happened and an utterly plausible alternative reality.

How did Waldman achieve in so many readers such a willing suspension of disbelief?  In part ,because she brings to bear in this first novel skills drawn from real-world reporting, and uses these to create a remarkably persuasive narrative fabric.

As a former journalist, Waldman has an ear for the public statement, whether from an interviewee or a reporter.  During the height of the controversy she give us perfectly voiced shrieking from the New York Post – “MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS: ADDING ISLAM  TO INJURY – as well as nuanced challenge from The New Yorker: “We should judge him only by his own design.  But this is where matters get tricky.  In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs.”

There is just enough direct connection between Waldman’s imagined world and actual post-9/11 events to enhance the alternate one’s reality.  The runner-up design, for example, is “A towering black granite rectangle, some twelve stories high, centered on a huge oval pool.”  Not Michael Arad’s creation, certainly, but enough like it to draw the two worlds together, especially when a leading character focuses on the most common element between the two: “The other night I dreamed about that black pool around the Void, that my husband’s hand was reaching up from the water to pull me down into it.”  This parallelism later appears ironically. As I looked over the railing at the enormous dual waterfalls descending into the abyss where each tower once stood, I smiled to recall the contention made by consultants hired to critique Khan’s design that “The canals were also a safety liability.  ‘One child falls in and the whole memorial shuts down.’  They recommended scrapping them.”

And, although Waldman has said she had completed a draft of the novel before the beginning of the falsely-termed Ground Zero mosque controversy, these arguments from her “Save America from Islam” coalition meld immediately into our real-world consciousness: “Muslims build mosques wherever they’ve conquered.  They could never get away with putting a mosque at this site, so they’ve come up with something sneakier: an Islamic garden, this martyr’s paradise, it’s like a code to jihadis.”  (Careful readers will recall that in the book’s opening pages, the jury’s spokeswoman for the artistic community had objected to the design on the grounds that “Gardens are fetishes of the European bourgeoisie.”)

Many of Waldman’s characters are draw from obvious stock.  Her 9/11 mourners include the suburban widow of a businessman, the blue-collar brother of a deceased fireman, and the widow of a Muslim janitor hired illegally by a building subcontractor.  There is also the over-aggressive reporter, the hate-mongering talk show host (“I Slam Islam” is his credo), the manipulative state politician, and Muslim attorneys and community activists at once fearful, indignant, and self-serving.  But these characters have additional facets, and some shift roles and perspectives in surprising ways through the course of the story.  As a seasoned New Yorker, Waldman subtly gives shape to her figures.  The memorial jury’s chair, for example, thinks to himself just before opening the fateful envelope, “To know the winner’s identity before the jury, not to mention the mayor or the governor…What better measure of how high Paul Joseph Rubin, grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant, had climbed?” 

The implications  layered, especially since the  main designers of the World Trade Center memorial and site reconstruction are both Jewish and have both been the subject of antisemitic diatribes by those who persist in seeing 9/11 as a Jewish plot.  But even upon immediate reading, isn’t it strange that the Jewish Rubin is named after two of the key figures in the New Testament, including the notorious convert Paul?  Later, when we meet Rubin’s sons, Jacob and Samuel, the anomalous interweaving of assimilation and identity becomes even more obvious.

The book’s title is so clearly multivalent that few reviewers have commented on it, whether because they don’t see it (highly unlikely), or because they fear being accused of stating the obvious or of flaunting their textual skills (about equally likely).  So let’s just get it on the table:  the submission of a design by a supposed disciple of the religion whose name means submission leads to a battle in which the architect must decide whether to submit to pressure and withdraw his submission. 

Of course, Mohammed Khan stands at the center of the story, and if he were not a convincing and complex character, the novel might have failed.   Fortunately, he holds the reader’s attention from outset, when he finds himself, like so many others, stereotyped in the immediate days after 9/11, to the surprising conclusion, where we find him looking back over a long career of which his Ground Zero design was both a false start and a catalytic event.  As he embraces a heretofore peripheral identity (he is, after all, American-born and non-practicing when we first meet him), then backs away from both his opponents and his apparent partisans, he is given a strong voice, though only one of many.  One of the great virtues of the novel is that few characters are allowed to remain static figures who keep our admiration, sympathy, or disdain.  In the book’s final pages, in fact, we connect in surprising, and surprisingly satisfying, ways to many figures from the heart of the decades-old controversy

[See "Nine Years After" under "Recent Articles and Reviews" for a piece on other 9/11 writing]

Ground Zero, November, 2011

Our local independent bookstore features literary quotations written high on its walls.  My favorite is from Logan Pearsall Smith, an early twentieth century writer: “People say life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.”  I wouldn’t go that far, but I think life is often enhanced by reading while living.  When I travel, for example, I seek out both fiction and non-fiction about my destination before and during the trip.

