Blue Highways: Brooklyn, New York

Unfolding the Map

Sometimes, when dates and stars align, one just doesn't question and one simply goes with it.  If you read the quote below, you'll understand why I chose my topic for this post, and why I waited an extra day or so to post it to Littourati.  On this day of remembrance, let us set aside differences for a little while and reflect on how events like those which occurred on September 11, 2001 affect so much in our world.  The image at right is the flag of Brooklyn, found at Wikimedia Commons.  The point I picked in Brooklyn, where I imagine, maybe, that William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) saw those now toppled "stumps in the yellow velvet sky" can be found at the map.

Book Quote

"....Things raced past like the jumpy images of a nickelodeon: abandoned and stripped cars on the shoulders, two hitchhiking females that nobody could stop to pick up, a billboard EAT SAUSAGE AND BE HAPPY, low-flying jumbos into Kennedy International, the racetrack at Ozone Park, bulldozed piles of dirt to fill the marsh at Jamaica Bay, long and straight Flatbush Avenue, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, the World Trade Center like stumps in the yellow velvet sky."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 7

The former Twin Towers from Brooklyn. Photo by Sander Lamme and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Brooklyn, New York

You might wonder why LHM refers to the World Trade Center as being like "stumps in the yellow velvet sky."  I remember once, while driving in Brooklyn back when the towers still stood, that in certain areas you could only see the tops of the towers in the distance, and that they did look like stumps, at least compared to how tall you knew they really were.  Now, a new tower like a young sapling or, some might say, a slender headstone, rises above the urban gravesite where those towers once stood.

Every generation has its "Where were you when...?" moment.  These are the moments that happen, usually tragic or devastating in nature, that have the potential to change lives and cause far-reaching effects that create and even transcend history.

For my parents' generation, December 7th, 1941, the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, was one of those moments in history that changed everything.  That day determined how many young men would spend the next four years of their lives, and it also sent many of those young men to their deaths.  We will never know what contributions to society those men might have made had they not been compelled to go to war to defend their country, but that day and their actions following that day certainly helped reorder a world and even remake it.

For many, that day came on November 22nd, 1963.  People around the United States, and even around the world, stood aghast, and even wept, as the incredible and almost unbelievable news reverberated around the world - the president of the United States had been gunned down in Dallas.  We will never know what John F. Kennedy would have done in his fourth year of his presidency, nor if he would have won a second term.  But his death ushered in Lyndon Johnson's presidency, which created a new era of civil rights and government responsibility, and an escalation of a war that sent many young men to their deaths and scarred many others.

I thought that my "Where were you when...?" moment was going to be November 10, 1989.  I remember listening almost without comprehension as East Germany opened its checkpoints and thousands of East Berliners and West Berliners danced together on top of the Berlin Wall.  This symbol of the Cold War, which had stood for almost 50 years during a conflict that I thought would never end in my lifetime, crumbled overnight.  For a moment, in the new era that followed, many hoped that the threat of a nuclear war that lingered over everything and everyone had, if not dissipated, then at least taken a step back in favor of democracy and world cooperation.

However, the positive forces unleashed that day also set other forces in motion that reached an apex in the events of September 11, 2001.  That date will stand as this generation's "Where were you when...?" moment.  As a political scientist, I see the train of events that link November 10, 1989 and September 11, 2001, so for me it is almost as if my generational marker spanned the nearly 12 years in between.  Nations that had been under the thumb of communist governments suddenly began to move toward democracy, which allowed simmering conflicts to rise to the surface, which fostered the rise of transnational groups bent on overthrowing the world order.  Of these groups, one with a fundamentally radical pan-Islamic philosophy began planning what would be the most symbolically and literally destructive moment in United States history.

