APRIL 1997
Apple jacked
At the Cooper Union
by Michael Hureaux-Perez
I believe it was the Cuban patriot Jose Marti who coined the phrase
"belly of the beast" in his description of New York City. He saw
this place as the headquarters of world imperialism and the self interest
of corporatism writ large, so there's some irony in the fact that it is
his statue that greets you at the entrance to Central Park on 60th street.
One would almost think there was some grudging respect on the part of the
old colonial masters until it is noticed that Marti appears to be falling
from his saddle as a result of a wound acquired in battle. It is almost
as if the upper crust residents of the high rises around the park are being
reassured that all troublemakers will be dealt with accordingly.
That is, of course, if the troubles of
the country are dealt with at all. The peculiar efficiency of late stage
capitalism is one that ponders mightily over the waste of material resource
through bureaucracy, but can turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the millions
of human lives thrown away by the market in its relentless quest for a downsized
efficiency. Every day in the subways of this city we are confronted by a
homeless army of mindboggling size, many hundreds of people, many of whom
are sick with tuberculosis, or who are HIV positive. This parade of the
dying probably would drive us mad if we allowed ourselves enough time to
think about it, but you know, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Ours
is an era of maximized internal colonialism and for the time being, most
of us have made our peace with mass homelessness, our epochs' version of
the debtor's prison. The age of liberation has been declared null and void
by the privileged, and our know-it-all ideologues of capital go along as
though this were a new idea, as if the privileged would ever say anything
else. Nihilist whimsy is the tone of the moment, evidenced by the crap
writing that finds wide distribution in journals whose names are best left
unmentioned for fear of invoking the devil.
Interesting indeed is the common response to those who criticize the current
turn of affairs. I remember the first time I heard George Bush spearheading
the current fervor around "politically correct". That bastion
of democratic integrity told us all that we were practicing the "politics
of envy". I remember thinking, "Wait a minute. Is that ASSHOLE saying I want
to be like him?" I tell you, if I could have found the ballroom where
he was doing his military voguing at the time, I would have bought him a
new party dress. I promise you, I have absolutely no problems with what
the wealthy do with their personal time. I just draw the line at their tendency
to believe their version of events is the only one with credibility. There
has been much hoo-ha over the supposed ability of the so-called politically
correct agenda to shut down all conservative argument, but it takes a great
leap of imagination to believe that the excesses of the so-called left in
these United States are on the same level as McCarthyism. In the years that
followed the Second World War, McCarthyism not only destroyed careers and
imprisoned the tired hacks of the Communist party of the United States,
but managed to create an atmosphere in the academy that precluded the creative
development of dialectical materialist thinking in postwar economics and
sociology. Don't try to tell me that this is the same as Kevin Costner and
Michael Douglas getting nasty reviews from the feminist community for making
shitty movies. It ain't the same. The rant against politically correct is
a festival of name-calling, when the issue of our era should be the increasing
tendency of capitalism to throw away individual lives and entire communities
of people, for example, the South Bronx, in the name of material efficiency.
If an old school Marxist were talking about acceptable sacrifices for the
market in the same way George Will and Louis Rukeyser do, we'd all smell
the shit. But we don't for the most part, and I can't think of anything
that better illustrates my point.
I found a guy knocked out on the bench
in front of the expresso store where I work a couple of months ago. I shook
him awake, gave him a cup of coffee, and told him he had to sit up. The
cops on the east side are not particularly known for their patience or charity,
after all, they're keeping the sidewalks clean for New York's Finest in
the Silk Stocking District. People who count. I knew he'd get run in, and
it was quite evident the man was sick and the last place he needed to be
was in a crammed cell in the "tombs" or some other god damn place.
MATT BRIGGS
There is an older woman who comes into
the store where I work, her name is Helen. She's seventy-six years old,
her passions are the Catholic Church and the music of Frank Sinatra, who
she saw at the Paramount in 1947. Anyway, Helen told me I'd better wash
my hands. When I asked her why, she said that this fellow was tubercular,
and that everyone in the neighborhood knew it because the police had told
them. The New York Police Department, which has a civic practice among the
urban poor roughly akin to death squad activity according to Amnesty International.
Who ya gonna call?
I asked Helen why he is allowed to be
deathly ill out on the street if that was true. She said she didn't know,
and she thought it was horrible, but that was the way people are nowadays.
In a short time, I began to get a little nervous, because Dude sat out there
for a couple of hours, and by the time he actually ducked his head in the
store to thank me for the coffee I was relieved. I didn't know how tuberculosis
is spread, all I knew was that it is an airborne illness. I didn't know
you have to have consistent contact with someone in the same room over several
hours. So right after the man left I ran out with a bucket of bleachwater,
and scrubbed the bench down with it, just like the sorryass idiot I am.
