Shreevatsa Nevatia: 9/11 and the economy of outrage

Ten years ago, on this day, I sat at home leafing through trashy magazines when my mother called. “Turn on the news,” she said, “Now!” I made it just in time for the second plane.

Before it struck me that there are possibly thousands trapped in these towers, that their families would now mark time by this mournful event, that this day would change the world forever, before all that, the first word I found myself mouthing was, “Wow!”

I remember being glued to the television for days. The same images seemed to be multiplying themselves. Planes swerving into buildings, people being chased by dust that seemed to have gained a Frankensteinian life, and finally, a tall, unfamiliar, bearded face, declaring war on a very way of being.

There was an eerie quality to these pictures. It was as if they were simultaneously real and unreal. And I was both empathetic and stupefied. Worse still, I clearly felt a rush of unexplained adrenaline, and it is that strange exhilaration I have tried to make several silent apologies for.

A decade on, my guilt, like that New York dust, has finally settled. And since this war has been a war of images as much as death, the one picture that, in my mind, encapsulates this ten-year global struggle is the one you see above. There is no better way to put this — it is time we moved on.

It’s oddly comforting to know that as I sat in my room trying to make sense of what I had just seen on September 11, trying my best to suspend disbelief, a group of five New Yorkers sat in Brooklyn, sunbathing near a wall.    

They were engaged in a seemingly nonplussed conversation as smoke billowed out of what remained of the World Trade Centre. Thomas Hoepker, who had pictured the group, decided to not publish his photo for five years. The controversy that chased the picture in the public realm perhaps explains Hoepker’s decision.

Apathy, indifference, ignorance - all these were inferences drawn from the posture of Hoepker’s subjects. The unsaid accusation seemed to be this: How can you allow yourself to be this unperturbed, this unflustered, when 3,000 people are dying, when 343 firefighters are rushing to their deaths to save the lives of your fellow Americans?

It would perhaps be foolish to assume that this group was finalising an itinerary for the night’s Manhattan debauchery as they saw their city’s skyline alter irreversibly. It would also be just as skewed to demand that they articulate their helplessness in a frenzied manner by cycling hurriedly around the city.

Not only did the Bush administration’s insistence on this very virtuous outrage keep it in power for all of eight years, it also gave them their nation’s license to invade Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts.

The Iraqi body count now exceeds 100,000, and the invasion has cost the US 4,474 lives of its own, nearly half as many more men and women it lost on 9/11. The one thing that the War on Terror succeeded in doing was that it made carnage passé, and since most terror attacks after September 11 have lacked that compelling quality of spectacle, even a suicide bombing that kills more than 50 in Pakistan has started to feel like a petty crime.

The world’s reaction seemed a tad ingenuous when the Qaeda chief was finally nabbed in a roomy Abbottabad compound. It was always a given that the world’s most wanted man would be found in a place you least expected, and a cave would have just been far too predictable for a man who predicated his entire life on the element of surprise.

Of all that the US Seals discovered in the garrison town, what interested me most was a grainy picture that showed a fast-greying Osama, pointing a remote control at a television that replayed his rousing speeches back to him. There was obviously an element of vanity in this rather literal case of self-projection, but more importantly there was an element of nostalgia that seemed to be forcing this man to dye his beard a striking black for his jehadi cadres.

Even before he was gunned down, he looked defeated. The attacks in Bali, London, Madrid were all driven by local dissatisfactions. There was to be no sequel to 9/11. The world had not quite changed all that much. The people had not quite risen to convert the living.

Even though one might hail it as the first terror attack of its kind, 9/11 was by no means the first terror attack, and will by no means be the last. But rather than tracing every atrocity, every perpetrated act of violence back to that unfortunate day, it would be wise to remember that even terrorists are hardened by an insistence on moving on. They know, surely as we do, that it isn’t Osama but time that destroys all things.