my brother, usually (more or less) an optimist, said to me last week “i’m starting to think that the world really is about to come to an end.” and he wasn’t even talking about george bush and iraq, though of course that’s always part of the american conversation these days.
it’s six degrees in NYC right now according to Yahoo weather. a month ago it was seventy degrees. it’s been thirty-something degrees all week in northern california; some of my co-workers left for the office shocked at having to scrape ice off their windshields first. from tsunamis to hurricanes; mudslides to an east coast summer in december — we are seeing it all. and this is only the beginning. even bush — goddam his evil, warmongering, religious-fanatic heart — has been compelled to mention climate change in his so-called state of the union address. this from the man who SUED THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA for tightening emission standards on automobiles. why w0uld he do that? check out the detroit republican campaign contributions; that’s all you need to know.
but what are the headlines? is this inconvenient truth — the fact that we are not just destroying, but have substantially already destroyed, this planet — plastered on the front page of any mainstream publication? please tell me if you’ve seen an example of that, because i certainly haven’t. every new freak of weather is described as only that: a freak, not a pattern. the same newspapers that find patterns everywhere — from fashion to voting districts to stop-and-frisks — do not see it here. or maybe they do, and are simply too terrified to document it.
here’s what they write about instead:
“Man dies in fall from ladder”
“Suit filed over rent”
“Kids find parents dead in home”
“Eight charged in ‘71 cop slay”
“NJ Transit calls for fare hike”
and my favorite: “Families of WTC victims turn to TV for protests”
what are they protesting? the order of the names on the WTC memorial. yes, you heard right, they are spending MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO PROTEST THE ORDER OF THE NAMES ON THE MEMORIAL. this group that has already collected millions (if not billions) for themselves; that has already cost this city millions in frivolous litigation over this memorial; and on which many millions more are about to be spent in the building of this talked-out overblown and (in my opinion) completely unnecessary memorial.
why is it unnecessary? because there may not be a city, or even a planet, to build it on if we don’t take some action quickly. this is what i mean by fiddling while rome burns. the enormous amount of resources — both time and money — already sucked up by this project could have and SHOULD have been spent more creatively. if you really want to “honor the heroes” (and that’s a topic for another day; not everyone who was killed in the towers was a hero — the firefighters and cops were heroes, everybody else was your ordinary joe going to your ordinary dayjob. are all of YOUR coworkers heroes? if not, would death somehow magically convert them into such?) a more fitting and useful way to use all those millions might be to set up a fund or facility for orphans in iraq, surely just as much victims of 9/11 as the tower-workers were; to join the antiwar campaign and help to stop even more unnecessary slaughter; to make a huge donation to alternative energy r&d groups and reduce the dependence on oil that sparks the hatred that leads to things like terrorist attacks.
there are dozens, hundreds, of other creative and effective ways to memorialize those killed than creating yet another downtown art installation. but no, let’s fight about the layout, let’s fight about the location, let’s fight about the order of the names. let’s fight about every last useless detail, while the storms of the world and the melting polar caps (not to mention greenland) raise sea level until manhattan reverts to the swamp it once was, and all memorials, office buildings, wall street bronze bulls and midtown glass towers are submerged in brown, mercury-laden, undrinkable saltwater.
no one, then, will be able to tell what order the names are in.
if there’s anyone left to read them.
