While my sister attends grad school at one of Ohio’s largest universities, she’ll be working there. She had to fill out a lot of paperwork and shared with me a form provided her by the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Division of Homeland Security.

The gist of this form is: are you a terrorist? If so, check the “Yes” box. If not, check “No.” There is no “Maybe” box but a handy three-and-a-half-page single-spaced addendum lists 133 organizations designated as terrorist by the U.S. Departments of State and Treasury.

Dana wonders if she wasn’t singled out with this form because she lived for a few years in Ireland, home to listed associations such as the Continuity Irish Republican Army, as well as the Real Irish Republican Army, which has better biscuits at its tea socials.

I have the same question as you: if one is a terrorist, why would one admit it to the state? But maybe the form is working. The ACLU noted today that there are now one million names on the nation’s watch list of individual terrorists, including “[m]embers of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters.’”

Andie left me an urgent voicemail at work early this morning, then gave me a follow-up call, to relate two distressing developments in her commute today.

First, a bum took a crap on her in-motion downtown 1 train, causing all passengers in a 15-foot radius to surge to the far end of the car and cling together like the final passengers alive aboard the Titanic.

Then, upon arriving to her gym prior to work, she came across a guy who had died while working out. Paramedics on the scene continued unsuccessfully to resuscitate him.

I believe the pooping was more traumatic because death doesn’t smell as bad, at least not initially.

I got nothing for today, so I thought I’d lazily link to this post on Boing Boing that is a reminiscence of some of Sesame Street’s creepiest moments. Ah, the memories.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times (“Where Little Is Left Outside the Camera’s Eye” by Mark Landler) asserted that since the Ring of Steel, developed in response to IRA bombings of the early ’90s, video surveillance has become widely accepted in Britain, “viewed as a fact of life rather than an Orwellian intrusion.” With an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras in the country, a Londoner can be caught on tape hundreds of times a day, the article claims.

Then, in the paper today, a story (“New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown” by Cara Buckley) reported that by the end of this year, more than 100 cameras will have started monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, “the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.”

If [the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative] is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

That staff is a key difference; there are already about 250 cameras placed in high-crime areas of New York City, but that video must be downloaded; the cameras of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative would transmit live video instantly.

Will the city approve and follow-through on this or will it end up the meaningless bleating of politicians aroused, like (apparently) that massive subway station camera campaign (strangely mentioned by neither Landler nor Buckley) that the city announced in response to the London Tube bombings of July 7, 2005?

And even if such a system were to be approved, could there ever be enough staff to track potentially thousands of live feeds? Cameras like these are really useful only in helping sift through ashes, at least until technology gets much more adept at real-time detection of “suspicious behavior,” whatever that might constitute in New York City. The cameras of London, for instance, prevented neither the Tube bombings nor the attempted car bombings last month, though they were useful in detecting suspects in the aftermath.

I can’t be certain but I think I dreamed about that brain implant-controlled monkey that feeds itself with a robotic arm, only instead of the monkey secured in a plastic box, it was the freshly shorn and tattooed head of Britney Spears, feeding itself bananas. Do you suppose this means anything?

After work today, I was totally in the groove to get my taxes done nice and early. I had all the paperwork spread out on my new table, instruction manuals open, pencil at the ready. And then I noticed that according to my W2, I only made a few thousand dollars last year. Now, I don’t make a lot of money, but I had a suspicion I made slightly more than that. Turns out that when our company was acquired last year, we were issued another W2 for the money accrued under our new corporate moniker, a W2 I either misplaced or was never issued. Damn. So much for that.

Looks like New York got punk’d by Iraq on the whole subway-specific terror threat on Friday, according to news from CNN this afternoon (“Sources: Tip on N.Y. Subway Threat a Hoax,” by Kelli Arena):

Information that led to heightened security for the New York City transit system was a hoax, government sources said Tuesday.

The sources said an informant in Iraq who provided the tip had told investigators about a terrorist plot involving New York’s subway system. That informant admitted he gave false information, the sources said.

