Category Archives: News

Private, Keep Out

One thing that strikes me as incredibly ridiculous is the Republican belief that airport security should remain a private sector industry. Using that logic, why not use private sector companies to guard the U.S. borders to Canada and Mexico too.

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After the Aftermath

First Ave at MiddayTomorrow it’s Monday, and hopefully the nation will have finally crawled out from under the misery-fueled lethargy of the past week. The mandate now is to return to normalcy, because anything else would be tantamount to an acquiescence to terror. It remains to be seen whether, as a society, we know how to do that yet, whether we know how to leave behind the truly disorienting aftermath that gripped us for days. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget it. I don’t mean just the two crashes that felled the World Trade Center towers — that goes without saying. What I mean is, I’m not sure I’ll be able to leave behind the stupor, the silent confusion that followed it. Or at the very least, I’ll never be able to forget the site of Manhattan’s normally bustling First Avenue on the day immediately after the terror, when it was six lanes abandoned to nothingness.

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Pictures from Today’s World Trade Center Tragedy

I woke up a little late today, so by the time I made it down to lower Manhattan (on foot), most of the area had been cordoned off, and the twin towers had collapsed already. I was only able to photograph the aftermath, the monstrous, slow-moving mass of smoke as it digested the blueness of the sky. It was misery to behold, but what newscasters didn’t talk about was the strange juxtaposition of tragedy and calmness.

New Yorkers, known to the outside world perhaps best for their excitable nature, are also capable of a staggering brand of indifference — sometimes out of spite, but sometimes too perhaps out of a numbness resulting from years of aggressive living and living among aggressors. That was very much in effect just outside of ground zero, beyond the police perimeter — people walked and chatted on their mobile phones (contrary to reports, I saw dozens of people using their phones successfully), some laughed mildly, some looked disturbed or quiet, but no one was in hysterics. I don’t say this to condemn my neighbors or take away from the tragedy, but to offer an added layer of depth to what’s available through news sources. It was a truly bizarre day.

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In Absentia

BallotI just spent all morning reliving the indecisive hell of last fall’s protracted U.S. Presidential election face-off. The New York Times published a massive article on that whole debacle in this morning’s paper, resulting from a detailed study of all the ballots (which resulted in what sounds like a complex analytical database). Journalists David Barstor and Don Van Natta Jr. focused on the Bush campaign’s mercernary approach to qualifying absentee ballots, and the results are disturbing. It just gets me so mad, thinking about the evil consortium of Republican playas who contrived to put that dolt into office…

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“Beijing Wins 2008 Olympics”

I get a kick out of this headline, captured this morning from a story on MSNBC which has probably changed by the time you’re reading this, but luckily for you I’ve posted a screen shot of it here.

Beijing Wins

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It has a bizarrely predictive quality, as if MSNBC looked into the future and saw that Beijing will basically sweep all of the games in 2008. What’s so interesting about this is how, unconciously or not, China is playing a larger and larger role in the West’s psyche. As the next great capitalist frontier, there’s a growing willfulness towards the idea that, if China does well, then we all do well. (Granted, there’s a corresponding anti-Sino mentality on the rise too.) I think that sentiment is very much at play here, not only in the Olympic Committee’s decision, but in MSNBC’s double-entendre headline. Get ready for more of it.

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