You've seen me without my beard. You'll have to die now.
Sharks must keep moving or they die. What we have here is a dead shark.
Universal Orlando just announced that it’s eliminating the Jaws ride at Universal Studios Florida. It was one the last of the rides that was original to the park’s 1990 opening. (Well, sort of original. It’s a retool of a hitchy version that included some impossible-to-maintain gimmicks such as red “blood” billows in the water and a turntable that turned the boats around.)
And now this still-too complicated boat ride is mooring in that great chlorinated wharf in the sky. It puts me in the mind of 2005, when the New York Post pitched Universal Orlando on a story: Would it let me come do a theme park performance job for a day? Could I see operations from the resort’s point of view? To the park’s credit, it agreed to try it. I flew down to play skipper for the Jaws ride (which it screamingly calls JAWS) for a day.
The nervous P.R. people sent me a videotape of the ride shot from the back of the boat, and by playing it over and over, I learned the script and flew down. The Hard Rock Hotel welcomed me to my room with an over-the-top, custom-made confectionary platter complete with half-bitten chocolate surfboards poking out of a plate of blue “water” frosting.
The resort’s risk paid off. I gave a great show. I was a test case for backstage journalist access, and it was a smash. It went so well, in fact, that when Ellen DeGeneres came down to tape her show a few months later, Universal put her to work on the Jaws ride, too. I’m not bitter or anything, but it bears noting that she didn’t stick to the script like I did. I’m just saying.
Here is my experience, which appeared in a different form in the New York Post (here’s a scan, since it’s no longer online there) and in my book on Orlando for the Pauline Frommer series.
++++
I’ve been attacked by a shark, unprovoked, 84 times.
And I haven’t even had my break yet. In the name of journalism, I’m working Universal Orlando’s 2.5-acre JAWS attraction, which begins as a scenic cruise of sleepy Amity Island but, as these things do, goes horribly awry when a vicious great white menaces my vessel. From my introduction to the guests as “Skipper Jason” to the harrowing, high-voltage climax, each ride is 5 minutes of fishy mayhem. Fireballs, explosions—the whole circus. And I’m the ringmaster.
When I was a kid, any carbon-based life form with opposable thumbs could operate a theme park ride, but here, training is a ritual. Normally, I’d have to go through 5 days of it, including a swimming test at nearby Wet ’n Wild, before being allowed to “skipper” a JAWS boat, but for the sake of journalism, Universal treats me to an abbreviated education. I learn it’s not a ride, it’s a “show,” and it’s not narration, it’s a “spiel.” As a spieler, I’ll usually run three boatloads in a row before taking a break—each show takes more than 5 minutes, so that’s 15 minutes of opera-level intensity. Phil Whigham, the attraction’s trainer, shows me where they keep the Gatorade jug. I am gonna need it, especially in this heat.
I receive a costume (cleaned daily by Universal and picked up at a huge wardrobe facility), a script (eight pages, annotated with acting “beats”), plus a nine-page workbook (Essay question: “How do I feel about the grenade launcher?”), and a tongue-in-cheek dossier on people and places in Amity (in case anyone asks). Normally, I’d go through at least 4 days of training before setting foot on a boat. But I’m thrown into deep water, so to speak, with just a morning’s education behind me.
Out on the lagoon, Phil adjusts my microphone headset and explains what the boats’ dashboard buttons do. One errant elbow could shut down the entire ride. So that provided exciting potential for lifelong mortification.
I meet Mimi Lipka, Universal’s resident acting coach. Although she’s a great-grandmother, she has more perk than the clean-cut college-age kids she shepherds through JAWS’ acting rigors. Before the park opens, Mimi has me run the “show” on an empty boat while she rides along, taking notes for my improvement as the mechanized shark rams us.
Interacting with the attraction’s timed special effects is like doing a pas de deux with a pinball machine. The machines are going to do their thing even if I forget mine. I have to fire my grenade launcher at the correct targets, yank the steering wheel at the right moments, and with full-bodied emotion, I must trick the guests into thinking I don’t anticipate that pesky shark’s pre-programmed re-appearances. Like clockwork, I go Rambo on the beast. “Eat this!” I bellow, blasting away at it, while Mimi scribbles. (A typical tip: “Look for survivors!”)
Finally, with a proud flourish, she writes my name on a dry-erase board hidden behind the unload station. I am “signed off” and officially on rotation. The ride opens.
I nervously guide an empty boat to the load station, where “deck crew” assigns seating by playing what they jokingly call “Human Tetris.” Now I see 48 open faces before me, waiting for me to take control of them. Judging by their expectant—some might say passive—grins, they’re dying to buy whatever I’m about to sell. I press the green start button. No return now.
“Well, time to start our voyage,” I chirp, on cue. “Wave goodbye to the happy landlubbers!” That line was always the start of my script, but I’m surprised to see my passengers actually do it. Once I fight the urge to rush, I realize I have them. Children gleefully point to the merest ripple; grown men shy from teeth they know are fake. The interaction—a triangle between me, a multimillion-dollar machine, and my audience—is invigorating, and I stop fretting about timing and just have fun. Show by show, my voice grows hoarser and I get thirstier, but the feedback from the guests’ faces feeds my energy level. When my passengers disembark, and as I catch my breath between runs, I eavesdrop.
“I wanna go again!” squeals a boy. “I wasn’t scared,” fibs another. And from a British girl: “I’ve got a soppy bottom!”
To me, a wet customer is a happy customer. Fin.
My classic attempt at misdirection is as hilarious as what I'm packing.
