Recovery

NEW YORK — The city that never sleeps seems to be getting back on its feet. Times Square was so crowded over the weekend even near midnight and Broadway plays were full, including Les Miserables which is already in its 13th season. On "New 42 St." where Disney’s Lion King is playing and where Madame Tussaud’s museum is located, a man was trying to return to the bad old days of 42nd St., hawking a pamphlet featuring "452 lovemaking positions" for just $1. No one was buying.

What flew off the shelves – or the makeshift curbside stalls – were t-shirts featuring the World Trade Center, pre-Sept. 11, as well as sweatshirts and caps of the New York police and fire departments. T-shirts making fun of Osama bin Laden were sold out, though there were some rolls left of toilet paper with his face printed on each sheet.

But there is no way of escaping the shadow of terrorism. The biggest tourist draw here is the World Trade Center – or what you can glimpse of its ruins. Army and police have cordoned off several blocks of Lower Manhattan, prohibiting anyone from taking photographs from the best vantage points. Tourists make their way along this security cordon. Another favorite spot is Wall Street, where a huge flag is displayed at the New York Stock Exchange.

You take the subway downtown at your own risk. From the World Trade Center security area I waited nearly an hour for my train going uptown before someone started shouting that it wasn’t coming and we should find another one. So we squeezed into an already packed train, only to be told after a few stops that it would no longer proceed to its final destination and everyone had to transfer.

Around the security area there is still a whiff of something like Mt. Pinatubo’s ashfall, which can be scary when everyone in town is on the lookout for suspicious white powder laced with anthrax spores.

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In Washington, Kramer’s café offers a vodka concoction called "The Absolut Prick" – also known as The Osama bin Laden. Priced at (what else?) $6.66, it’s "prickly pear cactus purée, Absolut vodka and fresh citrus on the rocks in a sugar-rimmed glass."

As of this moment, however, Bin Laden and his cohorts are still having the last laugh. Whoever was sending those anthrax-contaminated letters succeeded in temporarily shutting down one branch of the US government.

Americans are trying to laugh or shrug off their worries. Anthrax is just another risk they have to avoid, like being run over by a truck, they say. An employee at The Washington Post told us she was starting to feel insecure because no one was sending her a contaminated letter. She also didn’t merit a security detail when her neighbor on Capitol Hill, John Ashcroft, had all those police cars and dark-tinted security vans outside his house.

The anthrax scare has made Cipro, cutaneous and "weaponized" household words here. Visitors aren’t immune from the scare. I’m not drinking tap water, and I continue covering a two-week-old minor wound with adhesive strip even though it healed and dried many days ago.

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I’ve met several foreigners who are aghast that Americans seem to continue being so lax with security. You can still pose for photographs right by the White House fence and walk up to the Capitol if you’re not scared of anthrax.

Americans are debating how much of their civil liberties they are willing to curtail in the name of national security. Very little, the way I see it. I met the journalist assigned at the Pentagon who I think was the first to file a report that alerted the international media — and therefore the world, including the Taliban — about the start of US military retaliation. He did his job as a journalist in a free society, he said, and he didn’t think he jeopardized his country’s military operations.

I met a visiting professor from Ghana who complained to his American guide that he had a scary flight on Northwest Airlines from Amsterdam to Washington because he was in business class with a family from Afghanistan. The professor knew they were Afghans because they couldn’t speak English and the father sought his help, flashing an Afghan passport. The American’s comment: Well, do you think all Afghans live in caves and can’t fly business class?

We were in a night spot where people crowded the stage to dance to "Turn Off the Light" and the bars, lounges and tables were full on all three floors on a Friday night. Americans are recovering. But the process may be as long and difficult as clearing up the ruins of the World Trade Center.