The WTC Attack, Sep 11 2001

Commentary and Analysis

Death by Numbers

To put numbers in context:

Estimated deaths in the plane attacks on 11 Sept: 6000

Pedestrians and cyclists deaths, United States 1999 = 5656
Each year over 9,300 pedestrians and cyclists die on EU roads.

Our thoughts go to all innocent victims of terrorism.

We perceive death in very different ways depending on context (and spin)... Our ability to ignore routinized deaths (of peds on our roads for example) yet go into a frenzy of national mourning over a comparable number of deaths from a terrorist attack, imho has many roots. It's not just a complete disregard of some lives and a valuation of others; I don't think we believe that people who work in office buildings are somehow better than people who are taking a walk.

Many other emotional factors are involved. Even if Bush were were a pedestrian he would not rattle his sabre as loudly at careless drivers as he now does at "foreign terrorists". Some deaths speak more loudly than others, for various reasons.

• Deaths that occur one by one in isolation are less impressive than deaths which occur all at once. 120,000 Americans perish each year from maladministraion or incompetence in our medical system, but these people die one by one, not as a group, so we never perceive them as a crowd.
• Deaths which occur slowly or gradually are less impressive than those which occure quickly or catastrophically. 400,000 people die every year from nicotine addiction, but it takes years for smoking cigarettes to kill you, and cancer patients linger on a long time before they are finally vanquished.
• Deaths which occur quietly are less impressive than those which occur with a lot of noise, flame, and smoke: 50,000 people die each year from air pollution, but air pollution is quiet as well as gradual. Plane travel (I mean without hijackers) is far less risky than breathing, for dwellers in our most polluted cities -- but we fear it much more because death by plane is noisy, fiery, catastrophic.
• Deaths which occur with no damage to the property of the powerful (major corporations, rich individuals) are less impressive than deaths which accompany major property damage. Ever noticed how "100 people were killed when flooding destroyed a small village in India" seldom gets quite as much press attention as "100 people were killed when a luxury hotel collapsed during Tropical Storm Dubya"?
• In a "mediated" age, deaths which get little media coverage are ipso facto less impressive than those which do. People cared more about Nicole Simpson's murder than about the other approx. 2000 women who are murdered by men each year in the US, because Ms Simpson's murder was front page news for month after month.
• Deaths we don't expect are more frightening and impressive than deaths we can predict. About 2.3 million people die from all causes every year in the US, but many of them are very old, or in terminal condition after a long illness. Their deaths are predicted and expected, so they do not shock us.
• Deaths we feel we personally could have avoided (by not being that kind of person or not making those choices) are less frightening than random deaths which no one could have avoided. When people who live in ways we don't understand or disapprove of come to grief -- gangsters, drug dealers, prostitutes, smugglers -- or for some of us, anyone less fortunate than ourselves or more foolish -- we tell ourselves that this will not happen to us because we have not made the same choices they made.
• Deaths which are caused directly by someone's malicious action are more shocking and impressive than deaths which occur indirectly by someone's inaction or by covert or remote influence. When some identifiable or potentially identifiable person directly, immediately kills a person or lots of people, there is a villain -- therefore a story with a plot that any child can understand. If the story gets complicated, if the chain of cause and effect takes any effort to follow, then there is less interest. Most of us remember Jack the Ripper far more vividly than we remember Queen Elizabeth I's iron-fisted suppression of the Irish attempts to rebel against English rule. Even though the Queen's commanders in the field killed more innocents, and caused more total suffering than Jack ever did, Jack makes a better and more vivid villain in our collective memory. His is a simple story, but the story of the Irish Troubles is long and involved.
• We must be honest and admit that for all humans who don't aspire to sainthood, the deaths of "our own", our near and dear, kin, friends, members with us in various expanding concentric rings of belonging, matter more to us than the deaths of strangers, foreigners, and people far away. The more "different" or distanced we feel from the dead people, the less we feel their pain -- unless our own sense of outrage or injustice is stirred by the manner of their passing, there is no personal, visceral grief.
• Lastly, deaths which infringe on our sense of territory, i.e. that "send a message", are more impressive than deaths which represent no message to us. Mafia leaders used to (and still do) communicate messages of defiance, anger, rebellion and punishment by killing one or more members of another Don's clan, then sending some version of the traditional Sicilian "nyah nyah" confirmation; the dead fish wrapped in an article of the murdered person's clothing. The rage and retribution that were elicited by such a message might have little to do with the absolute importance of the person or people killed, but more to do with the defiance, insolence, or authority asserted by the Don who sent the message. A death that "means something" or "sends a message" gets our attention in ways that no accidental or even randomly violent death can.

