28 September ‘07 - Evil Has Landed

This week was dominated by an event of epic proportions. Well epic for a kid from New Zealand, commonplace for a local. And that is a key distinction. New York is the coal-face, the gravel-pit, the frontier of all that is changing in the world. New York―along with Paris and London I imagine―is the lip of the lava that flows down a volcano’s side. What is created here solidifies and becomes a permanent marker, a monument to be absorbed, assimilated and adapted by the rest of the world.

And that paragraph may reek of Eurocentrism, it is, I believe, justified. For example, the event I refer to was the arrival of the Iranian President―Mahmoud Ahmadinejad―to Manhattan. Ahmadinejad, here for the United Nations General Assembly, was restricted to a 25-mile radius of a local landmark. His every move watched by the NYPD, the Secret Service, and most worryingly fanatical Americans. The New York Post, for example, the country’s eighth-most popular paper, announced his arrival with a headline that did not just dominate but completely overtook the front page. That headline: ‘EVIL HAS LANDED’. The following day: ‘WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR EVIL FACE’.

Columbia University falls squarely within the 25-mile range. As such, Ahmadinejad was invited to speak and he agreed. The announcement of his arrival was met with the most industrious and mechanical opposition I have witnessed. Overnight, tee-shirts, badges and laminated posters were produced which professed outrage at the invitation. Overnight a Semite army was born which donned said tee-shirts and badges and voiced their outrage. The following day the campus was plastered with photos of hangings, statistics, and quotes (in English) attributed to Ahmadinejad. The day after that the University President was forced to justify the invitation on the grounds of free speech. As Ahmadinejad’s speech neared, the protest intensified. Other groups, less professional than the Semite army, joined the fray, adding hand-drawn posters and playing instruments. More groups were represented than I knew existed.

And then the day itself. I arrived at school as I usually do―dark sunglasses, headphones on, bleary from being cruelly woken by my alarm―and climbed the stairs from the subway to the street. The sight that met me was, like so many other sights in this city, straight out of a movie. A Fox News van with antennae extending five metres skyward was parked next to a CNN van with a car-sized satellite dish was parked next to the black-tinted minivans of the Secret Service. And pressing through the gaps between the vans, the school gates, and the street were crowds of protestors, students and spectators with banners, placards, take-away coffees.

The event itself was even more remarkable. Ahmadinejad’s address was preceded by an introduction from the Columbia University President. To a group of 600 in the auditorium and a crowd of many thousands watching a giant-screen on the lawn outside, the University President lambasted Ahmadinejad, calling him a ‘cruel and petty dictator’ among other insults. While Bollinger’s speech was perhaps to be expected given the great might that the political lobbyists (and university funders) wield, I had no expectations of Ahmadinejad.

And sure enough the Iranian’s speech was rambling and nonsensical and like all good politicians he avoided directly answering questions with aplomb. Some of what he said, however, resonates with me still. Not because of the content but because he managed to unsettle some deeply held assumptions on my part. What these assumptions are I can not yet say – they are too fundamental, they are too well entrenched in the psyche to have labels. I shall spend some time digging them out and exposing them to the light. I just hope they are not found out to be rotten.

In other news, a friend from New Zealand came to stay with me for a few days. It was delight seeing a familiar face. Living in a city of unknowns means that anonymity can be assumed at any time – a luxury in certain states, in certain moments. The disadvantage is that individual identity is subsumed by an identity greater in breadth, history, and flexibility. You start thinking of yourself not as an individual but as constituent part some great machine. Meeting someone from a past-life relocates you, shifts you to the past, or to a different place, at least while they are here.

There is a scene in the Great Gatsby where the central character, Nick, moves to a new city and immediately feels lonely, isolated, alien. Soon after his arrival a stranger asks him directions and Nick is able to direct. From that moment, Nick’s status changes - he is now a path-finder, a guide, an original settler. And while Nick’s story and my own are not perfectly analogous, there are similarities. Whilst guiding around the city I became aware of, for the first time, the thousand little idiosyncrasies of the City that are now familiar to me. Those thousand little things that govern where you stand on a subway, how you insert a bill into a vending machine, which direction you take when you approach another pedestrian.

The rules for dealing with the idiosyncrasies are imbibed unconsciously - they seep into your head and influence your motor functions without you even noticing. But when you show someone else the rules are reflected on and identified and all-of-a-sudden you realise that you actually know something about something, that the City is no longer a stranger to you, that slowly―ever so slowly―you are beginning to feel at home.