First we saw recorded footage of the North Tower being hit by American Airlines Flight 11; and then, seamlessly, live footage of the South Tower, as United Airlines Flight 175 punched a hole in its façade that had all the cartoon noir simplicity of Mickey Mouse’s silhouette. Jaw slack, mind numb, I stared at the shaken-up snow globe of Manhattan for a while, then said to my wife: ‘Well, there’s nothing much I can do about this, I’m going upstairs to work.’ Only to have her, twenty minutes later, shout up three storeys of our London house: ‘Look! The whole building is collapsing, I really think you ought to be watching this!’
Indeed, I ought. And not to minimise my own part in it (how would this be possible?), things were not the same afterwards, for me, for the dead, the maimed and the traumatised, for Muslims, martyrs, Republicans, Jews and even journalists. So, I resolved to walk to New York in the spirit of peace, tracked lazily overhead, as I traversed west London, by the fat fuselages of the long procession of jets that caromed down the crystal hill of the flight path into Heathrow.
Could my own, slow advance, needle-limbs piercing and repiercing the fabric of reality, sew up this singularity, this tear in the space-time continuum through which medievalism had prolapsed? Legs slowing down. . a trick-turning ape balancing the globe. . slower and slower, then halting it altogether — a long fermata: serpentine, hairy arms bat at biplanes — before reversing it. . walking backwards to roll back the years to some poorly imagined Arcadian past, where livestock, saints and the virginal abide by the Laws and a pleasing sfumato obscures everything.
On my walk to New York, passing through Wandsworth Park, which lies on the south side of the Thames, just before Putney Bridge, I was struck by the industrial blower mounted on the back of a small truck that was sending the old-gold autumnal leaves skittering away across the combed grass. This was like some hackneyed filmic symbol — the pages of a calendar torn off by invisible hands — used to denote the passage of time. And walking, too, blows back the years, especially in urban contexts. The solitary walker is, himself, an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller. The first time I walked to Heathrow Airport, I reached the road tunnel that plunges beneath the runways and into the terminal complex, only to find the following sign: ‘No pedestrian access. Go back to the Renaissance.’ This was, of course, a hotel on the Bath Road from where you are required to take a shuttle bus.
Yes, this was to be a peaceable protest, this discontinuous march from Stockwell in south London to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. If I was assaulting a tyranny it was one of distance, and of a form of transportation that decentres and destabilises us, making all of us that can afford it subjects of a ribbon empire that encircles the globe. This is a papery and insubstantial realm, like a sanitary strip wrapped around a toilet bowl.
It’s Wednesday, and I must be in Bangkok, Benin or Beijing, although not because I know in any meaningful sense where I am; for, if you were to take me outside this hotel, I’d be hard pressed to point north, let alone tell you what lay in that direction. When we marvel at the hermetic culture of the foreign bases, from which, sated by roast meals and entertained by imported TV shows, our fucked-up troops emerge to fuck up those who can’t afford airline seats, we should rightly understand that we too belong to this army of disorientation, sallying forth from Holiday Inns and Hiltons, on missions of search & acquisition.
Bite down on this, why don’t you? Bin Laden spoke of 9/11 as a ‘spectacular’, a horrid echo of Debord. And his terrorist affiliates — who applied to Al-Qaeda for venture capital, exactly like any other business start-up — weren’t only attacking the Twin Towers as the supreme interfusion of capitalistic symbol and Western hegemonic reality, they were also attacking our transport system. Try to think of the civilians killed as collateral damage, as we do when we bunker-bust in Afghanistan and Iraq or our proxies do in the Lebanon and Somalia.
Even in England’s own greening, our home-grown religious maniacs understood which form of transport was appropriate (as did the Moroccan Al-Qaeda freelancers who wreaked pre-emptive vengeance on Madrid). They may have been led by a lowly classroom assistant, yet as they petted and aroused their new primitivism via the internet — self-grooming paedophiles, both corrupters and corrupted in a worldwide web of deception — there was this nascent awareness: that just as the Modernism of New York reached its apogee in the 1920s, with its pre-stressed steel and poured concrete buildings, so London’s own, Modernist era was at the turn of the previous century: the soaring glass and iron rail terminuses, the deep-level Tube system augured through the clay of the Thames Valley. The ‘spectaculars’ of both 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London were thus attacks on our notion of ourselves as, above all, a mobile society, ever stimulating our ever growing, ever more turgid economy with rapid movements of hand and eye.
They — that nebulous, shape-shifting ‘other’ — have remained faithful to this plan of attack. Nothing so static as a stadium or a queue for them, and into the summer of 2006, if the spooks are to be believed, they persisted with their evil designs on transatlantic flight. They won’t let go of the possibility of pulling off a ‘spectacular’ to match their last. The bomb-making materials may have been mundane — hair-spray, cleaning fluid, lighter fuel — but the blast would be anything but, tearing down tens — scores, even — of jets from the sky, thereby, simultaneously, thrusting the eastern seaboard away from the West Country, while yet, perversely, drawing them into tight, political proximity.
Still, if the spectacularists were intent on dividing and ruling, then they couldn’t have done better. The seeming unanimity in the first, shocked months after 9/11 was just that. Soon enough, we began to ‘other’ each other.
The opposition to the retributive attacks on Afghanistan began quickly here in London. I was going to public meetings within days, and a local Stop the War coalition committee was set up. Attending this (in the upstairs hall of the local swimming baths, used typically for winter badminton and five-a-side soccer), I was struck by the juxtaposition between the platform apparatchiks and the masses. The latter were rentiers living off the consumer credit provided by their ever escalating property values; the former, the same rent-a-proles that I’d seen at leftist groupus-cules a quarter-century before, right down to their Doctor Marten’s boots; right up to their shop-worn rhetoric. When I addressed the meeting I said only this: that for every ‘comrade’ one of them uttered they could guarantee losing another hundred — or thousand — potential supporters.
It’s only the benefit of hind-facetiousness that leads me to observe how queer it was that while these unrepentant Trotskyists were, with dull predictability, using one coalition as a front for their belated attempts to kick-start the permanent revolution, so their recusant brothers and sisters were the éminences grises behind another one; a coalition that, even as we fruitlessly deliberated, was kicking the chocks away from its B52s.
And so it went on: the grapes of wrath trailed across Afghanistan and Iraq, the bitter vendage of civilian deaths, then the hypostatisation of terror through the cirrhotic liver of another failed state. Yet, throughout all of this, what mattered most was the way we were divided: from our consciences, from our own, delusional sense of righteousness. As if the dreadful, old world of left and right were any less binary than this terrible new one? Both the best, the worst and — more importantly — the mediocre, lacked all conviction, while all three moieties were, nonetheless, full of passionate intensity.