I suppose Iraq is entitled to give us some good-natured ribbing of this sort, especially so close to the tricks and treats of Halloween, and we did kind of start it with that whole invade-their-country thing.

But might I suggest Los Angeles get picked on next time? Look, they’re a huge, all-American city rife with landmarks and symbolism, and populated by infidels and smug twats, just like New York, only with tans and better teeth. How about some terror over there next time? We could all use a rest here.

For the first time, according to media reports, terrorists have directly targeted New York City’s subway system with threats of a bombing, possibly one modeled on those that took place in London this summer. Here’s a summary from an article in today’s Times (“New York Named in Terror Threat Against Subways,” by William K. Rashbaum):

Information about the threat, the officials said, came to light last weekend from an intelligence source who told federal authorities that the three men in Iraq had planned to meet with other operatives in New York.

One official said the group would number about a dozen. Another official said the total was closer to 20 people involved. The men planned to use strollers, briefcases and packages to hide a number of bombs that they planned to detonate on the subways.

“It was a conspiracy involving more than a dozen people aimed at delivering a number of devices into the subway,” one of the officials said.

The attack could happen as early as today or later this month, the officials added. Mayor Bloomberg announced at a press conference yesterday that he was immediately stepping up security, including the random bag searches implemented in July, and told New Yorkers to keep on straphangin’ but to be watchful for any suspicious activity. “If you see something, say something,” he repeated.

On the other hand, Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, labeled the threat “specific but noncredible” and said there are no plans to alter the threat level either in New York or the nation. The Los Angeles Times even quoted him today as having said, “The intelligence community has concluded this intelligence is of doubtful credibility.” What? Let’s get on the same page, politicos. Now I’m left to wonder if Bloomie’s announcement wasn’t at least in part politically motivated, kind of like our current presidential administration’s shenanigans with the national, color-coded terror alert system.

Lunchtime Update: Oh, great, a bomb scare at Penn Station. According to AFX News, law enforcement officials in biohazard suits, National Guard troops and police with bomb-sniffing dogs were called in this morning to investigate a suspicious substance that had been reported in a soft-drink can near an Amtrak ticketing area. It turned out to be a Drano-like liquid: a false alarm. I also just read that Bloomberg made a show of taking the subway to work this morning, in a gesture to reassure us commuters; hey, I got your gesture right here, buddy. Finally, police are now telling commuters here for the first time to refrain from bringing along backpacks, baby strollers, briefcases or bags, all of which could be used to hide explosives. I think I’ll sigh and walk home from work today.

I wonder how quickly Hollywood and the publishing industry started scrambling for movie and book deals about Katrina’s swath of destruction. My guess is instantly. My hope is that many of these profiteering parasites will die in the next great West Coast earthquake so I can write a screenplay about their welcome loss.

My cynicism continues with what I think is this story’s moral: Fuck with nature (levees, pumps, dams and living in a potential toilet bowl of a city) and nature wins in the end. Wonks have known exactly what would happen to New Orleans in the event of a huge storm like Katrina for at least five years now. “The fact that New Orleans has not already sunk is a matter of luck,” as Popular Mechanics’ Jim Wilson wrote in an eerily prescient article in 2001. Hasn’t living in New Orleans all this time been a game of Russian roulette?

Amid startling visions of thousands crammed into dark stadiums, the desperate clustered on roofs and in attics, the dead floating, I await and dread the total number saved, the total lost, both figures wild guesses at present. Issues of race arising in the floods’ aftermath have been most disturbing to me, from the depiction of black “looters” and white “finders” to the alleged email from a rescue worker claiming, “The poorest 20% [...] of the city was left behind to drown. [....] The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn’t be able to get out. The resources—meaning, the political will—weren’t there to get them out.”

