a fulcrum, not a pivot.
(c-note: im posting this without proofreading it, cuz i have to run and i dont want this to be an unfinished post.)
i have something important to say!
this post is based on my having just watched episode four ('the power and the people') of new york: a documentary film.**
episode four covers the triangle factory fire. (as always, wikipedia has a good concise description of this tragic event.)
for those unfamiliar with the triangle fire, here's the opening paragraph from wikipedia:
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was a major industrial disaster, causing the death of 146 garment workers who either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.
the garment workers were mostly - if not all - teenage women - girls, who worked ridiculous hours under disgusting conditions and basically defined the term 'sweat shop.' the tragic, disgraceful catalyst for the horror was the fact that the doors to the floor where the fire was were locked by the factory owners, preventing the girls' escape. (ostensibly, the exits were locked to encourage labor and to prevent stealing.)
anyway, i had long known about this event, but i had never been fully aware of the grisly, bloody scope of that day until i saw this episode of new york.
the film's narrators read from first-person accounts of the fire. word of the fire spread around the city quickly, and many bystanders came down to watch the event unfold. sadly, no one could really do anything to help any of the girls. firefighters' ladders and hoses simply could not reach the upper floors of the building. so those who were there eventually realized that they were not going to see a rescue; they were only going to see a slow, agonizing tragedy. needless to say, it was brutal.
there were multiple first-person accounts that spoke of watching girls crowd in the open windows of the doomed high floor, with flames jumping behind them, nipping at them. accounts of watching girls jump individually, and also holding hands. accounts of realizing that since there was no way out, all the girls in all the windows would eventually have to jump, with no hope of survival. accounts of girls in mid-air, fluttering their arms to right their bodies. in vain.
the new york film was released in 1999.
this i swear to you - if i played certain excerpts of these first-person accounts for you - the accounts of girls crowding windows and jumping - you would never be able to tell if the account was of the triangle factory fire of 1911, or 9.11. realizing this was one of the most eery feelings i've ever experienced. (i havent seen the last episode of the film, which was made after 9.11 to accomodate the event. i dont know if the film draws this parallel at that point.)
this transcendent parallel of the two single greatest tragedies in nyc's history got me to thinking.
it took a while, but the triangle fire served as the catalyst for great labor reform, and even the women's movement. progress was slow--laws were not changed immediately, but one could fairly say that eventually, crucial measures including key safety and workers’ compensation laws were borne out of the triangle fire.
thinking about this kind of depressed me.
b/c the thing is, while new york city seemed to have 'learned something' from the triangle fire, we don't seem to have 'gotten the message' from its recent analog, 9.11.
sure, in the days, even weeks, even months following 9.11, the city took on a different vibe. people really were more copacetic with each other, and i genuinely felt a unity here i had never experienced previously in my 20 odd years living on the rock. but now, in nyc, it feels practically like 9.11 never happened. it's business as usual.
sure, the US went after osama and the taliban pretty quickly. sure, we waged a war on terror.
but, to say nothing of how silly the 'war on terror' really is, we, nyc, didn't really learn the right lesson: a lesson pretty similar to the fire of 1911.
in short, both events should have spurred new york to protect its needy, downtrodden citizens, but only one event did.
make no mistake, 9.11 was more about poverty and desolation than 'terrorism' (yes, i know this idea is not original, but still). the plain truth is that if there weren't hopeless people in the middle east who don't have a proverbial pot to piss in, there wouldn't be terrorists attacking us, with our proverbial streets paved with gold.
im not saying new york should have responded to 9.11 by extending aid to the middle east. that doesn't seem to fit. but why not take the underlying lesson from 9.11--poverty and hopelessness hurt us all--and apply an antidote to those forces here, in nyc?
why didn't we, as galvanized new yorkers, stand up and say 'we will alchemize this tragedy. we will learn from it, just as we did from the triangle fire. we cant necessarily help people all over the world, but we sure as hell can help people in the five boroughs. more of us can volunteer at shelters, more of us can volunteer at needy schools....'
sure, some people did take it upon themselves to do these things, but where was the gestalt movement? where was bloomberg truly championing these ideas, with the full weight of his office, and even wealth? where was bloomberg putting radical new laws into effect which would aid the needy?
he/we had so much inherent political capital from 9.11. im not saying we didn't do anything, but we didn't do enough. of that i am sure.
the triangle fire produced sweeeping, once-in-a-generation labor reform. where is our reform? what will we tell our kids 9.11 was good for? a war? a conspiracy theory? a few movies?
