AMERICA-2
Our Manhattan
GEOFFREY WAGNER
New York—There is a story told. of the celebrated Hungarian marxist critic, Georg Lukacs. For years, it seemed, he had held to a fairly rigid party line concerning the work of Franz Kafka. The Zhdanov decree was that Kafka was frivolous and unreal, contaminated in any case as a toy or darling of Western intelligentsia. But after the Hun- garian uprising Lukacs was, with other in- tellectuals, sequestered in a strange castle, where he and his colleagues were treated to bouts of abuse and affection alternately. Eventually he is said to have remarked, 'So Kafka was a realist, after all.'
It was not so very long ago that one sat at the feet of one's tutor in England and read Kafka as an allegorist. Brilliant as it all was, such things didn't really happen. Yet this supposed Middle European par- anoia of bureaucratised city man is almost re-parodied by life in New York City today, with a population nearing nine million and where no one lives with less than three locks on a door. My neighbour down the hall, an old lady of seventy who still teaches at Hofstra University, has hers laced with five, and a chain. All windows are double-glazed, despite this being the twenty-first floor of a middle-income co-operative, just north of Columbia, which invests a fortune each year in its own supply of guards. Nor are these the celebrated Burns Guards (hired from a private detective agency, and supplied to in- stitutions), one of whom has recently con- fessed to arson contributing to the $370,000 worth of damage done to the City College of New York in 'student' rioting this spring.
Next to the good lady teacher lives a young lawyer who has given up buying television sets now that he has had his fourth removed from his apartment in the past year and a half. Another friend has just lost the third battery off his car since January, out of a policed and locked garage which one night not so long ago boasted five stereo tape systems stolen off customers' cars in an evening. And this is in an area of
Manhattan with a low crime rate. Two
nights ago, as I write, a dancer was killed in the Julliard apartments (belonging to the school of music of that name) just opposite where I live. Another neighbour reported two bullets in the back of her favourite arm chair—obviously from a roof-top sniper try- ing out his new weapon for range.
In short, American big city life—with no one answering a doorbell before Judas-
eye screening, and then only on a chain—
is a pretty paranoiac one. That no one talks to strangers in lifts is, I suppose. not sur- prising to English visitors. But to find a
woman refusing to take an elevator every time there is a single man inside is. In and
around City College, where I teach, there were an estimated one hundred 'muggings' between September and the end of last year —and this did not include a probably larger number unreported. My wife lost her hand- bag twice in that period, once snatched and once stolen off a counter. But the end result is the same. Nobody now minds losing money in Manhattan (in fact, some people even carry a billfold of three or four dollars to hand over to muggers immediately); it is the endless 1?ureaucratic business of re-form- ing one's identity by replacing stolen papers that gets you down. For we live a paper or symbolic existence in these cities, and re- covering car registration when you have had yours stolen (over 40,000 are stolen in Manhattan each year) would make Kafka pale.
This is the atmosphere in which urban guerrilla warfare becomes all too easy. We read of the Reverend Albert Cleage, a pro- minent Detroit black nationalist, claiming 'the ranges of the shooting clubs are packed; the city is way behind in processing gun registrations. So, naturally, any black man who can get hold of a gun is getAng hold of it.' Fear causes hate and hate causes fear; the fear of crime causes citizens to arm, or try to, and arming causes further fear and thus leads those who fancy them- selves threatened, like the black nationalists, to arm.
I say try to since a gun licence is almost impossible to obtain in New York City to- day. Indeed, with the law as it currently is, possession of firearms is a dubious ad- vantage. It is frequently judged as excessive force. even in the case of armed attack, and if it touches off other violations, including murder, the responsibility often comes home to the arms possessor. A reasonable amount of force to meet force may be permitted and for this reason there has been a huge sale recently of so-called 'security spray weapons'. The New York Times was con- cerned enough to do an article on these re- cently. 'Mace' (although strictly illegal) is only the first, though most famous, of these chemical weapons which are now car- ried like so many sidearms by secretary and housewife alike. Legal devices can be bought in drugstores and are enjoying a very brisk sale.
The trouble is twofold. As anyone who did even the most elementary street fighting or clearing in World War Two knows, it is a hazardous business at best and, at worst, in a skyscraper city of long, wan canyons for streets, pretty well impossible. Secondly, the contemporary metropolis simply cannot afford (nor does the liberal democrat desire) the size of police force necessary to safe- guard it. It is this climate that is now being exploited by black militants all over America.
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