Blown Off, if Not Away....

OK—I have a simple policy about hurricanes: I take them all seriously.

Yes, all of them, barring the ones that are clearly too far north of us to have any effect whatsoever. But any storm coming low across the Atlantic? I’m on it.

Maybe I get it from Rose, who in the pre-Internet days would give me big paper maps of the Atlantic and Caribbean, on which we would put coordinates as NOAA announced them every six hours. Then, for five days or so, we would watch the storm coming, and slowly go into storm mode.

Which meant that you bought two gallons of water every day before the storm. This you did because you were on foot, not car, and anyway, if you waited until the government announced the storm? There would be pandemonium in the street, small riots in the stores, huge lines at gas stations, and reports of muggings for bags of ice.

A category three or above? In the early days, we took every picture from the walls, and lifted every rug from the floor. And I should tell you, I live on the second floor, probably 100 feet above sea level, and the walls of the building are three feet thick full of brick and stone.

And so, two years ago, I called to John and Jeanne—my middle brother and his wife—with the news that Hurricane Irene was not making me happy.

“Not a problem,” he said. “It’s just a tropical storm.”

“John, it’s been a hurricane category 2 for three days now….”

This exchange will tell you everything. I’m am in the tropics, worrying and monitoring the storm. John?

On the golf course!

Look, everybody deserves a vacation. And so they were reluctant to move from the house they had rented—a wooden house five streets away from the beach.

“FIVE STREETS!” I am almost shouting at John. “HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT STORM SURGE?

“Well, we’ll go up to the second floor,,,,”

Is it because I’m the youngest? Because I swear—the more adamant I became that John had to leave, the more casual—no, admit it, here’s the word I want to say—cavalier John became. It ended with the promise that John would evacuate if the storm got too bad.

Well, it was a fight—but it ended with no serious hurt feelings. They both swore—they weren’t blowing me off, and the Fire Department had told them the morning of the storm to stay put.

I could have countered: of course the Fire Department is going to say that. But there were several reasons to have evacuated days before. First, you never really know where these storms are going to hit. Second, if you wait until the water is knee high in the streets, and those three mini Austins ahead of you can’t make it through….well? Oh, and the firemen prefer to do their rescues without too many vehicles on the road.

Of course you know what happened--Irene barely touched them, and they were able to call several days later and report that it barely rained. Irene, however, did major damage north of them.

I had been, it seemed, silly, alarmist, absurdly fatalistic. Was I OK—they asked? Was I having anxiety in other areas of my life? Perhaps I should call my therapist….

I learned—my brother blows me off. He had “been” through a hurricane up on Cape Cod—and that was a Category 2. So a Category 1 should have been no problem, right? And what was Marc worrying about, down in Puerto Rico?

A bit more than a year later, Hurricane Sandy blew through the Caribbean and it was obvious—this was going to be a bad storm. But I had learned—John is a big boy. He gets the Times delivered to his door. And if he’s not going to listen, why talk?

So I stayed silent, and then watched—as the rest of the nation did—as New Jersey and Staten island got smashed. When I flew in to the city in early November, they had just had a major snow storm on top of the super storm; I watched the local news of parka-covered rescue workers walking through the dark halls of city housing projects, trying to figure out who was who and what to do with them.

Up on the upper West Side, where John and Jeanne live, nothing again had happened. Sure, some tree branches had been lost. Was was hard to get—but that was the cab driver's problem—not mine or John and Jeanne’s.

“Who would have thought,” I heard Jeanne say to John in the kitchen, “that a storm could cause so much damage?”

Sitting in the living room, I silently raised my hand.

It’s now a year later—I watched the documentary below yesterday about Sandy, and thought about the devastation, and the many miracles among the tragedies there were. How could it be that in the fire that destroyed over 100 homes, not one life was lost?

Have we learned out lessons, the media are asking?

In one important way—no.

I generally like the National Hurricane Center—I can hear them breathing a sigh of relief up there in Miami—but there is one thing that they’ve got to do. We have got to give the public a better perception of how dangerous a storm is. Which means we have to kiss the Saffir-Simpson Scale goodbye.

Sandy, in fact, was not a hurricane when it hit the East coast; here’s what one writer said about it:

The National Hurricane Center was being infamously stubborn during the storm, refusing to issue hurricane warnings for New Jersey and New York City based on the technicality that Sandy would become extratropical (lose its tropical characteristics) before landfall. Sandy had all the effects of a hurricane, but because its structure wasn’t expected to fit the textbook definition of a tropical system by the time of landfall, no tropical storm or hurricane warnings were issued north of the North Carolina coast.

Whether a storm is extratropical or not makes pretty little difference when the water is rising to the second floor. And if all you have done is consider the Saffir-Simpson scale, and chosen to stay home and ride it out because it’s “just” a Category 1, you’ll have missed some other very important factors.

Such as?

How big is the storm? How much water is associated with it? If it hits, will it be at high tide, as it was for Sandy? How fast is it moving? A category 1 hurricane stalled over the house for 36 hours is not fun….

I left New York and took the now-running subway, in which I saw what I had never seen: a fight broke out between a well-dressed Wall Street type and a young black dude. I was quickly broken up, and people went about their day.

I got back and thought about the storms that come, the storms that fizzle. My brother blows me off—but you know what? He’s otherwise a very good brother—a guy who is fiercely protective and loyal to the ones he loves. Oh, and very guarded in a very public way. If you want to hide, the best place is out in the open.

“Not a problem,” he says to me at any ridiculous request I manage to cook up. So he plays golf when he should be evacuating? No big deal.

He gets away with it!

On Edge

Tell me again—when did we agree that it was OK to play your music into my ears?

I know, I know—you must be tired of this rant. Look, everybody’s life is hard, and mostly getting harder. You don’t need this.

So here’s the good news. It wasn’t I, this time, who lost control. Just the guy next to me, on a supremely jammed subway train on the upper West Side of Manhattan at 8AM.

Well, we crammed ourselves in, and a black woman and boyfriend were having sharp words. I tuned them out, of course—do I need that? Isn’t getting to the airport on time with two bags in a subway car holding people in the low three figures enough?

Well, miraculously, a seat became vacant. I sat, figuring to chill until Columbus Circle. That’s when the black guy flipped on a transistor radio and treated us all to some (I think / presume) hip-hop.

Let me put this gently, Refined Reader. Every stanza made explicit and very street reference to the pudenda of African-American females.

We all stood it for a couple of minutes. Then the eye telegraphs began among us—the brows furled, the eyes flicking heavenward, the shoulders shrugging. And then the guy next to me said, loudly but politely…

“Would you please turn that down!”

Guess the response…

Second time, and note the absence of “please.”

“TURN THAT DOWN.”

Just realized—it can’t be a response since it wasn’t a response. It was…what? Ignoration? Ignor-ance? Ignorance? You choose….

The guy has the insight to say…

“I’M LOSING MY CONTROL!”

But he doesn’t have the power to act on it. Instead, he lunges across several people to get at the black guy.

I don’t do well in emergencies. I look on, a stunned witness, as the lion mauls me, or the scorpion plunges its stinger into my foot.

So I was not among the group of guys who separated the two.

I did hear, however, the screaming rage of the black woman as she soundly (pun intended) berated the white guy. Must have had some effect—the guy sat down, and then said, “I apologize for my behavior.”

“I am leaving this train,” said the black woman, stomping out of the car. Her boyfriend / husband sauntered out—every movement a “fuck you.”

The man was shaking with rage—I could feel it just sitting next to him.

Well, first question—am I gonna go there?

Nope.

I’m not letting that into my day. Which was very nice—got to the airport with plenty of time, came home, scolded / caressed the cats, talked with Mr. Fernández.

Second question—why did the guy act so explosively?

