Have you ever met a genuine New Yorker? I don’t mean the type that went to elite private schools and lives in a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side. I mean the kind of New Yorker who grew up in a tough neighborhood, went to public schools, has a heavy accent, and demonstrates a wiseness about the streets. These are the kinds of people who make up the New York fire and police departments. They’re the people who won the admiration of the nation on 9/11 and in the days after. Conservatives had made such a habit of blasting New Yorkers as effete bleeding heart liberals, that I had to do a double-take when I saw the outpouring of support for my suffering city (I grew up in the NYC suburbs, and lived there until 2002) after the al-Qaeda attacks.
I thought that Red America hated New York and hated New Yorkers. It was nice, but odd, to see them embrace us for once. But, then I knew New York and New Yorkers. I knew they were the toughest sons of bitches that our country can produce (they’ve got rats on the West Side, bed bugs uptown). To live in New York, you have to put up with a level of crime and uncertainty and hustle and bustle that is beyond most people. You can’t be scared of people that look, talk, and believe differently than you do. You can walk for an hour through Central Park without hearing English being spoken once. If that is outside your comfort level, you’re not tough enough to live in New York City.
So, no, it doesn’t surprise me a bit that New Yorkers are generally unafraid of putting swarthy-looking terrorists on trial in their courts. They live everyday with the threat of a terrorist attack. Manhattan is the number one terrorist target in the country. Perhaps the oddest thing about Timothy McVeigh is that he chose to attack Oklahoma City. What was that about? It’s infinitely more likely that terrorists will attack the NYC subway system than it is that they will attack, say, Little Rock. It should have made people wonder that New Yorkers turned against the war in Iraq faster than anyone else, despite the fact that the war was, at least in part and theory, an act of retribution on their behalf. New Yorkers knew better than anyone else that the war in Iraq was making them more, not less, of a target.
That’s why I agree with Markos Moulitsas when he calls the conservatives a bunch of cowards. They want to fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Why be afraid to fight terrorists wherever they might arise? After putting New Yorkers at increased risk of retribution by attacking and occupying a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, the conservatives feign concern for the safety of New Yorkers when they try to put the real culprits on trial. It is beyond insulting.
They seem to have no idea how much contempt they bring on themselves when they express fear of having terrorists lodged in even adjacent states. Anyone who works or lives in New York City puts up with infinitely more risk than that every single day. And who do you think is most likely to get killed by some terrorist who is motivated by Guantanamo Bay? It isn’t the good people of Nebraska, I can tell you that. So, what are New Yorkers to think of some jackass senator from Nebraska, who says this:
Alarmingly, two of the sites on U.S. soil that some speculate could house transferred detainees are Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and the supermax facility in Colorado. Both facilities are within two hundred and fifty miles of the Nebraska border. That alarms me and alarms my constituents. That’s why I sent a letter to Attorney General Holder on April 23 requesting a personal briefing before any decision is made to move current Guantanamo detainees within four hundred miles of Nebraska’s borders.
This coward is afraid of having prisoners housed within 400 miles of his state! He’s lucky New York City isn’t within 400 miles of his state. That would much more frightening. It’s a wonder that Senator Johanns can make it to work on Capitol Hill without soiling himself in fear. You think a NYC firefighter is going to have any respect for this fool?
Excellent post! Stay righteous, Brother Boo.
Right on , Booman!
And what did we do a month after the towers fell and anthrax-laced letters started popping up in FL, D.C. and – yes – in New York. We went about our regular business, took the subway to work and simply paid a lttle extra attention to what happened around us.
What a pile of shit Senator Johanns is!
what ask and rae said-
Yet more reason why out of towners are easy to spot.
How about building a supermax prison for them in the vicinity of Atqasuk, Alaska – our version of Siberia…
It’s not just Democrats. Look at Jim Webb. He’s opposed to the idea. This after his state, my state, successfully tried the “20th hijacker” at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, VA, only a few miles from the Pentagon which was also hit on 9/11. You didn’t have residents hiding in their homes or pulling their kids out of schools and leaving town. No, our prissy progressive asses continued to shop, lounge and drink overpriced coffee right on the same block as the courthouse.
I just wish for once a Democrat would say while appearing on air with one of these conservative cowards, “you know what terrorists want? They want to know we’re scared of them and you just told them we are.”
Well, at least Webb voted to table the Inhofe amendment yesterday.
