It is now more than two weeks since the terrible events in New York and Washington; and the political and emotional reverberations will be with us for years. But among the apocalyptic images, one picture which will stay with me is that of Mike Kehoe, the New York fireman climbing the stairs of the doomed World Trade Center as the office workers fled downwards.
As a British fire chief interviewed on the radio pointed out, firefighters are often to be found going in the opposite direction to everyone else - whenever people somewhere need to be rescued. And the same goes for police, ambulance crews and lifeboatmen.
This trauma across the Atlantic has illuminated for me the question of how we view the traditional male virtues: courage, endurance, loyalty, emotional toughness - unfashionable characteristics maybe, but qualities for which every New Yorker is profoundly thankful.
It also throws a new light on to the modish question “What are men for?” which, in the wake of such phenomena as assisted conception and the netaddress preoccupies the feature pages of our newspapers and magazines from time to time. It’s a question which underlies our current difficulties in educating boys, especially in primary school.
In a culture which has lost faith in the male virtues, much of the behaviour of small boys - their boisterousness and energy, their risk-taking and showing-off, their noisiness and gangs - is simply seen as a pain in the neck, something to be ruefully put up with by their long-suffering teachers (usually female), rather than celebrated, developed, and channelled into positive activity.
In New York, the moneymen (and they did seem to be mostly men) honoured the firefighters by inviting them to perform the ceremony of re-opening the Stock Exchange. It wasn’t only a way of celebrating their heroism; it was also a not-quite-expressed recognition that the comfortable lives of these high-fliers are based on a bedrock of dependable systems largely operated by working class men.
Even I, more than 3,000 miles from the disaster, felt a twinge of anxiety on that Tuesday evening as my tube train pulled up at the eerily deserted platforms of Canary Wharf which had been evacuated earlier in the day. I was relieved to reach my stop and make my way home. But the train driver had to continue through many more scary stations until the end of his or her shift.
So I am not forgetting that women too can be tough and brave; or that it was men who hijacked those planes and planned that devastation - and men who look like leading us into a war. But we do need to think more deeply about our attitudes to educating boys.
Doris Lessing recently attracted a lot of flak for describing a primary classroom she saw where “smug” little girls revelled in teacher’s approval, while bewildered small boys wondered why everything they did seemed to be wrong. And never forget that new girl-power skipping rhyme: “Girls go to Mars to get more starsBoys go to Jupiter to get more stupider”.
Of course Lessing is wrong to say that the battle for female liberation has been won. And of course not all primary classrooms are like the one she described. But I have to admit that her observations had a ring of truth.
September 11 has left us all in a welter of confused feelings. But there are a lot of people in New York and Washington today who have reason to be grateful to men who probably drove their primary teachers crazy.
