Some of Us Wanted to be Firemen

Some of Us Wanted to be Firemen

by Michael Azre
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On September 17, 2001, policemen, firemen and a paramedic, serving as representative heroes from the previous week’s harrowing events, joined Richard Grasso, the Chair New York Stock Exchange, in ringing the bell to announce the resumption of trading after the longest suspension of American business since the Great Depression. Smoke still clouded the sky around Ground Zero, the stench of the carnage still shifted with the winds, but at last, the country was returning to its rightful pursuit of happiness.

It was by all accounts a moving and portentous event, full of the religious overtones that now obligatorily accompany such public expressions of faith in markets. Rudolph Giuliani and Hillary Clinton attended, serving as angles of the reconciled right and left. Treasury Secretary Paul O’neill was there, too, as an envoy for the President, who was in the War Room pouring over maps of Afghanistan. Allen Sloan from Newsweek, there to cover the event with legions of other reporters who’d been granted the proper security clearances, breathlessly observed that Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan was there as well -- "in spirit, but not in flesh," a holy ghost of the market itself. Greenspan was "hovering over the market," Sloan wrote, his own enthusiasm for the miracle of "The Street" taking flight, "courtesy of the Fed’s half-point rate cut early in the day."

In his benediction before the start of trading, NYSE Chairman Grasso took a cue from our CEO President, announcing that America would "obliterate" its enemies. "The people who inflicted this heinous crime on America and all Americans have lost," he said, as if to suggest that, along with all of the calls for shopping and other markers of American normalcy, the reopened stock market was proof of the nation’s fortitude and resolve.

At the end of his declaration of the market’s triumph over the barbarous enemies of "our way of life," Grasso called for two minutes of silence. They were observed with the same piety as other such moments of silence were observed all over the country in those days. A Marine Major, Rose-Anne Sgrignoli, then led the assembled traders and dignitaries in the singing of "God Bless America," which, through its call for guidance and help, had replaced "Star Spangled Banner’s" declaration of steadfastness as the song that most embodied America’s conception of its place in the world.

The most dramatic moment, however, arrived with the ringing of the bell that announced the NYSE’s return. The firemen, policemen, and the paramedic -- all of whom might have heretofore been cast as sources of labor strife and symbols of the outmoded economy the market itself had all but "obliterated" without sending in a single Blackhawk helicopter -- offered, in photogenic ceremony, more of the help that they and their brethren had delivered over the last few days, joining Grasso in the act of reviving the dynamo of American capitalism.

The symbolism was not lost on Newsweek’s Sloan. "Think about it. . ." he wrote. "The start-trading button is pushed by [men] with names like Manuel Delgado, David Lim, Patrick Boylan, and David Fischer. All of different ethnic origins, but all of them Americans."

This was one of many E Pluribus Unum media moments over the course of those gut-wrenching days, when Americans still suffered the strangling chafe from the choke chain at the end of what had for years prior appeared to be the long, long leash of American history. The country needed visions like this one, needed them desperately. On September 10, it was still reeling from the fiasco of Election 2000, less than dignified, foolish images of George Bush were a media staple, and for all the talk about the end of partisanship that the Bush campaign had promised, the American political landscape was still partisan indeed, full of squabbling over OSHA regulations and the level of arsenic that we could be assumed to tolerate in our drinking water. And now, with the destruction of the Twin Towers playing in a constant loop on every major media outlet and a beleaguered citizenry asking, "Why do they hate us?" America longed to look at itself as unified again, presenting a solid front against a threat whose name continued to change -- Osama, Usama -- in the mouth of every newscaster.

