Posted: 11 Sep 2013 10:03 PM PDT
Last Wednesday, Lashawn Marten was playing chess when he
announced, "I hate white people". Then he began hitting random
white people who were walking by. By the time he was done, several were
wounded and one lay dying.
I
have walked by countless times and seen the chess players sitting near the
overhang of the Union Square subway entrance; mostly black men daring white
passerby into a money game. At the fountain to the left, Moonies squat on a
blanket and sing their sonorous chants. To the right, the remnants of Occupy
Wall Street set up tables to collect money and dispense buttons.
In warmer weather, break dancers perform on the stairs and office workers sit
beneath the statue of George Washington expelling the British and eat lunch.
NYU students mingle with Whole Foods shoppers. Elderly Puerto Rican men push
makeshift wooden carts piled with unlabeled bottles of homebrewed soda pop
and dog owners head for the run underneath the towering edifice of the Barnes
and Noble superstore.
On Wednesdays, the farmers' market shows up and if not for Rosh Hashana, I
might have been passing by the chess tables, maneuvering between the Moonies,
the protestors and the chess players. Jeffrey Babbitt, the man Lashawn beat
to death looks familiar to me if only because he has that kind of New York
face that you pass on the street. You see it worn by plumbers and high school
teachers. It's the badge of the vanishing New York City working class.
No conclusions will be drawn from the murder. Lashawn Marten was obviously
mentally ill. And if his mental illness took the form of violent racism
toward white people, that is an incidental fact. The murder is an incident.
The details are incidental. Even if Lashawn is actually prosecuted on hate
crimes charges, no conclusions will be drawn from what happened between the
chess tables.
Incidents take place all around us, but patterns have to be articulated. The
incident is insignificant. It's the pattern that counts.
Our minds are not trained to hold incidents. They are trained to grasp
patterns. The patterns and incidents float all around us like bits of data.
They are formed out of the firsthand experience of our memories and the
secondhand experiences of the news items that we pick up. They are the chess
game that goes on in our minds between our subconscious processing the events
of the day and the outside forces seeking to shape our minds. The pieces that
they move around are our thoughts.
The patterns that we absorb from reality we call common sense, but the
patterns imposed on us are propaganda.
A man can live in a building where a dozen murders have taken place and still
believe that he is in a low-risk area as long as he is toldt hat there is no
pattern to these murders. That each single incident does not form any greater
whole. And a man can be compelled to believe that he is living in the
deadliest place on earth by convincing him that two local murders in one year
form a pattern.
The incident is anecdotal, but the pattern is scientific. The incident is
something we have to learn to get over so we can get back to shopping in
downtown Manhattan or walking through Union Square. The pattern is a social
problem that we must dedicate ourselves to fighting. The incident isn't
supposed to define our lives. The pattern is.
The murder of Chris Lane was an incident. The murder of Jeffrey Babbitt was
an incident. To be a New Yorker is to grow up under the shadow of such
incidents that can never be officially talked about. To know the shadow
pattern and understand its implications without discussing it.
The Boston Marathon bombing was an incident. So was the Fort Hood Massacre.
So was 9/11. No conclusions can be drawn from them and no pattern can be used
to tie them together. They are to be processed separately and discarded. Lone
bits. Ragged ends of experience with no further meaning than the private pain
of their victims.
One incident is an isolated dot. A stop on a train that goes nowhere. Connect
enough of them together and you form a route and a map. And now you're going
someplace.
The media is not that concerned with suppressing incidents. It is concerned
with suppressing pattern awareness. No one can deny that the occasional
racial murder takes place and that the perpetrators look like Obama's sons.
And no one can deny that Muslims sometimes set off bombs or fly planes into
buildings. They deny only that these incidents form a pattern.
Real patterns are replaced with false patterns. Every Muslim terrorist attack
is met with media chatter about an Islamophobic backlash. The backlash never
materializes, but it doesn't need to. The mere repetition of it does the
trick and sets the pattern. It tells readers that the attack is the incident,
but the backlash is the pattern.
The attack is only an incident and not characteristic of Muslims while the
backlash is a pattern and characteristic of our bigotry and intolerance.
White
racism is a pattern. Black racism is an incident. Racism is characteristic of
white people, but not of black people. The crowds passing through Union
Square are subdivided into the oppressors and the oppressed. Their lives are
color coded for morality and justice. Jeffrey Babbitt, who dreamed of being a
motorman, loved comics and took care of his elderly mother, was an oppressor.
His death is an incident that in no way detracts from the pervasive pattern
of white racism.
Jeffrey Babbitt was an oppressor and Lashawn Marten was one of the
oppressed. Why else announce that he hates white people? This social dynamic
was imposed on them at birth and cannot be altered by any act of violence.
