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With terror no longer confined to cities, Americans will have to abandon the illusion of perfect safety.
By Philip Nobel
February 2002
It is a peculiarly American idea that life can be made perfectly safe. However
it originated--as a product of geography (the United States as an island
nation), history (the United States as a haven of last resort), or myth
(the doctrine of American exceptionalism)--it is hard to deny that aversion
to personal risk has long been a mainstay of the national temperament.
Recently, ignoring the world has increased our sense of comfort. It is an
old story now that news organizations in the 1990s were neglecting their
foreign bureaus, even as they pioneered the 24/7 cable non-event at home.
Only the blind are blindsided; the single viable parallel between Osama
bin Laden and Hitler is that each clearly stated what they would do before
they did it.
Let's take advantage of this moment when the world has gotten our attention.
One thing we might want to notice is that although the events of September
11 were novel in their execution and--in New York--wholly unprecedented
in scale, there is nothing new about cities coming under terrorist attack.
Why is it sometimes so hard to find a trash can in central London?
What are those sinister carabinieri watching for from their posts in the
streets of Rome? To say nothing of decade-to-decade atrocities in Belfast,
Madrid, and Tel Aviv. New York is now a world city with world-city problems.
And terrorism is of course only the most recent manifestation of the violence
that gave cities their walls in the first place.
The spate of writing about city life following the attacks has been sustained
by our homegrown heritage of antiurbanism. It is an inglorious tradition,
one that spans from Jefferson's vision of a nation of gentleman farmers
to the bulldozing years of "urban renewal" to Celebration, Florida.
Only where there is an alternative would people even muse about abandoning
New York, and for most Americans that alternative begins at the end of the
driveway. The New York Times has been keeping an eye on the first stirrings
of this feared abandonment and has reported that it is a mixed bag: the
young and hopeful are coming here as they always have, but a growing number
of families have already left for the suburbs. Let's call it "fright
flight," in honor of that last ignoble retreat from the city.
Will these new emigrants be safer in the hills? The quick answer is "yes"--any
given suburb is less target rich than the downtown of even a marginal American
city. But, as our generals know, to think that would be like fighting
the last war. The Pentagon, of course, sits not in D.C. but across the way
in suburban Virginia. Nearby the urbanizing suburbs boast areas of density
that rival city centers. And then there's anthrax, which respects no municipal
boundries. The FBI has acknowledged that the tainted letters are most likely
a case of homeland-bred terrorism, the work of a single wacked Unathraxer
who has exploited the fantasy of domestic isolationism as only a native
could.
It seemed strange at first that a focused assault on the press and
two Democratic senators would send the country into such a spin, though
the effect was of course amplified by targeting TV. (CNN never reported
a story so thoroughly as they did the afternoon the first bacteria
were discovered at NBC.) With the exception of Chicago, where for a while
the Sears Tower was evacuated daily in sympathy with its lost brothers in
New York, how many Americans can relate to working (or living, or dying)
above the fifth floor? But germs? Every American kitchen was already
a declared battleground against them; let's remember for history that the
explosion in marketing antibacterial sprays and swabs and such preceded
these first bioterror attacks by many years. And everyone gets mail.
So for perhaps the first time in American history--and definitely
the first time since the hands of the nuclear clock started ticking
in reverse--town and country are in the same fix, equally vulnerable.
Watching from a distance over the years as San Francisco suffered little
earthquakes and waited for the big one, I used to wonder why people chose
to live in such a fragile place. Then I started to see it as a tribute to
their city; staying there was the clearest way to say they didn't want to
live in a world without San Francisco. Life in cities is fraught, but cities
are where life happens.
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