New York, New York
"... A wondrous attraction for me"
I have just successfully navigated the security arrangements at LaGuardia Airport for the second time. LAGA hasn’t figured out how to combine concourses so you only go through security once. So, if you are sitting in Gate C-1 waiting on your flight back to the Heartland and American Airlines cancels your flight and puts you on “stand-by” on a flight three hours later leaving out of D-1, you have no choice but to go back through the cavity search process that modern air travel has become. Now the reasons for the cancellation are interesting enough…it is amazing how poorly equipment operates for American and Delta and United when they have less than a full flight. This mysterious defiance of the laws of physics (planes only appear to fly when full) and the laws of probability (odds are, if you’re sitting in a terminal with only a few friends, something on your Brazilian made Embraer is going to break) occur, despite billions in bail out subsidies from the U.S. taxpayer. It is this continuing involvement by the Feds in areas that are not sanctioned by our Constitution that bothers your humble scribbler as it does seem to be growing steadily despite Republican control of all three Houses. And it is a sharp contrast to the streetscape of New York City, where I have spent the last three days.
New York City, or more properly, Manhattan, is the world’s largest horizontal shopping mall. The unending string of Victoria’s Secrets, Gaps, Barnes & Nobles and Crate & Barrels is broken only occasionally by a restaurant or a small door leading to an elevator lobby and a studio apartment above. While this is jarring to an eye that is more accustomed to an occasional tree, it is raw, muscular capitalism at it’s best. Trends will change and the retail names and products will change, but the ultimate jury for those changes will be the people. Unfortunately, we have been unwilling to unleash that energy on the transportation sector. Southwest, which Redstater travels on regularly, does not cancel flights. Their flights are almost always full and the regulars have learned how to jockey for position to get the best seats, because, heaven forbid!, they do not have assigned seats. Oh, they are also comparatively cheap, efficient, fun to fly. God help American and United if Southwest gets a couple of gates here at LAGA! When left alone, people make good decisions for themselves. Freedom is an invigorating, if frightening, force.
This brings me to the cross. I flew over Manhattan on my way to Boston in late September, 2001 while the fires in the bowels of the World Trade Center still burned leaving a whitish-gray line that stretched across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Yesterday my oldest daughter and I rode the subway to Ground Zero and looked at it up close. Well, as close as they will let you get. The area has an enormous fence around it pushing pedestrians back off the sidewalk…it is hard to get a decent view of the symmetrical caverns that used to be WTC. A walkway to a neighboring building is shielded with corrugated sheet metal so you just can’t see it. By navigating the side streets and circumnavigating the site, you can start to get an appreciation for the physical magnitude of the area. I remember going to the roof of WTC I in 1982 and seeing a small private plane coming down the Hudson some 40 floors below. But the physical collapse of two quarter-mile high buildings into these two square footprints is hard to comprehend. The question that haunted me as I walked down Church Street was “why obscure this?” Why push the public back and not give them a clear vantage over this hallowed ground? Instead of the tired black and white pictures relating the “history of lower Manhattan,” why not have a video kiosk showing the attacks of 1993 and 9-11? What are we afraid of? My suspicion is that the muting is occurring to suppress our rage. But there is no need to… there is the cross. A silent sentinel on the edge of the abyss, the simple metal crossbeams, the ultimate symbol of love and forgiveness, fused in the fires of hatred. Unfortunately, it is behind the fence. Like so many of our religious principles, the cross at the World Trade Center is barricaded away from the public so it cannot be touched and interacted with. But it is still there, tapping gently on our visual interaction with this tragic site. For better or worse, the cross ameliorates our hatred and our rage. The cross has controlled us throughout our history and despite the best efforts of the ACLU will continue to do so. Set the information free and let the people decide. Allow the raw, muscular force of the truth to guide our consciences and our decisions just as we allow that same force of economic freedom to guide the cityscape of New York."Hang Around an Ink Well"
"Get sick, get well, hang around an ink well..." -Bob Dylan
Well, my friends I apologize for the long absence. While some of my westward leaning comrades may be grateful for the hiatus, I have been humbled by a number of you asking me where the heck I was during these momentous times. I confess that every year around New Year’s I take a personal sabbatical and try to finish up books I had started the year before, clean out the “To Be Read” file, throw away the eight year old tax returns and try to clean sweep my brain for the oncoming year. That ritual ablution aside, I have also been exceptionally busy in both professional and personal life. Professional busy is very good…private busy had been an experience on par with Alice’s wanderings: the Redstater household will send our first-born off to college next year. Those of you that have been through it know what I mean: the forms, the trips, and the angst. All this aside, however, I have been keeping tabs on an historic groundswell that we are riding. Throw all that in with preparing for the annual kabuki dance of complying with the IRS and a bad cold and you don’t get much time for scribing.
