In listening to and writing the recollections of others, I started thinking about my own memories of that day from a perspective that was different in that I was not writing it, or talking it, and I realized that over the years there’s a major detail in my own recollection that’s been distorted into something quite different from what it was.
I wasn’t terrified of the prospect of us going to war that day. I was terrified of the prospect of the power of PR people, the force of which I had – as of that morning – yet to fully comprehend.
I clearly remember setting a cup of coffee down on a table as I tried to figure out what all the racket outside was. I lived in one of the center apartments of a courtyard complex at the time, and the first thing that came to mind was that someone’s cat had been run over by a car. I lived in that building for eight years, and more often than not there were more cats in residence than people, so the thought wasn’t exactly out of the blue.
I was at work that morning by 10:00, and already little U.S. flags were being handed out at the front desk. I have, up until now, maintained that the reason the gesture was alarmed me was because it struck me as the beginnings of the beating of the war drums.
It was worse than that. I had been working in the PR industry for a year and a half at that point, and it was dawning on me slowly – I wasn’t nearly as jaded back then – that I was spending the majority of my waking hours with people unlike any I’d ever encountered, people who believed with spectacular fanfare in storylines in which billion-dollar, global corporations were cast as the underdogs not because they were true but because they were paid – six-figure salaries in many instances – to write them, people who did not answer to their conscience not because they made an honest decision to instead follow the money but because they did not have one. It was mind-fuck city down there, and there I was in their midst, functioning for the most part. I do not know what that says about me, and I’m not sure I want to know.
By the morning of September 11, 2001, the U.S. military, George W. Bush, Iraq and burning buildings were the last things I thought of when one of the most unscrupulous people I’ve ever met thrust a flag in my face and bellowed, “We’re going to get them.” She was a big, loud Amazonian woman who, in spite of having been born into a lot of money and showered with the most expensive and exclusive private education available, conducted herself without a trace of tact, class or decorum. I have never, before or since, met someone with quite the same knack for sniffing out power and then stomping over the head of anyone who interferes with her mission to align with it. She has children now, I hear.
The worst of the worst, to be sure, but still, one among hundreds of people whose mere presence put me on the defensive. I would work in that agency for six more years, and the feeling of being under siege never really went away. It gelled that morning, what I’d been sensing in an abstract way for months, as they handed out desk flags and gathered in conference rooms to yell at big-screen televisions as if the whole thing were a football game – which, in hindsight, was an almost refreshingly authentic reaction. That office was in downtown Portland, a nice distance from the mothership office, which was out in a suburb proudly inaccessible by public transportation (including walking). We were outcasts at that agency, I think, regarded as misfits because we worked in a neighborhood where there were drug rehab facilities and homeless people. We weren’t watched very much, so I was pretty liberal with the smoke breaks, and that day, I was even more so.