What Newsweek’s Sloan failed to note in his melting pot hubbub and talk of the market’s resurrection was the event’s attempt to offer a symbolic declaration of a truce between management and labor. The firemen’s, policemen’s, and emergency workers’ unions, which, pre-9/11, had long been maligned as thorns in the side of city government and as vestiges of the pre-deregulation days when productivity growth suffered, now appeared to be working together with America’s managers and bosses, teaming up with them to get the very engine of American capitalism running again. Earlier that year, other union types -- not firemen, but lowly garment workers and factory workers, along with some anarchists and hippie types -- had been gathering to denounce the WTO and other arms of globalization, gumming up the works to the extent that the strategically placed fencing at their protests would allow them. But there would be no talk of that now, no talk of social class, no talk of an America that wouldn’t have much to cheer about when Wall Street made its triumphant return.

And so rift between management and labor was one more thing that September 11 had allowed the country to transcend, along with partisanship and a desire to put profit first among all things. "For today, it’s only money," Newsweek’s Sloan wrote, dismissing his and the market’s losses that day. "Tomorrow we can get back to greed."

Who didn’t want to be a fireman in days like those, when greed could be put off in the face of the higher aim of national unity? Who didn’t admire those firemen’s self-sacrifice, their commitment to the commonweal? Who didn’t brace themselves and gulp when they heard reports of how those firemen and their other union brothers -- Port Authority cops, NYPD uniform guys, workers from a nearby construction site -- ran into the burning towers of the World Trade Center? Who didn’t want to buy the caps and t-shirts that said FDNY?

Union guys, it seemed, were "hot" again, maybe even capable of taking on the public admiration they’d once had once had when they were cleaning up the mills and winning the forty hour work week. By the end of September, the Baby Gap had managed to stock its stores with the firemen costumes that would symbolize our solidarity. By Halloween itself, costume shops and the Baby Gap were reporting shortages plastic fireman’s hats and firemen’s coats. Masks and disposable rubber suits that represented the individualistic renegades who dominated the output of the nation’s entertainment conglomerates were readily available.

Meanwhile, women wrote personal ads like this one from the September 21, 2001 Chicago Reader:

MAN OF INTEGRITY and honor wanted. Yuppie corporate types need not apply. Cops, firefighters, tradesmen preferred.

Done with the guys who watched money move across their desks, these lonely hearts wanted what everyone wanted then: rescue from the national nightmare of anthrax in the mail, the Trade Center rubble carted off to Fresh Kills landfill, and Jihad updates scrolling across the ticker on CNN. It didn’t matter if there weren’t enough firemen, cops, and tradesmen to answer the ads. The point was the collective desire for a set of strong arms to save, not the dwindling number of union members across all trades, including firefighting. By September 2001 many of municipalities were already struggling with budget shortfalls. In some areas, fire departments had been so deprived of funding that they were reduced to rounding up a volunteer work force from fire departments in surrounding communities that were still willing to pay for them. Not that anyone worried about such things after September 11. There were more than enough firemen on television.

Even Anne Coulter, the right’s attempt at a sexy and feminine re-branding of Rush Limbaugh, chimed in on firemen’s new status as hot property in the media. Surprisingly, Coulter took issue not with the fact that these heroes benefited from collective bargaining, but with the fact that so many of their most prominent admirers were liberals. Coulter, writing long after the firemen fad had passed in February 2003, complained about peacenik Susan Sarandon’s appearance in a play about firefighters and about Hillary Clinton’s endorsement of federal program that would provide additional funding police and fire departments. How dare these women use "real men," like firefighters, as symbols of their own values, she asked. "It is blatant phoniness for these women to pretend that they like firemen," Coulter wrote, full of her usual unsubstantiated sneering and disownment of her own place of privilege. "Rich feminists have as much in common culturally as I do with sumo wrestlers. They hate the way firemen talk, they hate their beer, they hate their moral and cultural sensibilities. . . ."

