It’s been over three weeks now, but I can’t shake this sense of dislocation. My mind now may go for hours attending to other business, but it’s always there, a preoccupation. Sooner or later, I remember and think, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Then I take a deep breath and go on. In the middle of the afternoon, I realize I haven’t checked the news in a few hours and flip on the radio. The sound of regularly-scheduled programming is a simple pleasure I’ve come to appreciate.
Now, as the rubble is sifted, we can start figuring out what really happened. On Tuesday the 11th, the airwaves were filled with so many incredible tales; it seemed anything could be true. Now, we’re learning much of what was passed around was not fact but instead instant urban myth, or perhaps internet myth.
For example, it is true a Port Authority police officer named John McLoughlin was pulled injured by alive from the trade towers’ wreckage, but it is not true that he rode the building down from the 82nd floor. Like the phantom tapping heard by rescue workers, that story was the product of what we wanted to believe.
It is true Jackie Chan was supposed to have started filming scenes for a new movie on top of one of the towers at 7 a.m. on September 11th, but the script was delayed and Mr. Chan was in Toronto instead, working on a different film that day.
It is not true that Nostradamus predicted the terror attacks. The writings of Nostradamus can be made to seem to predict almost anything after the fact, especially when his words are rearranged and new lines are added, as they were in the verses that were scattered about the internet.
Some things that showed up in my e-mail box were just plain silly, like the notion that NASA requested everyone to go outside and hold a candle at 10:30 p.m. on a given evening, for a photograph from space. Even if candlelight were visible from space, which it isn’t, wouldn’t some provision have to be made for turning out all the electric lights?
In the sad but true department is the story of the Midwood Ambulance Service. Based in Brooklyn, the drivers headed over to Manhattan when they heard of the attack on the towers. In lower Manhattan, they pitched in, treating many people for shock. People in shock need water, so the Midwood drivers went to a nearby Starbucks to find it. Starbucks gave the drivers three cases of water – and charged them $130, which the drivers paid for from their pockets.
Any big company can have a bone-headed employee who blows a call under pressure. The people who own Midwood Ambulance thought Starbucks would want to know, for purposes of quality control, so they called Starbucks customer service. Starbucks customer service told the folks at Midwood that such a thing could never happen and hung up. OK, so that’s two bone-headed employees, one particularly ill-suited to customer relations. The people at Midwood wrote a letter to Starbucks HQ in Seattle. No response. No response, either to telephone calls from reporters, until the story broke in Seattle newspapers. Only then did Starbucks reimburse Midwood Ambulance for the cost of the water, and then Starbucks CEO Orin Smith attacked the media for making his employees feel bad. Perhaps we are getting back to normal.
Better we should remember the paramedics, cops, firefighters and bystanders who became heroes on September 11th. The best urban legends from this tragedy are legends in the finest sense, stories of common people in uncommon circumstances risking and sacrificing their lives for the sake and safety of people they didn’t know. Those stories will be legends because those men and women became larger than terror, larger than hatred and larger than life.
Myths and Legends
It’s been over three weeks now, but I can’t shake this sense of dislocation. My mind now may go for hours attending to other business, but it’s always there, a preoccupation. Sooner or later, I remember and think, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Then I take a deep breath and go on. In the middle of the afternoon, I realize I haven’t checked the news in a few hours and flip on the radio. The sound of regularly-scheduled programming is a simple pleasure I’ve come to appreciate.
Now, as the rubble is sifted, we can start figuring out what really happened. On Tuesday the 11th, the airwaves were filled with so many incredible tales; it seemed anything could be true. Now, we’re learning much of what was passed around was not fact but instead instant urban myth, or perhaps internet myth.
For example, it is true a Port Authority police officer named John McLoughlin was pulled injured by alive from the trade towers’ wreckage, but it is not true that he rode the building down from the 82nd floor. Like the phantom tapping heard by rescue workers, that story was the product of what we wanted to believe.
It is true Jackie Chan was supposed to have started filming scenes for a new movie on top of one of the towers at 7 a.m. on September 11th, but the script was delayed and Mr. Chan was in Toronto instead, working on a different film that day.
It is not true that Nostradamus predicted the terror attacks. The writings of Nostradamus can be made to seem to predict almost anything after the fact, especially when his words are rearranged and new lines are added, as they were in the verses that were scattered about the internet.
Some things that showed up in my e-mail box were just plain silly, like the notion that NASA requested everyone to go outside and hold a candle at 10:30 p.m. on a given evening, for a photograph from space. Even if candlelight were visible from space, which it isn’t, wouldn’t some provision have to be made for turning out all the electric lights?
In the sad but true department is the story of the Midwood Ambulance Service. Based in Brooklyn, the drivers headed over to Manhattan when they heard of the attack on the towers. In lower Manhattan, they pitched in, treating many people for shock. People in shock need water, so the Midwood drivers went to a nearby Starbucks to find it. Starbucks gave the drivers three cases of water – and charged them $130, which the drivers paid for from their pockets.
Any big company can have a bone-headed employee who blows a call under pressure. The people who own Midwood Ambulance thought Starbucks would want to know, for purposes of quality control, so they called Starbucks customer service. Starbucks customer service told the folks at Midwood that such a thing could never happen and hung up. OK, so that’s two bone-headed employees, one particularly ill-suited to customer relations. The people at Midwood wrote a letter to Starbucks HQ in Seattle. No response. No response, either to telephone calls from reporters, until the story broke in Seattle newspapers. Only then did Starbucks reimburse Midwood Ambulance for the cost of the water, and then Starbucks CEO Orin Smith attacked the media for making his employees feel bad. Perhaps we are getting back to normal.
Better we should remember the paramedics, cops, firefighters and bystanders who became heroes on September 11th. The best urban legends from this tragedy are legends in the finest sense, stories of common people in uncommon circumstances risking and sacrificing their lives for the sake and safety of people they didn’t know. Those stories will be legends because those men and women became larger than terror, larger than hatred and larger than life.