Say the Right Thing
“Frankly,” Tribune columnist Clarence Page told me by E-mail, “I envy those who were able to react with remarkably measured, cold-blooded reason on the first day. I couldn’t do it.”
Then he worried and warned. “Much of the world lives every day with the possibility of being bombed. Compared to them, we Americans have been lucky. Now their war is our war….This massive terror attack tests Americans in ways the United States has not been tested before. It tests our ability to rally behind an effective counter-terrorist war. It also tests our ability to avoid turning against each other while we wage it. . . . Our anger must not lead us to demonize entire ethnic groups for the acts of a few of their distant cousins.”
“I felt a real need to write that day, and I wrote fast,” Morrissey told me that afternoon. “The only difference between me and anybody else walking down the street that day is that I was able to write a column about Tuesday’s events. We all were hurting that day. To take the columnists out of Wednesday’s paper, I believe, would have taken some of the sense of shared pain out of the coverage.”
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“For a columnist not to write,” said Bob Greene, “would be, I think, to break an essential understanding between us and the people who choose to read us.” Greene forwarded to me some E-mail from readers. “It takes a great writer to capture the feeling through simple things such as people on Lake Michigan looking at the sky towards downtown,” wrote one of them.
All this was about Wednesday. But the columns right for Wednesday wouldn’t do even one day later. Though few new facts were known, Schmich’s “first flush” had passed. On Thursday, columnists again shouldered their obligation to be considered. Eric Zorn, who alternates with Schmich in the Tribune, acknowledged this in print. He told us how he and his son had been tossing the baseball around in the yard Tuesday morning when his wife “came onto the porch to interrupt our little Norman Rockwell scene,” and how when his son took off for school “he stepped into a different country than the one in which we’d been playing catch.” This was day-one fare, and Zorn stepped back from it. “By now,” he wrote, “you have probably read and heard your fill of ordinary-morning-interrupted tales and how-I-heard-and-what-I-felt anecdotes. In fact, I’m grateful that you slogged through mine and have made it this far down the column. But they’re important stories to tell. And I urge you, once you finish with the newspaper, to pick up a pen or go to the computer and take a few minutes to write about your day Tuesday. . . . You think you’ll never forget, but you will. . . . Your thoughts will gradually come to conform with history’s judgments, and your recollections will turn generic.”
By the third day the catastrophe had begun to recede, even if no one was ready to say so. Televisions in offices weren’t necessarily running nonstop any longer, planes were beginning to fly, and networks were discussing when to go back to commercials. Catastrophe was being assimilated. There was still only one subject fit for a columnist, but the strain of continuing to dwell on it in the absence of fresh facts began to show. “We’re at war. There’s no other way to put it now,” John Kass wrote for Tuesday afternoon’s extra edition of the Tribune. The next morning he asserted an “obligation of blood” between America’s living and its dead. On Thursday he stepped back for a wider view: “For the past decade we’ve sat dumb and stupid as the U.S. military was transformed from a killing machine into a playpen for sociologists and political schemers.” By Friday he was saying, “I thought I’d surely hear the whining, and the carping, and the press conferencing and the picketing against public prayer. But the anti-public prayer whining isn’t enough to register. So we’re not hearing the separation-of-church-and-state crowd gnashing its teeth.”
