THE ANTIDOTE TO HORROR IS LOVE

by John Podhoretz

"...On Oct. 11, I got a phone call from my girlfriend, who worked at NBC. She had traveled to Louisville to attend a wedding and she heard that an envelope filled with milled anthrax had been found at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

She was terrified, and as she spoke to me, I calmly looked up the symptoms of anthrax poisoning. It was highly unlikely she was infected, but she needed something to calm herself, so I read about an antibiotic named Cipro and told her of it. She got it, held on to it and never had to use it.

I remained blithely unworried, and the only sign that perhaps my blithe lack of worry was hiding something else came maybe a week later, when it turned out that first one colleague at the Post and then another had been exposed to anthrax as well.

The anthrax envelopes had sat about 21/2 feet from the top of my head in an in-box nobody had bothered to get to. Surely now, surely now, the terror threat would come home to hit me in a big way.

Only it didn't. I tried to puzzle out why I was so calm. Maybe it was because I had thought and written a great deal about terrorism in the past decade, had been in Israel during the first Gulf War where I had to wear a gas mask on two occasions after sirens indicated Saddam had sent a Scud our way, and so on.

And so it went - save for one thing: Within two months of 9/11 I was engaged to be married, within 13 months I was married, had a baby 19 months after that and another one due to be born in a months' time.

This wasn't the way it was supposed to be for me. I had only met Ayala in June, and I was determined not to think about marriage for at least a year in any relationship. I had nearly ruined my life getting married precipitously after a 10-day romance in 1997, and I simply could not trust myself.

But I couldn't be bothered with learning to trust myself. Getting married was an urgent, all-consuming need.

I took Ayala aback with the ferocity of my determination. At every turn I brought up what it would mean to be married. I was so determined that I proposed to her at 9 in the morning sitting in the living room of my Brooklyn Heights apartment, through whose window we had seen the black gash of the sky above Ground Zero every night since 9/11. She accepted - and then informed me we had to come up with a more romantic engagement story to tell her family and friends.

I'm telling the story now for the first time because I think it is romantic. I fell in love more deeply with Ayala and had to marry her because I had witnessed the worst and needed the best. Something deep and elemental within me needed to supersede the evil of 9/11 with the purest affirmation of existence - unconditional hope for the future and new life in the form of children whose presence on this earth would be the most crushing blow a middle-aged man like me could deliver to the cult of death that sought to tear out America's heart."

The search for 9/11 articles returns the good, bad, and in the case of J-Pod, the ugly. I was going to feature nothing but feel-good, bootstrap-hoisting tales of derring-do this day, but decided to add a whine from Jeopardy winner Podhoretz as something of a balance. The salt to counter the sugar. I spent 9/11, 2001 quite differently than he, and have decided against including what went on that day because it certainly was not about me. Tired and not thinking all that well I entered a comment over at Misha's blog yesterday, that I wish I could take back. Men were jumping on flatbed trucks to assist in the recovery, and not a one of us imagined we'd find anything alive under that rubble, and were correct in that assumption. It was difficult to find medical professionals as most of the ones able to do so were rushing to their respective hospitals, and the one or two nurses about were nagging us into areas where nothing could have lived. The recoverers knew it was body-parts day and didn't need the pollyanna's beseeching them to crawl into one steaming mound of debri after another to search for poodles.

It was a gory, sickening, number of days. There was no romance to be found. I'm happy for the the old waddling neocon, but a battle was fought that day and in the days to follow, the type of battle to make veterans weep and not because they were falling in love. The first major blow upon the homeland had taken it's toll and I keep myself strong with the memory of what it was; an atrocity to end all atrocities. The City was a sea of waving photographs as loved ones spent day after day, week after week, roaming the streets in the hope that someone would recognize a missing family member or friend. Downtown Manhattan was the stuff end-of-the-world movies are made of.

I didn't see John Podhoretz on the streets of his hometown back then. I do not know of anyone who did. It's nice, for him, that the fear of it all bade him to ask for a woman's hand in marriage. She said yes, and I hope they live happily ever after.

But that day wasn't about him or her. It was about the thousands of Marianne MacFarlands who were happily about their lives in the greatest city of the greatest country the world has ever seen, when monsters decided to kill them.

In the real world, the antidote to horror is to destroy horror so that it's like may never again inflict such evil upon us.