Hmmm, many things to say; how to organize them? The venerable numbered list:
1. Ahnold wins California. Not much to say about this, except that every time someone like this (Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono) wins office in this country, I'm disgusted all over again. Clint Eastwood is the exception to this rule, in my mind, because he's actually a pretty smart guy and didn't treat his political position as though it were a way to revive or further his media career. So now California, that strange mix of decandence and conservatism, gets a Nazi-admirer who shameless gropes women. The latter activity's not unknown in the Kennedy clan into which he's married, but the politics couldn't be farther apart. It'll be interesting to see how much of a shambles (or uptight little German mini-state) Arnold makes of California. Glad I'm not living there. And the percentage of people who voted for him because he's a celebrity? What do you think?
2. Mediabinge is Back! Yay! This is good news for me, because not only do I like reading Emily's musings, but she's part of my lifeline to pop culture, since I still don't have a TV. If not for Em and Jen, I would be as clueless as I was when I was a kid and could only watch 1 station on a B&W TV when all my friends had color and cable, or at least better antennae than we did. Doubtless this is the origin of my indifference (mostly) to most mass media but print and music, but I still have this twinge of the adolescent horror of being uncool when someone says "Did you see X?" referring to a movie or TV program which I've ignored. Plus, thanks to the abysmal nature of NYC radio, I'm now so far out of the music loop I can't even find the cool stuff anymore. Em's not much help in this area because we've got very different taste in music, but Jen keeps turning me on to bands I like. Sadly, most of the new music I like I hear in the subway. One thing I'm really looking forward to in moving to the Bronx is finally being able to get a clearer signal on WFUV and possibly on WBGO, too.
3. My Last Friend in Canada. Anita called me last week to tell me that Debra's husband Gary had had a heart attack and died. It was great to hear from her again, despite the circumstances, and I was glad she called to tell me about Gary since the Draper clan seems to have disowned me as completely as I was once embraced by them. As far as I know, only Denise has some reason to be pissed at me, but I haven't heard from either her twin Debra (to whom I was closer) or their older sister Suzanne since Denise and I had a falling out. Anita was Denise's roommate at one point, so she probably knows them as well as I do. I'm still boggled by the fact that Denise and I saw my last visit in two such completely different ways (boy, your focus really does determine your reality, Master!), and I still find it outrageous that she says she liked me better when I was depressed (that's about on par with telling someone at least their cancer chemo took off all that weight), but I can't say I'm harboring any ill-will about it. Why waste the energy? So I wouldn't mind hearing from any of them, but I'll never again make the mistake of thinking I'm part of the clan, no matter what they say. Anita, for all that she's quite a lot younger than I am, still seems like the last voice of reason up there, which comes, I suspect, from being an only child in a fairly normal household--as normal as an household gets, including my own. Here's hoping we keep in touch better than we have.
4. Thoughts on Ground Zero and Highrise Fires. One of the things Anita asked me was if I'd been down to Ground Zero yet, which I haven't. When she asked, I said that it was hard to explain to someone outside New York how raw it still is to many people here, me included. It's true that I've spent the last five weeks researching and writing about the World Trade Center site and the rebuilding plans, but that doesn't entirely explain how I still feel about going down there. Then Marcia sent me an article from the Times about a psychoanalyst, Charles B. Strozier, who watched it from the Village that explained some of what I'd been thinking or feeling lately:
I have studied trauma, and those, such as Christian fundamentalists, who have apocalyptic visions that come close to what I now saw. No event in recent American history has more decisively evoked the apocalypse. This apocalyptic vision was shown on the television, but it was for those who viewed it a very different event. I wondered how the perceptions of viewers who were not there and our perceptions were different.
That pretty much defines me, although I have to say that it was a pretty minor apocalypse, as apocalypses go. Maybe I've read too much apocalyptic fiction, too, not just the Book of Revelation. It wasn't the first thing that came to mind, but the images were portrayed that way on TV, even though, as is pointed out in the article and in an Esquire article called "The Falling Man" (the same image I based "Each Step is a Fall, Arrested" on) the images of people jumping from the towers soon disappeared from the news. I watched very little of the news or the images the news offered. Most of my experience of it was the smell, the black smoke, the stories of my friends who were here and escaped: Adam narrowly escaping being crushed by a falling jet engine, Kelly missing a workout at the Deutsche Bank gym because she'd broken her hand, Eileen late for her job in WTC 7 because of a dentist appointment, George's pregnant wife getting out of one of the towers just in time, along with Lily's son. Strozier says he's noticed a difference between people who were here and people who weren't, and that was pretty obvious even at the time. I remember calling a friend in the midwest a few days afterwards, still shell-shocked and traumatized and freaked-out and being stunned that she wanted to talk about what seemed to me like trivial little problems of everyday life when my city had just had an act of war perpetrated on it fer Christ's sake.
