Is there a curse on New York City?
The island of Manhattan once belonged to the Lenape people, like a lot of NY and NJ.
Writers used to be solemnly warned that “to be universal, you must first be local.” Why my explanation of a possible curse on the Big Apple will actually begin a two-hour bus ride to the south of the Holland Tunnel. Which is not mentioned by accident. The fingerprints of the Dutch are all over the origins of this story.
The place down south of NYC is Salem County, New Jersey, which had a very special relationship with the Lenape people:
The Salem Oak Tree was the real center of the county seat of Salem, where I grew up. It was so old and huge that its massive trunk had lower limbs that were the size of mighty oak trees themselves.
The tree was already a landmark in 1675 when the treaty was signed under it.
Others eventually moved into Salem without disrupting the rural atmosphere over the centuries. The county was an active station on the Underground Railroad in the period before and during the Civil War. Other wars claimed Salem lives but they were fighting for the peace of their homeland, not conquest.
Nothing earth-shattering changed until the mid-1960s, when economic hard times persuaded the county to join the only growth industry left to them, the administration of federal government programs transferring money from the Great Society coffers to new arrivals from the impoverished south. What had been a stable, family-based community populated 60-40 by white and black flipped to 40-60 and the underprivileged new residents brought urban-style crime with them. Salem entered a period of steep decline in its income, schools, businesses, and safety. The Salem Oak Tree, however old and seemingly immortal it was, fell to earth in 2019 and lay sprawled across the graves of the Quaker ancestors of the old colony.
It felt, somehow, like we had earned this, that maybe the spiritual contract with the Lenape grantors of rights to the land had been betrayed by drug- and crime-infested streets and gangs of adolescent white thugs and black thugs shooting each other for no reason while people, and even police, stood aside and let it get steadily worse. Something had been lost. Something bigger than a tree.
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What, I can hear you busy city people asking, does this have to do with anything that’s happening right now in the most important place on earth?
How the New Yorkers have thought of their place and role in the world.
Who now remembers that the crown city of what would come to call itself the Empire State had its own history with the Lenape people?
Those Dutch were always shrewd bargainers. They went on to build a great city around the literal bedrock of Manhattan, and they never looked back at the tribe which came to feel itself cheated and exiled from its own homeland. But hey, it’s New York. Winners keepers, losers weepers. Right? Maybe. Unless, like a lot of things in life, it’s not that simple. Something I found on Facebook when I was trying to track the footprints of the Lenape:
Click to enlarge the text. Rotate that screen too if it helps. This is important.
Take a big breath. More to come. This part is even more important.
The “very special tree”? I get that. We had one. But “fish people”? What? Then it came to me. As in “sleep with the fishes.”
One of those pivots of history. A small hinge on which a big door swings.
Yes, New York had a long run of successes after their heist from the Lenape in 1626. Lots of new people assimilated, lots of mighty buildings and institutions built, lots of sins and virtues both, and generally more prosperity than privation, while the elder spirits watched and bided their time from the timeless realms of eternity and its patient justice. I remember the Sixties as a time not of fads and dead ends but as a period of rapid, seemingly irreversible transformation. Not just the weed and the harder drugs but the upending of sexual mores and fundamental philosophical systems. The extreme change in the air was not confined the young people before they graduated into life’s practical demands. It extended almost by osmosis into institutions, corporations, and political strategies and tactics. It took over everything, even when it seemed to have leveled off and returned to sanity.
One of the ‘so big it’s hard to see in perspective changes’ was the one wrought by the movie The Godfather. I remember seeing it when it was first released. My college roommate could not be deterred. We had to drive into Boston on a hot summer day and see it at once. Struck me as a very “New York” movie, why it impressed my upper east side roommate more than it did me, Yet that turned out to be a bigger day than I thought it was at the time. Only later did I come to realize that I couldn’t forget that day. A sea change had occurred and I learned by degrees, mostly in graduate business school, that the constant quoting of lines from that movie by ambitious young businessmen in casual conversations about everything was not a joke. It had become their simple but comprehensive manual for getting ahead while the post-Sixties rhetoric was about changing the system from within. A kind of substitute for any inconvenient moral qualms.
When Godfather 2 came out I dutifully saw that one too. More powerful to me personally than the first one had been. I still recall, because I agreed with it so, what New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote about Pacino’s performance as Michael. (Paraphrasing here..) “It’s astounding. He does not change his facial expression or do any actorish movements. He seems almost inert at times. But you can still see him rotting from inside.”
Not what I was thinking of when, only a few years ago, I was trying to capture the image of Biden as a fish rotting from the head down, like the adage refers to. My efforts did not really satisfy me, but Apple has been in the habit of raiding my work-in-process image files and turning them into videos, presumably to show me their cool transitions or something. Here’s one of those, just as they did it except for the random inclusion of a picture of my favorite cat at the end. I cut that out for decency’s sake.