Well, first there is the…right, it’s not music, so let’s call it “aural incitement.” Because make no mistake, the stuff is there to provoke rage. I once heard a song blaring down the street (started up by the Governor’s mansion, ended down by the plaza) in which the last word of each line was the endearment “motherfucker.” Took twenty minutes of meditation to wash that out….

The city is also on edge. No, not up in Upper Manhattan. But the train was coming from the Bronx. When was the last shower the guy took?

Third question—what about the black guy? Why didn’t he react? Yeah, he was trying to throw punches too—who wouldn’t? But when the situation stabilized—or perhaps was stabilized—he went back to being his insouciant self.

Well, a blogger on his toes would have the answers to all these questions. The Internet, however, is slow these days. The best I can do is to provide the conclusion of a research paper by an admittedly less-than-stellar source—The Journal of Undergraduate Psychological Research. Eliana Tropeano, in 2006, wrote the following:

This study examined whether or not watching a violent music video would provoke individuals to answer questions with violent responses. Eleven participants watched a violent music video, 11 participants watched a non- violent music video, and 11 participants were in the control group and did not watch any videos. It was found that watching the violent music video containing violent lyrics, aggressive behavior, and degrading behaviors toward women did make an individual feel and react more violently with regards to responses to questions about fictitious scenarios. The conclusion was that watching violent music videos does negatively affect behavior.

Well, well, so the dog bit the man. Nice to know.

Now, here’s my absolutely un-researched theory. This music does what pornography does. It blunts you, stupefies you, and puts you into a mindless state of inert violence.

And what happens when there’s a trigger?

Two Muslims (Part One)

Well, New York continues to surprise.

Or maybe not. Coming to the city as a new (or perhaps altered) person, I’m not sure what was here before that I couldn’t see, versus what was never here at all.

“She’s a pretty amazing person,” said Jeanne about her colleague, who conducts evaluations for people requesting asylum in the US.

Then she told me the story of a fifteen-year old girl from—where? Let’s call it Pakistan, though it could be any one of countries where fundamentalist Islam is raging.

The girl wrote the name of a schoolmate in her notebook. The family discovered it.

So?

The schoolmate was a boy.

Well, you and I would probably say “so,” and maybe even wonder whether the family had any business looking inside the girl’s notebook. Not being a parent, I don’t know if that’s standard operating procedure….

You can probably guess.

Family wasn’t pleased. So they gave the girl two options:

1.     marry a fifty-some guy whom the family would chose

2.     ritual killing by a family member

The girl chose:

       3.   get the hell outta town

Well, she did. Don’t know the story of how, but she landed in the United States. And is now in hiding because she fears her family may be sending / arranging a hit man to kill her.

That’s where Jeanne’s colleague comes in. Working for a group called Physicians for Human Rights, she does evaluations for people seeking asylum in the United States.

Which has, by the way, the largest number of petitioners for asylum of any industrialized country. About 40,000 people, if yesterday’s-read-today’s-not-findable number is correct in my memory.

And she trains young physicians and med students to do the evaluations as well.

The evaluations themselves are interesting. They’re not supposed to be therapeutic—though paradoxically, they can be. Instead, they’re meant to make the person requesting asylum relive and retell the worst of the (usually) torture that they have endured—to do it fast and dirty, as it were.

Why?

Because the person requesting asylum is gonna face a judge who is going to rule on the question—has this person truly suffered persecution or terror? Is he or she in danger, should the US deport? How convincing is the evidence? Yes, you call appeal the decision. Better, though, if you don’t have to.

The person doing the evaluation, then, becomes a psychic surgeon—applying the saws and drills to the mind and memory, extracting the most painful abuse and torture to display to the judge.

Curiously, some people find the process helpful.

Right, so Jeanne’s colleague had a problem. A fifteen-year old in hiding somewhere, without cash or food or clothes. And Super Storm Sandy bearing into the city. What to do?

Rent a car and deliver the goods, make sure the kid was safe.

Well, I did my share of snorting and some of Franny’s share as well. It seemed to call for it. Look, I don’t give a shit about culture and respecting religions and pluralism and anything else. This family? Rather, these guys—since they have completely subjugated the women?

They’re unspeakable. “Heinous,” perhaps, is the adjective that springs to mind. “Abominable,” certainly, is another alternative.

I can make a case—sort of—for why Islam developed the rules and traditions it did when it was a desert religion. A religion formed where water was precious, hospitality was a necessity not a nicety, when a harsh environment forged a harsh societal code.

Right, but now?

I’d say something that I think any woman would say. There is nothing more important than the family—the husband she has loved, the children she has born and has raised. And for a guy who is willing to kill his daughter for the “crime” of writing a boy’s name in a notebook? A guy who has sent her fleeing in terror halfway around the world, and who is hiding who-knows-where as a massive hurricane / Nor’easter / snowstorm bears down on the region? A guy who does that for his family’s “honor?”

Off with his balls!

(Stay tuned for part 2.)

Multiple Worlds

It’s one thing to be motherless, another to be familyless—and that’s how it was beginning to feel. And though the Fernández family does very well—excellently—in some areas, even exceeding my own, they can’t compete in others. Who else but Johnny has been observing my muddled attempts to open containers, waiting for my imploring eyes to lift to his. He’ll take the container, slide his fingernail under a slot hidden somewhere, and open it in seconds. Pass it back to me.

He once taught me how to fold a shirt—a shirt we were giving to a little Puerto Rican kid living up in Spanish Harlem. I’ve forgotten the process now, of course, but not the thought—is a little kid gonna care? Is he gonna see all John’s careful, neat, ordered work? Nah—it’s Christmas morning, he’s ripping into his presents, wrapping paper flying everywhere, the tape stuck to his fingers or nose!

It’s a thing with John—he can’t abide something less than tidily done.

Well, they lead crazy lives, these two. And there are more of them than me / us. So it was time to come up to a city still recovering from a disaster.

Which announced itself at the airport. Waiting for the luggage, I watched a news reporter follow a social worker around the darkened halls of one of the projects. Knocking on doors, checking on people. 60,000 people are still without power.

The gypsy cab driver, checking his GPS for directions to West End Avenue and 93.

Hunh?

A New York City cabbie can’t get to an easy mark on a grid? I begin to explain.

“Listen, just go up to whatever-that-bridge-is-that-comes-into-125^th, you know, up there in Harlem…”

“Listen, Buddy, you think I don’t know my city?”

We have a breezy confrontational exchange—quite pleasant after Caribbean gusto and cordiality, which variably turns into action.

Some of the bridges are still closed.

Oh, and the subway is jam-packed, and quite slow.

But the world of Upper West Side Manhattan is unaffected. Yes, trees are down in Central Park, and the North Woods is closed. Widow-makers, I think, and then remember that Jack told me that curiously, the branches that are resting in forks of trees—until they fall on the victim walking under them—tend to come down on perfectly still days. One of those things he had to say in lieu of “I love you….”

The supermarket, as usual, never ceases to astound. The logistics—how do they get all this stuff into the city? And what stuff it is. Pomegranates? Syrian figs? Thirty-five kinds of olives? Who buys this stuff?

And curiously, little bits of Puerto Rico are incorporated here. I’m in line at the deli, wanting my lox and bagel. The lady in front of me is ordering pinchos and then it’s my turn. Another guy takes my order.

“¿Son de cerdo o de carne de res?” asks the pincho lady.

Pork or beef?

Pure Puerto Rican Spanish, as is the pincho.

So I switch to Spanish, as does the clerk, and we’re all 2600 miles south. 

Or maybe farther. Since I enter John and Jeanne’s apartment and discover disorder, for the first time in my life. Then I see—I’m backstage, behind the scenes, and the stagehand is Ángela, the cleaning lady from Queens, via El Salvador.

Well, I’m curious about life, or rather lives, and we chat. She’s not a lady who much likes, or practices, taciturnity (what! No red squiggle? Did I get away with it, or has the computer given up on me?).

