The Defenestration of Innocence

Andre Bertolino

My co-workers told me that N.Y.C. was under attack but I did not find their claim to be credible. Events are after all, only things that happen untimely or out of place. They were discussing it as if it were just another one of those things that happen in the city, one of those things that New York had a way of doing every now and then. It assailed you with an image so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

    These out- of -the ordinary days happened, and re-happened, because N.Y. was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or to signify the new world like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. N.Y.C couldn’t care less about where it stood. It kept on going forward precisely because it didn’t give a damn about what it left behind. The past disappeared in the city and that was why there weren’t many monuments around.

    I went about my work with a mind full of wonder. When i overheard some customers talking about an assault on the Pentagon i imagined Martians had invaded driving monstrous tripods of shiny Martian alloy with articulate arms of steel dangling from the main body and great puffs of green smoke spewing from the joints in the limbs. They might as well have been Martians invaders. America had just been taken over coup d’ etat style by the sleaziest psychopaths imaginable. Then I began to worry if Godzilla was on a rampage in SOHO, because I was currently showing my paintings there and Godzilla could hurt sales. As far as I knew this was the first time since the war of 1812 that the national territory had been attacked or even threatened. Many people brought up a Pearl Harbor analogy, but that was misleading. As you may know on Dec 7, 1941, military bases on two U.S. colonies were attacked-not the national territory.       

    As we now know, the likely perpetrators of the attacks in 2001 were not Martians or giant lizards. They were tribesmen of Arabic speaking Asia. Media play closed early out of fear of the asymmetrical war making method these tribesmen practice (A technique they learned from the English in WW1). The district manager of Media Play probably figured that with tens of thousands presumed dead and up to twenty-two airlines hijacked no one would want to shop. He was wrong; shopping would soon become a new form of patriotism. In his first address to the nation after the attacks the president asked Americans to go out and shop. Don’t stay home and grieve for the dead. Don’t question the cause of the attacks or the reasons why they weren’t prevented, just shop. Of course the attacks were done in the name of god and justified by a system of belief. The believers wanted their own place in the world, their own utopia, not ours. It was an ancient war and its effects could be seen everywhere. There were three symbolic targets assaulted that day all fabricated as fantasies of wealth and power that became fantasies of ruin.

     The pentagon, a five sided ring, reminiscent of an old fortress, built to surpass the biggest office in the world is a military headquarters big enough to hold 40,000 people with parking for ten thousand. It is only four stories high since at the time of its construction a tall building would have required too much steel, and steel was urgently needed for battleships and weapons in 1941. The Nazis were in control of much of Europe and they were already half way to Moscow though they had launched their surprise attack on the Soviet Union only three weeks earlier.

    On September 12th 2001 the pentagon was still on fire and the hallways were filled with a smoky haze. Electricity water and communications were turned off and half the building was closed; many corridors were blocked off with yellow crime-scene tape and guarded by soldiers with M-16 rifles. Fire fighters on the roof struggled with the blaze, attacking it with foam. The plane went through three rings before stopping and pools of fuel had ignited over night. In the basement, plans were being formed to pursue the perpetrators at home and abroad.

    “On September 15th I went to retrieve my paintings from the Agora gallery and the train was nearly empty. At each stop i looked out the window and saw a parking lot full of cars whose owners would never return. New York was in mourning and floral motifs figured prominently in the shrines to the dead and the missing. i studied them wherever i found them: Idealistic peace signs, photos, bouquets, words of condolence and words of ignorance all flourished between shops and in public squares. Flags were everywhere. On windshields, bumpers and windows. They were on toothpicks and toys.

    Even the Media jumped on this patriotic bandwagon, showing American flags on news sets, while news readers wore flag lapel pins and spoke of “us” vs. “them,” the evildoers. This rhetoric did not suggest a particularly independent frame of mind, nor was the climate in America conductive to debate. In the coming months America was gripped by a self-righteous rage. A mighty host was impulsively raised and dispatched on a Crusade. Cab drivers were beaten nearly to death; the FBI was raiding mosques, shops and even houses while Arab and Muslim men were disappearing into shadowy detention centers where they were interrogated. The presidents Lawyer (Jon Yoo) advised him that interrogation becomes torture only when it causes organ failure and even then it’s O.K. as long as the president says “war on terror.”