I was catching up on all the local news that went down while I was away. As you might guess, the one that irritated me the most was the August 23 announcement that the city would saturate the subway system with “1,000 video cameras and 3,000 motion sensors.” To leaven the Big Brotherness of it all, they’re throwing the unwashed masses a bone: cellphone service in 277 underground stations (but not on the subway itself), to ease efforts in calling 911 in case of emergency. I guarantee you, legitimate calls to 911 will be 0.01% of the calls; the others will be people calling other people saying, “Oh, nothing. Waiting for the subway. Where you at?” and more-important-than-you people in suits that start trembling like crack addicts without their little hands-free call device.

But at the center of the effort

will be a dense network of cameras that can zoom, pivot and rotate, all while transmitting and recording images of sensitive areas, from dark tunnels under the East River to bustling subway platforms in Midtown. Each camera will capture distances up to 300 feet and will cost about $1,200. A selected location could have 2 to 30 cameras.

The cameras, supplied by military-favored corporation Lockheed Martin, are “intelligent video” systems in that they’re operated by software that can differentiate between moving people on a subway platform and a “suspicious” stationary object, like an unattended suitcase or a bag lady, sending off an alert to police. I think the best we can hope for from any camera system isn’t preventative, but to get some smudgy color photos of the infidels who just killed themselves and a bunch of subway passengers, like in the London bombings.

In reference to the exciting subway bag searches, some cheeky fellow defaced this NYPD recruitment poster at the 49^th Street station for uptown N and R trains by penning “You too can be a subway bag checker!” Not quite visible in my photo, someone added underneath, “The 4^th Amendment is not really that important. Get over it!”

As might have been expected, today the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the city over its new practice of searching the bags of subway passengers, despite reports that the public doesn’t seem to be resisting.

ACLU: Fourth Amendment rights violation and “unlikely to have any meaningful deterrent effect on terrorist activity”!

NYC: The searches meet all legal requirements, preserving “the important balance between protecting our city and preserving individual rights”!

Who will win? Stay tuned.

P.S. Amusing New York-vs.-the-rest-of-the-world bit about the searches in the “Letters of the Week” section of this week’s Village Voice:

Editor’s note: Chisun Lee’s article about Tony Lu, an immigrant rights activist who designed T-shirts declaring his objection to the new random bag search policy in New York’s transit systems [“NYers to NYPD: ‘I Do Not Consent to Being Searched,’ ” July 21, villagevoice.com], received an extraordinary response from readers. Nearly all disagreed with Lu’s protest, many were angry, and some voiced their opinions in the most extreme terms. At deadline, the Voice had not received a letter from a New Yorker.

A front-page story by Patrick McGeehan in today’s New York Times Metro Section says it all in its title: “A Week of Random Backpack Searches Yields Little Drama.” The past week has resulted in several thousand searches of the bags of passengers in more than 400 subway stations. Results? According to police and transit officials, one arrest for possession of illegal fireworks, no legal challenges (yet) and “minimal resistance,” despite the fact the NYDS is not tracking how many people decline to submit to a search. The Port Authority Police Department, which oversees the PATH trains, did keep track and of the 8,010 briefcases, backpacks and purses searched (without any arrests), only five people refused and walked away without incident.

Running “late” at 8:20 this morning (I’m usually at least an hour behind that time), I entered my usual subway stop at W. 86^th Street and Broadway and experienced my first random bag search checkpoint.

Although by “experienced” I mean I saw it and kept moving through the turnstiles. It was manned by four uniformed cops, silently standing around and looking mischievously bored, as only the NYPD can look. (Or maybe they were counting in their heads 1...2...3... because they had to stop every fifth or tenth person for a search. I wasn’t going to hang around to watch or ask them as I wasn’t in the mood for a brisk bag-riffling.) One of the guys was holding a megaphone. They also had a semi-professional sign made with blue vinyl press-type letters and temporarily tied at eye-level to the back of the exit gate. It read: “Backpacks And Other Containers Subject To Inspection.” I imagined that the cops themselves made the sign and that their commanding officer had awarded them each with a gift certificate for a free 99-cent menu item at Wendy’s for their expeditious and top-rate craftsmanship.

Four cops seemed intensive for my lowly station, which has no connections and only one line passing through it. On the other hand, it’s on a direct route to both Times Square and Penn Station, which probably accounts for its selection. You could see why it could be the choice of subway suicide bombers as an entrance point: it’s far enough from those big stations to be out of the limelight, but not so far that you nod off on your train on the way there. Plus, we have a quiet, accommodating neighborhood. It’d be a perfect place for the potential bombers to kick back before the big fatwa Downtown. They’d be able to find a great parking spot off West End Avenue, maybe pick up a Snapple at Gristedes.

The 86^th Street station actually has two entrances—the main one consists of a block of four separate stairway entrances, covering the uptown and downtown trains. Then there’s a lesser-known mini-entrance at Broadway and W. 87th Street that’s only open for downtown trains during the morning rush hour. I noticed that entrance wasn’t covered by the cops at all.

This guy on the subway this afternoon seemed a little suspicious to me. Maybe he’s a terrorist. Aren’t terrorists often religious zealots?

At the very least, those two exclamation points are terrorizing me.

After yesterday’s post about terrorist-spotting, I didn’t think I’d read anything more surreal about the NYPD’s training. Then I read a front-page article by Ellen Byron in today’s Wall Street Journal that the force is bringing groups of newly promoted officers to the Frick to examine paintings in order to improve their observational and analytical skills.

Although the course began last year, presumably it will be useful for spotting terror suspects on public transportation, a keen concern of cops these days. Specifically, it seems to be aiding the NYPD in its profiling efforts of suspicious-looking Middle Eastern men¹.

Standing in front of El Greco’s “The Purification of the Temple,” David Grossi, an NYPD captain, recognized Jesus as the painting’s central figure, characterized the scene as chaotic and explained the work’s use of light and color.

“The gang unit would probably be called in,” he continued. “It appears there’s grand larceny here, felony assault there, and Jesus would probably be charged with inciting a riot.” Counting 17 people in the scene, he added: “Good thing there are plenty of witnesses.”

¹ Although Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that the massive, heavily armed police response to reports of five Middle Eastern men with backpacks aboard a NYC tour bus on Sunday was the fault of the bus company’s report, not the NYPD. The men didn’t have backpacks and were Sikhs from Britain on vacation. Nonetheless, Bloomie encouraged the public to continue reporting “suspicious activity.” [back]

I’m sure Letterman has already gotten plenty of mileage out of this one, so I’ll just flat-out report it.

According to an Associated Press story, in light of the London attacks, the NYPD issued a memo late last week to its officers on what sorts of suspicious behavior to look for on NYC subways, trains and busses. Commuters are also being urged to be vigilant about reporting any signs of trouble. Here’s what to look for among your fellow passengers:

• clenched fists. “In past attacks, suicide bombers have used explosives that require them to maintain pressure on hand-held triggering devices until detonation, police said.”
• nervous feeling under or patting down of his or her clothes.
• excessive use of cologne. It could be a sign of someone trying to mask the scent of explosives.
• profuse sweating.
• avoidance of eye contact.
• mumbling or chanting.
• wearing clothes unsuitable for the temperature, such as a coat in summer.

In 1967, more than 60 acres of buildings were demolished in Lower Manhattan to make way for redevelopments including the World Trade Center, a process documented in photos by Danny Lyon now on exhibit.

I walked over to the Museum of the City of New York this afternoon and checked it out. I’d never been to this museum before and after having been to the park and the dog run named after him, it seemed serendipitous that there should be a larger-than-life statue of DeWitt Clinton standing outside, rebuking me stiffly for poking fun at him.

It’s one of those museums that used to be an old house, handsomely built of red brick, renovated and well-kept, with pleasantly creaky floors. On my way to it, a few blocks south, I walked past the Guggenheim and noticed it was swarming with summer tourists, so I feared equally dense crowds at the city museum. But the there were only a handful of elderly patrons that looked as if they could die at any moment and become part of an exhibit.