The WTC deaths occurred all at once, in a blaze of smoke and flames, with massive property damage, quickly and catastrophically. Pedestrians killed by cars die one by one, usually without a lot of fanfare, with little damage to the car that hits them; some linger on a while and die later of complications or multiple injuries. No fireballs, no Hollywood-style disaster footage.

"Pedestrian Hit By Car" is not a rating-grabber news story, so we don't see heavy media coverage of this death toll. The Sep 11th hits have been covered 24x7 by all US networks and many foreign ones as well. The footage of the destruction has been played over and over again, as have the harrowing interviews with the relatives and friends grieving or panicking on the streets.

We know that our roads are dangerous and we "expect" pedestrians and cyclists to be hit by cars. This is why we invent road "safety" campaigns that focus on warning pedestrians to stay away from cars. When pedestrians are hit by cars, it is expected, not surprising. No one expected that the ancient strategy of fireship deployment would be revived using hijacked passenger aircraft during broad daylight, or that mighty skyscrapers could be brought down in ruins by such simple means. The stunning effectiveness of the WTC hit was a complete surprise. Though some geopolitical watchers (professional and amateur) have thought for years that something "like this" would eventually happen, the actual execution was a mindboggling surprise. However, the extreme surprise and bewilderment of the American public is itself a symptom of naivete and ignorance; see my notes on the history which should make events such as this unsurprising.

Terrorism picks its victims at random; on the surface, no one can make decisions, be "the right kind of person", not be the person that this sort of thing happens to. But people who own cars always have the choice not to do something "dangerous" like walking. Death as a pedestrian is avoidable by not being one; death by terrorist is like lightning out of a clear blue sky. We tend not to consider that governments could avoid a significant percentage of terrorist attacks by amending the conditions which lead to them: expropriation, suppression, the legacies of colonialism, etc.

Mass murder is even scarier than individual murder. Large numbers of deaths caused by a small number of people are more frightening than 5000 murders committed by 5000 different people (unless, of course, an entire subculture becomes murderous, as when the Hutu turned on their friends and neighbours the Tutsi; more on that later). State Department is making a good PR call in immediately trying to pin suspicion on a man with a bad reputation and a known face (bin Laden); like Jack the Ripper, he is a visible, concrete villain ready made to increase the "story value" of these deaths. Deaths by automobile are always interpreted as accidents, not murders; in very few cases are they in fact deliberate, forethoughtful murder, and my own refusal to accept the term "accident" is because of social, political responsibility rather than because I think each individual motorist literally intended the fatal result.

Because the WTC deaths occur in the context of global conflict and are widely believed to be the work of hostile foreign nationals, the emphasis is on the victims as Americans; therefore, for Americans, the victims are "Us", our own, our kin. We feel their deaths more vividly than we feel the deaths of British civilians killed by IRA bomb attacks, Spanish police killed by ETA snipers, or casualties on either side of the never-ending war of terror between the Israelis and the Palestinians. These are American deaths and they are "ours".

These deaths are a message. No dead fish is needed, we know what it means. Someone hates the US very, very much and is prepared to treat their own operatives as expendable, as well as any random number of our "family", to send that message to us. The style of terrorist warfare is the traditional Mafia style (in fact, modern warfare borrows more from gangland and Mafia tradition than from the "legit" tradition of wars of chivalry in Europe, but that's a big subject and let's not go there right now). The death of a pedestrian conveys a message only if you are already alerted to a political struggle over the control of public space, to the automobile as a symbol of power, and to a class or caste distinction being made between the motorized and non-motorized. To the average person, the death of a pedestrian by automobile sends no message at all; it is "an accident", it "just happens."

All these reasons, some "good reasons" and some perhaps a bit shameful, contribute to our indulging in an orgy of national grief over 6000 deaths when we have no difficulty at all ignoring a much higher death toll (40 to 50 thousand), year in and year out, on our highways.

The well-known algebra for headlines: One dead American is equal to a handful of dead Europeans. Hundreds of Asians might die to rate the same treatment. And bottom of the list, shamefully, are the thousands of Africans who must die before their tragedy will measure up at all.

--Scott Peterson, on the unwritten rules for war correspondents

Leaving behind the contentious question of our own past culpability, the problem of immediacy affects us even when the numbers are much larger. The tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq, horrendous as they are, are dwarfed by the sheer scale of suffering and death in the last couple of decades in Africa.