I had a weird feeling just after our election. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Have you ever entered a room and felt that someone just left but you don’t know whom it was? It’s as if the image, a ghost or a hologram, remains just long enough in the room for you to feel its presence…it makes the hair on your neck stand up. I think W had the same feeling, because his Inaugural Address was majestic in it's tone, filled with hope and calling on the ghosts that have gone before us in this great Republic. Taken alone the events of the past two months are heartbreaking or elating, momentous or disastrous: the tsunami, the Ukrainian election, the Iraqi election, and the real possibility of peace in Israel. The question uttered by a tsunami survivor in Banda Aceh sums up the common thread that runs through all these events and is the ghost in the room: “Where are the Americans?” We are here, and we stride large upon the world stage and we are a force for good. Whether it is delivering the millions of gallons of fresh water that kept a desperate people alive in Indonesia or pressuring the Soviets, er Russians, to quit interfering in Kiev we are there.
What is it in the American character that calls us to action? Clearly our sheer size, economic and military power put us front and center in the world. But this does not translate into a call to duty. There have been large empires in the history of the world that saw to their own good, but not that of others. There is little that we will gain in Indonesia, or among Muslims from our efforts to help in the wake of the tsunami. The “where are the Americans?” question will just as likely be yelled by a group of Muslim radicals storming our Embassy in Djakarta…their intent far different. The same people we were rescuing had the brass to tell us we couldn’t fly our planes off the USS Lincoln for any other use except to assist them. But there we are.
It is entirely possible that the freedom we have helped the Iraqi people achieve will backfire on us and a Shia majority government will align themselves with Iran and evolve into another mullahocracy. But there we are.
Of the events I listed above, perhaps the two that could yield the most fruit for us in the long run will be peace in Israel and a free and independent Ukraine adding to the march of democracies in Eastern Europe. The tanks we will be able to pull back from the Fulda Gap could well be needed elsewhere. But there we are.
It is a fundamental aspect of our character that we simply keep trying. We have a faith that there is always something better if you just keep plugging away. It is the same character that drove us westward. As David Brooks observed in his recent study of the American scene, “On Paradise Drive,” “ …it is the spirit that led young Americans to pass over perfectly good farmland in Kentucky and keep moving west.” Some call it restless, some call it naïve…but in its core, it is good. This is the central aspect of America that European intellectuals, American college professors and the entire Democratic Party don’t get. They see a nefarious scheme to extract oil in our Iraqi venture. They earnestly fear Bible thumping bubbas are going to break through the French doors of their Long Island estates and make them recite the Ten Commandments while being strapped to their loungers and forced to watch Nascar. They honestly believe that if Redstaters had their way that old people would be tossed into the sewers, forests would be clear cut and the entire state of Connecticut would be turned into a giant Wal-Mart staffed with ignorant buck-toothed schleps that don’t know the diff’rence ‘tween a Chardney and a Caberknee. They are committing political suicide and like the Minister in the funeral scene of “The Big Chill,” commenting on the self-inflicted death of the friend that brought them all together for the movie, we find ourselves asking: “Where did their hope go?” Goodness and hope are the Siamese twins of a life lived well. It is this spirit that animates the majority of Americans and it is a spirit that needs nurturing and routine revival.
This is a lesson that must be taught at home. We are generations away from seeing public school teachers allowed or capable to carry this message. Entrenched teacher’s unions that serve as the Zampolit of the American left cannot allow such an uplifting story to permeate the dull block walls of our educational camps.