26 October '07

Last week I mentioned, briefly, that a shooting had occurred in the apartment building adjacent to mine. About fifteen minutes after I left the house, shots were heard. Two guys were seen fleeing the area, two more were found inside with wounds to the chest. One of those inside died, the other is in intensive care. When I returned home, at about 3am the next morning, the police had just left. Indeed, the only trace of any ‘disturbance’—what a horrible euphemism—was the discarded ‘Do Not Cross’ tape in the gutter. I only learnt of the incident when I left the house the next day as the police presence had resumed. And what a police presence it was. A great, crime-fighting machine was turned on and went about its work, mechanically: a van was parked on the street with a mounted megaphone, looping a plea for information in a booming Orwellian voice (except that the voice was female, a sign of an NYPD conscious of their public image); posters were stapled to all posts also calling for information, promising a reward and anonymity; a forensics truck spent the day parked outside, white-suited officers coming and going. Curiously, there was a lack of media interest. Not surprising, I suppose, for a country saturated with crime to not be titillated by a mere shooting.

Once the police left, a shrine was erected on the steps of the house opposite the crime scene. Below a photo of Jose Batista, the 15 year-old deceased—another horrible euphemism—lie a row of candles, flanked at the corners by opened bottle of Corona. In the first couple of days following the shooting, people sat by the shrine. Now they do not, though the candles continue to burn.

Now that a week has passed, the shock of the shooting has largely evaporated. For a while it was, actually, quite disarming. I don’t, and never did, feel in any danger—the facts suggest that this wasn’t a random shooting, and thus could have happened anywhere—so the cause of the disarmament must be located elsewhere. As I wrote in the last entry, the feeling of listening to rap music about gang or drug shootings when walking past the site of a shooting is uncanny, almost perverse. The perversity comes, I think, from being that close to violence but not being able to comprehend it, except through parody. In this case the RZA saying ‘Keep it in the hood, niggaz walk with they gun / Keep it in the hood that's where we come from’. And because it is incomprehensible, the violence, the ‘incident’, is ignored and forgotten. So that now the posters calling for information have, like the police tape, fallen into the gutter, and the cardboard protecting the shrine from the wind has been heavied with rain, and has sagged and crumpled.

And so we get to the ‘incident’, the ‘deceased’, the ‘disturbance’. This country has to be the world-capital of the euphemism. New Zealand is, of course, guilty too but the extent of it here is remarkable. You do not go to the toilet here, for example, you go to the bathroom or the water closet. What this euphemising reflects, I’m not sure. I do know that it is linked to the desire for sterility that the advertisers of household cleaners and accessories feed off. A professor once related an anecdote in which he was visiting a winery on a bus with other tourists. Wineries often run sheep also, letting them graze on the grass in between the vines or in adjacent paddocks. In one of the wineries that my professor visited, a sheep lay dead—presumably of natural causes—in a paddock near the driveway. The tourists refused to buy wine from the winery, associating the dead sheep with some imagined contamination in the wine. These tourists, like the alarmingly high percentage of American children who don’t realise that meat in Styrofoam containers in the supermarket come from actual animals, or the patrons who obsessively and compulsively clean every surface of their house with lemon-scented bleach, or, indeed, the perpetrators—like myself— of meaningless euphemisms, are disconnected. Disconnected from nature, from the smell of ferment and sweat, from the feeling of grease and surfaces tacky with accumulated scent, from the sour aftertaste of milk that has just expired, from the sight of death and unconcealed, uncontrived, emotion.

There is, it seems, more and more that classifies as obscene. For Heller writing in the middle of the twentieth-century, the sight of two leg-stumps on a raft in the ocean was what it took to draw people to peek guiltily through the bushes at the edge of the shore. Fifty years later, we are so diligent at sanitisation that asthma cases have increased because we’re no longer so resistant to the detritus the world hurls at us.

This week has been a long one, school has been draining with myriad essays, presentations, books to read, notes to take. Tomorrow I head to Mountain Lakes New Jersey for a night as part of a United Nations conference. I looked up Mountain Lakes and, as it turns out, there are no mountains. And the lakes are man-made. Someone, somewhere, must be laughing at us.