HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Slate staff members discuss the current crisis.

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Another Victim: CHOGM

By Geraldine Brooks
Posted Friday, Sept. 28, 2001, at 2:43 PM ET

When Atta, et al., blew up the World Trade Center, I wonder if they knew they'd also be destroying Brisbane?

RSS

Brisbane is a relaxed, tropical, riverbank city on the east coast of Australia. Next week, it was to have hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, a monster talkfest for which every hotel in town had been booked solid months ago. Today, in a massive act of international cowardice, that conference was canceled.

Related in Slate

Related on the Web

I don't know how many receptionists, limo drivers and dishwashers will be laid off as a result of this, coming as it does on top of massive cancellations by American tourists now too scared to travel. The axing of CHOGM is just one glaring example of the reverberations of Sept. 11, but it is a particularly telling one, for if ever there was a pressing time for world leaders to meet and show solidarity--especially a group such as this one, where developing and developed countries meet on an equal footing--it is now.

I don't know who pulled the plug on CHOGM, but I'd be surprised if it was Tony Blair. I was in London in the mid-1970s, when the IRA bombers were targeting the haunts of wealth in London's West End. Every time a bomb blasted a restaurant, the blood would be mopped up, the glass shards brushed away, and the place reopened as soon as possible. And, inevitably, it would be packed. That kind of defiance robbed terror of its ultimate goal, which is, after all, to terrorize.

I'm glad David Greenberg flew to his friends' wedding. But I'm profoundly sorry for every postponed holiday, canceled business trip and stock market sell-order. I know that Michael Lewis has argued that the best favor investors can do for the market is to let it work rationally, but how wonderful it would have been if the Invisible Hand had raised its middle digit to the terrorists in the gloriously defiant gesture of a surging Dow.

We should fight them on the beaches, we should fight them on the Street, and on the golf course, and by going to the movies, and by putting our bums back on the seats of our airlines. It is time to master fear and depression and get on with our lives.

the breakfast table:
entries