Lessons learned, some forgotten, as anniversary of 9/11 approaches

TO be working in America the week of the anniversary of 9/11 is to notice how much has changed — and how little has changed.

Every newspaper carries advertisements for the Mozart Requiem, beginning simultaneously throughout the country at

precisely the moment the first plane hit. Local courthouses have guest speakers: people who counselled bereaved families in New York. Frivolous weekly events like wine-tastings have been cancelled.

The big, official national flags fly from the banks and civic buildings. But small flags are much less in evidence. In October last year, flag makers couldn't meet the

demand for car flags. Up to that point, only rednecks driving pick-up trucks stuck flags on their vehicles.

Last October, every second Lincoln town car had its pair. Not any more. That first patriotic reflex has had its day. As has the belief that WTC would change behaviour for the better.

Individuals tell stories of colleagues or customers who, prior to last year, were

always difficult, but who, in the weeks following 9/11, softened. Now, though, they say, that improvement's history.

"We're all back to normal," one man told me, as we both observed a road rage incident. "Unfortunately."

Mass conversion was never going to happen in response to something that occurred in daylight on the TV in the corner. Distance and darkness chill the skin and the soul.

But this this was a bright miniaturised film loop without sound or scale. A silent gliding little plane disappeared behind a building from which flame burst and blossomed. Later, billowing black clouds hid a collapse and people stumbled out into streets dirtied by cement dust and shredded paper.

It was a story television could not fully tell, despite its immediacy and its capacity to hoover up anecdotal evidence. To appreciate the sheer size of the excision you had to be there, and so millions of people from all over the world have since trekked to mid-town Manhattan to get a sense of the vastness of the destruction.

But, then, TV didn't try to tell the whole story. For once, decency broke out. The big networks stopped showing footage of the 200 people who, pursued by the jet-fuel inferno, jumped to their deaths. Newspapers published one photograph, then stopped, although these pictures, much less familiar than the majority of the visuals from that date, have been reappearing in recent days.

The captions, designed to comfort, say the drop lasted 10 seconds and death was instantaneous. Reports point out that seeing the people in the north tower jumping was what motivated people in the south tower to evacuate their own building: good came out of evil.

The search for comfort manifested itself in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity, in talk of the perpetrators as cowards. That comfort, however, was ephemeral: these young men had known for months, even years, that they would die in a chaos of shrieking noise and flame no coward would have essayed. Cowardly caricatures to hate, manipulated by some visibly villainous mastermind would have been an easier option than coming to terms with a group of young idealists living and dying the dream of a brilliant man with a beautiful serene face.

America has moved quickly from easy chauvinism to a complex openness, one illustration of which is the purchase of more books about Muslim faith and mores in the last year than ever before.

America wanted 9/11 to be transformative: an epiphany. The firefighters and police were secular saints and martyrs who went in, climbing the stairs weighed down by equipment, only to be obliterated by pancaking concrete. The need for heroes made people generous, in retrospect - although one firefighter, hours after the tragedy, noted bitterly "6,000 people are missing at the World Trade Center, and one of them's the president". Once George W came out of his bunker and appeared at Ground Zero, the public mind decided he had always been there.

But you can't make a transformative national experience once money and fame come into play. This week sees the publication of Let's Roll!, an account by the widow of the man on Flight 93 who finished a mobile phone call with that phrase as he and his companions went on the attack. Relatives of other people who died say the widow has got way too much attention. Her husband, goes the complaint, wasn't the only hero on that plane. The minor resultant controversy is widely seen as an irrelevant and squalid little squabble. America has moved beyond the need for simple heroes.

The most traumatic blow dealt was to the sense of national control, and everywhere you go this anniversary week you see efforts to regain control, to impose pattern on what initially seemed haphazard, to reduce the random by applying data to it.

The data itself is painful. Heroes they may have been, but analysis shows most of the firefighters and emergency workers died needlessly, victims of poor co-ordination and communication. Intelligence agencies at home and in Europe have come under sustained criticism for failing to pick up signals which seem, post-factum, obvious.

The architectural exegetes have established that the fireproofing of the two buildings contributed to their collapse.

The hunger to learn lessons from 9/11 derives partly from the need to invest some sense, some nobility, in otherwise meaningless yet horrific deaths. They did not die in vain, goes the thinking, if, out of their deaths come better guidelines for saving lives in a future similar attack.

The paradox is that the lives saved in this atrocity were frequently saved because some people refused to abide by the existing best-practice emergency guidelines. The achievers stayed at their desks on the basis of telephoned advice and in the interests of their careers.

The underpaid casual workers, in contrast, dropped everything and ran for their lives. 9/11 was the first tragedy on a massive scale where so many informed wealthy privileged professionals died and so many of the poor survived.