It was the day before Kabul fell, and before Americans began to think the campaign in Afghani-stan might actually be going their way. The nation's mood was still fragile. True to form, Tom Ridge - the Bush administration's "director of homeland security", supposedly on the cutting edge of all security issues and intelligence that could possibly concern our safety - had to be informed during a live radio interview from his office that Flight AA587 had gone down over New York on Monday. "I've got to find out more," said a stupefied Ridge, before hanging up the phone. Within 24 hours, the disaster was practically forgotten - just a routine tragedy that claimed more than 260 lives, rather than yet another sinister act of terrorism. Phew!
But if the third loss to American Airlines of a passenger jet since the morning of 11 September shows anything, it is the devastating effect of the September attacks. American Airlines itself is now losing between $10m and $15m a day; United Airlines is suffering similar losses. All major airlines are now losing millions every day, with payloads reduced by 27 per cent and 140,000 jobs already gone.
Hotel occupancy is likewise drastically down, along with car rentals - with resulting shock waves rippling all the way down the US economy. The once mighty cruise industry, from Florida to Alaska, is practically out of business. And all this is happening despite a $15bn bailout of the airlines by Congress.
Public money is going somewhere, though. This being America, rapacious industrialists are preoccupied with making a quick buck out of 11 September. For example, a traumatised nation is being ripped off by pharmaceutical giants over smallpox vaccinations. The hapless Tommy Thompson - George Bush's secretary for health and human services, and a man known to have taken holidays in Europe, southern Africa and Australia at the expense of Philip Morris, the tobacco conglomerate - put out tenders for 250 million new doses of smallpox vaccine (to ensure that the US stockpile would cover everyone in the country), budgeting $509m for the purpose. But ten huge pharmaceutical companies all bid at around $6-$8 per vaccine - three to four times the budgeted amount - even though they could still make huge profits were they to charge around only $2 per vaccine.
War profiteering, in fact, is in full swing here. It is helped by the mood in government circles that nobody should be quibbling over spending a few billion more here or there in the fight against terrorism; the war itself is costing the US taxpayer more than a billion dollars a week, and those costs are likely to increase.
Bipartisanship, clearly and even movingly evident immediately after 11 September, quickly disappeared when the issue of federalising airport security workers came up: the Republicans thought it was a Democrat plot to enlarge Big Brother government and to bring in more unionised workers.
Then there is Bush's "tax stimulus", which was in the works before 11 September, but which received a big push as a result of the atrocities. Not least, it was retitled the Economic Security and Recovery Act. What patriotic American could say no to that? Its premise is that by injecting more money into an already struggling economy, individuals and businesses will bounce cheerfully back into their competitive ways next year. Children will find more spinach and cabbage in their school lunches - because the spinach and cabbage industries had particularly poor crop yields in 2000 and 2001 and are now being rescued. Three-quarters of the $100bn supposedly being reinvested back into the economy goes towards giving major companies better tax deals, and only $14bn will go to poor and middle-income families. Even the treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill - yet another Bush appointee who has already shown he is not up to the job - dismissed the tax breaks as "show business". Representative Greg Ganske, a Republican from Iowa, likewise broke from Republican Party lines to describe the tax stimulus as "an early Christmas card" to "already profitable corporations".
The biggest single item of the package is a $25bn repeal of a complicated industrial tax known as the corporate alternative-minimum tax, plus backdated refunds of all payments of the tax since 1986. Of the $25bn, more than a quarter goes to just 14 companies. IBM will get a $1.4bn bonanza, for example, and General Motors $833m. General Electric (makers of the jet engine that catastrophically exploded last Monday) pick up a handy $671m, Chevron Texaco $572m, and so on. A further $21bn is designated to allow US companies to avoid paying taxes on profits from overseas offshoots, on condition that those profits remain overseas; it has not been fully explained how funds that cannot legally be brought back into the US economy will none the less help stimulate it.
In this frenetic atmosphere, life is in full swing for Washington's shameless lobbyists. Not surprisingly, the 14 lucky companies that will receive such largesse in the Economic Security and Recovery Act are all regular political donors that have poured $15m into political campaigns in the past decade. In defence of it all, Representative Dick Armey - the House majority leader and, along with the former insect exterminator turned chief Republican whip, Representative Tom DeLay, a zealous crusader of the Republican right - says lamely that the post-11 September measures "will create 170,000 new jobs next year alone". He does not explain how that will help the remaining 7.83 million other Americans already out of a job.
And so America continues to ride the confusing and confused emotional roller coaster it has ridden since 11 September. Dread and terror when AA587 rained down on Queens was followed by jubilation at developments in Afghanistan. The Bush administration has slid from convincing the US that it was fighting a war against first Osama Bin Laden, then al-Qaeda, then the Taliban. So now people seem to think that "the war" is all over. But Tommy Thompson is still dithering over which company or companies he should give the smallpox vaccination bonanza to, while he and cabinet colleagues are still terrified by intelligence reports that more terrorism is on its way.
The resurfacing of Mayor Rudy Giuliani when New York was once again hit by an exploding plane demonstrated how a political leader can lead - in contrast to Bush (who these days limits his appearances to a few set-piece recitations of platitudes) and the vice-president Dick Cheney (who has almost literally disappeared from public view).
Last Monday, Bush came out of the White House for a brief photocall with Nelson Mandela - "a man", he said, "whose name symbolises freedom and courage". Not for 27 years, it didn't - not when Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island and seen in the US (and the UK) for most of that time as a communist member of the ANC and, yes, a terrorist, too.
A terrible plane crash greeted first with horror, but then with relief all round; the suspension of the Bill of Rights whereby the FBI will be allowed to eavesdrop on client-lawyer conversations; jubilation over "victory" against the Taliban; the war profiteering; the welcoming of a former "terrorist" to the White House; the F-16s still rumbling overhead for 24 hours a day, seven days a week - it is all part of what Tony Blair would doubtless call the "kaleidoscope" of emotions that have cascaded over America in these astonishing few weeks.
Andrew Stephen is the New Statesman's US editor