This was the Techno-Sphere Swatch. I owned one in the late '80s. It, too, is obsolete.
There’s pervasive concept that things that happen online deserve a whole different set of words to describe them. We contend daily with new words that there really don’t need new words for, such as hyperlocal, content, and that gossipy reduction of a complex social trend, meme.
In the beginning of our collective online existence, techies invented scientific-sounding new coinages as a way of legitimizing their offshoot world. But now that world has essentially merged with the Real Time world, but the colloquial segregation endures. For a movement that likes to view itself as expressively free and nimble, the onliners quickly burdened their communication with a lexicon of stultifying jargon, and they stubbornly resist using everyday language. Their writing is often as impenetrable and lifeless as the memos shuffled around in a mammoth corporation.
That’s annoying, but it’s not where the divisions end. The online world is treated like a separate kingdom even by those reporting on it.
Keep your ears open during the next newscast. Again and again, events are reported as being a story “online.” It instantly diminishes whatever happened.
If it’s a story, it’s a story, period. Why do we keep pretending that online happenings happen in some other universe?
When they talk this way, it’s as if TV journalists are still contorting to prove that they even know what the Internet is. We’re hip to the Twitter, gang! So hip, in fact, that it’s going to take 45 minutes away from reporting news to make sure you’re aware it knows what Sassypants87 tweeted about Taylor Lautner.
Its probably a form of Luddism to hold technology in a separate sphere from the rest of life. But that’s what we are still doing, 15 years after most of us adopted email and the Web fully into our lives.
The TV news channel journalists would probably excuse themselves by saying they always name the source as a way of citing sources, but their patronizing presentation hints that’s not quite the simple truth: They often show Web comments on a separate screen, complete with the logo of the originating site. They condescend, they switch into a new style. It’s not as if they broadcast the logo of a newspaper if it happens to run salacious or controversial remarks by a political candidate.
If you wonder if I have a point, it may be that you haven’t noticed. Go ahead, listen. On Twitter, Kardashian defended herself… Here’s what the candidate said on Facebook… Nine times out of 10, you could strike the “online” or “on Facebook” from the script of any TV report. It doesn’t matter anymore. They said it no matter where it appeared. Our online lives are integrated with our other lives.
So much news is drawn from the Web these days, anyway (kitty-cat YouTube videos on NBC Nightly News? really?), that surely by now it’s redundant to keep repeating it in many cases.
If it happened online, it still happened. The Internet is part of our lives. Let’s absorb it, accept it, and start talking that way. All of us.
Travel can be empty without connection: Badlands, South Dakota, 2011
I hate to say it, but someone should. Sometimes travel isn’t enough.
I know I have made travel, and the discussion of how anyone can do it, one of the central themes of the last 15 years of my life. And the world of magazines, blogs, and Twitter encourage me daily to maintain that. My identity dictates my focus.
But I also can see when travel, and the addictive pursuit of it, overtakes lives. The lessons one learns by traveling can be life-changing: the similarities between all people, the vast inequalities between societies, the deep psychic simplicity of rituals.
However, there comes a point when many people don’t give their own lives an opportunity to incorporate these profound discoveries of wisdom.
I can always spot the traveler who has been too long on the road. They linger for too many hours in the hostel common room. They surf too long on Facebook. Their eyes may gradually glaze over when confronted with a long list of potential new experiences to tackle tomorrow. They go slowly.
In short, they often show the same symptoms as someone who hasn’t been on the road long enough. For both groups, their inner voices are actually back home. The conscience knows what ambition does not, and if there is one thing that nearly every society has taught me, it’s that the natural state of most human lives is not conquest but ritual. And without the ritual of a daily life for comparison, the things one learns through travel would have far less meaning beyond mere curiosity.
I myself first felt this feeling of travel malaise when I was nearing the end of a nearly two-year backpacking trip. I was in Wellington, New Zealand, a city I have since returned to and come to adore. It was a Friday night, and everyone else in the hostel — nearly all of them had been on the road for only a few months — was going out on the town. But I found myself resisting. I wanted to stay in and read a book instead.
I heard myself say, “But what if I meet someone I actually like? I can’t have them. I’m leaving town soon.”
It was the first time I felt that the exposure to something new was not going to be enough. It was a rupture in my travel worldview.
I know now that it was a sign that after all of my meaningful discoveries, my heart was telling me that it was time to give meaning to the meaning.
Many travelers get that feeling, but many of them override it by seeking another destination with more discoveries. That works for a while because learning is never a waste. But they find the voice keeps gnawing, and as it does, it nibbles away at their resolve to remain in perpetual motion. Sometimes they start going back to the places they loved the first time around, not realizing that impulse could be a surrogate for building a ritual life of their own. Some of them head back out with a girlfriend or boyfriend, whichmaybewhytheworldiscrawlingwithtravelingcouples.
I had my Wellington realization more than a decade ago. Of course it didn’t stop my travels. But it altered how I approached them. I still go to new places, but increasingly, I find myself gravitating to places filled with people I care about, or to spots that I know to be my personal lodestones. Having seen nearly 100 countries, I now find myself reinvesting my explorations by learning and loving a few chosen places more deeply. More importantly, I invest in my true life back home.
Because of my recent apartment building fire, I have found myself needing to pass time outside of my home. My first impulse, being a career traveler, was to head to Thailand or Edinburgh or to spend some time writing in Tulbagh, South Africa, where one of my friends from past travels runs the sublime Cape Dutch Quarters retreat.
