TiVo’s year-end sales appear strong ::: To have a TiVo box is to be a TiVo evangelist. This is a piece of technology the whole family can get behind (as evidenced by the variety of “season passes” in our house: Sesame Street, Rolie Polie Olie, Sopranos, Sex and the City, West Wing, The Larry Sanders Show, Ed, anything mentioning the 49ers, etc.), and it will radically change the way you watch TV. The good news from this article is that their sales were strong in Q4, and subscriber growth is up. (Also helping: a 7 year licensing deal with Sony, and rumors of more on the way.)
Some have predicted that this is the death of free TV. I’m not so sure. If you’ve used TiVo, you may have noticed the recent Lexus ads on TiVo – creative ways of encouraging you to watch certain shows where Lexus had placed their ads. If you watched the ads, you could return to the Lexus TiVo microsite and enter a sweepstakes to win a new Lexus. (Results? A response from nearly 25% of all TiVo subscribers.)
Other ways TiVo has leveraged its technology: aggregating subscriber data for the networks, and selling sponsorships to the networks themselves. (One example of this: while watching an NBC show on TiVo, an ad for another NBC show comes on. Thanks to the TiVo box, it displays a “push select to record” message – allowing one-click recording of the show being advertised. This is a great way for NBC to expand its reach, and was used effectively by NBC to introduce new shows.)
There’s no question that TiVo changes the way you watch TV. But it doesn’t necessarily undermine the broadcast “free” TV that we’re used to. As TiVo’s penetration continues (it’s still in less than 500,000 homes), it will become its own gateway to ad- supported content: the same model that the major networks operate on today.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see TiVo change the way the ads support the broadcasting. Anybody else noticed the way that DVDs can prevent you from fastforwarding promos at the beginning, before getting you to the main menu? Or in many European countries, where the ads frequently follow the main show? TiVo could make it very easy to mimic these options – locking in a few ads as required viewing for uninterrupted shows.
Now why won’t TiVo come up with a recorder for my car radio? Oh wait… somebody already is.
Altman Weil’s 2001 report to legal management ::: While this article is tailored to law firm management types, it is applicable across the professional services field. Altman Weil urges firms to address undercapitalization, (a focus of Hildebrandt’s 2001 1=titlelink_pub&id1=702&cat_id_31=300”>Client Advisory as well), invest in technology (it “must be viewed as a long-term investment”), and improve the management of client relationships. (How could they do that?) The good news? Hildebrandt predicts that the economy shows signs of being far more resilient than the bust of the early 90s, and sees the latter half of 2002 as strong.
CEOs damage their corporate brands ::: The headline at News.com for this article was certainly catchy: Fiorina mars HP’s image. The article goes on to summarize a report which is available here. The report claims to correlate CEO performance with company brand. (Note: this links to a zip file, which contains a 1.3MB PDF file.)
The problem? The results are useless, the information in the report is at times misleading (and even outright wrong), and the conclusions are porous, to say the least.
Let’s see: from the report, we learn that Microsoft CEO Bill Gates most personifies his company’s brand. He is also among the top 3 most damaging to his company’s brand. Microsoft is #1 in companies who maintained their brand (and #6 in companies who did the worst job at maintaining brand value). Huh? Of course, there’s that little issue of him not being the CEO for the past two years; that’s Steve Ballmer’s job. Or that Microsoft’s market capitalization grew by more than 40% this year (outperforming every major stock index), that it has put together four straight $6b quarters, or that Microsoft is the #2 worldwide “brand” according to Business Week’s latest survey.
There’s more in the Liquid Agency report, but it’s more of the same. It reads like a personality test of the Valley CEOs (predictably, nobody likes Larry Ellison either), and arm-chair opinions about whether HP or Compaq will get hitched. Ultimately, the survey reflects polarized opinion in the industry about who’s doing a good job – yet it fails to deliver any useful information that would persuade anyone to change their minds. (Do I care that some people think Microsoft did a great job maintaining its brand value, while others think it’s among the top 10 in damaging its value? Not nearly as much as I’d be interested in seeing a survey of Microsoft customers who could assess the value of the brand to them.)
