Sitting on an aeroplane. You would think that this was the last place nayone would want to be, the morning after what the media is describing as the world’s worst terrorist attack. Normaly, I’m scared of flying, a phobia which has mellowed into a mild loathing through recent years of globetrotting, but I am sitting here cool as a cue today, and Ken is starting to get fed up of my WTC jokes, which reached their irreverent zenith during the animated safety video we just watched (do I need to explain that these jokes are at nobody’s expense but my own?) The thing is, I realise today that my old fear of flying was much like my fear of monsters under the bed that grab your ankles if you venture out in the night – a vague acknowledgement that bad things can happen to you on aeroplanes, based on my own experience of vomiting all the way from London to Sydney, aged ten. Now I know exactly what the worst possible thing that can happen to you on a plane is, and I know two other important things, too: 1. it’s not very likely to happen to me this morning, 2. if it happens then there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Tyuk phoned me yesterdy afternoon around 3, to tell me to log on to the CNN website and look at the news. He said a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre in New York. It didnát really sink in. I tried to log in, but no pages would load, no news would come up. Within minutes my brother was on IM sending me links, and I had had calls from my colleagues who were listening to it in their cars. I couldn’t get news on the BBC, the Guardian, CNN, in fact the Daily Express was initially the only site I could get into for an article and pictures, so nI tried my regular chatroom, and only had to ask if anyone could recommend any news pages – they all knew what I was talking about. I’m sure I don’t need, by now, to give details of the events, and I’m certainlz not going to spin myself into a hyperbolic frenzy like the self-important tosser reporting on talkSPORT radio, with his tabloid vocabulary, virtually wetting himself with excitement that he would be going to NY in a month’s time – assuring us all that he was determined still to go, as an act of solidarity. In fact, so devoted was this man to the support of democracy, that he cut short an interview with a professor of middle eastern studies, who had the outrageous cheek to try and present an objective analysis of how Islamic fervour had reached such a pitch that people could plan and implement a plot like this. We’re not interested in WHY it happened said Mike Parry (I paraphrase from memory here), we just want to express our outrage and sorrow. Good bit of journalism – I don’t think. Footage I saw later of dust-covered survivors in the dust-covered streets of Manhattan showed people casting their eyes heavenwards and uttering one word: WHY? And of course I know that a detailed analysis of middle-eastern politics was probably not the first answer they wanted to hear, but here in the UK, safe in our cars and our offices, we may be stunned and horrified, but life does go on. The most appropriate reaction to this must surely be what the politicians always describe as a thorough investigation: How did it happen? Why did it happen? How do we stop it from happening again? You, I, radio journalists, and the rest of the population of the world do not have words enough to try to claim that we can only express emotion about what has happened. Whilst Mike Parry was censoring his interviewees, Radio Five Live was broadcasting a UK fundamentalist Muslim, who also wanted to discuss hows and whys, and managed to avoid uttering any kind of condemnation of the incidents in America. This is offensive to me and to most of the sane world, but he still has a right to say it. Free speech…. democracy – isn’t that what the perpetrators are acting against? The our most effective protest is not missiles pointing towards Afghanistan, but the protection of the liberty we all take so much for granted. About to land in Zurich. That’s the first time in 20 years I have flown without fear, without even tension. It’s an ill wind, isn’t it?