Although travel has always been like a companion in my life, I couldn’t pull the tigger this time. I have a book I want to write and other projects I want to see grow. This time, rather than unplug and absorb, I felt the psychic need to feed my learnings back into my ritual life. I will return to the road sometime. But right now, I feel like it’s not my purpose to discover, but to create.
Some travelers confuse this shift as a message that they have grown out of the need to travel. That’s not the case. The rewards of travel are not a function of age. After all, we have all been out there with old timers with more zest for exploration than the alcoholic Gap Year kid in the bunk above you. They can be, however, a function of where you are in your life.
I used to look at those Gap Year kids, those listless Australians gulping non-stop rum shots to impress girls and loitering for months in a single hostel without much resolve to pick themselves up and resume their lives. When I began traveling, I envied their open-ended itineraries. But after I felt my emotional rupture in Wellington, I saw some of them as avoiding the inevitable and necessary emotional connection to themselves. A new phrase came to my head:
“If you don’t put down roots, you can never grow.”
For many of us, this is why we travel. We travel to enrich the soil of our lives back home. But the lure of learning, paired with the emotional intensity of meeting fantastic people and having to condense the arc of a relationship into a few days, can be so seductive, so addictive, that we forget.
William Tweed, fireman, accumulated political power by proclaiming religious values and stoking the furies of those who felt society was leaving them behind. Sound familiar?
The GOP presidential aspirants are getting a lot of mileage by demonizing the potential of a civic health care system, but they clearly don’t know history. We’ve actually done something like this before in another area of our health and safety. Take this example from the history books: Boss Tweed.
The refrains from the nattering healthcare debate may remind us of a past adventure in “socialism”: not the time when we switched from private militias to standing government-organized armies (although that happened, too), but the pre-Civil War era in New York City, when the job of firefighting was wrested from the private sector and placed in government hands. It’s hard to imagine that anyone today thinks that old system of response was superior. But that’s pretty much how our healthcare system works — and it’s a mess, letting a whole class of people fall through the cracks.
In the old days in New York, you bought insurance for your house, and if disaster befell you, you first got attention from brigades your insurance company liked. And in a city built from wood, fires were a constant threat. (They still are. As I wrote last time, I’ve been living in hotels for nearly a month because of a fire in the apartment beneath mine.)
There was no fire department. There were fire gangs. If you wanted your fire put out, you had to rely on volunteer crews.
The Black Joke brigade plunders the draft office at Third Avenue and 47th Street. They also burned a hotel that refused to serve them whiskey while they did it. Stay classy, public services!
But those volunteer forces were a threat unto themselves. While buildings burned, firefighters recruited volunteers from street gangs, brawled, and beat up rivals in other companies. During the Draft Riots of the Civil War — a grisly, racist episode depicted in Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York— Black Joke Engine Company No. 33 actually set a draft office ablaze itself, then prevented other companies from putting it out.
The insurance companies became a part of the problem. Still, the job usually got done, because, Luc Sante wrote in Low Life, “What they lacked in professionalism, they made up in enthusiasm.”
But slowly, as people felt more violated by the inefficient and corrupted system, alternatives emerged. Private fire companies, like the Fire Insurance Patrol, were established to fill in the gaps. But they were a mess, too — they were established by insurance companies who stood to make a bundle by salvaging whatever they could.
So the very companies charged with protecting citizens made money by failing to prevent fires — just as today’s health industry makes more money if you get sick and undergo an optimal number of procedures.
Cincinnati became the first American city to ditch the patchwork of self-interested volunteer companies and institute the country’s first “paid,” or fully governmental, fire department, in 1853. The timing was technologically fortunate: Cincinnati that year started using steam engines instead of laborious hand pumps, putting untrained volunteers on the sidelines.
But how did New York’s rickety volunteer system survive so long?
Because, like our healthcare system, it had friends at the top. In New York, one friend was named Bill Tweed, who later ran the infamous Tammany Hall political machine.
Politicians got the population to say things like this: “Everything will fall apart if we change it.” “The government will ruin it.” “The government could never do it as well as the private citizen can.” “Give us a way to opt out.”
Tweed is now remembered as one of the most corrupt politicians in American history, and his powers of public manipulation were timeless. Behind the scenes, he was all about cronyism and kickbacks, but publicly, he held the vote by invoking Christian themes at every opportunity, and directing huge sums of tax money to churches and charities. It was slick P.R., and his constituents ate it up.
Tweed got his start in as one of those volunteer firemen — in those days, a quick road to power since, like the Mafia knows, it got a whole neighborhood behind you. He led a thuggish brigade with the misleadingly patriotic name Americus Fire Company No. 6. Tweed became known for the red shirt he wore in his early days with the “Big Six.”
The fire insurance model bred corruption, and Tweed, the former fire company foreman, did everything to make sure his buddies in the fire business didn’t lose their power, including by gleefully stoking racist fears in the population.
This ad for an 1859 Big Six social event, held as it was increasingly beleaguered by reformers, glorifies a hand-pumped wagon six years after steam pumps came in. If you want to get the people on your side, whip them up with nostalgia.
In the 1850s, someone had enough. A politician overseeing the volunteer companies blew the whistle. Alfred Carson spoke out about his companies’ failings and their slipshod maintenance. But Tweed censored Carson’s critical reports and ultimately got Carson replaced by Harry Howard, a Tweed man who, not surprisingly, didn’t want to change the system.
Still, reformers like Carson had made an impression on the public, which gradually decided it deserved a better system. Both police officers and firefighters were transitioned into forces fully backed by the government — which managed the transition from private to public so poorly that there were two police departments for a month in 1857.