all there was/is was an eye-for-an-eye military response by the US as a whole, and a year-long (give or take some mos.) campaign of faux born-againism by new yorkers, mostly taking shape as tacky american flags taped to apartment doors.
i see as many homeless people as ever. i see as many beggars on the subway. i feel just as much racial tension. it's the new york i grew up in and i love it, but--aye, there's the rub.
i dont want to tell my kids that the new york i grew up in didn't change on account of 9.11. i want to be able to tell them that before 9.11, there was a lot of poverty and hopelessness here, but 9.11 taught us something, and we fought like hell to change all that after the tragedy. just like they did after 1911.
what reforms will i be able to point to? i want to be able to say 'that's how mike bloomberg got his universal new york health coverage bill passed' or 'that's when it was mandated that every neighborhood had to have a homeless shelter of certain quality.' but i fear i wont be able to say SHIT.
i know i sketch some broad strokes here, but i think/hope you get my point.
i wouldn't say we're letting the terrorists win. but by responding in kind to them, rather than fixing the wounds we already had--the wounds the poor, hopeless terrorists illuminated for us--we're making this battle a push (tie) at best.
let's learn our lesson, new york. let's honor the people who, hopeless, jumped from the trade towers. let's honor them by giving strength and help to the hopeless new yorkers who are not jumping, but dying the slow death, every day, month upon month, year after year.
we see them every day. they should be our proxies for the people we couldn't save in battery park. and we have much more time to help them. right now, we aren't doing NEARLY enough.
let's change this city in a goddamn tangible way. radical reform, not the wish that every new yorker now has that fuzzy feeling in his heart that we all should be on level ground. let's fucking level the ground.
fulcrum and pivot have mostly overlapping definitions. but i use them here to mean different things. a fulcrum is a pt on which a great swing is made. a lever is pulled. something changes. in basketball, a player with the ball can pivot on one foot as much as he likes, but he does it to throw the defense off. he never actually moves anywhere.
let's make 9.11 a fulcrum, not a pivot. we did in 1911.
100 years apart, new yorkers watch a nightmare come true for fellow new yorkers.
** - (i dont know if ive endorsed this seven disc series here before or not, but in any case im gonna do so now. if you live in nyc, you must netflix or buy the film immediately, because it will open your eyes and heart to the city in a whole new way, and you will be grateful for this. if you just like nyc, you must do the same. if you're remotely interested in nyc, you must watch it. even if you hate nyc you should watch it to gain the respect for the city you're so sorely lacking. basically, everyone should see this film -- it's spectacular and epic. it's eptacular.)
i have something important to say!
this post is based on my having just watched episode four ('the power and the people') of new york: a documentary film.**
episode four covers the triangle factory fire. (as always, wikipedia has a good concise description of this tragic event.)
for those unfamiliar with the triangle fire, here's the opening paragraph from wikipedia:
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was a major industrial disaster, causing the death of 146 garment workers who either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.
the garment workers were mostly - if not all - teenage women - girls, who worked ridiculous hours under disgusting conditions and basically defined the term 'sweat shop.' the tragic, disgraceful catalyst for the horror was the fact that the doors to the floor where the fire was were locked by the factory owners, preventing the girls' escape. (ostensibly, the exits were locked to encourage labor and to prevent stealing.)
anyway, i had long known about this event, but i had never been fully aware of the grisly, bloody scope of that day until i saw this episode of new york.
the film's narrators read from first-person accounts of the fire. word of the fire spread around the city quickly, and many bystanders came down to watch the event unfold. sadly, no one could really do anything to help any of the girls. firefighters' ladders and hoses simply could not reach the upper floors of the building. so those who were there eventually realized that they were not going to see a rescue; they were only going to see a slow, agonizing tragedy. needless to say, it was brutal.
there were multiple first-person accounts that spoke of watching girls crowd in the open windows of the doomed high floor, with flames jumping behind them, nipping at them. accounts of watching girls jump individually, and also holding hands. accounts of realizing that since there was no way out, all the girls in all the windows would eventually have to jump, with no hope of survival. accounts of girls in mid-air, fluttering their arms to right their bodies. in vain.
the new york film was released in 1999.
this i swear to you - if i played certain excerpts of these first-person accounts for you - the accounts of girls crowding windows and jumping - you would never be able to tell if the account was of the triangle factory fire of 1911, or 9.11. realizing this was one of the most eery feelings i've ever experienced. (i havent seen the last episode of the film, which was made after 9.11 to accomodate the event. i dont know if the film draws this parallel at that point.)
this transcendent parallel of the two single greatest tragedies in nyc's history got me to thinking.
