Well a lot has changed in 19 years
From Slate:
From 9/11 to COVID-19
The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.
A lot has changed in 19 years.
One of the first things that I would point out is that when Al Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they attacked the United States.
I was a freshman cadet an ROTC at the time and all of us cadets were rushed off to Camp Atterbury for an emergency crash course in training because of the military going onto alert.
Even in rural Indiana, we were acutely aware that 9/11 was an attack on all of us. Americans from every state joined the military to fight against those that attacked us.
It was only later that many of us learned the arrogance many New Yorkers had that they didn’t see it that way and that 9/11 was not an American tragedy but a New York tragedy only. This headline seems to come from that point of view.
It’s a tale of two cities, yet it’s about the exact same city, in two very different times. Eighteen years ago, in the wake of Sept, 11, 2001, New York City became America’s city, and Rudy Giuliani became America’s mayor as the nation mourned something unthinkable. Now, as the coronavirus crashes into an unprepared country, New York City is again experiencing something unthinkable—but this time it’s doing so as an outsider, a criminal, an unwelcome foreigner. What’s changed? Surely New York is the same New York it was 18 years ago. What’s changed, it would seem, is the rest of America.
New York didn’t change? Really?
The New York City that once elected Rudy Guiliani is now run by a Sandanista supporting communist progressive named Bill de Blasio and has a card-carrying socialist for a Congresswoman.
But let me guess… Trump.
Rudy Giuliani transformed into “America’s Mayor” overnight. Americans felt a singular pride for the patriotism of 9/11, a pride that lasted for over a decade. Movies, songs, and TV shows, tied themselves in knots to both affirm and elide the complicated relationship between popular culture and the city that never sleeps.
Fucking New Yorker. 9/11 was an attack on all of us. We all grieved together.
Coronavirus is affecting every state in the union right now, New York may be an epicenter of the American outbreak, but every city and state is dealing with their own sick.
As of this writing, New York City has seen more than 1,500 people dead and more than 57,000 cases diagnosed. But this time, New York City has not received an outpouring of national love and support. Instead, it has been shunned and shamed.
Maybe that’s because New York City did shit like this:
Mark Levine is the Chair of the New York City Council health committee.
You know what, I’m going to post this video just for fun:
Not to be an evil victim blamer, but it seems like New York did this to themselves because the political leaders they elected were so infected with TDS that they downplayed the Coronavirus to spite Trump’s “racist” and “xenophobic” travel ban.
Maybe it’s the fact that the media is telling us daily that New Yorkers are still not engaging in the same social distancing that we in far less densely populated areas are told that if we don’t do, we are literally murdering grandma. Then The New York Times comes out to remind the rest of us that it’s wrong to call out New Yorkers for that because social distancing is a privilege.
Or maybe it is the number of states that have had to crack down on rich New Yorkers who have decided to take their infections out of the Big Apple and hide out in luxury in their vacation homes. It’s hard for people from Florida, Rhode Island, or even the Hamptons to show support for NYC when privileged New Yorkers are their vector for infection.
There might be very good reasons that New York isn’t getting the same “outpouring of national love and support” it once did, but no New Yorker isn’t going to see it that way.
The president, in particular, seems to have no allegiance to his former hometown.
Maybe that’s because he’s the President of the whole United States of America and just New York City?
Or maybe it’s because the impeachment bullshit that consumed the Democrats during the early part of the Coronavirus outbreak was lead in the Senate by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.
Yes, the President should be above that, but “help us after we tried to destroy your Presidency” is a tall order to ask of any person.
As Masha Gessen suggests, New Yorkers are quickly finding themselves with no good options. They can stay hunkered down in tiny apartments and listen to the sirens all night, or they can be pilloried for fleeing, a sign of disloyalty and privilege. Those who leave are blamed and shamed for both spreading the virus and using scarce resources wherever they land. Those who stay will be blamed for using up scarce resources in the city. There is no right way to be a New Yorker right now—just as there was no wrong way to be a New Yorker after 9/11.
Boo-fucking-hoo. You don’t get victim status for being a rich New Yorker wanting to spend your lockdown on your beach house in Miami because you don’t like being cooped up in your Manhattan condo.
Also, there were plenty of ways to be a wrong New Yorker after 9/11. Like spreading conspiracy theories that it was an inside job carried out with controlled demolition by the Bush Administration or that it was the fault of Israel and the Jews. Let’s not forget that.
