Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [41]
Six months after 9/11, the Gallup Poll of Islamic Countries found that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed believed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been the work of Arabs. Well-educated Egyptians and Saudis believed that the Israelis were behind the murder of three thousand innocents on 9/11, in large part because of articles in their countries’ official state newspapers. One of the widely disseminated stories was that no Jews died in the collapse of the Trade Towers because they had received calls telling them not to go to work that day.
To tell you the truth, I got the Jew call. I had an office in the Trade Center where I used to do most of my writing. The call came from former New York mayor Ed Koch. “Al,” he told me, “don’t go to work on the twenty-third day of Elul.”
Actually, I watched the events of that awful day from Minneapolis, where I was visiting my mom. Mom’s in a nursing home, so I was staying at a hotel. That morning, as I grabbed some coffee, I noticed people huddled around a TV. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Must have been a commuter plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or something. Then the second plane hit. It was sickening. Then came the Pentagon. We were under attack.
Somehow, I got through to my wife in Manhattan. She was fine, at home on the Upper West Side, about five miles north of the Trade Center. My son was at school on the Upper East Side. My daughter was away at college. As I watched the first tower collapse, I was stunned. But I still couldn’t register the magnitude of what was happening, even as the second one went down.
I spent the rest of the day at the nursing home watching TV with my mom. She didn’t understand what had happened—as if any of us really did. A friend of mine watched with his elderly mother in Queens. As he left that evening, she said to him, “At least no one was hurt.”
That night, like all Americans, I just kept watching. Giuliani was masterful. Bush seemed a little shaky.
On Wednesday, I couldn’t reach my family. I desperately wanted to be home in New York. The airport was closed, of course. But Northwest said they’d start flying on Thursday, so instead of driving back, I played golf. In the charity tournament for my mom’s nursing home where I had been billed as the celebrity guest. It was a very weird day for golf. Everyone was there to support the nursing home, but we all felt funny enjoying the beautiful day after the ugliest day in American history. At the closing ceremony, as I thanked the nurses who take care of my mom (she can be difficult), I started to choke up.
Thursday, I got a reservation on an afternoon flight to LaGuardia. Dropped my rental off at the airport Hertz. Just as I got to the Northwest ticket counter, they announced that the airport was closing down because of a security threat. I did a one-eighty and ran back to the Hertz counter, where I was told they were now charging $300 a day for cars. The world was falling apart, and I was being bilked.
“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Hertz is taking advantage of a horrific tragedy to jack up the price of your cars?” Yes. But the woman recognized me as the guy who had just turned in his car rented at the pre-terrorist-attack rate. So she gave me the same rate, plus a reasonable drop-off fee in New York. America was pulling together.
It was late afternoon. I left the Twin Cities, determined to drive straight through, listening to local radio and NPR. On September 11, 2001, NPR had more foreign correspondents abroad than any other network news organization in the United States. Americans, so the other networks thought (probably correctly), had lost interest in the world.
Listening to twenty straight hours of coverage as I drove alone through the heartland, I was overwhelmed with the enormity of what had happened. Friday afternoon, I pulled into a truck stop in Eastern Pennsylvania to watch President Bush lead a memorial service at the National Cathedral. For twelve bucks, I got a room with a bed, a shower,