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July
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July
21, 2003
A Walk Through Carnage
Third and Arizona,
Santa Monica
By BRUCE JACKSON
Orgasmic Vegetarians
About noon on Wednesday, I was walking
east on Wilshire and crossing Second Street in Santa Monica.
A block south on Second street, at the intersection with Arizona
Avenue, I saw a big awning and a big sign that said "Orgasmic
Vegetarians."
My first thought was that this is the
place where, perhaps more than any place else in America, people
take their bodies seriously, where maintaining and displaying
bodies is a full-time job. It is also the place, perhaps more
than any other in America, where the loopiest technologies for
health, happiness and personal transcendence are advertised,
adored and tried out just in case one of them actually works.
My second thought was that I should maybe
put on my glasses. I did, and everything got far more mundane:
"Orgasmic Vegetarians," once in focus, was "Organic
Vegetables." The big awning was several small awnings, around
which a lot of people were moving. It was one of the farmer's
markets, of which there are several in that area on Saturdays.
This Wednesday market cut across Santa Monica's Third Street
Promenade like the transverse of the Christian cross.
Wednesday evening
I left my hotel about five that evening,
drove one block west on Wilshire to Ocean Avenue and turned left.
I was going to visit my friends Warren Bennis and Grace Gabe,
who live two miles south of that intersection, just above where
Santa Monica ends and Venice begins.
Yellow police tape was stretched across
the foot of Arizona. A few people stood on the Ocean Avenue side
of it-looking, taking pictures, hanging out. A little way in,
one of the bodies, covered by a yellow police tarpaulin, was
in front of the dark red Buick LeSabre, where it had been since
the Buick plowed through all two-and-one-half blocks of the farmer's
market a little before two p.m. that afternoon. The front of
the Buick was dented, the windshield was smashed and there was
a dent on the roof.
I know I saw that tarpaulin covering
the body and the smashed windshield and dented front of the car,
but I don't know if I actually saw the dent on the roof or if
I'm remembering it from the television coverage I'd watched the
previous
three hours. I'd learned from one of the local stations that
when the Buick finally stopped a dead man was on the hood and
a woman was underneath. About twenty people, the newsperson said,
had lifted the car and gotten her out.
Almost immediately after I got to their
house Warren said, "There was a terrible thing that happened
only a block from where you're staying this afternoon."
"I know," I said.
When the terrible thing happened I was
in Hennessey + Ingalls, an art and architecture bookstore about
fifty feet from where Arizona crosses Third. I had been on my
way to the market to get some things for lunch, but a photography
book in the Hennessy + Ingalls window caught my eye, so I'd gone
in, walked to where the book was, and immediately saw people
running by the window. They looked strange so I went back outside
to see what was up.
I told Warren and Grace what I'd seen.
"Did you take pictures?" Grace
asked me. It was a reasonable question: maybe a dozen of the
photographs on their walls were mine and ever since she's known
me I've almost always had some kind of camera in my pocket or
bag or on my shoulder.
"No," I said.
"I've never seen you so shaken,"
Warren said. We've known each other for thirty-five years. I
knew he was thinking back to the night in 1970 when he and I
had been in a student building surrounded by police who were
firing tear gas canisters and shooting up the glass front doors
with buckshot.
"It was the dead girl," I said.
"I keep seeing her."
"Have you ever seen anything like
this?" Grace said.
"No," I said. Then I said,
"What's like this?"
"It's what people in Israel live
with all the time," she said.
"You've seen it," I said to
Warren. He had been an infantry lieutenant in the Battle of the
Bulge.
"Yes," he said. He paused for
a moment, then said, "The thing I remember most is the smell
of burning hair."
By the time I drove back to my hotel
at ten o'clock, everything along Ocean Avenue seemed normal.
The sidewalk on the right was full of people and so was the esplanade
on the left. Lots of people were crossing Ocean both ways going
to and from the Santa Monica pier. The intersection at Arizona
still had the yellow police tape across it and the Buick was
still there, but the body and the yellow tarpaulin were gone.
Thursday
The yellow police tapes were still up
at noon on Thursday. At the intersection of Arizona and Third
a very officious traffic officer was telling people they could
walk on the sidewalk but not in the street. A few people asked
her if they could just cross over and she said, "If you
want to cross go up to Fourth Street and cross there." She
gave no explanation, just said the same thing over and over again.
I don't think she was even making eye contact with the people
who asked the question: she just looked up the Promenade toward
Wilshire and said it, "If you want to cross go up to Fourth
Street and cross there." One woman asked if Second street
was open, if she could go that way. "If you want to cross
go up to Fourth Street and cross there," the traffic officer
said.