Nationally we are doing a lot more emoting, feeling a lot more rage and grief, over our 6000 dead US citizens than we have over -- say -- the 20 million Africans who have died from AIDS in the last decade (2.4 million in 1999 alone) -- or the approximately 2 million people who have died in Congo during armed conflict following the 1997 incursion of Hutu from Rwanda.

Nor, earlier, did we demonstrate in the streets, light candles, howl for revenge, see our elected leaders weep in public, or hold a national day of mourning for the 800,000 Tutsi whom the Hutu massacred in just one year (1994) in Rwanda. At the time, US State Department looked the other way and found every excuse in the book for not getting involved -- the fiasco of Mogadishu was fresh in our minds at the time and Clinton was worried about re-election. (The government of France, to its eternal discredit, continued supplying arms and materiel to the Hutu government long after the genocide in Rwanda was verified by the international press.)

Yet these awesome tragedies -- human suffering and social destruction on a scale we can hardly imagine -- are dismissed airily today as our press and pundits describe the WTC incident as the worst thing that has ever happened, the most dreadful act of terrorism, the most terrifying thing, the thing that will change the world forever, the most traumatic thing we can imagine.

It changed Africa forever when ordinary Hutu people, maddened by a well-orchestrated campaign of propaganda by their own government, turned on their neighbours with improvised weapons and started a slaughter which, for sheer efficiency, outdid any previous genocide in history. The daily body count varied between 11 and 30 thousand, day after day, month after month, until there were very few Tutsi left to kill. The world was indeed never the same (for Rwandans, for neighbouring Zaire, for all of Africa, for the UN peacekeepers who were withdrawn when they wanted to say, for the journalists who dared to go and see the unspeakable happening in daylight). But it didn't change the world for Americans, so we didn't really notice. We knew there was "some trouble in Africa as usual". [Recommended reading, Me Against My Brother (Peterson), Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Glover)]

So never mind the 5500 pedestrians we write off every year -- we responded with less passion and anger even to (literally) millions of deaths overseas than to a "paltry" few thousand here at home. It's not that we don't know how to add. It's not even that it's "none of our business" -- that things at home matter, things abroad don't. To some events overseas we respond passionately even when it is none of our business; others we ignore. But none of them have the same impact as tragedy at home; it's just human nature.

When we hear these irritating statements being made about "the most terrible thing that ever happened," "the worst act of terrorism the world has seen," "an event that will change our world forever" and so on, I think we have to discount a little of the callousness and ignorance that people seem to be displaying. I don't think most people are really, literally saying that they think 6000 Americans are more worth weeping over than 20 million Africans, or that this event has changed the world more than AIDS, or that we have now suffered more than Bosnians or Somalis or Indonesians or any other people who have come under surprise attack. Or even that killing people on our roads every day is just fine. I think they're just saying they are deeply shocked, and these wild exaggerations are an expression of shock.

The appalling body counts in Africa escaped our collective grief for various reasons listed above. We are used to disaster in Africa, so we expect bad news from there. The death rates (except for the Rwandan genocide) are steady and almost unvarying. The stories are complicated, with few individuals whose names we can remember (or pronounce), and often no self-evident Good Guys and Bad Guys. The place is very distant, the people very foreign; they speak strange languages and look very different from ourselves, and on top of all that they are poorer than we are. They fail many of the criteria for easy and immediate compassion and grief.

Their deaths also seem remote from us morally. Students of geopolitics, world banking, the history of colonialism, and so forth, will protest that they are intimately connected to the US and Europe -- but the average person in the street doesn't feel that way about it. Even if we know in some corner of our souls that starvation and disease in the Third World are somehow connected to our own history, to colonialism, to contemporary commercial, trade, and military arrangements that keep us on top of the food chain, the connection is tenuous in our own minds -- we are not personally standing over starving people within arm's reach, tormenting them with our super-size burgers and fries.

They, however, may feel as if we are doing just that. America, thanks to its financial and media domination, is far more immediate and present in every other country on earth than those countries are immediate and present to us. The world watches American TV -- we don't watch their TV. The world watches American movies and wears American T-shirts; only a tiny fraction of Americans watch foreign movies or wear foreign clothing; and there are many here who consider those few to be "suspect" or "weird." People in other countries are not quite real to most Americans. As our corporate culture reaches further and further, more and more Americans even when they travel never really experience a foreign place. Many tourists never stray from the resort hotels and carefully controlled packaged tours for which they pay top dollar, and their chances of finding a Mickey D, a Starbucks, a Gap in the midst of any "foreign" city are increasing daily. Even when we travel to other places, we evade or reject their foreignness, instead packaging the experience as product.