Mostly in English, some in Spanish. In fact, she’s set this stage for almost a decade now, and met and knew Franny. We talk about life—how it takes her two hours, now, to get home to Queens by subway. So she’s spending the night with her mother, up in a project in Harlem. How lucky they were that the hurricane hit Jersey, not the city. How fast the power had been restored, all things considered. How good it was to have work.

Well, last week it was the hurricane. John stood and watched through the window as the transformers blew across the river in New Jersey. “Looked like the 4^th of July,” he reports. (Note to John—tempting as they are, windows tend not to be the best places to stand afront {no, computer, I did mean that “afront”} in hurricanes.)

And yesterday it was the Nor’easter. Well, there’s snow in the Park, and this morning I was much more in Wisconsin that Manhattan. Snow on the ground, the trees losing their leaves, a dark, cold sky. Squirrels leaping branches above the urbanite dogs below.

Leave the park, and it’s city, all right, with chrysanthemums still blooming over patches of snow.

And oh, another thing different.

Marc.

Always before, this city had overwhelmed me, mocked me, doubted that anything would come of or from me. It had scorned me, or rather sniffed at me.

Wrong.

It hadn’t. I had come limping with self-doubt / self-defeat leading to the point of despair and suicide. The city had welcomed me. I had slunk back from its embrace.

My Spanish is better than Ángela’s English, and we’re saying farewell. I escort her to the door of the home that’s not mine but is; a home that is, in a way, more Ángela’ s than John or Jeanne’s.

“Mucho gusto” I say to my new friend, whom I may not see again….

Or do I say it—finally—to a city welcoming me?

Bached

Well, if the hurricane is over, somebody should run down and tell the ocean the news.

The surf is as strong as ever. This morning, on the trot, I saw four rows of cresting waves, each wave perhaps 15 feet tall. It was a bit like being in an animated Japanese woodblock print.

If there’s music that only the young could write (see yesterday’s post) there’s also music only the old could create. And in the end, I always go back to Bach.

Started out with the Magnificat (WHAT!! the computer has just red-squiggled Magnificat and suggests instead magnificent!! Dear Reader, we live in degenerate and dangerous days!)—a tremendous piece of music.

And it’s music written with a sure hand by a man in full command of his talents.

Right, so I sat and watched the waves this morning, and heard Bach, and thought that perhaps there is no other composer who manages to capture a particular and wonderful emotion.

Exaltation.

When those trumpets start blaring away, in the first movement of the Magnificat, I’d better be in private, not public. My hands are incapable of remaining at my side, but are instead flung up in triumph to the heavens. I am a Roman emperor, striding in victory into the city. It’s aural orgasm.

Well, the Magnificat lasts only 20 minutes or so, and I wanted a bit more. I’d been living down in the “H’s” on my iPod (damn thing is jittery, so it was easier just to stick to Haydn and parts, and not try to move around too much) but I’d made the effort to move to the “B’s.” (Which is, of course, a pretty crowded neighborhood, in the city of classical music ….) So, time for the Mass in B minor.

To which I came late, as did Bach. (Sorry, combining me and Bach in the same sentence feels just a bit pretentious…)  In fact, I had heard it years ago, and stuck it in the “later” folder in my brain.

Warning to hypoglycemics—eat a FULL meal before you enter the concert hall. Even so, you may want to sneak in some jellybeans to munch on—it’s gonna be an hour and a half easily.

My main impression from that performance? A sense of failure as a listener. It was common in those days—I’d go to a concert with some heavy-duty music and I’d be in seat 33 in row F. Also, I’d be at the beach, mentally—at any rate far away. Not paying attention. Not giving the great music its due.

So the Bach went on and on—hey look at the trumpet player turn completely red wow is he gonna stroke out?—and I’d sit there—'bet the third chair cellist studied with Karl Fruh'—trying to listen—'he’s gotta be hung' days—and well, you get the picture.

I left feeling like I’d been Bached.

I wish someone had pointed out that there’s evidence that Bach never intended it all to be performed on a single occasion. And it might have helped if I had known that Bach completed it in his last year, though parts of the work were written years before.

