An Open Letter to Our Enemies

Not everyone shared the sorrow or the shock of Sept. 11. An English journalist remarked afterward that he had found the abundance of American flags “embarrassing.” An English friend of mine said he knew someone who found the American mourning “excessive.”

But nothing was as jolting as an essay written by the French writer, Jean Baudrillard, that appeared in Le Monde last November and in Harper’s magazine in February. Baudrillard wrote: “That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream the destruction of so powerful a hegemon--this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West, and yet it is a fact nonetheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to erase it.”

And then this sentence: “In the end, it was they who did it but we who wished it.”

It is impossible not to feel bitter about these words, looking at the extraordinary book published by the New York Times of the little profiles of the dead it published in the months following the attack. The book, “Portraits: 9/11/01,” is a collection of 1,900 informal obituaries that were printed in a section the Times called “A Nation Challenged.” They were wonderful snapshots, full of tiny telling details about the deceased. They let us see, as Howell Raines, the executive editor of the paper, has written in the foreword, “the subtle nobility of everyday existence, of the ordered beauty of quotidian life for millions of Americans .... “

Raines recalls how reporters were seen crying at their telephones; 143 of them did the interviews and wrote the pieces. As Janny Scott, reporter on the metropolitan desk, writes in her introduction, “it was heartbreaking work.” It went on until early this year. Some families refused to take part or could not or wanted to wait.

The sweetness of these severed lives is overpowering: Children, jobs, cars, hobbies and passions colored these lives so beautifully. We can look in their faces in the little pictures and see how full of life they were, how eager they were to get on with it. Surely our critics would see that they were not titans of capitalism, not people to be slaughtered because of a government’s policies and wrongdoings. Scott recalls the reader who sent an email saying: “Never before in my forty-plus years as a reader have I been moved to close my eyes, place my palm on the page of a newspaper, shed a tear and say a prayer.”

So many of the dead were young, and not all of them were making money, although a majority were traders and brokers. Many had humbler jobs. We remember the firemen, who earned our love, and know they were never well paid. Often the voices of family members or friends or colleagues can be heard in these portraits, and their words shimmer with a thankfulness at having known the murdered person, and the stories they tell are lovely and often funny. Some of them crack open the heart.

After I finished reading “Portraits: 9/11/01,” I felt calmer about the essay by Baudrillard. But I wish I could send him the book with a note that says: Is this what you wished for?

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From ‘Portraits: 9/11/01’

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On September 11, 2001, Rancho Santa Margarita resident Lisa Frost was a passenger on the ill-fated United Airlines Flight 175.

When Boston University went to California to recruit Lisa Frost, she fell in love with the school. By the time Miss Frost was in her junior year at B.U. she was traveling the West Coast talking about the university and doing the recruiting herself. She graduated in May 2001 with two degrees.

“Everybody that comes in contact with her is just so inspired and so motivated,” said her father, Tom Frost. On the B.U. Web site there are more than 80 messages sent in by people who knew Miss Frost and many who didn’t but were touched by the story of how she died while taking a flight to begin her career at home in California.

Mr. Frost recently planted a 13-foot scrub oak near his home in Rancho Santa Margarita in honor of his 22-year-old daughter [and] placed a granite plaque ... detailing her life, her death and all the lives she touched.

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You probably think you know Firefighter Joseph E. Maloney. Son of a cop, grandson of a fireman; married forever to Kathy, the pretty, tough-talking nurse; father of Joe, 10, and Megan, 7.

Sure, you know Firefighter Maloney, 45, of Farmingville, N.Y. He is the tall, dark and handsome type who keeps the muscles pumped and the prankster side buffed. Every firehouse has one--or a dozen--like him.

You know him? Not at all. Meet Firefighter Maloney, who never mentioned fear or death, who cared more about being a hero dad than a hero firefighter, although he was both.

Recently, Mrs. Maloney was going through paperwork ... and found a note, stuck between the kids’ birth certificates, dated 1995. “Honey, if I die and if on the F.D.N.Y.,” he wrote, “you will fare O.K.” Tax instructions followed, and an admonition to a giddy shopper: “Don’t spend a lot of money.”

It concludes: “I love you, Joseph and Megan. Sorry I had to leave you so early.”