Even as 9/11 led Americans to rally around New York, it also led to a forever war and a decadeslong policy of demonizing Muslims and travelers from Arab lands. In some ways, the event only superficially pulled the country together before ripping it brutally apart.
Ummm… the decade that followed 9/11 saw lots of Islamic terrorism against the US. The amazing thing about that was despite 9/11, the underwear bomber, shoe bomber, Times Square bomber, Ft. Hood shooting, Army recruiting station shooting, etc., there was no popular uprising and mass violence against the Muslim community in the US. So 9/11 resulted in far more pulling together than ripping apart. Except for a Woke New York Progressive.
Today, in the absence of clear “others” to blame, we are inventing them. For a while, the foreign “others” that seemed easiest to blame for COVID-19 were the Chinese, and then Asian Americans in general (and yes, this happened in New York too).
New York and San Francisco. Not so much in those “racist, redneck states” that New Yorkers look down on.
But now, blaming any New Yorker will do. It’s no accident that the city is a long-standing American symbol of multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and openness in ways that date back to the Statue of Liberty, itself a former icon that has only recently fallen out of favor as a national symbol of tolerance and refuge. Back in 2001, we all celebrated New York for being particularly tolerant in the face of narrow-minded fundamentalist hate from Islamic extremists. It is a marker of a uniquely Trumpist, “America First” fundamentalism that this isn’t a quality to be celebrated anymore, but a soft underbelly to the MAGA dream that now threatens to infect us all. What we loved about bighearted, tolerant New York in 2001 is what cannot be tolerated in 2020.
And there we go. It’s Trump’s fault.
New York is just to “international” and “diverse” and “tolerant” to be part of provincial American patriotism. New York might as well be a foreign country to Middle America.
It’s not like New York City hasn’t spent the better part of the last decade-and-a-half reminding us in Middle America that we are stupid, uneducated, uncultured, ignorant, uncouth, racist, close-minded, bigots because we elected President GW Bush, didn’t whole-heartedly support Obama, and then voted against Hilary Clinton.
I think David Carr of THE New York Times pretty much summed up how New Yorkers feel about the rest of us back on Bill Maher’s show in 2016.
Just watching that clip has me rallying around the virus instead of New York City.
It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America.
This is shitty juxtaposition. Las Vegas and Parkland were shootings by evil mad man.
Puerto Rico was hit by a hurricane but the subsequent disaster was due to corruption, corruption abetted by Democrats who wanted to blame Trump while Puerto Rican leaders hid water, food, and supplies in warehouses and under tarps rather than do their jobs.
Detroit is the result fo 50 years of Democrat mismanagement. The Flint water crisis was the result of city and county financial and technical fuckups of criminal proportions and has nothing to do with the President.
California is suffering from the effects of a decade of one party Progressive rule. They were hijacked by the environmentalists who stop creating reservoirs, divert water for a baitfish, and fight forest maintenance and then complain when the state dries up and burns to the ground. Californa has legalized every quality of life crime and paid for it by taxing the middle class to death and now it’s no wonder that it has the worse wealth inequality and highest rates of homeless, drug addiction, and welfare in the country. It’s the state where an illegal can get a slap on the wrist for stealing a gun and killing a woman on a pier but a gun owners goes to jail for life because he tried to comply with the state’s firearms registration.
I don’t want that for America, and that doesn’t make me a bigot.
New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity.
Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.
And there is the deflection. When we hate New York, we’re told it’s because it’s ethnically diverse, not because it’s home to Wall Street which lined its pockets as it put Middle Americans out of work and then collapsed the economy in 2008.
Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves.
I cannot get over the fact that the same people who told us three years into Trump’s Presidency that his economy was really Obama’s economy have decided that Obama’s drawdown of N95 masks and failure to stockpile ventilators after the H1N1 outbreak was Trump’s fault.
The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.
New York wants the right to bully other states.
It was Mayor Bloomberg that sent the NYPD to Arizona to harass people at a gun show.
It was New York that banned travel to North Carolina because the Tar Heel state decided that men should use men’s rooms and women should use women’s rooms and worked to get major events in North Carolina canceled.
New Yorkers constantly use their media platforms to degrade and insult Middle America in every way possible.
But when tragedy strikes them, along with the rest of the country, they want to be rallied around with special tender loving care.
This is an incredible level of arrogance, that can only be seen by celebrities and people from New York City.
If New York wants to be treated like it did after 9/11, it has to stop giving the rest of us so many reasons to hate it.
