morning commute
The names of port cities adorn the former headquarters of JP Morgan’s shipping company, the International Mercantile Marine: London, Montevideo, Gibraltar, wrapping around the corner of the neoclassical facade, where scaffolding blocks the sun and melting snow drips all day long. The names of people in the sidewalk mark all the honorees of past parades, which once processed up Broadway while ticker tape unspooled from office windows. A street sign still designates the route as the Canyon of Heroes, so called because of how the skyscraper walls, ever steeper and severer, foreshorten the sky above the boulevard. The names, which were first installed in 2004, provide an index as true to history as any monument, but have a minor, random quality. Winston Churchill several paces away from Willie Turnesa, British Amateur Golf Champion. Bobby Jones honored twice, as if there was nothing else to celebrate. Forgotten aeronauts, long-dead heads of state, Vichy collaborators, the New York Giants—it is a record less of heroes than of the American concept of heroics. For the past 27 years, only sports teams have been honored, save one parade for essential workers in 2021.
Walking along this roll-call of generals, Nazi sympathizers, and pro athletes reminds me of remarks made by an Iranian cleric in 2020, after the US assassinated Major General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike. (Reza Pahlevi [sic], Shah of Iran and Empress Farah have their own plaque in front of the Whole Foods.) Asked on Iranian state TV whom they should kill to avenge Soleimani’s death, the cleric responded, “Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn’t have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters—they’re all fictional.” To be fair, most of the heroes in the Canyon are not American or long-dead, but it’s still a feeble showing. I imagine rearranging the letters—Bobby Jones, Misanthropic Hipbone—or plucking the plaques from the street and laying them out in a field somewhere, like decommissioned subway signs for scavengers to bid on. Maybe Don DeLillo, still alive, would call and buy the lot.
A little less than a century before the plaques were laid, America and Asia were hoisted onto their pedestals before the Custom House, which now houses the National Museum of the American Indian. They make up half of the Four Continents, a set of statues designed by Daniel Chester French. America sits with torch in hand, corn across her lap, and an Aztec feathered serpent underfoot. A young man kneels at her left side, rolling the winged wheel of Progress, and an American Indian in a warbonnet peers meekly over her right shoulder. Asia, attended by slavish figures and a tiger, holds a Buddha figurine and sits on a throne of skulls. A Christian cross looms presumptuously behind her. Europe and Africa are hidden, perhaps ominously, behind a large green construction shed, as the building undergoes repair. You can look up photographs of them online.
You have to walk halfway up the Custom House stairs to see the back side of America, which, judging by the looks of the security guards, is not something that most people do. There French included the remnants of indigenous life that the wheel of Progress had surpassed: a buffalo skull, a broken urn, and a raven—Tulugaak, perhaps—with folded wings, facing backward. Emerging from billowing folds of marble to trample the buffalo skull is America’s left foot.
They come as no surprise, the foot and the skull. The men who commissioned the Custom House were the same men melting down the Plains into boneblack and glue. Still, there’s something odd about it being so difficult to see, tucked away in shadow, ignored even by the tour guides, when the whole point of this neoclassical stuff was that it had nothing to hide, that all violence could be reordered into the martial binary of triumph and melancholy. Even genocide, even the massive bonepiles at the carbon works, scaled by grinning men in bowler hats, who pose for the camera next to every last annihilated thing. That too could be made Roman, unfortunate but inevitable, stern and civilized. America has no heroes because the hero is America. And her avatars: Liberty, Justice, Progress. With their marble feet on the mercilessly dead.
It may be hokey to slink around statuary before work, just to re-grieve the buffalo and unsettle the tourists, but we ignore this at our peril. The glorying of death now looks more crass but is the same. I’d like to think that every monument admits the need for the distortion it creates, that mythifying always marks some unassimilable reality. But lately I’ve been feeling like it was already all assimilated, that the winged wheel never stopped spinning, but turned faster and faster, rising over the land, seeking out some new target to destroy.
Eleven years before Hermann Göring gave him a medal on Hitler’s behalf, Charles A. Lindbergh was driven up the Canyon of Heroes, on the occasion, according to his plaque, of the First Solo Nonstop Transatlantic Flight. You can watch clips of it on YouTube, watery from digitization but still with that newsreel feel, as if the camera were nothing but a crowd machine. In one shot, a crush of men push against the cordon of police. Their hats float atop their heaving bodies, panamas and fedoras, as if by some force of their own, like the plastic trash that beats against the ice at the end of this island, gets sucked out and dips and drifts back again. It all has nowhere else to go.
ben tapeworm