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September 17-19, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

MORE HEROES: It now seems clear that the inital count of heroes aboard Flight 93 was low. The original count was three: Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, and Mark Bingham. Then further information added a fourth, Todd Beamer, whose relatively lengthy phone conversation with a GTE supervisor provided more information about exactly what was happening on the plane. After Beamer's story came out, I got him confused with Bingham, whose name I left out of an earlier item.

This USA Today story provides a good overview of what we know about passengers and their actions. (This St. Petersburg Times story adds a possible fifth man, toy executive Lou Nacke.)

The entire passenger rebellion challenges every assumption of the neoconservative view of American decadence. First, it happened. Regular guys on business trips overpowered hijackers and saved their fellow Americans from a fourth disastrous hit. And not only were these men of action technology executives—and a high-tech p.r. guy!—but Bingham was gay. As Jeff Taylor wrote in Reason Express, zapping the Jerry Falwell view of the world, "Turns out that Washington's 'veil of protection' included a big, gay rugby player." Bingham is memorialized on this rugby page and on Planet Out.

Time's description of the Flight 93 heroes is apt: "nimble, successful, charismatic, self-elected leaders—the kind that have a knack for finding one another." The kind of leaders nourished by an entrepreneurial economy in which merit is more important than hierarchy or background. Not obedient Organization Men. [Posted 9/19.]

TAMA RETURNS: After a break, Tama Starr files a new report from Manhattan:

Our new factory, the one we're in process of moving into, is on 55th Ave. in Maspeth, through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and across from the Fire Department Communications Center and parking lot—usually a festive-looking place with its lined-up rows of shiny red vehicles, but not now. The area was closed last week, but now it's open, and through our garage doors the people setting up the factory watch the burned and crumpled fire trucks being hauled in as they're dug out of the rubble. Five big engines and some smaller vehicles came in today. All those firefighters who disappeared when the buildings collapsed, including the chief, arrived there in something. Now the parking lot has the air of a graveyard, all the hulks lined up.

The Missing are everywhere, smiling in photographic clusters from bus shelters, newsstands, store windows, walls. Many of the photos seem to have been taken on happy occasions—weddings, birthday parties, nights on the town--as though what's "Wanted" is not just the folks in the photos but the vanished happy times the snapshots celebrate. JoAnne is back at work, having done all she could, including delivering the DNA sample. You carry your sister around as a molecule. The sister worked for that brokerage house on the 105th floor that lost everyone except a few vacationers. Her picture is in our front window. We hugged JoAnne--who looks gorgeous, as her sister would wish, with fresh rhinestone appliqués on her inch-long, mauve fingernails and a little rhinestone heart on her sunglasses that looks, come to think of it, like a tear—and promised to inundate her with chores. She's working double-shift, with the move.

Moving the plant is a real haul, with every truck being searched both ways traversing a tunnel or bridge. The searchers are polite, the drivers are polite—"Be our guest!" —but it's slow. Our esteemed landlord from the factory we are moving out of is asking us to hurry it up, so he can donate the building to the Red Cross. We'll have to find a way to share. The Family Center, having outgrown the Armory, is being moved to Pier 94, across the street from our old place. You can't take a step without stumbling over the Tragedy.

A scary moment. Leaving my house this morning I realize I've forgotten something, so I get back in the elevator. I'm joined by two very swarthy young men in t-shirts, carrying gas canisters. They push the button for 73, the penthouse whose owner is never around. Who are they, and where is the doorman who always accompanies tradespeople upstairs? It's a long ride. There are not a lot of 800-foot-tall-plus buildings. Left. My companions' gaze is firmly fastened to the carpet.

Reaching my floor I do a quick about-face, and head down to the desk in the lobby. "I don't wish to seem paranoid," I tell Mark, the dignified concierge. "But who are those individuals with the gas canisters?"

Air conditioning technicians, he assures me. Doing work on the roof. From the company we always use.

"Are those the same men they always send?"

Mark seems momentarily nonplused, as "They all look alike to me" flits across his features. "Well, they keep changing, but I know them," he says.

Oh. Okay. I'm sure it's perfectly safe, but I think I'll just get outside for a while.

I see now that all those false bomb scares are not all hoaxes: many, probably, are mistakes. Those Arab or Pakistani guys could have been carrying their lunch. Everyone is so jumpy.

Good to see marble halls and galleries and chique boutiques wearing the RW&B—usually patriotism is a blue-collar occupation. Fifth Avenue store windows are all done up in flags and mourning; Bonwit Teller's is particularly beautiful. Wish the villains could have been satisfied with mincing a flag, if they had to go after a symbol. The WTC was so big, so grandiose, it was a symbol only of itself. It never evoked affection like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. You haven't heard, and you won't hear, anyone mourning the architecture. We were used to its hulking presence, and now there'll be a hole there, but we never loved it. This is all about the people.