That moment, when the United States was spearheading a global market and trade regime that it planned to lead, and which was symbolized in the Twin Towers, once again altered history.  At the time, I was working on my PhD and teaching classes at the University of New Orleans.  I remember hearing on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and thinking that it was a small plane.  I then heard that another hit, and turned on the television to scenes of destruction caused by "low-flying jumbos" that are seared into the memory of, possibly, a majority of the earth's current inhabitants in one way or another.  I remember having to calm a student who called me.  She was afraid that, in the new and dangerous world that suddenly revealed itself to be lurking within America's post-Cold War confidence (and perhaps arrogance), she would become another victim of terrorists while driving to school.

I often wonder how my life changed after that horrific day.  That was a day in which thousands of men and women calmly went to work or boarded an airplane, not realizing it would be their last commute, their last trip, their last moments on earth.  American self-assurance was shattered, our confidence in its ability to protect ourselves was compromised, and worst of all, our hopefulness in the future was lost.  While, as in any disaster, the best of our natures came forward and heroes and martyrs were and still are justifiably celebrated, the events of September 11th also brought forth the worst of our natures as well, including fear, racism and a tendency toward the reactionary.  In the wake of the disaster, the sorrow and support of the whole world was evident in the thousands of gatherings and demonstrations, the most poignant example of which were the signs in many other countries proclaiming "We are all Americans."

I felt that we wasted the the opportunity, born out of tragedy, that was given to us.  In individuals such as myself, as well as the larger population, a re-evaluation of what was important occurred.  Some moved toward a focus on protection and security.  Others focused on the actions of our country and how our foreign policies over the years and decades could have culminated in the disaster.  Some held the United States blameless, and others held the US and its policies and practices around the world wholly to blame.  The US became preemptive, and started two wars from which it is only beginning to disentangle itself.  Even in death Osama bin Laden is still a political issue.

For me, I realized that the charade of a peaceful world was gone in the complexity of the forces surging within it.  But, I also realized that the forces and motivations of people were also too complex to be generalized.  I couldn't hold one person, movement or country responsible.  I began to see, for example, that Islam was very complex and that it was too easy to brand it as a religion of terrorists and fanatics.  Instead, I wondered how we had simultaneously ignored that aspect of Islam while taking for granted the more moderate forces that were quite willing to work with us and had even warned us.

But most of all, the loss of those Twin Towers reminded me that nothing - absolutely nothing - is certain.  We get up in the morning and expect our day to go as usual.  We head to work, we spend eight hours there, we head home.  We do our evening activities and go to bed and expect much the same to happen the next day.  Until an event that impacts our lives, like that on September 11th, 2001 or any other date where the continuing human drama surprises us with an act of tragedy, reminds us just how fragile and unpredictable our lives can be.

Musical Interlude

I was going to leave this space for a moment of silence.  However, one of the most moving pieces of music I have ever heard is Terence Blanchard's Funeral Dirge, written for his post-Katrina album A Tale of God's Will.  I left New Orleans a year before Katrina, and didn't experience that life- and history-altering event but I think that Blanchard's dirge captures so much about the loss, pain, hope and emotion brought about by tragedy.

If you want to know more about Brooklyn

There is so much to Brooklyn, I'm sorry I can't write more about it.  But, visit Brooklyn!  It's a wonderful place.

Brooklyn Blogs
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (newspaper)
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Online
Eat It: The Brooklyn Food Blog
Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn
Wikipedia: Brooklyn
Wikipedia: List of Brooklyn Neighborhoods

Next up:  Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, New York

Blue Highways: Fort Klamath, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

On this day of remembrance for the heroes and martyrs of September 11, 2001 I do a reflection on where the United States has gone since that tragic day and where it might go.  The opinions expressed are mine only.  William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) quote is used only as a path to my own reflections.  I do not discuss much about Fort Klamath, but offer some links below for your information.  Feel free to leave a comment whether you agree or disagree with me, but regardless, let's honor the innocent victims of a horrible act of terrorism.  Here's a map to locate Fort Klamath.

