In Union Square the chess players sit alone under the statue
of George Washington waiting for a game. A Latino family, father, mother and
son, sit on the sidewalk holding cardboard signs and singing. “I’ll be your
friend, when you’re not strong.” The big
chain stores are closed but the bodegas are open and Muslim and Chinese
storekeepers charge up to ten dollars for a gallon of water. New York City in
blackout, in short, is much like New York City as usual.
The electronics stores are closed and the wine stores are
open. A chalk sign outside one darkened store reads, “Screw electricity.” NYU students crowd the bus stops and French
tourists elbow their way through the crowd on the way to a cheaply expensive
hotel. A massive ancient tree lies torn out of the earth in the old 16th
Street park and residents crowd around sticking their iPhones through the 19th
Century ironwork of the shuttered park to get a photo. A photo of devastation.
Recording disaster has become instinct. I saw dozens of
people taking photos on September 11 and the number would have increased by a
factor of x10 If the modern smartphone with its 8 megapixel camera had been
present in 2001. A click of a touchscreen and the photo is uploaded to Facebook
to be shared around the world with people who like gawking at broken things.
The departure of the internet accompanies the return of
drive time news radio and the shocking reminder of what the media is really
like. On WINS a cheerful male anchor runs through the list of catastrophes.
“Gone in Sixty Seconds,” he says about a flooded town, almost chuckling at the
joke. “The town of Little Ferry sure lived up to its name,” he says of
another. The obscenities repeat
themselves every 10 minutes intersecting with audio clips of survivors who only
have a few seconds to mention the water or how much they lost before the whole
things cut to a commercial.
With a million Con Edison customers out of power, the
commercial is naturally for Con Edison, but it isn't one of those, “We’re
working as hard as we can” ads that utilities run while their customers curse
them in the dark, instead it’s an ad touting Con Edison’s Diversity Supplier
Program which distributes supplier contracts based on race, instead of
competence. Even liberals would not have been reassured by the timing.
Chris Christie is everywhere, flying around in the
helicopter and landing just long enough to survey the destruction. A few
minutes later he is launching into an anecdote about jet skiers rescuing 80
year old ladies on jet skis. “All they wanted was a photo with me and then they
were off,” he says, reminding the audience that while the governor is trying to
be the Rudy Guiliani of this news cycle, he isn’t Rudy.
While shopping for supplies, Senator Schumer comes on the
radio and in his best oily voice, informs beleaguered shoppers that he has
gotten calls from Republicans and Democrats and assures us that this issue will
not be politicized. Unlike Hurricane Katrina, an unseen heckler supplies in the
rugs and mops aisle.
An hour of this is enough to remind me of how unprofessional
professional news is and how much better Sean Hannity was at this during the
last blackout through the simple expedient of jettisoning the formula and
supplying helpful information. There is no helpful information on AM news
anymore, with the brief exceptions of traffic and weather, just ghoulish
exploitation of tragedy in the same cheerful voice that is then used to sell
Carbonite, computer backup for only 59.99 a year.
The NYPD is doing what it does best, cutting off streets and
telling people where to go. A pile of ordure in the morning acts as evidence
that the mounted police were deployed at some point during the night. But the
amount of actual crime appears negligible. One store window is lightly broken,
more likely a result of the storm than casual vandalism. But being cut off from
collective news sources also acts as a reminder of how news shapes perceptions.
Without a news report, I have no idea if the blackout and
storm were accompanied by a massive crime wave or hardly any crime at all. As
people did a century ago and as many still do, I can only judge larger events
by my perceptions. The status of crime in New York City is determined entirely
by the number of unbroken store windows that I pass among the darkened stores
selling handbags, artisanal cookies and neck massages on my quest to find
working internet. But the moment I pass along that perception, then I am once
again creating news and the entire cycle of collective perception repeats
itself again.
Past 40th Street on the East Side and 26th
Street on the West Side, there is power and I recognize the phenomenon first
through the sight of distant red traffic lights. “Do Not Walk,” they say, and I
walk on. On the radio a politician talks about revisiting the unity of
September 11, but that’s a cheerful story to sandwich between commercials for
motor oil and a reality show about Texas bachelorettes.
On September 11, we briefly came to the awareness of a
common enemy, but now we remain in our old divisions, those who have and those
who have not, those who define themselves by race and those who do not, the
woman screaming loudly about how Bush did not find any Weapons of Mass
Destruction in Iraq four years past the point when that kind of thing was
fashionable and the young girl in duck boots saying, “Omigod,” over and over
again into a cellphone until it becomes its own mantra.
We are on an island and we are islands. The prosperous
smiling natives paying 10 dollars for a quart of sink water reprocessed in Michigan
bottling plants and paying double to travel downtown in a taxi and the
immigrants who take their money, but hardly ever smile. There are the gangs who
plot looting sprees on Twitter and the Long Island cops who leave behind their
families to drive around the streets telling them to go home. There are the
people in flooded homes and the news anchors cheerfully asking them how it felt
to lose everything they have.
The finance expert with a Lithuanian accent tells his broker
over a shaky connection in an internet café to sell the dollar and a male model
named Justice chats about San Francisco. They are all New York and they aren’t
New York, because New York City is an idea and it can be hard to live inside an
idea. New York is immigrant neighborhoods full of people who want to live just
like they did back home while making more money and having access to free
social services. New York is British brokers straight out of the City putting
in their time before they go somewhere glamorous, like Dubai.
New York is the remnants of its working class, hiding out
deep in Brooklyn or leaving city limits for Long Island or New Jersey. New York
is the place that you see in movies which shoot on every block, tangling their
cables like snakes around fire hydrants while their refreshment tables full of
sliced avocados stretch on forever.
New York is the idea of the Everycity, the
city that never stops because it is always busy doing things and being things.
It is the idea that we can leave behind our roots and our histories to create a
new glamorous history out of the fragments of everyone else trying to do the
same thing at the same time. And when I look back, surrounded by the floor to
sky video screens of Times Square as the darkness grows, all I see are the
outlines of dark towers and the lights of the endless traffic of secretaries,
brokers, cops and doctors, professors, porters, drug dealers, antiques
appraisers, actors and drivers, prowling through the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment