Gary Percesepe
In the Hamptons
Beach & Social Class
Since the time that our children were babies S and
I have taken August vacations on Long Island, in the Hamptons.
It is an odd choice for people living in the Midwest; our
neighbors and friends in Illinois (where we lived once upon a time)
and Ohio (where I reside now, a New Yorker in exile) retreat to the
Ozarks or, farther afield, the Gulf Coast of Texas or Florida, or
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. (For those who desire something more
upscale, the middle of the middlebrow: Hilton Head.) At the beaches,
inns, and restaurants of the Hamptons there are no Ohio license plates in the parking lots. It
is long way from Myrtle Beach to East Hampton, and I don’t mean the mileage.
Class differences in New York
(and if you believe F. Scott Fitzgerald, in America, generally) are best viewed
from the beach.
As a rule of thumb, the closer a beach is to
New York City, the more "undesirable" it is.
The beaches of Brooklyn and Queens teem with ethnic diversity. In the dog days of
summer there are hordes of people, packed in so tightly there seems
to be little open sand. The music is loud, the sexuality seething.
Beaches are "public," and the suntan lotion of choice is oil. Orchard Beach,
Jones Beach,
Brighton Beach, Rockaway—
Forgeddabouddit.
The farther from the city one goes, moving east on Long Island into Suffolk County, the more "desirable" and
homogeneous the beaches become. Skin is lighter, expensive
sunscreens are in evidence, beaches are private and accessible by
resorts and single family houses, and music is muted, if it is
present at all. Swim suits are modest, nannies are in evidence at
the tonier resorts, and a certain "space" between beachgoers is
observed.
Americans have always found it difficult to talk
about social class, believing, as we do, that our true destination
and station in life is the class above our own. Put simply,
Americans are conflicted about money. They want it and admire and
envy those who have it, but they don’t want to be seen appearing
to want it, and are naturally suspicious of anyone who has it and
claims not to want it, or does not have it and seems to like it that
way. It is difficult in this country to organize the "have-nots"
against the "haves," precisely because the "have-nots" see
themselves as one day becoming the "haves." American politicians who
run populist campaigns are regularly accused of engaging in "class
warfare," a cardinal sin in contemporary American public life. The
few who actually ran populist campaigns have generally been southern
pols including such figures as Huey Long, Jimmy Carter, Sen. Albert
Gore, Sr. (D-Tennessee), and his son, Al, Junior (remember "The
People Against The Powerful?") They all eventually lost, with an
asterisk for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential contest, who despite
(or because of!) a desultory, dispiriting wreck of a campaign
managed to win the popular vote and lose the presidency to a man who
accused him of—you guessed it--waging class warfare.
Lost in
America
"Let me tell you about the very rich," Fitzgerald
once wrote, in a short story called "The Rich Boy," written in
Capri in 1926 while awaiting the publication of his
novel, The Great Gatsby. "They are different from you and
me."
"Right," quipped Hemingway in his famous rejoinder
to his friend, "they have more money than us."
It is unfortunate—and instructive-- that
Hemingway’s jokey comment (as evasive as it is witty) has kept many
from thinking further about class differences in America, a topic
that was never far from Fitzgerald’s mind, or his literary
imagination. As if that were the end of the story.
It isn’t.
Here is the way the story begins:
"Begin with an individual, and before you know it
you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you
find that you have created—nothing. This is because we are all queer
fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to
know or than we think ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming
himself an "average, honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that
he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has
agreed to conceal—and his protestation of being average and honest
and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.
"There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich
boy, and this is his and not his brothers’ story. All my life I have
lived among his brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides,
if I wrote about brothers I should have to begin by attacking all
the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have
told about themselves—such a wild structure they have erected that
when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for
unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life
have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land."
Two things stand out in this remarkable passage:
1) the narrator’s suspicion of generalizations, his marked
preference for particularity (this rich boy’s life, not his
brothers, the singular not the plural, the individual not the type)
as the royal road to universality; and 2) the sense that we are
entering foreign terrain where things are not as they appear, where
lies and liars abound, a land great with the possibility of self
deception and illusion.
A land, in other words, like Long Island, where Fitzgerald lived for a time, and
selected as the setting of The Great Gatsby.
And then, amazingly, the narrator takes us right
back to type. The next two sentences are among the most misquoted in
American letters, but it is the end of the paragraph that continues
to astonish me:
"Let me tell you about the rich. They are
different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does
something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical
where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it
is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts,
that they are better than we are because we had to discover the
compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they
enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that
they are better than we are. They are different. The only way I can
describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as if he were a
foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I accept his
for a moment I am lost—I have nothing to show but a preposterous
movie."
It is difficult to keep a consistent point of view
when discussing social class in America.
Things blur, go in and out of focus, because the
subject of investigation and the subject doing the investigating are
both highly mobile. It is like trying to hit a moving target from a
truck moving through a tunnel at warp speed while sitting on a
rocker that is itself atop a rotating wheel. Fitzgerald’s narrator
clings stubbornly to his point of view—keeps his eye on Anson, his
friend, not "the rich" but this particular boy—even while
acknowledging that he is one step from being lost.
Lost in America.
And if the rich are impossible to type while
telling the truth, so are "the poor," a term I have grown to
despise. Who are the poor, and who cares to know?
Gatsby
Scott Fitzgerald lived for a time in the 1920s at
6 Gateway Drive
in Great Neck, Long Island, not far from Queens.
He lived in a modest house, not unlike that of Nick Carroway, the
narrator of his greatest novel. When Fitzgerald published Gatsby
in 1925, his fable of America and the American Dream, he gave us one
of the most enduring descriptions of place in the history of
American letters—and with it, a map of social class in America. Here
is how Nick described where he lived:
It was a matter of chance that I should have
rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which
extends itself due east of
New York -- and where there are, among other
natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles
from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and
separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated
body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard
of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals -- like egg in the
Columbus
story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end -- but their
physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the
gulls that fly overhead. To the windless a more interesting
phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape
and size. "
I first read The Great Gatsby in high
school and immediately felt less alone. Here was a
writer who understood the geography of desire and the slippage of
time. Fitzgerald’s best writing is a lyrical meditation on time,
space, and women. Like Fitzgerald himself, during the First World
War, Jay Gatsby falls helplessly in love with the "right" woman at
the wrong time. Daisy Fay marries the wealthy Tom Buchanan, and
Gatsby manages to convince himself that he lost her only because he
was poor. He makes a fortune through mysterious means, buys a house
in "West Egg," across Long Island Sound from Daisy’s house in "East
Egg," where he gives a series of lavish parties, intending to
attract Daisy, in the hope of winning her back. The plan fails—Daisy
is put off by the crassness of the western nouveau riches,
and Gatsby is crushed but undeterred. He arranges to meet Daisy
through her cousin Nick Carroway. Touched by Gatsby’s devotion,
Daisy agrees to leave her abusive and adulterous husband. One hot
summer day there is a confrontation at the Plaza Hotel in
New York. Revealing the illegal source of
Gatsby’s wealth, Tom breaks Daisy’s resolve. On the drive back to
Long Island, driving Gatsby’s car, Daisy kills Tom’s
mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in a hit and run accident. Gatsby assumes
the blame for the fatal accident, and Tom directs Myrtle’s
revenge-minded husband to Gatsby’s house, where Gatsby is shot in
his pool. He dies alone, bereft of his illusions.
As Matthew J. Bruccoli remarks, from the first
words of the novel ("In my younger and more vulnerable years") to
the last ("borne back ceaselessly into the past" there are at least
450 time words in Gatsby. In one arresting image, the
Buchanan’s lawn is described as "jumping over sun-dials." The novel
was mapped out in my heart in such a way that East Egg and West
Egg—Fitzgerald’s fictional towns, separated by "the great wet
barnyard" of Long Island Sound—seemed more real to me than anyplace
on earth that I had ever been. Surely I had been there before.
Certainly I would return, year after year, to check in on Daisy, and
Nick, and poor Gatsby, but especially to see about Jordan Baker, a
slender, small-breasted girl whose trim athlete’s body and gray
sun-strained eyes seemed to call to me. She was dishonest but
lovely. I could relate to that. I wanted a different future for her.
I hoped for her and took her part against Nick, whose reticence
toward her I could not understand at sixteen. I had yet to learn to
keep my distance. Like her cousin Daisy,
Jordan
was from Louisville,
Kentucky, a place I could no more imagine than Gatsby’s North Dakota. As an easterner the west (or
the south) was not someplace I thought much about. The farthest west
I had ever been was in my father’s car at the eastern border of
Pennsylvania
and New Jersey,
on Sunday drives after church. Even Tom Buchanan’s Chicago was foreign country to me. No wonder I
resisted my English teacher’s simplistic Gatsby formulations:
West = outsiders, new money, East = cultural elite, old money. I was
moneyless and from the east, slipped between the lines of the
formula.
Nuke the
Hamptons
If New York City
is the international home of money—the capitol of capital and
capitalism--then the
Hamptons
are where the money goes for the summer.
With much money comes much stupidity.
If Fitzgerald were still alive and writing
Gatsby, he might be tempted to set it farther east on Long
Island in the Hamptons.
The Hamptons
is the collective name for a cluster of tres chic resorts at
the eastern end of Suffolk
County
on Long Island. These picturesque
towns and villages—East Hampton, Sag Harbor, Southampton,
Bridgehampton-- play host to America's cultural and business elite:
the richest, most successful, most powerful - and consequently most
obnoxious and loathsome - people in the country, who move there to
spend their time unwinding on the beach and annoying local residents
(West and East Egg redux?). Real estate prices in the Hamptons are obscene; a
beachfront property costs about the same as the gross national
product of a third world nation.
Some years ago I was delighted to discover a
website called Nuke the
Hamptons. The operative assumption is that
anyone who says they are "going to the Hamptons" for the summer
deserves to be nuked. Nukethehamptons.com is a site that allows you
to pinpoint a target in the area - Main Street in Sag Harbor, say,
with its twee gift shops, or East Hampton, the home of
self-appointed U.S. Style Maven, Martha Stewart - and launch a small
nuclear device that will wipe it from the face of the earth.
The site has addressed a deep-seated desire among
non-Hamptons residents. "I felt extremely giddy and gleeful as I
watched East Hampton burst into
flames," confessed one attacker. Another said he delivers, "A few
megatons to some targets at least every other day." According to
site data, by midnight on June 10 members of the
public had dropped more than 25,000 megatons of nuclear warheads on
the area, reducing some very expensive real estate to smoldering
ruins.
What has so angered the locals?
In an article some years ago in the East
Hampton Star, Sheridan Sansegundo made the case for preemptive
strikes on Bridgehampton rather than
Baghdad:
"It is 90 degrees outside and you have driven from
Southampton to East Hampton trapped behind a flatbed carrying a
giant California
redwood," writes Sansegundo.
"On Newtown Lane your car is nearly rammed by
a guy on a cell phone whose Mercedes convertible suddenly makes an
unsignaled U-turn.
"There are no parking spaces at the Post Office,
there are 10 people in the checkout line at the supermarket, and the
cinema has been taken over for an HBO movie premiere.
"It might ease the pain to know that now you can
go home and vent your frustration at nukethehamptons.com."
The elaborate web site—which is the creation of
Miles Jaffe, a Bridgehampton artist—opens with a NORAD lookalike
control panel featuring maps of targeted villages and a list of
their crimes; from there you are led step by escalating step to a
nuclear launch. You got a problem with Nick & Tony’s--er, "Slick &
Phony’s" restaurant, the oh so trendy eatery in
East Hampton? No problem. You imput authority code,
coordinates, disengage the safety lock, arm your warheads, initiate
a launch sequence, and swooosh—in real time a missile is on
its way to the rescue.
"Thank you for nuking East Hampton. Please support the arts by visiting the gift
shop."
Nuking the Hamptons can be stressful. As any visitor to
the Hamptons
knows, the best cure for stress is shopping. So after you’ve had the
satisfaction of wiping out Southampton Town Hall - "home to
officials who regularly violate their own self-imposed code of
ethics in their zeal to support further frantic redevelopment in
which they are heavily invested" - you might want to visit the Gift
Shop and buy a bottle of "Nuclear Summer Hamptons Hot Sauce - Too
Much Is Not Enough."
When you click on the Gift Shop all that remains
is a giant crater and the coded message: "The damage you have
wrought is nothing compared to the utter destruction that wealth has
wrought."
Miles Jaffe is an angry man. "If the
Hamptons
are an example of the height of American culture and of the social
values that are widely aspired to, then we are in deep trouble," he
says.