As if his illness were one that could be spread through casual contact.
A few weeks later, this man came back to the store strung out on smack,
the manager had him arrested and I haven't seen him since.
Here was someone who had just given up
on our culture and our endless obsession with production line ethics. His
plight is far from uncommon in this city, and there are a thousand variants
everywhere else. It does not seem as though his present is one that is in
our future, but one never knows what will happen, do one? Studies everywhere
tell us that almost all of us are suffering from sleep deprivation. How
far is it from such a state to one in which one seeks permanent rush, perennial
dream? Support networks fall apart in a heartbeat oft times. For some, they
were never even there. Maybe someone reading this now is getting ready to
jump through a window in his or her head. Suicides shock quite often because
we know with a little more ground glass in the soul, it could be us. It
is quite a comment on our time that a chief concern of our populace has
become the right to die, as opposed to the right to a vibrant life. There
never are guarantees, and there is no future at all in the game "whoever's
the fastest gets the most". I try to keep it light, I put the letters
Ph.D. on my resume now. If people call me on it when they notice my resume
says I haven't even finished my Bachelor's, I just tell them I thought it
was code for unemployed. That's how it really is, and everyone knows it
except those who won't. We do not own our lives. Thousands of years from
now, people of this world or others will wonder at how such a technologically
advanced people could not resist the urge toward indentured servitude.
I fear, dear hearts, that we have conceded
defeat far too easily. I do not believe it is enough to correct one's personal
defects and pay reparation to everyone, although that is certainly part
of the process. I do not believe software literacy is a magic bullet. I
do not believe that it is enough to get counseling, and water one's own
garden. We are dealing with a mass social pathology, one that is gaining
ground fast, and is making greater and greater inroads upon those personal
gardens we supposedly esteem so highly.
I think we have to get serious about general
hellraising. I am not of the illusion that we can match the viciousness
of the system, nor should we want to. We've done well enough letting it
run rampant as long and as hard as it has, as a creation of our own that
we have, many times consciously, let slip away from us. No one is clean.
It seems to me that a lot of people for
a lot of years have been telling me that we have to start with where people
are at, I can't disagree. I am not advocating the whole course of a Gandhi,
a Rosa Luxemburg, a Che. But I think there is beauty and brilliance in Gandhi's
rumination that we have to go forward, and if they kill us, they have our
dead body, but they do not have our cooperation. I think Rosa was right
when she said we can lose every battle but the last one. I think Che was
right when he spoke of creating one, two, many Vietnams.
And I most emphatically agree with Dr.
King, when he said that a culture that spends more annually on the costs
of war than it does on the costs of education and the well-being of its
people is approaching spiritual death. I see it everywhere around me here
in New York, the self-proclaimed "capitol of the world". Spiritual
death is real. But there is a splendor in the eyes of young people that
no nastiness here has conquered. Sometimes it is a wild thing, and when
those eyes turn on you, you have to stand accountable with everything you
have, and it's never easy to do. Still, it must be done. People have told
me for years there will never be a utopia, and that's probably true, at
least not in our lifetimes. But it seems to me that is what people seek
when they attempt to escape the destruction of urban life, the way that
our suburban retreats have been "mall'd" by corporate America.
And there is nowhere to run. Now is the dance. Now. Those who deny this
do so at their peril. The level of racial buzz words used by opportunist
leaders of the corporate state guarantees that without persistent and willing
confrontation of the tough day-to-day issues, Bosnia's present becomes our
future.
Shortly after I got to New York, I went
with my wife Kathleen to a flamenco performance in the East Village. As
we were on our way to the theatre, we passed a building called the Cooper
Union Institute, which was an engineering school founded by the philanthropist
Peter Cooper sometime around the middle of the last century. I had to stop
and look at it, feel the walls of the place. I remembered in the moment
that Lincoln gave a speech there in 1860 that many historians feel secured
for him the Republican nomination for the presidency, that is, as he spoke,
he caught the eye of the rising caste of engineer industrialists who would
consolidate their place in national leadership in the twenty years that
followed the Civil War.
But what can I say? I'm a mystic, a romantic.
As I stood there touching those walls, I could hear that high nasal twang
(as Lincoln's voice is described by his contemporaries) speaking the following
words in those days of national mediocrity that guaranteed civil war, that
other day of civic leadership that put more accent on that which is hung
on the physical frame than that which is stored in the heart. On the question
of the threat to the country's survival, Lincoln said the following:
"...At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never. The combined forces of Europe, Asia, and Africa, could not by force take a drink from the Allegheny, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in the trial of a thousand years. I answer, that if it come from anywhere, it must come from amongst ourselves. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and its finisher..."
And no matter where I go, that's how it
looks from here.
Mikey
© The Raven Chronicles 1997