    I arrived in Manhattan around 9:30 am and walked toward ground zero. The place where the first and second blows had struck. Canal st was the closest anyone without a badge could get and there were a number of people there, students and tourists, attracted by the stories they had heard who wanted to get a glimpse of the wreckage. Its shattered steel exoskeleton was sixteen blocks wide and its massive grey ribs smoldered on Broadway. I wanted a closer look so i entered an apartment complex on canal st and took a rickety old Otis elevator to the roof. After crossing the building I found a fire escape down to chamber st. I crept down Church st for four blocks and took a left on Barclay. The air was acrid and smelled of loose molecules from burned everything. Pompeii may have smelled similar after Mount Vesuvius pounded it with its volcanic wrath. i had the uncomfortable sense that I was intruding upon a tragedy that I could never comprehend. i had been to this approximate location two weeks prior. On that occasion I had purchased a small coffee from Starbucks for $3.60 on my way to the train underneath. But now the way forward could not be traced through the ashen covering. The overpriced Starbucks was now the grave of an empire. Its splintered walls resembled a medieval cloister set upon a desolate heath.I idled there in the sentient ruins contemplating its strange beauty until I was covered in a veil of ash myself. At the zero time was suspended, or reversed, or erased; it was hard to say which. Not even in their prime did the sight of the gigantic towers, full and running over with life, move my heart as they did now. To see the zero like this was to see the ghost of New York haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It was the most impressive, stately, solemn, mournful sight I had ever seen. I was tempted to stay longer but I still had to pick up my paintings so I walked back to Canal st.

    When I got there the scene had changed a bit. There were rows of news trucks lining the street grief fishing, while actors worked camera crews who were stockpiling footage. Flag salesmen peddled pocket sized $3.00 flags made in china and Models posed with the flags for photographers. I wondered if the flags were talismans for warding off evil like the garlic one might put over a window to ward off vampires. But really they were just a chic expression of generalized grief. Generalized grief proved to be a self deception, a bubble, a castle in the air, a fashion, convention, flavor of the month. What were people in Oregon or New Hampshire really grieving? A loss of safety? Some demolished delusion that a lifetime of purchases and television programs had meaning? Indeed it was a shared moment in our culture, like the final episode of Seinfeld. But it was meaningless. We woke up the next day wondering when the next disaster was scheduled. When the next shoe would drop.

    The owner of the Agora was slightly more antagonistic, snide and venomous than the average New Yorker. She mocked my lack of address saying “the only reason you claim to be homeless is because you think it is a romantic Thoreauesque idea. The assistant insinuated that the real reason the owner resented me was because of my “other talents.” She thought i was some kind of sooth-sayer in other words. The paintings were indeed prescient. The central piece in the show strongly resembled ground zero. But the painting they had rejected was even worse. It featured a giant airplane crashed into a city on fire.

    When I first heard about the attacks Sci-Fi scenes flashed across my mind but then I felt a terrible guilt and a strange thought occurred to me. Was I not an agent of the coming destruction that I had foreshadowed? Was I somehow responsible for not preventing the attacks? The curator’s hostility only heightened this guilt and confusion. Of course she was under a lot of stress. It was then that the art market stagnated after all and her gallery’s prospects looked dismal. Jean Michael Basquiat had show in this very location a decade earlier, but this was the end of the SOHO art scene.

    I needed to waste an hour while the gallery bubble wrapped my paintings, so I went to Strawberry Fields. There I saw a crowd of four to five hundred people deranged by shock and grief adorning vigils with candles, trinkets and letters lamenting their loss. They had all seen the footage of businessmen opening their windows and leaping to their death, just moments before both towers crumbled into their own footprint.

    I was listening to a woman from the red-cross painted green and dressed as the statue of liberty give a sales pitch to a small crowd, when a group of young men with signs on sticks began yelling over her. I turned around and read their “Bomb Kabul” signs. But that did not tell me who, what or where Kabul was. I still had no Idea who carried out the attacks and I did not wish death upon anyone. So I interrupted to ask them the geographical, political and legal reasons for their demonstration in a polite and objective way. It turned out they were campaigning for indiscriminate bombing because the F.B.I. had published their list of suspects the day before. Another added that the secretary of homeland security had unveiled a color coded threat level chart. Then made clashing claims of privacy and security, convenience and safety. They were ranting and raving but not really angry. They had mounted the square to throw a conniption fit but they did not know despair and they refused to acknowledge loss. They declared war when there was none and when we were at war, they probably pretended we were not.

    The rest of the world wailed and vowed revenge as it buried its dead and we just turned on our televisions. Entertainment is the only thing that America produces, besides fast food and it is the most insidious propaganda ever devised. While people elsewhere die questioning the propaganda of tyrants and royals, Americans crave theirs. They demand the distraction and triviality, and it has become our national religion. In this faith we are backwards fundamentalists, not so different from those we pretended to battle. Perhaps the bomb Kabul boys little protest was a function of Patriotism/nationalism. But what does “either your with us or against us” mean when Americans switched sides indiscriminately armed their enemies and then wondered why they got shot with their own guns? It means the rest of the world better follow America’s four year election cycle very closely. 

    The motivation behind the attacks could be explained by analyzing the attackers.

         When I returned to the gallery my Paintings were encased in bubble wrap, so I was unaware they had included an extra painting until the next day. The discovery did not surprise me very much because they had also misspelled my titles and lost my website. It was my first show and I was fed up with the art world already. From that moment on I viewed the gallery as little more than a department store of upscale entertainment. They had shown themselves to be interior decorators who dealt in pretty things with pleasing subject matter, or only art that was in fashion at the moment. Now that hard times had arrived fashion was no longer relevant.