They hate their beer? Coulter’s analysis of the "feminist infatuation" with firemen amounted to little more than the right’s ongoing campaign to promote its faux populism, and it was full of that campaign’s manufactured affinity for the common man and its accusations of elitism against those who’d be his advocates. This was the same logic that made stories of George W. Bush choking on a pretzel a charming pratfall -- evidence of both the man’s distance from the blue-blood of his ancestors and the world of secret handshakes at Yale. Coulter’s case reduced to this: because elitists like "feminist harpy Anna Quindlen" didn’t like beer (one wonders if Coulter had bothered to ask her) and elitists like our dry-drunk President may have liked beer too much, it stood to reason that firemen were the constituency of -- no, the embodiment of -- conservatism, even as their unions worked to undermine labor flexibility and inflated the size of government outlays.

To Coulter and no doubt to many of the traders who applauded them at the reopening of the NYSE on September 17, 2001, firemen had no business serving as symbols of the agenda that their representatives pursued at the bargaining table, but every business taking their place among the larger pantheon of symbols that had been generated after September 11 to reassure the country that the angry white men who made up Rush Limbaugh’s core audience were now in charge, acting decisively and heroically to protect and serve. Like those traders and like most Americans, they drank beer and watched the NFL on Sundays -- this was all one needed to know about trusting anyone -- and sure enough, if the buildings were falling around us, they’d be there to rush in. Why? Because. Their heroism certainly wasn’t a question of whether one paid them fairly or allocated funding for the equipment they needed to do their jobs. And it certainly wasn’t the result some antiquated notion of the value of public institutions as refuge against the motives of private interests and profit. Could you imagine if Al Gore were President, some pundits asked, doubting whether such a man could have taken on the fireman-like macho and commitment to public service that rightfully belonged to George W. Bush, to spite the fact that he’d gone AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard and been the beneficiary of a life-long allocation of resources that successfully equipped him with the tools he needed to steal an election.

But the facts about Bush the candidate were quickly forgotten after 9/11, along with those childish and incompetent images of him posing with elementary school kids, holding a copy of The Hungry Caterpillar in his lap. The fact is, in much the same way as the media rushed to offer up the firemen as a reassurance of America’s benevolence and courage (versus, say, disturbing, in-depth reports about how the CIA had funded and trained bin Laden), it quickly recast George W. Bush as the man capable of our rescue, rolling out a new image of him faster than the Baby Gap had managed to fill its stores with firemen’s costumes. The definitive moment came when Bush himself spoke to the crowd through a megaphone at Ground Zero, taking the rescue worker’s equipment and recasting himself as a comrade to all of the firefighters, policemen, EMTs, and hardhats, who were doing the real work of sorting through the wreckage. He was one of them, and he, too, would save us from the devastation of that day.

The narrative of George W. Bush as proper savior had an irresistible sweep; not only was it necessary on some gut level of national consciousness, it was aided by what was perhaps the most media savvy White House Communications office in U.S. History. Known already for their ability to keep Executive Departments on message and for their uncanny propensity to release news of executive orders and regulation revisions on Fridays and holidays, the President’s handlers and a complicit media made sure that only steely and resolved images of our leader were released to the public. Some photos were even mis-credited to members of the press, when in fact they had been supplied directly by the White House.

Of course, if images of the cowboy-slash-action figure President (now in jeans, t-shirt, and ten-gallon hat, squinting over the wheel of a Cadillac) failed to reassure, there were still, in the months following September 11th, a surfeit of images of the new cultural icons from the FDNY. Thomas Franklin’s now famous New Jersey Bergen Record photo of three firemen raising the flag over Ground Zero appeared everywhere, drawing gasping parallels to the famous Life photo of American troops raising the flag over Iwo Jima, following the Bush administration and Project for a New American Century inspired script that September 11, like Pearl Harbor, was a catalyzing event that united the country in its longing and aspiration for -- what? -- global war and a return to shopping? But despite the romance of Franklin’s image and its part in selling firemen as representatives of the American spirit triumphant (a good thing to look at while John Ashcroft hassled librarians), it still led to one of the first disputations over the meaning of September 11, one that signaled the first cracks in depictions of the world after the tragedy, like Allen Sloan’s account of the reopening of the NYSE, as one that brought together Americans of every cultural stripe and reaffirmed our best values.

