Parting thoughts: effective New York tourism

Really, I've just written this so that Hitler's not the first thing people see when looking at my blog...

1. Eat Pizza from a non-chain pizza place: It makes no sense to visit the city and blow all your money on a 5 star meal--fancy food can be bought (almost) anywhere, but the foods that New York is famous for, it turns out, are actually unique to the place. There's nothing like a New York pizza--every New Yorker has a favorite slice. Mine happens to be Sal and Carmine's on Broadway at 102nd street--my first and favorite taste of NYC pizza.

2.Don't waste your time in stores (except for H&M, which is worth a detour). Go see the parks, and pick up coffee while you're at it. No trip to the city is complete without an afternoon in central park (from which you can get cool cityscapes from the heart of the beast). Washington square has some of the best people watching in the world. Riverside park is a good place to see inhabitants making good use of public space.

3. Walk through times square, but do it at night, and leave promptly.

4. Take the subways, they don't bite.

Hitler should have been a cat owner.

(photo by Walter Frentz)

The carnage of the twentieth century, unprecedented in scale and graphic availability to the civilian, has taught my generation much about the ubiquity of evil. My generation, I say, because we haven't been heavily involved in any major wars, and even the photos and footage we've been shown of 9/11 were heavy on the spectacle of falling buildings and light on actual carnage and casualties. Not having been able to follow the rise to power of those who we now recognize as evil, it's been easier for our history books to paint figures like Hitler into vicious little caricatures of themselves, less human and more nightmarish than he realistically could have been.

This is important because when people my age look for evil today, we seem to have stopped looking at people who seem ordinary-ish, and search for the "bad guy" caricature that we've been supplied with. Conversely, when one has been given the label of 'evil,' we stop thinking of them as rational people, stop listening to what they have been saying, and discount them as bad or mad entirely. (Bin Laden is a good example of how this has worked)

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I think it's important for you to know, dear readers, that Hitler loved puppies. Capable of such callous carnage in his public life, and such empathy for animals, dogs in particular, in private. He found a mutt in the trenches during World War I, named it Fuchsl, and was distraught when he was stolen. Later, he received Blondi, an Alsatian, as a gift. In the 1930s, he instituted animal protection laws that afforded animals more rights than anywhere else at the time--this included a ban on using dogs to hunt, as Hitler considered it "unsporting." In political life, good treatment of animals became tied to good citizenship; for example, Goering once said, "Whoever tortures animals violates the instincts of the German people." Regardless of how the reforms were sold to the people, this concern with the ethics of treatment of animals surpasses that of our own time and place. The hunting laws instituted in Nazi Germany--which, I believe, remain in place--aim to combat unnecessary suffering in the hunted. We, stuck in the second-amendment-issues of such regulation, afford our critters much less compassion. That bears repeating: regarding animal cruelty, our society is notably less compassionate than Nazi Germany was...in this one respect, Hitler has the moral high ground. It boggles the mind.



(Fuchsl next to Hitler)

I'm convinced that there's more to learn from this, but I'm not sure what it is. As one who spends a lot of time with dogs and dog owners, I've concluded that one can learn a lot of a person based on the kind of pet they choose, and what breeds they're drawn to. Personally, I find that the more compassionate of us opt for pound mutts. But it can't be just a coincidence that Bob Dole is drawn to miniature schnauzers while the Clintons had a lab. Napoleon's wife had a pug, Marie Antoinette had cats. Lenin had a cat, too, and I think Stalin had a pet tarantula. This all seems appropriate, but I can't put my finger on why, exactly. Back to Hitler, and his beloved mutt. Perhaps it's just another drop in the bucket of examples of the banality of evil, but the image is hard to get past.

(photo by Walter Frentz)

59 degrees farenheit, with light rain and thick fog

It's rainy and cold today, an anomaly for August, but much what it was like outside when first I came to this great city. I remember the gaudy "welcome to the big apple" sign at LaGuardia; now I roll my eyes at it, then it actually meant something important to me. The smell outside of baggage claim, the smell of a new city, dark, mysterious, disorienting. I can't smell that anymore. I was 18 at the time, in hot pursuit of an ill-fated romance (I'd call it a trainwreck in retrospect, but at the time, it was a lot of fun, like in the movies). The cab drove with typical bravado through slippery October highways, past the prominent "History channel" billboard, to the Hayden Hall hotel, on 79th and Columbus. The smells of that place linger with me as well--smoky, cheap rooms, with overtones of lavender air freshener. It was a crappy place, as close to the kind of hotel room where detectives on Law and Order find cold bodies as the Upper West Side can manage, but I paid for it myself, and to me it represented my first tentative steps towards independence.

That first night, I met the 1/9 train, saw times square at night for the first time (impressive, not annoying--now I avoid that area like the plague), and then went directly to a coffee shop in greewich village, Esperanto's. You could smoke inside back then. In the ladies room, someone had scrawled "For Ophelia, for we are also what we have lost" on the defunct hand dryer. I had a chai. I'd love to be able to remember what Michael and I talked about that night, but it's a blur.

That was 5 years ago, and in that time, I feel that I've really grown up in the city. It's difficult to recapture the excitement of being on the precipice of a decision that I knew would affect the rest of my life, but sometimes, on days like today, I can walk along 81st street, in front of the planetarium, or though West 4th, where the other important cafe of my past no longer exists, and remember the beauty of being new to New York City.