it took a while, but the triangle fire served as the catalyst for great labor reform, and even the women's movement. progress was slow--laws were not changed immediately, but one could fairly say that eventually, crucial measures including key safety and workers’ compensation laws were borne out of the triangle fire.
thinking about this kind of depressed me.
b/c the thing is, while new york city seemed to have 'learned something' from the triangle fire, we don't seem to have 'gotten the message' from its recent analog, 9.11.
sure, in the days, even weeks, even months following 9.11, the city took on a different vibe. people really were more copacetic with each other, and i genuinely felt a unity here i had never experienced previously in my 20 odd years living on the rock. but now, in nyc, it feels practically like 9.11 never happened. it's business as usual.
sure, the US went after osama and the taliban pretty quickly. sure, we waged a war on terror.
but, to say nothing of how silly the 'war on terror' really is, we, nyc, didn't really learn the right lesson: a lesson pretty similar to the fire of 1911.
in short, both events should have spurred new york to protect its needy, downtrodden citizens, but only one event did.
make no mistake, 9.11 was more about poverty and desolation than 'terrorism' (yes, i know this idea is not original, but still). the plain truth is that if there weren't hopeless people in the middle east who don't have a proverbial pot to piss in, there wouldn't be terrorists attacking us, with our proverbial streets paved with gold.
im not saying new york should have responded to 9.11 by extending aid to the middle east. that doesn't seem to fit. but why not take the underlying lesson from 9.11--poverty and hopelessness hurt us all--and apply an antidote to those forces here, in nyc?
why didn't we, as galvanized new yorkers, stand up and say 'we will alchemize this tragedy. we will learn from it, just as we did from the triangle fire. we cant necessarily help people all over the world, but we sure as hell can help people in the five boroughs. more of us can volunteer at shelters, more of us can volunteer at needy schools....'
sure, some people did take it upon themselves to do these things, but where was the gestalt movement? where was bloomberg truly championing these ideas, with the full weight of his office, and even wealth? where was bloomberg putting radical new laws into effect which would aid the needy?
he/we had so much inherent political capital from 9.11. im not saying we didn't do anything, but we didn't do enough. of that i am sure.
the triangle fire produced sweeeping, once-in-a-generation labor reform. where is our reform? what will we tell our kids 9.11 was good for? a war? a conspiracy theory? a few movies?
all there was/is was an eye-for-an-eye military response by the US as a whole, and a year-long (give or take some mos.) campaign of faux born-againism by new yorkers, mostly taking shape as tacky american flags taped to apartment doors.
i see as many homeless people as ever. i see as many beggars on the subway. i feel just as much racial tension. it's the new york i grew up in and i love it, but--aye, there's the rub.
i dont want to tell my kids that the new york i grew up in didn't change on account of 9.11. i want to be able to tell them that before 9.11, there was a lot of poverty and hopelessness here, but 9.11 taught us something, and we fought like hell to change all that after the tragedy. just like they did after 1911.
what reforms will i be able to point to? i want to be able to say 'that's how mike bloomberg got his universal new york health coverage bill passed' or 'that's when it was mandated that every neighborhood had to have a homeless shelter of certain quality.' but i fear i wont be able to say SHIT.
i know i sketch some broad strokes here, but i think/hope you get my point.
i wouldn't say we're letting the terrorists win. but by responding in kind to them, rather than fixing the wounds we already had--the wounds the poor, hopeless terrorists illuminated for us--we're making this battle a push (tie) at best.
let's learn our lesson, new york. let's honor the people who, hopeless, jumped from the trade towers. let's honor them by giving strength and help to the hopeless new yorkers who are not jumping, but dying the slow death, every day, month upon month, year after year.
we see them every day. they should be our proxies for the people we couldn't save in battery park. and we have much more time to help them. right now, we aren't doing NEARLY enough.
let's change this city in a goddamn tangible way. radical reform, not the wish that every new yorker now has that fuzzy feeling in his heart that we all should be on level ground. let's fucking level the ground.
fulcrum and pivot have mostly overlapping definitions. but i use them here to mean different things. a fulcrum is a pt on which a great swing is made. a lever is pulled. something changes. in basketball, a player with the ball can pivot on one foot as much as he likes, but he does it to throw the defense off. he never actually moves anywhere.
let's make 9.11 a fulcrum, not a pivot. we did in 1911.
100 years apart, new yorkers watch a nightmare come true for fellow new yorkers.
