[dovate.com] » pretentious
A few minutes ago I was standing in line at the local corner grocery, staring at the halva and fig bars and waiting to pay my 99 cents for a bottle of white vinegar, when the person in front of me said something that caught my ear.
“American Spirit Organic, please.”
American Spirit is a brand of cigarette. The company used to be owned by Native Americans, but recently went the way of Ben & Jerry’s. My first reaction to the organic blend cigarette was, holy crap that’s unbelievably stupid. My reaction has changed very little over the past few minutes.
I smoked for 10 years. At the end I even bought an additive free brand… I can see how, if I still smoked, if faced with the option and if there wasn’t a price difference, I might even go for the organic… but as an outsider looking in. Organic cigarettes? It’s like inflating the tires in your Hummer to get better gas mileage or voting for the Green Party.
Maybe I’m just becoming an asshole non-smoker. O’well. That’s all for now.
All things being equal, I’m a liberal. I believe in the idea of taxes and I believe that the point of paying them is to protect and enrich the citizenry of a society. I believe that monopolies are bad for a state’s economy and that the government should intervene when they develop. I believe that the rich should pay a significantly higher percentage of their earnings towards taxes than the poor. Civil Rights, (including of course gay rights) abortion, environmentalism, you can mark me down in the strongly ‘pro’ category for each of them.
With all this said, there are plenty of things about ‘liberals’ that piss off or embarrass me. These are usually things that a young and well meaning and ostensibly socially conscious person says in a well meaning and ostensibly socially conscious way. For weeks now, I can’t get a recent ‘slant’ (guest column) in the City Paper out of my head. Maybe sharing it with the anonymous masses will help me move on.
The article recounted an experience a young white person had when the subway broke down in North Philly and then their reaction to it. They questioned the cities preparedness for a disaster on the scale of Katrina or a terrorist attack. The well-meaning author (Temple student, John Paul Titlow) argued:
Most of the almost entirely black (except for me) sea of faces represent some of the most disadvantaged sectors of our society — working single mothers, students on their way to the most underfunded public schools in the region, and others. For most, SEPTA is the only conceivable way to get where they need to go — where, in most cases, they barely earn enough to survive…
…the hardest hit will be the primarily black low-income and homeless population, the people the report refers to as those with “special needs.” Among the lessons from Katrina were that neighborhoods without access to basic resources are the areas where attention is most needed. The committee’s report is a step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough.
I’m sorry, but that ^^^ is straight up fucking offensive. A good point - the cities lack of preparedness for a large scale disaster - was argued with the same condescending pity for the cities A.A. poor, which is usually held in reserve for a sick animal. Whatever the author’s intention, this came off as deeply condescending and impossible to read without feeling like John Mark Karr’s spindly fingers are crawling up your spine. Good god. I have a feeling that Titlow will look back on this in 5 years and feel a sense of deep and terrifying embarrassment. At least I hope so. Let me close with a letter written in response to the column.
I agree with John Paul Titlow that Philadelphia needs to take serious action based on the findings of the Emergency Preparedness Review Committee, but his analysis of the problem isunbelievably simplistic and sophomoric [Slant, “At a Disadvantage,” Aug. 3, 2006]. His argumentthat Philadelphia’s emergency preparedness planslights the poor and the blackis based on ridiculous evidence — his experience of a breakdown on Septa’s orange line:”Funny how the orange line is the first thing to break down in the city. The Market-Frankford, or as I sometimes call it, ‘the White Line,’ was running smoothly all day.” Funny how there are breakdowns and delays in public transportation all over the city, and in the suburbs! Has Titlow ever ridden the Market-Frankford line? As a person whose stop was 40th and Market for years, I must inform him that there is a wide range of people riding the blue line on any given train.His observations ofthe stranded passengers as poor black folk “barely earn[ing] enough to survive,” and the “few of them lucky enough to have cell phones” calling friends for rides, reminds me of early anthropological accounts of communities by outside observers. We don’t need uninformed paternalism, Mr. Titlow. We need to continue facilitating discussions among the city’s neighborhood spokespeople to determine how tobest go about preparing for the worst, and to begin enacting the agreed-upon solutions.