In his book Five Points, Tyler Anbinder wrote: “The Irish-American condemned the [change] for its ‘partisanship, odiousness, and tyranny … It virtually disenfranchises the people’ by taking control of municipal institutions away from the city’s elected leaders.”
Just as they do now, politicians with something to lose argued the skies would fall if things changed. Opponents convinced immigrants that the changes were part of a plot to centralize government control over their lives, and to make them irrelevant. The city’s poor were whipped into a frenzied anger that sparked a deadly riot on July 4, 1857, as gangs attacked any cops they could find from the new professional force. They swarmed the streets with knives, pistols, and iron bars. Cops and gang members alike were killed, and the militia was called in to bring calm. (A recession began in that year, too.)
The government placated the volunteers by allowing them to intermingle with the new system — shades of the “public option” opt-in of today’s healthcare debates — and by promising their entrenched members first crack at the paid jobs. Compromise paved the way to our current system — a system once so despised that people killed each other to prevent it.
Just as with the political benefactors of New York’s fire insurance industry, many of the bureaucrats wrestling today with healthcare reform and regulation came from the ranks of the health-insurance industry. And today’s elected politicians have strong links, too: Sen. Joe Lieberman’s swing vote determined the structure of the bill — even as, reformists argue, his wife works with a lobbyist firm that serves the health-insurance industry.
Tweed’s grasp on absolute power weakened after his fire-insurance system was extinguished. Within five years, he was under attack, and soon after, he was sent to prison on corruption charges. Tweed died behind bars, and Americans adapted to the new system of a government-led fire force.
And then there’s another important side note: In 1798, John Adams, our second president, signed “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” It authorized a government-run system of hospitals and a tax to fund them. And Thomas Jefferson, his biggest political rival, supported it, too. That’s right: The two fathers of our Declaration of Independence, and our second and third presidents, both supported government-run healthcare.
I’ve never thought Obamacare was a fair name for the new system. After all, it was clearly the product of compromise between the two parties on Capitol Hill. But calling it Obamacare succeeds in maligning Obama with a vague smear, and it also distracts from the facts: The Congressmen who most shaped the bill are often cashing big checks from Big Pharma, which didn’t want things to change.
Few would argue that the greater good wasn’t served by the painful switch from private fire insurance.
Then again, few are arguing about the greater good at all.
Everyone's a critic: The KAWS sculpture weeps for luxury values at the Standard
On the first day of this month, the New York nightmare happened to me. The apartment beneath me caught fire. The girl who lives there wasn’t at home, but I’m lucky I was, because I had just returned from three weeks away. I’m fortunate my apartment wasn’t empty, because I smelled the smoke, then I heard the crackle of a large blaze, and finally I called 911 as the air in my home became rapidly unbreathable. I stopped the flames, but I everything I own was smoked. I’ve been living in hotels ever since.
The first thing I have learned is that having insurance is worth every penny. Believe it.
I’ve had to switch from hotel to hotel because Fashion Week logjams swept in and swept me out. So now I’ve moved four times, which has enabled me to see New York as a visitor sees it. It’s not a pretty picture.
A hotel may have comfortable beds and a pretty structure, but it always reveals its true attitude toward guests through its amenities. The rooms were built by architects and designers who have long since moved on, but the administration of amenities shows what the people who now run the place really think of you.
Forgive me if I’m cranky (I warned you about that in my last post), but I haven’t slept in my own bed for nearly a month now. And although I do understand these hotels need to make a buck, I also recognize that the nickeling-and-diming of the American traveler has eroded the proud values of the hospitality industry to the point where it’s not often worthy of that name anymore.
John Cleese recently said that what interested him in doing Fawlty Towers was all the hotels he’d been at where things were run for the convenience of the staff and not for the convenience of the guests. He said he could tell in a minute after setting foot in the lobby which hotel he was in. Only some hotels truly care to be hospitable to people stuck away from home. The selfishness of the hoteliers in the other category was what inspired him to create Basil Fawlty.
When I checked into the Standard New York, the model/clerk asked how I was. I told him I was checking in because of a house fire at home. He didn’t say another word until, “Here’s your key.” Not hospitable, no, but perhaps the awkwardness won in that instance.
Soon, I realized that chilliness was endemic to The Standard. The Standard’s rooftop bar, featured prominently in its marketing, was usually closed to guests. It was always rented out at peak cocktail hours. One night, a friend of mine asked whose party was happening, he was told by a model/host, “I’m not going to tell you that.”
Putting the traveler second: The W Hollywood Pool, pictured here without hotel guests
I found the situation just as prickly last year in Los Angeles, when I tried to use the pool as a guest of the W Hollywood and was told to go away. My complaint caused quite a furor, was covered in The Economist, and elicited some non-apologies from the hotel management. But the trend persists.
The hotel also advertises free wi-fi, but once you check in, you learn the truth: The free wi-fi is a crappy version that tops out at 512 Kbps and kicks you offline during downloads. If you want to do much of anything, including watch movies or YouTube, you have to pay a ghastly $20 a day for the high-speed variety. Were they kidding? Andre Balazs Properties, which was charging me $700 on some nights, actually went through the trouble of creating two wi-fi networks — one of them intended to be junk for the have-nots? They can’t throw in high-speed internet for rates like that?
This week, CNN wrote about this issue, which I’ve been pointing out for years at Budget Travel and AOL: The expensive hotels rip guests off on Internet, while the cheap ones know that including quality wi-fi will guarantee future repeat business.
I think someone should create a blacklist of hotels that advertise free Internet access that, in reality, stinks. Just because a hotel tells you it was wi-fi doesn’t mean it works. Last month, I found the same wi-fi bait-and-switch at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Avenue in Chicago: It advertises free wi-fi that, in truth, is often impossible to use.