She was protecting nothing but an empty
street. Everything was gone. All the dead and damaged bodies,
tarpaulins, spilled fruits and vegetables, emergency vehicles,
awnings, strollers, shopping carts-all were gone. It was the
cleanest street in Santa Monica. Nothing , other than the traffic
officer, was in Arizona two blocks to the right to Ocean or one
block to the left to Fourth.
She kept saying that one thing over and
over to anyone who spoke to her. I thought at first she was nasty
but then decided she wasn't saying any more because she had no
more idea why crossing was prohibited than any of the rest of
us did. She knew it was an empty street and that there was no
more police work to be done there. But she had been told to stand
in that place and tell people they couldn't cross and that was
what she was doing. She was doing her job.
She wasn't the only one. Two teams of
tv reporters were interviewing people on Third Street. They were
the next day's tourists, not people who had been there the day
before when the dark red Buick had gone through, so the questions
were, "What do you think about what happened?" and
"What do you think is the meaning of this?"
News station helicopters hovered a few
hundred feet in the air at a few hundred yards to the west and
east of that three-block strip of Arizona Avenue. What were they
photographing? What was there to see, the day after, when the
dead were gone and nothing was left except that traffic control
officer telling people they had to go up to Fourth Street if
they wanted to get over to the other side of the street and the
two teams of tv reporters asking people what they thought about
what it happened and what it meant?
I went into Hennessey + Ingalls and looked
at the photography books and magazines, then spent some time
in the typography and design sections. By the time I was back
on the street, maybe 45 minutes later, the yellow police tape
and the traffic control officer were gone. Cars were moving normally
on Arizona again. One tv crew was there, but they weren't talking
to anybody. A man who looked like a tv reporter was holding a
microphone and looking at some notes while the cameraman stood
by his tripod. I assumed he was getting ready to give an on-the-scene
report that would air on the early evening news. Several bunches
of flowers and a sign were neatly arranged at the end of the
island in the middle of the street, a small shrine of the type
that is now found at nearly all scenes of violent death in America.
Wednesday afternoon,
a little before two p.m.
I'd left my hotel and walked down Second
Street to Wilshire. A block further along at the Arizona intersection
I could see the sign that I now knew said "Organic Vegetables"
and the awnings and people looking and shopping. I walked a block
east. Three Santa Monica police cars were parked at the northwest
corner of Third Street, the north end of the three-block Third
Street Promenade. Two of them were closed up, one had its windows
open, computer on, and motor running. I didn't see any policemen
anywhere. I suppose they were confident that no one would steal
a police car, since they're pretty easy to spot. Where I grew
up, New York City, a minor consideration like that wouldn't trump
temptation and opportunity.
Shoppers and strollers walked along the
Promenade, but not very many. On Saturday and Sunday the place
would be filled by this time of day, but not in the middle of
the week. The street people who hung out on the Promenade's nice
benches were there. Days of the week mattered less to them. I
recognized several for whom that three-block no-autos stretch
of restaurants and shops was home base.
I thought I'd get some fruit at the market,
then come back up to Hennessey + Ingalls, but I came upon Hennessy
+ Ingalls first and, as I said, something in the window caught
my eye, so I went inside. The intersection with Arizona, was
full of people walking, carrying bags, pushing strollers.
The photography section is in the front
of the store, just behind a large window facing on the Promenade.
As soon as I got there I saw people running toward Arizona. It's
common to see runners in Santa Monica, but not on the Third Street
Promenade and not with expressions like the ones I was seeing
on their faces. There were more and more people running. I went
outside and joined them.
The intersection looked as it had before,
but almost immediately I realized that none of the faces were
as they had been before. Some people were just standing, as if
they were trying to walk but couldn't. A young woman came from
the direction of the awnings, sobbing. A lot of people were sobbing.
Other people were walking very slowly, their eyes focused somewhere
far away or not at all.
I looked to the right and saw a baby
stroller and some people kneeling down in front of it. I couldn't
see what they were doing but I saw a child's feet and they weren't
moving at all.
Then I saw more things. Plums and peppers
and radishes were scattered all over the street in front of me.
Some of the stands were skewed and their awnings hung at odd
angles. There were clumps of things in the street, a lot of them.
Then I realized that the clumps weren't things; they were people.
To the left and to the right, there were bodies everywhere. And
spilled fruit and vegetables. And skewed awnings. And people
bending to help and other people just standing and other people
crying.
"It was a terrorist," someone
said. "He just drove through here at 80 miles an hour and
kept on going."
