In America, afterwards A six-week lecture tour of the U.S. for author KEN WIWA is turning out differently than planned: After Sept. 11, he is less interested in what he can tell Americans than in what they might have to say to him. Today's dispatch is the first in a series By KEN WIWA Saturday, October 6, 2001 – Print Edition, Page F8 The security detail at Pearson airport barely raised half an eyebrow when I patted my stomach and muttered, "ICD." My medical documents were proffered and examined. I detoured around the scanning machine and adopted the crucifix position for a manual search -- standard procedure for anyone with an implantable cardiovascular defibrillator. People standing around the scanning machine glanced over at me. Some smiled out of an involuntary politeness, their eyes betraying a momentary anxiety. The war zone, I thought, is as much a psychological as a physical space. I collected my bags and joined the handful of passengers waiting to board flight CA 1996 to Newark, where I would connect for Boston. It was a ghost plane. There were maybe 12 passengers on board for the 737-300 jet's 60-minute flight. As it ducked under the clouds and circled in a holding pattern, offering a clear, bird's-eye view of New York, there was a collective holding of breath as everyone on board strained to get a view of Ground Zero. In the silence, you could almost hear everyone mentally ticking off of the familiar landmarks of Manhattan: the lime-green oxidized copper of the Statue of Liberty, the gothic gleam of the Empire State Building, the industrial arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. I've been to New York quite a few times now, but I couldn't call up a mental picture of the city before Sept. 11 to compare with the scene below. Scouring the cluttered profile of skyscrapers, I looked for a yawning hole. For some reason, I imagined I'd see some smoke billowing up from the ground. But from holding-pattern altitude, New York looked just the same as ever. Forty-five minutes later, I was stepping off the plane at Logan Airport in Boston, having flown over two angles of the 9/11 Triangle (the New York, Boston and Washington airports). I hooked up with two Bostonians, Carl and Chris Williams, Amnesty International members who had agreed to put me up for the night at the start of my six-week U.S. speaking tour. Before Sept. 11, the idea had been to pitch into the debate about President George W. Bush's isolationist and mawkish instincts on foreign policy and global warming. I'd been approached, as someone whose family has been the victim of big oil interests in Africa, to offer a perspective to Americans about the dangers of dependence on oil and the attendant human-rights abuses. But with his approval ratings bouncing around in the 90s and public opinion wrapped around the Stars and Stripes, Bush is, for now, almost immune from criticism. The former unilateralist on global warming is busy building and heading a multilateral response to another global problem, terrorism. But this one suits American interests, and in this global problem you are either with us or with them -- a strong soundbite for the world and Osama bin Laden to digest. But while the Pentagon is hammering away to ensure that Americans and the world stay on message, I'm taking time off on my tour of duty to assess the mood of the country. I want to know whether the States are as uniformly united as the polls make out, to see how America's resolve holds up in time and across space. In the next six weeks, I will travel from New York to Hawaii, taking in Chicago, Atlanta, Alaska, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and more in between. In that time, I imagine that something will happen,as everyone keeps saying, and I am intrigued to know whether America is clear in its collective mind just what is and may be at stake in its New War. Which is generally how the American media have been describing the world post-Sept. 11. Occasionally, when the word "war" seems too strong to describe events, CNN changes its tune to "Target: Terrorism." Meanwhile, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is urging New York to go shopping. But as soon as the Taliban drags its feet over bin Laden, we're yanked back to Pentagon briefings about troop deployments. The 70 per cent of Americans who are reported to be "depressed" might be getting emotional whiplash from all the mixed messages. Has the roller coaster of emotions destabilized the American mind? What's more, I need to get one thing straight: When does usmean us and when does it mean only U.S.? Carl and Chris Williams know their own minds and are unequivocal and uncompromising in their opinions: Us means us, and U.S. is the problem, not the solution. Identical twins, both are successful consultants in the computer-service industry. Work is a little slack right now, but that doesn't colour their attitude to the war. Carl and Chris have always been into human rights and speak as one, a dual-action rapid fire of radical politics peppered with well-informed opinions that would enrage the Pentagon thought police. Despite being a bastion of the Democratic Party, Boston is a conservative place, but it has one of the highest