Manhattan: the urban jungle
Geoffrey Wagner
The last subway car of a train pulling into Astor Station, on the borders of New York's Greenwich Village, was almost empty. It was 3.45 pm of a pleasant October day. As the brakes were applied three youths pounced on the only other occupant of the carriage, a well-dressed Long Island businessman; the leader held a knife to the man's throat and demanded his money. The businessman handed over his wallet which contained exactly $118. Still, the would-be thieves weren't satisfied — they required that their victim turn out his pockets. The individual did so and produced a gun. He was one of only twenty thousand New Yorkers licensed to carry such and he suggested his assailants accompany him to the nearest precinct house; when they ran for it out of the subway car's conveniently opening doors, he winged one and caught him. The other two got away.
This was an exceptional encounter. On that same afternoon an auto salesman in the Bronx was relieved of his money at pistol point and then shot twice in the head anyway, while later in the day a young medical student was shot to death in upper Manhattan by a band of roving teenagers. The day before there had been the funeral of a young French boy who had come over from a village near Lyons on a special grant to study and who had, in his first few days in New York, been similarly held up, robbed, then shot in the back. The bullet had lodged in the youth's spinal column and, paralysing him almost completely, had condemned him to a lingering and painful death lasting almost a year in hospital, while his parents watched from the side. For the last week of this time he was mercifully in coma. out a Lincolnesque jaw to the TV cameras, boldly prosecutes police corruption. One supposes that murder is, by definition, something other than corruption.
There are over fifteen hundred homicides in New York annually, most of them unsolved, as against a mere seventy or so in London. They are proliferating because about all juvenile court judges can do is confine the offender to a reform school which will be guaranteed, as Attica showed, to make a professional out of an amateur. Why, only the other day a black Bronx Judge — and all the assailants mentioned in the cases above were black— refused to set bail on one murderer apprehended in the act and set in front of him because, so he said, the number of blacks being brought in was obvious evidence of bias. When the President of my own college, on the borders of Harlem, was finally galvanised into making arrests of a few particularly flagrant drug-pushers, he received the logic of the same syndrome. He asked the local police chief to make sure that all the arresting officers were themselves black, so that there might be no colour friction; student groups thereupon denounced him as prejudiced since, by selecting black cops, he had shown that he wanted to arrest Negroes.
It is, indeed, difficult to win in New York City these days and the losers are those other eight million or so of us who can't obtain gun licences for our protection. For roaming deliquency and itinerant vandalism, semi-sympathised with by the earnest liberals as the produces of 'dissent' or poverty, appear to be moving into a new and more violent phase. I, too, have felt the knife pressed to my throat by muggers in New York — more than once; I have also had the bizarre experience of sitting in my university office at 9.30 in the morning and watching an assailant entering through my plasterboard ceiling! One of these incidents I did not report; I said nothing about it to anyone except my wife. And I suddenly realised that this is the way we are increasingly asked to live in the city — with murder, mugging and rape commonplace.
The true horror is to realise that in an agglomeration of this nature we are all dispensable digits, our deaths will be forgotten in a day or less. The funeral parlour barrow trundles us out of our apartments, wrapped in black leather, in as long as it takes to dispose of a pet cat. The ME, or Medical Examiner, has a neatly run office where those wishing to identify the dead receive numbered tags, and wait in turn; the ME's museum near Bellevue Hospital, with its ranks and ranks of bottled human organs perforated ' in various ways by bullets, is a shiny steeland-glass affair which you enter as you might any cheerful store.
Reformism has here come full cycle. I challenge anyone who has had someone dear to them killed in this haphazard fashion to attribute it to substandard social conditions, or an over-Oedipal childhood. In a queer, distorted way the last phase of student and anti-social protest in America was closer to My Lai that it knew. As for the Marxists, evil did not exist. Evil was merely capitalism. Tear down now. Significantly, H. Rap Brown, a fugitive black militant on the FBI's 'most wanted list, was shot and arrested the other day while he was sticking up a Westside bar, frequented by blacks, quiet clients whom their assailants called • brothers' even as they pistol-whipped them about the heads.
But of course Rap Brown was only allegedly holding up a bar, just as Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged murderer of Robert Kennedy despite the fact that forty million TV viewers saw his crime. The New York Times has just editorialised the new crime, wave as that of 'The "Wild Children likening these insensate killers to the bands of dissident young who terrorised the Russian countryside after the Bolshe' vik revolution. Sympathetic to the victiM5 as this editorial undoubtedly tried to be, It yet turned such crime into criminality and, was essentially on the side of the social planning and reformism which, DostoievskY at least considered, so often neglect or obscure the human reality. In both Notes From Underground, his great anti-utople attack on Chernyshevsky, and Crone ctn4 Punishment Dostoievsky showed the danger of treating violence 'with a shade of liberalism,' i.e. as a mathematical product of misery. As Razumikhin puts lt at one point of the latter story, in a patent parody of Fourier, 'I will show you sour of their little books: they explallif everything by the "deleterious influence 0, the environment" — and that's all! Their favourite cliche . . . From that it foflovvisi that if society is properly organised, ale crimes will instantly disappear, since thetA will be nothing to protest against ae: everybody will immediately become lavirw abiding.' In the interim eight million 14, eie Yorkers, at any rate, are hoping for a lit law enforcement.
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