I was pleased to see, over Labor Day weekend, a few minority people in town: African-Americans strolling along Middlebeach Road; Asian-Americans and Latinos fishing off the rocks. This is in addition to the tiny smattering of wealthy immigrants who have moved to town in the last few years. More often than not I see a South Asian or Chinese family in my visits to the Surf Club, which brings me to my main point: the court ruling which opened the town beaches was a small but significant step in breaking open the system of racial and/or class privileges that structure Connecticut society. But the ruling only addressed the legal side of the veiled “apartheid by zoning” which segregates the shoreline.
The ruling was a small step, of symbolic value. I would prefer to see low-income housing developed here. This would go beyond symbols and strictly legal rights of access to truly challenge the economic and moral foundations of Madison’s exclusivity. For while Madison as it is is aesthetically beautiful, any thought as to the reason for such manicured beauty – the exclusion of the poor – arouses in my mind a moral stench that detracts from the tranquil picture. In the long run, our anti-poor zoning and development policies threaten the aesthetic beauty we rightly cherish. How is this so?
In my mind, handing over the town, for the sake of tax dollars, to developers such as Milano and friends, as has occurred at a startling rate, only produces elephantine houses that sit on lanes – excuse me, “courts” -- with cartoonishly pretentious names like “Richborough.” Can anyone honestly argue that steroid-bloated faux-“country manors” that consistently win zoning approval in any way contribute to the “small-town atmosphere” of the simply-designed and modestly-sized colonial homes which are this town’s real cultural treasures? Somehow, the blank ugliness of houses built for the wealthy is sugared up in the eyes of zoning boards by their great cost, while the plain functionality of housing built for the poor is easily tagged “ugly” and “out of character for a small town.” The real fear – a truth that does not need to be spoken – is of having to face people of other classes on one’s own street. The issue is not really aesthetics, or traffic, though aesthetics is how people talk about what housing should and should not be allowed. As for traffic, are the poor likely to own more cars than the rich? The bedrock issue is the maintenance of class privilege.
But this is not something that is openly discussed in our little enclave. We love questions of morality in the movies, or in foreign policy, or in novels, but we fear them when they knock at the door of our own privilege. We love Erin Brockoviches or Mr. Smiths in the movies, and we shake our heads at the obvious wrong-headedness of Irish nuns (as in The Magdalene Sisters) or other screen villains, but can we see the wrongs of our own system, a system without clear villains, a system in which we all implicitly participate? A mere 18 miles separates us from New Haven, but it is another world to us culturally – our media, our zoning boards, and “our” developers (where do they live?) make sure of that.
It is no doubt true that low or lower-middle class housing would no more match the beauty of Madison’s quaint old houses than the McMansions do, but at least such housing would represent the socially useful cause of economic and racial integration, which possesses its own beauty: a moral beauty.
One need only stroll along the back roads of the Hammonasett district (near Clinton) or along the railroad tracks, or even along any street built before the 1980’s, to realize that the obsession with huge houses and exclusivity is a recent phenomena in Madison’s history. Modest housing – such as the little red house on Route 1 next to the former site of Schumann’s store – has a unique beauty which does not need to punch one-acre holes in the forest like the herds of McMansions lumbering clumsily over our landscape. Zoning Boards do have a choice. Markets do not determine all the decisions of our town leaders. Certainly Guilford, which is no less charming than Madison, displays far less infatuation with pretentious housing developments. And though Madison is right to resist a Milford-style giveaway to commercial development, the other extreme – a New Jersey-style giveaway to residential developers for the wealthy – is little better.
This letter will not bring about the changes I desire. But in the long run, this town will pay the price for its leaders’ short-sightedness. What price that might be is another subject. What is the philosophical justification for privilege? Privilege is a certain comfort denied to others which is rationalized as something one deserves morally, as if a ritzy beach house had been graciously granted one by God or society merely for the goodness of one’s soul, and the fact that one need not deal with poorer neighbors no more than a lucky accident, rather than the result of social engineering by zoning boards. I believe there is no “privilege” without “abuse”: privilege is nothing more nor less than systematized, legally institutionalized, abuse. And no one in Madison, myself included, is innocent of this privilege.
And what, then, of those souls laboring in wage-earning jobs? Are they then poor because they deserve to be? Do they have no moral right to leafy lanes and strolls along the beach? For such is the radical implication of Madison’s exclusionary housing policy, which uses economics as a false justification for exclusion. Using economic arguments in this way allows us to avoid responsibility by passing the buck: “Its not me, its the system,” one can always say. But just as talk of aesthetics and small-town atmosphere is really about class anxieties, so is talk of property values and markets a cop-out from the real issue of town policies. For markets are not “free.” They are structured by regulations. And it is regulations, not the market, which effectively ban lower-income housing development here. It is a policy without a conscience: and if this state and country face worsening social strife in coming years it is only because too many town leaders are exactly like Madison’s, allying with certain developers and looking only to a narrowly defined advantage which in the long run cannot be sustained against the anger of the excluded.
Showing posts with label 2003. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2003. Show all posts
Monday, May 7, 2007
fourth of july reverie
Hundreds of cars lined Boston Post Road as I biked into town to pick up a video. The Concert on the Green was still in swing. I saw ice cream trucks and people in lawn chairs and bottles of wine and balloons and felt the tug of a real happening. I got on the phone and dad said he would come down, so I sat to wait in front of the old town hall on my bike, a second-hand girl’s Schwinn.
At intermission the high school musicians in black pants and white shirts came down off the band shell and stood around the city hall steps saying Guess what just happened, you know that cord in the back row? . . .The orchestra seemed to be a refuge for every minority student in town. The few Asian- and African-American students stood out from the white faces of the crowd.
On a bench sat an old Korean couple, grandparents, weathered, as if transported from winter on the Manchurian steppe to this summery bench in Madison – to the only big event in town not related to high school sports. Perhaps they were waiting for a granddaughter who played bassoon. Next to them sat a young white man. He wore his hair long under a baseball cap, and had on a Jack Daniels T-shirt. Before long a friend came by, more muscled, baggy pants hanging low. As they walked down the path in the heart of the crowd they stood out too. The bigger one walked as I have some urban black men walk, one stiff leg taking a step, the other leg swinging loosely forward. Lift and swing, lift and swing.
A group of middle school girls walked about, all eyes on the lookout and a circuit of talk humming low amongst themselves. They are locked into each other, a huddled transistor, in tune and uneasy; I could see the flittings of eyes passing over irrelevant figures, weeding out those of us who posed no threat of challenge or opportunity for mockery. Two girls walked by, one a little larger in the jeans, and I thought their group hum stilled a little, and I thought their eyes were tracking the vulnerable rear end for a moment.
I have kept my ears on edge all my life, especially where I am a stranger to the language – as I am here with these girls wired so tightly into each other. I am tuned to social vibrations in the air. It is defensive, protective, even paranoid. My radar came to me in high school. Just as I was then I felt invisible, watching, monitoring, even though I am not involved in their game. The habit remains. My antenna sniff the air defensively, automatically protective of those two girls walking away, vulnerable to whispers. There is a pause of the transistor’s activity, a question not mentioned, not mouthed: did you see her butt? For a moment they are silent. I am right. They have transmitted a thought. The spell passes. One of them makes a suggestion, and I know who the leaders are. Both girls are dressed in shorts and white tank tops, two pillars to which the rest cling for support. The whole group moves with the two. All the girls are barefoot, a visible code of conformity, of loyalty. A girlhood mafia. There is safety in numbers.
The light goes down. As they leave, a young couple walks their little girl along, grasping each arm to swing her in giant steps. She lifts both legs each time, emphatically. She squeals, mouth wide open, picture of a delight emphatic. The parents smile down at her and I melt too, my eyes following her. There is a small bust of James Madison, recently installed beside the road. The bricks around the bust are inscribed with the names of donors. Small children take to running around the pedestal. Soon the little walker joins in, and all is light-hearted until she bumps, forehead to forehead, with a munchkin only bigger by a matter of months. The difference matters. She is the one hurt, she the one in a mother’s arms, she, cradled. Even her pain is a tableau to be adored by those of us lucky enough to have flitted into the light of that moment.
Next to the bust of Madison is another recent addition, a small block with a plaque stating the woman named was a stewardess aboard one of the planes on September 11. I wonder why her loss should be commemorated more than that of any other lost son or daughter. Were her parents more grief-stricken than other parents? Or is it that she was unlucky enough to have died in a terrorist telecast? Her memory, empty to all like me who never knew her, is replaced by a public store of images drawn from CNN. We did not know her, but we can locate exactly where and when she died, which plugs into a moment in our individual lives, and that moment plugs us into a circuit of collective memory around this name, this empty name. She – or rather her death – stands in a connective moment. In that moment, re-imagined as we see the memorial, her figure edited into our imagination, we are connected to others. We are connected through her. She is our medium.
Our moment of seeing is coordinated with that fiery moment and through it, to this stranger’s death. It is to be meaningful because she and we shared a town of residence. She is the opposite, then, of the child who died on September 10th of diarrhea, in Eritrea: not American, not white, not even blessed with the reflected terror of the eleventh, not part of out “national tragedy” which drapes around our burly shoulders the righteous mantle of victimhood. Three thousand deaths have never had so much political mileage on the road to national myth. Three thousand deaths from diarrhea have moved not one army, not one congress, not one American tear. Three million deaths in the Congo matter far less than Paris Hilton, merely because the perpetrators of that war -- Rwanda, mainly -- are American allies. The Rwanda massacre was eclisped in the eyes of Big Media by O.J. Simpson. The death of this Eritrean girl, as anonymous as this fellow Madisonite is to me, does nothing to help me imagine we are a group, called Americans, that is essentially different from all others. Her death provides us with no service.
The eleventh was a gift to a violent clique within the state apparatus, a justification magically malleable to any end. The eleventh was a license for them to carry out fantasies kept under wraps since the Soviet Union disappeared, even including a renewed nuclear arms race. And so the eleventh became an honor – of sorts – to this woman, who died publicly, at the intersection of every TV eye on the planet.
I ride around the green. Groups of boys mix it up, a gruff intimacy acceptable for boys only because it is mediated by skateboards, bikes with shiny parts, and glow sticks (for the younger boys). Boys not yet ten say with authority Dude, this one goes the highest; they will be the go-getters selling jet engines or missiles to third worlders one day, cultured technocrats around tables will be blown back for a moment by the force of this American’s confident steeliness – which seems welded into and strengthened by the power of the corporation he represents. For now he trains his self-confidence by the act of possessing, which magically endows him with the qualities of the thing owned. For now he bounces the tires of his miniature bike, another city export to the hinterlands, an artifact whose Puerto Rican creators could never follow their bikes past the city limits. It was they who first fetishized the grease-free gleaming chains, every link crystal clear. The frame is so tightly made and the tires so tightly pumped that the whole thing is silent, not a rattle or clack when dropped to the pavement. It is a metaphor of the perfect man, impermeable, so efficient all humanity is expunged.
