Venice on the web
A semi-regular column

From Sarasota to NY to DC to Venice
first two days of national and local news chills Venice to the bone
- John Patten, 09/13/01 jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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CNN was reporting for a time yesterday that the guys at Huffman Aviation were taken into custody, along with a local guy, Charlie Voss. Voss is pretty well known in this burg, he's a nice guy. None of them were taken into custody, although all were questioned as material witnesses. But all of the local participants are as shocked as the rest of the country, even more so as now they feel unwarranted personal guilt.

Why? It seems that at the end of Day 2, the FBI had tracked two of the kamikaze terrorists responsible for the tragedy in New York to Venice. It was here, in our fair town, that these men had acquired their deadly skills.

Wonderful.

Rudi Dekkers of Huffman Aviation was all over network and cable news last night, proclaiming innocence and ignorance. Alright, fair enough. He's probably not the only person to be used unknowingly in this insidious sequence of events. But it felt like our whole town was guilty, somehow culpable. We, as a community, aided and abetted enemies of the state, villains far more evil and hated than even Timothy McVeigh.

For a solid two or three hours on Day 2, Venice was the focus of world wide attention. Welcome to Venice, terrorist central. Coming soon: lessons on Zen and the Art of Stinger Missile Maintenance.

Wonderful.

Just 20 miles up the road in Sarasota, things were getting funky too. The national drama had started here in Sarasota County on Tuesday morning as President Bush announced to the nation and a group of local schoolchildren that the United States was under a terrorist attack. Now on Day 2, the FBI had gone to a local recording studio to obtain a copy of a rap CD single that supposedly predicted the attack in NY. I say supposedly, because after reading the lyrics, I found the references vague at best. Certainly in poor taste, but not nearly as ominous as this album by The Coup that is set for release next month.

But let's go back to Tuesday morning. And pardon some of the language in the following, but this has been a difficult time for everyone.

Tuesday morning. I got up, let the dog out, made coffee, booted up and settled down with cnn.com.

Big news. Gary Condit (remember him?). CNN posted a story at 8:35 am about how a civil grand jury had rejected a complaint against him.

Big photo at the top of the page, the headline story at 8:45 am on cnn.com -- Michael Jordan will play.

Now that's news worth waking up to. So what if he'll play on a lousy team, he'll play. Sipping coffee, I read about Jordan telling reporters "You've got your story," Damn, it's going to be an interesting winter after all.

Bush, in Sarasota, is going to make nice and talk education in one of the local elementary schools.

Phone rings, a friend makes a bad joke about turning on my TV, Manhattan is under attack. Yeah, right. No really, I'm not joking, turn on your TV. Yeah, right. I guess I'm supposed to tune in CNN and watch live the political propaganda spin out of Sarasota about how Bush is the education President. I don't have time for this crap, I really need to settle into a work mode. Oh well. Maybe he'll pull a Dan Quayle and misspell something simple.

I have a TV tuner card in my computer, so I hit the icon and suddenly the room was filled with the sound of explosions as the TV showed a replay from a minute earlier (my computer is wired into my home stereo system, and I had been listening to some loud music the night before). While doing a quick dive for the volume control, I watched a spectacular special effects shot of a plane crashing into one side of a skyscraper and incredible blossoms of flames coming out of the other. Not the greatest camera angle, granted, but I'm sure there will be some incredible slow-motion interior shots.

Holy shit, that's fantastic!!! Damned lifelike.. When is this movie coming out? Why hadn't I read any buzz about it? It looks just like straight news coverage.

Dude, it's not a movie.

Oh.

Bryant Gumbalt's voice on the speakers hammered it home: this really was straight news, not an entertainment feature.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh shit!

It seemed unreal and almost inconsequential at first. Well, it's nasty, it's bad, but in spite of the weapon used, it looks like it'll be no worse than OK City, maybe even less. I know that sounds terrible, but it all happened so mind-numbingly fast and so far away that I think most of us didn't want to believe or accept it. It couldn't be as bad as it looked. Since I hadn't actually seen any images of anyone shedding the mortal coil, the deaths that I had just witnessed simply didn't happen.

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but part of my mind shut down instantly. The part that processes the data received and calculates the consequential outcome of what that received data really means.

I need another cup of coffee. How the hell are they going to put that fire out? Firefighters are probably struggling to get up the same stairwells that thousands of people are going down. What a mess! And how long will it take to rebuild the upper stories of those buildings?

Then came images from The Pentagon. Part of the building was in flames, as though a bomb had gone off, a big bomb. Early news reports were unclear as to what exactly had happened.

What the hell is going on?

Minutes later, the news hit that a fourth plane was headed for DC. Never in my entire life could I imagine what I insanely wished for: that the USAF would shoot down a domestic airliner carrying innocent US civilians. Then reports of a fifth plane that had crashed on or near Camp David and even a report of a possible sixth plane that was out there somewhere (or maybe I had gone insane by that point and had merely imagined I heard that). All the while, split screen images showed us The Pentagon and the WTC in flames.

I think that is when the real collective horror of the day hit all of us. For me, that was when I got that numb feeling in my gut, the one that tells me I may be close to vomiting. The last time I had it was a few hours after I found out my mother had died. I certainly didn't feel anything like this on the day of the Oklahoma City blast.

What seemed like hours later, the two towers collapsed. That's when the numbness set in. Then came close-up taped shots of actual people plummeting to their deaths. The networks had apparently been sitting on these images, but by now the carnage was so incredible that the order had apparently gone out to run the tapes.

It's a world gone mad. Movies were the only point of reference. The Missiles Of October, Dr. Strangelove, Independence Day. Actually the Bible had quite a few good points of reference as well, only that was even more horrifying.

Then, on a detached and very selfish note, I suddenly realized these terrorists had screwed me personally, along with the rest of the country. What little money I do have stashed away is there, right there, in New York, probably in the records in the WTC. My shares of some tech stocks, plus some shares in a bank in Tennessee. Not much money, but everything I have.

Not only was this a national tragedy, but this could wipe me out. And not just me, everybody I know who has their savings stashed in NASDAQ.

Oh.

Oh shit!

Whoever did this did not merely want to kill a few people, they were out to literally destroy the country.

Meanwhile, Bush is bumping around the country. We are assured that he is safe. His wife is in a bunker. Cheney, our Vice Prez, is safely in hiding, as are the leaders of the Senate. They are all safe and in hiding, there's nothing to worry about. The news kept pounding us that there is nothing to worry about, there is no need for the American public to panic.

Huh?

I walked down to the neighborhood 7-11 to get a pack of smokes, fully expecting a nuclear strike to have started by the time I got back. Nah, nothing to worry about. No need to panic. I'd run for my life if I had a good place to run to. I don't know about anyone else, but by 2:00 pm or so on Bloody Tuesday, I was panicked, fearful that we had only seen the beginning of an attack. An old rock song by an obscure band named City Boy ran through my head: "Run for your life, the Earth's caught fire!"

Now in Day 3, we are still in collective shock. I did no work yesterday. Tuesday was a total wash.

Michael Jordan, Gary Condit. Who the hell are they? Chandra Levy is now a forgotten ghost, she'll be banished to the back pages forever. In fact, while the rest of the nation mourns, Gary Condit may have some cause for celebration -- this is about the only possible thing that could have happened that would save his career.