** - (i dont know if ive endorsed this seven disc series here before or not, but in any case im gonna do so now. if you live in nyc, you must netflix or buy the film immediately, because it will open your eyes and heart to the city in a whole new way, and you will be grateful for this. if you just like nyc, you must do the same. if you're remotely interested in nyc, you must watch it. even if you hate nyc you should watch it to gain the respect for the city you're so sorely lacking. basically, everyone should see this film -- it's spectacular and epic. it's eptacular.)
posted by Colby | 5:14 PM
3 Comments:
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a galvanizing event in the movement for worker protections during America's booming industrial era, a milestone on the road to the militancy of our trade unions during WWII. the fire was a complementary event to the squalor of the slums depicted in episode 3 of rick burns' New York, the answer to which were the museums bequeathed to the public by the robber barons. both incidents spurred on advances in public hygeine and workplace safety, but after the neo-classical marble museum halls emerged in tandem to the electrification of the polis, what more could the Morgans and Carnegies bestow upon the city to redress the injuries of 1911? their gift to the struggling workers was a draft, a ticket to explore the gas-filled trenches of Europe's bold experiment in the industrialized slaughter of man en-masse. J. Edgar Hoover cut his teeth working with the American Protective League, a national operation with graduated membership levels forming a nexus between every major industrial concern that spied upon and intimidated men into supporting the Great War and submitting to the draft. this turn of events had interesting consequences in Russia when the Czar was toppled by history's greatest anti-war movement. the morning after, a stupendous inverted pyramid of war debt hung from the ravaged European continent, funneled through the City of London, grinding its capstone into the mirrored fun-house of Wall St.
Britain bled Germany dry through the Treaty of Verseilles, a prescient model for MacNamara's World Bank. the modest growth of the interwar period wasn't enough to pay off the crack-dealer, and no sooner did the implosion of the debt pyramid spark the crash of '29 than the first men to discreetly exit that market were investing their spoils in Germany's illegal re-armament. As North America underwent a decade of gut-wrenching economic contraction, labor became yet more radicalized, and the usual suspects looked across the Atlantic for growth opportunities. what Dillon Reade, Sullivan and Cromwell, and Brown Bros. Harriman saw was miraculous: not only a solution to the Bolshevik problem, but a fantastic re-industrialization in the very country they had just pounded into dust! all it took was a little more blood to slake the golem's thirst. on the domestic front, the booming trade in contraband had given rise to a national syndicate of black market profiteers, who moonlighted as the strike-breaking heirs to Ford's Pinkertons. in the post-war era, the Syndicate would find it more useful to penetrate the trade unions rather than confront them head-on, prefering to settle issues under the table and behind closed doors. the legacy of Tammany Hall was far from extinct.
when ground for the Pentagon was broken on September eleventh, 1941, a rebirth not altogether disimilar to Germany's began to unfold in old Virginia, the original power-base of our slaver's republic. out of the ashes of the Depression, a mighty war machine re-invigorated American industry and scientific "progress," outliving its Akira-esque growth spurt and absorbing West Germany and Japan's top scientists, spies, psychologists, torturers, fanatics and pirates. as the Cold War unfolded, East Asia provided the war machine with several opportunities to genocide those remotely affiliated with Red China. The very existence of the Soviet State allowed Europe to be bloccaded into a hub-and spokes subservience to NATO's leadership, free to concentrate on internal development. in North America, the thrill of internal investment started to ware off as growth potential waned in 1956. Morgan, Chase, Baring and their ilk prefered the growing European markets, fed by the raw materials being squeezed out of Latin America by the remnants of the Gestapo and their acolytes. As the '70's approached, MacNamara's World Bank shifted its policy doctrine away from encouraging Banana Republics, as Wall St and City of London foresaw a new growth potential in Latin America: authoritarian cadres could generate mountains of debt for them by corralling local elites into building huge infrastructure projects. protest and dissent could always be liquidated by officers trained by graduates of the German school, reborn as the 'School of the Americas.'