Another boy wears a sun visor in his hair, taking on the aura of careless MTV athleticism, of sporty but coolly indifferent college boys on spring break. This kind of performance, resting on the props of fashionable objects, is the root of America’s cult of success. The key to such performance is to weld the object-symbol into your being as if it, in itself, were your being, or came from your being. The aim is to convince others of this magical truth. These objects, then, whether fetishes of discipline like the bike or fetishes of laxness like the visor, become talismans, keys to the soul that cannot be dismissed so lightly as mere fashion.
The successful fashion performance is one that believes in itself, and so convinces; it wows, dazzles, draws, lures, conquers. It is a performance that makes concrete gains, transactions. The culture of success-as-performance is perfected as much in schools by boys afraid of looking weak – afraid of being mistaken for mere boys – as it is in corporate boardrooms. The performance of success is not success per se. Immigrant kids and women have more of that real-life success, but they still lack the symbolic power, that social talisman, which is the aura of the white male who possesses wealth convincingly – as if he really deserves it. The performance of course requires recognition, convinced as it already is of its own rightness. This self-conviction is the privilege of the white male. Not every white male succeeds in living up to the symbolic power of his category. But this one convinces. Well done. At 15, this MTV boy has already perfected college. You would never know he was ever a boy at all. He is a guy.
I rolled slowly around the green on my bike. On the lawn in front of the Congregational Church I saw the only person I was to recognize all evening, the middle school orchestra director, Mrs. Clemmons. She had surprised people by marrying a black man way back when. There they were with a lanky daughter. On the green people had set up displays of food and flags inside rope boundaries that had been pegged into the ground early that morning. Tables were draped with quilted stars and stripes, coverings bought for the occasion, with bowls of potato salad, cutting boards, neatly stacked cheese slices, bottles of wine, guttering candles, scenting the air against mosquitoes; around the trophy table sat ranks of old folk and middle aged salary men whose pursuit of the good life had brought them all to Madison. And threading about the margins ran the kids for whom Madison would become seen as a fate once they hit high school – a fate to be subtly lorded over neighboring towns at football towns and in derogatory comments about their girls – but never a choice.
The oddest of trees stood in a back corner of the green. I had noticed it a few weeks before while walking home. It was a tree without much of a background, a Rapunzel, head bowed under the weight of her heavy tresses. When I had first seen it I had thought it a quirk on a picturesque scene, a sadness in nature that someone had let grow. But last week, sitting on the green while antique dealers piled boxes of knick-knacks into vans after a flea market, I had seen it again in its hidden possibilities. A child would find a small world under there. I swung close on my bike and smiled to see that I had been right. A dozen kids larked about under the whispering drapery of leaves. I looked closer. Even inside the space was mysterious, split by hanging bows into fairy rooms. The voices of spectators glimmered distantly through the intimate walls.
My dad found me, sitting in front of the city hall again on my bike, and we strolled into the many-voiced mass. It was dancing with a simmering zest. We found an empty space of grass and sat down on a blanket. The orchestra returned, and struck up a series of patriotic tunes. A small group of people near us were stirred by the music. When “Anchors Aweigh” sounded out several of them stood up, clapping, human erections swelling in pride. I mean that metaphor seriously. Isn’t there an erotic charge to collective demonstrations of transcendent loves, or hates, an excitement at being a hero among heroes? This fervor is not limited to men. One man among them had a brush cut, which I would not have noticed had he not stood clapping.
Dad lay back, his hands clasped behind his neck and the light fell further, leaving the band shell a garish glare over dark heads and flags. A medley of songs from “West Side Story” wafted out, and I hummed along. I could not stop what happened: my analytic eye faded. In its place, the eye of sensations, of sights overlapping with smells and past and present seeping into one another. Partly it was seeing the kids play, and remembering the sensuality of a languid summer night when everything dissolves sweetly into darkness. Every year at this concert, kids are fanatic about glowing light sticks. Girls and boys were alive to the magic of iridescent green or pink or blue. There were simple tubes that could be turned into a loop and whirled around a finger so fast the tube lost distinctness and blurred into one disc of light. Some kids had a safety-conscious version of the sparkler, pulsating with blue light, with long filaments animated by the light. Whipping them slowly through the air was a transfixing illusion, as if a silken sheet were being tossed about.
Where the players were all boys, a restless mania for individual distinction took over, a trickle down effect from their corporate dads, creativity becoming a tool for competitive triumph, Hey didja know it flips better with two fingers? Hey look at this, two fingers is so cool! Someday he will be in high finance, living in Greenwich and buying his kids these toys on the Fourth. The cannon boomed through the 1812 overture and the boy in the back of the band shell hammered at the bells and the noise and the thunderous music coming from the high schoolers in high passion welled up and burst out in clapping, and cheering, people standing, a crescendo of childish fantasy spilling over into the adults too, even me, even this grouchy anti-nationalist.