Strozier explains:
Those who viewed the event through the repeated images on television alone became numb. . . . The constant repetition of the image served to cut the disaster from reality. The images on televisions were more disorienting, more confusing and maybe more seductive. I knew from past studies that numbness leads not to anger but to rage, to anti-empathy, to undirected anger. The confusion of rage often pushes people towards violence. Numbing leads to a diminished capacity to feel.
This partially explains my cousin's reaction of immediately wanting to annihilate Afghanistan. As Strozier says,
You cannot underestimate the difference between the experience and the image of the experience. . . . Those who lived in Lower Manhattan breathed in the smell of the dead for weeks, like those at Auschwitz. We all knew what the smell was even if we did not speak about it. The dust settled over huge sections of the city, from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. The chaos and fear were real to New Yorkers. This made the experience authentic. New Yorkers were much closer to the suffering. It was harder to become numb to it. And while they may have been angry, they were less filled with rage. . . . It was much harder to get those of us who were there to believe in the notion that killing others would somehow make us safer.
And that's the hard thing to explain to people who weren't here. It's why I still don't really want to go down to Ground Zero (a name I still resist for the truly outrageous violence implicit in it, a violence it fell short of). It still feels like an open wound that's just been tidied up; they've taken out the necrotic flesh, but the gaping hole is still there, unhealed.
I had that same frisson of horror Monday down on Union Square. I was on my way to see my acupuncturist after work in the later afternoon, and came up out of the subway to see everyone on the south end of the square looking up and over at the Zeckendorf Towers, where smoke was pouring out of one of the windows and you could see fire in the room. The picture at this link is taken from about where I was standing. The fire was in the tower on the left, at the first setback of the tower itself, just above the base of the building. FDNY arrived as we were all watching and one fireman was leaning out the window in a room right above where the flames were and breaking out the windows with a swinging hammer. Inside, the windows started to burst outward and we all wondered at first whether it was more firemen or someone inside. It turned out to be firemen. The double-glazed windows seemed alarmingly difficult to break, although I don't know where you'd go once you'd broken one anyway. It must have been about the 14th floor of 27. I assume the apartment was empty, but it was hard to tell from where we were standing. Seeing the windows broken out and smoke pouring out and flames growing in one of the rooms was eerie. The crowd of people I was with was very silent.
I've always had a fear of being trapped like that, which is why I was so horrified by the people jumping from the WTC. It was primally horrifying anyway, but it seemed particularly awful to me, even before I saw "The Towering Inferno" as a kid.
I'm starting to feel like it might be a good thing to finally go down to the WTC site, and walk up those stairs at Cortlandt street that used to lead into the shopping mall underneath the towers, the now very truncated stairs that only lead to daylight. I want to go down to the open house this weekend and take pictures of the new Solaire building in Battery Park City, which I'm writing about for the newsletter, so I might wander by the WTC site while I'm down there. We'll see.
5. Neil Gaiman's Sandman. What is it with this? Despite Jen's obsession with all things Sandman, I'm not seeing the brilliance here. Sure, it's not standard comic fare, but I don't understand the fascination. American Gods was brilliant but I wasn't all that impressed with the stories in Endless Nights, or vignettes, really. Not all of them were really stories. I haven't read the other Sandman comics, but from what I've read of the rest of Gaiman's work, he does long fiction better than short. Neverwhere was great too, but Smoke and Mirrors didn't impress me either. Some of the art in the Sandman is certainly interesting, but I don't find the characters all that compelling. Maybe it's just this set of stories though. Oh Je-n-n-n-n! Got a present for you . . .
6. Bush's Iraqmire. I admire George Paine's dogged blogging about Bush and Iraq. I can't do it anymore. The bastards have worn me down. It still sickens me that we're losing at least a soldier a day there, that it's like the bombings in Israel now, expected and common. I can only say that I see signs of hope in the Economist's latest cover headline "Wielders of Mass Deception?" with Bush and minions on the cover. It's still a war, and it's still one of attrition that we're losing, just like Vietnam and for many of the same reasons. Now there's a Terminator in the governor's mansion in California. Thank goodness he can't run for president. That's the only regime I can think of that would be worse than this one.