Only in America. Matt Frei
go to the same Home Depot the following morning to buy supplies for our new house. We cancelled the trip. A week after the killings started the police received a tip-off about the shooter. (It was only at the very end of their hunt that they realized two gunmen were involved.) According to the tip-off the assailant was driving a white truck. For builders, bakers, refrigerator maintenance men, postal workers and plumbers this is the delivery vehicle of choice and for an entire week the streets of Washington were lined with white ‘box trucks’ held up by twitchy police officers.
It was at about that time that police stopped the car used by the snipers, because it was veering from one lane to another on a Maryland highway. The officer checked the two occupants’ IDs but never searched the vehicle. The snipers got away undetected and went on to kill another five victims. Had they not repeatedly sent letters to the police which were thinly veiled pleas for recognition, containing crucial details about their identity, they might just have driven to the next state and disappeared. In the end it was a truck driver stopping at a roadside motel in the middle of the night who discovered their car and called the police.
I had lived through my share of hairy moments but I never felt such relief as the day the snipers were caught. Everyone did. The playgrounds filled up fast, schools removed the black tarpaulins from their windows. There was no more crouching at petrol stations. And yet the city had been left with a bitter realization: how easy it is to terrorize people who have become used to a sense of security. We had just experienced a very crude but effective form of homespun terrorism, which took the authorities three weeks to neutralize despite all the means at their disposal. What about something more sophisticated? The very notion of ‘homeland security’, that folksy concept that combined heartland images of curtain-twitching vigilance with the Pentagon’s sophistication of unmanned surveillance drones, had been held up to ridicule. It turned out to be a fitting prelude to a year of terror alerts and paranoia. America, the country that possessed the mightiest military ever known to man, was feeling vulnerable. And when powerful nations feel threatened, they are prone to overreact.
Six months after 9/11 the new Department of Homeland Security devised a ‘terror threat advisory system’, a colour chart that was used to alert citizens about the degree of perceived danger from any potential terrorist attack. Red is severe. Orange, high. Yellow, elevated. Blue, guarded, and green, low. You cannot avoid the colours or the adjectives associated with them. Go to any airport in the United States and you will hear the same computerized baritone advising you that ‘the terror threat advisory level is currently at yellow or elevated’. That’s where it seems most of the time. In fact, since the system was put in place it has never gone down to green and only once to blue. For three months in 2003 Hawaii was let off the leash and lowered its coding to ‘guarded’ before moving it up again to ‘elevated’. There was no obvious logic to this move. Indeed, the Attorney General’s office, which is in charge of setting the codes, is under no obligation to publish the criteria or explain to a worried public why the colours have changed.
When they did change it was big news, as if the whole nation was taking part in a mass show-and-tell experiment. ‘Did you hear? We’ve gone to orange!’ It was a common talking point competing with the din of cutlery at the American Diner on Connecticut Avenue or the flatulent steam nozzle at the La Baguette Café on M Street. It engaged people’s attention. It rekindled their most recent fears. It made them call home. What was less clear was why the colours had changed. Had a new plot been discovered? Were we about to be attacked? Was it the latest Osama bin Laden video release that was really a code for triggering a wave of suicide bombers? Sometimes the administration obliged with possible explanations. The Attorney General had announced the unmasking of an alleged Al-Qaeda sleeper cell or a piece of intelligence about a potential threat to container ports. At first twitchy citizens lived on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but after a while the colour codes became like a faulty burglar alarm that keeps going off. First people stopped paying attention, then they started wondering whether the administration was manipulating the codes and treating us like a Pavlovian dog. The comedy shows started to make fun of it all.
‘There were more warnings issued today,’ Jay Leno told The Tonight Show audience, ‘that another terrorist attack was imminent! We’re not sure where. We’re not sure when, just that it is coming. So, who is attacking us now? The cable company?’ David Letterman chimed in on CBS. ‘Homeland Security has already warned about new terrorist attacks and it must be pretty serious because President Bush has already ignored three memos about this.’ This was just a tiny sample from a growing catalogue of derision which was enriched when it was discovered in 2005 that the deputy press spokesman of the Department of Homeland Security had been arrested for soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old. ‘This fifty-nine-year-old guy, Brian Doyle, was arrested for exposing himself to a young girl in Florida on his webcam and sending her porno on the internet. It’s nice to know,’ said Leno, ‘that our surveillance cameras are being put to good use in the war on terror!’
Then the conspiracy theorists got to work. Brigette Nacos, a social scientist from Columbia University, began to track the uncanny coincidence of code changes and spikes in the President’s popularity. She then plotted the graph to a timetable of the 2004 presidential election campaign. Bingo! We were being taken for a ride, she concluded. Eventually, even the hapless Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, had to admit that the system ‘invited questions and even derision!’ Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, with an honest face and a firm handshake, admitted to me that he hated his job. ‘It’s a pretty thankless task, to manage a super-department of 170,000 bureaucrats and to live and work in a world of constant threats.’ A few months later he resigned and you could hear the sigh of relief all the way from the White House.
Perhaps the low point of the colour-code system was reached in November 2003 on the day the Department of Homeland Security hastily told people to prepare for the eventuality of a chemical attack. The result was panic, confusion and a collective scratching of heads. The following morning I was waiting for my train at the Cleveland Park metro station. The middle-aged woman standing next to me grabbed my arm. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing inside the carriage which had just swished to a halt. ‘There are too many people asleep.’
‘So?’
I didn’t actually say the word but I threw her an involuntary look, somewhere between disdain and surprise.
‘They might have been gassed!’ she added in a whisper.
Clearly mad, I thought. The doors opened and I walked in, leaving the woman on the platform, shaking her head. Then I looked around. Out of fifteen commuters in the carriage half were indeed asleep. My normal instinct would have been to join them and nod off, hoping not to miss my stop. I resisted. Then it dawned on me. It was nine in the morning! I should have been squashed in a throng of other passengers, fighting for half an inch of elbow room, trying to revive the blood circulation in my trapped feet. This was Thursday rush hour … and the subway was emptier than it was on a Sunday. Now that did make me feel uncomfortable. Penny had beseeched me: ‘Take a taxi. Don’t take the tube!’ No, I thought, I won’t let Osama dictate my commute.
Three stops to Dupont Circle. Only three but I counted them in and I counted them out. Suddenly the train jerked to a halt between Cleveland Park and Woodley Park. We must be somewhere below Connecticut Avenue, I thought to myself, while all the other passengers continued with uninterrupted slumber. Near the Uptown cinema. They’re still playing The Lord of the Rings, even though no one seems to be going these days. Cinema … confined space. Great for gas. Just like the subway.
I started reading the emergency directives: face forward, press the red button, don’t panic, walk slowly in single file. Fine for misuse: $2000 or jail. Surely they would understand. We are in an orange alert, after all. My stop. I got out, relieved. But the escalator had broken down and it was a very long walk up the steps towards the crisp blue winter sky. I got to the top and bumped into a man with a megaphone holding up a copy of the Bible: ‘We are all damned,’ he proclaimed. ‘Hell awaits every one of you!’ His voice was fuzzy. Perhaps his loudhailer was running low on batteries. The city may have been on orange alert, but my imagination was already running on red: the ‘what ifs?’ had vanquished the ‘so whats’ and I forgot to buy my grande latte.
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