01 09 11

[arisbe]

Got through the day without being exposed to the media on the subject, except for one bit. I was surfing around about a half hour ago when I saw the beginning of a rebroadcast of the Pope's visit to the World Trade Center site. It was enough. I had of course seen it live, broadcast to the enormous screens at Yankee Stadium, where I sat for hours in the cold fog waiting for him to arrive, but then there was no sound, and not much of a clue to what was going on. Early this afternoon I walked down to the river, as I had so often walked to the river at the World Financial Center in the months before the attack, not so much afterward, even when we had moved back to Barclay Street. I have often mused on the faces in the crowds I would see crossing over from the WTC to the WFC, and wondered how many of those lives had been obliterated and how many merely ruined, as some would say my own was when my job was moved to Chennai, perhaps in consequence of the attack, but perhaps not. Certainly my country was destroyed, not by the attacks themselves, but by the politicians who used them as a pretext for starting the war they had long promised their backers. In so doing they had befouled the pride and prostituted the grief of my city. The priest whose skull was crushed when he took off his helmet to pray for a fallen comrade did not die for this. Indeed, his helmet was later presented to the Bishop of Rome, an old, sick man keeping himself alive by sheer willpower -- and prayer -- to fight the Satanic power he felt emanating from the White House, a fight his successor gloriously reigning, whom I watched tonight, continues.