This survey could have represented a great addition to the thinking on the impact a CEO has on the company’s performance. Instead, it lacks any scientific basis for drawing conclusions, gets its facts wrong, and fails to establish any link between CEO performance and brand value.
Jakob Nielsen on Micropayments ::: Jakob Nielsen, publisher of Alertbox, predicted last year that “free” web sites would vanish. The ad-supported web site would become a thing of the past, he said. He was right.
The problem is that content providers still haven’t figured out how to get it right (am I the only one who doesn’t visit Salon anymore, thanks to the full-screen ads, pop-up ads, restricted content, confusing presentation?). Nielsen suggests micropayments are the answer.
Nielsen doesn’t see a mature micropayment service in 2002, but I think we may be closer than he thinks. PayPal is set to go public soon, looking to raise a little over $70 million when it debuts on the Nasdaq. Unlike the prior generation of digital cash efforts (remember DigiCash? CyberCash? First Virtual?), PayPal kept the model simple – as Fast Company says, by building its system around e-mail, by learning from its mistakes, and by not “inventing a new currency.” (Cf Beenz, Bippy Dollars, Flooz)
I’m a PayPal user – have been for almost 2 years. It’s easy, makes selling anything on eBay remarkably simple, and they are wonderfully responsive. Though this article in Technology Review says that PayPal hasn’t seen a huge demand for micrpayments, I can see them becoming a very simple application of their technology. (PayPal could restrict the way in which micropayments were processed, at least by requiring that the payments go from one PayPal account to another, instead of involving credit cards; in this sense, they wouldn’t impose any external transaction fees and would just be shuffling bits within their system.)
(Saturday Night Live fans: the transcript of the “First Citiwide Change Bank” sketch in which they make change in any number of combinations is available here.)
Here’s hoping PayPal’s IPO is strong. They represent the best opportunity we’ll have in 2002 to see a solid, viable infrastructure play for enabling micropayments next year.
The Google Zeitgeist ::: Wondering what was hot, was not, and everything in between in 2001? Google has put together the “gaining” queries (the ones becoming the most popular), the “ declining” queries (falling out of favor), and just about everything else.
The 2001 Timeline is neat, too – giving a great overview of the year that was in searches.
This is further evidence of the knowledge management premise that you just don’t know what you’ll want to know in a year. When they came up with the concept behind Google, they didn’t (I’m guessing) explicitly say they wanted to be able to tell us what were the top 10 brands… yet by archiving the data (they process more than 150 million queries per day), they are able to then sift through it and come up with some great analysis. Be sure to spend some time here, and if you want to do some digging, check out the Zeitgeist Archive with links to a month-by-month breakdown.
Survival Is Not Enough ::: Great article about the importance of change in uncertain times. Seth Godin points out that the state of the economy dictates the type of organization that is required: in a stable economy, the corporation is a machine. Companies are “finely tuned and easy to copy, scale, and own.” The goal with a machine is to make it cheaper and more reliable. (I would say you want the machine to be predictable – which may be only slightly different than reliable. But that’s another discussion.)
It’s uncertain times – which we are most certainly in right now – that demand evolution. Godin argues that organizations evolve at the individual level – that evolution is all about two entities competing and the stronger entity winning. By definition, the stronger individuals (employees) are what drive a larger, corporate evolution. (Read the article. It’s worth it just for the line “Penguins don’t have meetings about evolution” alone.)
Fair enough. But to what extent is evolution possible in a culture that doesn’t encourage evolution? Godin says that it’s not up to the corporation – in fact, he thinks that most successful companies avoid evolving – that evolution happens regardless of the culture. It’s just that successful companies embrace it.
The challenge here is that the evolution will often not benefit those who are leading the corporation. Those leaders arrived where they are by learning the ins and outs of their environment – and evolution puts them in unfamiliar surroundings. So if we accept Godin’s premise, then we must also accept that the most successful leaders are those who encourage evolution, willingly subjecting themselves to circumstances with which they’re not familiar… [From Fast Company]
Gartner Hype Cycle ::: Gartner’s take on the bell curve of acceptance of technology. An interesting attempt at explaining the seeming see-saw of expectations when it comes to new technology. It’s represented here: Is CRM past its “trough”, heading for a “slope of enlightenment”? I think so. Gone are the predictions of wild results, but I think we’re also past the famous “70% of all CRM implementations will fail” assertions as well. Gartner explains the slope in this way: “focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology’s applicability, risks and benefits.”