Lindsey Mears
Germantown
This morning I sketched out the founding tenet of my personal religion. This doesn’t mean it’s actually my personal belief system, just that it’s the foundation of a belief structure by which others could live. Does this make me a hypocrite? I know it sounds strange to invent a religion and then not be much of a follower of it, so here’s a more detailed explanation:
The truth is, this tenant is something I thought of this morning as I was brushing my teeth and reading the personal letters of the Columbine killers. I’m just not sure I want to convert yet. Secondly, I’m wary of any religion, even my own. Lastly, this founding tenant is based on an amalgam of established religious belief structures, none of which I necessarily assign any credibility. But from a cultural standpoint, this tenant goes a long way in explaining the world we live in and I’m sure I can gain some following… even if I’m not among them. I also think that it’s strong enough conceptually to share and therefore would like to present it.
Basically, I came to the conclusion that power is corrupt. On the flip side of things, power is an incredibly effective tool that guarantees results. Say I spend this life accumulating power, being greedy and lustful, stepping over anyone weaker than me and following the general template of Satanism and/or capitalism. By my belief structure (and here’s where I break from others and here’s that founding tenant) you’ll be rewarded in the next life… sort of. That’s the tenant. Power is the road on which to get more reward. The catch is that you will be reborn at a higher station, but you will be reborn in flesh.
An old friend of mine, teenage father and marine used to say that love is weakness. If weakness is equated with a lack of power, then he was right. Love is weakness. But weakness isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Poverty, selflessness, kindness, empathy… these things will get you nowhere… unless you live that life perfectly.
To get Christian, if evil weren’t tempting and if it didn’t hide behind a mask, then it would be a pretty weak force. If people didn’t serve evil in with the mistaken assumption that they were actually serving God, then the old dark force would be pretty ineffective.
I could go on for a while about this, but I won’t do that here or now. Let me end with my favorite quote from the Toynbee tiler and one that is pretty well in line with what I’m trying to say:
“EVERY CONCEPT OF PAST 500 YEARS DONT EXIST IN CHRISTIAN HEAVEN THEY ONLY EXIST IN CHRISTIAN HELL”. NOW THE “CULT OF THE HELLION” ARE NOW SEARCHING FOR MORE THAN ONE HELL (IDEOLOGIES) TO GET MORE REWARD.
That’s all for now.
My girlfriend, Liza is in New Hampshire. I’m in Philadelphia. Long ago - relatively speaking - I had a girlfriend, who in the summer, lived in New Hampshire. I used to take the train up there to visit her. She lived on some land that had been in her family for about as long as land can ‘be’ in a North American family. She lived in an old one-room school-house. The time I spent up there is some of the most important time that I’ve experienced in this lifetime. I’ve been happier, I’ve been more captivated, I’ve seen places far more beautiful and I have felt love stronger than I did in New Hampshire; but I don’t think I’ve ever been more relaxed. Not relaxation in a physical, hedonistic sense, but truly relaxed. My time there was like a massage for the soul.
But anyway, this post is about something different. This is about what I wrote on August 9th, 1999. That day, I turned in my final paper in my class on human evolution at the University of Penn museum of Archeology and Anthropology, walked straight out of the building, jumped in a taxi and went straight to 30th street station. There I got on a train to Boston. Just outside of New York, I looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline. I saw the World Trade Center towers and wrote in my blue spiral notebook:
NY fucking city. The greatest city in the history of humanity. There it is as it always is. And as it will be until its covered by water or destroyed by terrorists.
Two years and a month later, September 7th, 2001, I was on my way back from Maine. I remember looking out at WTC1 and 2. It was night. They were glowing in the sky. I was amazed that the city was still there.