The acts of violence only affirm the pattern as the oppressed lash out
blindly against their oppressors. The occasional death of an oppressor in no
way alters the fixed pattern that it is the oppressors who kill the
oppressed. It is an incident. Nothing more.
The deaths of a million white men in their sixties who love comic books and
dream of driving trains will be no more than an incident. Their lost lives
will never congeal into a pattern, their blood will never outweigh that of an
Emmett Till. The pattern is set in stone and embedded through endless
indoctrination. It is immune to human realities. The passing of a Chris Lane
or Jeffrey Babbit moves it not at all. No more than the Zebra murders did.
The pattern of American intolerance is likewise unmoved by September 11 or by
two Chechens who set off a bomb near an 8-year-old. The blood and ashes of
3,000 dead is nothing but a stain on the liberal pattern. The blood and ashes
of three million would make just as little impression. More people die of
cancer or in car accidents, the liberal can always answer. Numbers alone do
not make a pattern. And if the pattern is not recognized, then it does not
exist.
We live in this world of unreal patterns and real lives where inexplicable
things happen all the time.
Overhead, I see two beams of pale light piercing the sky and reflecting at an
angle. The towers of light remind us of an incident. Not a pattern. After
over a decade of war, no one in authority will admit what we are fighting or
why. All that ash and rubble, the twisted steel and the falling bodies, are
not part of a pattern. But when a Muslim cabbie is stabbed by a sloppy drunk,
that is a pattern.
Most of us see the real patterns, even if only hazily, like the beams of
light cutting across the sky. And we see that the unreal patterns, the
obsessions with Muslim backlashes and the martyrdom of Trayvon Martin, are
unreal things. Not true patterns, but false patterns that reflect at an angle
from the true light.
We do not speak of these true patterns. But we know them. They stir in us
when the right moment appears. They keep us alive.
Millions walk through life with this double vision, the lenses of their minds
blurring the real and the unreal, paying lip service to the grave threat that
someone will spray paint a mosque while nervously studying the Muslim sitting
in front of them on the trip out of Logan Airport or voting for Obama but
moving out to the suburbs.
Those who fail to develop that double vision, who mistake the false patterns
for the true patterns, often come to bad ends because they are unequipped to
recognize danger when they see it. They see incidents where they should see
patterns and patterns where they should see incidents. And finally one of
those invisible patterns that they can't see swallows them whole.
We deal with problems as incidents or patterns. An incident is resolved once,
but a problem requires a more enduring answer.
Patterns are power. The pattern-makers and pattern-dealers derive theirs from
being able to dictate the problem and the solution. They are determined to
educate us, to explain us to ourselves, to understand things for us and
explain them to us so that we will see the same patterns that they do. They
know all too well that if we stop seeing their patterns, their cause and
their power will die.
For now it is men like Jeffrey Babbitt or the spectators in the Boston
Marathon and the soldiers at Fort Hood who die. They die caught in an invisible
pattern that they cannot see. The pattern is no great mystery. It can be seen
by anyone with their eyes open .It does not need to be manufactured or spun.
It is simply common sense.
Meanwhile their governments attend to false patterns, chase moderates and
promote democracy in the Middle East. In the Ivy League or any European NGO
these patterns seem very real. But the patterns are manufactured to promote
ideas about who should run things. The patterns themselves do not run things.
They cannot change reality, only our perceptions of it.
The gathered pattern, like the lives of men, tells a story. The story has
many themes and characters, but it is always mainly about two things; who
should run things and what should be done about it.
We live in a world of phony patterns, of global environmental apocalypses
made to order, of shadows and illusions, of phantom fears, panics and doubts.
But beneath the illusions of ideas that clothe the false world is a world of
real patterns and real observations. This world is the one where problems can
be solved as long as we learn to see the pattern.
But
even in the liberal world of ghosts and shadows, where rogue air conditioners
and cow flatulence are a greater threat to the planet than the nuclear bomb,
where Lashawn Marten was oppressed by the unconscious white privilege of
Jeffrey Babbitt who died for what he did not even know he had, where every
social problem can be solved by destroying the patterns of the past and
replacing them with the terrible blank slate of the future, where Muslim
terrorism is a phantom fear of bigots, these true patterns intrude.
Terrible acts of violence momentarily tear apart the world of illusion with
blood and fire and reveal the terrible truth lurking inside the lies.
On September 11, thousands of New Yorkers standing at Union Square looked
downtown to see a plume of smoke rising over Broadway. I was one of them.
Some fell to making anti-war posters on the spot. Others enlisted in a long
war. On another distant September, some New Yorkers came to the defense of a
62-year-old man being beaten to death for the color of his skin. Others
walked on to the farmers' market, bought their organic peaches while the
liberal memes in their heads told them to see no evil.
Our lives are sharpest and clearest when we see the pattern. In moments of
revelation, the comforting illusions are torn away and the true pattern of
our world stands revealed waiting for us to act.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment