Crumbling Certainties

New York City
Sept. 24, 2001
Congress had become a coalition government; defense is not foreign policy anymore, it’s domestic. President Bush declared a state of emergency and called up the reserves; Congress wrote a $40 billion check. Soldiers at home and around the world were on high alert, and ready. “This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger,” the President said. “This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.” But it

will also come in a way we still cannot imagine, because we are fighting an enemy we have never met. Suicide bombers are supposed to be 17-year-old zealots with nothing to live for but the hope of a martyr’s welcome by 72 virgins in paradise. These men, the FBI reveals, lived middle-class lives, had degrees and jobs and wives and kids and a willingness to leave them all to kill us. Among the casualties last week was our sweet certainty that anyone lucky enough to be able to live in America, share its vices and freedoms and gifts, surely would not want to destroy it.

Athens
Oct. 11, 2004
As Liu Xiang raced to victory in the 110-m hurdles at the Athens Olympics, his legs pumping to clock a world record-tying time of 12.91 sec., the panic in sports announcers’ voices was palpable. Even though China had touted the 21-year-old Shanghai native as a medal hopeful, few in the West knew that China had a decent hurdler. Stunned by the victory, a Greek TV announcer stammered: “In first place, it’s it’s a Chinese man.” Foiled by the X in Liu’s given name, the broadcaster sidestepped the problem: “He is Mr. Liu. Congratulations to Mr. Liu from China.” The world had better get used to Mr. Liu’s name. With his chiseled jaw and winning smile, Liu has already been tapped as a pitchman for Coca-Cola and Nike. More importantly, he serves as the charismatic icon of a continent’s athletic ascendancy, just as Asia gears up to welcome the next Summer Olympics.

Everywhere
Jan. 1, 2000
[The Millennium Bug] was going to topple this electronic pack of cards, sending planes crashing to the ground, nukes leaping from their silos, electricity to a standstill and all of humanity back to a time much earlier than the 1900 our computers would believe it was So as Apocalypse Not struck around the globe people everywhere celebrated. Many cultures celebrated despite the fact that most follow completely different calendars, and despite the fact that far too many people were pointing out that the millennium doesn’t really start until next year and that our system is all messed up anyway, because Jesus was born 2,004 years ago. They celebrated because the most famous odometer mankind has ever created was displaying three zeroes in a row. It’s exciting enough when it happens to your own car; when it happens to the world, it makes you downright giddy.

Baghdad
April 21, 2003
Ali [Ismail Abbas] recounted how one night, just after midnight, a missile dropped from the sky onto the home where he and his mother, stepfather, brother and six sisters were sleeping. “The house collapsed,” he says. “My mother was dead, my stepfather was dead, my brother, dead. My mother was pregnant.” Ali believes some of his sisters may have escaped. As a result of his burns, Ali is suffering from septicemia, which is spreading toxic bacteria through his body. His condition should be treated in a sterilized location, but Ali lies on a bed near an open window, a dirty towel suspended over his chest. His nurse says the boy is quiet when he’s alone and never cries out in pain. “He just wants to go outside Iraq to get treatment,” she says. “And he just wants to see his sisters.” [A few days after Time published his story, Ali was evacuated to Kuwait and then to London where he was treated in hospital and where he now lives.]

Los Angeles
Aug. 15, 2005
After taking advanced classes and getting a private drama coach, [hip-hop singer André (Andre 3000)] Benjamin went to auditions. They did not go well. Once, in front of a group of Fox executives, he got so frazzled that he couldn’t stop sweating. “I was supposed to be playing this ultra-cool guy,” Benjamin says. “I was supposed to have a cigarette. I was totally not that person. The people in the room pretended that nothing unusual was going on, but when it was over I ran into the bathroom and looked at my face, and I looked like I just climbed out of a pool. I pray the people at Fox have honor, man. I beg them, Destroy that tape.” His discomfort with auditions, Benjamin believes, was caused by a sense that he had to accomplish too much in too little time. “First,” he says, “I had to make people believe that I’m not Andre 3000, that I am this character. It created a lot of nervous tension.” Perhaps, but Benjamin happily allowed his agents to use his renown to get auditions, so he could hardly take offense at the parts he was reading for or the burden of being seen as just another rapper. The noblest solution might have been to stop using his fame. The smartest was to use his fame differently. Benjamin asked his agents to cold-call directors he respected to find out whether they would be willing to have lunch. More often than not, they were. Benjamin always made a point of explaining that Andre 3000 — the platinum blond superfreak put together from the spare parts of George Clinton, Rick James and Prince — is nothing like André Benjamin, the person named Esquire’s best-dressed man in the world. “Andre 3000 is wild and crazy. He’s got the energy of a little kid,” says Benjamin. “I’m totally opposite from that, way more calm. I have friends that call me Turtle.”

Indian Ocean
Jan. 10, 2005
They are burning bodies on the shore of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Manikimuttu, 24, whose grandfather is among the 60 or so in the pyre, is crazed with grief, one moment scooping water into cooking pots and throwing it on the flames, the next collapsing in uncontrollable sobs. They are collecting bodies from the normally green lawn in front of the old mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, now littered with a thick debris of dead snakes, chickens and humans — in just one collection point of the city, the authorities have gathered 3,500 corpses. On the Andaman coast in Thailand, soldiers are using an ax and a spade to dig out the body of a woman half-buried beneath a palm tree. Eighty kilometers south in Patong, a honky-tonk beach town on Phuket Island, 100 bodies are laid out in front of a morgue that has room to refrigerate only two. To the south, in Galle, an old Dutch town on the Sri Lankan coast, Z.A.M. Fahim, 45, a restaurant owner, has found 32 bodies before midday. He walks toward what was once a busy junction in the town and claims that the giant swamp that now obscures the ground hides 500 more corpses. To prove his point, he walks over to a marshy landscape of tires, rafters and mud. “There,” he says, with a note of triumph, pointing to yet another body, lying in the open. “We are standing on bodies right now.”