The View from Mrs. Thompson's

It turns out the cause of poor old tendony Mrs. R—'s meltdown in the kitchen is that she has a grandniece or something who's doing some kind of internship at Time, Inc. in the Time Life Bldg or whatever it's called, about which Mrs. R— and whoever she's managed to call know only that it's a vertiginously tall skyscraper someplace in New York, and she's out of her mind with worry, and two other ladies have been out here the whole time holding both her hands and trying to decide whether they should call a doctor (Mrs. R— has kind of a history), and I end up doing pretty much the only good I do all day by explaining to Mrs. R— where midtown is. It thereupon emerges that none of the people here I'm watching the Horror with — not even the few ladies who'd gone to see Cats as part of some group tour thing through the church in 1991 — have even the vaguest notion of Manhattan's layout and don't know, for example, how far south the financial district and Statue of Liberty are; they have to be shown via pointing out the water in the foreground of the skyline they all know so well (from TV).

This is the beginning of the vague but progressive feeling of alienation from these good people that builds throughout the part of the Horror where people flee rubble and dust. These ladies are not stupid, or ignorant. Mrs. Thompson can read both Latin and Spanish, and Ms. Voigtlander is a certified speech therapist who once explained to me that the strange gulping sound that makes Tom Brokaw so distracting to listen to is an actual speech impediment called a "glottal 1." It was one of the ladies out in the kitchen with Mrs. R— who'd pointed out that that week was the anniversary of the Camp David Accords, which was news to me. What the Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre absence of cynicism in the room. It doesn't once occur to anyone here to remark on how it's maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider that it's possible that Rather's hair being mussed is not 100% accidental, or that the relentless rerunning of spectacular footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn't seen it yet. No one else seems to notice Bush's weird little lightless eyes seem to get closer and closer together throughout his taped statement, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to statements made by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back. Nor that at least some of the shock of the last two hours has been how closely various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I-III and Air Force One to Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor. Nobody's edgy or sophisticated enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We've Seen This Before. Instead what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. Nobody does anything as nauseous as try to make everybody all pray together of pray aloud or anything, but you can tell what they're doing.

Make no mistake: This is mostly a good thing. It makes you think and do things you probably wouldn't if watching alone, like for one thing to pray, silently and fervently, that you're wrong about Bush, that your view of him is distorted and he's actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some weird soulless golem or nexus of interests dressed up in a suit, but a statesman of courage and probity and ... and it's good, this is good to pray this way. It's just a little lonely to have to. Innocent people can be hard to be around. I'm not for a moment claiming that everyone in Bloomington is like this (Mrs. T.'s son F— isn't, though he's an outstanding person). I'm trying to explain the way part of the horror of the Horror was knowing that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my own — mine, and F—'s, and poor old loathsome Duane's — than these ladies'.

Editor's Note: Some names have been changed, and some details have been altered.