They played “Its a Grand Old Flag,” and “Stars and Stripes Forever,” relics of mannered times and Victorian patriotic fervor, but in the night mood they were contemporary, real and alive, and people kept standing, drinking them in. “These songs could never be written today,” I said to dad as we walked out. “Too quaint. Not angry enough.” But maybe this anger explains peoples’ hunger for something so outdated, like every other hunger for gems from the past, even for the cliches, of picket fences and British royalty. A hunger for an innocent spirit untainted by the angry vengeance lain over our souls by the eleventh like a bill of debt.
When will this bill be considered paid? How many of the innocent will have to die before our masters are satisfied?
At intermission the high school musicians in black pants and white shirts came down off the band shell and stood around the city hall steps saying Guess what just happened, you know that cord in the back row? . . .The orchestra seemed to be a refuge for every minority student in town. The few Asian- and African-American students stood out from the white faces of the crowd.
On a bench sat an old Korean couple, grandparents, weathered, as if transported from winter on the Manchurian steppe to this summery bench in Madison – to the only big event in town not related to high school sports. Perhaps they were waiting for a granddaughter who played bassoon. Next to them sat a young white man. He wore his hair long under a baseball cap, and had on a Jack Daniels T-shirt. Before long a friend came by, more muscled, baggy pants hanging low. As they walked down the path in the heart of the crowd they stood out too. The bigger one walked as I have some urban black men walk, one stiff leg taking a step, the other leg swinging loosely forward. Lift and swing, lift and swing.
A group of middle school girls walked about, all eyes on the lookout and a circuit of talk humming low amongst themselves. They are locked into each other, a huddled transistor, in tune and uneasy; I could see the flittings of eyes passing over irrelevant figures, weeding out those of us who posed no threat of challenge or opportunity for mockery. Two girls walked by, one a little larger in the jeans, and I thought their group hum stilled a little, and I thought their eyes were tracking the vulnerable rear end for a moment.
I have kept my ears on edge all my life, especially where I am a stranger to the language – as I am here with these girls wired so tightly into each other. I am tuned to social vibrations in the air. It is defensive, protective, even paranoid. My radar came to me in high school. Just as I was then I felt invisible, watching, monitoring, even though I am not involved in their game. The habit remains. My antenna sniff the air defensively, automatically protective of those two girls walking away, vulnerable to whispers. There is a pause of the transistor’s activity, a question not mentioned, not mouthed: did you see her butt? For a moment they are silent. I am right. They have transmitted a thought. The spell passes. One of them makes a suggestion, and I know who the leaders are. Both girls are dressed in shorts and white tank tops, two pillars to which the rest cling for support. The whole group moves with the two. All the girls are barefoot, a visible code of conformity, of loyalty. A girlhood mafia. There is safety in numbers.
The light goes down. As they leave, a young couple walks their little girl along, grasping each arm to swing her in giant steps. She lifts both legs each time, emphatically. She squeals, mouth wide open, picture of a delight emphatic. The parents smile down at her and I melt too, my eyes following her. There is a small bust of James Madison, recently installed beside the road. The bricks around the bust are inscribed with the names of donors. Small children take to running around the pedestal. Soon the little walker joins in, and all is light-hearted until she bumps, forehead to forehead, with a munchkin only bigger by a matter of months. The difference matters. She is the one hurt, she the one in a mother’s arms, she, cradled. Even her pain is a tableau to be adored by those of us lucky enough to have flitted into the light of that moment.
Next to the bust of Madison is another recent addition, a small block with a plaque stating the woman named was a stewardess aboard one of the planes on September 11. I wonder why her loss should be commemorated more than that of any other lost son or daughter. Were her parents more grief-stricken than other parents? Or is it that she was unlucky enough to have died in a terrorist telecast? Her memory, empty to all like me who never knew her, is replaced by a public store of images drawn from CNN. We did not know her, but we can locate exactly where and when she died, which plugs into a moment in our individual lives, and that moment plugs us into a circuit of collective memory around this name, this empty name. She – or rather her death – stands in a connective moment. In that moment, re-imagined as we see the memorial, her figure edited into our imagination, we are connected to others. We are connected through her. She is our medium.
Our moment of seeing is coordinated with that fiery moment and through it, to this stranger’s death. It is to be meaningful because she and we shared a town of residence. She is the opposite, then, of the child who died on September 10th of diarrhea, in Eritrea: not American, not white, not even blessed with the reflected terror of the eleventh, not part of out “national tragedy” which drapes around our burly shoulders the righteous mantle of victimhood. Three thousand deaths have never had so much political mileage on the road to national myth. Three thousand deaths from diarrhea have moved not one army, not one congress, not one American tear. Three million deaths in the Congo matter far less than Paris Hilton, merely because the perpetrators of that war -- Rwanda, mainly -- are American allies. The Rwanda massacre was eclisped in the eyes of Big Media by O.J. Simpson. The death of this Eritrean girl, as anonymous as this fellow Madisonite is to me, does nothing to help me imagine we are a group, called Americans, that is essentially different from all others. Her death provides us with no service.
The eleventh was a gift to a violent clique within the state apparatus, a justification magically malleable to any end. The eleventh was a license for them to carry out fantasies kept under wraps since the Soviet Union disappeared, even including a renewed nuclear arms race. And so the eleventh became an honor – of sorts – to this woman, who died publicly, at the intersection of every TV eye on the planet.
