September 11 attacks

Report from Ground Zero

By Sarah P. Rubinstein

Fall 2004

My alarm went off, and I lay in bed listening to the weather and news. It was September 11, 2001—an ordinary day, a workday, one of those early fall days that Minnesotans look back at longingly from winter’s chill. I went downstairs, switched on the radio in the kitchen, and sat down to breakfast with the newspaper. Shortly before eight, the newscaster said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York.

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A Kind of Solution

By Christopher Merrill

Fall 2004

The writer was drinking himself to death. In his first flush of freedom—he had come to Iowa from a land ruled by a military dictatorship—he drowned himself in vodka, and when for the third day running he was rushed to the emergency room with a blood alcohol level that would have killed another man, he was committed for observation. The date was September 10, 2001. That evening, more than eight hours after his last drink, the writer was still dead drunk. The judge who signed his commitment order called the next day, incredulous.

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Face-to-Face with Terror: Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God

By Jack R. Fischel

Fall 2004

The American people came face-to-face with the realities of worldwide terrorism following September 11. Although the United States only a few years before had been shocked by our own homegrown terrorists who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing, we never realized the extent to which religious militancy has come to replace Communism as the primary threat to our security

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The Sky Is Falling, the Sky Is Falling!

By Art Spiegelman

Fall 2004

Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning—and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first saw it unmediated. On September 11th my wife, Françoise Mouly, and I had just stepped out of our Lower Manhattan home. Those towers had been our taken-for-granted neighbors, always picture-postcard visible a mile south of our front stoop. That morning, out of the very clear, very blue sky, a plane roared right over our heads and smashed into the first tower.

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