New York has got the spring back in its step. The shock of September 11 2001 will never completely go away, but New Yorkers have determinedly gone back to being New Yorkers — proud inhabitants of a city that is like no other in the world.
Not even the sudden and total power failure that blacked out the city for 24 hours two weeks ago daunted them — not for long anyway. As the news started spreading that this was not another terrorist attack after all (but then will we ever really know?) New Yorkers rediscovered their sense of camaraderie, their talent for collective survival in good times and bad.
Hundreds of thousands walked for up to six hours in the darkness to get home, keeping up their spirits by cracking jokes with strangers and encouraging each other to persevere. Those who lived too far away, like in New Jersey or Connecticut, shacked up with friends or slept in the streets.
It is this kind of spirit that makes New Yorkers different from other Americans. But there are other Americans who seem to believe that New Yorkers are also expendable.
Not only has the United States government lied to the American people and the people of the world about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, it also lied to the people of New York about the after-effects of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre on their environment.
According to radio station WBAI, one of the only voices of dissent in the American body politic, literally tons of asbestos, lead and the other toxic substances that go into the construction of the modern skyscraper hung for days like a pall from hell over the site of the catastrophe.
You hardly needed experts to tell you that. Even sitting watching that appalling event on television from the safety of your own home thousands of miles away across the world, you could see the cloud of grey and brown smoke hovering in the air. In the days that followed, as this cloud slowly settled into the ground and in the fabric of surrounding buildings, a large part of southern Manhattan had become, and remains, severely contaminated.
The White House, however, moved rapidly to suggest that this contamination was minimal. It deliberately changed the wording of reports on the level of this contamination in order to allay justified public fears. In other words it systematically lied, even if it meant that its own people, including the much-vaunted heroes of the New York Fire Department who spent hours in the thick of things, could die in the long term from toxic poisoning.
In some ways you can understand the conundrum. The damage inflicted by the men who hijacked those doomed airliners was so vast and so dramatic that the White House probably wanted to minimise the full effect of what had actually happened. But it is somewhat unethical to be less than truthful to your own citizens about a health hazard as massive as this one.
Of course the bulk of the media, swinging in patriotically behind the government’s drums of war, say nothing about this — with the exception of WBAI, and maybe one or two other small private radio stations and a handful of loony magazines.
The main spin doctor in this disinformation campaign was George W Bush’s energy adviser. He had been a lawyer representing the asbestos, lead and toxic emissions lobby before joining the White House. And surprise, surprise: the administration has just announced that it is riding roughshod over the namby-pamby anti-toxic emissions Bills that were about to be ratified in Congress. Corporate/ industrial America has begun collecting the debt it was owed for putting Boy George in power.
The cover-up of the extent of the toxic fallout from the collapse of the twin towers thus becomes less surprising. The US burns up 25% of the world’s non-renewable energy resources, and is planning to eat up even more. It is already poisoning its own atmosphere. Now that the worst industrial polluters are to be allowed to escape various obligations to more stringently filter their unbelievable toxic emissions, things are set to become incalculably worse.
So what’s the loss of a few thousand New Yorkers living and working in contaminated buildings in downtown Manhattan compared to that? With any luck the majority of them will be hippies and deadbeats from Greenwich Village, anyway, and good riddance.
The US’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have turned most world opinion against Americans in general. And yet it is true that you always have to guard against the danger of generalising, and failing to see the forest for the trees.
Yes, it is hard to hate New Yorkers. It is hard not to be caught up in the excitement of being in New York, with its pulsating will to live and all its contradictions.
Returning to the city for the first time since 9-11, I find myself stepping back and looking at it anew.
The destruction of the twin towers presented the spectacle of the mightiest power on Earth brought low, with all its sophisticated technology unable to prevent the elaborate edifice disintegrating in a spectacular dust cloud, whose effects will linger for years to come.
But the recent blackout has shown that this outer layer of sophistication also hides a creaky and out-of-date infrastructure. The subway system is remarkably antiquated, even compared to London’s, which was in place long before New York’s was, but has been continually updated. And if you depend on getting around by bus, be prepared for a long wait.
So New Yorkers pound the pavement as if they were mere Third World serfs, moving for miles on foot along caverns of skyscrapers while expensive limousines purr down the boulevards.
Contradictions. Castles in the air. New York.