It took Jaffe about six months to construct the
site. At its zenith it was getting 1,700 hits a day.
"It’s a meme," Jaffe says. "An idea that passes
through the culture like a virus."
Mr. Jaffe comes by his anger honestly. His father,
Norman Jaffe, was an architect in the Hamptons. "So I know all about the futility of
trying to satisfy the fantasies of the nouveux riches."
"We are in deep trouble. That's what Nuke the
Hamptons
is about," Jaffe says. "When I came here [30 years ago] this was a
rural community, we balanced tourism and agriculture and sustainable
lifestyle ... Now there is no balance, lifestyle is king. People
have to have a 12,000-square-foot house and a fleet of exotic cars."
Jaffe also headed up a local group that campaigned
to ban the Hampton Jitney from using back roads. (The Jitney—also
featured on Sex and the City when Carrie and the girls hit
the beaches for the weekend—is the daily "shuttle" bus from
New York to the
Hamptons
filled with pale New Yorkers on cell phones.) That campaign resulted
in the banning of commercial traffic on many residential streets in
Southampton, Bridehampton, and Water Mill.
Nuclear devastation, of course, is no joking
matter. But still.
Bernie Madoff owns a beach house in the
township of East Hampton. It is currently on the
market for $8.75. It is hoped that the proceeds of the sale will
eventually go to victims of Bernie’s Ponzi scheme, which defrauded
investors out of billions of dollars, including Holocaust survivor
Elie Wiesel. Do you begin to see what I am talking about?
I spent an hour or so today on the web site
targeting Sag Harbor, home of
Martha Stewart and her gracious living. Here is nukethehamptons.com
description of Martha:
Martha Stewart built an empire creating a
behavioral guide for insecure social climbers who desperately seek
to achieve the look of the class they aspire to belong to. Caution:
[Martha Stewart]… will subject you to countless suggestions for
better living through copious consumption of such vital necessities
as Martha Stewart’s Maple Leaf Pancake molds.
It’s not so much that I had it in for Martha—I
like the way she cooks, even if she did have that little episode a
while back where she—ahem—cooked the books--but I was upset with the
local Sag Harbor "traffic
control" practices. Driving into town for dinner from Montauk one
night with S, I saw to my amazement an open parking space!
Amazingly, it was right in front of the American Hotel, where we had
dinner reservations. I put on my turn signal, waited patiently for
the traffic to clear, and pulled into the spot. Within seconds I was
greeted by a cheerful young man in a khaki uniform (there were three
other young men outfitted just like him in the half block by the
hotel. I was cited for crossing a double line. "Don’t worry," the
tasteful uniform said, "it’s not a moving violation, it’s just a
parking violation." "Whatever," I said, and threw the ticket on the
seat of the car. When I read the fine print the next day I saw that
my parking violation had cost me a cool fifty dollars.
Thinking about it further, what I don’t like about
the black humor of nukethehamptons.com (which is funny enough, in a
banal way) is its sense of keeping the Hamptons "ours"-----when they are not "ours,"
and never were.
Original Sin
Seventh grade students in New York study
New York state history. I was one of them,
in 1967, at Lakeland Middle School. We learned about the
Dutch, the English, Henry Hudson, wampum, the Algonquins, and the
Mohawks. Nothing was said about Montauk or the nation that thrived
there, in their ancestral land.
Nothing was said about original sin.
Long Island
was formed over 100 million years ago shaped by the debris of the
last Ice Age. The resulting pile left on the South Fork of Suffolk
County is known as the Ronkonkoma Moraine, which is submerged beyond
Montauk Point, at the easternmost tip of Long Island, but surfaces
again to form Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and the
island of
Nantucket.
Over 3,000 years before any white man set foot on
North America, Montauk was inhabited by a native
Americans. The tribe principally associated with this area called
their land Montauket, meaning "Hilly Country." Although the Montauk
tribe was relatively isolated at the eastern tip of the island, it
grew to prominence based on the importance of wampum—polished sea
shells, particularly clam shells—which were in great demand as the
chief source of barter among the tribes of the region. By the time
the first British settlers arrived in New England, Montauk’s abundance of shells had made it a
natural target of tribal envy, a factor that led to the eventual
collaboration of the Montauks with the British.
