The happiest house on the block yesterday morning must have been #405. It’s owner, Jason Sudeikis, woke up with one of those winged, atom-embracing Emmy statuettes, for best Lead Actor; the show he created, Ted Lasso, garnered 20 nominations and three more awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series. The last time I saw Jason was a few weeks ago on a hot August day, right there inside that gate, helping his daughter with her lemonade stand. (Would you believe that the going rate in Brooklyn for a sidewalk lemonade is now $1!?)
Just as I was finishing yesterday’s blog post, hearing a revving car engine, I pivoted my chair to look out the window. Before I could look down to the street, there was a terrific crash that split the air.
An impatient driver had gunned his BMW past a slower car, veered to avoid a head on collision with another vehicle, then spun out to smash into a big red oak tree in front of a new apartment building. Two members of the construction crew who were running a cement mixer were struck by the fishtailing car, and thrown a few yards, along with the plastic road barriers.
Almost exactly two years ago, I’d watched as the crew of Guatemalan and Mexican construction workers had pulled down the north wall of the second story of the ca. 1850 brick building that formerly stood on that site. I happened to be coming down the sidewalk when I looked up to see the crew organizing themselves for the dangerous feat. I had held my breath as the foreman counted down. . .
These same guys have come to work every day, every week, since September of 2019, to an always risky job. I have seen and heard them each day as they pack up their tools and hardhats to head home, the lovely lilt of their Spanish goodbyes wafting up from the street. Not a single injury or accident until yesterday, when a speeding driver thoughtlessly took out two of their brothers. While the two men were carried to the ambulance on the stretcher, neither the driver nor his passengers – none of them injured – expressed any concern for them. A tow truck arrived a few hours later to remove the totaled car; the banged up cement mixer was hauled away; the buckled sidewalk and curb were swept; today a new set of 2x4s will be erected to protect the oak tree from the delivery trucks that pull up at the site 24/7.
The driver was not charged with even a traffic violation. Since he wasn’t from here in the neighborhood, perhaps he didn’t know that nine days before, less than two blocks from the carnage he caused, another young speeder had t-boned a car after he’d run a red light and then gone up a one-way street the wrong way. The car he hit slammed into a mom pushing her three-month-old son in a stroller. The mother is still in a coma, and doesn’t yet know that her baby is dead.
The day before that tragedy, I was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with a mother and daughter from Santiago, Chile, when the air above filled with helicopters and the East River below sported a dozen NYPD, Coast Guard, and Secret Service gunboats. It was the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and along with President Joe Biden, the helicopters were bringing the three former presidents in to the WTC site.
There they are, listening with (feigned) patience and even pride to George W. Bush, the architect of the 20-year-long reign of terror that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill Clinton had his own dark history of “humanitarian” wars; Barack Obama added weekly drone strike murder skull sessions, and the destruction of Libya and Yemen to his laundry list of war crimes.
The shameless, cynical ritual carried out every single anniversary since September 11, 2001 reached its awful apotheosis this year. These spectacles are staged to airbrush our anxieties, to spoon feed us fantasies of heroism so we will be less likely to recognize our leaders as murderous imperial tyrants, and ourselves as silent collaborators. A rampant language of “safety,” of “law,” of “democracy” is parroted in the halls of power.
There is no safety, no law, no democracy under empire – especially perhaps the soft empire of oligarchy. Any reassurances that these exist are lies, propped up by illusions. Whether the quick and easy reassurances offered me by the NYPD officers at the scene of the crash yesterday when I asked about the safety of our children (our grandson was out in his stroller on a walk with his parents when the infant Apolline was killed; they heard the crash) or the reassurances the ex-presidents peddled about American goodness and virtue, the illusions and lies are seamless. There are killers in our neighborhoods, hiding in plain sight. Let us have the courage to call them out from behind their black masks.
Thanks for your vibrantly expressed compassion, courage, and unwavering insight into the underbelly of a country now so bloated that it is fully exposed to view, or at least will be, increasing, when people speak with your straight eloquence.