"How do you know it was a terrorist?"
someone asked him.
"Who else would do something like
this?" the first man said.
"It could a been somebody else,"
the second man said.
For what seemed a very long time, there
were no police and no sirens. I wondered how something like this
could happen and there were no police and no sirens. After a
while, two policemen in khaki ran past me, coming from Fourth
Street, heading toward Second Street. I wondered where the others
were. I wondered where the cops who drove those three empty police
cars I'd seen before were.
I knew what I was seeing but something
in my head kept trying to say this couldn't be real because if
it were, there would be sirens and police. Eventually sirens
started. And police came. A lot of sirens. A lot of police.
I thought of a time when I was seven
years old and had been jumping up and down on the bed and had
slipped and fallen and whacked my forehead on the radiator. I
went to the mirror to see what had happened and I saw a huge
gash but there was no blood and I thought "There is no blood
so I'm really all right" and then, as I stood and looked
at the mirror, blood started gushing from the cut in my forehead,
all over me, over the floor, even on the mirror, and I wasn't
all right after all.
One of the street people asked a policeman
walking quickly toward Second Street, "Did you get the guy?
Was he a terrorist?" The policeman hurried on. "Them
cops don't never tell you nothing," the street person said,
annoyed.
A policeman passed in front of me walking
very fast, heading toward Fourth Street, carrying a child who
was two or three years old. I think he was trying to give her
mouth-to-mouth as he went, but she was dead. I could tell that
and surely he could too. His face was terrible.
I wanted to help, but I didn't know what
I could do that would be useful. I don't know first aid. I didn't
want to wander around, just looking, getting in the way of people
who did know what they were doing, who might be able to do something
useful. Professional journalists are free to look at the most
awful suffering because it's their job, but I'm not a professional
journalist. A lot of people were running around now, bending
over the injured and the dead, and more and more police and fire
people were there. After the policeman passed in front of me
with the little girl in his arms I just went back to my hotel
room, crying like nearly everybody else.
A jogger
I walked back up the Promenade to Wilshire,
turned left a block, then turned right on Second. My hotel was
a hundred yards or so up that block.
A jogger was running toward me on Second,
not unusual in that part of Santa Monica where joggers sometimes
outnumber walkers. He was a man in his thirties, wearing a t-shirt,
walking shorts and shoes that weren't running shoes. He carried
something in his right hand which, as we passed one another,
came into focus: a stethoscope and what looked like some plastic
gloves. He was a doctor who'd probably been at home. Maybe somebody
had called him. Maybe he heard it on the radio or something was
already on tv. He'd just grabbed the instrument with which, among
other things, doctors differentiate the quick from the dead,
and he'd run from his house to do what he could. I have no idea
who he was and I'll never see him again. I love him for that,
running down the street in clothes he hadn't bothered to change
out of, with his stethoscope and his plastic gloves.
TV
I went to my hotel room and sat a while,
then turned on CNN. Wolf Blitzer was jabbering in his Wolf Blitzer
voice, which punches out all syllables as if they were of equal
importance. After a minute or two, he gave an update about the
event in Santa Monica, California, for which camera footage was
just coming in, which he showed bits and pieces of, then went
on to another story. And another. After a while he came back
to the event in Santa Monica. It wasn't one dead, as he'd said
previously; now it was two dead. There was more footage. Stay
tuned. More to come.
It was hard to hear him because of the
sirens down in the street and the helicopters going by the window.
I got up to close the window and I noticed that the helicopter
going by at that moment said NEWS 2. It rounded the building
and the next helicopter said NEWS 4.
Ah: I was there, wasn't I. Why was I
listening to Wolf Blitzer giving second-hand reports from Atlanta,
Georgia, when the people he was getting his feeds from were delivering
it live a click away?
I switched to channel 2 and watched it
live. I switched to channel 4 and watched it live. I watched
those two channels broadcasting live all afternoon, their chopper
steadicams showing the three blocks from Fourth Street to Ocean,
with frequent shots of the dark red Buick with its dented roof,
its shattered windshield and, just in front of its bumper, the
yellow tarpaulin police in LA use to cover dead people in the
street.
Some time in there, I don't remember
exactly when, the light outside got odd. I went to the window
and saw that it was raining. Lightly at first, then heavily.
My room was on the fifteenth floor and faced the ocean. The bright
backlighting surface of the Pacific made the raindrops shimmer
like falling crystals, almost like snow. I heard the two tv reporters
talking about the sudden downpour. "I don't remember it
raining here in July in twenty years," one said. "Neither
do I," the other said. "It's pouring on the triage
area," the first reporter said.