The museum’s motto is a quote by Abraham Lincoln that begins, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives,” a stark contrast to the Lyon exhibit. I don’t know what was in the water in New York City in the ’60s, but I don’t want any of it. In addition to the vast swaths of chiefly 19th century buildings leveled below Canal Street, you’ll recall from a recent entry that the elegantly original Penn Station was razed in 1963.

I imagine many of these buildings were beyond repair and had to go. Others, Lyons suggests, were architecturally and historically significant, torn down at a terrible loss. For instance, at 258 Washington St., on the northeast corner of Murray Street, was the first cast-iron building erected in New York (1848) and possibly the oldest cast-iron building in the world. It was demolished.

Lyon risked limb by sneaking into structurally unsound buildings to photograph their interiors, surprised that some still seemed to have people living in them or people who had been recently evicted. His photos document empty Coke bottles in a kitchen, a child’s bedroom containing deflated balloons and an artist’s loft with some sketches strewn on the floor. He photographed the foremen and their crews, too, known as “house wreckers,” looking weary but determined.

The exhibit’s title, which Lyon chose in the ’60s, is the eerily prescient The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, and the exhibit hints at the irony that a grand neighborhood was destroyed to build the Twin Towers. For me, the exhibit illustrated the line between preservation and renewal. The photos, posted mostly without commentary, seem to speak obliquely against renewal. (Lyon is more direct in his convictions, claiming in a recent interview with The Village Voice that the U.S. is committing “architectural suicide” through renewal.) But renewal seems to be an unstoppable fact of New York as a whole and Lower Manhattan in particular. One fact I learned from the exhibit, for example, is that West, Greenwich and Washington Streets are all built on garbage. They became streets when they were surveyed as such in 1723. Prior to that, they were all underwater.

In a sudden development announced only today, starting tomorrow morning, the NYPD will begin randomly searching the bags of people riding the city’s subways, trains and buses.

Since 9/11, New York has instituted bag checks at museums and sporting events, and the police have sporadically checked bags during large public assemblies, like the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. But according to The New York Times, the police have never previously extended such searches to mass transit passengers, “even after a firebombing on a subway station in Lower Manhattan in 1994, a deadly sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995 and a foiled plot to bomb the subway in Brooklyn in 1997.”

So the London bombings inspired this announcement, right? Well, officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told the Times that “internal discussions about random checks had been going on for several weeks—before the bombings of subway trains and buses in London on July 7 and again today.”

Yeah, O.K. By “internal discussions,” I think they meant two junior MTA employees talking about it for 15 seconds at the urinals, after which they launched into a spirited debate over the merits of Being Bobby Brown.

Random searches! Remember when the Transportation Security Administration adopted those and a day couldn’t pass without some hack writing a snide little column about how he personally saw some 85-year-old grandmother being given a patdown at the airport? I can’t wait for those. But New York is historically more fond of racism than ageism, with officials pre-emptively whispering assurances that they will “take pains to avoid racial and ethnic profiling.” They’ll also have to counter the ACLU, which is denouncing the searches and shrieking about a little thing called the Fourth Amendment.

So how random are we talking about here? How big will the sample size be? As I mentioned on Tuesday, Penn Station alone hosts 500,000 commuters a day. I’m too lazy to look up how many people take public transportation throughout the entire city daily, but rest assured it is A Very Big Number. What, will the cops stop anyone with a big bag? Every fifth person no matter what? Form a nice, New York-style slow-moving line? It seems no matter which course is taken, folks will be inconvenienced.

The last thing we need is soul-crushing lines in the subway stations, particularly now, when they’re all hot enough to brown a roast. (Although the terrorists might like it because then instead of bombing the trains, they can bomb the stations, filled with long lines of people waiting to be searched.) I mean, look how inefficient and useless the lines are at the airports now, and recall that they’ve been at that idiot semblance of security for what, almost four years now. I think if you instituted two lines at the airports, one for the usual TSA gauntlet and another year 2000-style line billed as “Skip Security and Take Your Chances with Terror! Proceed Directly to your Plane after Check-In,” they would have to leap out of the way to avoid being trampled by the rush of people.