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Voted Nay … of course.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
I probably wouldn’t last 48 hours in NYC. Not that I would want to — the very thought of trying to function in that kind of urban density makes me claustrophobic. But you have to admire the grit of a people who survive and thrive in it.
I think McVeigh targeted the Federal Building in OKC specifically to seek revenge on the folks directly involved in the Waco fiasco. If that cluster fuck operation has been mounted out of Little Rock or Albuquerque, he would probably have turned his sights there. I don’t know what he would have done if it had come directly out of NYC or DC.
I do know that the OKC bombing was a wake-up call for a lot of us out here in fly-over country. Until McVeigh did his thing, everyone I knew was pretty complacent about the threat of terrorist activity. Most of us, myself included, assumed that what happened in New York or LA couldn’t really affect us in any direct way.
That all changed on that day in ’95. If such a thing could happen in Oklahoma City, fer chrissake, it could happen anywhere. And as those awful videos started streaming out on 9/11, where before a lot of Okies might have just waved it off as something else them city folk on the coasts had got themselves into, every Okie I know stopped and thought, that could just as well be me and mine.
From a viewpoint in a more northeasterly part of the flyover, there seems to be little evidence that most folks out your way have ever made a connection between McVey and Sept 11. Pols around there seem to think being blowed up by darkish Muslims is way, way, scarier than being blowed up by pretty blond Christians.
It might be noted in passing that Guantanamo is around 100 miles from Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second largest city with a population of about half a million, capital of the country’s second-largest province. Funny how none of our brave Republicans never worried about placing the
evil superbeingsaccused terrorists almost amid a population of a million people. But then they’re only dark-skinned commies, so who cares, right?The pathetic weasel Mark Kirk of Illinois is sure that the unstoppable superterrorists will blow up Chicago if they’re housed 150 miles away in a town that wants them, but no problemo if we expose a population to these same terrorists without asking anybody if that’s OK. What was that question everybody was asking way back when? Why do they hate us? With the likes of Kirk and the rest of the GOP cowards-on-demand around, the real question becomes, why wouldn’t they?
They wouldn’t last the night in the general population of the Cook County lockup.
I agree with you about the sentiment, silly to be afraid, but how is New Yorkers with a thick accent and not from elite schools in any way different than “real Americans, white Americans”?
How is Spike Lee different from Barack Obama? How is Danny Aiello different from George Clooney?
They were born and raised in NYC. That doesn’t make them better than anyone else. It does make them recognizable as native New Yorkers, with all that entails.
Put ‘er there, pal, I’m from Brooklyn.
Booman: My only disagreement with your comments is that there are plenty of genuine New Yorkers who’ve grown up in wealth and privilege who aren’t cowards either. To live in this town—and a lot of other towns, like Philly and Chicago— you’ve got to be tough.
You can’t be a poseur, like all those “real Americans” with their guns, their confederate flag and ‘In God we trust” stickers on their trucks and SUVs,who don’t have the guts to get on a subway car.
Thinking on it further, it’s gratifying to jump on these pols as cowards, etc., but deep down we know that their failing is far worse than that. Fear may or may not be as admirable as bravery, but it is understandable and even demanding of some empathy.
What pols like this ass from Kansas, Mark Kirk, and Rudy Guiliani — as well as their media doggies — are indulging in is something else. They are not afraid. They are stimulating and manipulating fear in others for their own mendacious purposes. They are using fear of terrorism as a lever to unleash a multitude of xenophobic, racist, sectarianist demons from the chains so painstakingly bound to them by the process we call civilization. They are following the playbook of all the great monsters of history from Caligula to Pol Pot to Hitler.
Their predictable kneejerk script, whether the topic is Obama’s birthplace, the Fort Hood murders, or the NYC trials, is always the same tedious fake screaming. I think there are enough Americans who get bored with hearing the same old crap, and enough who don’t shit their pants at every fright wig, to assure that the current Republican Party scams will end up yet an other epic fail, even though they leave a degree of damage in their wake. Evil ain’t always as powerful as we’re led to imagine, whether it takes the shape of this Ass of Omaha or bin Laden. The odds are still with the brave, the sane, and the skeptical.
“Putting George Bush on trial”
That’s how it was put to me by a formerly sane conservative. Not sure if he got the talking point from the rightwing wurlitzer but I think that’s what at the core of it.
I think so too, aside from just auto-screaming about every single thing Obama does. They’re terrified that “our” murderous thugs might be recognized as the same order of being as “their” murderous thugs.