Beyond the Information Revolution – 99.10 ::: In October, 1999 Peter Drucker wrote an article for The Atlantic that put the “information revolution” into historical context. His last paragraph is a prediction for where he expects the modern corporation to be within 10 years:
…[P]robably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) “shareholder value” as its first — if not its only — goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold and motivate knowledge workers. [emphasis added]
Drucker, who’s been providing these predictions since the mid-1940s, sets the stage properly, but misses a final element. I’m most interested in professional services firms – where the concept of a knowledge worker is quite old. Yet the compensation model – not to mention the organizational structure – is firmly tied to a system that doesn’t encourage the sharing of this knowledge. The technology to promote such sharing exists today (CRM, portals, etc.), yet too few firms have “leaders” who are capable of evangelizing the benefits of sharing their knowledge. Where Drucker fails to close the loop (and who knows, he may have done it since this 10/99 piece) is to point out that the modern organization must not only “attract, hold and motivate” knowledge workers – it must also provide an infrastructure for them that will enable and reward the active dissemination of that knowledge.
Using E-Mail to Count Connections ::: Is “ six degrees of separation” a myth or reality? A group of researchers at Columbia University are trying to establish how connected we really are. They plan on assembling a self-selected group of participants, and will then e-mail targeted individuals with the goal of reaching a group of other individuals. Once the chains complete, the researchers then want to identify whether there are any patterns we can learn from.
If successful, these guys could actually provide us with some interesting hypotheses for how to intelligently route data. One of the challenges in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is that they can often fail when a large number of nodes request the same data from the same place. If they learn anything, they could help future P2P networks avoid the same congestion.
That Sneaky Exponential ::: What if Metcalfe’s Law is wrong? That is, what if the value of a network isn’t proportional to the number of users, but actually exponential?
The idea behind Reed’s Law is that within a network of N users, users will naturally form groups from N-(N-1) to N-1 in size. That’s a big shift from Metcalfe’s Law, because it starts to get at the value represented by what the users know – and what they can accomplish when they aggregate their knowledge. Metcalfe looked at value as roughly equal to the number of connections in a network, while Reed is focused on the actions the users make – and the dynamics of the groups formed.
The implications of Reed’s discussion are far-reaching. If you buy into his assertions, it would suggest that the goal of a senior exec at a corporation ought to be to encourage (mandate?) the sharing of information. It is through this sharing that groups form, and through these groups that value will start manifesting itself to the organization.
Most interesting is that this starts to explain why truly large, distributed organizations will have the most to gain by encouraging these interactions.
The Next Computer Interface ::: An interesting article detailing the possible future of computer interfaces. The major question is: is an interface created 30 years ago still appropriate in today’s multi-gigabyte world? However, the article focuses too much on the individual desktop, and doesn’t really address a larger problem: how do you navigate information beyond your own system? How do you find information that matters to you? I think this notion of taxonomy and navigation is critical to understanding how organizations can benefit; if the focus is on the individual at the keyboard (and not the organization to which the individual belongs), then the interface will be limited – its goals too narrow. [From MIT Technology Review]
September 11, 2001 7:00am
I boarded the plane at O’Hare. The plane was empty – no more than 1/3 full. I was on a flight to Dallas, with a connection to San Francisco. The direct flight to San Francisco was another $2,000, so I had opted for the less convenient (but less expensive) flight with a connection.
7:48am
I’m asleep through the beverage service, since I bought my breakfast at the McDonald’s in the airport. 7:48am is when the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred. Though not obvious at the time, it later occurs to me that the flight attendants were nowhere to be found after the beverage service. The pilot makes no announcements.
8:45am
We’re not scheduled to land for another 45 minutes, but we’re in our initial descent. By now, the World Trade Center has been hit twice, and the Pentagon is about to be struck. Rather than raise alarm, the pilot and flight crew remain silent. Connecting flight information is announced as we prepare to land, as if everything is normal on the ground below.