In fact, I’ve found that about a third of the time, it’s lousy despite the fact it’s listed as an amenity. You’d never tolerate algae in the swimming pool, or a faucet that only yields a trickle, but we seem to shrug and overlook clogged or inadequate web access.
The Dream Downtown, famous for having windows in the bottom of its pool that are visible from the lobby lounge, was kind of a mess. It boasts about fancy in-room bells and whistles, such as a desk-side panel where you can plug your MP3 player in. Except there were no instructions or cables, and no one who worked there could explain how to use it. Unfortunately, rates of $600 a night are too steep for members of the Geek Squad.
Style icon? Or just a bigger celebrity than Lisa Simpson?
Like so many new urban hotels, The Dream Downtown is essentially a life support system for its event spaces, so guests are not prioritized highly.
On the first night I was at the Dream, Nate Berkus was on hand to get an award from US Magazine as one of the city’s best-styled people. (He accepted it in, um, a grey tee shirt and an open denim button-down.) The next night, Marc Jacobs had his show’s after-party there. So those were two nights I pretty much had to stay in my room. On my last night there, I tried to get up to its buzzed-about rooftop bar. I was a paying guest — a heavily paying guest at that — but at the kiosk I was told it would be up to “the doorman’s discretion” whether I could have a drink there. No, thank you. Not gonna submit myself to rejection at a hotel I’m paying already to stay at.
I joined the plebes at the ground-floor bar instead. It had run out of several ingredients, making my order impossible. The next lady who sat down beside me wanted a pinot and they were out of that, too. At the sound of her voice, I glanced aside and saw that it was Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson.
It was gratifying to know that it wasn’t just me. Even multimillionaire celebrities get the shaft at Manhattan’s overtrendy hotels.
Then at 11:45, the half-stocked bar declared it was last call and trounced us all out, leaving us with only one option: the bar where the doorman wouldn’t look twice at us because we were not 22 with perky boobs.
The company that manages the bar replied to my tweet about it — incidentally, that’s what the W Hollywood did, too; it blamed my dissatisfaction on a contractor — but the way I see it, I laid out the problem in plain English already. It’s not my job as a customer to jump through hoops, to keep emailing customer service reps, to make sure it’s rectified. It’s theirs as professionals who claim to be in the “hospitality” industry.
These hotels look pretty, even if they all charge for $17 for the most basic of cocktails, which I have required several of during these trying days of contractors and movers, and I can only imagine how delightful they would be if they rose to their price bracket and truly treated customers with luxury. Then again, value has never been at the forefront of fashion.
I peck, but it’s not all bad. I did have a good time at a third hotel I’ve stayed in, the Soho Grand Hotel. It let me borrow a fish during my stay. And it even had an amenity that the Standard and the Dream would never permit to clutter its hyper-styled decor: a free coffee machine for guests.
It was so thoughtful, for a minute I thought I’d died and gone to Best Western.
They don't warn you that cruddy Internet comes standard at the Standard
A friend recently gently accused me of being too vocal on Twitter about bad customer service. “Do I henpeck too much?” I asked her. “It’s what makes you you,” she said. “Keep pecking.”
Being a consumer reporter is one of the things I do. Being a travel writer, too, is a form of consumer reporting.
But beyond the fact that it’s one of my bailiwicks, it’s also the right thing to do in a society that increasingly marginalizes and takes advantage of the masses.
Bad value is a form of poor governance.
I could get all Naomi Klein on you right now. In our society, corporations are the new governments. In fact, in many cases, they hold the puppet strings to the government itself.
And when businesses treat customers poorly, or milk them, or coddle them, or rip them off and refer them to script-reciting Indians to be assuaged, then they are bad stewards of our destines, and fighting becomes a form of good citizenship.
I feel the same irritation with a business that cavalierly betrays me as I do with a politician who disregards my vote, or calibrates the denial of my needs as an acceptable loss.
Some people permit poor customer service as a necessary byproduct of a capitalist society. They say businesses have to make money somehow. I see it more as a breach of trust. So some see it as complaining. I don’t. I see it as having my say after a business has had theirs.
There’s not much justice to be had in our consumer culture, partly because the natural state of consumption is to become apathetic. When people deign to appraise the value of the consumables, or gauge the essential ethics of the contract, it makes some people nervous.
Pecking, to me, is a form of critical thinking. It’s a way of keeping consumer culture in check.
“I’m a huge critic of abusive systems,” I told my friend. “And the best way to do that is to point out abuses.”
Is delivery a fantasy? (Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 2002)
The United States Postal Service lost $3 billion last quarter, and now its masters intend to cut overnight delivery, slow down mail, and close facilities (particularly in poor neighborhoods).
Government-hating Teabaggers whinge, but the fact is that while the Postal Service is federally mandated, it does not receive taxpayer money. So if we’re going to save it — and if we don’t, we’d be the only country in the world without one — we have to reinvent the way it works. Although we are increasingly digital as a society and writing fewer letters, the Post Office still handles plenty of mail, and it’s a standard piece of any country’s infrastructure.
But as with most of America’s infrastructure, we’ve ignored it, and refused to update it, for generations. It’s limping along on an outdated financial model at the very moment anti-government candidates are being elected to the government they hate, and they’re bearing hatchets.
On a recent trip to London, I looked to the British Post Office, which may hold the secret to returning the United States Postal Service to solvency. Watch my short video:
I wrote this post on September 18, 2001. I haven’t changed a word.
I titled it “Ago.”