At the time of the Mayflower landing in
Massachusetts—1620—the Montauks
were led by the greatest sachem (leader) in their history,
Wyandanch. There was almost constant war among the tribes of New
England, and the Mantauks were no match for the larger, more
aggressive tribes of Connecticut and Rhode Island.
The Pequots of Rhode Island preyed on the Montauks at will, slipping
across the Sound in their silent war canoes. Isolated from any
neighboring tribes who might have offered help, the Montauks were
forced to pay increasingly larger and larger tribute to the Pequot
in wampum. With no other alternative in sight, Wyandanch in 1637
formed the first alliance between his people and the white settlers
of the
Connecticut
colony. Captain Lian Gardiner, a 38 year old soldier, engineer and
adventurer, commanded the British to whom Wyandanch pledged loyalty.
(Lord Gardiner and his descendants, the "lords of the manor,"
created a self-sufficient agrarian economy on Gardiner’s
Island. They grew and raised their own food, as well as
what was needed for barter, and exercised total manorial control of
their island from 1639 until 1788, when it was annexed to East
Hampton. Today, the island is still managed by the Gardineer family,
the only known English land grant to remain in the possession of the
original family.) In the summer of 1637 the Montauk sealed their
allegiance to the British when, supported by British troops, a
Montauk war party met and destroyed the Pequot at the
Battle
of the Great Swamp. The Pequot’s demand for tribute
ended, Wyandanch transferred that tribute to Gardiner. Gardiner was
invited to visit the East End. He
quickly realized the potential of the virgin land for new British
settlements. Gardiner and Wyandanch underwent a ritual of blood
brothership, and Gardiner learned the Montauk tongue. The friendship
between these two leaders remained an isolated instance of native
American and British friendship, but there was a price to pay. The
Montauk people became increasingly isolated from other native
tribes, ever more dependent on the British.
Not, as it turns out, a good thing.
Wyandanch and Gardiner transacted the first large
land sale on the East End, which resulted in the founding of East Hampton. For these 31,000 acres, spanning present day
Southampton’s borders to the western edge of Napeague, the British
colonists gave 20 coats, 24 hatchets, hoes, knives, looking glasses,
and 100 muxes (a form of drill used in the making of wampum). The
Montauk were left with legal rights to fish and hunt in that area,
and the remainder of their original lands, stretching from the
Napeague border to Montauk Point.
Not long after, the New England
governor sold the rights to these 31,000 acres to a group of
colonists. Arriving from New England in 1648, and landing at
Northwest
Harbor, they named their new settlement
"Maidstone"--many of them having come from Maidstone,
England. Within a few years the
town was renamed East Hampton. The
settlement flourished, and by 1651 the settlers had finished paying
their debt to the governors of
Connecticut
and New Haven,
and received the final deed to their town. The original nine
settlers include names still common in East Hampton today: Hand,
Mulford, Talmadge, Barnes, Dayton, Hedges, Osborn,
Edwards, and Strong.
These early settlers grew distrustful of the
Montauk. In 1649 a Montauk brave was accused of the murder of an East Hampton settler. Even the discovery that the murder
was the act of a renegade Pequot did nothing to ease the tension.
Rumors of an incipient "Indian uprising" were always afoot,
including the rumor that the Dutch were secretly arming the Indians
for a massive uprising—patently false. In fact, the Montauk
population was rapidly declining. Constant warring with the
Narragansetts inflicted serious losses on the tribe. In 1653 the
Naragansetts ambushed the Montauk in what became known as "Massacre Valley," at the foot of what is now
Montauk Manor. Wyandanch’s own daughter—Heather Flower--was
kidnapped on her wedding day and had to be ransomed from the
Narragansetts with the assistance of Gardiner. Wyandanch rewarded
Gardiner with a large tract of land in what now constitutes the
greater part of Smithtown. In the
late 1650s a series of smallpox epidemics killed two thirds of the
remaining tribe.
Wyandanch died in 1659, leaving his 19 year old
son in joint guardianship to his widow and Gardiner. The few
surviving Montauk moved to East Hampton village, to be near Gardiner
and the Rev. Thomas James, the first pastor in
East Hampton. The following year the Montauk sold the
last of their land to a group of East Hampton settlers, a total of
9,000 acres, stretching from Napeague to Montauk Point. The price of the purchase was 900 pounds.