I ride around the green. Groups of boys mix it up, a gruff intimacy acceptable for boys only because it is mediated by skateboards, bikes with shiny parts, and glow sticks (for the younger boys). Boys not yet ten say with authority Dude, this one goes the highest; they will be the go-getters selling jet engines or missiles to third worlders one day, cultured technocrats around tables will be blown back for a moment by the force of this American’s confident steeliness – which seems welded into and strengthened by the power of the corporation he represents. For now he trains his self-confidence by the act of possessing, which magically endows him with the qualities of the thing owned. For now he bounces the tires of his miniature bike, another city export to the hinterlands, an artifact whose Puerto Rican creators could never follow their bikes past the city limits. It was they who first fetishized the grease-free gleaming chains, every link crystal clear. The frame is so tightly made and the tires so tightly pumped that the whole thing is silent, not a rattle or clack when dropped to the pavement. It is a metaphor of the perfect man, impermeable, so efficient all humanity is expunged.
Another boy wears a sun visor in his hair, taking on the aura of careless MTV athleticism, of sporty but coolly indifferent college boys on spring break. This kind of performance, resting on the props of fashionable objects, is the root of America’s cult of success. The key to such performance is to weld the object-symbol into your being as if it, in itself, were your being, or came from your being. The aim is to convince others of this magical truth. These objects, then, whether fetishes of discipline like the bike or fetishes of laxness like the visor, become talismans, keys to the soul that cannot be dismissed so lightly as mere fashion.
The successful fashion performance is one that believes in itself, and so convinces; it wows, dazzles, draws, lures, conquers. It is a performance that makes concrete gains, transactions. The culture of success-as-performance is perfected as much in schools by boys afraid of looking weak – afraid of being mistaken for mere boys – as it is in corporate boardrooms. The performance of success is not success per se. Immigrant kids and women have more of that real-life success, but they still lack the symbolic power, that social talisman, which is the aura of the white male who possesses wealth convincingly – as if he really deserves it. The performance of course requires recognition, convinced as it already is of its own rightness. This self-conviction is the privilege of the white male. Not every white male succeeds in living up to the symbolic power of his category. But this one convinces. Well done. At 15, this MTV boy has already perfected college. You would never know he was ever a boy at all. He is a guy.
I rolled slowly around the green on my bike. On the lawn in front of the Congregational Church I saw the only person I was to recognize all evening, the middle school orchestra director, Mrs. Clemmons. She had surprised people by marrying a black man way back when. There they were with a lanky daughter. On the green people had set up displays of food and flags inside rope boundaries that had been pegged into the ground early that morning. Tables were draped with quilted stars and stripes, coverings bought for the occasion, with bowls of potato salad, cutting boards, neatly stacked cheese slices, bottles of wine, guttering candles, scenting the air against mosquitoes; around the trophy table sat ranks of old folk and middle aged salary men whose pursuit of the good life had brought them all to Madison. And threading about the margins ran the kids for whom Madison would become seen as a fate once they hit high school – a fate to be subtly lorded over neighboring towns at football towns and in derogatory comments about their girls – but never a choice.
The oddest of trees stood in a back corner of the green. I had noticed it a few weeks before while walking home. It was a tree without much of a background, a Rapunzel, head bowed under the weight of her heavy tresses. When I had first seen it I had thought it a quirk on a picturesque scene, a sadness in nature that someone had let grow. But last week, sitting on the green while antique dealers piled boxes of knick-knacks into vans after a flea market, I had seen it again in its hidden possibilities. A child would find a small world under there. I swung close on my bike and smiled to see that I had been right. A dozen kids larked about under the whispering drapery of leaves. I looked closer. Even inside the space was mysterious, split by hanging bows into fairy rooms. The voices of spectators glimmered distantly through the intimate walls.
My dad found me, sitting in front of the city hall again on my bike, and we strolled into the many-voiced mass. It was dancing with a simmering zest. We found an empty space of grass and sat down on a blanket. The orchestra returned, and struck up a series of patriotic tunes. A small group of people near us were stirred by the music. When “Anchors Aweigh” sounded out several of them stood up, clapping, human erections swelling in pride. I mean that metaphor seriously. Isn’t there an erotic charge to collective demonstrations of transcendent loves, or hates, an excitement at being a hero among heroes? This fervor is not limited to men. One man among them had a brush cut, which I would not have noticed had he not stood clapping.
Dad lay back, his hands clasped behind his neck and the light fell further, leaving the band shell a garish glare over dark heads and flags. A medley of songs from “West Side Story” wafted out, and I hummed along. I could not stop what happened: my analytic eye faded. In its place, the eye of sensations, of sights overlapping with smells and past and present seeping into one another. Partly it was seeing the kids play, and remembering the sensuality of a languid summer night when everything dissolves sweetly into darkness. Every year at this concert, kids are fanatic about glowing light sticks. Girls and boys were alive to the magic of iridescent green or pink or blue. There were simple tubes that could be turned into a loop and whirled around a finger so fast the tube lost distinctness and blurred into one disc of light. Some kids had a safety-conscious version of the sparkler, pulsating with blue light, with long filaments animated by the light. Whipping them slowly through the air was a transfixing illusion, as if a silken sheet were being tossed about.
Where the players were all boys, a restless mania for individual distinction took over, a trickle down effect from their corporate dads, creativity becoming a tool for competitive triumph, Hey didja know it flips better with two fingers? Hey look at this, two fingers is so cool! Someday he will be in high finance, living in Greenwich and buying his kids these toys on the Fourth. The cannon boomed through the 1812 overture and the boy in the back of the band shell hammered at the bells and the noise and the thunderous music coming from the high schoolers in high passion welled up and burst out in clapping, and cheering, people standing, a crescendo of childish fantasy spilling over into the adults too, even me, even this grouchy anti-nationalist.