We’ll see. As the searches unfold here starting tomorrow, there’ll be more details; I’ll keep y’all posted.

July 22 Update:

• According to the MTA, New York’s subway system, which is the prime target of the random searches, is the largest in the U.S., carrying about 4.5 million passengers on an average weekday.
• No delay for me on the subway this morning. I didn’t even see any searches, but then, I rise and leave for work early, before the crowds and the potential terror.
• Still no details on the frequency, location and duration of the searches.
• However, they actually started on a small scale yesterday, July 21. At Union Station, a reporter observed officers stopping five men over a 15-minute period during afternoon rush hour. “In each instance, the officers peered briefly into their bags, then waved them through.”
• If the cops find non bomb-related arrestable offences in your bag (drugs or such), they can arrest you, even though that’s not what they were searching you for.
• They’re sidestepping that legal snare by saying the searches are conducted with your consent, in the sense that if you enter a subway station and see cops searching bags, you’re allowed to leave without being searched or pursued.
• Great quote from Mayor Bloomberg: “We don’t plan to stop people on the streets. We probably don’t have the legal right to do that.”

It’s monumentally tacky, but the first thing I thought of when I heard about the London public transportation attacks on Thursday was Sliding Doors. In the film, there are two concurrently running and radically different storylines: one in which Gwyneth Paltrow’s character catches her train in the London Tube and another in which her train’s doors close before she can get on.

This probably wasn’t too far from the truth for an untold number of people, and for one specifically that The New York Times reported about on July 9:

Paul Dadge overslept. That meant he reached the subway late, boarded a train at King’s Cross late, and ended up two trains behind—instead of possibly inside—the one ripped apart by a bomb deep in the tunnel outside the Edgware Road station at 9:17 a.m.

New Yorkers were reminded of the bombings whether they wanted to be or not. The day after the London attacks, the NYC public transit system was put on “high alert,” which meant a temporarily increased presence of uniformed cops wandering around the stations and subways. I found out later that the city had literally assigned one officer to every train in the city during rush hour, amounting to thousands of police officers, state troopers and National Guard members, standing around looking bored or vaguely menacing.

Having a uniform on every train is a weak semblance of security, and something that can’t and won’t practically continue, but really, as I suggested last month, there is no protection against terrorism. That’s why it’s terrorism. It seems kind of obvious to state but the AFP ran a story on the topic on Friday:

With millions of people converging daily on the subways of the world’s major cities, analysts say it’s nearly impossible to stop determined assailants carrying out attacks like those seen in London.

Militants have targeted public transport as a relatively easy way to sow terror in urban populations, which often have little choice but to use trains that are dangerously exposed to attack.

It went on to mention that the Tokyo subway system, which is the world’s largest and which has had tight security since the 1995 sarin gas attacks, is taking the additional step of removing most of the few trash cans still remaining in its stations. Authorities will also pay closer attention to passengers’ baggage but admit there is no foolproof security. Even hand-checking every rider’s baggage wouldn’t work as there other options for bomb placements including restrooms, trash cans and public areas.

9/11 was a blockbuster of an attack, but looking at the bigger picture, the events in Tokyo, Madrid and now London suggest that terror attacks in general have evolved to be quick-and-dirty, nearer the ground and hitting closer to home for many in the world’s largest cities.

“We always knew there was going to be an explosion in London,” said Dadge, the Brit who overslept. “It’s a question of when, not if. It’s pure coincidence that I was there then.”

A year ago this weekend, I stood several stories beneath the streets of lower Manhattan, in an enormous pit where the World Trade Center once stood, as the cornerstone was lowered for the building that would take its place, the Freedom Tower. It was hot and sunny and before the ceremony began, there were restless children playing and scampering around on the hard-packed dirt floor. I tried but failed to grasp the fact that some 2,700 people had died on the spot.