As the Syndicate continued its bourgeoning diversification away from booze and labor mediation, Arlington Virginia worked with State & Treasury to create pliant and eager labor markets the world over. Corporate America took its cue and began the de-industrialization of North America. Milton Friedman had a dream: never again would the Bossman have to get his hands dirty fighting with the uppity Yanqi worker. Leisure and distraction became a full-time job after Hoover's COINTELPRO thoroughly strangled the last gasp of air out of the republic during the tumult of 1968. no sooner had the Baby-Boomers settled into the cozy sub-urbs and wild nightclubs than the twin oil shocks of '73 and '79 gave the struggling workforce a shot-gun wedding to the 'service economy.' Running the economy in reverse was soon to be all the rage in Chile, when their elected president was assassinated on September 11, 1973 on Nixon's orders. As Thomas Friedman was having his first wet dream, circa 1975, Rockefeller's buddies used the recession in NYC to sink their claws into the city's public pension funds and exact the First World's first Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). Like the subways, the schools and hospitals never recovered. As New York had its NeoLiberal cherry popped, the Twin Towers were erected as a monument to the fabulous petro-dollars that Kissenger and Schultz had engineered with OPEC and the House of Saud to be invested in dollar-denominated securites. it was this green recycling of black gold that enabled the Dollar Wall St. Regime to wildly speculate on 3rd World Mega Projects across the globe. During the 80's, the residue from this orgy of spending would collapse national economies and as financial panics cascaded through the 90's, Washington's technocrats beat the drums to exact a triple price on the peoples of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, and East Asia: public tributary payments to Wall St/City of London ("debt service"); the sanctioning of illegal capital flight as the dictators' cronies sequestered their monies in offshore 'Private Investment' schemes; and the stripping of public assets at firesale prices as G7 companies and their local accomplices feted themselves on the fruits of IMF/WorldBank's SAP-mandated "privatizations." our banks made loans, the local elites siphoned off money and hid it in our banks, then when the bills for the half-finished projects came due, the local governments nationalized the debts and our banks got paid again! using that same capital to buy up the last businesses left standing was the icing on the cake--no wonder Clinton couldn't stop grinning all the time.
from then onto 2000, sweet dreams in the US hinterland evaporated as the Boomers' wages stagnated against an erratic cycle of oil shocks, inflation, rate hikes, recessions and a Telecomm/equities bubble. in the decade when Reagan's Central Command was busy in the near East sowing the seeds for the Northern Command to rise over the 'Homeland,' putting fiber optic cable into the ground allowed fin-de-siecle USA to execute yet one more upward transfer of wealth, and not so many people were counting on that cable laying their lives bare for the NSA to see. not many were concerned by the intense media mergers of 1996, the Lebanization of the Balkans, or the vacuum left in the Middle-East when MI-6's Muslim Brotherhood outlived the Arab Nationalists and Socialists they were designed to annoy--and annoy they did when they helped King Hussein of Jordan crush a Palestinean uprising on September 11, 1970. a select few saw the future; they were busy as bees organizing the PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY, feverishly plotting the Balkanization of Iraq.
September 11, 2001 represents the complete inversion of the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. whereas the latter was on the road to America's modern industrialization, the former represents an acceleration off of a cliff, racing toward the de-industrialized global feudal slave state of hyper-modernity. whereas in Triangle, all of the common man's aspirations seeded the grandeur of the New Deal, WTC was an event severed from reality and instantly incorporated into the simulacra of the corporate media's mighty wurlitzer. no sooner had Giuliani shipped the crime-scene evidence off to Chinese steel yards than had the Bush Agenda been launched into the stratosphere like some Scram-jet Global-Strike Bomber. no longer would client dictators need to be cultivated, new markets and (re)construction white elephants could be created out of whole cloth at the push of a button. only half a decade later, Halliburton/KBR is building immigrant detention camps in the South West, while the Army has promulgated a slave-labor agreement with the prison-industrial complex. Right on schedule, a guest-worker program is offered up as a bone-dry strawman, to be set ablaze by the white-hot xenophobia of trailor park america. just like the prohibition regime for drugs and everything else, human trafficking yields a sweet buck for the enforcement agencies in place to lean on the snake heads. as visa violations become felonies, doubtless none of this is lost on Julie Meyers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, daughter of the general standing next to Cheney and Wife in the bunker on 911, nor on Michael Chertoff, head of DHS, who used his position at the head of the FBI's criminal division to nudge into the memory hole an investigation into his former client's brother selling nuclear triggers to undercover agents posing as terrorists! Chertoff and the Dept of Justice played tugg of war for the chance to cover up all of the banking records that tie 'the Establishment' to 'the Evil-Doers.'
now the pliant workforces of Pinochet and Deng XiaoPing can be trafficked into to the States, where they will be forced to accept any conditions, competing with Army/Halliburton slave labor, facing the risk of being deported to their own chaotic countries. there will be no shortage of chaos there, to be sure, as Blackwater mercenaries and Stephen Cambone's Special Forces Command will always be ready to stir the pot. could the difference between the outcomes of 911 and 1911 be more stark? one can only hope the War Machine's organic reaction to the progressive current of 1911 will have its doppleganger in the people's reaction to the Controlled Demolition and fascist exploitation of 911. Let it be our fulcrum, not their pivot.
holy fucking shit.
My novel TRIANGLE, published last June, draws the connection between the Triangle fire and 9/11.
Katharine Weber
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