Two weeks ago, I experienced an almost perfect symbiosis of life and reading.  Visiting New York for a board meeting of Facing History and Ourselves, which was to begin with a visit to Ground Zero, I took along a novel that enriched an already profound experience.

Because of Facing History’s reputation and its many supporters, we were given exceptional access to the site, including a talk by the director of the National September 11^th Museum, and a tour of the memorial with him as our guide.  Next we were privileged to participate in a small group conversation with architect Michael Arad, the designer of the “Reflecting Absence” pools that occupy the site of each tower.

Every part of this event was simultaneously painful, and, in a sense, uplifting. Museum director Lee Ielpi, a retired New York fireman whose firefighter son died on 9/11, introduced us to the mementoes people retrieved from the site and donated to the museum.  One in particular struck me: an investment manager who had located the small set of bilingual dictionaries he had used for his work, and who said he donated them as a reminder of the need for all peoples to understand each other.  Among the quotations painted on the museum’s pillars and walls, I read with a shudder both of shock and of admiration for their power, these words of the poet Hettie Jones: “We are breathing the dead, taking them into our lungs as living we had taken into our arms.”

Mr. Ielpi spoke to us of his son, their last phone call as the young man headed out with his rescue crew, and the three months before his body was discovered.  Throughout the tour he focused not on esthetics and numbers, but on the human beings who perished – and who he always described as “murdered.”  He consistently referred to them as souls, and told us of the 19,000 yet unidentified body parts and the more than 1000 victims as yet unaccounted for.  He told us the remains will be stored below the memorial, and re-examined as DNA research advances, and most movingly, of the special rights families of the missing will have to visit the vaults to be near whatever may remain of their loved ones.

Leaving the museum, we went to a nearby location, where Michael Arad spoke about his design and answered questions.  Arad, who was 34 when he began working on the project, barely looks that age today.  He spoke about the concept for the design, and the many ways he worked on it before ever entering the competition.  (Just before he received the commission, he had been working for New York City designing police stations.)

Above all, Arad’s sensitivity to the meaning of the memorial came through.  The most contentious part of the project had been the inscribing of names.  Some had assumed simple alphabetical order, others had urged that rescuers be separated from other victims, still others that their ages, affiliations, or other information be included.  Arad firmly believed that a name alone should represent each person, and that aside from noting the tower, plane, or other location where people died, and placing police and firefighters in their own groups, there should be only one ordering principle: families should be allowed to request proximity of their loved one to others important to them.  Despite opposition from many who thought the task too complicated, and with Mayor Bloomberg’s support, he persevered, and with enormous care and patience, 1200 specific requests were accommodated.  Some of these were remarkable: partners who had not shared the same last name, best friends, but also some that required ingenuity, such as the young woman who wanted her father, killed on one of the planes, to be near her friend, killed in the towers, or two brothers, one a firefighter, the other a policeman.  In these cases, one of the two is listed as the last person in their section, tower, plane, or rescue group, and the other as the first person in theirs.  That such care was given, even though perhaps only one living person will know, demonstrated a depth of commitment from the living to the dead that was, as I said earlier, inspiring and uplifting, even in the face of grief.

Next blog: the truth of fiction

$weet $ucce$$

            Whenever I read about educating American students so they can “compete and succeed” (usually followed by “in a global marketplace” or some such), I think of a story I once heard about Americans introducing football to Samoa just after World War II.  As the story goes, the Samoans took to football instantly, which seems entirely plausible, given the fact that Samoans are now 56 times more likely to play in the NFL than other Americans (yes, they are Americans). 

            The strange (and admittedly unconfirmed) part, is that the Samoans played with one difference: they played for a significant length of time, and when the score was tied after enough play, they happily stopped, while their U.S. teachers tried to explain that the purpose of the game was for one side to win.

            True?  I’m not at all sure.  But there are many other cases where we know that the European-American view of competition and winning clashed with other cultures’ views of cooperation and sharing.  Think of the Native Americans in Manhattan and elsewhere, who thought they were agreeing to share land and exchange gifts, while the colonists thought they were buying exclusive rights.

