rdewald's Journal: This one's for you, KshGoddess

Re: Sorry, your rant *was* about me.

I read this article in the actual paper-paper yesterday. I was in a Chinese restaurant. On the table was also a copy of WaPo *and* BoGlo (as they are referred to by my peers here in The City). Yes, I was reading all three of them. Yes, I make time to do this on a regular basis. Yes, I drop them off in newspaper recycling bins when I am finished. Usually the ones in front of my apartment building (my place is smaller than you imagine--670 sq ft, but a move up from the 290 sq ft studio I lived in before) where I am throwing away my money.

I didn't have a latte, there's too much milk and too many calories, I drink either cafe americano (espresso diluted with hot water) or red-eyes (espresso added to drip brew) with organic half and half and turbinado sugar. The table next to me was occupied by a Dominican family arguing about baseball. I could hear Russian being spoken across the table right behind me. Across the aisle from me was an orthodox jewish couple trying to restrain their child who was upset because they wouldn't let him pick the Dim Sum from the cart the Malaysian woman was pushing around. The Mexican busboys were playing grabass in the hall. My waiter, who was Chinese, was cursing at them in flawless spanish, but I could just barely understand his English.

I was grabbing some Mandarin soup with mai fun before I saw my psychotherapist, who is stunningly gorgeous, jewish (of course), was educated at Yale, married to another shrink, and they vacation in Argentina. We spent most of the session comparing 11/02/2004 to 09/11/2001 (yes--the horror, the horror).

11/03/2004 was a very quiet day in the City, most everyone was frankly stunned. I honestly don't know anyone here who voted for Bush. Not a single solitary soul. Not any of my friends (not even the uber-conservative multi-millionaire investment bankers I count as friends), not the Pakistanis at the Deli, not my Sudanese dry cleaner, not my Jamaican super, not my Egyptian coffee guys, not my Swede butcher or my Columbian fish monger. The Muslim calls to prayer on 116th were particularly haunting on Wednesday morning because it was so quiet (I know I am on time when I hear them as I leave the house).

So, while the Blue states are really not that much different from the red states, i.e, some 40-odd percent of the red states went for Kerry, and about the same number in the blue states pulled the lever for Bush. New York City, OTOH, in particular, Manhattan, *is* different.

When I first moved here, the one thing that really stuck out at me (which I now hardly notice) is that everybody reads. I ride the subway to and from The Bronx every day, before that I walk down 125th st, the cultural center of Harlem, right in front of the Apollo, past the Magic Johnson Cineplex. I buy coffee from the Starbucks (Magic owns it) at the corner of Lenox.

This is not the City of Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big, this is the City populated by the working folk of NYC, but the working folk who care to live in Manhattan, and are willing to make the sacrifices to do so. I love being within a five minute walk of Central Park, I wouldn't trade that for five times the sq ft at half the price I pay now (which is what I could probably get in a red state).

Almost every single person is reading something, be it a newspaper, a magazine or a book. The sidewalk vendors on 125th street aren't hawking fake Vitton bags, that's downtown for the tourists, up here they sell books--everything from black muslim separatist rants to something that might not have made it your way just yet--thug fiction. There's a thriving genre of fiction aimed at the disenfranchised urban african-american young person, they are salicious pulp novels, full of pimps, ho's, and shiny nickle 9's (as in millimeters).

There's a snickering joke among people who live here: It's not that New Yorkers think they're better, we *are* better.

It's a joke, and it will piss most of you off, and that's part of the joke, it's designed to piss people off. If you don't live here, you won't get it. We think it's funny that you care what we think about ourselves. The very fact that people regard New Yorkers as "dumbasses who think they're better than everyone else just because they live in "the city" (or alternately "The City")" is hilariously funny to us.

Just this morning, I was making my way around a bend in a subway station and I ran headlong into a Haitian gentleman reading from a file folder. His stuff went flying, my papers went flying, and we both bent down to pick everything up. I got what I could reach, he got what he could reach, then we stood up and sorted it out, handing things back and forth at a frenetic pace while other New Yorkers impatiently stepped around us because the train (subway) we all wanted was pulling into the station on the platform down the stairs.

We finished and I said "Are you good?"

He said "I'm good."

I said "Me too, let's go!" and we both sprinted down the stairs to the platform, he got there first and stuck his foot in the now closing door of the subway car so it wouldn't close before I could get on. I never saw or talked to him again. Yeah, we're "asshats" all.

Sound like your town? No, it doesn't, does it?