Book Quote

"I don't know whether Oregonians generally honk horns or whether they had it in for me, but surely they honked. Later, someone said it was part of the 'Keep Moving, Stranger' campaign. I turned off into the valley at the first opportunity, an opportunity numbered route 62 that ran to Fort Klamath....

"....I stopped at a wooden cafe....In front sat an Argosy landcruiser with an Airstream trailer attached; on top...was a motorboat and on the front and back matched mopeds....I stood amazed at this achievement of transport called a vacation.

"A man with a napkin tucked to his belt came out of the cafe. A plump woman...watched from the cafe.

"'What's up, chum?' the man said.

"We went inside, and I heard the woman whisper, 'His type make me nervous.'

"....I got reviled by people who could afford life at six-miles-per-gallon....After all, they read the papers, they watched TV, and they knew America was a dangerous place."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1

Historical photo of Fort Klamath. Photo at Legends of America. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Klamath, Oregon

The quote today is a long one, and I had to do some manipulating so that it wouldn't be too long.  The reason I chose to have such an extensive quote has something to do with the importance of this day, September 11, to many of us.

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was getting ready to head from my home on Grand Route St. John in New Orleans to the University of New Orleans to teach my class.  I was a graduate student, and as I ate and listened to National Public Radio, I heard the announcer say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.  Curious, I turned on the television, thinking that I would see that a small plane, such as a Cessna, had flown into the side of the building.  The flames and smoke from the tower immediately told me that something much bigger had hit the building.  Like everyone else, I watched in rapt fascination as yet another plane hit the second tower, and when I tore myself away and went to school, I heard in the car that yet another plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.  At that point, the announcers were reporting that the United States was under attack through acts of terrorism.  At school, I fielded a call from a young woman who was terrified and did not want to come into class because she was afraid that terrorists might get her.  I excused her from class, and told her not to worry because terrorists usually attack large crowds or very well-known symbols.  Somehow, I knew that day that everything would change.

I was heartened when the world, in the aftermath of the attacks, turned out in force to support the United States.  My heart swelled when I read that so many peoples from so many other countries were expressing solidarity with the U.S. and, in the headline of the French paper Le Monde, "We Are All Americans."  Perhaps, I thought, the United States will use this opportunity to forge new bonds of friendship, cooperate with other nations, and work together with them toward a common, peaceful and prosperous future that we all seek.

But, it was not to be.  The people of the United States turned inward in fear of other terrors out there, and outwardly, the U.S. took a belligerent stance, striking out wherever it smelled the whiff of terrorism.  First it was Afghanistan.  I watched the cheers of a crowd at a prison rodeo in Louisiana when it was announced that the first cruise missiles had launched into Afghanistan.  Then, it was Iraq.  Our leaders seemed to have a lineup of countries that they planned to invade in preemptive moves to bring democracy.  Studying political science, I knew that tearing down nations and rebuilding them was hard work and could be impossible under certain conditions.  I was saddened to see the U.S. reputation suffer, and all the goodwill from most other nations dry up and blow away.

I have also watched as the U.S. has become a nation that seems to be increasingly looking without and within for enemies.  A column by Cal Thomas that I read in my local paper on September 9th, 2011 exemplifies this fear.  Thomas writes that Americans must observe 9/11 because it is a constant reminder of the countries and entities out there that "hate us," and that are "plotting to attack us again...and again." In the ten years since the terrorist attacks, American citizens are subject to new rules and regulations designed to keep them safe, but which have increased the powers and latitude of our country's law enforcement and military forces.  The U.S., in conducting its war against terror, has appeared to compromise some of the very ideals of democracy itself by profiling based on race and religion, capturing and renditioning suspects, using enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, and denying prisoners accused of terrorism basic rights under national and international law.

