Nervous Americans stock up on food, guns and gas masks

Nation at a loss

"People's behaviour has been kinda quirky," said one of the staff at my local library. "I saw five or six fender-benders in a one-mile stretch on my way over here. Somebody just left their two-year-old in here and walked out without him. Nobody seems to be thinking quite straight."

These are strange times in America, and getting stranger as the sheer incomprehension over the attacks on New York and Washington continues to grow. It is not just a question of mislaying sunglasses, or handbags, or children. Nobody quite knows how to respond. People want to do the right thing, but they have no idea what the right thing really is.

Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Neil Young and a legion of other stars of the US entertainment industry decided that the right thing was to blanket Friday night's airwaves with a telethon to raise money for the victims' families. No fewer than 30 TV networks and 8,000 radio stations – far more than for Live Aid in 1985 – tuned in for, among other things, Paul Simon singing an updated version of "Bridge over Troubled Water" and Springsteen performing a new song, "My City of Ruins".

There has been much talk of grieving and the need to be sensitive to raw emotion. Why then did the nation's largest radio station owner, Clear Channel Communication, ban Simon and Garfunkel, John Lennon's "Imagine", and Peter, Paul and Mary from their playlists?

Proscribed titles range from the obvious to the bizarre: "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong; "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens; "American Pie" by Don McLean; "Leaving on a Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul and Mary; "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" by the Gap Band; and "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles.

President Bush and Mayor Giuliani of New York have urged everyone to lead normal lifestyles, embrace freedom and celebrate diversity, but even the most suave of city-dwellers are starting to behave like hunkered down backwoods survivalists. There is a rush on canned food, 55-gallon water tankers, first-aid kits and even army-issue ready meals.

Weapons are also fashionable again, obliterating years of cautious progress by the anti-gun lobby. The mild at heart are plumping for baseball bats and pepper spray, while others are going head-on for handguns, rifles, shotguns and gas masks – particularly Israeli gas masks.

"Let's face it," said Mona Skyler, owner of the Earthquake Supply Store in the San Francisco area, "the Israeli gas masks are the best because terrorists have been trying to wipe them out since for ever." She has 50 of them on order, all pre-sold.

Throughout California, which has the toughest gun control laws in the nation, firearms sales have shot up 50 per cent in the past week. Gun shops, relishing their moment in the sun as the rest of the economy crumples around them, have taken to hanging wanted posters of Osama bin Laden behind the counter.

So far, mercifully, there has been very little actual shooting. True, there have been some vicious attacks on Pakistanis, Arabs and Sikhs, targeted simply because, to the ignorant, they look like the bad guys. But New York City has not reported a single murder or rape since the World Trade Centre collapsed.

Violent crime is down drastically across the board – a 34 per cent drop in New York and 26 per cent in Los Angeles. The most common crime since 11 September, in fact, has been flag stealing. The rush on star-and-stripes banners has been overwhelming, and some people just can't wait for the shops to stock up again. What's a little kleptomania between patriots?

This has been a time of embarrassments, big and small. The movie executives at Sony were just congratulating themselves on getting through the troubled production of Spiderman, their big blockbuster for next summer, when they realised that their whole advertising campaign was based on an image of the eponymous superhero spinning a web between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Back to the drawing board.

United Airlines, meanwhile, sent out a brochure to its frequent flyer club members, inviting them to be "a pilot for a day" at its flight training centre in Denver. The offer has been hastily rescinded.