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A Gathering of Herds Copyright © 2001, Burt Alpert. All Rights Reserved. "We
are fighting for God. This is a holy crusade to kill the infidels. "Whatever
makes a soldier sad will make a killer smile." "It
makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. He is speaking. Alone at the lectern, he faces a full chamber. Neither on the floor nor in the gallery is there an empty seat. All ears are focused on his words, every head is poised in an expectancy of what he has to say. It is September 20, 2001, nine days after the bombing and desolation of the twin towers at the World Trade Center and the breaching of the Pentagon. Day by day a crew of thousands, firemen, police, welders, crane operators, volunteers all have been digging through the wreckage, hopefully, though now increasingly with sinking hearts, for of more than 6,000 souls buried therein almost no-one will be recovered alive. Over and over, endlessly, from this angle and from that, from sea to shining sea, the images are beamed around the country, first one plane then another, a great ball of orange flame, an immensity of collapse, then a second, billowing clouds of smoke and debris pouring through the streets, crowds fleeing before them, leaving behind an unforgiving mountain of brick and mortar, twisted steel, broken shards of jagged glass, plumbing fixtures, torn electric conduits rebuking their makers, computer fragments, a shoe, a wallet, bodies and parts of bodies. Smoking and smoldering, sheets of flame eerily darting up from this vast malevolence of ashes and of flesh, here certainly was the death pit of Dante's inferno, a message from hell. Onlookers bury their heads in their hands, weeping. Photographs are held up: my husband, my daughter, my brother. The psyche of a nation has been torn apart. What will he say? What comfort will he offer, what direction staked out, what action taken? A nation sits planted in front of their television sets, hanging on his every word, and there in the great hall of congress he is making the speech of his life. Though in time there may be others, this now is the way history will remember him. He speaks with muted certainty, arranging his words in short bursts and phrases, emphasized with deliberation, punctuated with carefully measured pauses. His voice modulated to convey assurance. Everything will be taken care of. "Make no mistake about it!" Everything will be all right. Time and again the entire chamber rises to applaud, greeting his words with accolades of approval, enthusiastically rendered, vigorously sustained. Congressmen, senators, generals, admirals, a fireman in uniform, a policemen, supreme court justices in their black, flowing robes, a gallery jam packed with Americans from every walk of life. One and all, they are investing this man's words with the hopes of their lives, with a promise of deliverance from a reality that has proved to be more devastating by far than their worst nightmares. He is their man. He will lead them in a war of good against evil. Two-thirds of the way through his address to the nation and to the world, the president stops. Glances up at the balcony, his gaze fixed on the First Lady. A sideways smirk of self-satisfaction, that annoying look of overweening self-assurance, from which his advisers had weaned him in the early days of his candidacy, has returned to twist the contours of his mouth. And he winks. In the midst of this most solemn moment in the history of the nation, an entire people caught up in the enormity of their terror, and looking to him for a way, a clue, a solution, in a gesture of private exultation, the president winks. "I've done it, Laura," he might as well have been saying. "I've got them now." |