New Moon (L'Shana Tova, everyone), black sky. That damnable white cloud is still puffing up.

Tama's previous reports are here, here, here, and here. [Posted 9/19.]

GOD DID IT, III: Country singer Charlie Daniels is the latest to join the chorus. A sample:

Why has a nation which has enjoyed the blessings of God for over two hundred years suddenly experienced such a catastrophe? We've shaken our fists in God's face for far too long. We have ignored His laws, belittled His son, taken His name in vain until it's almost a national slang word. We have allowed radical groups like the A.C.L.U. to all but remove the name and reverence for God from American society. We have murdered untold millions of unborn children and tolerated an immoral president in the name of a good economy. We have proclaimed that homosexuality is just another lifestyle when the Bible clearly states that it is an abomination to God. We have encouraged illegitimate birth, and condoned living together out of wedlock, practiced racial prejudice and child molestation, followed new age religions and harebrained spiritual leaders. Some of our music is fit for nothing but a garbage can, we are surrounded by greedy opportunists who would sink low enough to use this tragedy for an excuse to raise the price of gasoline to five dollars a gallon. We allow our streets to be inundated with punks who sell death to our children in the form of drugs. Politicians tell outright lies to further their cause and waste our tax money on frivolous programs which do nobody any good. Our city streets are rampant with violent crime, underpaid, overworked, harried public prosecutors try to put criminals in jail who are being represented by attorneys wearing two thousand dollar suits. We can no longer travel this road people. This road leads to hell.

Also, fresh from his 15 minutes of infamy, the unrepentant Anthony C. LoBaido writes to tell me that he is not just "some guy," (a phrase I didn't actually use but could have) but Very Impressive Person—a real-life Indiana Jones and "a polished, world-class international correspondent and photographer with a unique handle on global events," in the words he quotes from World Net Daily's p.r. sheet. Hugh Hewitt, who has asked World Net Daily to avoid linking LoBaido's columns to his book but will continue to write for the site, says LoBaido isn't worth wasting time criticizing. I guess he and LoBaido disagree about who's important. Hugh also disagrees with LoBaido's vicious, anti-American tirade. [Posted 9/19.]

FAIR USE: For the past decade, and particularly over the past few years, copyright holders have been fighting not only to protect their intellectual property from digital copying but to extend their copyrights and to erode the traditional U.S. legal doctrine of "fair use." These copyright holders are mostly corporations but also organizations of writers, photographers, and artists. (I wrote about the foolishness of media companies cracking down on fan websites here. My colleague Jesse Walker published an in-depth analysis of the issues here.)

Against this onslaught, media analysts like my friend Henry Jenkins of MIT have noted that trying to stamp out the reuse of cultural materials threatens the very dynamic process through which individuals create culture. As Henry wrote in Technology Review:

Preparing for this new era, media companies are expanding their legal control over intellectual property as far and as wide as possible, strip-mining our culture in the process. They have made inventive uses of trademark law to secure exclusive rights to everything from Spock's pointy ears to Superman's cape, pushed policies that erode the remaining protections for fair use, and lobbied for an expansion of the duration of their copyright protection and thus prevented works from falling into the public domain until they've been drained of value. In the end, we all suffer a diminished right to quote and critique core cultural materials. Imagine what our holiday season would look like if Clement Moore had trademarked Santa Claus!

For most of human history, the storyteller was the inheritor and protector of a shared cultural tradition. Homer took plots, characters, stories, well known to his audiences, and retold them in particularly vivid terms; the basic building blocks of his craft (plots, epithets, metaphors) were passed from one generation to another. The great works of the western tradition were polished like stones in a brook as they were handed off from bard to bard. This process of circulation and retelling improved the fit between story and culture, making these stories central to the way a people thought of themselves. King Arthur, for example, first surfaces as a passing reference in early chronicles and only over the course of several centuries of elaboration becomes complex enough to serve as the basis for Le Morte D'Arthur.

Contemporary Web culture is the traditional folk process working at lightning speed on a global scale. The difference is that our core myths now belong to corporations, rather than the folk.

Like many other public issues, this debate took on a new dimension last Tuesday. Fair use asserted itself in ways that go far beyond Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan sites, as important as those are to the people who create and enjoy them. After Tuesday's attacks, Americans rushed to the web to express their deepest feelings and to share them with the world. Those creative acts were heedless of copyright. Yet no one objected.

