What the Bushleaguers stole from us: a note for New Yorkers
Most people in America seem to be under the impression that we all should feel the same way about events -- coast to coast -- that given the same data, we should all come to the same conclusions. And we are generally convinced, due to mass media saturation, that we are all receiving the same information at the same time.
Not so.
Just watch CBS news (or NBC or ABC, or even PBS) and then BBC’s TV broadcast. Read the news on Al Jazeera’s website. Not only do the stories have a different perspective, but the selection of what they think is important may not come close to being the same as that which our homegrown media thinks is, or, for that matter, given adequate information, that we do. And this is excluding local stories that are, of necessity, different in each location.
Long time ago – more than 30 years ago -- writer Tom Veitch pointed out that if you blew up the Empire State Building, it would not be the bricks falling down on 5th Avenue that were significant, but the images of bricks falling through the media that counted. Still true.
So, on September 11, 2001, news footage of the mass murder at the World Trade Center (and also a very little bit of the same at the Pentagon) was broadcast around the world. The footage was the reality, but it was not the same footage everywhere, and didn’t mean the same thing. An example, removed from the emotions of 9/11 follows:
*****
Oakland, California: in 1989, there was a large earthquake centered about 70 miles south of here. The earthquake caused a section of the Bay Bridge to fall, making it impassable, also, in West Oakland a section of the Cypress Freeway pancaked – the upper deck collapsed onto the lower deck, trapping and/or crushing anyone driving north and west on that stretch of road.
Traffic was screwed royally – in addition to everything else, the so-called Bay Bridge World Series game between Oakland and San Francisco was scheduled to begin at Candlestick Park in SF a few minutes after the earthquake struck at 5:03 PM. Hours later, when friends or relatives still failed to show up, our hopes that perhaps the missing were still in transit, stuck in traffic, faded and the possibility that they might have been crushed under the fallen top deck of the freeway became more likely. Later that evening, many of us headed down that way.
It was a nightmare scene. The upper deck was less than a yard above the lower one, and people – local people -- were climbing in the space, feeling around in the dark, crawling, trying to rescue people guided in the dark by screams and moans, their efforts slowed intermittently by aftershocks making the entire structure shake and sway. Ironically, they were getting up to the opening on forklifts made available by the car-crushing yard across the street.
Some time after dark, a long white stretch limo pulled up beside the remaining structure in West Oakland. The back door opened and Dan Rather got out. He pulled down his tie, rolled up his sleeves, mussed his hair a bit so it might look as if he’d actually been somewhere doing something, looked into the camera and said, “We’re here in San Francisco, where the freeway …”
And the rest of the country – actually the world – was told this had happened in another city. Compounding to the wrong impression was the fact that the greatest devastation was near the center, in Santa Cruz. But the road/bridge into that town was out, so no media-bricks from the collapsed buildings were shown. (Another irony: Rather’s limo had gone around the bay, south on 280 to highway 17 and around and up 880, had actually passed within a mile or two of the epicenter, but he didn’t know it.)
Rather than the various media correcting their mistake later, admitting they had been unable to cover the full story, they told everyone it was a San Francisco earthquake, a San Andreas Fault earthquake, even, finally, the Loma Prieta Earthquake, knowing that NO ONE, not even the Bay Area people, would have known where that was if it hadn’t been connected to the devastation in Santa Cruz.
The hundreds or even thousands of people at first thought to be dead turned out to be only 56 individuals, most of them under that collapsed roadway. All the people normally on the bridge and that stretch of freeway at that time were getting ready to watch the game -- already home, pouring the beer, or in a bar near their jobs, planning to go home late. For the rest of the country, it had been defined and was no longer interesting: “San Francisco, earthquake, yeah yeah yeah, fine, seen it before. Fifty-six people? Hell, that ain’t nothin’.”
I didn’t know at that time that a dear friend had been on the lower deck of that stretch of freeway, one of the 56. Another friend had just been on that stretch, felt his car being blown around by a wind, looked in his rearview mirror and watched the collapse 20-30 yards behind him.)
*****
So we cut to September 11, 2001, lower Manhattan. The twin towers everyone in the New York had hated since they’d gone up were on fire, were melting, were down.
And we watched it on TV, even as we had watched Tommy Lee Jones in Volcano and all the rest of the actors in all the rest of those disaster movies. It didn’t register.
