I climb out of the subway at Broadway and Wall Street, just in front of Trinity Church, down-Downtown, sacred ground in Manhattan in more ways than one. It is a shudder-inducing place to visit, not least because it is beautiful, lined by Federal grandeur and chilled by short water-winds that prowl up the canyon from the thin island's tip. Money always gets the best address — money and lawyers, of course, the latter of which I'm here to see.
Down here streets are busy. There are tourists and there are the young and dully rich, those anxious and restless souls who make money for the sake of making money — men and women both, driven to it, addicts of a sort, pure of heart in their own heartless way. It is not the sort of place one expects to hear thumping of bibles. And yet I do: a man on the sidewalk at the top of the steps, leatherbound volume, well-worn, clutched aloft in his hand. He's a burly guy, middle-aged and ordinarily white. He stands facing the street on his toes. His cheeks and forehead have gone red, tendons taut down his neck, as he bays into the rushing noon crowd. The words are not entirely distinct, though their meaning's clear enough. It's a monochromatic hurl of language boiled up from his nether parts. It's a torrent, a hot pouring forth. He's not speaking to anyone in particular, just shouting into sky, into street. He is a machine of holler. It is as if he contains an engine, a thing that makes steam and bitter heat and forces it up to his head and then out in red bursts. And there are other men with him, other members of the team; and they stand at opposite corners of the intersection carrying leaflets, but they are, by comparison, chumps. They are the bat boys, the gardeners to his noble stoic horseman. By New York standards you can't really call them aggressive — they're easier to duck than the handers-out of restaurant menus, free papers, gym memberships and comedy-club lineups. It is the talker who is the main event.
It's an impressive performance. Anonymity is the shared condition of our streets — mental, physical, spiritual most of all — and rather than transcend this he has transformed it. He connects with no one but this — connection — doesn't seem to be the point. There is no point, really, except to unleash the flow. He has come to deliver a verbal bludgeoning. It's not that he seems angry — in fact he seems beyond anything as personal as anger. Words simply spill forth, hard and flat and inflectionless like sunbaked stones. They don't represent anything you could call rational discourse. This is not an attempt at persuasion, a first step in some hopeful dialogue. It is the recitation of edict. It comes packaged in certainty, even a little in threat — hints of a speech from some hoary patriarch enraged. This man has come down here to what might be called enemy territory — though of course what do I know? — to offer not cajolery, not seduction, but rather a good hard and unembellished shove.
People seem to take him in stride. One more nut, their — what, rueful? bemused? — expressions seem to say. There is no crowd gathered, no ring of the stonyfaced to gawk. Even on his slowest day the Robot Man gets more passing regard. And yet, to me, he could not seem more inexplicable. Of all the strange things I have seen in this city the man with his book is among the strangest, the most inscrutable. And it's not the God thing per se that separates us. I am an atheist now, but I was raised on a mild but consistent New Testament Christianity. I went to Sunday School; I spent many mornings on hard benches in the struggle to stay awake, sit up straight, stop fiddling with the back of the seat in front. I don't believe in God but I understand, in a fundamental sense, what it means; and more importantly still I understand the moral philosophy the church provides, the principles of empathy and generosity of spirit and community. Really, they're what guide me to this day.
But of course not much of this is in evidence out here on Wall Street. The water in this man's river of talk roars with anything but empathy; his message never reaches generosity. Instead it's all fire and brimstone, a long list of threats presumably transcribed from the almighty and meant to induce — what? some prostrate plea for mercy on the street? The details are unclear but the gist is plain enough: he's recruiting; he wants us to join up. And this of course is where the vast distance lies.
Once I might have said it was conviction that divided me from a man like this. I might have said that he has, by all appearances, by his own sidewalk testimony, an assurance — literally, a faith — that I don't and can't. He's free of doubt, is how I might have put it. And as such my reaction would have been a common one, tinged with hints of admiration. It's how we in the mainstream have long dismissed fanatics: a chuckle, a slight shake of the head, a wry comment about how we wish we could feel that kind of conviction. We ceded the lowlands of belief in order to hold the high ground of rationality, normalcy, social peace.
Now I look at it differently. I don't, for example, think I'm any less certain of principles than he. I have a belief system; it just doesn't come with a handbook, or a television channel, or a well-funded army awaiting command. Yet it's got me no less convinced. I've no more doubt, I mean, that I'm right.
The difference lies in our notion of community. It lies in our understanding of the basic tenets of human interaction, and in our expression — or lack of expression — of respect for those who find themselves our neighbors. In one sense, he doesn't have any: respect, I mean — for those around him. They're not so much fellow humans, fellow strivers travelling roads of toil and fulfillment as they are numbers in the calculus of his personal achievement. He won't be satisfied until they're converted. Which is another way to say he won't be satisfied until they're just like him. This strikes me as an expression either of the greatest possible narcissism or the greatest possible insecurity, I can't decide: this imperative to remake the world as reflection, either to indulge in forever being surrounded by self or to remove, also forever, all possible challenge. Either way, it's about as complete a denial of the agency of every man, woman, and child walking down that street as one could imagine.
It's not conviction that divides us but rather an understanding of community as a place of negotiation, a zone of jostle and compromise, argument and counter-persuasion. It is a respect for the divergence of experience, the honesty and reality and value of alternate perspective. It is an embrace of the richness of difference and a belief that all learning has not already been done. It is a commitment to rational discourse in the public sphere. And it is, above all, a conviction that browbeating and thuggish intimidation — bullying, spiritual or political or physical, worst of all — are the enemies of a healthy society.
This man on the corner is not a terrorist, of course; he's just a man, just standing there, spouting his routine. Yet the line between him and, say, the Taliban seems to shorten every day. Terror, after all, is not a belief system as such. It's merely a tactic, a means to an end. These days it serves men whose goal is to silence opposition. It serves men determined to eliminate difference. It serves men who cannot rest until the world, in so far as they can reach it, becomes a reflection. And this, really, is the fulcrum of our time.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to choose which side we fall on. And sooner just might mean today.
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On another, not entirely unrelated note: yet more evidence of the Republican commitment to democracy: in South Dakota, they've been following Native American voters out of their polling places. They've been taking down their license plates, trailing them home. It took a court order to stop them. Another court order has let them into polling places in Ohio, and thereby opened the door to similar mischief. Call it the first step toward selective disenfranchisement.
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