This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Remembering Todd Gitlin, witness to 9/11

By:   []

Date: 2022-03 

He had not expected Trump to win the presidency and never anticipated to confront what Trumpism has now become. But Todd’s capacious intelligence was capable of reacting to surprise. When we launched in early 2001, Todd, along with James Curran and David Elstein, became the co-editors of openDemocracy’s ‘Media Strand’. (The strands were co-edited by distinguished unpaid advisers who did not agree with each other, it was not a model that lasted.) Later, he became North America editor. Above all, he wrote regularly and continuously and perhaps his most outstanding article for us was his third.

From the kitchen of his then apartment in Washington Square, you could see all of lower Manhattan. On the clear morning of 11 September 2001, he and his wife Laurel thought that the World Trade Centre was on fire until the second plane hit. I called him from London and before the end of the day, we published his response to the calamity. His humanity, exactness, wisdom and foreboding shine through. He called it ‘Is this Our Fate?’, we republish it below, as a memorial to the best of comrades.

One striking theme in the article expresses a defining aspect of Todd’s politics. He does not resile from the need for, as well as the inevitability of, an American strike back. The killers have to be killed. Unlike many of his fellow New Left activists, he endorsed military action by the United States if it was justified. At the same time, he condemns in advance what he dreads: that it will be used to widen the cycle of revenge. When, at the conclusion, he calls for “a focused military response – a precise one, not a revenge spasm, not an attack on a pharmaceutical factory” he is referring to Bill Clinton’s wiping out a medical facility in Sudan with cruise missiles four years before.

His presentiment was justified. Two years later I was with Todd in New York demonstrating against the US attack on Iraq the day after it was launched. As we set out, because London time is earlier, my older daughter returned from the London protest. Using the basic mobile phones of the time she texted me, “Best slogan, ‘Shocked but not Awed’”. We laughed with delight. Since then I always associate Todd with those words. He never lost his shock at the racism, barbarism and the dark side of America but he was never overawed by it or the work needed to defeat it.

Is This Our Fate? 11 September 2001

A fog of terrorism has settled on us – America, New York, everyone I know. Affliction by the phantasmagorical. Dull fear – fear of what’s already happened, fear of the future. More than anything, perhaps, disbelief – a disbelief so bleak and wobbly you can’t even believe in it.

Myself, I’ve been groping around in a fog since 9 this morning when my wife pointed out the window at the sickly yellow-brown smoke pluming eastward, one mile further downtown. A couple of minutes later, an explosion – the second one, I missed the first – and since then, we weave in and out of the unreal.

Staring into the unknown, we fall back on the aura of precedents – catastrophes felt so deeply in common they define the ground for a generation or more. Pearl Harbor, the marker in my parents’ lives and times. The Kennedy assassination, when the world went gravely strange, and we knew nothing would be the same. We were right. But of course we didn’t know the ways, not the half of them.

Just back from a walk around lower Manhattan. It’s the quietest Manhattan gets short of a blizzard. People stroll southward under an unnervingly blue sky, the kind of occasional blessing the city receives fall and spring, for all its mania, aggression, and preoccupation. People want to get the closest possible look at the sealed-off catastrophe blocks. Mostly, they look stunned. A few jokes, not many. Mobile phones, umbilical lines out to the world. Clusters of people in bars watching TV. Closer to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the wounded from lower Manhattan are being taken, people cluster waiting for word about loved ones. A couple, on mobile phones, are weeping.

A friend calls from Brooklyn. She left the windows open when she left to work in Manhattan this morning. Now there’s ash all over her flat.

After politics, violence

“This is profound,” a neighbor I’d never met said to me in the elevator this afternoon. More profound than Pearl Harbor, perhaps. That was war, armed force against armed force. America wasn’t supposed to be vulnerable. For my parents’ generation, Pearl Harbor cracked the old mystique, that old colonial fancy that the oceans were safety walls. The mystique grew back, but in attenuated form. In the 1960s, a lunatic fringe – not such a narrow fringe, actually – feared the Viet Cong would be landing on the beaches of San Diego if they weren’t stopped. That was crazy! Now the most fanciful anticipations of terror cannot be dismissed as crazy. Dire anticipations will be normal, now. This is our fate, now. This is part of the trauma we suffered and will continue to suffer.

On TV – how can we live our catastrophes without TV? – the same images burn into the brain, dozens, scores of times, past the point of banality. The networks compete for the most lurid amateur videos, which remind us of disaster movies. (Shouldn’t the digital quality be better by now?)

But here’s one piece of good news: in the media, though there’s some talk that war has been declared – strange, unprecedented war, but the term is hard to resist – there’s refreshingly little jingoism. It’s a relief to hear the mantra: no one knows who is responsible. Officials, news anchors, and terrorism experts alike are careful not to exaggerate what they know about who committed these mass murders. (As I write, Mayor Giuliani, who’s never been better, warns against blaming whole ethnic or racial groups.) There are hints and guesses about Osama bid Laden, but disaster relief is the main subject. Politicians are pompous, no big surprise, but the networks learned not to repeat their egregious rush to judgment after the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, when they started out blaming Muslims.
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