They played “Its a Grand Old Flag,” and “Stars and Stripes Forever,” relics of mannered times and Victorian patriotic fervor, but in the night mood they were contemporary, real and alive, and people kept standing, drinking them in. “These songs could never be written today,” I said to dad as we walked out. “Too quaint. Not angry enough.” But maybe this anger explains peoples’ hunger for something so outdated, like every other hunger for gems from the past, even for the cliches, of picket fences and British royalty. A hunger for an innocent spirit untainted by the angry vengeance lain over our souls by the eleventh like a bill of debt.
When will this bill be considered paid? How many of the innocent will have to die before our masters are satisfied?
no trespassing sign
To the Editor: November 21, 2003
There is something that doesn’t love a “No Trespassing” sign on public land. On a recent stroll at the Surf Club I discovered that the sign prohibiting people from walking on the rocks of Garvin’s Point had, yet again, been pulled up and tossed aside. I couldn’t help smiling. Someone besides me despises that sign, I thought.
Since I was small, those rocks have interested me far more than anything else at the Surf Club. Countless children and adults explored that peninsula of boulders that turns into an island at high tide. A few years ago, however, some lawyer or administrator in our nannyish town hall deemed the risk of slipping and getting a boo-boo too great for the people of Madison to be allowed. “Wouldn’t be prudent!” one imagines this decision-maker exclaiming.
I will keep walking out on those rocks. No government trembling at the thought of lawsuits will take from me the distinct pleasure of meandering those barnacled, seaweedy surfaces. It is bad enough that most of the town shoreline is owned privately and walled off, preventing an unmarred view of the coast, not to mention a stroll. What next? Will the danger of jellyfish stings in August result in a prohibition from entering the water?
If Madison’s town hall simply cannot endure its phobia of lawsuits and sore bums, it would be very sensible to simply put up a sign stating that anyone venturing onto the rocks does so only at their own risk. To prohibit everyone from risking (an improbable) pain for (a certain) pleasure is for the town government to put its own (imagined) interests above the freedom of the people on the people’s land.
Otherwise, that ugly sign and cowardly yellow rope will keep going up – and coming back down again.
There is something that doesn’t love a “No Trespassing” sign on public land. On a recent stroll at the Surf Club I discovered that the sign prohibiting people from walking on the rocks of Garvin’s Point had, yet again, been pulled up and tossed aside. I couldn’t help smiling. Someone besides me despises that sign, I thought.
Since I was small, those rocks have interested me far more than anything else at the Surf Club. Countless children and adults explored that peninsula of boulders that turns into an island at high tide. A few years ago, however, some lawyer or administrator in our nannyish town hall deemed the risk of slipping and getting a boo-boo too great for the people of Madison to be allowed. “Wouldn’t be prudent!” one imagines this decision-maker exclaiming.
I will keep walking out on those rocks. No government trembling at the thought of lawsuits will take from me the distinct pleasure of meandering those barnacled, seaweedy surfaces. It is bad enough that most of the town shoreline is owned privately and walled off, preventing an unmarred view of the coast, not to mention a stroll. What next? Will the danger of jellyfish stings in August result in a prohibition from entering the water?
If Madison’s town hall simply cannot endure its phobia of lawsuits and sore bums, it would be very sensible to simply put up a sign stating that anyone venturing onto the rocks does so only at their own risk. To prohibit everyone from risking (an improbable) pain for (a certain) pleasure is for the town government to put its own (imagined) interests above the freedom of the people on the people’s land.
Otherwise, that ugly sign and cowardly yellow rope will keep going up – and coming back down again.
the sun was made for us
The sun was made for us. For our walking briskly across Harlem.
Instead, it was me. You were in the office; I was walking briskly across Harlem.
I felt such a zest, fuelled by the sun, by the joy of the movements of the people. Kids out of school crowded the sidewalks, a sea of black coats, team logos, and backpacks. They charged one another around fire hydrants, they turned their heads at rumors and repeated them, they face one another down in a war of insults, supporters behind each one.
Their talk was rich and strange.
African women leaned against the glass of a front window, peering out at sidewalk life from their braiding salon. Men stood behind tables of incense – “money,” or “Abyssinia” -- and books – The Glories of Ancient Egypt, or Booty-full African Queens. A little girl holds her mother’s hand, a sticker on her forehead. A woman with a colorful headcloth, jeans, and winter coat, a tatooed mark on her forehead from such a long ways away. A place where poor folk put old magazines and shoes on the sidewalk for sale: “jugs,” with covers of women with huge breasts.
Only minutes later most of that life that sparked me is gone, emptied out of me. The man on the seat next to me nods forward, asleep, book clasped against his belly. The train is hushed, a church of work. The sun still shines for me – and for you, there in your office.
Instead, it was me. You were in the office; I was walking briskly across Harlem.
I felt such a zest, fuelled by the sun, by the joy of the movements of the people. Kids out of school crowded the sidewalks, a sea of black coats, team logos, and backpacks. They charged one another around fire hydrants, they turned their heads at rumors and repeated them, they face one another down in a war of insults, supporters behind each one.
Their talk was rich and strange.