At the request of the New York City Fire Department, and no doubt at the tacit request of the nation itself (which longed for the unity declared by the newsprint flags that it had taped in its windows), a statue replicating the photograph had been modified to show the three firemen, who were white, as a multi-ethnic group consisting of a white, a Hispanic, and an African American. When word of this reached the public in March of 2002, outrage followed. While they praised the statue’s sentiment, many liberals complained that it papered over the New York City Fire Department’s historically racist hiring practices; meanwhile, conservatives, outraged that the truth of the day had been violated in the interest of a Clintonite agenda, complained that the "multi-culturalists" had gone too far, distorting history in the interests of fetishizing diversity.

Both sides were right on this count: 9/11 had forced the American psyche to more than its usual reflexive distortions of fact. What was at stake in this commemoration were two necessary visions that were inimical: on one side was a need for a genuine promotion of the idea of America unified and genuinely committed to inclusion, a need for promotion of the idea that we were all New Yorkers and that we had all been attacked; on the other side was a need for accuracy (and, perhaps, for further proof of whiteness as a determiner of true American value), which would acknowledge gravity that was owed to the event, holding it sacrosanct and aligned to truth. More interesting than either side of the firefighter’s memorial argument, however, was the fact that both its camps, in raising a ruckus about how this Ur-commemoration of 9/11 would be constructed, were offering up questions about the whole post-9/11 PR machine in a time when most Americans were still heeding Ari Fleisher’s warning that now was a time to "watch what you say."

The media let the story of New York City firemen’s memorial drop. Surely most Americans, even having seen Franklin’s photograph hundreds, if not thousands, of times have no idea which image represents the truth of what happened when those firemen decided to raise a flag over the site of the disaster on September 12.

But the facts and symbols of 9/11 are well damned, even more so than the facts of George W. Bush’s military service and the maneuverings that took place during the recount in Florida. While the day is now largely considered the defining moment in the George W. Bush presidency, only few recall that, on the day itself, some in the media were more worried about the location of Dick Cheney than the location of the President himself. And no one recalls either that Air Force One kept the President in motion, out of potential harm’s way, and not, as the new Showtime movie would have it, at the White House, talking his cowboy talk about how those cowardly terrorists would "know just where to find [him]" if they wanted a fight. Fewer still, according to now oft cited polls in stories regarding the run up to Gulf War II, realize that no evidence exists to link Al Quaeda and Iraq.

Less spectacularly, but no less inaccurately, few Americans recall that most of the heroes of September 11, and many of its victims, were members of organized labor. This was a fact to be glossed over even as the firemen’s costumes flew off the racks. But Tom Robbins, writing for The Village Voice, recorded labor’s losses in October 2, 2001 story. As many as 1000 of the victims belonged to labor unions, Robbins speculated, pointing out not only the firemen, policemen, and EMTs who had been lost in the rubble of the Twin Towers, but also the members of the Pilots Union, the Public Employees Federation, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, and Service Employees International Union who had perished. Robbins couldn’t be sure of the exact numbers, and relied instead on ever fluctuating estimates.

As eager as anyone to find hope in what had happened, Robbins also chronicled some of the union members’ heroism. It’s worth quoting at length, if only because so much of this has already been forgotten:

Moments after the first dark smoke began rising from the north tower, construction workers from all over the city began heading for the Trade Center. At 76th Street and Third Avenue, several dozen hard hats boarded a city bus and made the driver take them downtown. Others commandeered contractors’ vans.

In downtown Brooklyn, where three new high-rises were going up, workers, their tool belts flapping, ran across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The new AOL-Time Warner tower on Columbus Circle was stripped of workers within minutes of the first attack. "Every job in Manhattan and most in Brooklyn were pretty much shut down by 10:00 a.m.," said [the New York City Building Trades Council’s Paul] Fernandez, who rode to the site in one of two truckloads of steamfitters. . . .

