September 11

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 16 SEPTEMBER 2001

I WAS WATCHING THE cricket test match on Tuesday afternoon when a friend called and told me to turn on my television. “My television is already on. My television is always on,” I replied sternly. It doesn’t do to have people questioning your work ethic.

“Turn to CNN,” said my friend, and there was something in her voice that caught my attention.

Soon I had forgotten the cricket. I watched, like the rest of the world, in whirling disbelief as scenes from Hollywood played out on my screen. It was all purest cinema, as though it were the alternate ending of a lost Bond movie in which 007 had somehow failed to foil the improbable and frankly impractical plot of the evil super-villain, who plans to paralyse the United States and panic the free world for inscrutable reasons of his own.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the footage was just how astonishing it was. It has long been the argument of old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud media critics, such as myself, that today’s hyper-realistic special effects, in which anything that can be imagined can be made real, has the effect of gradually and progressively numbing the viewer to the experience of life outside the cinema. After you have seen a famous icon or national monument being destroyed on the big screen, as in movies such as Deep Impact and Independence Day, I would have assumed that the emotional force of watching the same thing in real life would somehow have been diminished.

Nothing of the sort, as it turns out. In a peculiar way, it made the experience of seeing the towers of the World Trade Center disappear in a cloud of dust and rubble seem even more surreal, yet more difficult to comprehend. Your first reaction is to blink it away as a scene from a film, but when you rationally return to the fact that this scene, which can only have been from a film, is not in fact from a film, the disjuncture is even more baffling and boggling.

It is always instructive to watch the same news event unfolding on rival channels. Sky News (DStv) seemed to have the edge in efficiency, not only breaking information first (they had news of the Pittsburgh crash at least 30 minutes before CNN), but offering a wider range of snap opinions and specialist interviews. Those interviews also tended to be more helpful, while the CNN team seemed to be under instruction to ask each guest the question that should live in infamy: “As a New Yorker/American/member of the fire-fighting fraternity, how do the day’s events make you feel?” Not surprisingly, the answer to that question remained fairly constant. No one was much pleased by the day’s events.

CNN did have the edge, however, in the all-important story-headline department. While Sky opted to label its coverage: “Terror in America”, which was accurate enough though a little uninspired, CNN boldly declared: “America Under Attack”, which is altogether more snappy.

It was interesting to watch the coping strategies coming into play. At first the Americans hid behind a numbing wall of circumlocution. “If you listen carefully, in the background you can hear the sirens from the mobile anti-fire apparatuses,” intoned one reporter in Manhattan as a cavalcade of fire engines swept past.

“Here in the casualty ward there are many people dealing with issues relating to or stemming directly or indirectly from involuntary smoke inhalation,” declared a field reporter from St Vincent’s hospital.

Soon, however, they were moved to displace their shock with anger, and the anger didn’t take long to find its obvious target. Within hours we were being told that US intelligence sources were fingering “the Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden” as the culprit, a comforting source of speculation, given that US intelligence sources hadn’t been able to give even the slightest prior warning that four hijacked passenger flights would shortly be used as weapons of terror.

Shortly thereafter, the channel managed to scrounge up footage of five or six happy Libyans dancing a jig, apparently celebrating the news of the attack on America. Even if one overlooks the questionable news value of watching a handful of foreign civilians in a hostile nation reacting for a TV camera, there didn’t seem to be much in the handbook of responsible journalism to encourage cutting the footage with images of weeping New Yorkers and showing the montage on a repeating cycle all through the next day.

Far from America – though arguably not far enough – there was a peculiar and almost perverse pleasure in the communality of Tuesday evening. Wherever you went, groups of people were clustered around television sets in restaurants and bars, supermarkets and shop windows. Strangers at check-out tills started conversations about the fifth missing airliner; newspaper vendors at traffic lights asked me if I had heard any fresh news on my car radio. For an afternoon at least, people were drawn together by the sense of shared occasion, as we had been during the Gulf War, during the 1994 elections, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was an event we could all share, and something deep inside us thrilled to that.

“At least it gives us something to watch other than Big Brother,” said my friend on the phone, later that night, as we sat in different cities, unable to stop ourselves watching the same video footage being replayed for the umpteenth time. It was kind of funny, but neither of us felt like laughing. There are times, as TS Eliot nearly said, when humankind cannot bear very much reality television.