9/11

It feels like more than three years ago. Perhaps that has something to do with the gulf between being a high school student and a college upperclassman.

Nevertheless, I have a few salient memories. First of all, I'm never going to forget how beautiful the morning was. I had to walk to an outdoor modular classrom for first period Latin, which was when kids started filing in late with stories about bombs in New York. Before the period was over, the entire student body was summoned into the auditorium to hear whatever news was available. I remember feeling something like a mild anaphylactic shock.

At that point, there was a special meeting for the senior class. Let me set this up: all the seniors in my high school were required to complete an internship over the course of the year, going to work on Wednesdays rather than school. September 12 had been scheduled as our first day to go to the internships. Many of them, naturally, were in the financial district in New York, and some were even in the WTC. The class internship advisor said something so straightfacedly, unintentionally, darkly comical, that it has been permanently burned into my brain. "Some of you had internships at the World Trade Center," she averred. "They don't exist anymore."

Most of the other details of the day are a bit hazy for me. I do remember getting into a heated argument with an intelligent female classmate of mine (I think she goes to U Chicago now), who at that point was a dogmatic Aynrandian. Exactly how it started I can't recall, but it ended with us screaming at each other about the morality of indiscriminately carpet-bombing the middle east (I was against doing so).

Oddly enough, and though I didn't recognize the fact until many months later, 9/11/2001 was the beginning of the end of my flirtation with Marxism. (Hey, it could have been worse; I could have been an Aynrandian). Marxism offered no explanation for what had taken place. And an uncomfortably large segment of the left had adopted the Chomsky-Cockburn line about America essentially deserving the attacks. My revulsion at their polemics was pure gut and bile, and pre-theoretical. My first sustained attempt to sort out my own politics (if you haven't noticed by now, everything I write is at least as much an attempt to understand my own mind as it is an analysis of the external world) resulted in this article, published in a conservative campus newspaper. I continue to stand by the spirit and most of the substance of what I wrote; though there are places where I clearly allowed polemicism to overcome my better judgement. Also, my strained attempt to rescue Marx from the Marxists makes me laugh upon rereading the article (none of my conservative readers noticed this by the way; but at the time, I still felt a residual loyalty to the old man, and even now, I regard him as I regard some of my better teachers). If you're wondering about the two or three instances of awkward phrasing in the article, I can assure you that they were the consequence of a rushed editorial process in which I exerted little control. I do sympathize with my editor; I have an obvious thing for secondary clauses, and its tough to parse through them without creating a bit of stylistic wierdness.

There's one last thing I remember about the 11th of September three years ago. It's a vision that appears in my nightmares every so often. My drive home from school that day carried me over NJ Route 4 in Teaneck, to an intersection with River Road that offered a perfect view over the Hudson River into Manhattan. I saw the asymmetric mushroom cloud, and the gaping wound in the skyline that had delighted my imagination for the first 18 years of my life. In some strange way, New York now feels even more like my spiritual home than it did before I had any shocking memories of the failed attempt to destroy it.