I was a few hundred yards up on Liberty
Street when the Two Tower of the World Trade Center blew.
I put my nose inside my shirt and ran through
smoke that turned day into night. In the smoke were computers,
asbestos, pulverized glass, human bodies,
lead. I got on another street and One Tower blew up. Again, the air
was black with a pulverized 110-story building.
I did not feel well for two months. I never
said anything because I was too embarrassed. A couple of thousand
had died. So many others were scorched
and broken and maimed. I had no right to open my mouth, I thought.
Besides, from the first day, the EPA had
announced that air was remarkably clean. Work on. Breathe on. You're fine.
They lied. They lied because the administration
did not want people not going to work. They lied the first week
and they lied the week after that and they
have lied every day of the past two years to the people of this city.
Christine Whitman was the EPA head until
recently. I wasn't disturbed that her education was a jump horse school,
but I thought she was better than standing
up and doing what she was told by George Bush's White House, telling lies
to a public who had to breathe this air.
Turns out she isn't much of a human being.
The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time.
Now what are we supposed to do? By now I
feel better physically because I have adjusted to feeling lousy. I'm not
going near a doctor. Once I read
what was in that air, and in it for all those days I spent around there,
I didn't want
to know anything more. Don't scare me.
My friend Dan Collins, whose office is on Broadway, only yards up from
the
site, said he has not taken a good breath
for two years. "They tell me it's good and I know it's bad," he said.
This lying with the lives of the people
of the nation is not solely the habit of Bush and his crew, although it
is more
widespread and being done in so many cases
by so many of their people that it looks like a generation of liars.
This war with Iraq started with the full
government standing right up and looking you in the eye and openly lying
about why we had to invade Iraq immediately.
Bush said the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. Why, they
were starting to make nuclear bombs. He
had a statement about this in his State of the Union speech. When it was
shown to be a lie, Bush had people like
Condoleezza Rice say, Why are you so worried about 26 words in a speech?
That the 26 words were about nuclear weapons
seemed beyond her. Out in the streets, you can scare people with
only three words: "Stick 'em up."
I sit here in New York and I don't believe
one single solitary word of what the government says. Can you believe
anything Bush says? Only if you're a rank
sucker. Then you put that Rumsfeld on and he grimaces and tells you the
first thing he thinks of, and here is Powell,
who I thought would be our first black national candidate and he's as bad
as the rest of them.
What I would like to do is sit here and
type in anger only about Bush and his vile people. The trouble is in my
memory
there is a corrupted past of people I favored.
There was the day in 1962 when John F. Kennedy
was in Cleveland on some sort of appearance and a courier from
Washington brought him photos taken of
Russian missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy canceled the stop and flew back
to
Washington. His press people announced
that he had a severe cold. This was reported to the country.
Kennedy was rushing back to begin secret
meetings about the chances of whether the country was going to go into
a nuclear war with Russia over the missiles.
Talk worked. We're here. But only one person
complained about the false report of Kennedy's cold. That was David
Wise and he worked on a newspaper I was
on. He said that it was a dangerous precedent to lie to the nation for
any reason.
At the time, I thought it a minor complaint
about an enormous occurrence. I didn't have the wisdom to understand
that once government gets away with lying,
it becomes virtually impossible to dislodge the habit from any of them.
I don't know what other lies Kennedy told,
but it couldn't have been his last and he had our lives in his hands.
It was only in August of 1964 when Robert
McNamara, the defense secretary who presented himself as being a person
of unparalleled brilliance, told Lyndon
Johnson that a North Vietnamese PT boat had attacked the American destroyers
Turner Joy and the Maddox in the Gulf of
Tonkin, off Haiphong, east of Hanoi. On a night of confusion, McNamara
persuaded Johnson that it was an actual
attack. Johnson acted. He put the country into a war right there.
The attack on the destroyers never happened.
McNamara lied. And the lie grew, and anybody who took the time
to build evidence of this was attacked.
"This is a just war," Johnson said.
The war blew up 58,000 of our young.
And now we have this administration welding
their lies together on two matters: the air you breathe and the war they
insist is good for us. We've just dealt
with 40 years of lying and death. It is getting worse. "We're winning in
Iraq,"
your poor president says.