I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, for twenty years, most of that time very much in the midst of an extrordinary community of Cape Verdeans. Cape Verdeans? Most Americans have no reference whatsoever for this part of our immigrant history and national heritage, but part of New England knows it well.
A story in today’s NYTimes about a small nineteenth-century sailing ship brought back memories of Fox Point in Providence and of the Ernestina in particular. Even almost forty years ago, since it was already an era described as the jet age, it was almost impossible for me to register that this noble little ship had been functioning as an immigrant transport. I visited it in port in the early sixties, and I was astounded by the pluck, no, the enormous stamina and courage of those it brought across the Atlantic to a new world and a new life.
I was a white guy grad student living only blocks away in a modern city! How could I possibly understand what this was all about? I wanted to know more, but my shyness and the Cape Verdeans’ sense of privacy precluded much interaction with that part of the larger Portuguese-heritage community in southeastern New England. My biggest successes were friendships and affairs with Portugese boys whose families had come from Portugal or the Azores, but not Cape Verde. For at least those blessings, thank Mother Nature for the tenacity of homosexual desire!
I am now living in New York in the midst of a lot more stories and many more immigrants, of the past and of today. I think I am able to understand this thing a little more. These are the real All-American heroes. The rest of us are living on their dreams and the dreams of our own immigrant parents.
Move it!
That is, move the location of square footage lost with the destruction of the World Trade Center.
One important re-imagining of a solution has West Street buried entirely from below Chambers Street through old Battery Park until it joins FDR Drive around the bottom of Manhattan. Above ground, on the footprint of the current intrusive West Street there would be more than enough room to restore all that was lost September 11 and much more, leaving the actual 16-acre site of the Trade Center for whatever grand purpose consensus the City may produce.
Mr. Schwartz’s plan, which builds on precedents going back to Westway in the 1970’s and the Plan for Lower Manhattan before that, sets forth two integrated goals. The first is to reduce market pressure on the World Trade Center site. The second is to mend the cityscape now shattered by the stretch of West Street south of Chambers Street. With remarkable elegance, both objectives are accomplished with a single move: transferring the bulk of the required commercial space from the World Trade Center site and distributing it along West Street.
The aim of this concept, I hasten to add, is not to create a huge void in the middle of Lower Manhattan. Nothing in the plan precludes building on the 16-acre site. The goal is simply to reduce the economic and political pressures that have compelled the development corporation’s planners to pack the 16-acre site with more bulk than it can handle.
For my part, whatever the comparative merits of this proposal, the mere fact that it suggests the effective elimination of the disruptive, dehumanizing and anti-urban assault of a broad highway in the midst of one of the most densely-occupied sections of the City makes it especially worthy of consideration. Battery Park City would become part of New York at last, as New York would become part of Battery Park City. Win win.
defend America’s freedom to torture!
Do we have something in mind that we want to keep hidden from the world? We’ll almost certainly never know now.
The United States lost a bid today to rewrite a United Nations plan intended to reinforce the 1989 convention against torture.
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Diplomats say, and American officials do not dispute, that the United States is sensitive about this issue because of potential demands for access to the detention camp at the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 detainees suspected of being Al Qaeda members and others seized in Afghanistan are being held, as well as to others held in the United States as “enemy combatants.”
. . .and must be regularly and lovingly nourished
“The male ego is not a hardy perennial;
it’s a very delicate flower.”
–David Rudgers, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, and author of Creating the
Secret State, speaking about the U.S. military’s pricklish attitude toward gays and lesbians in its midst, in one of a number of interviews conducted recently by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Call in the army!
Let’s see what else can we do to destroy the country while no one is looking? The Cheney administration hasn’t gotten anything right yet. It seems to be (fortunately) doing pretty well at messing up even its own pet projects (especially the golden-egg-laying goose) while it destroys everything that has made us as a nation successful and admired. But now it wants to bring in the military to whip us all into shape at home.
They are considering it. They are re-thinking the military’s role in policing domestic affairs. Because as we all know it is a time of forced paranoia and false terrorist warnings and of increasingly obvious co-opting of 9/11 for oil and powermongering and political gain on both sides of the aisle. And you know what that means. Exactly: The government does whatever the hell it wants, calls it anti-terrorism, and please repress your deep cringing.
Mark Morford’s spectacular column is one of the most dramatic responses to this latest villainy from the Junta in Washington, but the drama of the proposal merits such a response, and he does it justice.
on losing God, our sponsor
With the elimination of the phrase, “under God,” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and the brand recognition that went with it, does the country risk losing its marketing powers?
The U.S. Justice Department, assigned the difficult task of finding a replacement, said it has already been in contact with several entities (“One nation, but 24,000 Starbucks”) interested in having their brands associated with America. Until an agreement is reached, however, the U.S. will advertise the position by replacing the phrase “One nation, under God,” with “One nation, (sponsorship opportunities available).”