9:00am
We land early – which could be a good thing, since there’s an earlier flight to San Francisco that means I won’t have to wait in Dallas for two hours. I check the flight board, and flights are showing on time departures – still no indication that there’s anything wrong. The first sign that something’s not normal is that there are groups of people huddled around televisions in the TGI Friday’s bar near the gate. That’s normal when there’s a big football or baseball game, but this was early in the morning. Must be a big news story.
I hear Tom Brokaw’s voice, but not the words. I see smoke coming from the top of the World Trade Center – it’s bad, but I have no clue how bad. I try to call Robin to tell her I’ve landed. My cell phone takes forever to connect – ordinarily a sign of congestion in the cell network. What could possibly be tying up the cellular network on a Tuesday morning? I finally get through, and that’s when she tells me about multiple hijackings and crashes. It’s hard to fathom – surely this is just rampant speculation, rumors passed on by the press? I tell her I’ll call back once I find out what the situation is in Dallas.
9:30am
I’ve called Hilton and reserved a room. I swing by the Admirals Club and catch the first gruesome video of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. It’s hard to process, but the building’s still standing – at this point, it seems possible that the worst is over. An announcement is made over the flight club intercom that all flights are cancelled for the day. None of us know that this is the first time in U.S. aviation history that all airports are shut down. At the desk, I’m told I’ll be put on an 8am flight to San Francisco departing tomorrow morning.
10:00am
Waiting for the courtesy shuttle to get me to the hotel, I try to get a rental car. Hertz has no cars available – anywhere in the Dallas area – for the next several days. American’s Executive Platinum desk tells me that they’ve been asked by the government to shut down for 72 hours. This is interesting, mainly because this isn’t being reported by any of the news organizations.
Calls made from my cell phone get through about one in ten attempts. One of these attempts reaches Mom – I’m able to tell her that I’m OK and on my way away from the airport. Through tears, Mom tells me that Tower 1 of the World Trade Center has collapsed. Standing on a curb of a mostly deserted airport, this is hard to internalize.
Gone? How could it be gone?
The shuttle finally shows up, and I’m glad to be going to the Hilton. It’s a good 4 miles away from the airport – far enough that if anything were to happen at the airport I should be safe.
I check in, and I have to beg for a room with a high speed Internet connection. It’s just becoming obvious that I could be stuck for days in Dallas – the least I can do is stay connected.
10:30am
I finally get to watch the news channels. Of the 30 channels in the hotel, 20 or more are tuned to one of four broadcasts: ABC News, Fox News, CNN, or NBC News. (ESPN and its affiliates are all pointing to ABC; TBS, TNN, CNN, CNN Headline News, etc. are all on CNN; NBC, MSNBC, CNBC are all pointing to the Brokaw/Williams broadcast.)
This is when it starts to sink in. We’ve been attacked. Not by thugs, or by simple terrorists. This is a more vicious attack than Pearl Harbor. The coordination becomes clear – they needed to know how to fly the planes to specific targets. There had to be multiple people to commandeer the planes and keep people subdued until impact.
None of the news outlets are speculating on fatalities, but it’s likely that it will be over 10,000. Considering that we lost just 2,000 at Pearl Harbor, and 50,000 soldiers in all of Vietnam, this will be devastating. The World Trade Center is gone – vanished into a pile of rubble. I’m still numb – the awesome power of the attack is lost on me, the loss of lives hard to wrap my arms around. We’re a country that reacts violently to an attack on dozens or hundreds of our citizens – and that pales in comparison to what we’re witnessing.
11:30am
The web sites of the major news organizations can’t handle the traffic. Foxnews.com, ABCNews.com, MSNBC.com – they’re all unreachable. CNN.com – who’s been online the longest, and learned lessons from JFK Jr.‘s flight, the British Nanny case, the Cole bombing – manages to stay up by putting up a stripped down home page with a link to just one page. It’s just one photo – of the impact of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. By later in the day, they manage to get more information up and online.