(Well, not completely: a radio report that mentioned the couple joining hands and jumping from the 80-something floor made an impression, made it real for a moment, brought pain and tears.)
Over the following days, I asked a friend in New York about it, e-mailing him for his descriptions of looking across the bridge and seeing empty space where the buildings had stood. And it was becoming clearer, but still… it also was causing him some pain to be describing feelings he and his students were having. Perhaps he thought I was only interested in morbid superficial sensation.
And then the Bushleague crew took over, pointing a finger at Osama ben Ladn as quickly and surely as a finger (complete with dossier) had been pointed at Lee Harvey Oswald minutes after the murder in Dallas in 1963.
And then, with those of us not there in physical presence, still trying to grasp just what it was that had happened – the significance of it, then came the emotional theft of the catastrophe for political purposes …
“We’re doing what we’re doing because because because…”
And then we got to see Monkey Boy standing there at the hole some days later, feeling up a fireman, acting as if he cared enough to put out a few bucks to get those people better communication devices. And then every one of the insect-like Bushwah mob lining up and mouthing the same words, all of which amounted to “Shut up, keep shopping, don’t ask us what we’re doing, we’re on top of it. But be afraid, very afraid, every time we tell you to.”
Before we could manage some emotional understanding, some real connection, it was stolen, sold to a smiling gentleman with a face full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged,” a man whose robot-like gestures were taken to be leadership, gravitas of a presidential type.
So, please understand, you who pass those holes in the ground every day -- there’s a discontinuity in the sense of what that soulless abbreviation “9-11” means to us. The thousands of deaths of September 11, 2001 were freeze-dried, packaged, and sold to us as a George Bush Special.
Perhaps some of you in New York saw a president trying (either successfully or not) to help establish some semblance of normal civic calm, but we saw an opportunistic asshole trying to upstage the Mayor of New York, a hard-ass intelligent leader who was showing us all how a dictatorial fascistic attitude could be used for social welfare and healing.
We saw a stupid man being scripted by oh-so-very-clever-men dancing on the vaporized bones of thousands of people for his own personal gain. We saw an obscenity that in some ways surpassed the one that had occurred at the World Trade Center Towers that day in September – saw it in that smirking, “Hey look at me, I’m Presidential” behavior; in the endless loops of WTC atrocity meltdown images; in the "Be afraid, keep being afraid" manipulation. It just finally stopped working. As the late great Lord Buckley said in the classic Jonah and the Whale, "Boy, you keep ringin' that bell, you gonna bend that bell." They bent that bell and made it useless for any future time when it might be needed again.
And now – well that’s why we don’t have the same fear you do, don’t have the same trauma -- nor do we have the energy to play “Monsters in the Middle East” any more. So, heartless as it may sound, dear folk of New York, I’d like to return some of the valuable advice you gave us: Get over it.
Stop justifying every bit of excess and viciousness you do with a snarling reply: “You want to see the holes in the ground?” That’s not the real New York. I am appalled to see people who were once so healthily cynical, so intelligent and abrasive, turn into simpering shrieking Kate Smith wannabe camo-queens.
I’m not romanticizing the city when I remember that New Yorkers never used to feel any need to justify their snarling, their viciousness, their excesses. Those bits of nastiness just came out as naturally as farts, and any objection was met with a quick-shot “You got a problem with that?” to us hicks from out of town.
I can only wait with mixed horror and anticipation to see how you’ll react in August when Monkey Boy and his minions meet there for a self-congratulatory party and make the entire disaster once again be about them, and who they are and how wonderful they are and how masterful they were. Not about the burned ones. Not about their families. Not about their friends. Not about the people of Manhattan who breathed in the vaporized remains of steel and flesh. It will all be about them, the politicians and their masters.
So please – give them a traditional New York welcome, the kind of welcome that a couple from Keokuk would get when they walk into Cannibal Sam’s Midtown Used Car Lot because they heard they could trust him to be fair. The kind of welcome a Methodist minister from Macon might get walking down an alley to find a little “far-from-home” gay sex. Show those GOP delegates some of that famous New York mugging, hustling, burglarizing, short-changing, rude, here’s-a-Rolex-for-$100, bird-flipping behavior. No more excuses.
hjp
kcaB
