2004-12-22 - 7:32 p.m.
I like New York City better when I have time. I spent a large part of the day today wandering about, finding books to give my nieces (one older, one younger) and bought a belt buckle with a horse head on it for myself. I did not do this out of some kind of hipster desire, but because I sincerely love horses and am almost more satisfied with this belt buckle then my proposed “prude” belt buckle, which I WILL get made one of these days. I was thinking the other day about how I identify more specifically as a pro-sex prude, but that’s a story for another time. But back to thoughts about the city, while I wandered around Union Square and browsed at St. Marks’ Books I thought about the pleasure of urban spaces, of having time to take in the crowds instead of feeling constantly hassled by them. I started to think about the kind of privilege this entails, does the pleasure come from knowing I have some kind of consumer power that enables me to participate in this? It also reminded me that I want to read Walter Benjamin’s writing about the arcades around the turn of the last century in Paris because I think he deals with these very thoughts and questions.
Packing dirty clothes to take home tonight (the strategy, take home dirty clothes and wash them twice, hence saving on quarters and time here, and heads up Maine friends, I’ll be there until the 30th and I want to hang out) and listening to NPR I heard that two of the service men who were killed in an attack on a mess tent outside of Mosul, Iraq were from Maine. They interviewed families in Maine that lived at or around the air force base in Brunswick and the governor, Baldacci. Listening to those familiar names of people and places I found myself on the verge of tears. In my class Anthropology As A History of the Present we had been discussing how things are written to direct the kind of identification you are supposed to, as a reader, have with the text. We talked especially about news and newspapers and I couldn’t help but think about this as I listened to those smooth NPR accents report on these particular causalities.
What does it mean that it took a radio story about people from my home state to bring the war “home” for me? How is news designed to have us read or listen to it with glazed eyes and ears, listening and reading but not really taking in the depth of what is being reported on? Of course, people working in media studies have done a lot around this, but I think we can investigate these questions outside of the academy as well. How can, when we do have an emotional response because we can relate to a particular story in some kind of way, can we use this response to mobilize against the war, or imperialism or capitalism more broadly? How can this kind of emotional response lead us to greater solidarity instead of leading us to only really care about those we identify as “our own”? What kind of privileged distancing does it take when I don’t know anyone personally who is in the service, but yet, say, the ninth graders in Crown Heights that I have been spending Wednesday afternoons with all do? The answers to this have everything to do with power and privilege, of course, but also how power and privilege work in subtle ways.