            Last week I talked about what it would mean to prepare all children equally by giving them equal access to health care, education, technology, nutrition, and personal safety.  I can’t help but think that, aside from the enormous amount of money that would demand from the wealthy, there is also an underlying fear of truly unleashing millions more highly capable people into American law, business, medicine, and other lucrative fields. 

            That fear assumes that a large majority of these young people would be eager to compete, and to compete for the same things.  But if that were true, would anyone go into the clergy, teaching, social work, health care (other than the highly paid specialties), or any of the hundreds of jobs that do not promise large financial rewards?  We know it’s possible to make people want things they wouldn’t ordinarily – look at the power of marketing and advertising in America today – but the fact that the number of humanities majors has dropped by almost half since 1970, while the number of business majors has risen by almost three-quarters, is only proof that our wants are conditioned, not innate.

            More and more research shows that people, and many of our near and even distant mammalian cousins, are more cooperative than we once thought.  From mirror neurons, which cause us to react biologically as if we are having the same positive or negative experience as someone we are watching, to evidence that people who help others report a greater increase in happiness than those they helped, it is becoming harder than ever to see either nature or ourselves as entirely red in tooth and claw.

            So don’t worry, millionaires and billionaires. Even if every child in America had a clear path to becoming a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates, the majority of us would still be content with entirely different lives, based on entirely different definitions of success.  Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked for a number of them, once said “Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.”  It might be better to be a real janitor, but be in possession of your life.

           

           

           

           

           

           

Be Careful What You Wish for, Mr. Brooks

On Friday’s NPR “Week in Politics” roundup, conservative columnist David Brooks said America had to make a choice between a “redistribution” of wealth, in which the rich would pay substantially more in taxes, and a “meritocratic” approach, in which “you give people the tools to compete and succeed.”  E.J. Dionne replied that this was a false choice.  In fact, the rich would be much better off under a redistribution policy than under one that truly gave people the tools to compete.

            Why? Because really giving people a level playing field (as we always say, even though very few games above the sandlot level are ever played on a tilted playing field) would mean giving them equal starts in life, at least through college.  Now hang on readers, it’s going to be a bumpy ride, filled with big numbers.  But I was an English major, and if I can get through it, I have confidence you can too.  And let's stop at high school, for convenience.

            Let’s take 90% of the 73 million U.S. children under 18, and consider what it would cost to give them the same “tools to compete” as the top 10%. 

            I expect the costs to level the playing field for the 65 million constituting would have to include at least these:

• ·      Equal quality of health care, including pre-natal care
• ·      Equal quality of education, from pre-school through high school
• ·      Equal nutrition
• ·      Equal access to technology
• ·      Equal provision of safe home and neighborhood conditions

The cost of health insurance alone would be at least $150 billion  (calculating the cost of a high-quality health plan, then generously presuming that the 65 million are averaging half that now).

Equal education, based  on the average cost of an independent school education like the Bush, Obama, Biden, and Jobs children had or have, versus the average cost of public education, and adding pre-school costs for all, would cost around $750 million.

Spending $1000 a year to give each child ages 6-17 a computer and internet access at home, and just $30 a week to provide better nutrition, adds another $120 billion to the total  (assuming a quarter already have access to these).

      The last item, safe homes and neighborhoods, is probably so enormous as to be incalculable, but just increasing the number of police and firefighters by 25% would cost $17 billion annually.

That’s a grand total of just over $1.1 billion.  Today, according to the Heritage Foundation (no friends of redistribution) the top tier pays 71% of all income taxes, or $835 billion.  So their taxes would have to be raised by 130% in order to level the old playing field.  That would mean a top tax rate of around 70%, compared to the 28-35% brackets that exist now.  So Mr. Brooks would be wise to accept redistribution by raising the top rates 10% as a much less costly alternative.

Next Blog: What would America be like if everyone could “compete and succeed,” and what would we mean by success?  And a lot fewer numbers.

When the Soul Soars (For the Dedication of the MLK Memorial)

                                                               

A few years ago, I attended a friend’s installation as head of a Quaker elementary and high school.  (Schools heads are not inaugurated, sworn in, or crowned, they are installed.  “Made me feel like a plumbing fixture,” another friend observed.)  Describing why she was so enthusiastic about her new school, my friend mentioned the interesting questions posed to her by members of the community during the interview process.  She singled out one question in particular; a teacher had asked “What makes your soul soar?”