Several thousand hardhats worked at the Trade Center for the next week. . . .

Nobody was paid. . . . Meanwhile, paying jobs at worksites elsewhere in the city sat abandoned as workers refused to leave the rescue effort. . . .

But in those days of uncertainty, if it was no time for Bill Maher to be questioning the depiction of the terrorists as "cowards," it was also no time to be a champion for organized labor. The call was to rally around the flag and the President, and the President, for all his compassion, was no friend of the worker. As debate began over the formation of the Homeland Security Department in October 2001, the Bush administration, in keeping with the market-driven dictate that labor must be flexible, insisted that the executive branch not suffer the constraints of union rules for those who would protect us from "the evildoers" and reserved for itself the "broad authority to hire, fire, and transfer employees in the department." The Administration also wanted to follow the dictates of privatization, as it had in pushing for school vouchers in its original version of No Child Left Behind, attempting to leave baggage screening to private security companies. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, remarking on the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to work with organized labor, called it "the most anti-union Administration since Hoover."

And so even as firemen -- and to a lesser extent union members -- came to represent all that was American, right, and good, the vision of reconciliation that their appearance at the re-launching of the NYSE might have symbolized was undermined, or rather revealed to be the media moment that it ultimately was. It took a less than a month for the nation to forget the idea that unions supplied the heroes of 9/11, just as it had long ago forgotten that unions were an integral part of public service that been invited to represent public employees by a government that believed itself to be "an honest broker" between interests of the people and the interests of property. By September 11, 2002, as the Bush Administration began to "roll-out" its marketing plan for the war in Iraq, the rift between labor and management in the media was as wide as it had been during the first wave of union-busting that took place during the Reagan administration. The public and the press, of course, seemed to back Bush in his antipathy to labor. To commemorate the anniversary of September 11, the Northern Indiana Union Post Tribune, a paper that served the onetime union-dominated area around Gary, printed an editorial cartoon showing Osama bin Laden passing through airport security with a bomb under his arm and a guard saying, "Go ahead -- I’m on my break." The caption below the cartoon ran: "IF HOMELAND SECURITY EMPLOYEES BECOME UNIONIZED."

If the public hasn’t vilified firemen’s unions in this same way as it has vilified the prospect of unionized members of the Transportation Safety Administration, then the conservative majority in Washington has been only too happy to do its part, passing a series of measures, including the President’s second round of tax cuts, that have effectively strangled state governments, and -- in more of a rush than a trickle down -- starved large municipalities, like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago, of the funds they need to meet federal mandates for homeland security and provide for adequate police and fire protection. Cities, of course, represent more than just prime targets for terrorist attacks; they also represent large, traditionally Democratic voting blocks and union strongholds. Unfortunately for their residents and unfortunately for the public employees who are at the frontline of protecting those residents from potential attack, cities have been given short shrift in maintaining the safety and security that the President has declared to be at the heart of his every policy decision. On a per capita basis, homeland security funding for states like Dick Cheney’s Wyoming is as much as ten times the amount dedicated to protecting states like California and New York, and the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that federal funding for security -- police stations and fire departments -- will fall short by $98 billion over the next five years.

With their massive homeland security outlays, cities like New York are hit hardest by these shortfalls. Already forced to enact a commuter tax and to make drastic cuts in city services, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has shaved $42 million off the New York City Fire Department’s budget and this past April, he released a worst-case-scenario, "doomsday budget" that would cut an additional $62 million from the department. New Yorkers have protested fire station closings with some avail, but the problem runs far deeper. This August, a firehouse in Queens was shut down because it was over-run with rats. The firefighters there were forced to evacuate the building, not because they were unnerved by the sound of rats running behind the walls and across the ceiling, but because the stench from the rats had grown overwhelming.

