From Streetcars To Spaceships

The real New York, in one tidy package.

So, I'm in the middle of using up yet another day of my life formatting the newest edition of the Native's Guide to New York. This is just rebreaking lines for the copies to send out to book stores, which means that I'll be doing this all over again in a few weeks one last time before slapping on an ISBN and finally bringing the "serious" editions to press. That having been said, I cannot begin to say how sick I am of those little pages of text. Once you've read and revised anything this many times, it's like tearing out your own fingernails to work on the damn thing.

But it does remind me of something that I'm going to write up for the next serious revision. If you're ever going to be in New York for a day with a couple of friends and want a real cross section of authentic New York food, forget every place you've ever heard of and get on the 1 train. Take it to 231st and get off. Right under the tracks is a classic New York diner, though these days they sell Mexican, too. A block over to the west is a huge Italian deli that can give you all you need in the way of pizza, heros, and the like. (And they sell a full selection of Manhattan Special. WIN!) Along that strip and on Broadway in the few blocks north you can get Dominican, New York Chinese, and pretty much the whole set. You want to hit a greasy, dark, Irish neighborhood bar? You're good. You want to shop for African crafts? No sweat. You want some gorgeous 1800's churches? Easy peasy. You've even got Riverdale from Archie Comics starting about five blocks away. Feel free to take the Number 10 bus north past the highway stretch and you'll get all the kosher pizza and real New York deli you can handle.

If you want to see places you've heard of and that they talk about on the television shows, then fine, go to Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty and the frackin' World Trade Center site.

But especially if you've got enough folks with you to be able to hit a dozen places in one shot and buy food in all of them, especially if you've only got one day, if you want to see the real New York as New Yorkers live it, screw Manhattan, get up to the Bronx, walk around one little area you've never heard of, and you've all that you need.

You're welcome.

-Rustin

Bush is out. Fascism is more of a risk than ever.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini

Personally, I have found the overuse of the term "fascism" in my lifetime reprehensible. It is not "fascism" when your teacher won't let you get out early to see your friends. It isn't fascism when Walmart stops carrying some music label. Not every act of potentially capricious authority is fascism.

But some things are. And, as folks tend to forget, fascism has always been built from the ground up as partnerships between public idealogues, authoritarian movements, and corporations who have used those movements to protect and maximize their profits in return for funding and legitimizing the otherwise very unestablishment face of the movement.

In other words, whether we're talking Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, or the Klan, frankly, fascism has always had roots in the kind of people we these days call trailer trash. This has made for a very useful dynamic in the eyes of the monsters who have served as fascism's architects. The low-class, usually unemployed thugs of bottom-of-society movements have made very useful shock troops to undermine groups like farm worker unions that threaten the profits of corporations. And the quiet but increasingly public support of those corporations has provided material resources and a much-needed veneer of respectability to the otherwise socially rejected masses of those authoritarian movements. All while the least honorable among the media take their funding from the corporations while inflaming the conflict and then reaping the increased revenues from getting to feature the very violence and hatred that they helped build in the first place.

Any of this sound like what we're seeing now with the "birthers", the "teabaggers", the health insurance industry/Big Pharma, and FOX?

If you still have any doubts, I suggest that you read this piece on the recent appearance of activities in America, like the disruption of our ongoing town halls, that have always in the past been leading and reliable indicators that a country would soon be suffering a fascist regime.

I thnk that the article actually, in some ways, understates the problem. I have said from 2002 on that the TSA was designed from the get-go as a training ground and then reserve of brownshirts. Minimally-screened, recruited largely from the unemployed and underemployed, given arbitrary and intrusive powers "justified" by a fear-based logic that was made both sacrilege and dangerous to question, they have continued, with an expanding mandate, almost no supervision, and minimal training in jobs that get them used to treating the public as hostile adversaries to be controlled, questioned, and kept within ill-defined and non-negotiable limits.

Every day that somebody holds a TSA job they are further conditioned to make a trustworthy goon who will follow the unexplained and possibly counterintuitive orders of The People In Charge. They are already building adversarial dynamics with, well, real cops. The cops find them contemptable. Undertrained, puffed up, poor, and posturing. The TSA employees find the cops arrogant, uncooperative, questioning of the limits of their mandate and jurisdiction. If push comes to shove, TSA staffers will have been hardened by years of public displeasure and frustration. Trained to demand unquestioning obedience from the public, where even a joke about their techniques or concerns are considered grounds for arrest and detention.

Make no mistake. The "birthers" and their ilk are dangerous. A clear and present danger to our democracy and basic rights and principles. But if we're to look at this honestly, we need to stay vigilant about the armed, staffed, equipped army of fascism-ready bully-boys who walk our streets and control our rights of way right this very minute.

This is NOT a drill.

It was a good potluck BBQ at Watershed.

Sometimes it's enough just to see that we really are living years ahead of the yobs out there. Excellent cheap food and an ever-changing variety of tasty booze don't hurt either.