Today, city officials unveiled the revised plans for the Freedom Tower. The original design, distinctive in its architecture, was rejected last month because of its vulnerability to attack. News stories this afternoon reported that the new version of the skyscraper will be “straighter and more conventional,” set further back from the street and set atop a three-foot-thick concrete and metal base designed specifically to repel a truck bomb attack.

In February 1993, a truck bomb went off in a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Six people died and more than a thousand were injured. In hindsight, The 9/11 Commission Report noted, “although the bombing heightened awareness of a new terrorist danger” in the U.S., there remained a “widespread underestimation of the threat.”

I have two opposing thoughts. One is that we are resistant to change only until catastrophe of a certain magnitude. We live under a comfortable assumption of safety and well-being that’s nearly unshakeable. When destruction does occur, our memories of it are short.

My other thought seems supremely cynical but I believe it to be true. It was rekindled during Bush’s re-election campaign when he pledged to keep Americans safe from terror. No, he can’t. And no one can. It’s impossible to foresee; the methods and means and targets and the number of countries and groups in the world that aren’t so keen on America are far too great a number to possibly patrol.

That three-foot-thick base will look impressive and while we’re admiring it, someone somewhere will be cooking up some plans involving dirty bombs or biohazards or planes again or public transportation.

After I moved to New York, the book I wished I hadn’t read, particularly as I rode the subway to work every weekday, was Underground, novelist Haruki Murakami’s oral history of the sarin gassing in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. A dozen people died and thousands were injured. It was surprisingly easy to enact and there isn’t anything practical we could do to prevent something similar from happening here.

What to do? Press on. I’ll take the easy way out of the corner I’ve painted myself into by quoting from a story I’ve mentioned here before—Gene Weingarten’s exceptional Washington Post article from last summer, “Fear Itself: Learning to Live in the Age of Terrorism.”

You are not afraid of terrorism, really. You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured. You feel no special tension when you place your seat tray in the upright position. You are old enough to have lived through other supposedly apocalyptic times, or you've surely heard about them—most famously, the silly spectacle of 1950s-era schoolkids giggling under their desks in anticipation of The Big One.

The recent warnings about terrorism during the election campaign have ratcheted up your concerns a little, but so what? You are going on with your life not as an act of defiance so much as a celebration of rationality. You will be fine.

For the magazine, I went down into the World Trade Pit this morning to cover the placing of the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower, the first building to rise on Ground Zero.

After their speeches, New York Mayor Bloomberg, New York Governor Pataki and New Jersey Governor McGreevey removed the velvet veil from the slab, which a crane then hoisted into a shallow hole. Out of context, the cornerstone resembles a headstone — a 20-ton headstone, but a headstone nonetheless.

Although conerstone-settings/groundbreakings traditionally signal the beginning of construction, they’re not getting down to business on the Freedom Tower until later this year or early 2005, and steel won’t go up until 2006.

But when it’s done in late 2008 or early 2009, it’ll be the tallest building in the world, at 1,776 feet and boast 2.6 million square feet of office space on 72 floors.

Maybe I would have felt differently about the event if I had been one of the several hundred there who lost a family member on September 11, but there wasn’t a single sentence spoken by the politicos there that didn’t contain a fatty slathering of patriotic hyperbole. It is annoying to try to report on an event where all the politicians are saying is “honor” and “freedom” and other such wispy nouns that send speechwriters into orgasmic shivers. More matter, less art, please.

Also, it was really hot in that pit, which didn’t help my mood any; nor did jostling with the dozens of other mediafolk that turned out for the event, although I do have plenty of photos of the backs of their swiftly darting heads to remember them by. I'm told there would have been even more media at the event had there not been the other big newsworthy story of the day to cover in Manhattan.

But when all is said and done, I can rest assured that someone, somewhere out there will likely pay good money for my special event press pass, should I opt to sell it on eBay.

God bless America!

Postscript: There's an interesting article about the cornerstone’s typeface over at Design Observer.