But such are the working conditions for the heroes of September 11, who having served as proper photo-ops, are now living with reality of the policies that their media images have indirectly promoted. Nationally, the irresponsibility of the current homeland security funding structure has passed without much comment, and the Bush administration’s overall hostility to labor is only something a few determined presidential candidates will mention as they look to focus their "messages" in Iowa. But no matter, still more images of American strength and endurance have taken the firemen’s place. The firemen of New York City are easily forgotten now that the war in Iraq has provided the country with a new spate of sound-bytes about the indomitable power of American men in uniform. The President, of course, cast himself among these men in uniform yet again, this time by landing on the deck of the USS Maine and prematurely declaring an end to hostilities.

Back at home, the Bush Administration was cutting federal subsidies for the schools that served children from military bases and planning to reduce combat pay. But what did it matter? The soldiers in Iraq were volunteers. They’d signed on and of course they’d do their duty, just as the firemen had on September 11. What no one in the Bush Administration was willing to ask, however, was what was owed these people who would sacrifice themselves for the notion that America was larger than their own interests and for the idea that the public good, and their duty to it, superceded the value that they would grant to their own lives. Thanks to the rush of events -- to the ongoing war on terror abroad and to the terror alerts here at home -- questions like these simply aren’t asked, and memories that point to how the nation might have reacted differently to 9/11 are simply "obliterated" like so much else.

Remember: after 9/11, some of us wanted to be firemen. Some of us admired the sacrifices they made and saw those sacrifices not simply as symbols of the country determined and united, and not simply as symbols of our desire for rescue, but as symbols of our ability to put public interest ahead of self-interest, to put people above money and property and corporate graft. We agreed with President Bush when he called for a new commitment to public service in his 2002 State of the Union Address, and we couldn’t believe it when, a year later, he slashed the funding for AmeriCorps, treating potential contributions of American young people as cavalierly as he’d treated the funding for our first responders. After 9/11, we wanted to show the world how we were committed to helping our neighbors, now matter how different they were from us, whether they were New Yorkers or the women of Afghanistan. But these sentiments, no matter how real, were transformed into the rationale for a completely different approach to the facts, one that made September 11 and the hope that rose out of its tragedy into a justification for destroying the very things that underlie the ideas of public trust and public good.

New York City’s firefighters deserved better than buildings infested with rats and American soldiers deserved better than the squalid conditions they’ve been forced to live in thanks to the fact that private contractors, who were hired to support them by supplying food and building barracks, have failed to share their sense of duty in taking on the all but insurmountable task of subjugating and rebuilding Iraq.

Those companies that failed to honor our men in uniform, if not their no-bid contracts, were scared to take on the risks of entering the uncertainty of a war zone. And corporate America was just as scared over 9/11, with some companies pulling out of New York, unwilling to be "targets." Fear of this sort is all too common now, and both the Bush Administration and the media have done their part to keep Americans from reacting to events with the courage that their firemen and soldiers have demonstrated. All through those heady days after September 11, another set of media images ran as a counterpoint to those heroic images of New York City’s firemen: those shots of bin Laden with his minions in Afghanistan; those chilling photos of the 19 hijackers. With each image of rescue, there was another image of fear, a John Walker Lind pulled from a flooded basement in Afghanistan, suggesting that the terrorists were harder than us, more willing to sacrifice, and more than capable of spreading their antipathies to our shores. What we should have been scared of was this: even as we were singing "God Bless America" and plastering "United We Stand" on t-shirts and bumper stickers, our leaders were systematically attempting to demolish the possibility that we’d be able to stand united either as workers or as citizens, wrecking the possibility that we’d be able to believe that we held an America enough in common that we could come together, reconciled and truly representative of our currency’s E Pluribus Unum, and sing to her of her dignity, purpose, and promise.


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Michael Azre is a freelance writer based in Chicago, IL. He can be reached at m.azre@worldnet.att.net
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