Hurricane Tania
Ho, my hearties! Don your foul-weather gear! Our shores are about to be swept by Hurricane Tania – not a weather system, but a Force Five Scandal, all the deadlier for appearing, at present, to be free of pecuniary drag. The sentimentality about “9/11” (a semi-mythical event, replete with more heroes than the Iliad, but with tenacious roots in fact) is about to clash with the too-long leashed hounds of critical thinking.
Until just the other day, Tania Head, one of the very few survivors from a tower at or just above the point where the jetliners struck, was the president of the Survivors’ Network. There is no sugggestion that she has done anything wrong (such as misappropriating funds – it’s not even clear how she has supported herself) in this office, but there is also no suggestion, beyond her own, that her story of what happened on the 78th floor of the South Tower bears an iota of truth.
In their Times story, “In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit,” David Dunlop and Serge F Kovalevski portray a woman who exploited the city’s psychological disarray to create a new identity for herself. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure, Ms Head’s story worked like an “open, sesame,” to give her entrée to a ring at the circus of grief that became our obligatory entertainment for a few months before it was decided by harder heads that it was time to “move on.”
Ms Head claims to have attended Stanford and Harvard, but her multiple CVs suggest a fabulist without benefit of university training. Eventually and inevitably, a couple of journalists got interested in trying to patch her anecdotes into a coherent quilt. They couldn’t. Let’s see if, say, Rudy can.