James Atlas writes “The Fear This Time” in the
current New York magazine. I suppose the title is intended to bring to mind James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next
Time,” which is already a sign of overreaching and totally inappropriate. The
piece itself reads likes an overwritten essay by an overwrought hysteric. Atlas leaves no doubt of
that with his hand-wringing.
Living in New York is like a terminal disease: You start awake in panic every
morning, your stomach knotted, your heart plunging in your chest. But as the day wears on,
you’re not even aware that you’re going about your life. An event that will surely qualify as one
of the most astounding in the whole of recorded history has occurred not a mile from you. It’s as
if you just happened to be a shepherd tending your flock near Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius
erupted, or a seventeenth-century London publican glancing out the window of his establishment
in the Strand to glimpse the flames consuming London. That two hijacked, passenger-loaded
commercial jetliners should plunge into the World Trade Center and topple it to the ground,
reducing almost 3,000 innocent civilians to ash, was beyond imagination — but I still have to drop
off the dry cleaning and go to the bank.
Compare that with Baldwin. The difference in the quality of the writing, to say nothing of the
sentiment, is like night and day.
I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering — enough is certainly as good
as a feast — but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.
That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human
cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it,
something about himself and human life that no school on earth — and, indeed, no church — can
teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable.
At least the magazine also offers John Leonard on two
documentaries about reality — “Death in Gaza” and “The President Versus
David Hicks” — without the Upper West Side seepage.