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Europeans, meanwhile, seemed to be confused by the entire episode. “I don’t understand. I always thought it was ‘One nation, we are God,'” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “Oh my, I’ve been worshipping them for nothing.”
New York, a great place for hiding out!
(at least for a few million years) Researchers have announced the discovery of an entirely new genus and species in the Ramble in Central Park.
“We didn’t know what was out there,” Ms. Johnson said. “We wanted to see who’s out there in the spring, who’s out there in the fall and the summer.”
[sounds like so many guys I know, and they’re all naturalists themselves in their own special way] Actually the new genus is a centipede, certainly a disappoinment to most readers, but oddly exciting for those who read further.
“I was astonished,” Dr. Hoffman said. The odds against it surviving in a densely populated city and, in particular, the constant trampling of millions of Central Park visitors were astronomical, he said.
….
“Nobody in Manhattan is native. Exotics have displaced native North American species, just like we did the Indians.”
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Ms. Johnson said the discovery of Nannarrup hoffmani gives new reason to appreciate the virtues of natural mess in parks.
“If they rake all the leaves, remove all the fallen twigs and branches, new species and the regular guys will not survive,” she said. “The whole system will cease to function. We need to appreciate unmanicured nature.”
Could we just as easily be talking about people after all?
last chance for the Democrats?
I for one don’t think there is a chance, a chance that they will pick up the challenge, but here’s the case outlined.
The big, unacknowledged picture is this: The people in power represent an economic clique whose interests are only superficially tied to the well-being of the country as a whole. In collusion with their delighted big-money supporters, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their Cabinet-level entourage spent years lining their pockets with sweetheart loans, option deals and golden parachutes from oil companies and other related industries. They built political careers thundering against regulation, fueled by a cozy camaraderie with Enron and like companies that grew fat on–surprise!–deregulation. In office, these men make energy policy in cahoots with their ultra-wealthy sponsors, a club of very special Americans whose membership list they still keep secret. They consistently fight to secure America’s energy dependency on oil and related fuels. Toward that end, defying the understanding of virtually everyone else in the world, they have denied the existence of global warming, willfully distorting the scientific evidence. When its own government scientists sounded alarms, the Bush posse dismissed them as ”the bureaucracy” and kept galloping down the oily path toward even more catastrophic global climate changes associated with petroleum dependency.
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Democrats have a golden opportunity now to pound the podium and make a case to the nation that the interests in power–the interests who won a minority of the ballots cast but a majority of the Supreme Court during the 2000 presidential election–cannot be relied on to solve problems that their entire careers were devoted to creating. These interests are in revolt against plain American value and virtue. Even the honest men and women among them cannot muster the resolve to reform–their thinking is too deeply molded by the lives they’ve led.
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Now, the Democrats need to do more than win the votes for this or that new corporate regulation. They need to move beyond merely feeling smug about how the Republicans have sabotaged themselves. They need to confess their own sins–as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has done. But even more, they need to back the Republicans into their chosen corner. They need to connect with the healthy side of American skepticism. They need to be thunderous and clear on the essentials.
If the Democrats forfeit the opportunity now handed them to connect all the flaming dots, they are truly as flabby, corrupt and venal as Ralph Nader says.
book activism
“Spiritual autobiography” is not my thing, but still, the mind reels, thinking about the other possibilities, after reading an author describe how he simply slips his own books onto store shelves, rather than wait for the middleman to get to him.
To the Editor:
As a book lover and a book thief, I found your article about book theft (“The Best Stealer List,” Making Books column, July 18) riveting.
My habit started when I self-published a spiritual autobiography about my experiences at Union Theological Seminary, only to discover that it was virtually impossible to get bookstores to carry it. That’s when I start stealing in reverse (that is, stocking the shelves with my own book).
While some steal for drugs, others for money, some of us and I’m sure that I’m not alone steal from ourselves for a broader readership.
(Rev.) TOM REIBER
Summit, N.J., July 19, 2002
“Metrosexuals”
Are we dizzy yet? Some people were just beginning to sort out the old categories, but new species seem to be popping out all over, contributing to a delightful confusion for those who welcome life, and a nightmare for the half-dead.
MEET THE METROSEXUAL
He’s well dressed, narcissistic and bun-obsessed. But don’t call him gay.
….
For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn’t shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image — that’s to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that’s the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser’s walking wet dream.
Mark Simpson‘s essay concludes with a caution however.
The final irony of male metrosexuality is that, given all its obsession with attractiveness, vanity for vanity’s sake turns out to be not very sexy after all.
But then, it’s much too late for second thoughts. Metrosexuality is heading out of the closet, and learning to love itself. Even more.