So I sat, this morning, and thought about the hurricane that has left and is still going on. The people sitting alone in dark, cold apartments. The people who, as one commentator said, are not the homeless but now are.

Also thought about a cellist who morphed into a writer and didn’t go away, though why, I’ll never know. Mostly, he’s stubborn, I guess.

And there’s a lady who went away, and is now back. She’s stirring around, and will stir further, I’m sure. We go to the beach, most days, on the trot that has now incorporated the plunge. “Moe” I say to her, and she says, right—I’m on that.

Moe writes his thing.

“Brian,” I tell her.

Ditto.

“Let’s get into that water,” she says, and I throw her / me in, diving head first into a crashing wave, which spins us around and soaks us in its power, and we race laughing and exalted to the shore.

We’ve been Bached.

Romney and FEMA

Well, there I was, last evening, enjoying my fleeting fifteen minutes of fame, when Mitt strode into the room.

OK—it just felt that way. Is it just I, or does anyone else hear the repressed petulance of a guy wishing for the 1950’s who knows in his heart they’ll never come again?

Mitt, as you can hear, wants to send the responsibility of cleaning up after disasters back to the states, and preferably the private sector.

My first question—what do the experts say? Is there anybody out there that thinks that’s a good idea? Are all disasters alike or can some be dealt with at the state level while others require a centralized / national organization? Would we really save money, or would we just be sticking the tab on the states?

Well, in an effort to be fair—that father of mine is still lingering around somewhere—I did a brief google on the topic. And guess what?

Still don’t have the answer!

There is a guy, however, who makes a case for privatization in the case of disaster response. And he adduces a little company I know something about.

Wal-Mart!

Right—Wal-Mart’s finest hour was in response to Hurricane Katrina.

Anybody remember FEMA’s response to hurricane Katrina?

Or that “heck of a job” that “Brownie” was doing?

Well, while Brownie was answering emails or shopping for shirts, Wal-Mart was giving away ice-cold water to people who needed it.

Good business strategy, really. Lady in the shop across the street did the same for me, after one of our hurricanes, and am I gonna buy cigars anywhere else?

Nope!

Right, and I’ve had a little experience with FEMA, too. Well, actually, I’ve not. But my students have, and the reports were hardly raves.

Also true, of course, that NOBODY is happy after a disaster. There’s something about not showering for two weeks, sweating bullets as the mosquitoes dive-buzz your ear at 2AM, and not having a hot meal for a fortnight that sours the mood.

But hey—wait a sec. Before we privatize our disaster response, there’s something we ought to consider.

Wal-Mart is perhaps the most centralized company in the world.

Want an example? When a freezer in the Bayamón store goes above a set temperature, an alarm is activated in Bentonville, Arkansas, and a technician there calls the store—as he or she will call ANY store, anywhere in the world. At this moment, Bentonville is monitoring freezers in China.

Bentonville, as well, is monitoring the weather. It’s got its own meteorologist—nice guy, we exchanged emails once—who said metaphorically to New Orleans what I said actually to my brother John.

“You’re fucked….” 

So since they have a very efficient (and very centralized) logistics system, it was no problem to put the trucks with that cold water in a nice high-and-dry spot.

OK—so we’re at the point of asking: which is better, the (probably centralized) private sector or the public sector? Does business do it better? Does the profit motive increase efficiency to the point that we save money AND get better results?

Well, Mitt, I grew up in the fifties and sixties in a little town that worked. Nobody except the Catholics paid for private schools, nobody had gated communities, you could drink the water. And government did all that, or regulated the industries that did. And everybody grumbled about their taxes, but assumed automatically that if you called an ambulance, one would come.

It was efficient, it was clean, and the press kept an eye on things, as did an educated populace.

Well, maybe those halcyon days weren’t quite as lustrous as remembered. But I got a question.

Why am I suspicious of rich guys who want to privatize everything? I bashed FEMA, a few paragraphs up.

Anybody remember Halliburton?