The United States is a nation fed on such fantasies, as witness the success of Independence Day, in which the country's major buildings are splatted by, yes, aliens from outer space. Now that the aliens from inner space are threatening them, they don't know what to do.

Wednesday, September 26, 2001
(Tampa, Florida, USA)

I SLEEP poorly, room too cool. We talk over breakfast about the nervousness of the American people now. The bookstore owner's mother-in-law tells me she well recalls the 1938 episode when Orson Welles made the spoof broadcast on the New York radio that Martians had landed. She was working in New York, and two National Guardsmen drove up in full uniform, which she had never seen before, shouting to everybody to take cover as aliens had landed in Jersey. I said that no alien in his right mind would choose New Jersey to land in, and she laughs. She says there was nothing in the newspapers, so she went to the radio, and scanned all the channels -- again nothing about aliens -- and finally landed on the station which had broadcast the original story: it was now issuing a retraction. But the damage was done.

I tell her that Adolf Hitler hooted with derision about the story, and repeatedly brought it up in conversation as proof that the Americans were endemically jittery (not his precise words, but close enough). See Hitler's Table Talk.

One newspaper delicately mentions that the odour of six thousand rotting bodies now pervades Lower Manhattan, and it must be truly awful for the salvage workers penetrating the ruins of the Twin Towers. None of the Germans (and British and American prisoners of war) who had the similar task in Dresden after the British and American bombing raids in February 1945 failed to tell me about the same sickly stench. Of course, we killed over one hundred thousand innocents in two hours that night (or "only twenty thousand" if you listen to the conformist historian Professor Richard Evans). Even alcohol-soaked rags across their faces failed to blot out the smell.

The fallout on the entertainment front has been what one might call collateral damage. Ellen de Generes, the lesbian television actress, has found that her producers have cut out the lines scripted for her new pilot episode in which she explains that she is home early because her dot.com company "has collapsed." Her mother says, "Oh dear, I'm glad you got out in time."

I bet my host that within twelve months, if a bloody war begins in Afghanistan, the unseen enemy will have struck back again. I for one shall not be using the Lincoln or Holland Tunnels into New York City. One suicide bomber with a truckload of McVeigh-brand souped-up fertiliser could inflict real terror on the tunnel commuters. I listen to the radio news. The latest scare is anthrax attack. A woman phones in, in a broad Oklahoma dialect, that she lives in a rural area and is surrounded by crop-dusting aircraft. She is scared that she is the next target.

  Star Wars II, where are you when you are needed! I recall the image of Cary Grant fleeing from the sinister crop-duster aircraft in Alfred Hitchcock's North by North-West. If somebody does use such aircraft to spray anthrax (or, more likely, botulism: that was what Britain was preparing to use and defend her people against in WWII), it will not be against a single farmer's wife in Oklahoma.

The United States is a nation fed on such fantasies, as witness the success of Hollywood's Independence Day, in which the country's major buildings are splatted by, yes, aliens from outer space. Now that the aliens from inner space are threatening them, they don't know what to do. Their president inveighs endlessly about Osama bin Laden and his "attack on Americans' freedom."

Yeah, right: The bathrobed, be-turbaned gentleman, sitting in his cave, unable now even to use his cellphone safely, decides to smite the Twin Towers saying, "If there's one thing about the Americans I can't stand it's their freedom."

Think again, George: It may have been something else you were doing that upset them.

Previous diary

Sept 13: CNN first reports Pennsylvania crash debris found 8 miles away