The City
I’m still quivering like a struck gong. As I was on September 11. I take it personally, I suppose. (Which sounds narcissistic and infantile, but bear with me for a minute.) I love London, and I love New York – both of them. In a very basic, in the bone way, that goes back to childhood and adolescence. Both cities stand to me for freedom – for escape, adventure, independence, self-fashioning, possibilities. (What comes into my head – this is very absurd and hokey, but I’m going to be absurd and hokey today – is that moment in the [absurd and hokey] movie ‘The Electric Horseman’ when Redford is just about to set free his stallion in a hidden valley to join [and rule] a herd of wild horses. Just before he pulls the bridle off, he tells the horse, ‘Make something of yourself, now.’ Then off comes the bridle and away goes the horse. ‘Make something of yourself, now’ – that’s what New York and London tell us – at least in my personal mythology.) I grew up about 50 miles from New York, so of course it was our Golden City, our Oz, the place where everything was going on. It was an immense part of my growing up to be able (both allowed and competent) to navigate around New York on my own. I liked going with a friend – especially with my eccentric amusing clever cousin Steve – but I loved going alone. The freedom I felt! I can’t even explain it, because it seems to be more than the sum of the parts. It wasn’t just that I was off on my own in a big city with no one knowing exactly where I was. (Sometimes no one even knew vaguely: I would occasionally go without telling my mother, partly just so that…no one would know. Disappearing. Disappearing into freedom. I didn’t do anything scandalous or stupid – just escaped.) It was something more, and I take it that the something more was New York. Cleveland or St Louis probably wouldn’t have done it.
And London was the next stage of that, when I was seventeen. I spent two weeks there on my own – and it was like the freedom of New York squared, or cubed. Because I’d never been there before, never been out of North America before, wasn’t going back to Princeton on the bus at the end of the day – and because it was London. London’s not just any old city, you know. And it got into my bloodstream then and has been there ever since.
So I take it personally. And then, as I mentioned, I was just there, I know people there. I’m wondering if the nice people at Souvenir Press will be able to get home (but buses are running in Zone One again so they’re all right unless they left early). But even without all that, it’s just London itself. It upsets me, somebody bashing at it. And that’s narcissistic, but it’s not entirely narcissistic, because the people who did the bashing did it precisely so that people like me can never ever have that kind of freedom. In fact they did it to punish New York and London for allowing people like me to have that kind of freedom. In the world they would establish, people like me would, far from being allowed to roam strange cities at age seventeen, would be locked up for their entire lives, and never even allowed to know what freedom is. Death and immurement, that’s their Golden City. Well no to that.
So I guess the millions of Africans dying from poverty are knocked off the agenda. Tony Blair and George Bush have other things on their mind for now.
The west has tragically neglected the dark continent for decades (forever, really)…it’s a horrible shame. I think Blair was and is genuinely concerned for the millions there. Even Bush in his ignorant jesus-freak sort of way probably genuinely cares. But let’s be serious here, Fryslan. A horrible thing just happened.(again!) It should be part of the agenda. One could argue that if we don’t get a handle on this, which apparently we haven’t!, there will be no helping Africa…or anyone else.
Yes indeed Ophelia! No to that! Out of Iraq–ASAP–redouble our efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Track down the perpetrators and bring them to whatever kind of justice they deserve. Then get on with true diplomatic pressure and caressing–whichever needed, whenever and where ever–throughout the Muslim world. Kick the creationists here in the states in the rear, send them back to the bronze age where they belong all the while educating the rest with the writings of Dawkins, Shermer, Hitchens, Sagan, Russell, Hawking, PZ Myers, and of course, You!
Today I need to dream.
Michael,
“One could argue that if we don’t get a handle on this, which apparently we haven’t!, there will be no helping Africa…or anyone else.”
Would you care to actually argue that?
Today is not a day to dream, but instead to a day to look very, very clearly at the state of the world. As Roosevelt said “There is nothing to fear except fear itself”. If we in the West are cowed into letting these acts obsess our thinking and take everything out of proportion, then the world will go to hell even faster than it already is.
Let’s be real, horrible things happen every day. What we need to focus on are those things that we can change for the better.