concentrations of students of any city in America. In Boston, as in other parts of the country, there were antiwar demonstrations and marches last weekend. In their flat, Carl (it might have been Chris) was anxious to show me the picture of the shopping-mall clown from last weekend's peace march. Chris (it might have been Carl) told me how the clown had heckled the peace marchers and how one time he started making a gun from those balloons and popping it, like he was firing into the crowd. And then -- here the twins' eyes widened -- he gave the gun balloon to a child. I woke up the next morning feeling like a war had broken out right there in my head. Carl and Chris had to take me to the airport at 5 a.m. I took the red eye to Washington and we gave ourselves plenty of time because there had been a security breach at Logan Airport. (A Tiger Team of federal agents had managed to get on a plane at Logan armed with guns and knives.) The twins had spent much of the night surfing the Web to laugh at the latest conspiracy theories. At the airport, I left the brothers to their unpatriotic activities, picked up my boarding pass and joined the long line of suits waiting to go through the scanner. Nobody blinked when I adopted the crucifix position. Everyone was too busy working or thinking about work. The new war is becoming a nuisance, with all these delays and excesses of paranoia and patriotism, one suit in the departure lounge told me. I picked up a copy of a magazine while we waited for the plane to depart. "Are we worried yet?" "In Security," "Global Warning," "Enemies at the Gate." These were just some of the headlines of the magazine, a "technology intelligence" journal that was printed before Sept. 11. I learned that Tiger Teams were people "acting on our behalf attempting to break into our security systems to test our security." Social engineering was "guessing passwords by knowing people's birthdays and other personal data." I read that "when securing international operations, one size doesn't fit all." The article was about a business conundrum, but I couldn't help thinking about the task facing Bush as he tries to turn all of us into U.S. National Airport was still closed and flights to Washington were being diverted to Dulles when I arrived at the capital of the U.S. (as opposed to the capital of us,which is New York). In a transit mobile at Dulles, I sat next to an elderly southern couple who spent the entire time of the transit describing the size of the Stars and Stripes they saw on some road in some town somewhere in the South. In between the loud drawl, I underheard two suits, whom I imagined were government officials, quietly grumbling about having to use Dulles, which is a good 45 minutes from town. I picked up the Washington Post, looking to confirm a rumour about Reagan National airport reopening -- I was due to fly out of there to New York in 24 hours. The Post told me that Bush was going to announce that the National would open later that day. As it turned out, Bush announced that the airport would reopen two days later, on Thursday. The uncertainty was killing business, especially for taxi drivers in Washington. My driver, a cussed old goat, was not one of us. As we drove past the Smithsonian Institution, he gesticulated along the length of the street: "You see this? All this would be full of tourists right now, lining up right around the block. But the terrorists have taught Americans that they are not Superman, that they got to be very careful when they go to sleep." Washington was baking under a 80-degree Indian summer, but the mood there has been gloomy. I detected a repressed resentment that all the attention had been focused on New York, but my host told me that people in Washington were especially nervous because it is a "legitimate target-rich environment," using the war jargon that has already begun to creep into workaday conversation. On Wednesday, I headed for New York by train. I gave myself plenty of time after learning of an incident that had prompted Greyhound bus to cancel all its services: A passenger slit the throat of a driver, a bus crashed and killed six people, and 1,900 buses were ordered off the road. I figured I should get to the station in good time in case there was a rush for the train. My fears proved to be irrational: The queue for the Acela Express was modest, but the train was full. Full of businessmen jabbering incessantly into their cellphones. Every conversation was about the crisis, people recalling where they were when it happened, still needing to talk it over, seeking catharsis. I overheard one man wondering about the Greyhound situation: "You can't bail out every transportation industry." If fear is the first condition of war, then America is at war. But it is a curious war, undefined, visible but invisible. Paradoxes and ironies are in full bloom. The U.S. is not sure of itself: The world is changing, or is that us changing, or just the U.S.? An isolationist president is forced to export justice to the world, an antigovernment Republican becomes a new-deal-for-a-new-war kind of President. The land of the free is willingly giving up its freedoms. Security breeds insecurity. A kinder, gentler America, anyone?