Life Sentences

Life Sentences Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Life Sentences Read Online Free PDF
Author: William H. Gass
cause in almost identical moments, and maybe in matching amounts.
    The more dismay was ours, the more joy was theirs, for hate has an insatiable appetite, and will eat whatever’s offered it. Though thousands died, casualties were not the purpose of the attack. There were no islands to be won or lost, no towns to be taken. The World Trade Center had been wounded before; this time they killed it. And the towers fell of their own released weight, so that the head was the destroyer of the feet. No Pearl Harbor here. The target was what they believed we stood for: money—money and its power; greed—greed and what it served; arrogance—the arrogance of the rich.
    The terrorists, as we decided to call them, did not smile wryly at the money of the wealthy men who funded them, or at the scams, the lies, the treacheries, the drug sales and robberies that were committed to support their cause. Nor did they examine their own ills, except to blame us for them. They are, and were, the least independent of all men. In exchange for our burning towers, they sent us images of boys throwing rocks and men firing guns at God. They became the bombs that blew up at their festivals. Such shells burst into the only stars their celebrations make: bloody wall spatter and street stain.
    Now we have guards at every significant gathering. They peersuspiciously in purses, in bags, at packages that are usually recent purchases, the soles of shoes, at IDs where the poorest possible pictures of ourselves tell them—these strangers—of our harmless hearts, our benevolent selves. At this huge joke no one is allowed to laugh. What bridge, dam, public building, bank, arena, school; what plane, bus, purification plant, or power station will be picked on next? Yet terrorists did not set the West on fire. We did. In St. Louis, where I live, thousands gathered at the arch to listen to Western tunes or rock schlock in the early evening, and subsequently to ooh and ahh at the fireworks, as they have done in the past, though this year there were plastic fences in a vulgar orange everywhere, police busy being noticeable, park rangers searching sacks, National Guardsmen who would have looked natty in their camouflage suits had we been able to see them, and, as a consequence of this protection, far fewer people.
    In the weeks after 9/11, the homes that line my street were strewn with flags. They hung from attic windows; they rose up on poles stuck in yards; they fluttered like wash from improvised lines. On this Fourth three small grave-size flags were posted in flower boxes near my house. At the last minute, two more were hung down the block. But decals, once prominent on cars, are soiled; banners that flew from antennae have been shredded to indistinctness, bumper stickers have worn out their welcome. It’s only a small sample, I know, but it strikes me that the spirit of the Fourth, this year, was used up by September’s end and fell like an early leaf.
    Instead of fresh defeats, which weekly headed our news after Pearl Harbor, and which refueled our anger and renewed our resolution, other types of towers have fallen, not cities in Asia or islands off Alaska, but those that many corporate entities and financial markets form, with consequences of a different kind: thousands whose jobs have been lost or are now in doubt, savings looted, pensions dissolved, smug and greedy members of small-town gambling clubs who have been left holding their handbags while businesses built of money-lust collapsed from moral decay, as nearby, steeples standingfor God’s good family enterprises sagged from similar fears: tarnish of reputations, drops in contributions, huge losses in civil suits. The terrorists could not have dreamed of luck like the luck they’ve had, because, though it sometimes seems so, 9/11 was not the cause of our present consternations, our tepid patriotism, our anxieties about the future, our massive mistrust of our leaders, or the weakening of our faith in
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