African women leaned against the glass of a front window, peering out at sidewalk life from their braiding salon. Men stood behind tables of incense – “money,” or “Abyssinia” -- and books – The Glories of Ancient Egypt, or Booty-full African Queens. A little girl holds her mother’s hand, a sticker on her forehead. A woman with a colorful headcloth, jeans, and winter coat, a tatooed mark on her forehead from such a long ways away. A place where poor folk put old magazines and shoes on the sidewalk for sale: “jugs,” with covers of women with huge breasts.
Only minutes later most of that life that sparked me is gone, emptied out of me. The man on the seat next to me nods forward, asleep, book clasped against his belly. The train is hushed, a church of work. The sun still shines for me – and for you, there in your office.
their first ride
Their First Ride
I taught them to put coins into the violinist’s case open on the tunnel floor. I taught them to put coins into the drummer’s empty mayonnaise bucket – into the flautist’s black sack. The violinist played facing the wall, a New York mystery. Maybe he was just tuning up. Maybe it was something worse, tragic, or even worse. He heard the clink of dimes and nodded a thank you over his shoulder. But the little blonde girl did not see him nod. She was already walking away, shoulders hunched. She is my niece, just off the plane from Arizona.
On the A train from JFK, I had told my older sister, “We’re in Brooklyn now.” The girl’s face lit up. Her name is Brooklyn. I said to her, “You can get whatever you want here for free,” and she grinned and hunched up her shoulders, shy.
I had taken them up to the front car to show them the innards of the city: three blond kids, one at a time. It was their first time on the subway, and they took to it right away. At first they sat, eating pretzels and cheez’n crackers with me. I had been famished, with no more than a buck something in quarters and dimes by the time I met them at the airport. They called me “uncle” so easily I was not shy asking them for some of their food. They were not at all surprised that a grown man would want to share their snacks. After a bit they were swinging on the poles the way a half-empty car makes one want to do.
“I’m Tarzan,” said Kellen, the oldest. I asked him if he would really want to wear fur undies on the subway.
I took them up one by one to the front, six trips past the same riders. Even I was excited to pull open the heavy doors and step across the gap, rails screeching below. When the door opened, in rushed stale air, the breath of hell. Maddie, the littlest, wanted me to lift her across. But the other two were game, and jumped. They even tried pushing open the next door themselves, letting go my hand and straining, rails screaming tortured below. At the very front I put their noses to the window.
“See that yellow light? See it turn green? That’s a signal,” I said. I pointed out the graffiti on the walls. They saw lighted platforms come up out of medieval dimness. “Its fun, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” each one agreed. I told Kellen how workers and commuters were killed on the tracks. I told them when we were under the East River. I wanted fear to touch them, a little: isn’t this how they will remember? When Kellen and I crossed the gap the screaming was all around. We were slowing down near a station. Even I was shaken. The two cars we straddled bucked hard. He’ll remember.
While waiting at Howard’s Beach I had told them about the big rats and Maddie, nose to the glass in front, asked me again: “Where’s the rats?” I told her they were scared of the train. They were hiding. I had to hold her up to see out. A young guy already there moved aside for us. He smiled at her. She is a cartoon character, a doll with eyes that look up, somehow proportioned to tug people’s face into a smile. What it is about her face I cannot put a finger on.
The kids wanted to see a rat. I sure wanted to show them one. It was 10:45 on the Time’s Square 2/3 platform. The 15 minutes there waiting we didn’t spy a one. The tracks were too clean. But they were ready for anything, spring-set for anything. They bounded up the steps next to me to see two men pounding deafeningly on plastic buckets. Going back to the platform they veered confidently off the wrong way. They grabbed up dead Metro cards, and told each other how many they had. They thought nothing of contamination. They were infectious.
For the last time their mom and I stirred them from their swaying, rocking ride. They shouldered their assigned bags. “The next stop is one hundred and tenth street,” came the Ken-doll voice of the recorded announcement. In the long tunnel under the park the kids had finally started to droop. Even kids on their first rides will sooner or later give in and be lulled.
Not long from now and they won’t hug me unless they are told. But they will remember riding the A train. My name will be stuck to the memory. Not much longer and Britney Spears will have given way to some edgier version of the same entertainment product they will want to own, or be, and we will realize we don’t know each other. But the memory will have dried to our skin like a shiny old dragonfly wing that won’t shake off, after a rain.
I taught them to put coins into the violinist’s case open on the tunnel floor. I taught them to put coins into the drummer’s empty mayonnaise bucket – into the flautist’s black sack. The violinist played facing the wall, a New York mystery. Maybe he was just tuning up. Maybe it was something worse, tragic, or even worse. He heard the clink of dimes and nodded a thank you over his shoulder. But the little blonde girl did not see him nod. She was already walking away, shoulders hunched. She is my niece, just off the plane from Arizona.
On the A train from JFK, I had told my older sister, “We’re in Brooklyn now.” The girl’s face lit up. Her name is Brooklyn. I said to her, “You can get whatever you want here for free,” and she grinned and hunched up her shoulders, shy.
I had taken them up to the front car to show them the innards of the city: three blond kids, one at a time. It was their first time on the subway, and they took to it right away. At first they sat, eating pretzels and cheez’n crackers with me. I had been famished, with no more than a buck something in quarters and dimes by the time I met them at the airport. They called me “uncle” so easily I was not shy asking them for some of their food. They were not at all surprised that a grown man would want to share their snacks. After a bit they were swinging on the poles the way a half-empty car makes one want to do.
“I’m Tarzan,” said Kellen, the oldest. I asked him if he would really want to wear fur undies on the subway.