I get the most current information online by going overseas – the BBC’s web site had excellent information, including more information about the reaction abroad.
At this point, I start thinking about getting out of Dallas. I would prefer to drive, but it’s 1,000 miles and it later becomes obvious that there are simply no cars to be had. American is still staying that it will be at least two days before they can confirm flights out of Dallas, and at this point I’m not even sure I want to be on a plane at all. Amtrak becomes a surprising alternative – there’s a train leaving Dallas at 3:30pm that arrives in Chicago at noon tomorrow. I call Amtrak and make the reservation. I have two hours to get to the train station.
12:00pm
There’s a mall across the street from the hotel. I check out, leave my bags at the desk and go to the mall. I want lunch, but I also want supplies for the long trip home. At the very least, I want a Walkman and some books.
Walking in the mall is eerie. Traffic isn’t light – it’s nonexistent. Most of the stores are locked up, closed completely. I get some food, and sit in the mostly empty food court and watch the large screen TV tuned to CNN. No new news is reported in the twenty minutes I take to eat lunch, but the scope of the attack, and its effect on the country, is starting to become clear. For the first time I see photos of the Pentagon – and shudder to think about the loss of life.
12:30pm
The Virgin Megastore is closed, as are a number of other stores that might have a Walkman. I walk the whole circle of the mall, and there is fortunately a Radio Shack open. They have a portable stereo, with a digital tuner that has a nice feature – it’ll automatically tune in the stronger signals in the area. That’ll be nice for the train travel.
My luck continues – the Books a Million store around the corner from Radio Shack is also open. The mall – which has more than 100 stores – can’t have more than 50 people walking around. I’m one of just two people in the bookstore, yet they say they’re staying open the rest of the day.
As it turns out, the rest of the mall closed shortly after I left, along with most commercial establishments around the country. About the only thing people are shopping for, I hear, is gas. In less than six hours, the price of gas at some pumps has risen from $1.60 to more than $4 per gallon. Lines are more than a half mile long in some places.
1:30pm
With my two books and stereo, I walk back to the hotel. I catch a cab. The cabdriver is Arabic, though I don’t know from where. He says he heard that the Japanese are responsible for the attack. Wishful thinking? It’s hard to say, but all I’ve heard on the news so far is that the only real suspect is Osama bin Laden. That’s based on nothing more than wild supposition, but it’s still something for us to believe.
2:15pm
I arrive at the train station, and it now dawns on me that the train could be late. Why did I check out of the hotel? Sure enough, Amtrak shut down all trains for nearly two hours for security inspections. The train would be delayed another six times before we finally leave Dallas. No sleeper cars are available, so I’ll be in a coach seat for the 24 hours that we’ll be en route.
3:00pm
I talk to Jim McNeal; he was working across the street from the World Trade Center until 7am this morning, and turned down an overtime opportunity. Three of his co-workers are unaccounted for. He’s taken this hard, nearly breaks down on the phone.
There’s a woman on the train whose boyfriend was at the Pentagon, and he was badly injured in the attack. She turned her cell phone off because she says she doesn’t want to know until she’s off the train.
9:00am
We’ve just pulled into Little Rock, Arkansas. Because of frequent extended stops last night due to freight train schedules and track repairs, we’re now about twelve hours behind schedule. We’ll probably be pulling into Chicago around midnight.
11:30am
President Bush pointedly didn’t answer a question during the press conference that just concluded. “Will you ask Congress for a declaration of war?” He didn’t say no. I’m encouraged by this – but also curious. How do you declare war on an enemy who has no address? If it is bin Laden, he has no permanent address. His followers are scattered throughout the globe. Some news reports have bin Laden supporters in Florida who are connected to the attacks. If they’re here, and in Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, and surely elsewhere, how can we possibly fight them in a conventional sense?
As the train continues through the heartland, I wonder what about us has changed. We’re still a country of values, but this attack strikes at our core. Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers suggests that World War II was a time when ordinary men did extraordinary things. Those men weren’t born heroes; they were made heroes.