The rotting fish metaphor strikes me as broadly applicable anymore. It crystallizes that sense of rotting from inside and invites the participation of the sense of smell.
It’s not just age. More sad and sinister than that. Even their smiles look painful.
Not all the people above are from New York obviously. But they have had a lot of help in the cultural education department from people who are from NYC or the part of North Jersey that should be ceded to it. Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Alan Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Mario Puzo, Erica Jong, Susan Brownmiller, Leonard Bernstein, the faculties of Columbia University and NYU, the journalists of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Nation, and myriad “anti-hero” actors and movie stars. Life is exhausting to intellectuals who perceive that New York is the capital of the world and should rule the world except it’s so depressing to go anywhere else, especially places where some idiots claim to be happy.
They have given me, like their cousins in Washington, DC, a sense of them living in an aquarium that has rarely if ever been cleaned. Everything is rotting inside the glass and the swimmers of all kinds have bumped hard against reality so many times they do their rotting in quite constricted circles, trying vainly to keep out of each other’s way.
Spectacular crises are an inevitable aspect of anyplace that regards itself as the center of the world. It’s worse when they have managed by dint of being the media and publishing capital of the nation to convince a big swath of the rest of the country that they are as smart and important as they claim they are.
What can’t be known is the extent to which crises are baked in the cake — that is, inherent in the gravitational pull of New York City — or so, well, smelly in the nation’s subconscious that they transmit signals of future crises so vivid that they help make them come to pass. In other words, is it possible that a lot of what NYC experiences is caused by contagious nightmares from outside NY that come true at great human cost? That New York is itself a cake baked by its own psychic emanations to the world they look down on?
This is not at all a new idea to me. On my mind now because of the distinct possibility that the city might actually elect a mayor who was not born in this country, espouses beliefs that have never been mainstream in this country, and that expressly vilify values preserved by 250 years of constructive and virtuous action compared to every other nation in human history. Mandamnme’s success in pulling off such an upending of American principles and traditions could drag the nation’s once most popular political party into an orgy of misanthropic violence against the Constitution, Christianity, and the economic system of capitalism that built the nation’s unprecedented prosperity.
We actually have a similar, smaller but parallel situation in New Jersey, as we are being asked to choose between an old-style good-guy Catholic and a mother of five who supports unrestricted abortion and is also demonstrably a DEI congresswoman, DEI navy pilot, and DEI beneficiary of Biden-friendly press coverage. The icing on the cake? She doesn’t even know what position to take on the mayoral candidate in NYC whom she endorsed and who in turn endorsed her.
I really can’t stand all the political commercials (wall to wall in Jersey now) and the hypocritical word salad rhetoric by Dems claiming to be in favor of free enterprise while endorsing a man who wants the government to own and run everything. Too ridiculous to hurt my ears with. Why I've been watching movies, a lot of them, and remembering some particular movies that seem weirdly relevant about now.
That’s what’s inspired me to surface the questions about the role of our subconscious — or even the universal unconscious — in creating the absurd, almost sci-fi reality we’re living in.
Have we all somehow absorbed a psychic awareness of the Lenape Curse for which New York City might be on a permanent payment plan? Think about this election and these movies at the same time. Don’t force the plots to make political sense. Just drink in the imagery (like stale aquarium tank water) and soak your self in the doomishness of it all. We even have badly driven helicopters and shit. We have elaborate plans for both invasion and escape, mass murder and the gruesome deaths of thousands of innocents, all occurring in the immediate vicinity of New York or a city that might just as well be. We have hostages and stupid politicians, kickass malcontents and plenty of nice T&A like NYC used to have before all the genitals corroded away in the tank water.
Not going to explain any of this. Just show you some trailers and clips grouped under their titles and leave you to it. Then ask yourselves, is the universe or the shared mind of our people trying to tell us something here, warn us, or just laugh at us for getting fooled so often and predictably into some unlikely but entirely avoidable mess. [Fair Warning: I’m going to put these in at the smaller default size because I’ll be doing some switching around and stuff. Rest assured you can see anything at full screen size and still get back here. You don’t have to turn any vid off. The next one you play will shut the prior one down. Got it? Have fun.]
Escape from New York
He’s breaking in and breaking out. Like both the mayor & the prisoners.
A soundtrack they could use at the polling booths tomorrow.
Battle Dogs
Central Park at its scariest.
No. This is Central Park at its scariest.
Pretty good job of hitting the high/low spots toward the end
21 Bridges
More bridges locking up the city. But not as many as bad cops if that’s your favorite plot.
They Live
This feels more and more familiar, and likely, these days.
You don’t always get away from doom.
Priest
This seems farther in the future. What we have to look forward to.
But the motorcycles are the very coolest ever if it’s doom time.
There could have been more. But the election is tomorrow, and time is running out. But I have given you a couple bonus clips to shore up your own sense of the political context.
If your from New York or Jersey, vote early and vote often, it’s the new American Way.
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