Expressing the Unthinkable

As Americans watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse, again and again, new images perhaps as terrifying and powerful as any in U.S. history imprinted themselves on the nation’s consciousness.

Like emergency workers sifting through rubble for survivors, the country began searching through history, memory and metaphor in an attempt to interpret and cope with Tuesday’s horrifying events. Some people spoke solemnly of Pearl Harbor. Others invoked the Cuban missile crisis or reached further back through history to the burning of the White House in 1814.

This is a moment, said historian Simon Schama, when Americans must face vulnerability in a way they never have before. The bombing of Pearl Harbor, for all its massive import, was not an attack on the country’s mainland, much less on its political and cultural centers. Tuesday’s attacks strip away the United States’ centuries-long belief that it is not only invulnerable, but also impregnable.

“With the exception of Atlanta,” Schama said, “no American city knows what it’s like to be blitzed. I grew up in postwar London, played in the bombed-out rubble. And although I don’t know if that experience helps you cope with something like this, it does prepare you.”

“America has aged today,” he added. “This could be the moment when we have a bleaker but more realistic view of how we share the responsibilities and dangers of the world.”

In interviews Tuesday, historians, psychologists and writers groped for language capable of conveying the enormity of what had happened in New York and Washington and the long-term impact it would have on the nation’s psyche. The attacks, they said, probably would test and reshape the country’s identity, purpose and sense of resolve like no event in decades.

“In an odd way, this was an act of terrorism so great that it’s not even an act of terrorism; this is an act of war,” said Alan Wolfe, director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “War we can handle. War has rules.” But what is the nature of a war begun in such a way? Wolfe said he cannot imagine. “As a father of boys, my immediate reaction is, ‘Are they going to drafted?’ And then you think, ‘No, it’s not going to be a war like that. It’s going to require something else.’ ”

Tuesday’s events and their aftershocks, Wolfe said, will test a whole generation “that’s never experienced a recession or war, and it’s quite possible that we’ll have both.”

Yet the wars of the past may offer lessons for creating images of strength in crisis. For example, during the blitz, Schama said, the king and queen were told to evacuate the palace and refused, and the heartening effect that had on Londoners and, indeed, the Allies was incalculable. “The greatest message the president could send of defiance,” he said, “is to be seen in a New York hospital ward this evening. People need and want to see their leaders sharing their risks.”

They also need to see visual metaphors that counter the terrifying images looping across their television screens. Other images can and should be used to rally, to shore up our confidence, he said. “The fact that the Statue of Liberty still stands as she does should be made much of. The media should use it to show that much more remains than has been destroyed.”

California State Historian Kevin Starr said Tuesday’s attack struck directly, and intentionally, at key symbols of the American way of life. “The whole metaphor we have for our nation, our sense of who we are as a people, I don’t think will be the same after that,” he said. “This is globalization with a vengeance.”

Some struggled to articulate what, until Tuesday, was barely imaginable. “I have no words yet,” said Michael Chabon, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” which dealt explicitly with the devastating effects war has on individuals and society. “I’m still trying to come to grips with it. I keep wishing it weren’t true. It’s like I’m suffering from a personal tragedy; I keep wanting to get in bed and go to sleep and wake up again to find it’s just a dream.”

The tragedy is so enormous, he said, that he cannot think about it in terms of the lives lost or even the political implications. Instead he, like millions of Americans, remained in the first hours after the attacks transfixed by the image of impossible absence, of the ruins where once the World Trade Center stood.

“It was just so--I cannot find the right word,” he said, pausing a moment. “So horribly impressive. So calculated. I realized that either it is a lot easier to do such a thing or they’re incredibly more effective than we ever thought.”

The fact that the “they” remains ill-defined makes these events even harder to put into any context beyond that of metaphor and imagination. With no one to declare war against, said historian Schama, there is no one to focus one’s anger or fear on, and so the feeling of helplessness, which is the trademark of terrorism, is increased.

The correct emotional response to these attacks, said Gary Perlstein, professor of administration of justice at Portland State University, is fear, and fear is anathema to the American self-image. “Terrorism is not meant to win a war,” he said. “It is meant to communicate to us that we better be afraid--and I’m saying we better be afraid. But being afraid and being a coward are two different things. We need to be aware of the danger out there and prepare for it.”

The dangers, some predicted, could be many-faceted. When Chicagoan Ray Hanania heard the news that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center, a shiver ran up his back. “All I could think of was, ‘Please let it be an accident.’ ” As an outspoken Arab American journalist and the author of “I’m Glad I Look Like a Terrorist: Growing Up Arab in America,” Hanania said his reaction to the tragedy was twofold. He felt attacked as an American and also as an Arab American. “I’ve been sick all day,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. I just feel hopeless.”

When he met with members from 50 local Arab groups, he said, he was met with similar concern. “There is going to be a backlash,” he said. “We are all very scared. We know that people will want to strike out, but we need to remind them, and ourselves, that if we are Americans, this is an attack against us too.”

He has family in Jerusalem, he said, and in spite of some of the unnerving images of celebration there, Hanania believes that most people recognize these acts as insanity and condemn them. Those who do not do not understand what has really happened. “They are looking at the images [of the towers falling] like it was a video game,” he said. “When you’re living in a violent situation, where your life is endangered every day, you watch something like this on TV and it doesn’t seem real.”

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Times staff writers Mimi Avins, Martin Miller, Lisa Richardson and Mary Rourke contributed to this report.