And what’s ultimately troubling about the attack is that, while we may never know enough about the men who carried the attack out, we know that they were born no different from us. But they were made into what they were. Ordinary men can do extraordinary things. The problem is that the extraordinary things can just as easily be evil, unexplainable. Do we do good because we don’t have sufficient opportunities to be evil? Or is evil our baseline, a failure to do good just evidence that there were simply not sufficient opportunities to do good?
What makes us different? In the end, very little. Oklahoma City was the product of an individual, turned against his homeland by the belief that his government no longer represented him. McVeigh was evil, but he had also been an excellent soldier, one who could just as easily been one of the Easy Company fifty years prior.
The same virus that infected McVeigh infects the others who attacked us. They have not chosen the easy way – far from it. bin Laden is a billionaire, yet he’s one who changes his residence three times a week to avoid capture or assassination. His followers died in pursuit of their cause. McVeigh died believing that he’d acted justly. McVeigh murdered hundreds. The perpetrators yesterday murdered thousands, possibly tens of thousands. No doubt they’d been conditioned to see their acts as just, as serving a higher purpose.
What separates their higher purpose from ours – the justification of our own actions in WWII from their actions today – is a very fine line. While we ascribe a higher purpose to our own society, it is hard to separate us from them. We kill innocents with every air strike in Iraq. We killed countless civilians with our involvement in Yugoslavia. We felt justified in our actions, and we decorated our soldiers.
Separating ourselves from bin Laden and his ilk requires us to remain convinced that we’re right, they’re not. Is there a moral high ground here? Are there any absolutes?
Whatever we do, it must be rooted in our founding document – the Constitution. We accept legal, moral and practical limitations on our actions because of this document. It is this document – and the hundreds of thousands of lives, hundreds of years, and millennia of human history that led to it – that ultimately separates us from them. Rather than base our society on limitations based on restrictions stemming from a religious text, we base our society on an acceptance of basic freedoms stemming from a secular belief. The religious view of government assumes we’re sinners and must be saved from ourselves. The secular view of government assumes we’re basically good and must be given the choice to act as we want. Religion has a place – but its role in government can be extraordinarily destructive.
—
I’ve periodically caught a radio station with clear reception. A few songs have stood out and brought me close to tears. As I passed through Arkansas and Missouri, these songs really caught me:
“Only in America, where we dream in red white and blue.
Only in America, where we dream as big as we want to.
We all get a chance. Everybody gets to dance. Only in America.”
—Brooks and Dunn, “Only in America”
“Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear.
And I can’t help but ask myself
how much I’ll let the fear take the wheel and steer.
It’s driven me before,
and it seems to have a vague,
haunting mass appeal.
But lately I am beginning to find
that I should be the one behind the wheel.
Whatever tomorrow brings,
I’ll be there with open arms and open eyes.”
—Incubus, “Drive”
“If tomorrow all the things were gone I worked for all my life
and I had to start again with just my children and my wife.
I thank my lucky stars to be living here today
cause the flag still stands for freedom
and they can’t take that away.
From the lakes of Minnesota,
to the hills of Tennessee,
across the plains of Texas,
from sea to shining sea
from Detroit down to Houston
and New York to LA
well there’s pride in every American heart
and it’s time that we stand and say that
I’m proud to be an American
where at least I know I’m free
and I won’t forget the men who died who gave that right to me
and I gladly stand up next to you
and defend her still today
cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land,
God Bless the U.S.A.”
—Lee Greenwood, “God bless the U.S.A.”
There is a lot we don’t yet know about what happened. But the lyrics in these songs seem to add gravity to what I can only hope is real: that we are a brave nation. My generation has not yet been tested like my parents’ generation and my grandparents’. Will we earn our place? Will we honor the memory of those who are almost certainly dead? Will we accept that more will die to ensure that this does not happen again?
6:00pm
Traveling by train today has been a surreal experience. I’ve been in the train close to 24 hours. I’m one of the few on the train who’s kept on top of any news, so many people are simply unaware of today’s developments. That said, I’m hardly “connected.” As we pass through one unpopulated area after another, I’m lucky to get 10 minutes of clear radio signal for every hour or two we travel. I mostly stay in the low frequencies, hoping to catch a local news channel or NPR.