            Yes, when said out loud that’s a doubly ambiguous question, but she accompanied it with gestures that dispelled any confusion.

            I spent the remainder of the ceremony half attending to the event and half pondering the question for myself.  (She never said what she answered, and I never asked her later.)  By the time we marched out, I had settled on three things:  music, the sea, and righteousness.  Of these, the last is the only one that can actually bring me to weep.

            It started a long time ago.  As a boy, I wept when Robin Hood shot an arrow out the window from his deathbed, and told his men to bury him wherever it landed.  I wept more than once and in more than one version, when King Arthur went to his last battle, hoping that, in T.H. White’s words, “There would be a day – there must be a day – when he would come back to Gramarye with a new Round Table which had no corners, just as the world had none – a table without boundaries between the nations who would sit to feast there.”

            I couldn’t have given it a name then, but I believe I was moved by the righteousness of these men, and by the failure, or death, that ended their striving.

            Later on I found myself moved as much when righteousness won its little victories as when it suffered its big defeats. One story in particular exemplifies for me the experience of witnessing righteousness.

After years of research on genocide and cruelty, scholar Philip Hallie described his reaction to reading about a small town in France which, under the leadership of its Protestant and Catholic ministers, determined to rescue its Jews:

“About halfway down the third page of the account of this village, I was annoyed by a strange sensation on my cheeks.  The story was so simple and so factual that I had found it easy to concentrate upon it, not upon my own feelings.  And so, still following the story…I reached up to my cheeks to wipe away a bit of dust, and I found tears on my fingertips.  Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet.”

That night, he says:

“Lying there in bed, I began to weep again. I thought, why run away from what is excellent simply because it goes through you like a spear….To the dismay of my wife, I left the bed, unable to say a word, crossed the dark campus on a starless night, and read again those two pages on the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.  And to my surprise, again the sear, again the tears, again the frantic, painful pleasure that spills into the mind when a  deep, deep need is being satisfied, or when a deep wound is starting to heal”

                       

  --  Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed; see also the film “Weapons of the Spirit”

            Just last week, I encountered a very similar moment in Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil.  The incident described comes from the autobiography of Thomas Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor who became a cofounder of UNICEF and a judge at the Hague:

“At just nine years old, Thomas was rounded up with thousands of Jews and taken to Auschwitz.  There he had to watch while an inmate was forced to hang his friend who tried to escape.  An SS guard ordered the inmate to put the noose around his friend's neck.  The man couldn't fulfill the order because his hands were shaking so much with fear and distress.  His friend turned to him, took the noose, and in a remarkable act, kissed his friend's hand and then put the noose around his own neck.  Angrily, the SS guard kicked the chair away from under the man to be hanged.

Nine-year-old Thomas and the other inmates, watching the man kiss his friend's hand, rejoiced at that simple act that said (without words) ‘I will not let my friend be forced to kill me.’”

I hope others will share here their stories of righteous acts read about, in fiction or history, or witnessed in person.

Minimum Impact

I was rereading Getting to Yes, the classic on negotiation from Roger Fischer and William Ury, when I came upon this wonderfully nuanced sentence: “You will have not only a strong interest in affecting any agreement you reach, but also one in effecting an agreement.” [italics authors’] What a difference a letter makes, I thought, and what a fine-tuned distinction.

            A moment later, though, it struck me that, in the not too distant future, that sentence may be not admirable, but incomprehensible.   (Compare for example, this sentence:  “She was a buxom maid, but I determined that her homely sister would make me a much better wife.”  A few centuries ago, any reader would have realized that the speaker was not referring to the torso of one lady or the face of the other, but rather to one’s lively, cheerful disposition and the other’s domestic skills.) 

            The villain in the piece is, of course, impact.  Technically, impact first meant “to pack together,” or “to strike against, collide.”  This is why we still say, “the passengers died upon impact.”  It also had two very special use: bones and especially teeth are impacted when they are jammed together in a way requiring surgical intervention, and impact wrenches combine torque with car-crash force.  These are the only definitions accepted by the 1971 American Heritage, for example, nor is any sense of affect for impact mentioned in the OED.