With this sale, the Montauk had relinquished all claims to their
ancestral lands.
Over the course of just 23 years the Montauk had
sold, bartered, or given in tribute nearly 60,000 acres of Eastern
Long Island to the English settlers. Unlike their Shinnecock
neighbors, who kept 300 acres as a reservation, the Montauk did not
retain a single acre of their land. In effect, they had ceased to
exist as a tribe. From this time on they were treated as guests in
their own land. In 1909 New York State Judge Al Blackmar declared
the Montauk Indians to be no longer recognized as a tribe. With this
decision, the Montauk lost their status as a tribe and all legal
rights to their ancestral homeland.
They no longer exist as a people.
They have largely been forgotten. In this way,
they have been extinguished a second time.
September 11, 2009
It is hard not to believe that America
is lost. We are adrift and in debt, our economy propped up by
Chinese currency, perpetually at war, with a broken economy, fifty
million people without health insurance, and apparently
ungovernable. I write these words on September 11, 2009. A few
nights ago a U.S.
congressman heckled the president of the United States, after a summer of
similar behavior at health care “town hall meetings” across the
land. What is it about late summer that causes people to lose their
minds?
We are a nation at war, but few pause to think
about it for even a moment. We are busy consuming, consuming, but
anxious that we may not have enough to consume enough. We go on
evading genuine thought. As Heidegger put it, "The most thought
provoking thought in this thought-provoking age is that we are still
not thinking." He also says in another place, only a god can save
us.
Surely not the American god. I remember the
billboard there in Gatsby, at the valley of ashes, at the
intersection of the haves and the have-nots, the spectator god
looking down on it all, the sad sorry spectacle of America, what it is, what it had
become, and what it was headed for.
One semester at Wittenberg University—in
September 2001, in fact--I taught an 8:00 A.M. class. I mention this
because it concerns hope in a dark time, a subject which is of some
interest to me. And because it concerns my students. On the morning
in question, the room was dark, and the windows open. It was chilly,
and I shivered as I laid my umbrella on the lectern. Outside, rain
was falling straight down, as heavy as I have ever seen it. One
young woman sitting in the front row was drenched completely. She
had no umbrella. Her long hair was dripping onto her desk, and the
bottoms of her blue jeans were dark and soaked. Her bare arms were
pale and smooth, glistening with water. She had two pieces of wheat
bread in her hands. Her breakfast had been interrupted. She was,
just before I looked away, reaching for her notebook, ready for
class to start. She was on time. She looked ready.
To teach is to hope, just as to pray is to change.
I teach and I pray for change. I teach and I discover that it is me
who is changing. I believe—as much as I believe in anything—in the
young. My teaching is itself a kind of prayer. To teach is to
believe and to invest in the future, and the future is the
undiscovered country, where hope lives, if it lives at all.
The Women of Lockerbie
Listening to the radio one day, I heard about a
play written by Deborah Baley Brevoort, called The Women of
Lockerbie. One day in December the sky exploded and the remains
of Pan Am Flight 103 fell upon
Lockerbie,
Scotland. Among
the many horrors one stood out for its seeming insignificance: what
to do about the 11,000 articles of clothing belonging to the
victims? The clothing, of course, was filthy and stained with jet
fuel, clothing that carried the stench of death; the authorities
called the clothes "contaminated" and decided that it must be
incinerated. But the women of Lockerbie prevailed upon the
U.S.
government to release the clothing to them. Over one year’s time,
11,000 items of clothing were washed in streams before being packed
and shipped back to the families.
When asked why they had done this, one Lockerbie
woman explained that every act of evil must be turned into an act of
love.
Until recently I didn’t know anything about this
clothing or the women of Lockerbie who washed it, but right now I am
wondering what their thoughts are this week, and, more importantly,
what they are doing. It seems urgent to me to find out.
Gary Percesepe
Gary Percesepe is
Associate Editor of the Blip Magazine Archive, and an ordained
minister in the United Church of Christ. A native New Yorker,
his stories, poems, essays, reviews and criticism have appeared in
the Mississippi Review,
Salon, Antioch
Review and many other places. He is the author of four books in
philosophy, and just completed a novel called "Leaving Telluride,"
for which he is seeking representation. He vacations each summer in
Montauk, New York.