My wife and I invited five guests and their dogs to watch the tragedy on the 6.30pm evening news. The dogs were kept outside, as were the smokers. I stood behind my house with the food editor and the distinguished journalist. We peered through the windows into my living room.
"We're nicotine negroes," the distinguished journalist told me. "Not a bad line," he said. "You can use it in one of your novels."
The footage of the airplanes hitting the towers was extraordinary. More so than the much-touted battle scenes from Pearl Harbor. Did any of you Brits see Pearl Harbor? It's the movie in which I learned that the Battle of Britain was won by a few resolute and devilishly good-looking Americans.
Enough of movies. Back to television. We'd been watching reality television all day. But there was starting to be too much reality in it.
Ordinarily, in America, we'll do anything to be on television. But on the morning the Twin Towers fell something elemental changed. Police and fire officials were turning away from the camera. It wasn't a toy anymore.
As the day wore on, though, we returned to form. You could hear the newscasters squabbling with each other. Then we learned that Tom Clancy had already written this in a novel. Thanks Tom. There are many things wrong with this country, but none of them would be solved by a more careful reading of the Clancy oeuvre.
We don't know if President Bush has studied Clancy. We know he's studied Ronald Reagan. He probably remembers the joke that got Reagan in: "What's flat and glows in the dark? Iran after Ronald Reagan takes office."
So our president came out swinging. "Terrorism against America will not stand," he said. The television anchorman told us what a great nation we are, mighty and innocent. "Innocent?"
Nobody we know intimately had been killed, though I have friends in Manhattan I still haven't spoken to. The lawyer knows the manager of Windows on the World, which was on the top of the World Trade Centre. But Glen was on the ground when the first plane hit.
The architect had been in Manhattan. She'd seen the Towers pluming smoke. The psychiatrist's daughter had phoned her mother to say she'd seen the World Trade Towers collapse. "I didn't believe her until I switched on the television," said the psychiatrist.
If a friend has died, everything will change. But for now it's like a blizzard, a sinister adrenal rush, and something to talk with strangers about. My 12-year-old hopes he'll get out of school tomorrow. "A day of national mourning," he explained. Today they had a special assembly, complete with a speech in which FDR was invoked and the word "infamy" recalled.
I got three e-mails asking if I was all right. One was from London, another from Kansas. The one from California was titled "WAR." (They know how to push the envelope in California.) My mother phoned from Ossining, New York, which is about five miles away.
She started on about how she hoped we wouldn't hurt those lovely Palestinians. I told my mother: "right now I'm not having good thoughts about Palestinians." The networks had been showing pictures of Palestinians chanting "God is great" and celebrating in the West Bank city of Nablus. But the clips showed the same children over and over again. They didn't even look particularly happy. The networks are thrusting the celebrations in our faces.
NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw has dubbed the Americans who fought Hitler "The Greatest Generation." His book was a bestseller. I'm a baby boomer and so a member of the worst generation. We refused to go to Vietnam. We wouldn't even wear a necktie. We still won't go to war. We'll watch one on television though. Or in the movies. Ronald Reagan wasn't the only American to confuse war movies with the real thing. I went to see an afternoon show of Dances With Wolves during the Gulf war, but left early, because I didn't want to miss the evening news.
Why do we so badly, and repeatedly, need to watch the news? I remember Challenger going up in smoke. Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. There are many important events in American history. Then there are the ones that got filmed.
News organisations are savvy about this. Two thousand people die in Burma. A house trailer is destroyed in Coral Gables, Florida. We see the house trailer. Why? No pictures from Burma.
Our guests stayed all the way through the news. After the news the president was going to address the nation. The guests all left. My wife and I watched the president alone.
This was a war between good and evil, Bush told us. "Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and pursue those responsible for these cowardly actions." A stirring call to arms. So why had his audience faded away. Bad politics? Possibly. Bad television? Definitely.
How do you square it with the fact that those pictures of the towers collapsing were thrilling? If Bush's people had projected them onto the background while he spoke he might have doubled his audience. There's no reason to deny the president of the US props that even local newscasters insist on.
When I went to bed, the adrenaline was wearing off.