By being courageous and unswerving in saving Africa we will be doing what is most effective in combatting terrorist propaganda.
Other than that (oh, I snipped the “that” because it wasn’t making any sense and added nothing), I’m wholeheartedly in agreement with Michael Kirchner’s second comment. Beautiful post, don’t give in.
(oh, and Fryslan – the “that” didn’t refer to your post, which I may not agree with while taking it more seriously than that – when you Frisians give us back Schiermonnikoog, of course).
“By being courageous and unswerving in saving Africa we will be doing what is most effective in combatting terrorist propaganda.”
I would rather combat terrorists themselves, not just their propaganda.
Make no mistake, I am with you regarding Africa. Much more needs to be done there. It’s just…Your first comment above made me wonder if you thought there might be some grand conspiracy behind today’s bombing. If nothing else it seemed you were a little too dismissive of the events of the day. Forgive me if I misread.
Of course we have to make things better in Africa. And in the Arab world. Oddly, this is what the Neocons seem to be on about: liberal democracies don’t produce terrorism. They have a point there – though their methods are backfiring terribly, they set the goals in the right direction. Hard as this is to say for me – I have to grant them that.
That does not change the fact that for the creeps who did this, apparently, ordinary people waking up one day and going to work, bank clerks, cleaners, teachers, policemen, whatever, are as much as a target as the people at the top. Which is one way in which atrocities like today’s differ from the IRA’s and the RAF’s routine back in the eighties. Somehow, for these people, you and I and OB and the girl that serves me beer and the Vietnamese guys I see cleaning around the University department and the three old guys that are sitting around getting drunk at the local bus station are as much a target as anybody else.
So, fight these people, while at the same time drawing their basis away from them. I see no contradiction.
Michael,
I don’t believe in conspiracies. However, I do believe that today’s shocking events will necessarily distract the focus of everyone (the public, the media, the G8 leaders). That would be a big win for the terrorists.
Actually, I’m not so sure, Fryslan. It could be that today will give Blair some extra leverage with Bush. That Bush will feel a kind of inner compulsion (or, who knows, maybe even a conscious aware decision) to show that little bit more solidarity with Blair. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Did you read the message from the alleged perpetrators? Sickening, yes, but also laughably pathetic in its shiny-eyed certainty that Allah is totally in favour of innocent bystanders being blown to bits.
The reaction of the majority of the Muslim world suggests they might have misread this a bit…
Ophelia, thanks for the kind thoughts – it looks like yet again the best attitude is to get up and carry on regardless; in the short term let’s hope the security services can do their work, round ‘em up and extract every last piece of intelligence. Only 37 dead; looks like a UK-led initiative. London is pretty much nailed down in terms of getting high volumes of illicit ordnance into town. My thoughts are that this could be a team of disaffected UK West Midlands hard-liners plus a handful of Euro-Islamists, probably originating from Algeria. These people are as close to being genuine Muslims as my Methodist preacher granddad was to the Ku Klux Klan. No amount of reaching out will change these bastard’s view of anyone of us as being part of a seething godless apostate sub-human sewer; theirs is a martyrdom through slaying infidels (they preach this in some of our Mosques; we’re so pluralist). In the longer term, our way forward must be dialogue over Palestine and Mid-East, if only to separate these cancerous fucks from the rest of humanity and the regional support they are getting from the disenfranchised mainstream of Mid-Eastern and North-African civilisation. Out-manoeuvre the bastards through negotiation, dialogue and diplomacy. But don’t ever forget they are bastards. (I see brave St George Galloway was at it already yesterday in Parliament. Respect?!! GHHAHHH!!!!)
OB by the way – your opening paragraphs – beautifully illustrating how I feel about London too – having grown up 50 miles from there.
They won’t win, you know.
Yeah, I did read the message. Blessed this and blessed that. It is indeed both sickening and laughable – nausea wars with derision as one reads.
Also saw Galloway in Parliament – this time nausea was well in the ascendant over derision.
Thanks, Nick. (Hope you’re right about last bit. I’d agree with you if it weren’t for…oh, you know, missing plutionium, smallpox stockpiles, that kind of thing. I think they could win, because they’re willing to just kill everyone. Since they’re willing to, and the means exist, I tend to think…they might.)