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May 7, 2002
Doreen
Miller
CIA
Breakdown
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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The
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Al Gore:
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May
7, 2002
From Ground Zero
to the Bronx:
In and Out of Line
by David Vest
As I learned last week, to spend a day in Manhattan
with no fixed agenda is to live out a number of scenes from Edgar
Allan Poe's great masterpiece, "The Man of the Crowd."
Poe sets his tale in London, but his anonymous character, who
wanders day and night, restlessly following the turmoil of the
street wherever it may lead, might as well have been me last
Tuesday in New York.
Having emerged from Penn Station shortly
after 9:00 a.m., I found a copy of the New York Times (virtually
unobtainable on Long Island where I had gone to visit relatives)
and wandered in search of a deli. From a second-floor room I
drank my morning tea, read the paper and watched the world go
by on the sidewalk below.
After a time I rose, left the cafe, walked
by the Empire State Building and made a spur-of-the-moment decision
to visit the site formerly occupied by the World Trade Towers.
Later I told myself it would have been almost disrespectful to
the city to search out its pleasures before making the pilgrimage
to the scene of its apocalypse. But the truth is I had no idea
I was going there until the moment I boarded a bus on impulse.
The Number 6 let me off just at the entrance
to the wooden ramp that leads up to the makeshift viewing stand.
"Ground Zero," announced the driver, in a quiet voice.
You have to walk down the hill to the
South Street Seaport and get a ticket at Pier 16, running the
gauntlet of sidewalk vendors selling books, snacks and souvenirs
of the disaster. The ticket is free, but the city wants to control
crowd flow and encourage shopping in the area. When you've trudged
back up the street, past the sidewalk cafes and noodle shops,
you can look at the memorial quilts and posters and teddy bears
propped against the fence while you wait your turn on the platform.
People counting pedestrian traffic on little hand-clickers are
stationed everywhere.
Working your way up the ramp, you can
read more posters and scrawled messages, written with ballpoint
pen, magic marker and pencil on railing, post and placard. Some
of them are touching, others are vaguely threatening, quoting
Jeremiah and Deuteronomy and warning us to repent before it is
too late. The Falwellian message that what we are about to behold
is something God did to us because we are wicked is by no means
dominant, but it is hard to miss the "lean on Him before
He leans on you" theme.
There is a good deal of Legion of Mary
angel imagery as well.
Every so often the line stops to let
the group up ahead get a good look and take a few photos. A woman
to my left tries to get past the rest of us. "You'll have
to wait your turn like everyone else," another woman says
as her husband rolls his eyes in empathy. I wonder idly whether
pickpockets are working the crowds at Ground Zero yet or whether
some unwritten code keeps them away.
There is not much to see anymore. But
there is a lot to feel. Whatever you think of it all, people
died here, by the thousands. Now, below and directly in front
of you, is what looks like any large construction site, with
dozens of trailers in rows. It is the buildings left standing,
with blackened and boarded windows, that lend the scene its horror.
Unless this is a spot from which you
routinely saw the towers, they are not conspicuous here by their
absence. (The skyline, seen from afar, is an utterly different
matter. A woman on Long Island told me she avoids going into
town because she can't bear to look at it anymore, it's too heartbreaking.)
I felt myself numbing out after three
or four minutes on the platform, so I turned away from the whir
and click of people taking pictures of themselves at the scene
and started down the other side.
Turning right at the sidewalk, I worked
my way on down to Battery Park. It was there, sitting on a bench
and looking out at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, that
the wave of feeling I had been dreading overtook me.
As an ex-cop out near Port Jefferson
had explained to me, "Let's get drunk and go kill the terrorists"
is not a feeling. It's something you do to try to get out of
feeling anything. But how can you understand anything you aren't
willing to feel?
I felt it now, and it shook me, and I
spent some time staring at the water.
A decision to buy a copy of the New Yorker
to read over lunch turned into an absurd time-consuming quest.
News stand after news stand claimed not to have it or, in one
case, never to have heard of it. Obtaining the magazine became
an aggravated obsession (would I have had better luck on Long
Island?) and I wound up eating lunch at 3:00 after being caught
in a rain shower coming out of the subway.
That evening I made another pilgrimage,
on a jam-packed Number 4 train to Yankee Stadium for the game
between the Bronx Bombers and the Oakland Athletics. Before the
game I joined the line of people wandering through Monument Park
behind the outfield, where after viewing the famous trio of monuments
to Lou Gehrig, Miller Huggins and Babe Ruth, you have to make
a choice. You can either go left to Mickey Mantle or right to
Joe Dimaggio. Almost everyone goes left to the Mick, leaving
Dimaggio's monument looking as remote and aloof as the real deal,
definitely not the man of the crowd.
The Yankees scored six runs for David
Wells in the bottom of the first. I sat in the left field porch.
It rained off and on until the umpires halted play in the bottom
of the fifth. I decided to call it a night and got caught in
a dangerous mob scene in the narrow tunnels under the stadium,
as people attempting to leave pushed against people trying to
get to the concession stands for more beer. A man trying to force
his way through the tangle (the very "type and genius of
deep crime," Poe would have called him) knocked me into
a woman. Her husband or boyfriend warned me I was "going
down" if I bumped her again. Unable to move forward or backward,
in danger of being crushed to death by a drunken mob of fans,
I found an exit, not the one I wanted, and tried to take it.
I found my way blocked by a stadium employee,
an angry woman who asked me three times if I really wanted to
leave. Did I understand that I couldn't re-enter the stadium?
Yes. Once you go out you can't come back in. I understand. There
is no re-entry, your ticket is void when you go out that door.
Meanwhile people behind me were lunging against me trying to
get past, voices rising in desperation. Yes, I understand, I
want to leave, three times I said it, as though I were trying
to get some weird kind of mystical Yankee divorce from the woman
blocking my escape. Finally I got past the sentry and made my
way into the street. I could hear her arguing with the next candidate
for escape, explaining it all again.
Is this an everyday occurrence in the
Bronx? What happens when the crowd is twice as large (or twice
as drunk) as on a rain-soaked Tuesday night?
I walked around to the front of the stadium
to reclaim the new umbrella the Yankees had taken away from me
when I entered through the turnstile. I still had my claim check,
but after twenty minutes of searching it was clear that the New
York Yankees, twenty-six time world champions, no longer had
my umbrella and were prepared to offer nothing better than a
shrug in compensation.
I told myself I was lucky to get out
of the place alive and walked off in the rain with my hands in
my pockets.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
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