Everyone You Know Someday Will Die
This is going to be unforgivably morbid.
A lawsuit has been filed against the Port Authority by the kin of those who died in the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center. Without comment on the lawsuit, which has serious merits, one motivation is dubious. According to the NY Times:
“Among survivors of the first attack, which left six people dead and more than 1,000 injured, there has long been a feeling of neglect, as if their suffering was not valued as highly as that of the people who endured the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. There was no federally engineered compensation fund, no blue-ribbon panel to apportion blame.”
Well, geez, whose death is as valued as those who perished in the attack on New York four years ago? And what, exactly, is fair about valuing any random death over another? We have in the Gulf Coast devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina a clear example of our weird priorities. Only weeks later, as the death toll reaches 9/11-like proportions, is there anything approaching the outrage that was palpable in this country four years ago. Maybe it’s because we can’t bomb God and Nature in retaliation, or maybe it’s because we’re so numb to daily life that doesn’t directly affect us that we’re only moved by astronomical body counts.
I’m working again – organizing – and without giving too much away, I am brought in daily contact with senior citizens (shucks, I’ve probably given it away). I met a woman the other day who was all too eager to talk about her life’s tragedies with anyone who would listen, particularly any young man who reminded her of her own son, who died years ago at the age of 33. Apparently he got into an argument with a friend of his, which resulted in a karate chop to the neck and a death from internal bleeding a few days later. Totally random and tragic, but who’s left to mourn him except his elderly mom and maybe an old flame, if he’s lucky? The old woman still beamed with pride over her lost son. She talked about the flashy job in finance he had landed a year or two before he died. He worked for some firm on the hundred-and-somethingth floor of the World Trade Center. “He would have died anyway,” she said wistfully.
Of course he would have. Everyone you know someday will die. So why privilege certain deaths over others?
Why do the 9/11 widows get to veto any kind of cultural space downtown that acknowledges the USA’s imperialism? Why is Cindy Sheehan’s voice privileged over those of the moms whose kids didn’t die in Iraq, or over the kids themselves who have yet to be shipped there?
My younger brother was at the World Trade Center on that fateful day in 1993, part of a third grade field trip to the observation deck. And had that been an airplane bomb instead of a car bomb, then I would be devastated by the loss of my kid brother and probably still climbing on the soapbox afforded me. But my brother will still die one day (I promised this would be morbid, Brian), and if I’m still around to see it, I’ll still be devastated. So why the double standard over everyday tragedies?
“You just don’t fit in.”
Apparently, to soften the blow from being fired from her reality show, contestants on Martha Stewart’s new version of “The Apprentice” will be told, “You just don’t fit in.”
Ha! Where have I heard that one before?
Does the NY Times Have a Homophobic Mandate?
Urban life for the straight guy is apparently quite the minefield these days. With all these homosexuals and metrosexuals running around, pinching bottoms and getting pedicures, a regular guy has to be ever-vigilant, lest an innocent dinner with another regular guy friend end in a mutual suck-fest. Thank goodness for those arbiters of social interactions at the NY Times Style section, who this week shine a light on an act that most adult men have been engaging in for as long as we can remember, but, well, might be a little gay: The Man Date.
Although the term was admittedly coined for the article, it already comes with a lengthy set of definitions and rules:
Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.
The author if this article, the absurdly named Jennifer 8. Lee, is clearly seeking the cultural cachet of coining a cutesy buzzword that will spread virally until it winds up in your grandparents’ vocabulary and Webster’s dictionary. And for this inauspicious goal she trots out tired old gay panic tropes? The Times deserves to get some letters about this.
Kitty
I’m haunted by Kitty Genovese, who was murdered 41 years ago, on March 13, 1964. The New York Times reported at the time:
For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.
The lede was slightly exaggerated but close enough to the truth to make the neighborhood notorious. You’ve probably read something about the case, and, if not, you can “Google it”. Kitty’s murder has been used as a touchstone or plot point in movies, books, teevee shows and even a famous comic book. It’s been tossed around like a football in various political debates and psychological theories. It’s easy to overlook the life of the young woman who died.
Although, I’d known about this crime since I was taught about it in high school, I, like many people, assumed that it took place in Manhattan, surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. You really need to walk around Kew Gardens to realize how shocking it is, and surely was then, that such a crime could take place here. Kew Gardens is a neighborhood of small shops, single family houses and a scattered handful of apartment buildings that go no higher than six stories. People in the neighborhood have a “nodding” relationship with each other, if not always actual friendships.
I can imagine living in the neighborhood with Kitty, who was young, short, tomboyish, independent, tough, plucky and pretty cute, actually. I could imagine having a crush on her, and hoping to “bump into” her at the supermarket or the local bar. I can imagine the gut-wrenching hole she would leave in the neighborhood’s street scene.
Last year, being the 40th anniversary of the crime, caused many media outlets, including the Times, to revisit the old story and many of the surviving witnesses. A key part of the story was Kitty’s “roommate,” Mary Ann Zielonko, who had the grim task of identifying the body, and who faded from the original story. Emboldened, I guess, by 35 years of gay liberation and probably just sick-to-death of being white-washed from the story, Mary Ann finally came out as Kitty’s lover. It’s hard to believe that the portrait of Kitty Genovese has been so incomplete for so long. This begs many questions. Was the attack a hate crime? (The more chilling probability is that it was a completely random attack by a psycho-sexual serial killer). Did her neighbors know about her sexuality? (Could residents of Kew Gardens in 1964 wrap their brains around homosexuality?). Was this the reason no one called for help? (Could neighbors distinguish her cries from the typical bar fights at the Old Bailey?).
Forty-one years later, Kew Gardens residents understand better than most New Yorkers that we have an obligation to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper. The “Eyes” on the street will monitor lover’s spats, unaccompanied children, reckless drivers – and watch for the first sign of real trouble, often calling the police before that first sign. We’re trying to live down the Kitty Genovese experience. I don’t think it’s something we should try to forget. We should keep Kitty Genovese in our minds as we actively and consciously try to progress beyond big city alienation. It could have happened anywhere, but it did happen here.