I get lucky and catch NPR’s hourly update. They piece together what they know to have happened today:
An FBI swat team swarmed the Back Bay Westin, where two individuals were rumored to be staying. Whether it was the rooms of the hijackers, or of their conspirators, isn’t clear. They apparently left with at least one person in custody, but no arrests were made.
Surveillance intercepted at least two cell phone calls made by bin Laden supporters, who told unknown callers that “the targets had been hit.” This led the FBI to pursue at least one individual in Broward County.
In an interview, Secretary of State Powell describes the attacks as “acts of war.” He’s quite clear about the implications of this.
NATO allies are agreeing that this attack constitutes an attack on a NATO member, which means that they’ll lend their military support to any reprisals.
Secretary Powell has spent most of the day building a coalition of countries who are supporting our plans. It’s not clear whether this is a Gulf War style coalition where each contributes to the action (though this seems unlikely) or whether he’s simply eliminating any possible contrarian voices before we strike.
Cuba, Libya and China all denounced the attack.
The airports, despite earlier public statements from Secretary of Transportation Mineta, are still closed. Except for the flights that had been rerouted to Canada (which are being allowed to fly into the U.S. sometime tonight pending security clearance), no flights are allowed. There’s no word whether they’ll open the airports tomorrow. American’s 72 hours claim from yesterday starts to look about right, though some are guessing it will be weeks before things are back to any semblance of normal.
I sit at dinner with three others, one a 25 year-old who’s finding himself en route to Seattle (on of only two people I’ve met on the train who had planned to be on the train) and two executives. They’re starving for information, so I fill them in on what I know.
We all agree that we hope President Bush responds well, but that he doesn’t so far seem to be projecting the steely confidence that we need. He speaks haltingly, as if he’s searching for some combination of words that will strike the right balance between anger and resolve. The good news is that he seems to be saying the right things – perhaps this is exactly the kind of situation where Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld will be most valuable.
8:15pm
I called Jim McNeal again. He’s still a mess, though his co-workers have been accounted for. The city is shut down, he has nothing to do, and he’s devastated by the attack. He cries for a while as it sinks in; the winds have shifted to the north and he’s now smelling and seeing the ash. The blanket of destruction has now settled in his neighborhood.
9:45pm
The human interest stories are starting to show up. It appears that the crash outside of Pittsburgh – the only hijacked plane that didn’t hit a target – was the result of a few brave passengers. One passenger called his wife from his cell phone, told her that they knew they were going to die but that three of them were going to do something about it. While it’s only supposition, it appears that they may have wrestled control of the plane and forced it to the ground in a remote area of Pennsylvania.
Two flight attendants who tried to prevent the hijackers from entering the cockpit had their throats slit.
I’ve flown more than 70 flights this year, and I can only begin to imagine the fear and paralysis that would consume you in a situation like that. How did these three people resolve to do this? Did they know that they were saving hundreds, maybe thousands of lives?
Or how about the manager on the 80th floor who ordered his people out of the building. On his way down the stairs, he heard a commotion. A woman in a wheelchair was unable to get down the stairs. He and a co-worker strapped her into an emergency wheelchair (from the stairwell apparently) and proceeded to carry her down 65 flights of stairs. It took them an hour. They escaped with just minutes to spare. Extraordinary.
Jim’s tears shook me. I’ve been near tears a few times today. They haven’t yet come, though I’m certain they will. I keep telling myself that they haven’t come because I am so removed, disconnected, on the train. I’m not sure. I remain awed by the attack, saddened that so many have lost their lives so senselessly. But the full impact of the day’s events have not yet really struck me.
10:00pm
Already they’re talking on the news about changes that are coming. E-tickets are being eliminated, at least for a time. Curbside check-in is gone. Only ticketed passengers can go to the gates. Random ID checks. Spot check of luggage. Some are calling for the resumption of the “Sky Marshalls” program, which I’m apparently too young to even know about.
I can’t but help to think about this war. If it truly is a war, then this was simply the enemy’s first salvo. If I’m bin Laden, and I know that the U.S. is going to come at me, hard, then I would want a second act. The first act was spectacular, designed to shatter our belief that we’re untouchable on our own soil.
I should be arriving in Joliet in the next half hour. Robin’s picking me up in Joliet and we’re driving home together. The last 36 hours have been long and draining, but it will be nice to be home in my bed. With Robin. Ricky will be down the hall.
I can only hope that the world I bring his sibling into will not be fundamentally changed for the worse. As a father, I want my children to know good, to know peace, and to strive for an enriching life. There is another part of me that hopes that if it comes to it, that they’re capable of becoming the extraordinary people they can be, that their country would need them to be.
But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Ricky has a habit – and has had it since he was about 10 months old – of pointing excitedly in the sky when he hears an airplane. Though he doesn’t yet know the word for airplane, he invariably looks up, points, and smiles. Though there’s a risk in imbuing too much significance in his action, the fact is that their mere existence brings him happiness. Certainly the next few days will continue without a plane to point at. And when they start filling the air again, how will we ever look at them the same way again?
It’s not overstating the point to say that yesterday changed everything. It changes our perception of ourselves, of our enemies, and even of our friends. Our President has had a tragedy – the scope of which will take some time to establish – delivered to him. He has a massive task ahead of him, and our country will be led. We will prevail.
I’ll close this mini-journal with a quote that started out the second novel I started reading today:
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events.
To some generations much is given.
Of other generations much is expected.
This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
September 22, 2001
In an effort to get back to normal, the Klau family – Molly & Rick; Kevin, Erin & Maggie; Rick, Robin & Ricky – all traveled to South Bend for a Notre Dame weekend. It was, in many ways, a wonderful way for us to reconnect after the attacks. We’d all lived through it, we’d heard more stories about the victims, and we’d started to address the grief and commit to moving forward.
I mentioned earlier that the tears had not yet come. On this day, in the presence of 80,000 Americans, they came.
Prior to the start of the game, 4 ROTC students presented the colors and the band played the Star Spangled Banner. More than 50,000 flags appeared – printed by the South Bend Tribune – and were waived high over everyone’s heads. The P.A. announcer defiantly – almost angrily – read the Declaration of Independence. Notre Dame president Monk Molloy read a moving prayer dedicated to the memory of the many whose lives were lost. After the first quarter, Notre Dame students circulated through the stadium taking a collection for the families of the firefighters and policemen who were lost in the Trade Center collapse. As powerful as all of this was, the tears came at halftime.
Michigan State’s band took the field and played two songs, one of which was America the Beautiful. It was solemn, respectful, and moving. As they finished and walked off the field, the Notre Dame band took the field. They played Fanfare for the Common Man, and then led into Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the U.S.A. It was sung by a student, who was slowly encircled by the rest of the band who formed the perimeter of the U.S. Inside, several of the bandmembers unfurled a large American flag.
It was at this point – a combination of powerful lyrics about the strength of our resolve, the solidarity presented by 80,000 football fans who just forgot their allegiance and became one stadium of Americans – that my tears started. The evil, thoughtless, callous acts of hundreds of men have threatened our existence. They struck at us, took advantage of the very thing that makes us who we are – our freedom, our openness – and will no doubt do so again. Families have been shattered, lives lost. For what?
The fear, of course, is that the country would react to this external threat by dividing itself: casting blame, pointing fingers. What happened next, in a small way, showed that this is unlikely to happen. As N.D.‘s band finished up, Michigan State’s band again lined up in the end zones. N.D. began playing Amazing Grace, and Michigan State’s students slowly walked towards midfield, until the field alternated between lines of N.D. students and lines of Michigan State students. The volume swelled as their ranks merged, and then Michigan State’s students walked forward. Now the lines were one – N.D., Michigan State, N.D., Michigan State. The song concluded, and many of the band members shook hands or embraced. It was simple, elegant, and poignant. What unites us must carry us through. And more than ever, it is critical that we lock arms, stand firm, and hold our heads high. Anything less is a victory for the fear that our enemy so desperately wants us to feel.
Update, 9/11/12: I found a video of the Michigan State and Notre Dame bands performing Amazing Grace from September 22, 2001 on YouTube. It's here:
Let’s see: from the report, we learn that Microsoft 