Excuse this digression into pompous jackassery, but I’d like to make a point. I’m a history person. I studied it in school. I did extremely well in school. The school I went to is regarded as one of the best in the country.
*obligatory caveat: I went to the University of Pennsylvania – although I went non-traditionally, working my way through part-time with a mixture of day and evening classes. I worked at Penn full-time and took classes year round. In the end I earned the same degree, from the same professors as any Penn student, only as a Penn employee, my classes cost me a total of $0.00. As Philadelphian’s well know, the stereotypical Penn student is a pampered, shiny faced, know-it-all, self centered asshole with an inflated ego and a delusional sense of entitlement. I was not one of those Penn students.
But where was I? O yeah. While at Penn I studied history… particularly American History. More particularly American History with an emphasis on the 20th century and a further concentration on United States culture and the country’s place geopolitically, especially the Western Hemisphere… (Although at this level it’s all just variations on a theme.) Got that? All that I’m really saying is that I know what I’m talking about when I say:
Whoever says it’s unfair to compare Iraq to Vietnam is out of their fucking minds. Sure they’re different (one was in a jungle and this one is in a desert) and sure, U.S. culture has changed in the last 30-40 years. No shit. But when people start talking about history repeating itself, this is what they mean.
Go to the library and read a New York Times from the year 1969. Replace the word ‘communist’ with the word ‘terrorist,’ ‘Viet Kong’ with ‘insurgent,’ ‘war on terror’ with ‘Cold War,’ ‘gunning down unarmed civilians’ with ‘gunning down unarmed civilians.’ Sure it’s not an exact parallel. It’s just a striking parallel in many of its most fundamental ways.
I’ve been mute for about a week now. I’ve got a lot in my head, lots of stories and ideas and impulses, but I’ve also got a problem. The physical act of writing takes the motivation out of me. I’m running through rapidly cycling headbirths. It feels like my brain is full of insects, born, mated and dead over the course of a day. The consummation of an ideas’ life takes place in my mind and never makes its way to paper or to keyboard. I have it while I’m making dinner, or walking to the bathroom, or riding my bike to or from work… not while I’m sitting and staring at the computer screen. That’s all for now.
There’s a flickering fluorescent light in the bathroom at work. Flickering fluorescent lights are like magical portals into despair and isolation. Not the despair based on a singular tragedy like violence, torture or war, but the despair brought on by the slow erosion of personal dignity. Their flickering serves as a metaphor for that grey area between the death of hope and the fear of death. One props up the other, until at last they consummate in the final breath of ultimate resignation. The flickering stops.But anyway – I’m actually feeling fine. To my readers, my fascination with the invisible, shuffling souls I call living ghosts is something rooted in observation more than subjective experience. While empathic tendencies pull me towards the romance of this sort of darkness, it’s really not something I desire to exist in.
But as a person and a writer, I’m absolutely in love with the lady high on crack who wandered into a bar with a 6-pack of beer under her arm and tried desperately to take me home. In real life, I kept a safe and healthy distance, before walking home quickly and alone.
What I enjoy is the idea that the distance I maintain is as artificial and as fragile as the illusion of civilization. Imagine an empty city and the strangeness of its existence. Or imagine a city of rubble full of people and the strangeness of its broken structures. Some of the most powerful photos in the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina showed abandoned stores, floods of Wal-Mart goods lying in dirty gutters. Ruined houses reduced to shards of wood, mud, broken glass, and religious idols – but with a family portrait hanging crooked on a crumbling wall. The hurricane broke all illusions.
Maybe it’s impossible, but I hope the things that draw me to these thoughts and feelings aren’t entirely selfish or condescending. I am after all, on the other side of that imaginary line. Illusion or not, the perspective comes with the full gambit of comforts, choices restrictions. I may have once lived on the line, but I decided long ago not to cross it.
