Fear and Clothing in New York

NEW YORK—Three, two, one. Just like that, I’m throwing off the towel around my waist and running into broad daylight, my hands thrown high up in the air as I whoop at the top of my lungs. At least that’s what’s going on in my mind. In reality, I’m stepping off Tillary Street and onto the Brooklyn Bridge ramp for a leisurely stroll to Manhattan. The jaunt assumes a level of intensity the people around me don’t share because not everyone believes—as I do deep in my gut—that one or more of New York’s suspension bridges will be the next target of the forces of terror the nation finds itself battling. Consequently, this midday walk—on July 5th, no less, during one of the government’s vague terror warnings—seems almost stupidly risky. It’s like streaking through midtown naked. Cheap thrills in New York.

I’ve had arguments with fellow New Yorkers about just how afraid folks should be of new terror attacks, rollicking debates that inevitably veer into territory totally foreign to us (although we never want to acknowledge that, lest we lose the argument). We take soundbites from 60 Minutes, the New York Times Magazine—hell, Dateline NBC—and toss them around with a seeming familiarity more appropriate to third-grade history. It’s not that hard to sneak a nuclear bomb into Newark, we say. Sure it is, they’ve been improving port security ever since Sept. 11. All right, fine, well, how hard would it be for me to load a van up with fertilizer and set it off halfway across the bridge? We banter with the same armchair quarterback’s sense of authority and expertise that we later apply to more traditional questions, like “Which Major Leaguers Are On Steroids,” “What Happens In The Next Season of the Sopranos” and “Which Celebrity Breasts Are Real?”

We find ourselves more inclined to envision potential terrorist scenarios we know nothing about because we have been asked by government officials to be more alert. Being more alert entails being more imaginative—after all, who saw crashing two planes into the Twin Towers as a legitimate terrorist option before last year? Eyes and ears become open to a host of horrific but suddenly and agonizingly plausible scenarios. In our eyes, trash receptacles become potential hiding places for sarin gas canisters. Mid-sized office buildings, no matter their unimportance, become potential targets for al Qaeda and require increased security. Tunnels become potential tombs. Nikes and Rockport wingtips become potential vessels for plastic explosive putty in the eyes of security guards who, given the obvious and proven dangers of laxness, are trained to view the next Richard Reid as just as likely as the next benign case of athlete’s foot.

The airline checks—both for sharp objects and non-kosher footwear—suggest the real nature of the times. President Bush and others have noted that this is hardly a war in the traditional sense, with a clearly definable enemy. But the uniqueness of the present situation goes further than that. The war on terror is nothing new as a war against America’s enemies or against an abstract “evil.” America has had enemies for well over 200 years now. Evil has been around a lot longer than that. What makes the new opponent so uniquely puzzling and intimidating is that it is a concept. We are fighting a war against creativity. Evil has become more imaginative, and we have consequently become more imaginative in our dread.

This is what I think about as I cross the Brooklyn Bridge and stare at Lower Manhattan. I wonder how much it would take to truly foolproof the structure I’m standing on—what it would take to search every car, to reinforce every beam and cable, to install the necessary guns atop each tower. And still, even in this wildly hypothetical case, the new foe, evil’s newfound creativity, would continue to find ways around the latest roadblocks. There is a risk, a vulnerability simply in existing.

At the moment, New York doesn’t seem to worry that much about its nakedness—perhaps it can’t afford to in a way that would really be worth the anguish. The only stitch of clothing I see are the two men in camouflage fatigues who are walking in the opposite direction. Maybe they aren’t even real soldiers, or maybe they’re off duty—they seem very relaxed. One of them warns me to look out—I have wandered into the bike lane, and a Bianchi is about to slam into me. I jump out of the way and thank the men. There they go, the real heroes, at it again.

And real heroes are at it around me, too. They jog and bike past me, either oblivious to or in spite of the incredibly welcoming target the bridge would present to any number of potential terrorists. They don’t go crazy and entertain the thought of shutting down the pedestrian walk and putting guns on the bridge’s towers, even thought it may very well prevent the unknown next disaster, what The Onion has cleverly dubbed “the July 19 attacks.” Either deliberately or as an instinctive form of mental self-defense, they have refused to become obsessed by their own vulnerability. It makes sense. I’ve always thought that, after the first few minutes, conversations at nudist camps eventually have to go somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, we’re naked, already. Let’s move on.

Martin S. Bell ’03 is an associate sports chair of The Crimson. Sensing that an internship with the Al-Jazeera television network would be ill-advised this year, the Winthrop House government concentrator snagged a summer gig with Sports Illustrated in the Greatest City in the World.