|
The US State of Denial
by William Bowles
Manhattan, 13 February, 2008 — For the first time, almost exactly thirty years ago, I sat where I’m sitting now, writing this, in the Broome Street Bar, corner of Broome and West Broadway. I was building the Cayman Gallery a couple of hundred yards away further up West Broadway for my good friend Jack Agueros, who later was to hire me as the designer/constructor of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.
In those days, SOHO (South of Houston Street) was full of empty sweat shops and industrial buildings that the owners were only too happy to rent out for whatever they could get. A couple of thousand square feet could be had for as little as $800 a month and on a ten-year lease.
Observations from the front line...
Thus began the loft boom which has utterly transformed not only this
neighbourhood but also the Brooklyn neighbourhood my former wife and I
were later to move to, DUMBO (Down Underneath Manhattan Bridge; New
Yorker’s and their love of acronyms) and many more beside including
Harlem (the inexorable march of Capital in search of valorisation is
unstoppable, even into the former no-go areas, for whites that is, of
places like Harlem).
The Broome Street Bar is about the only thing that hasn’t changed in
SOHO although on the surface almost everything looks the same barring
the plethora of overpriced boutiques and trendy restaurants. But New
York City has undergone a radical transformation, and in spite of the
crashing US economy, NYC has all the appearance of a boom town, with
new builds and conversions going on everywhere, even in the Bronx where
back in the 70s landlords were torching buildings for the insurance,
leaving a literal wasteland behind them as the former white inhabitants
fled to the ‘burbs.
Much of Manhattan, Brooklyn and now even sections of the Bronx have
become enclaves of the rich and the obscenely rich exactly as Jack
London described in his novel ‘The Iron Heel’ one hundred years ago.
But some things haven’t changed, the subway system for example is as
decrepid as ever, and travelling on it, I see the same weary working
class faces for all the world looking as if they’re on a one-way ride
to Hades, which in a way they are, just like the rest of us (many are,
just like me, plugged into their mp3 players, nodding to the rythmns of
another, more perfect world).
Above the subway, in Mid-town Manhattan, around Times Square, it’s a
riot of neon some of which has crept down off the buildings onto the
sidewalk beneath our feet, so as you walk, words stream endlessly, a
photonic treadmill, advertising this and that. In the words of the
Crazy Eddie TV commercial of the 1970s, it’s “absolutely insane!”.
Absorbing all this after an absence of fifteen years has been difficult
for me, made all the more so by those who are no longer with us or who
have succumbed to the various diseases of age and the ravages of living
in a rapacious and unforgiving environment.
The changes are perhaps best reflected in the TV commercials, dominated
as they are by an avalanche of ads for ‘medications’, health insurance
(which most cannot afford) and all manner of ‘lifestyle’ ads which
guarantee you happiness and escape from the daily grind of survival in
the dog-eat-dog society that is, we are told, ‘the best of all possible
worlds’.
The ‘news’ programmes explain much about US capitalism’s ability to
block out the reality of the situation, with virtually no coverage of
the world beyond the US, even the obscenity which is the US occupation
of Iraq gets no mention at all, nor even the sub-prime mortgage crash,
they simply don’t exist. You have to read the ‘quality’ newspapers like
the New York Times to even see it mentioned, never mind explained (the
latest stat put the total number affected at around 100 million which
seems a staggering number and if true must surely spell a social
disaster of gargantuan proportions). But the only disasters allowed are
the ‘small’ personal ones, murders, rapes and robberies, these are
after all, events that everyone can relate to, or the inevitable
natural ones, some of which are actually anything but natural).
This is denial on a grand scale. But above all don’t refer to anything
that might disturb the apparently placid waters of a society teetering
on the edge of a precipice. But occasionally reality breaks through.
One story tells us that the United Auto Workers Union has just signed a
new contract with General Motors that cuts workers’ wages by 50% for
the same hours. But that’s about it, there’s no comment, merely a
statement of fact, time to move on.
Yet and still, the US I left fifteen years ago is basically the same
one I returned to, what has changed is the frantic nature of the drive
to consume, keep on buying, keep the ‘wheels of industry’ turning. Rack
up the credit debt like there’s no tomorrow (maybe because there isn’t).
Frankly, I find it extremely difficult to communicate the nature of
contemporary US society, it’s so over the top as to defy description
even for someone raised in a so-called developed country like the UK or
for someone who lived in the Big Apple for seventeen years. And as the
contradictions of a capitalism in crisis increase, so too does the
frantic nature of its desire to justify itself by any means necessary,
including the use of the enormous force of the machinery of state.
It’s the impact on people, like a very close friend of mine here that
typifies the paradox involved, for when confronted with the reality of
life here by my writings, she gets defensive, even as she knows that as
a black woman, she has borne the brunt of this society for her entire
life. But who can blame her, she has to live here and deal with it
24/7, who wants to be reminded of the fact, especially by a foreigner
like myself, friend or no friend.
For the fact is, I like Americans, they are a generous, friendly and
uninhibited people, especially working class Americans, people I find I
have more in common with than the Brits (which is perhaps one of the
reasons I lived here for seventeen years).
But at the same time they are totally ignorant of the real state of the
world and their own country and kept that way by a corporate media and
an mis-education system that corrupts young minds. Blind even to the
reality of their own lives because they have been brainwashed into
thinking that ‘failure’ is the result of their own personal failure as
human beings, not that of the system which screws them every which way,
literally from cradle to grave.
It’s a lose-lose situation with no obvious solution short of total
meltdown, which is no solution at all. More likely in time the solution
will be provided by the rest of the planet, perhaps as JG Ballard
suggested in one of his novels by enforced isolation, ring fence the
monster.
Without an opposition, let alone an alternative, the future looks bleak
and not merely for the US given the central role US capitalism plays in
the affairs of humanity. Yet paradoxically, I remain optimistic, don’t
ask me why except to say that this situation can’t continue, quite
simply it’s unsustainable.
The pressing issue is how do we communicate this to the rest of planet,
for surely once they are fully aware of the gravity of our
circumstances they must realise that action has to be taken to halt the
behemoth, stop it in its tracks before it’s too late. So for the time
being forget socialism, of any kind, for what we are confronting is
whether our species and our planet can survive the battering it’s
taking.
Confronted by this reality, the November US elections pale into
insignificance dominated as they are by the promise of change that is
no more than an empty slogan designed to lull the populace into
accepting the continuation of an unsustainable status quo.
But could it be that should Obama or Clinton get elected and the much
touted but unidentified ‘change’ fails to materialise that this might
signify a ‘tipping point’? Or is this no more than wishful thinking on
my part? For it should surely be obvious that given the disastrous
state of the nation, unless real change is delivered there are going to
be an awful lot of very pissed off people, which could be the signal
not for progress but for out and out fascism.
Addendum: A couple of days later—I’m waiting in another shopping mall
with runways attached, this time in Charlotte, NC and an obviously
middle class black guy strikes up a conversation with me in a bookshop.
He’s perusing the displays and he expresses surprise that Obama has
written not just one but two books. So I ask him if he’ll vote for him
and he’s in two minds, perhaps he’ll vote for McCain he says. McCain I
gasp, but he’s a warmonger and a nutter. Well, he says, if Obama is
elected and he does try to make real change, they’ll just blow him
away, which doesn’t explain why he contemplated voting for McCain but
at least it does explain something about the state of confusion that
exists in the minds of the US electorate.
Archived at: http://www.creative-i.info/?p=211
If you forward this email to anybody, they can subscribe by clicking here
Email me with comments, whinges, suggestions and especially monies: editor@williambowles.info
 |
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