Why does all of this come to my mind with the above quote?  Feelings of being hated and persecuted are woven into the deepest and earliest fabric of this nation.  The original settlers arrived in North America with very recent memories of political and religious persecution in the Old World.  Even though the South was persecuting a significant portion of it population through slavery, the South always made the argument that it was the persecuted party.  Today, a white majority facing the possibility that it will not be a majority within a decade or two, now claims that it is persecuted by illegal immigrants taking jobs and racial minorities getting taking advantage of social welfare policies.  Businesses claim that they are persecuted by onerous government regulations.  What is overlooked is that often, those claiming the loudest about persecution have been persecutors themselves.

The 20th century international environment cemented in U.S. opinion that there were others out to get us.   Some of the threats were real, some were overblown.  If it wasn't the Hun in World War I, it was the Nazis and Japanese in World War II.  It was the Soviets and Chinese in the Cold War.  The enemies recently have been the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans and especially fundamentalist, Islamic Arabs today.  Supposedly, all of these entities are spending a lot of time and brainpower trying to bring down the United States.

All of this has coincided with a concern that within society, American are not safe.  Children are at risk from pedophiles, women endangered by rapists, ordinary folk by thugs, gangs, or psychotic mass murderers.  At the expense of social programs, enforcement has been stepped up and government has turned over the building and running of prisons to corporations to meet a perceived need to house all the criminals in our midst.  The most popular solution seems to be the notion that everyone needs to arm themselves so that they can shoot back if fired upon.  It's the same idea that drove the violent society of the Old West, with a civilized veneer.  If the United States could be encapsulated in one person, it seems to me that this person would be lonely and afraid, holed up in a house, gun pointing out a slightly opened window and ready to fire at anything suspicious but not quite sure that the house he is in is really all that safe.

Yet we seem to partake in actions that do nothing to increase our safety even if it makes us feel better for a little while.  We look with suspicion on those who are different, and distrust their motives even though we know little about them.  We have marked certain groups and people, in general, as being potentially dangerous and treat them as such.  Thus, every Muslim is a potential terrorist, and anyone who questions this generality is treated by some as at best naive and at worst a traitor.

LHM's quote, above, reminds us that we cannot, as a country founded on ideals of freedoms and rights, succumb to such falsehoods.  After all, LHM was a long-haired guy in a van that invited suspicion and contempt from an older couple, yet he wrote a piece of literature that is beloved by many today.  We invite nothing but polarization in society if we suspect everyone, and as Lincoln very wisely reminded us, "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

E.J. Dionne, also on September 9th, wrote a column that stands in stark contrast to Cal Thomas.  Dionne wrote that we should remember the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 on the 10th anniversary of their sacrifices, but that then we should, as a nation, move on.  He felt that it is dangerous to build a nation's policies around an horrific event in the past at the expense of the pressing problems that it faces in the present or looking toward the future.  He writes that our nation has never been in danger of falling to entities that wish to put a pan-Islamist fundamentalist empire in place.  Instead, we are more in danger from the mistake of not remembering what made the United States great in the first place.

I agree.  9/11 should unite us.  After all, the victims of 9/11 were a cross-section of American ethnicities, religions (including Muslims), political beliefs, and classes.  The terrorists of 9/11 did not warn Muslims to get out of the World Trade Center.  They didn't care.  We were attacked as a unified, diverse and free nation.  If all we learned from 9/11 is to be suspicious of everyone and everything and to always strike before we are struck, then we keep our world dangerous place for ourselves far into the future.  Instead, we should, as good democracies do, learn from our experience and take hard and sober looks at our actions.  We should honor the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 by being wise in our collective decisions and by continuing to uphold our democratic ideals of freedom, rights and justice.  Let's not be the old couple in LHM's quote, convinced completely that the world is a dangerous place, and that others must always be suspected and feared.

Musical Interlude

I was always taken by this version of The Star Spangled Banner, performed by Bruce Hornsby and Branford Marsalis.  Just let it wash over you on this day of remembrance.

If you want to know more about Fort Klamath

Fort Klamath Museum
Oregon Trail
Wikipedia: Fort Klamath
Wikipedia: Fort Klamath (unincorporated)

Next up: Crater Lake, Oregon