+ + + + + +
That morning, I was awakened by the silence.
I don’t recall what woke me up early, at 8:45 a.m., but it must have been something. Probably something I heard in my sleep, like the grumble of a garbage truck two blocks away. But the morning was so very still, the streets so unusually quiet outside my window, that I had to nestle deeper in my bed. I never get up before 9:00.
So I went back to sleep, shallowly. In the hallway outside my apartment, someone dropped something metal and it clattered to the ground. A few minutes later (ten? fifteen?) I had drifted mostly to sleep again, when once again I was awakened by the silence. This time, finally. I lay in the pleasant silence of a Tuesday morning in early September, as the city shook off the overnight rains.
Usually, only my alarm can roust me. That morning, for some reason, I made the sudden decision to be awake. I got out of bed, still bleary, and turned on the TV. I expected to see Regis or Kelly, the silly make-up people who usually start my day with a fired blank.
Everybody knows what I saw. Why say it?
The flames were just billowing out of the second building. The news voice was trying to remain calm as he said “…second plane just hit.”
I think I know now how people feel when vast stores of knowledge are suddenly released to them, when understanding suddenly deepens and taps into new reservoirs. It isn’t rapture, like the Christians say, or enlightenment, like the philosophers. It’s anguish — by law, the knowledge that anything is possible must have its potent flip side.
So I had feared this sort of thing for years. People told me I was being foolish. When I went on my world tour, which is covered in the first 30 dispatches on this site, I actually put my possessions in storage in New Jersey because I fully expected a terrorist attack to cripple Manhattan while I was away. I hate to say it once again, but cynics should get more credit.
I called my mother right away, knowing the phone lines would soon be jammed. She was already sobbing because she had been watching. I also called my grandfather, in Atlanta, because I knew the worry could trouble his weak heart. I told them to tell everyone I was fine.
I threw clothes on and grabbed a coat I didn’t need and flew down the stairs. A few people were walking down the street, slowly, as if they didn’t know yet. They probably didn’t. I suddenly got cotton mouth, and I jogged down 29th Street and turned down Eighth Avenue, and one block down, the World Trade Centers crept out from behind the building where Amnesty International has its offices. They were aflame, like we all know.
No one wants to hear about my emotions. We all had our own. But people do want to know what it was like in New York City when this happened. That is what I will tell you now.
++++++++++
People on the street were, at first, mildly interested. It was pretty impressive to see those things burning like that. More than one person remarked that it was just like a movie. Pretty sad that we find those kinds of movies entertaining, and pretty sad that we have no more facile ways to express ourselves anymore. But it did look like a movie, burning off in the distance, poking up over the New York Sports Club and the Duane Reade and the donut shop like a matte painting from a ’70s potboiler. The smoke gushed off to the left and we could look directly into the black gash made by what we later learned was The First Plane.
Now and then, little bits of debris would drip out of the gash, like sooty goblets of wax from a candle, and plummet to earth. We later learned what those were, too.
You have to understand that none of us thought they would fall. It didn’t enter our minds. We knew it was a big deal, of course, and that it was a day to remember, but we thought it would go something like, “Remember that day the Twin Towers got hit and burned out at the top? I saw it. It was awful!” Some of us had cameras, including me.
People came out of the subway at 25th Street and saw it for the first time. As crowds grew, someone would rush over and tell them what was just going on, the very latest from the TV. They were commercial airlines, it was no accident.
“It was no accident.”
This is where New York’s story differs from all others. The instant we understood that this was an attack, each of us was (without saying so) filled with instant dread. What if the smoke pouring out of the WTC was toxic, or tainted with germs—and here we were, standing on the street, breathing it. What if there were coordinated bombs riding on the subway, ready to explode beneath our feet? Behind us, the Empire State Building rose into the sky, tempting more jets. Some people suggested going to the grocery store to stockpile. There were a hundred possibilities for panic.
Cars parked at the curb were blasting their radios, and soon word spread that the Pentagon had been hit, and more planes were missing.
The rest of the country was shocked by what was unfolding on their TV screens. We in Manhattan, though, realized that without a doubt, we were in the crosshairs. anything could come next, right on top of our heads. People in Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle — their fears were based on conjecture. Ours were based on the towers burning in front of us. I cannot adequately convey the sensation of futility, and of suppressed panic, that gripped all of us.
I wasn’t chancing anything. I went indoors. I turned on the TV and started sending e-mails to everyone I knew.
The rest of the day was a blur. The first tower fell as the TV anchor wailed. The roar came in on my television and through my window. I remember grabbing my head, gasping a silent sob, and saying “From now on, there’s only going to be one!”
When the second tower fell, with the double roar again, the TV anchor said, “If there are any children watching…sorry, but I don’t know what to tell you.” Several stations went black when the antenna slipped into the smoke. The vibrations shook my house. It felt like the end of the world, like existence itself was slipping beneath the waves.
+++++++++++
Most people don’t know how it feels to have an important landmark suddenly deleted from the landscape of their lives. It’s like taking the sea away from Miami Beach, or the Eiffel Tower from Paris. All of a sudden, it feels like you’re in a different place altogether, with new buildings, new streets. Things you never noticed before become the dominant feature. Everything dies and is uncomfortably reborn on its own terms.
You come out of the subway and glance downtown. You think, “What’s missing?” before you tell yourself you know very well what’s missing. You can’t help it.
I don’t remember what I did that whole day. Fifteen hours that I cannot account for. The man I used to call Adolf Giuliani appeared on TV, dusted with powder and blood, and told us that entire fields of people were dead, and he saw it. Somehow, I felt reassured by that. Probably because it’s the first time I can remember that Americans politicians used candor. (Within days, President Bush would be back to public relations, and the honesty would end.)
