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Edited on Tue Jul-12-05 11:40 AM by Plaid Adder
Well, it's Tuesday, and so far so good.
Getting in was about as annoying and exhausting as it usually is, with the added hassle of having to get a cab once the Heathrow Express dumped me off at Paddington, and then discovering that he couldn't actually get to the hotel because so many of the surrounding roads were still blocked off. My hotel is right on Russell Square, which is part of what the police over here are now calling "the largest crime scene in London history." One of the bombed trains is still being dug out right underneath it and the bus bombing was about a block and a half away. Police tape is still everywhere. The entrances that lead to the excavation sites are screened off with white plastic sheeting. Every day when I come back to the hotel I pass a couple of media crews setting up for the evening broadcast. That kind of gives me the creeps, seeing them standing there in their suits getting wired for sound in front of that blank white background.
Although there have been some false alarms, there have been no new 'incidents.' I had a moment of pause when I saw a police canine unit on the street outside the Chinese restaurant where I ate Sunday night. A lone Fox News cameraman was filming it. No doubt they needed to fill up some space in their 24 hour schedule between asshole commentators talking about what a wonderful opportunity for the US this was.
At the nearest corner of Russell Square to the crime scene people have started leaving flowers and notes. Reading stuff like that always makes me cry, as does seeing the posters up with pictures of people who are still missing. For legal reasons and because I think the media culture over here is just different, the names of the dead are being released much more slowly than they would be in America. The first one was just announced Monday night. They are still trying to recover bodies from the bus site and from the train under Russell Square, so it will be a long time before some people know. I hate thinking about what that must be like. They have to realize on some level that most of the missing are dead, but it must be very hard to accept.
There is a lot of coverage in the media over here, but because they don't have the 24-hour cable scourge (at least my hotel doesn't get those networks, if they exist) there seems to be more actual reporting and less OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODAAAAAAAAAGHBEVERYVERYVERYAFRAID!!!! One of the reports I saw mentioned a website that went up Thursday called wearenotafraid.com, where I guess people go and post messages saying the terrorist attack has failed to terrify you so sucks to them. Which seems to me like the only really useful response to something like this; after all, terrorism depends for its impact not on the incident itself but on the way the victims and their state respond to it.
This is not to say that people haven't been shaken by this. No matter where you go you hear people talking about it. (Often they are American tourists...but not always.) The notes left with the flowers can be as bewildered, grieving, angry and raw as anything you would have found at Ground Zero in Manhattan. There's one at Russell Square that says, "Why? In the most multicultural, multi-ethnic, accepting city in Europe, why?" Don't know enough to debate London's claim to that title, but it did point out to me that America, England, Afghanistan, and Iraq all have something in common now. In all four places, civilians who never wanted to fight anyone are getting killed because of their so-called and, in the case of al Qaeda (and Bush, depending on who you believe), illegitimate self-appointed leaders. One of the survivors of one of the tube blasts was, somehow, able to stand up to a fairly long interview with a journalist who basically followed her home, and she said, "If this is a response to the Iraq war then it's even more wrong, because most of us didn't support it. I didn't support it because I didn't think it would solve anything." And, as the BBC has been quick to inform everyone, it's virtually certain that this attack will have killed a number of British Muslims.
Anyway, my time is pretty much up, and I don't want to have to pay another pound for this. But I'm here, I'm all right, and really, when you get away from the police tape, everything looks pretty normal.
On edit: Aaah, fuck it, I'm gonna get stuck for the extra pound anyway, so I wanted to mention something I forgot:
Sunday night, because I'm a moron, I stayed up watching a BBC Panorama special report on "the new al Qaeda," and then couldn't sleep for 3 hours. Basically the summary is that the 'old al Qaeda' infrastructure is not what it once was, so things like the London and Madrid bombings are likely being carried out by younger, less centrally-organized groups who are probably working from home. Not earthshattering, but it was interesting to see the ways in which Panorama repeats some of the kind of crap that American reports on al Qaeda do (for instance, getting an actor with a heavy accent to read out loud from Islamic extremist websites, complete with bloodthirsty slavering, instead of just using a translator) but on the other hand also does things you wouldn't, say, see Fox News do...like actually letting their interview subjects talk.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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