A new tragedy for a shocked nation

Americans do not sport poppies on their lapels on the weekend of 11 November. Nor do they refer to the anniversary as "Armistice Day". Those petals and those implications just do not " resonate", as they say, here. So it's called Veterans' Day instead, and most of the taxpayer-funded schools take Monday off. Which is probably just as well, since the American Airlines flight that ploughed into Queens took out two schoolyards. Vacant schoolyards, that is, that on any other Monday would have been loud with children. As always with catastrophes such as this, there is the thought of how much more devastating and soul-searing things could have been.

Or, paradoxically, how much less so. I was sure from the first that this was not an attack and I am just as sure now. I can remember from decades ago the terrifying moment when two planes collided over Staten Island and fell in flames into the streets: until very recently this was the most traumatic incident that New York had ever endured. That is trauma enough, without the notion of malevolence behind it.

However, with most of the evidence of a fearful accident available almost at once, the capital of the modern world went into a defensive crouch.

All airports closed, all bridges and tunnels "secured", the Foreign Minister of France unable to get into the United Nations headquarters building (to deliver his speech on terrorism and nuclear proliferation) because the place had been subjected to an immediate-lockdown. This is one of the things that " globalisation" now means. Touch the very end of a nerve at the remotest limit of a ganglion and the entire body will go into spasm or shock. To phrase things paradoxically once more, the whole system is in permanent high gear to generate shutdown.

Huge staffs of well-paid and secretive professionals now exist on continual standby; their mission to immobilise everybody at the first sign of danger. Meanwhile, somewhere in the shrunken cerebellum of this neurotic and jolted giant, a tiny presidential voice issues the contradictory instruction to "fly all you can, buy all you can" so as to give at least an economic kick-start to a half-inert beast. The limbs twitch, but the electroconvulsive therapy makes a bad match with the stun-darts and the tranquillisers.

As it happens, I was recently in all three of the crucial airports that define what shuttle-riders call the "north eastern corridor". The sinews and muscles that connect Boston, Washington and New York (or, if you prefer, Harvard, Georgetown and Manhattan) are so important to Establishment life that you don't notice them until they have degenerated or gone critical.

I obeyed all the instructions about showing up with hours to spare, and as a result had hours to spare, because the airports were eerily void. It was a ghosttown, no-eye-contact version of the real thing: a stage-set for an air-travel movie where the cast of extras was too thin and the budget couldn't pay for enough real planes. It could, however, afford an illtrained and intrusive person, in a bogus uniform, who solemnly deprived me of a portable corkscrew that I had forgotten stealing from a hotel mini-bar in 1999.

A handful of things absolutely define America and make it possible to connect its vast spaces into an affiliated society. These things are rapid air-transport, the interstate highways, the telephone-system and the mail. Air travel is a shadow of itself, as I just mentioned. A single lunatic who gutted the driver of a Greyhound bus with a box-cutter blade has now instituted a reign of search and surveillance and delay even on the coaches which poorer people use to make long journeys. It was very hard to get a telephone line to or from New York on 11 September and on the ensuing days.

And my mailbox in Washington DC, as well as the mailroom of my employer in Manhattan, has been a wretched and random and nerve-racking hit-and-miss system for several weeks.

The ancient art of ju- jitsu involved the simple calculation o f using an opponent's strength against himself. In one gratuitous act, the fanatics of al Qaeda have now conscripted the state and society they loathe, and forced it to dance to a maniacal tune. One twitch upon the thread, and the victim convulses. The horror of the scheme is that the victim does this whether the torturer has bothered to tweak the thread or not.

Meanwhile, and several continents away, the earth shudders as the same society delivers massive tonnages of ordnance onto a country which had many of its nerve endings cauterised, and many of its limbs broken, a long time ago. Has there ever been such a contrast between supreme confidence overseas and round-the-clock jitters at home?

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair