at the New York Vietnam War Veterans Memorial, the night of its opening to the public

"Vietnam," author Myra McPherson has written," was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America."

[from the New York Vietnam War Veterans Memorial site],

I've been to the New York Vietnam War Veterans Memorial beginning on the day it opened and a number of times since. Until 1987 I lived just one block away and I passed it at least once every day. At first it was never unattended, but visitor traffic has declined in recent years, and sometimes the small park triangle it occupies in the oldest, and during the day the busiest, part of the city is completely empty.

Even since moving uptown I've returned, often with friends visiting New York, and I'll be going again, since the letters of a war's American participants etched there in the glass are among the most profound modern testaments we have of the stupidity of both the governed and those who presume to govern them.

[tip: probably best to visit after dark, when the wind-swept day's trash is less visible, and the inscriptions are lit from within the glass monoliths]

Apparently not enough of either group has been visiting lower Water Street at Coenties Slip lately, or the letters which appeared in the NYTimes on Sunday might never have been written. Their authors all died in Iraq since last fall.

Read and you will surely weep.

What follows is an excerpt from among several letters to his mother written by Specialist Robert A. Wise, 21, of Tallahassee, Fla. Specialist Wise was killed six months later, on Nov. 12, by a homemade bomb while on patrol in Baghdad.

Thursday, May 8

Rumor has it that we'll be on a plane home June 22, so keep your fingers crossed. I'm really going to need your help setting up a budget when I get home and making sure I stick to it. I know the only way I'll complete my goals of paying off my car and getting all of that furniture for our house by the end of the year is by paying attention to what I spend my money on.

Well, I'm runnin' out of things to write about. I love you and I miss you. Tell everyone I said hi, and one day I'll get home.

P.S.: There's no place like home (click)
There's no place like home (click)
There's no place like home (click)
Damn, it didn't work again!

Since no one seems to be able to stop the senseless slaughter from this end, perhaps a mutiny would actually be a reasonable approach.

[image from the official site itself]

George Blackall Simonds The Falconer (1875)

It was a dark and stormy night. No, actually it was this afternoon, it was only 2 o'clock, and it was perfectly clear. I have no recollection of darkness.

It was Central Park, and it's aparently one of the most popular sculptures in its precincts.

Strawberry Fields, Central Park, today

Apparently yesterday's antiwar demonstration didn't begin and end in Madison Square yesterday.

[Footnote: Michael Torke and A.R. Gurney collaborated on a short opera, "Strawberry Fields," inspired by the site and the memorial. Gurney tells a wonderful story and Torke makes it sing, in order that, as one character sings, "the sounds of life drown out the fear of nothingness." The one act forms part of the trilogy, "Central Park," the work of three teams of composers and librettists.]

in Madison Avenue this afternoon

What if they threw a demonstration and everbody came, except the media? Would you be able to get people into the streets next time? Think about it, while you search for coverage of the massive antiwar demonstration in New York today, and especially if you're looking in the New York Times. See bloggy for the story about the missing story.

Is the conservative U.S. establishment still afraid to show the popular opposition to a disastrous goverment and its disastrous foreign adventures, even when those disasters have finally become so obvious? Does it think a crude media blackout will discourage its critics? And, more important, will it?

While I'm also thinking just now that the demonstrators who marched out to Versailles in 1789 didn't need the NYTimes to help them bring their own king back to Paris, where he was capitally eliminated a few years later, I have to admit that the French have generally been much more courageous about seeing that their governments remain responsible than we have.

Later this afternoon I expect to have a gallery of about two dozen photos up on this post, taken while we marched with Palestinians and Jews Against the Occupation.

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UPDATED: Photos are now here; captions will arrive later on Sunday.

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UPDATED: Captions are now atteached to the photos.

I think this was supposed to be a positive image

No reason for putting this up this at this particular moment. I just neglected to post this wonderful rant I found in Newsday when it first appeared, over ten days ago. It's been in my head ever since, and I thought that finally letting it out here might let me move on [I don't like to have to think about Giuliani. I really, really don't].

Jimmy Breslin [omigosh, someone I know was actually surprised to hear he was still around when I mentioned his name recently!] has no love for our former mayor, and he's not shy about writing about the man's bogus reputation as somehow divine, even when his column is really about another cheap charlatan, George W. Bush.*

He was a nobody as a mayor and in one day he became a hero. This sudden career, this door opening to a room of gold, all started for Rudolph Giuliani when his indestructible bunker in a World Trade Center building blew up. He had personally selected it, high in the sky, and with tons of diesel fuel to give emergency power.

And Guiliani walks on. He walks from his bunker, up Barclay Street and went on television. Went on and announced his heroism and then came back every hour or so until he became a star, a great figure, a national hero, the mayor who saved New York.

Most of this comes from these dazed Pekinese of the Press. Giuliani was a hero with these news people. He did not pick up a piece of steel or help carry one of the injured off.

He made the trade center his private cathedral. Police commanders were terrified of letting you in. There was only Rudy, who flew his stars, Oprah and the like, down to see it.

*
Breslin begins this March 7 column, with characteristic restraint, "In his first campaign commercial. George Bush reached down and molested the dead."

[Image by Joe McNally, from "Faces of Ground Zero"]

throngs escaping underground New York, February 29, 2004

It's worse than we could have imagined.

Ray Sanchez wrote another excellent column in Newsday on Monday, about disaster preparedness in the New York transit system. A second piece appears today. They're both very scary.

After February 29, and the reporting of Sanchez, we could no longer fool ourselves that the MTA knew what to do in the event of a subway emergency, even two and a half years after 9/11. Now, thanks to Sanchez's columns, we know that the city's Office of Emergency Planning (OEM) isn't interested in the MTA. But that's not all. It also seems that the various parties who have to work together in real emergencies can't even work together to plan for emergencies.

MEANWHILE: I've been "de-gayed" and "de-clawed" by Time Out

On a related note, I can report an interesting follow-up to my own experience, or at least to my report of that experience. Last week Time Out/New York included a surprisingly and offensively glib (careless?) piece on the fire which shut down a number of subway lines two Sundays back, injuring some passengers and frightening, even terrifying, many others. I felt I had to call them on it, so I went to my keyboard.

Last night I found that some form of my letter appears at the top of their current "Letters" section. Unfortunately neither the original article nor the letter can be found on their site, but since they made some very interesting changes in my text, I'll try to illustrate here what happened twixt my laptop and their hard copy.

I admit that I was kinda thrilled with the novelistic title they slapped at the top of the letter, "Tracks of my fears," and when I first read the five inches of printed text I thought they might not have cut my original letter at all. Then I checked, in what I thought was just an excess of conceit, and I uncovered some interesting edits.

I should have expected the subjective, fairly arbitrary word or syntax changes I saw, but what I found more interesting is that they decided to totally eliminate my partner Barry. Gee, I'd hate to think that you can only be queer, ok, even "gay," in Time Out if you're in the entertainment listings.

Also, even though I understand that TONY is basically just a [pretty good] entertainment rag and therefore I should not have been surprised by the tone of their article, I think it's significant that they were careful to eliminate my critical reference to their reporter's slant [which was in fact far more facile than I had indicated in my letter].

Finally, I notice that they chose to subtly eliminate my more alarming descriptions of what the situation was like underground, somewhat diluting the letter's basic argument.

What follows below is first what I sent them by email:

Along with almost the entire media establishment of the New York region, TONY missed the real story in the February 29 subway fire and evacuations. Even worse, Ayren Jackson makes light of it in "Talking Points" this week, and you all should know better. The next time might not be so entertaining to your readers.

People were discomforted and terrified, some were injured by smoke, but the real story is what the experience says about New York's ability to cope with a real terrorist incident, or even a disastrous accident. A single homeless man throwing debris can cause people to be trapped for hours in the subway?

My partner and I were confined below ground from 5:30 until 7:30. Our train was apparently one of the more fortunate, since some people weren't free until 9, and many suffered smoke inhalation requiring hospitalization. After the first few minutes of explosion and fire there was little smoke where we were, but many of us were terrified, and we still had to wait over two hours from the time the train was initially halted, more than an hour after we were told help was on its way, and certainly long after the tracks were "no longer juiced", in Jackson's words.

When we were finally permitted to exit, the route involved simply walking out an open subway door, stepping along a 15-foot shelf to an emergency exit, and then climbing a couple flights of stairs to the busy Village street above.

What the experience says about easily-imagined future disasters makes us seriously question living in NYC, and we're crazy about this city.

This is what they actually printed:

Tracks of my Fears

Along with almost the entire media establishment of the New York region, TONY missed the real story in the February 29 subway fire and evacuations ["Talking Points," Out There, TONY 441].

People were discomforted and terrified, some were injured by smoke, so the real story is what the experience says about New York's ability to cope with a real terrorist incident, or even a disastrous accident. A single homeless man throwing debris can cause people to be trapped for hours in the subway?

I was confined below ground due to this incident for two hours. My train was apparently one of the more fortunate, as some people weren't freed until hours later, and many suffered smoke inhalation, requiring hospitalization. After the first few minutes of explosion and fire, there was little smoke where we were standing; however we still had to wait more than two hours from the time the train was initially halted, more than an hour after we were told help was on its way and a long time after the tracks were "no longer juiced." What the experience says about easily imagined future disasters makes me seriously question living in NYC.

On Saturday Barry and I will be in the streets again, along with nobody knows how many others, on the anniversary of Bush's war on the world, sometimes known as "the war on Iraq," or even "the war against terror."

For us it will be the streets of New York, and we will be joining the Palestinian contingent. We should be assembling at 11:15 am on 25th Street between 5th Avenue & Broadway, in what is called Worth Square, named after General William Jenkins Worth and we will be next to the monument to this wretched man's iniquities: He mowed down Native Americans and Mexicans in several Imperial wars on their own lands. We ended up stealing all of the Seminole nation and half of the Mexican. Very heroic, very patriotic, and it had already become an American tradition even before his time.

For more information on the day, go to United for Peace and Justice, "The World Still Says No To War."

Momentum is building for the Global Day of Action against War and Occupation on March 20, 2004 — the one-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. On that day people all around the globe will take to the streets to say YES to peace and NO to pre-emptive war and occupation. In communities large and small around the United States and across the globe, we will call for an end to the occupation of Iraq and Bush's militaristic foreign policies. March 20 will be the first time the world's "other superpower" will take center stage since Feb. 15 [2003].

Giuliani's Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor of 7 WTC

Regular readers know why I have such a keen interest in the former 7 World Trade Center [friends who fled the building on September 11, a years-long office there myself and disgust with the human impact of many decisions made by its tone-deaf owner, Larry Silverstein, and his friend the American media-hero Rudolph Giuliani], and some know that I have tried in the past to bring attention to the reason for the monstrous building's astounding collapse that afternoon. Well, that reason may finally have attained real legitimacy, since Newsday reports today:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's press secretary is accusing Rudolph Giuliani's emergency management chief of making dubious decisions that led to the fiery destruction of a Ground Zero skyscraper.

Press secretary Ed Skyler leveled the charge at Jerry Hauer, the former director of the Office of Emergency Management, after The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Hauer yesterday criticizing Bloomberg for weakening OEM.

"It's funny he didn't mention his decision to put OEM's headquarters at 7 World Trade Center, complete with enough diesel fuel to burn down the entire building on Sept. 11," Skyler said.

The building collapsed hours after the Twin Towers fell; ignited diesel burned long afterward, contributing to the pall of black smoke that hung over lower Manhattan.

. . . .

Skyler's comments echo private remarks from Bloomberg administration officials who have criticized Giuliani-era decisions, including the decision to site OEM's Brooklyn headquarters in a flood zone.

Hauer's criticisms of the Bloomberg administration's handling of OEM doesn't seem to address these damning assertions, suggesting they are not even arguable.

I suppose it would be even more interesting if these guys were not all working in Republican adminsitrations.

[I had first seen this image, or one like it, from NYC OEM, two and a half years ago - it was hastily removed from the site soon after September 11 by the Giuliani administrartion, but it has returned at some point in the interim, although I believe it may be much smaller this time]

Socialist Party supporters celebrate their party's win today in Madrid

Yeeaa for Spain!

We all grieve for you still, but now we're all encouraged by your good sense and courage in throwing the current government into the streets where it belongs. If it had been there all along, 11 millions Spaniards just might not have had to stand in those same streets on Friday.

It's a remarkable turnaround from just a few days ago, when all pundits had been predicting a large victory for the conservative Popular Party, until now Bush's second partner in the coalition of willing rogue nations responsible for the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Blair should be quaking in his boots. No, maybe he's even soiling his pants by now, since he's had plenty to worry about ever since the WMDs evaporated into thin air.

In the meantime, maybe Italy can do something about their own embarassing toady. [Say, just how much in bribes has Washington been offering these governments, whose populations have been so unwilling? There's no other sensible argument for their support.]

Unfortunately here in never-never land we're going to have to wait until November for a regime change, but the population of the U.S. is neither as informed or bold as that of Spain, Britain, or even Italy, so nothing can be certain even about that date. Atrios wrote about that on Saturday:

Terrorism and Elections

Conventional wisdom, which we'll assume to be true for the moment, tells us that if the people responsible for the horrific bombings in Spain were al Qaedaish or Islamic extremists or something similar, rather than ETA terrorists, that it could cause the defeat of Aznar's party, PP, in the elections tomorrow. The reason being that Iraq was not popular with the Spanish people, and if Aznar directed resources to fighting a non-threat instead of spending time to find real threats, or if the terrorism is a response to their participation in the Iraq war, then he and his party obviously failed in their duty.

On the other hand, I would say that conventional wisdom in this country would be that a major al Qaedaish terrorist attack in this country before our election would be good for the Republicans and Bush. I have no idea if this, or the other, conventional wisdom is true, but the contrast is interesting.

Bloggy has an excellent post on the events and the mood in Spain.

[image from Yahoo! News]

Thomas Hirschhorn</a>, details of two panels from the series, UTOPIA UTOPIA = ONE WORLD ONE WAR ONE ARMY ONE DRESS (2003) paper, prints, plastic foil, adhesive tape, marker, ballpoint pen [each of the eight panels, 50cm x 60cm]

We're at home tonight, our unease suspended for now by 20th-century Spanish Music (Halffter, Marco, Soler, Hidalgo, Bernaola, Barce, etc.), one of the great rewards of a large collection of recordings.

Hirschhorn's work may seem like a particulary inappropriate context for this thought, but I'm fantasizing how in a different world art might actually be able to suspend all of the world's monstrousness, its dis-ease, just that easily.

[image photographed in the spaces of Arndt & Partner at the Armory Show today]