A fair amount of rubble must needs carrying out,
I guess, and so the brooklyn bridge has been
taking quite a beating of late,
I mean, one of those big sixteen wheelers comes thundering
over the spans, and wham ! hits that lip, whatever it
is.. booom ! off it goes. Would wake anybody,
I tell you.
Not that i have a problem with the taking out.
I mean, real estate - you know. But at a
certain point you have to ask; How far
down do you have to go before
this becomes a mausoleum ?
Missing, presumed dead. All that jazz.
The way i see it, this wasn't an attack on America.
This was attack on western civilisation. Not that
I mean to impune anything about the eastern kind,
of course. We are all in this together.
I mean we have to know who did it, but at the same
we don't. you know ? I mean maybe this is just
me, and I guess a lot of americans just wouldn't understand.
But, New York, for me, was always much more than
just a part of america. NYC has always felt
like the capital of our civilisation, the economic
and cultural capital of our world.
And thats why i say feel like there is only way to respond
to such an attack, and that is in a *civilised* way.
Mostly the people didn't run. We had sandwiches, we
carried our umbrellas with us over the bridge.
Let the barbarians come into Byzantium, let them sit in our throne, will we care?
During the war, the last one, Kosovo, I watched those so called
'planes' taking off from the Aviano air force base in Italy
- "molten lumps of pure black and heavy evil thundering into
the sky" would be more like it.
Every two minutes another two would tear into the sky,
the screams of their vortexing, tearing afterburners
screaming up into the darkest places of the sky.
Every two minutes exactly, another two, with
screams like the riders of nazgul.
But the strangest, the most *important* thing is that in
Aviano itself, the milkman was still doing his rounds.
We talked calmly with two 'FireMen' at the end of the
runway. Soon enough they were picked up in a broken
down bambina and taken out for pizza. You could pop
out for coffee.
And yet, at the *other* end of this, at the receiving end,
thousands were dying - army, civilians, terrorists... people.
The way i see it, there is only one way we can respond to
this sort of attack, and that is with dignity, with respect
for our fellow human beings, with civilisation.
In fact i would like to suggest that they take the whole area
bodily up, in one carefully preserved piece, and lay it out it
in a nice park. Somewhere upstate perhaps, where it can lie
forever, as our precious broken stone, a place for our bones.
It could be somewhere for us *all* to go and grieve, when our,
and *their* time for grieving finally comes.
