GROUND ZERO GENESIS -- THE SWAN SONG TANDEM

(Author's note: This was written late in 2001. After the towers ... and before the war. Unfortunately, it still reads well. ---BES)

No, I’ve not deliberately not written about the events of September 11th.

I’ve just been busy waiting.

Waiting for the thesaurus to be bled dry by the unending commentary.

Comes a time when all the possible adjectives have hyperbolized all the possible nouns, when no description suffices to address the depth of our passions provoked, and when language itself seems at once a frivolous and redundant interloper:

Unspeakable horror ... insufferable tragedy ... horrific assault ... despicable act....”

Ultimately, there simply are no words big or small enough to fully define how any of us feel when we suddenly find ourselves in the smoking ruins:

GROUND ZERO” --- Absolutely at once the most horrific and mesmerizing mix of sights, sounds and smells I’ve ever encountered. Gently milling crowds speaking in hushed tones. Faces filled with wonder and resolute sadness. A teary-eyed old woman attempting to poke her camera lens through the one torn hole in a draped barricade. Street vendors hawking NYPD/FD caps & shirts from card tabled displays.

Cops & Firefighters shoulder-to-shoulder on makeshift benches eating lunches served from mobile kitchens. Water cannons tamping down the unending rubble-dust. Dangling girders and collateral implosion damage of adjacent buildings. The pervasive, inescapable, acrid odors of post-calamitous human loss and pulverized construction debris.

The trappings of tragedy, and the springboards of mortal purpose.

And, rising from it all, the near-miraculous automation of a mending wound.

Moralists will blame the day on social decay and the disintegration of the American ménage. Extreme moralists will cite prophetic fables and say we’ve inherited our own wind, blaming God for blaming us. Scientists will fault poets, poets will wax on wane-sellers, diplomats will read and believe the half-truths they themselves doled out to half-lying journalists, and insurance underwriters will start partially including toppling building riders in their whole life policies.

From the moments of impacts, the best and worst of us shone through, from self-sacrifice to self-absorption. Even as the rescuing innocents were still throwing themselves in harm’s way, even in the very midst of the still untold and unfolding butchery, our own television networks began ratings wars:

America In Terror.”

Terrorism In America.”

Sight and sound bites replete with splashy collages of scrolling transparencies and thematic boom-bang tragi-tunes:

No one covers carnage better’n FOX.

Stay tuned. NBC/ABC/CBS will have the first dramatic interviews with the lucky ones who got out.

More after the break....

For the moment, I was out of a job. I waited. That’s what humor columnists do. We wait for the rhetoric to ripen and the superlatives to soften, then coin a new language for a new currency:

Tandemnation.

As fellow worlders, we’ve all now been officially placed one behind and/or one ahead of each other.

Yes, we’re all now galvanized in a call-to-arms, united in our stands, falling out of our divisions, and adding up the number of ways and means we can subtract hell outa the other guys. From my soapbox, however, I still see us as I always have: evolutionary tandemers in the journey o’ life, traveling together separately on stormy seas toward unmapped destinations, the same ship with complementary riggings, but now launched into a new world of spotlit and sanctified severance.

Unfortunately, whenever and however we respond in kind, it will do nothing to defuse the zealotry of those for whom indiscriminate killing is a ticket to heaven. The stage was set long ago, and the crew and cast is die.

But, as the deeds of that day have dastardized the human animal and encoded all its depraved capabilities into passwords, so have they bespoken its countersigns.

Yes, we have entered here, but we will not abandon hope. Sure, we’ve been in the belly of the beast, but we’ve also heard the caged bird sing. No question, we’ve long-spoon supped with the Devil, but we’ve also cast bread upon the waters.

Swan song tandemnation. Bring someone you love. I recommend this method, especially now, when all our pedals to the mettles seem like rudderless counterpoints.

Yes, dear dedicated readers: let’s put on our sailing shoes, alternately positioning ourselves one ahead and one behind, and do our best to navigate the groundswells of change, with and for each other.

Eyes on the horizon, sea to shining see.

Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.