Have you been moved by this site showing reactions around the world? Has a friend sent you this movie of remembrance? The memorial photos are all "stolen," without payment to their owners. So were the photos and songs in the movie. No one made a profit from these "thefts," and many more like them. Created by recombining the work of others, these new artifacts enriched our culture at a critical moment. I doubt that the singers or photographers would mind. But these amateur, not-for-profit creations are just the sort of thing that companies like Fox and Walt Disney have been trying to wipe off the web.

Henry Jenkins is right: Much of our most important cultural raw material begins as commercial products, protected by intellectual property law. That law is fine, as long as it is limited in scope. But its protections cannot be absolute and endless, or we will lose our ability to create the very culture that intellectual property is supposed to encourage.

Look at the memorial photo site. Watch the movie (but be warned that it takes a long time to download). They are eloquent reminders of the importance of generous protections for fair use. The campaign against grassroots amateur culture will never be the same. [Posted 9/19.]

NEW YEAR: I will make no further postings until Wednesday night, in observance of Rosh Hashanah.I wish you all a sweet new year, better than the last. [Posted 9.17].

UNITARIAN SENTIMENT: Sign outside the local Unitarian church: "Freedom is not for the timid." [Posted 9.17].

"LET'S ROLL: The third hero on Flight 93, Oracle executive Todd Beamer, got an airphone call out to GTE's supervisor before he, Jeffrey Glick, and Thomas Burnett attacked the hijackers. Jim McKinnon of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette tells the story here. The last words the supervisor heard from Beamer were, "Are you guys ready? Let's roll!"

I hate to be a broken record, but my earlier point about Thomas Burnett is worth repeating, in more-specific terms: All three of the men who took action to save their fellow Americans, and quite likely the White House, from destruction were technology-company executives. They were the sort of people David Brooks has been bashing in The Weekly Standard for the past several years. (Sample passage, from this Weekly Standard article: "Nowadays when you walk amidst the office parks, you see a country that is great but insufficient too—great in its scientific accomplishments, in its tolerance and in its industriousness....And yet insufficient because of its self-satisfaction and complacency.") These men were the people who create national greatness, not the ones who talk about it. Like foreign enemies past and present (as well as many American preachers and writers), Brooks has mistaken the quiet pursuit of happiness for weakness and decadence. But no one who has actually spent much time in technology companies should be surprised.

If you didn't check it earlier, the Oracle memorial service photo is here. [Posted 9/17.]

LIBERATE AFGHANISTAN: If you haven't read this article by Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary, you may be the last such person on the Internet. It's been circulating for days via email. It is surely the most influential article written in response to the attacks, changing the minds of many. Ansary, who usually writes children's books, makes a powerful case against trying to beat the Taliban and Osama bin Ladin by "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age," which is pretty much where that miserable country already is.

Ansary also argues that Bin Ladin—or, you might say, the broader movement he represents—hopes to spark a war between Islam and the West (really the modern world, which includes much of the East). That does appear to be the most reasonable explanation for the attacks, which lacked the usual sorts of tactical terrorist goals. If you want to change U.S. policy toward Israel, for instance, you've got to connect a policy demand to your act and threaten more terror if the policy is not changed. The same is true for any other specific goal. But slaughtering people in such a dramatic way without making demands or advertising goals can only be a way of sparking war for its own sake. That the hijackers were not typical suicide bombers—not poor kids from the ghettos of Gaza, with little hope, nothing to lose, and direct and personal grievances—but educated, privileged, middle-aged men also suggests an ideological crusade.

Ansary is unduly pessimistic. It has become clear that the U.S. need not invade Pakistan. We have, rather, become allies of a sort. We are certainly not going to war with Indonesia and Malaysia, which are also Muslim nations. "Islam" is not a single entity. Even the terrorism-sponsoring, theocratic Muslim world is divided. Iran's brand of Islam is not bin Ladin's, and neither is its anti-Americanism. This war will be stranger than his worst-case scenario, but also less deadly.

There is a truth, however, to Ansary's blunt and pessimistic argument. This will be a war against real enemies, fighting for a worldview not merely for power and territory. It cannot be a war against "terrorism," which is a tactic not a foe. Fighting a war against terrorism is like fighting a war against tanks or a war against poison gas. It is not realistic to think that "terrorism" will be defeated, taken forever from the world's arsenal of possible tactics, by military means. What can be achieved by military means—though not, over the long haul, by arms alone—is a change of the regimes under which people live. Tuesday's attacks have now forced us, for our own protection and probably at a terrible cost in American lives, to come to the rescue of the most oppressed people on earth. Here's to the liberation of Afghanistan. [Posted 9/17.]

Buy Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in hardback or paperback.