Evoking the aftermath

Thursday, July 31, 2008

SOME OF THE IMAGES were so searing that my eyes felt stung with acrid air from the scene. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but this week's news seemed dominated even more than usual by the murderous bombing of civilians.

Graphic reports poured in not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from Turkey (with seventeen people killed, the worst such attack in that country for many years) and from India (16 bombs, killing 45 people).

 

All the TV coverage - which almost invariably, and I'd say mercifully, records purely the after-effects of a bomb - was gripping and appalling, and yet was as incomplete as ever.

 

For it's a banal truism (but in the nature of a truism it's inescapably true) that video can never capture the full experience of being in a bomb scene. The grim silence which cloaks everything, despite sirens and yelling emergency workers, and which accentuates every sob or scream. The repulsive smell ... sour and yet cloying ... indescribable for anyone who hasn't had it assaulting their nose, throat and lungs. The long-immobile, stunned faces of the surviving victims and near-victims, often hours after the explosion. The sheer bloody mess of it all.

 

I recall an afternoon of bombs in Belfast, for no more compelling reason, perhaps, than the accumulation of this week's reports, plus the fact that an anniversary passed by last week with no special media attention. Thirty-six years ago "Bloody Friday" was the tabloid label instantly given to Friday, July 21, when 21 bombs (an odd mathematical chime) were exploded by the Irish Republican Army within a single hour in the city's crowded center, killing nine people and injuring well over a hundred.

 

At the time I had experienced bomb-blasts as they were happening, both close and distant, and rather like gun-battles they had an adrenalizing effect on me; I could sense it in other nervy reporters too. But in this case, rushing into the city from the Catholic suburbs, and arriving amid the now eerily calm devastation of Oxford Street, where six people had died, was to find ourselves enervated.

 

We were engaged of course in aftermath reporting, not unlike this week's dispatches from Turkey and elsewhere. (And in what's perhaps a coincidence of reaction, my friend and colleague, the Israeli documentarian Ilan Ziv, reflects this week for his blog that the long-overdue news of Radovan Karadzic's arrest has reunited him, via email, with many fellow observers of Serbian atrocities, many of them late arrivals on the scene, and he mentions being "not war reporters, but archeologists of fragments of genocide".)

 

Among my own subduded recollections of Bloody Friday - in addition to that smell, which in 2001 returned as a sense memory on the wind from Manhattan’s Ground Zero - there is a small scraping sound which I don't think will ever leave me. It's the noise of a fireman shoveling human remains off the street into a black plastic bag. (Pictured above left).

 

A commonplace description of such horrors is "an outrage". I feel the word is apt, but not just for its dictionary definition. Surveying the results of a bomb is something "out" of the realm of normal human perceptions and feelings, something beyond even rage.

 

 

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MERE JOURNALISTIC FOOLISHNESS PROMPTED EDITORS at Vanity Fair magazine into a juvenile response this week to their Conde Nast sibling The New Yorker for its purportedly satirical, but actually thin and silly cover, portraying Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House as a right-winger's nightmare couple. VF carried a copycat version, with John and Cindy McCain burning instruments of the US Constitution in the Oval Office fireplace - oh, and fist-bumping each other above an aluminum walking frame and large bundle of medications, presumably of a senior citizen's kind.

 

The media world's fuss about the first cartoon struck me as pathetic and overblown, especially when I considered how effectively the New Yorker's cover can be and has been used. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 it carried an iconic memorializing image, one that was notable for not including the World Trade Center. It was a heart-catching sketch, by illustrator Owen Smith, of a tightrope walker suspended in empty space between the non-existent Twin Towers (above right).

 

The high-wire artist being recalled was, you'll know, Philippe Petit - who famously pulled off that feat for real, and against all odds, way back in 1974 when the Center was brand new. His extraordinary coup, with all its planning, and with revealing portraits of all involved (not just the gargantuan but charming ego of Petit himself) is reconstructed and celebrated in the documentary Man on Wire, which has opened theatrically in New York, and will open in 22 other cities next week. The film also operates as a lyrical elegy for much that has been lost, not least those landmark buildings.

 

I urge you to see it - and not only because I'm very fond of the fellow, Alex Graham, behind the film's production company, Wall to Wall, of London. The movie is a joy to watch, and among its many amusing and heart-warming, even inspiring, qualities, it achieves something that took me completely by surprise.

 

It makes no mention at all of the towers' near-destruction in 1993 and their final destruction in 2001 - that much is no surprise, and makes total sense.

 

But watching it with my fellow New Yorkers, I realized what a strange effect was being created by the group's detailed, clandestine and quasi-military preparations, as craftily edited by director James Walsh into a pastiche of the classic bank-heist movie.

 

We all know Mohammed Atta and his gang would also have taken reconnaissance photographs, and made drawings and fine calculations of the seemingly impossible, but seeing all that done here by the very different Petit gang, and seeing it through the filter of fun and artistic mischief-making, certainly helped to exorcise some of the evil from those missing towers of our memory.

 

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