I took them up one by one to the front, six trips past the same riders. Even I was excited to pull open the heavy doors and step across the gap, rails screeching below. When the door opened, in rushed stale air, the breath of hell. Maddie, the littlest, wanted me to lift her across. But the other two were game, and jumped. They even tried pushing open the next door themselves, letting go my hand and straining, rails screaming tortured below. At the very front I put their noses to the window.
“See that yellow light? See it turn green? That’s a signal,” I said. I pointed out the graffiti on the walls. They saw lighted platforms come up out of medieval dimness. “Its fun, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” each one agreed. I told Kellen how workers and commuters were killed on the tracks. I told them when we were under the East River. I wanted fear to touch them, a little: isn’t this how they will remember? When Kellen and I crossed the gap the screaming was all around. We were slowing down near a station. Even I was shaken. The two cars we straddled bucked hard. He’ll remember.
While waiting at Howard’s Beach I had told them about the big rats and Maddie, nose to the glass in front, asked me again: “Where’s the rats?” I told her they were scared of the train. They were hiding. I had to hold her up to see out. A young guy already there moved aside for us. He smiled at her. She is a cartoon character, a doll with eyes that look up, somehow proportioned to tug people’s face into a smile. What it is about her face I cannot put a finger on.
The kids wanted to see a rat. I sure wanted to show them one. It was 10:45 on the Time’s Square 2/3 platform. The 15 minutes there waiting we didn’t spy a one. The tracks were too clean. But they were ready for anything, spring-set for anything. They bounded up the steps next to me to see two men pounding deafeningly on plastic buckets. Going back to the platform they veered confidently off the wrong way. They grabbed up dead Metro cards, and told each other how many they had. They thought nothing of contamination. They were infectious.
For the last time their mom and I stirred them from their swaying, rocking ride. They shouldered their assigned bags. “The next stop is one hundred and tenth street,” came the Ken-doll voice of the recorded announcement. In the long tunnel under the park the kids had finally started to droop. Even kids on their first rides will sooner or later give in and be lulled.
Not long from now and they won’t hug me unless they are told. But they will remember riding the A train. My name will be stuck to the memory. Not much longer and Britney Spears will have given way to some edgier version of the same entertainment product they will want to own, or be, and we will realize we don’t know each other. But the memory will have dried to our skin like a shiny old dragonfly wing that won’t shake off, after a rain.
blond boy in the stroller
Blond Boy in the Stroller
Yesterday my sister rang the buzzer for me, and I ran down and opened the door and smiled at the little blond boy in the stroller. His name is Ethan, and he shone in the sun. They live across 111th street, in Harlem. Unlike me they are here to stay.
I bet when locals see that beautiful little blond boy they feel an era has disappeared forever. When they see that angelic face they know that the days of white fear of Harlem are over. That is how I feel when I see him; its how I feel when I see them see him, or avoid seeing him. They must know, as I do, that Harlem’s power – a power built on legend – is gone. It still has the power to hurt. A few murders of whites may happen. But it no longer has the power to inspire fear. Japanese girls with ratty hair, punky jeans, and never before seen shoes walk down the street.
With its myth of danger slipping, Harlem is losing its force field. When whites and Asians stop being afraid, they and their capital will take over. Even if they only take over what had stood as a burned-out shell, won’t the people here still think: I once filled that hell-hole with my thoughts, my angers, my dreams. Now the dream-space is gone, the bricked-up commons enclosed and renovated, and the bums will have to find somewhere else to piss.
All those hipsters priced out of the village like the feeling, a feeling borrowed, of living in a memory called “Harlem.” The place is not what it was. If it were, they would not be here. But if it had not been what it was, they would not get the charge they do. The name earns admiration, even though the force field is down and anyone can just walk in there. The legend, now just a story, still reverberates from memory, for blacks as well as whites. These hipsters signal change.
But its that beautiful blond boy who presents the indubitable evidence, if anyone still doubted. They see him there in his stroller shining in the sun and try not to look.
Yesterday my sister rang the buzzer for me, and I ran down and opened the door and smiled at the little blond boy in the stroller. His name is Ethan, and he shone in the sun. They live across 111th street, in Harlem. Unlike me they are here to stay.
I bet when locals see that beautiful little blond boy they feel an era has disappeared forever. When they see that angelic face they know that the days of white fear of Harlem are over. That is how I feel when I see him; its how I feel when I see them see him, or avoid seeing him. They must know, as I do, that Harlem’s power – a power built on legend – is gone. It still has the power to hurt. A few murders of whites may happen. But it no longer has the power to inspire fear. Japanese girls with ratty hair, punky jeans, and never before seen shoes walk down the street.
With its myth of danger slipping, Harlem is losing its force field. When whites and Asians stop being afraid, they and their capital will take over. Even if they only take over what had stood as a burned-out shell, won’t the people here still think: I once filled that hell-hole with my thoughts, my angers, my dreams. Now the dream-space is gone, the bricked-up commons enclosed and renovated, and the bums will have to find somewhere else to piss.
All those hipsters priced out of the village like the feeling, a feeling borrowed, of living in a memory called “Harlem.” The place is not what it was. If it were, they would not be here. But if it had not been what it was, they would not get the charge they do. The name earns admiration, even though the force field is down and anyone can just walk in there. The legend, now just a story, still reverberates from memory, for blacks as well as whites. These hipsters signal change.
But its that beautiful blond boy who presents the indubitable evidence, if anyone still doubted. They see him there in his stroller shining in the sun and try not to look.
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