From Katrina to Sandy

As the superstorm Sandy drills down on New York City, I am far away, in autumnal England, but I hear from friends in Manhattan that they have had to move temporarily further uptown because they live in the mandatory evacuation zone. One e-mailed me this afternoon from an Upper West Side coffee shop, having abandoned her home near Wall Street. The mood seemed to be less post-apocalyptic than fin de siècle. But since the 9/11 attacks, can anything really surprise New Yorkers? Armageddon, once the exclusive domain of disaster movies and science fiction, is now something that almost everyone contemplates, or at least regards as a possibility. How different things are today than pre-9/11, pre-Hurricane Katrina, pre-U.S. decline. Something changed over the past twelve years, from the bungled and tawdry election of 2000 to the terror attacks, the bad and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the recession. We now live in a time when nothing, it seems, is ever over and done with. Wars are never entirely won or lost but instead drag on forever, along with their consequences, and the planet, too, is hemorrhaging in ways that we are all aware of but, in our everyday lives, try to keep just out of our thoughts.

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