Where I was and how I felt nine years ago

Nine years ago, I was consulting outside Atlanta. I'd been working with this company for seven weeks. I was about to wrap the project up, and as I was leaving my hotel on the morning of September 11, 2001, I saw on CNN an image of a rather serious looking fire on an upper floor of the World Trade Center. Everything else unfolded as I was driving to the office and then as I sat at my desk. A few days later I wrote the following:

September 15, 2001

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Alpharetta, Ga., where I’ve been consulting with a local company for several weeks. This is the first weekend I’ve spent here. I normally go home to my family in New Jersey on weekends, but after the September 11 attacks on the United States it seemed to the people close to me that there would be greater comfort in my just staying put until my project wraps up. It’s a small thing, but it’s one more broken shard to gather up from the wreckage of collective confidence that we’re safe and untouchable because we’re on American soil.

There are flags everywhere. The company I’m assisting has hundreds of them lining its driveways and parking areas, and a giant one in the atrium where they held a three-minute silence at noon on Friday. Patriotism is a natural and honorable reflex at a time like this. We’ve been assaulted because we are Americans, and we turn to each other and to the government for comfort, defense and the means to strike back. President Bush is the only one with the resources to make us feel safe and punish those who have violated us – whoever they turn out to be.

But not all of those people who died were Americans, and those who were Americans were also other things: Parents, Little League coaches, people with chronic illnesses they were fighting, depressed people, people who loved to do needlepoint, gay people, people who had just lost their jobs or were about to, alcoholics, children, tourists. People who had other aspects of themselves for which there are no flags to wave at vigils, but that preoccupied them at the moment that first plane hit the first tower.

I’m feeling a more personal rage, and when something like this takes place anywhere in the world, I inevitably think of one individual. His name was Bahram Dehqani-Tafti. I met him in 1977 when I was a senior at George Washington University. I was coasting, with most of the important work of my college career more or less finished. I decided to audition for a production of “Faust,” to be done, the poster said, in a gothic cathedral. When I showed up to read for a part, I found that the director, Bahram, a young, brilliant, charismatic, Oxford-educated Iranian graduate student who had been a member of Oxford’s famous Footlights troupe, had changed his mind. He was going to do Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” in GWU’s Marvin Theater instead. I read; I got a good part.

Theater productions are all-consuming for the cast and crew, and we got to be very tight-knit. Rehearsals were hilarious. Bahram was worldly, often bemused by American habits and ways of speaking. (I remember him one night trying to learn the proper colloquial use of the word “Solid!” which at the time was one of those meaningless interjections with multiple uses, roughly like “Whazzzup.”) The show ran for four nights and made a little money. Bahram talked about bringing his own Footlights back together the next fall for another production, but of course we all went separate ways.

A couple of years went by and I wound up in New York, and in Iran they kicked the Shah out and invented the Islamic Republic. One night I ran into an old acquaintance from Washington, another transplanted Iranian, and she told me Bahram was dead. He’d gone back to Iran – because his visa had run out, and to be with his family. In the Shah’s day, Bahram’s father was the first Iranian to be made the Episcopal bishop of that country. After the revolution, that made him an enemy of the state. Rev. Dehqani-Tafti eventually was forced to leave Iran, but Bahram was detained, and one day someone put him in a car, took him off somewhere, and shot him. I got a little of this from Shirin, and the rest from a book Rev. Dehqani-Tafti wrote called “The Hard Awakening.” I hope I have these few facts right.

This is all by way of saying that I hurt, and in ways that are just not soothed by the current patriotic surge. These weren’t soldiers who died on September 11. What I see are thousands of Bahram Dehqani-Taftis. This is not simply an us-versus-them conflict we’re entering into. There is a bigger and deeper context.

Two things are essential to understand as we face off against our faceless enemy:

The new war on international terrorism probably has no specific objective whose achievement will signal an end. We will conduct this like a war, but that is probably the wrong term for this campaign. There is a more visible antagonist in the world, however. It seems there is something in the combination of fundamentalist Islam and nationalism that cannot reconcile itself with secular American values and culture. Islamic Republics, governments that formalize this ideology, hate us, and this hostility motivates the Islamic terrorists. I can’t believe this is solely a function of our support for Israel; fundamentalist Islam sees Western culture as a cancer. We may never figure out how to have normal relations with countries whose main driving force is purist Islamic nationalism. But learning how to coexist with them is a core challenge now that the Cold War is done.

While we’re at this, we have to resist the urge to wound ourselves by lashing out at our own neighbors. In wartime, we dehumanize our enemies so that we can kill them in good conscience. If we dehumanize Arabs, Muslims and everyone with dark complexions, we will wind up turning on decent and entirely innocent people, including people who are, despite their accents, dress and immigration status, Americans themselves and hurting like the rest of us. The people who hijacked the planes on September 11 looked and spoke like them, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that they did not speak or act for…say, the Palestinian-born real estate developer in Massachusetts that one friend has told me about, for whom conducting the ordinary routine of American business and personal life has suddenly become as difficult as if he’d been identified on CNN as a terrorist himself.

We may be justified as a nation in responding to the attack aggressively, in ways that are difficult to justify politically and morally in ordinary peacetime. But however we feel about what the U.S. military does in the coming weeks, we’re responsible first for what we do as individuals. I hope we can all resist the impulse toward herd thinking and the temptation to vent anger and grief in ways that make us feel, later, morally reprehensible ourselves.

Peter Dorfman