After the Violence, a Nation on Edge

Doing what he thought was his part for America, a San Francisco man headed into the bay Friday in an inflatable motorboat. He maneuvered the craft under the path of jetliners descending into San Francisco International. And then he called the authorities on a cellular telephone.

“If I had a gun,” he told them, “I could bring down an airplane.”

At once takeoffs were aborted. Incoming flights were waved away. A detail of officers scrambled to the marina and detained the 52-year-old man, who was not named. Later, they let him go, conceding that his heart--if not his head--had been in the right place.

“It was a misguided, helpful citizen,” said airport Police Sgt. Larry Ratti, “trying to tell us we have problems with security.”

In a week of calamity, the motorboat affair was a trifling incident, but it illustrated the edginess of those who run the nation’s security apparatus and the new way Americans have begun to look at their common landscapes and reexamine their routines.

After the events of last week, for example, to take in the Los Angeles skyline on a Friday night from the rotating bar atop the Bonaventure Hotel was to see not high-rises, but a gleaming, glass-and-steel forest of potential targets. Eyes would train for maybe a tick or two longer on aircraft passing overhead, just long enough to calibrate the trajectory and reassure oneself the plane was on course.

Similarly, at ground level, unmarked vans parked at downtown curbsides drew double-takes. Shopping mall parking lots, unfenced reservoirs, subways and packed baseball parks and concert halls--the imagination yields no shortage of dark scenarios involving such common elements of any American cityscape.

“What I look at are the oil refineries,” Andrew Perederij, 42, was saying Friday from his booth at the Los Angeles County Fair. “If they struck one of those, it would be like a megabomb.”

Perederij was having a difficult day. While he worried about erupting refineries, those who passed by his booth were reminded of a different fear, one fed by revelations about the stateside aviation training the terrorists had received.

Perederij, you see, was at the fair to promote a private flying school. “Sign Up Today and Receive a $1,000.00 Scholarship,” beckoned one sign at his booth, which was situated in one of the many Fairplex buildings filled with vendors hawking products like mops that require no water and knives that need no sharpening.

“A lot of people have been scowling at me,” Perederij said. “They say, ‘Are you the ones training those terrorist pilots?’ I almost said, ‘What’s the point? Why not just pack up and go home?’ ”

Instead, the Long Beach man decided to hang tough. He planted an American flag on the table and began passing out red-white-and-blue pens decorated with stars and stripes.

Before Tuesday, the idea that flight schools might be sources of menace was not on the public radar. But many things were changed that day in this country. And if President Bush’s assertion is correct, if the nation indeed is headed into a long and unconventional conflict with terrorists, the changes to everyday American life have only begun. And they will not be limited to security precautions.

Entertainment will change. Already, shots of the World Trade Center are being edited from movies and video games. And given the horrid images that filled newscasts all week, it’s difficult to imagine much of an enduring market for escapist plots of the “Black Sunday” genre. The last time America was in a protracted war, the entertainment of choice ran less to simulated danger than to “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Laugh-In.”

Workaday routines will change. Business travelers who make the Los Angeles-San Francisco corridor the busiest in the nation have mastered the art of the last-minute airport arrival. It is considered practically amateurish to arrive any more than 20 minutes prior to takeoff. That practice, it would seem, is finished for the duration.

The legal fence work that protects personal freedoms will come under pressure. A Los Angeles Times poll taken late last week found overwhelming support for random police stops of those “who may fit the profile of suspected terrorists.” Half of those polled also said they would approve of giving the government “legal authority to read all private e-mails.”

“What little is left of the 4th Amendment,” said Jeffrey S. Weiner, former president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “will certainly be in jeopardy in light of these horrific events.”

The 4th Amendment protects people from unreasonable police searches.

Political discourse will change. As Patrick Caddell, White House pollster during the Carter administration, observed: “One of the things that has been very sad in this country is that politics, partly because the stakes have been so low, have become so cruel, vicious. I’m not talking about politicians but about ordinary people. If you are a conservative, then to the other side you must be ‘evil.’ If you are a Democrat, then to the Republicans you are without any redeeming moral qualities whatsoever.

“But,” he said, “when they targeted the towers and Pentagon, they were not targeting Democrats or Republicans--or, for that matter, blacks or whites or Catholics or Protestants or Jews. The crime was being American, being American and going to work. And at that point, it changed something about us. We are now all in this together.”

Homes will change. A cashier at Albertson’s supermarket in the Sunset District of San Francisco said Saturday that the checkout lines last week had been “surreal.” Everyone in the city, it seemed, was stocking up--not just on bottled water and flashlights, but on food and dinner items.

“People are eating in. I think they want to stay close to home.”

She did too. Her children, she said, were 19 and 21 years old. “They’re boys,” she said, but boys who are of draft age.

The modern American experience of war as television images shot back from distant lands--and we won’t be back ‘til it’s over, over there--might also be altered. And should terrorist attacks persist, sporadically turning home front into battleground, changes in daily life could be extensive.

Consider: Those who live in Israel accept security measures Americans might find startling. All autos are inspected when they arrive at the Jerusalem Mall. Purses and backpacks are searched at grocery store entrances. Private mail arrives sometimes with the envelope taped shut, evidence it has been read by government security officers.

A debate over how many such precautions the United States should adopt appears inevitable. Ruth Wedgwood, professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University, predicted there will be a round of political wrangling over the issue of monitoring e-mail.

“It’s very difficult to wiretap e-mails,” she said. “It’s not like tapping a phone line. You need to put a search engine into a server and search for certain key words, like ‘bomb’ or whatever, and there are a lot of civil liberties concerns because that sniffer sniffs everything.”

She also predicted there soon will be “air marshals on all but the very small flights.” And “a lot more checking at the border.” And “more checking in or reporting by foreign graduate students. More questioning of them--what courses they’re taking, what they’re majoring in.”

Other experts said they could imagine randomly established roadblocks, soldiers riding buses or standing guard at street corners, the issuance of national identification cards. Such measures, in turn, might alter the national psyche.

Bruce Hoffman, terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. in Washington, said that in places like Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka, “the first thing you notice is that people are afraid to go outside. They’re afraid to go to restaurants and discotheques. That’s what terrorists aim for; that sort of fear is emblematic of a collapse of confidence in government because governments are supposed to protect their citizens.

“And isolation breeds paranoia, which can breed xenophobia. Which may be a natural reaction, but in the long term it could do more psychological damage to America than anything--Americans afraid to go out of the house, fearful of foreigners, having the impression that they’re stalked not only throughout the world but in their own country.”

The larger question, Hoffman said, is “can we protect America from terrorism at all? If totalitarian states have difficulty eradicating terrorism, how can we expect a vibrant and open society like the United States to do so? We may have to simply accept that we have to live with a certain amount of risk.”

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Times staff writers Tim Reiterman in San Francisco and Tracy Wilkinson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.