Even so, when I stand under a flickering fluorescent light, the experience is transporting. The flashing is enough to make me feel unhinged; the arrhythmic strobe of pale light throwing dead shadows over a closed room can take me to any invisible place… a gas station bathroom on some oil-soaked highway somewhere near a desert strip-mall, or last call at a neglected center city diner’s cocktail lounge. These places are invisible to people lucky enough to be unaware of their existence. They only come alive after people like myself lie down to dream.
I love this city. I love that I can walk through the largest underground catacomb, the meeting point of the subway, the el, half a dozen underground trolleys and 9 regional rail routes. I love that I can walk through that nexus of transportation on a Saturday afternoon and find myself completely alone. It’s like being the last sinner on earth, scratching his way through a post-rapture apocalypse.
There’s a feeling of emptiness, but there’s also the sense of something enormously powerful. The final witness carries the incredible gift of being the final witness. It’s a privilege greater than being called en masse towards some beckoning light.
Being alone within the enormity of the city colors all that is observed with a thick brush of the surreal. When an events’ only witnesses are a single pair of eyes and the omnipresence of the empty space in which that event happens, you begin to call into question your own perception, or at least your own capacity to truly understand it.
Your only hope at remaining true to the greater witness of the space is to lose your own skewed ego and let yourself become a part of the space itself. I know this sounds troublingly western-filtered-eastern but there’s a difference. The space here is more terrifyingly surreal than any imagined Tibetan mountaintop. This is a city where buildings wander out of the mist like ships from a dream, and pigeons find a place to mate on the backs of sleeping homeless couples. This is why and what I photograph. I need the confirmation of a truly objective eye.
But why am I writing this testimonial? I heard something today that struck me as so arrogant and so incomprehensibly stupid, that I felt I had to share it with the anonymous public.
Like it or not, the steady march of gentrification is carried out in easily predictable stages. Like the early waves of fur trappers and bearded French traders who wandered into the North American woods, the first stage of territorial imperialism in our cities of today comes in the form of artists and self proclaimed outcasts. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with this. Actually, there’s a lot that’s right with it.
My problem comes when an artist complains about his or her neighborhood gentrifying, as if his or her presence in that neighborhood was an isolated event and not indicative of the early stages of that very force. But what really disturbs me, is when that person pines openly for the days when human bodies littered the streets, drug addicts roamed like living ghosts through trash strewn vacant lots and cars were set ablaze nightly in acts of petty destruction and terroristic retribution. Today, I heard a person wishing exactly that for his neighborhood.
As annoying as one might find the conversion of a crack house into a corner café, a vacant lot into a community garden and a hulking mass of a decaying factory into $750,000 lofts (actually I’m not being quite as sarcastic about this last example) I can’t imagine any resident wishing to return to the days of living in a legitimate war zone. The arrogance of that impulse verges on the psychotic.
For a person who is himself a gentrifying force, claiming innocence of the fact and on top of that, wishing for the violent deaths of his pre-gentrification neighbors, is completely insane. The paradoxical loops of reasoning necessary to form such a mindset, perform miracles of self-delusion so powerful, they’d make an Escher print blush.
What makes this city surreal is not, under any circumstances, in any way, shape or form, being threatened. The strangeness of this place runs far deeper than any economic veneer can cover. This is a city where the busiest transportation hub in the most densely populated, wealthiest part of the town sits eerily vacant on Saturday afternoon. The nicely manicured Washington Square Park doubles as a mass grave for thousands of unidentified bodies. If you can’t find inspiration without fresh bodies lying in the streets, then it might be time to find another town.
This city is already full of ghosts. When the streets are empty and you stand alone in the dark; when the wind whipping between buildings makes you feel like you’re standing on some bald mountaintop and not in the middle of a 325-year-old city of a million and a half people; sometimes then you can feel their presence, watching, listening, and whispering their secrets.