My friend Lee, who evacuated his office near the U.N. walked all the way over to my house through people-clogged streets. We staggered downtown, to the Village, and watched vans trailing concrete dust and saw red-eyed, dust-caked businessmen walk past us. No one had any particular emotion. It was as if we were going to the grocery story in slow-motion. I realize now that we were all in shock.
We heard that the island was sealed off, that all flights were grounded. We couldn’t get out if we wanted to. We might as well sit and wait for whatever. If the World Trade Center was truly gone, you couldn’t tell through the mighty white cloud issuing from the bottom of Manhattan. All traffic ceased, and the people overtook the streets. I’ve seen that happen only once before, in 1996, when a massive snowstorm turned all New Yorkers into good neighbors.
We each had a slice of pizza. We sat near the stoop where they shot “Sex and the City” that one time. Fighter jets stormed over our buildings.
The following days were just as hazy. I don’t know how I lived through them. I don’t know what I did except wait for more death.
+++++++++
In the nights after the carnage, something else happened. It’s something you didn’t hear about on your TV. How could they explain to you what I’m about to tell you?
The night of the attacks, the air my apartment felt tense. It felt charged with activity. For many hours, I was unable to separate the sensation of activity from that of my own fear. At first, I thought I was simply feeling anxious, which explained the constant feeling that I was being watched from behind.
If I had to describe it in one word, I would say that I felt an intense sensation of insistence. It was almost as if I felt strongly that there was something important that I had left undone, that there was something I had to get up and do, right away.
As the night went on, though, I couldn’t imagine what that responsibility could be. I had been released from work, and my kitchen was full of uneaten food. It took me a while to realize what was truly happening in my house.
In one 90-minute stretch, some 5,000 souls were violently unleashed from their bodies, and it happened a little over a mile from my bedroom. The feeling of insistence, I believe, was them. The recently deceased, you often hear, find themselves confused about their new state. The World Trade Center people were telling me that they couldn’t understand what had happened to them. It had happened so quickly, without preparation. They were confused, and they felt lost. It was almost as if they were trying to get my attention for some confirmation.
I folded myself tightly on my couch at 3 in the morning, shivering with chills, and told them quickly that yes, it was true, that they had died. But they should go leave me alone, or they should go to their families and comfort them, or they should go back to Ground Zero and help other people die. Or they should simply move on.
I feel silly saying this. But I know what I felt. Something was in my apartment. And no one can laugh at me unless they, too, have been very near a place where thousands of lives have just been suddenly snuffed out. Scoff if you like, but you have never been so close to such devastation. I felt them, and it happened.
Night by night, they began to drift away. By the fourth night, they were completely gone. On Friday, my apartment felt hollow, and I could finally focus on the fear.
+++++++++
Everyone became skittish. If someone happened to run to catch a crosswalk light, everyone around them shifted nervously. People were wary of everyone around them. Someone showed up in our office with an egg salad sandwich and I thought, for a moment, that we were being attacked with poison gas. It sounds funny. It wasn’t.
Everyone in the world can sympathize, but no one can understand. No one else saw it all unfold in front of their own eyes, or heard the sounds, or felt the fear. We all became exceedingly polite to one another, mostly because we realized, together, that life is hard enough.
And no one could be prepared for the smell. When the winds shifted to the north, the stink of burning metal and scorched concrete seized the lungs, and sent you back inside.
I have heard the sound of sirens more than my own name. Every single one could be the telltale beginning of another unexpected end.
When I hear about some housewife in Alabama who gnashes her teeth and mourns the death of her peace of mind, I have to admit I get pissed. What are you so mad about? You live in safety. We lived through all of this. We didn’t merely witness it.
A marginally talented TV actress named Shannon Elizabeth now carries a gas mask and biohazard suit in her car. She lives in Los Angeles. She represents how disappointed I am in Americans. We could have used this as a chance to plug into reality and to understand our role in the world. Instead, many of us have merely grown more ignorant, more reactionary, and more self-indulgent.
The media and the government — those people who tell us how to think — have already conditioned people well. Now, if you suggest that America has perhaps been too arrogant in its dealings with other countries, and that perhaps we did things to anger less powerful countries, then you are labelled an anti-patriot. The merest suggestion that America could have avoided this, or that America is itself guilty of atrocities abroad in Iraq or Afghanistan, is tantamount to agreeing with the terrorists.
When I am told that my political opinion is better left unvoiced, I am ashamed to be an American. Free speech is dying. I will not tailor my opinions to “support” a president who was not popularly elected — or any other leader. It is my right as an American to not support the millionaire boobs who run this country.
America did have warnings that this could happen, both political and specific. But we’re too greedy, to set in our ways, too crushed by the weight of our own bureaucracy to have any impulse other than intractable arrogance. How could an anointed land like America ever be wrong? Now, our blind patriotism, drummed up to galvanize a war, merely reinforces that heedlessly deadly habit.
The world is so big, but I have made it small. It seems like I always look up to see the middle of it. I want to find some big pocket of the world and vanish into it. A month before this happened, I was in the Australian outback. I would like to return, and never leave.
Within a day, Ground Zero was forbidden to visit. From then, New Yorkers’ only connection with the event was through television, same as everyone else. Might as well be going on in Taiwan.
