Copyright © 2002 Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies
All right reserved.
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Chapter One

Standing at Ground Zero

The picture of a plane swooping through a clear blue sky, tilting as it makes its approach to the elegant symmetry of a glass tower and then exploding in vibrant flame, has become a defining image of the 21st century. We witnessed that moment, and all the devastation that followed, live on television. The whole world experienced the catastrophe of 9-11 through the power and global reach of TV. Today, what we know of the world around us is mediated by television - now the first port of call for news, information and entertainment everywhere. We live in a world of images, packaged visual stories that come to us, and at us, wherever we turn - on billboards, in newspapers and magazines, on television, in the cinema - and we read into the images more than the pictures tell. This one defining image is horrific and real. It is not lessened just because it is effortlessly associated in our visual memory with the many unreal, fictional images of disaster that we have seen in films and on television. The important question is how much our response to the image of reality - our efforts to come to terms with the meaning of a real event - is shaped and structured by those associations. What are the links between the real and unreal images that shape our relations with the world in which we live?

Our direct personal experience of the world remains circumscribed: the neighbourhood in which we live, the place where we work, the schools that our children attend, the places where we shop, or worship, or go for entertainment, and the way we travel between them. This is the world of our daily round, as it was for all the generations that came before us. What makes our world smaller, more interconnected, is less the kind of lives we lead than the reach of communications technology that brings us vicarious experience - knowledge and ideas about what is beyond our individual experience - and brings it right into our homes. Television and the cultural products that it carries have become as significant a part of our lives as those things that we experience by direct personal contact. Our sense of identity, of belonging to larger communities, our cultural experiences, beliefs and opinions are shaped not only by the direct contacts of our daily lives but also by the larger world that we experience through the media. That the world saw and experienced 9-11 through television is only one small part of the story. How people everywhere have come to terms with that event, responded to it and been affected by it, is also mediated by the cultural community, the cultural conventions and communal resource of the media. Television showed us what happened; it also shows us the ways in which we thought about what happened.

The television series The West Wing represents the best of American liberal values and democratic culture. It won nine Emmys in its first season (more than any other program, ever) and has been described by Time magazine as 'a national civics lesson'. The continuing story of President Bartlet, a liberal Democrat of impeccable credentials, the show presents a parallel universe of US politics and a virtual mirror of American liberal consciousness. Just like any real administration in the White House, President Bartlet and his staff struggle to cope with personal problems, scandals, lobby groups, ethical dilemmas of power, domestic issues and global politics. On 3 October 2001, barely three weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, NBC aired a special edition of The West Wing. The episode is a dramatized depiction, a creative - in the sense of imaginary - attempt to come to terms with real events. The West Wing does not bring the real 9-11 into its virtual world - that would be an effrontery too far. But it does not need to; we all know what this episode is about. What is important is the way in which the program deals with the issues.

The episode switches between two storylines. A group of high school students, part of a program called Presidential Classroom, are caught up in a security alert while visiting the White House. They are directed to the Mess - 'it's where we eat lunch' - a location provided with tables and chairs and a white board, where the series' cast of characters provides the lesson for the day. The second storyline is about an Arab American member of the White House staff, named Raqim Ali, who is suspected of terrorist links and bundled into a darkened room for urgent questioning. When Leo McGarry, the Chief of Staff, is informed that a potential terrorist may be on the premises, he looks stunned and mutters: 'Well ... it was only a matter of time, huh?' The menace of terrorism is more than a potential threat - it is an inevitable event merely waiting to happen, intent on reaching into the centre of American life, virtual or real. Counterpoised with the civics lesson, this alternate plot theme will be an evocation of actual response, a disturbing and robust encounter of raw emotion.

The civics lesson begins with a slightly oblique question to the one on everyone's mind. One of the students asks Josh Lyman, Deputy Chief of Staff: 'So ... what's the deal with everyone trying to kill you?' In the parallel universe of The West Wing, a previous storyline had Lyman critically injured when gunmen opened fire on the Presidential party during a visit to Virginia. Presidents are always in the line of fire, and The West Wing acknowledged the fact with a two-part story that opened its second season: 'In the Shadow of the Gunman', first aired on 4 October 2000. In that instance, the intended target was not the President but his daughter Zoë. The reason for the assassination: Zoë is dating Charlie Young, an aide to President Bartlet, who happens to be black. The gunmen are members of a neo-Nazi group called West Virginia White Pride. It seems rather strange to refer to a previous episode within the fictional timeline when what we are about to receive is a special offering designed to stand explicitly outside that timeline. In the conventions of series television, such references set a context: in this case, the context of terror. It makes three connections. First, obviously, it makes the point that terror can have an American incarnation, that hatred is not an exclusive preserve of only one kind of group or society. On another level, it appears to be implying that racial hatred is the most pernicious and enduring of hatreds, an idea that we shall find at the heart of the special episode. Secondly, it provides an opportunity, through a long digression on the part of Lyman, to acknowledge the human impact of violence. In a world in which people feel as strongly, if not more so, about fictional characters than real ones, it is a means of incorporating emotion, however trite that may seem in the circumstances. Thirdly, possibly, we are getting a slight nod to the prescience of the series or the underlining of a simple fact: terror always has its own most obvious usual suspects. In the earlier episode, as the White House Situation Room is scrambling to deal with the shooting, the status report begins by noting that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden are not immediately known, and there is concern about a front-line build-up of Iraqi Revolutionary Guards.

Once these references have been made, the special episode moves swiftly to the obvious question: 'So why is everyone trying to kill us?' As convenor of this civics class, Lyman argues that not everyone is bent on violence towards Americans, but most definitely all Americans are targets. The question, he insists, must be refined and made specific. So he writes his test question on the white board: 'Islamic extremist is to Islamic as - is to Christianity'; and provides his own answer: 'KKK.' 'That's what we're talking about - the [Klu Klux] Klan gone medieval and global. It could not have less to do with Islamic men and women of faith, of whom there are millions and millions' - including those in the American armed services, police and fire departments, he adds. The analogy, once made, is never explored, making it hard to see how it helps anyone to understand better the source and nature of the threat.