ABlog

If death were single
but it comes mingled

The inauspicious day has come and gone. The ritual fingering of wounds in the media, public ceremonies the equivalent of banging on muffled gongs, chanting of endless dirges and performance of rituals to ward off evil spirits.

Why us?
Why us?

The “fifth anniversary of 9/11/01” passed for me as if it were somebody else’s religious holiday. There was that same feeling of nagging awareness, a sense, on the very edge of consciousness, of obligations neglected. (My most immediate association here is with the Jewish holidays; in the years I spent with my Jewish ex and daughter, a good deal of ambivalence rubbed off until it came to seem almost as if it were a dereliction of my own duty not to be in Temple on Yom Kippur….but now that I think about it, I suppose my susceptibility to this feeling originated in childhood, with my Unitarian i.e. atheist upbringing, which left me feeling always apologetic in the presence of the surrounding Christian multitudes.)

Except that other people’s religious holidays never leave me with this grief-edged rage. This endless dull anger at my murdering country insidious and inescapable as the lung damage I heard described in a radio broadcast of testimony from a public forum on the health effects of 9/11: a woman told how, after obeying official injunctions to return to her home near Ground Zero and living and working there for months on end, she learned that her respiratory tract had been permanently harmed, burned through and through by the acid air.

Of course I reject the notion that “innocent civilians” ought to die—horribly or otherwise—for an empire’s sins. But I also reject the notion that civilians are innocent.

(What must we call ourselves? Guilty noncombatants?)

How am I spending these days of 9/11?

I’m teaching my undergraduate writing classes, where we talk about craft, about point of view, about truth and creative license in personal narrative; where we may speak about politics and living history if they come up in the writing—but where I know from experience it will be like pulling teeth to break the surface tension of polite normalcy and diligent self-realization that an expensive, overwhelmingly white private institution of higher education located at a pricey Manhattan address insistently promotes (or should I say engineers)?

It’s passing strange, five years on from that day, to live in a New York that’s visibly undergoing massive processes of re- and uber-gentrification. Never mind the “hole in the ground”—everywhere else, it seems—at least along my habitual routes—enormous cranes are hoisting lumps of building materials far into the sky. One of these behemoths is going up at the corner of University Place and 14th Street, kitty-corner from Union Square. Another looms over Grand Army Plaza; as I stood on line to buy corn at the Green Market there last Saturday, a woman behind me muttered, “Not to sound redundant, but it’s so different with that thing there.” “Wait till the Atlantic Yards extravaganza gets going downtown,” I said (referring to the Forest City Ratner arena-and-highrise project whose promoters have managed to buy off most local elected officials and a good percentage of “grassroots” community groups). “Then we’ll really feel overshadowed.” Peter Cooper Village, where I visited my late dear friend Eve Weinblatt from the time I met her in the mid-seventies until she moved to Pennsylvania last year at the age of 93—the development that once struck me as, and was, such a bleached-out, prim middle-class fortress--is about to be auctioned off by Met Life, transformed into out and out “luxury” housing.

Like rising waves that herald an approaching tropical storm, the white tide is advancing up Flatbush Avenue in advance of the AtlanticYards makeover. In my immediate neighborhood of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, where a decade ago the large apartment buildings were populated almost exclusively by working-class West Indian families, young white tenants are now ubiquitous if still a minority. Next to the train station, there’s a new place, so far the only one of its kind in the neighborhood, where an integrated but decidedly paler-than-normal crowd can hunch over laptops and slurp smoothies. Two basins on the sidewalk outside are labeled “dog water.”

Don’t get me wrong: I like having a place that serves cappuccino (and dog water!) just blocks from home. I with my white self have been part and parcel of these tides of urban displacement for going on 30 years now. But I find it distinctly alarming that according to a recent article in The Brooklyn Paper, Brooklynites of African descent decreased by 20,000 just in the year 2004-2005, while in the same period the white population grew by 66,000. I find it beyond ironic that white Atlantic Yards enthusiast David Yassky (let me qualify that: he’s supposedly a “critical supporter” of the development) appears poised to capture the Democratic nomination for Congress in my district. If that happens, he’ll be directly in line for the seat long occupied by progressive Black Congressman Major Owens, who succeeded Shirley Chisholm.

The primary is today. And I, as a registered Green, can’t even vote for the one really progressive candidate, Democrat Chris Owens.

Yesterday a writer friend and I were talking about the usual: our worse-than-dismal prospects in the world of publishing, and what to do about it. My friend said that she thinks more and more of leaving writing behind, switching to doing something else. She said she’d been inspired by reading the New York Times profiles of people who’d lost loved ones in the World Trade Center—how many of them decided to work for peace. “That’s one way of responding to loss, and rather than just banging your head against a wall….”

I said—and feel very strongly—that in this time and place, whatever my endeavor, I fully expect to be doing a lot of head banging. And, stubbornly, I would rather do it in pursuit of the one thing I feel I’m singularly cut out to do, not the host of things I could do well enough.

In a new Monthly Review article on “The Structural Crisis of Politics,” Istvan Meszaros argues that the escalation of authoritarianism and marked erosion of constitutional protections in Western constitutional democracies (superseding the historically preferred practice of exporting hierarchical violence and repression to the colonial/post-colonial periphery while maintaining “democratic” institutions at the center) is a necessary symptom of the structural crisis of capital—i.e. an unsustainable system-wide condition that must be resolved by total transformation or collapse. In a cheery little piece posted on the Internet, “Tiger at Bay: Scary Times Ahead,” Immanuel Wallerstein surveys the decline of U.S. imperial power and predicts that, from a position of weakness, the “Cheney camp” will intensify its efforts to create international situations “from which it would be almost impossible for the United States to retreat…[and] concentrate (even more than now) on trying to use the executive powers of the presidency, under the docile front man, George W. Bush, to stir up military havoc around the world and to reduce radically the sphere of civil liberties within the United States.” The result of all this, he predicts, will be strong resistance on many fronts, including “the leadership of the U.S. armed forces (with the exception of the Air Force), who clearly think that the current military adventures have greatly overextended U.S. military capacity and are very worried that they will be the ones held for blame later by U.S. public opinion when Rumsfeld and Cheney have disappeared from the newspaper headlines. The Cheney cabal will be resisted as well by big business who see the current policies as having very negative consequences for the U.S. economy.” Wallerstein ends the piece with a mordant admonition to quit worrying about civil war in Iraq and prepare for its possible outbreak in the U.S.

Je suis l’empire à la fin de la decadence…..

Were there days like this in Rome, before it Fell?