We went to a Union Square peace night, which was really a mass gathering for healing. I bought extra candles at the 99-cent store and passed them out. We all sort of stood there and groped with the reality of what just happened to us, and warded off the fear of it happening again tomorrow. Then a show-off started playing patriotic tunes on her trumpet. The news crews, who had previously wandered listlessly among the mourners, honed in on her like ticks on livestock. They dashed over and shot video of her rabble-rousing and ignored the thousands of people who were there just for peace, with no political agenda. They turned our mourning into a political act.
We got disgusted and left.
Why should mourning ever be a political act? That implies that any government could be more righteous than our own humanity.
Then came the wallpaper of the missing. Bus stands, buildings, hospitals, random stretches of brick wall. Everywhere. Thousands of color-copier fliers with the faces of the dead. Some of the Poster People had wealthier families than others, you could tell. Mark Rasweiler, who worked in the rich-man’s office of Cantor Fitzgerald, a few feet beneath the poor men of the Windows on the World scullery rooms, was the most prominent Poster Person. He was everywhere; his family spared no expense.
Except on the posters, each dead loved one was called “Missing.” So began the euphemisms. Soon, we’d all be thrust into a world of propaganda, of hyper-p.c. watchcries, and of modern-day Victory Garden manure.
I bought a butane lighter and carried it with me in my day bag. Whenever I passed a shrine with candles (at 21st and Eighth, at the bus stand across from St. Vincent’s, at Washington Square Park, etc.) I would light all the extinguished candles. I wasn’t the only person who did that. All week, I carried that lighter with me and used it as regularly as my cell phone or my MetroCard.
I fear the phrase “United We Stand.” Beyond the message of defiance, the wording of that bumper-sticker phrase implies that challenging opinions are not welcome. Tow the line, don’t dissent, “support our president.” We have entered a time when free speech is not welcomed, when rational discussion is shunted on grounds of patriotism. Ironic, since my patriotism is stoked in no small part by the constitutional guarantee of free speech.
Housewives in Alabama and passionate patriots in Georgia can put up all the “Fuck Osama” posters they want. Their cities were not attacked. They never worried for a moment that, realistically, death could turn toward them next. So it’s easy for them to want war. In New York City’s Union Square, an ongoing peace protest has been mounted. The press doesn’t cover it; they only show little children waving American flags, as if to say, “Well, if they’re smart enough to love America, everyone should support our president.” But if you live in a war zone, and if you see two 110-story towers dripping burning humans — right before your groggy eyes on a Tuesday morning — then the idea of war means something else to you. It is real, it is dangerous, and it could come back to your yard. And to many of us who were here, no civilian death will ever be excusable.
++++++++++
I was there the night before, by the way. I rode right by them in a taxi at 7 p.m. on September 10.
In the pouring rain, I attended a function sponsored by the Hong Kong tourism board, held on a ferry. We rode out from South Street Seaport, down around the bottom tip of Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty. We looked back at downtown New York City and admired it through the gales of rain.
And I said, “Have you ever seen an old picture of Manhattan, or an old movie? It’s very strange to see those fancy skyscrapers aren’t there. It’s odd to think years ago, when whole generations of people thought of New York, they didn’t think of those.”
After that, I didn’t really notice them. I turned away from them and started a different conversation.
Something about the past week makes me think about one single, elusive word: ago.
What exactly does it mean? What, now, is the context?
Mount Rushmore is empty-calorie patriotism, but it’s pretty.
Local concerns overbuilt the amenities so much in the 1990s so that they’re still paying them off. Merely parking a car costs $11. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum took extreme care in rendering his four subjects accurately, but the piles of tourist junk hawked by Xanterra at its several gift shop concessions? Not so much.
Here’s what it’s supposed to look like, in all its placebo-patriotic attractiveness:
Mount Rushmore
But most of the tourist tat sold in the gift shops mangles the angles and fudges the faces.
Thomas Jefferson is usually made to look the most ridiculous.
Here, the boys appear to be beaten up
This Thomas Jefferson looks like Shelley Winters. I think Abe's in drag.
Abe looks like he just let one loose, and TR is giving him the stinkeye. Tommy's mascara is dripping. George is trying to ignore their shenanigans.
On this votive holder, it's Abe who's pissed off, and Tommy now resembles Bea Arthur...
...but if you light it, they look like the Beatles. George is John Lennon (of course), in shades.
Then again, even Gutzon Borglum's own model, on view in the old workshop, makes it look like George Washington is muscling in front of Thomas Jefferson, and Lincoln looks eerily like he's watching a play from the box at Ford's Theatre. (Obviously, our familiar, disembodied Mount Rushmore looks nothing like this model, either. He died in 1941, 14 years into it, and it's technically unfinished.)
East of the Black Hills, in front of a steak house on 79 in Hermosa, South Dakota, thought to be three castoffs from the now-closed Presidents Park sculpture garden, provide a counterpoint to Mount Rushmore with someone’s modern favorites: JFK, Reagan, and George W. Bush.
It's not the first time Dubya cast a dark shadow on the land
Then again, Teddy Roosevelt doesn’t really belong up on that mountain, either, does he? He’d only been dead for less than a decade when Rushmore was begun. But no one could talk Borglum, bullheaded man, out of carving TR on the rock.
There was a reason: Turns out they were good friends.
I visited the Minnesota State Fair in St. Paul and thinking of you, of course, I had my camera with me. I created this kind cool, kinda quiltlike portrait of what it’s like to go, with a special emphasis on all the many foods on a stick you can find there.
And, oh yes, there are a lot. Too many, as you’ll see.
There’s even a special appearance by Garrison Keillor, who himself makes an annual special appearance at the Fair with this Prairie Home Companion broadcast.