I watched that tv set and listened to
the reporters trying to make sense of what had happened and I
listened to the helicopters and sirens until it was time to go
meet my friends Warren and Grace.
Thinking about what
Grace said
That night, when I was back in the room,
I thought about what Grace said-that this is what people in Israel
live with all the time. She'd spoken about people coming to a
market, a disco, a pizzeria and seeing carnage, and of people
going to shop or dance or eat and being killed or horribly injured.
I didn't think to say, 'And it's also
what people the other side of the Israeli lines go through every
time the Israeli tanks or helicopters blow up a house in which
they think some malefactor they want to kill might be, and in
that house are men and women and children who are not that malefactor
who get blown up just because they happen to have been in that
house.'
If I'd thought to have said that, Grace
would have said, "Of course."
And if I'd said, "And it's also
what the people who saw violent and gratuitous death and mutilation
this year in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone through," Grace
would have said, "Yes, them too."
This death and that
death
The carnage in Santa Monica Wednesday
afternoon-ten dead and five times as many injured- was caused
by an 86-year-old man who got confused and hit the gas pedal
when he meant to hit the brake. The carnage in the Middle East
and Afghanistan and Iraq and all those other places is caused
by intelligent, competent, thoughtful, righteous people who,
after serious thought and consideration, find such carnage acceptable
and useful.
The Palestinian who blows him- or herself
up, along with a bus or dance hall full of Israelis has done
the arithmetic and found the carnage acceptable and useful. The
Israeli tank commander who blows up a house or a village or the
bulldozer operator who rips from the earth olive trees that took
generations to grow finds such violence acceptable and useful.
The American pilots who fire their missiles into vehicle convoys
and buildings and villages find their actions acceptable and
useful. Donald Rumsfeld finds the deaths and dismemberments accruing
therefrom acceptable and useful. Tony Blair finds the deaths
and dismemberments accruing therefrom acceptable and useful.
George W. Bush finds the deaths and dismemberments accruing therefrom
acceptable and useful. Osama bin Laden finds the deaths and dismemberments
he underwrites acceptable and useful.
That's them. I keep thinking of that
Santa Monica policeman, walking very fast but knowing he will
never be fast enough, doing mouth-to-mouth on the three-year-old
girl he knew was dead. I keep thinking of the mother and father
of that three-year-old girl, whose name was Cindy Palacios Valladares.
I keep thinking of George Russell Weller, that 86-year-old pathetic
sonofabitch who forgot which pedal was which in his dark-red
Buick LeSabre, a man who, according to everyone in his life who
has known him and who has been found by the press, would never
knowingly and intentionally have hurt anybody in this world.
What does intention have to do with anything?
The meaning of what happened in Santa Monica is that it doesn't
have any meaning. None at all. Something stupid happened; people
died.
From the point of view of the dead and
the people to whom they mattered, all the deaths are like that.
Palestinians and Jews and Iraqis and Americans and Russians and
Somalis and Rwandans-all the deaths are like that.
Grace is right. It's all the same. It's
horrible, it's awful, and the explanations and justifications
explain and justify nothing. From the point of view of the dead
and the people who loved them, there is no difference between
"My foot fell on the wrong pedal" and "God wants
me to do this." The reasons offered by terrorists of whatever
stripe, whether underground or ensconced in the finest houses
of state, matter not one iota to the dead and those who loved
them. Love and life and death are, finally, what matters. The
rest is just politics, just talk.
Bruce Jackson
is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is a documentary
filmmaker and the author or editor of 20 other books. In 2002,
the government of France honored his
ethnographic and anti-death penalty work by appointing him Chevalier,
l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His new book, The
Peace Bridge Chronicles, will be published next month.
He also edits the Buffalo
Report. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend Edition Features for July 19 / 20, 2003
Arthur
Mitzman
Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable
Than the Dot.com Bubble?
Julian
Bond
We Shall be Heard
Cynthia
McKinney
Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad
Mel
Goodman
What is to be Done with the CIA?
Jason Leopold
Tenet Blames Wolfowitz
Mickey
Z.
History Forgave Churchill
Doug Giebel
Impeachment as the Message
Jon
Brown
Whipping the Post
Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps
Steven
Sherman
Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC
Robin Philpot
Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters
Khaldoun
Khelil
Capturing Friedman
Jeffrey
St. Clair
You Must Go Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed
Lenni
Brenner
Sitting in with Mingus
Vanessa
Jones
Three Dog Night
Adam
Engel
Video Judas Video
Poets'
Basement
Foley, Smith and Curtis
Website
of the Weekend
Illegal Art
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