But having a couple of planes crash into showpiece skyscrapers in our own country, on our own turf, in one of our proudest and most vigorous cities, is not distant, it's not vague, it's not remote -- it's in-yo-face. It's real. And it deeply disturbs our sense of comfortable isolation from the more unpleasant realities of modern life. For most working- and middle-class Americans, this kind of trouble (bombs going off, buildings burning, large number of people suddenly dying) are things that happen on television, while we sit on the couch with a cold drink and a snack and watch with only limited attention the few seconds of coverage that our networks devote to overseas disasters.

Americans, because of our short national history (much of it spent in isolationism) lack of strong and aggressive territorial neighbours, and of course our national wealth (of both natural resources and capital), have a tremendous sense of invulnerability: from "fortress US" we can do what we like around the world, with no fear of reprisal. Seems like it is this sense of geographical and geopolitical might and immunity that creates such diplomatic aberrations as Bush's unilateralism and contempt for established treaties; the US's arrogant attitude to the UN and to international law; etc. Noam Chomsky once called the US the world's largest rogue state (Chomsky article).

It also probably accounts for the indifference of the US media to most news from other countries. We tend to ignore things that are no threat to us -- just like drivers "don't see" cyclists. If it can't hurt us we don't see it.

So there is a deep shock to the collective national consciousness any time this sense of complete invulnerability is compromised. It was compromised at Pearl Harbor, and the fear/rage response was draconian: aside from active combat casualties, the Japanese lost about 130,000 civilian residents at Hiroshima and another 60 to 70 thousand at Nagasaki. Fewer than 2,500 Americans died in the unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor; if we consider the nuclear strikes on Japan as a deterrent and retaliation for the Pearl Harbor attack that so enraged the US, then the "payback" was in the ballpark of 100 to 1, reflecting an algebra similar to that observed by war correspondents.

The other notable response was of course the internment of thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans, many of whom considered themselves Americans, were loyal to America, and whose faith in American justice and democracy was deeply shaken as a result. These overreactions are typical of anyone who has suddenly been thrown into fear and panic from a state of unconcern and unawareness of risk: America reacted just as any average, irrational human being would react -- but with megatonnage of nuclear explosives, and with the force of a wartime police state, rather that with fists, feet, or a handy brick.

Americans are panicking again, right now, because of that same feeling of loss of safety -- it isn't so much the actual body count, though no one can deny that 6,000 deaths is a fairly large toll for a one-hour disaster, larger than the losses inflicted by most earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, etc. America's nuclear weapons program, ironically, made us feel "safe" again after Pearl Harbor. We felt safe because we had the power to destroy life on earth: a peculiar definition of safety. Nevertheless, the strategy of "being the meanest SOB in the Valley" has comforted and sustained us for fifty years.

Americans (of the middle class, the respectable working class, and the upper and pundit classes at least) have believed for four generations that as long as they can avoid civil war, there will not be armed conflict on American soil: that "no matter what happens" they and their children will be safe. It is inconceivable that America could be invaded or defeated by conventional military assault.

You might say that America thinks like a SUV driver: the reality of our lives is to be as armoured, as protected, as "safe" as possible -- thus, we can run over anything in our path with impunity. So when a hooligan smashes the window of our SUV and shoots a passenger, it's very shocking; we suddenly feel so afraid, so vulnerable, because of the loss of our relative or imagined security. People who live in respectable neighbourhoods and experience a break-in, robbery, armed assault, experience the same crushing sense of betrayal and despair -- the home they thought was safe turned out not to be safe. The surprise, shock, and sense of betrayal may be far more devastating than any actual financial or sentimental loss from the stolen property, or physical injuries received in the assault.

My $.02 is that the SUV mentality works no better for ensuring global security than it does for ensuring "road safety". Arrogance and insulation breed dangerous behaviour; a sense of absolute personal safety encourages risky driving. True safety for everyone, real security, depends on real community: we are safe among our neighbours only if we have mutual trust, mutual regard, and mutual concern for our mutual reputations. America has for too long not cared a fig what anyone else thought of us; we have, instead, told the world what it must think of us, and what it must think about itself (it must think what we think, obviously, since we are always right).

So my answer to Andrea would be that for all these reasons, it is difficult for Americans to "see" the 5500 dead pedestrians killed by cars, scattered all over a huge nation; and all too easy for us to see, obsessively, nothing but the 6000+ victims of the WTC hit.