A Ruin Running to the Horizon - 7 June 2002

There was, on a day last week, a sombre ceremony in downtown New York in the grand canyon created by the explosion and fall of the Twin Towers.

It was a ceremony requested by the family survivors of the 2,800 victims and the hundreds of the firemen who died trying to rescue them.

It marked the taking away, by the last band of workers, of the last grain of debris of the 1,800,000 tons they had had to cart off since the dreaded 11 September.

What is left now is, I should think, the largest hole anyone has ever seen in the middle of a great city.

I urge visitors to go down there - to what has become known as Ground Zero - not for the morbid motives that some wretched people yielded to in the first few awful days - tourists wearing little flags pointing their holiday cameras at mountains of ash and into caves of what they called body parts.

At any stage of the recovery undertaking it was worth anyone's going down there because no picture, no television shot, could express the vast scope and range of the hole - the canyon.

All of us who had not seen it imagined a frightening space where the towers had been and then two or three flattened streets nearby.

But to this day the shock and the impressiveness is of the sheer immensity of the ruin - not a gaping hole between small skyscrapers but from east to west and north to south you're looking at a ruin running to the horizon.

Last week this landscape was finally bare as a dinosaur's bone.

At least 20,000 people lined the newly-built railed sidewalks, though in the only low aerial photograph I saw they looked like two long files of ants.

A small brigade of firemen bore an empty coffin through the silent canyon and on and out - that was all.

At the families' request too there were no speeches.

The mayor and a few city officials and notably the small hero of the horrible day - Rudolph Giuliani - stood at attention, their hands on their hearts.

So no music, no speeches, just the slow quiet tramp of the brigade of firemen.

It was a scene that touched thousands to tears and some to outright nausea.

What surely prompted everybody to moist eyes at least was the thought that in the first shattering hours when hundreds of people appeared out of the holocaust, to flee from it, the firemen we mourned ran towards it.

I've not had any letter from listeners who would dare to sound so tasteless as to think aloud, "Really they do go on about it."

But I suspect many strangers abroad must feel something of the sort. I believe anyone who does not live in America does well to wonder.

What must be said, though, is that what has finally come to be known as 9/11 was a national trauma, not restricted to downtown New Yorkers or uptown New Yorkers or indeed this state or this part of the country.

A fearful psychiatric study is to hand from California reporting the plight of hundreds of thousands of children in California and neighbouring states who still have nightmares, very many of whom have gone to seek psychiatric advice.

Then children are simply the most conspicuous victims of the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of whoever masterminded 11 September, namely the ability to inflict on a whole population the anxiety of wondering "What next?"

The politicians from top to bottom go on telling us to lead our normal lives when we secretly know that the prospect of life in America today, the tempo of life, the aims and ambitions, the risks of death - the prospect is no more normal than the Middle Ages were to the 18th Century.

But the Congress and the Government soldier on, holding elaborate and time-consuming hearings about whether the CIA or the FBI, or both, missed the telling signals that 9/11 was about to happen.

And maybe there'll be a presidential commission as there was after Pearl Harbour - who was asleep at that switch, who was responsible for the appalling destruction of the US Pacific fleet?

A simple, true answer is: the Japanese.

But the Pearl Harbour investigation reflected the unsleeping American suspicion that behind every accident there's a conspiracy, or more generally that every human situation - the ill-feeling between Arabs and Jews, for instance - is not so much a human situation as a problem.

No other people talk so naturally and so often of the problem of North Korea, the problem of Israel, the problem of social security.

Problems are meant to be solved, are they not? Of course. Then let's go about solving them.

The good side of this is the determination to defeat the undefeatable, to do what the experts say cannot be done.

For example, an anniversary strikes me - once America was in the Second War, after Pearl Harbour, and had a desperate need of ships - cargo ships, freighters - to supply not only the transatlantic ally but the allies and their own fighting men across the huge Pacific, the country's top shipbuilders reported they could together produce possibly a score of new freighters every year.

A construction man in California, who'd never built a ship in his life, one Henry Kaiser, told President Roosevelt he could pretty soon produce one a week. Ridiculous!

I never forget visiting his San Francisco shipyard. It was a gigantic chess board where cranes and trolleys, like a swarm of bees, deposited 30,000 components of the ship on to alphabetically marked squares, on to which descended an army of welders, like an invasion of ants.

Everything was hauled to the ways, only 1 in 200 of these ants had ever been in a shipyard.

The product was a huge lumbering tub of a supply ship.

An Eastern shipbuilder built one by traditional methods on the East Coast. It took 245 days.

Mr Kaiser, in San Francisco, got busy and he got it down to one Liberty Ship delivered every four days.

And it was the availability of these ships in vast numbers that fulfilled, at last, the ability to mount the invasion of Normandy by guaranteeing a continuous supply line across the English Channel.

I find no mention of this decisive condition or of Mr Kaiser in any of the ministerial diaries or memoirs of either nation.

Well with all this the Middle East and Afghanistan and India and Pakistan I must say I've had one or two horrendous nightmares of my own.

So a month ago I decided to change the habit of a lifetime, which has been to spend five or six hours a day reading, watching, following the news of government and politics.

Now I make do with the 85,000 words of the New York Times, check with CNN and abandon, until nightfall, suicide bombers and al-Qaeda and Pakistan and 160,000 Middle Easterners who have outstayed their welcome in the United States, and so on and on and on.

And I looked around for a story with absolutely no political implications whatsoever.

Sport is the great remedy for political saturation troubles.

In sport somebody wins, everything is solved. What could be better than this coming Saturday, the third leg of what is known as the Triple Crown, which has not been won for 24 years.

Let me explain.

The great American horse race is, you must know, the Kentucky Derby - pronounced "Durbee" for interesting reasons we'll go into some other time.

There follow, at about a month's interval, the two next great races: the Preakness in Baltimore and this Saturday, 8 June, the Belmont on Long Island.

The excitement for normal humans who don't take an interest in horseracing is the fact that the horse which won the Kentucky Derby also won the Preakness.

And so this Saturday, the day when we'd know whether for the first time since 1978, we could hail a winner of the so-called Triple Crown.

The interest for laymen was quickened in the beginning in Kentucky when we heard that the winner, a colt named War Emblem, had come up from nowhere, had been picked up, bought by its owner only three weeks before the Derby for less than a million dollars after he'd seen the colt win a race in the Mid West by four lengths. Nobody had ever heard of him.

The racing establishment, which had been exchanging knowing winks and expert odds for months was rather appalled when this obscure War Emblem - which had, by the way, two chipped knees - led from the start and came romping home at 20-1.

His trainer, one Bob Baffert, a veteran with six or seven horses that had won one or other leg of the crown, was looked on as the black sheep of the racing family.

He was a freak. He'd have his comeuppance at Baltimore.

Well he didn't. So now how to discredit the owner and the trainer as traitors to their class?

Not so difficult. War Emblem's owner is a prince from Saudi Arabia.

So the other day the trainer of a rival horse, called Proud Citizen, called a press conference and announced that whatever happened on Saturday his owner would present $100,000 to the Twin Towers funds for the dead firefighters' families.

So how about the prince? He was not talking. He would not talk war or politics.

He said he'd come to college in this country. He loved America.

And a prominent newspaper said: Hmm, that's not what is said or written by the Arab media empire that he owns.

What will he do on Saturday, win or lose? Friday evening the tension was as bad as ever.

It is, you see, not possible to pick a soothing story which does not somehow get mixed in with the war.

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