Can New York Save the World?
Today, the New York Times reviews William Langewiesche's American Ground. It sounds like an excellent book, describing how no event, no matter how large or how profound, transcends the underlying humanity, for good or for ill, of its participants:
Unlike most of the other 150 or so books published thus far about Sept. 11 (another 150 are on their way, no doubt), American Ground is not populated by "heroes," a word, Langewiesche suggests, that has become divested of meaning. There are good people here, performing admirable jobs under horrendous conditions -- Ground Zero was a demolition site and a cemetery at the same time. But he also gives us people, including members of New York City's now sacrosanct Fire Department, who succumbed to greed and selfishness and divisiveness.
The moral ambiguities of the World Trade Center operation, including the fact that it made a good number of people very rich, and the bad behavior of some of the main actors in the cleanup, are not well known.
Without flinching, he contrasts "the elaborate flag-draped ceremonials that the firemen accorded their own dead" with the "jaded 'bag 'em and tag 'em' approach that they took to civilians." And he recounts one episode in which firemen recommended amputating the leg of a dead Port Authority policeman because it was pinned in the wreckage. The Port Authority police officers who arrived at the scene became incensed at the suggestion, Langewiesche writes, pointing out correctly that "no dead fireman would have had his leg cut off."
Langewiesche is not cruel to the Fire Department; he recognizes its catastrophic loss, but he writes smartly that "the image of 'heroes' seeped through their ranks like a low-grade narcotic. It did not intoxicate them, but it skewed their view."
The success of the operation, Langewiesche makes clear, is due to a little-known city agency called the Department of Design and Construction, which, according to the city's organizational charts, should not have been in charge. But the men who run the department took charge because they were the best men for the job, in a city with the greatest capabilities of any city, anywhere. In one delightful aside, Langewiesche quotes the D.D.C. commissioner, Kenneth Holden, on why his small department never ceded control of the recovery to the Federal Emergency Management Agency:
As I kept explaining to FEMA later, this is not Oklahoma," Holden says. "We had the equipment. We had the connections. We could handle it. We just went in and did what we had to do. And no one said no."
Which made me think: imagine how much better off we'd be if only New Yorkers were in charge of domestic security and the war on terror.
I'm as unhappy as anyone with our attempts at domestic security and a war on terror, and I'd prefer that just about anyone else were in charge of them, but I don't think that New Yorkers have superpowers. Though I laughed the first time I read that, I think that attitude (reflected also in the Times recent piece about New York being the "real" capital of the United States) will only the lead the rest of the country to resent New York more.
9:44:25 AM 
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