            With almost unimaginable speed, however, impact became, first a noun for the effect on something, and then a verb for affecting something.  The Free Online Dictionary notes that as recently as 2001, 80-85% of its usage panel objected to impact as a verb meaning affect. Now, in the mere space of a decade, the dictionary concedes “the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions that many speakers have begun to regard it as standard.”

            I am a descriptive linguist.  I believe that a word means what its users mean by it.  I am sad, for example, that “gay” has a new meaning that makes lines like “Glitter and be Gay” from Bernstein’s Candide strike the ear a bit oddly, but I can  accept the new meaning, because it gives us a simple and judgment-free word for the clinical label formerly employed to marginalize a group of people.  After all, trying to prevent language changing is exactly like King Cnut sitting by the shore and commanding the oncoming tides not to wet his robes. 

            Yet when a word change costs us something in specificity and nuance, I retain the right to object, however futilely.  Impact not only seems to me a lazy way to avoid learning the distinction between affect and effect (a problem enhanced by psychology’s cooption of affect to mean the physical expression of one’s emotions).  It is also a matter of lost connotation. Impact, after all, always meant something bad.  No couple ever ran towards each other and kissed upon impact.  No returning soldier was ever impacted by a spouse’s or child’s hug. 

            Things now not only impact, they impact on, and are impactful.  We have businesses named “Impact Racing “ (helmets for potential collisions), Impact Supplies (cleaning, maintenance and safety supplies?), and Impact Guns (I’ll let that that one pass).  Does the word merely appeal to our desire to avoid complicated distinctions? Or is it a sign of our penchant for the violent, the aggressive, the biggest bang for the buck? (A feminist colleague of mine once stopped a speaker who had used that cliché with the announcement, “that metaphor is either military or sexual, and in either case, I object.”)

            I doubt this screed will impact upon impact’s impactful impact on our language, but I persevere in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most misunderstood observation: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

            I promise no more linguistic curmudgeonry for at least a month.

On the Killing of Citizens

From 1999 until 2010, I was interim head of eight independent schools – that is, I came in on short notice after the sudden departure of a school head or a failed search for a new leader, and ran the school for a few months to two years, until the board could find a new leader.

Knowing that, as the transition specialist William Bridges says (there’s a name that foretold a career), change challenges people’s confidence, making them unsure of their place in the new order, I always tried to assure them that I had not arrived as a hatchet wielder.  My favorite quotation at times like these was Samuel Johnson’s observation that “I have adopted the Roman sentiment that it is more honorable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy.”

Reading the news lately, it seems that for many Americans, it is not only more honorable to kill an enemy, but to kill a citizen.  To cite just a few examples:

·      The Republican debate at the Reagan Library where the audience cheered Rick Perry for his record of 234 (now 235) executions.

·      The subsequent debate where the audience applauded a shout of “Let him die,” referring to a Ron Paul staffer without health insurance.

·      The New Hampshire legislature’s 251-111 vote to override the governor’s veto – and ignore the views of the entire state’s police community -- and allow the use of deadly force anywhere in the state (rather than only in the home, as common law had always held).

·      The Arizona legislature’s vote, three months to the day after the Gabby Giffords shooting, to amend the state’s gun laws to override local wishes and allow open and concealed weapons on college campuses.  (Governor Brewer shocked the law’s advocates with what its sponsor described as a “very rude veto letter.”)

Today’s New York Times brings an analogous position regarding a symbolic form of killing. Over two-thirds of the states have recently introduced laws requiring state-issued voter identifications for voting, and several have cut back on the number of days on which voting can take place.  The argument, of course, centers on whether there is enough voter fraud to make such laws necessary, and on whether the laws will unfairly penalize certain groups.

But in another way, these laws echo exactly the “save a citizen, kill an enemy” concept.  A person who votes illegally does a fractional harm to the voting process. This harm  has an almost infinitesimal chance of affecting the outcome of any election with a sizable number of voters (read Charles Seife’s Proofiness Chapter 5: “Electile Dysfunction” to see how flawed the voting and vote counting process is aside from any deliberate malfeasance).  On the other hand, a person who is disenfranchised by the law is effectively “killed” as a citizen, since the right to vote is one of the  essential distinctions between citizens and non-citizens.  Weighing the two harms, it seems impossible to argue that such laws will not “kill” more citizens than its benefits might ever warrant.

P.S. In an outstanding case of what Alan Dershowitz called : “not passing the giggle test,” under the Texas law, licenses to carry concealed handguns would be an acceptable form of identification to vote, but not student ID cards.