9/11/2001 was a real loss of innocence for New Yorkers. We were shocked that someone could be so destructive, that eight men could bring down two 110 story skyscrapers, that the chief physical feature of downtown could be there one minute and gone the next. It took a long time to get over it. Many of us still aren't.

But for the days following the attacks, we took care of each other. I can't tell you how many strangers I hugged, how many tears, actual physical tears, fell on my actual physical shoulders from people I had never met before sharing a cry with them. You folks watched it on the TV machine, I could smell the fires. I picked glass shards out of a friend's back.

So, when President Bush, with his characteristic smirk, said that he wasn't really all that concerned with bin Laden any more, try to imagine how personally we all took that.

Ksh, the article that offended you so does not offend me. The election of Bush is a shock to us that I don't expect you to understand. We actually can't believe that you voted for him. It's a loss of innocence. We believed that the facts would protect us. We believed that if we just told people about the fraud, the lies, and the incompetence that there was NO WAY he would get re-elected.

I refused to believe the polls. I thought Kerry would easily get more than 300 EV's, I thought the popular vote margin would be more than 8-10 percent. I thought it would be a new day in America. I thought he would win Virginia, since there are so many people from DC that live there and they have also smelled computers burning because they were doused by jet fuel.

What do I get for being honest about that? What do I get for opening up my heart?

In the last JE, I tried to do the opposite of what my fears wanted. My fears want me to separate, to disown, but I looked hard within myself to try to understand what could possibly explain a vote for Bush. I'm pretty sure I found it. If I didn't have the personal experience that I do with the man I could easily see myself deciding to vote for him. I tried to share that insight with you all, carefully qualifying that I did not mean it as an attack on anyone, and what did I get?

You read it. RW, a man whose unit patch I wear on my jacket, a man to whom I have sent care packages and asked others to do the same, calls my explanation fraudulent rhetorical bullying. I try to explain what I mean, he tells me I'm sophistically twisting my rhetoric. I went to a lot of trouble to honestly reveal some pretty shameful things about my past, my intent was to help other people similarly afflicted, and I get told that I am mentally ill and trying to smear Bush voters with the horrid and ugly notion that they could be as bad off mentally as I openly admit I have been. I did no such thing, but that doesn't matter.

That hurts. I am not made of stone. Not a single solitary one of you Bush supporters said "Hey, you've really had a rough time, thanks for being so honest, are you okay now?" That's real compassionate conservatism for ya.

No, I'm incapable of understanding that somone who disagrees with me might come to those conclusions rationally. That's a nice way of calling me a pig-headed, arrogant, ignorant, intellectual bully. Forget the disclaimer, forget that I said I am only growing less and less certain of *anything." That's sophistry, right?

You know what I was apparently wrong about? I was wrong to believe that if I was honest enough about my own feelings and reached across this divide by just discussing some *ideas* that I've been considering that I could rely on my friends here who have a different political persuasion to reach back. You know a Liberal is hurting when he gets the best treatment in a post-election political disagreement from Pudge. Kudos to him for actually acting like the Christian he represents himself as.

So, congratulations, Bush-voter defenders. You've lain me out like a fish ready for the oven. I am hurt. Even though I know what's in my heart, it hurts to read how people believe otherwise, particularly when it is in direct contradiction to honest, deeply felt, careful assertions about some of the most private and painful periods of my past.

Yeah, Bush won, RW. Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, too.

I'm sorry, all of you sober, rational, and fair Bush voters have exposed me for the sophisitic, elitist, lying, fraud that I must be because I use this clever, evil, trick of pouring out my heart in order to obsfucate the pursuit of my *real* cryptoagenda--bashing Bush voters by suggesting that they might be as *mentally ill* and lost in a sick morass of denial as I am/was. Ignore the fact that I said nothing of the sort, it *was* what I really *meant.* Ha ha, you're as sick and twisted as a hideously fat guy! Take that!

Yep, no one I know in NYC voted for Bush. Almost 85 percent of the people who actually experienced a terrorist attack (instead of just watching it on the hideous Jerry Bruckheimer movie that cable news has become) voted against Bush. We're having real trouble understanding you, so it's not that we're informed by our experience, it's not that were alarmed that before 9/11 the Bush administration counter-terrorism task force NEVER MET, it's not that Bush ignored the 8/6/01 PDB ("Bin Laden determined to attack in US"), no, no, we must be elitist, sophistic, intellectual thugs who obviously think that all the red state people are "a bunch of uneducated hicks".

I'm the asshole?

See ya, got a train to catch.

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