A 32-year-old man was shot once in the face and rushed to Beth Israel Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The victim's identity has not been revealed yet.
[Police Commissioner Raymond] Kelly said about 15 minutes before the shooting, the suspected gunman was urinating on the outside wall of a West Village bar, and then walked into the bar and threatened the bartender with a silver pistol.
The suspect then left the bar, joined two other men and then the three confronted the victim and a male companion, who were walking south on Sixth Avenue.
The alleged shooter called the victim and companion anti-gay slurs several times and asked if they were "gay wrestlers," according to Kelly.
After the victim was shot once in the cheek, the suspect fled to MacDougal Street and West 3rd Street. There, Kelly said the alleged gunman dropped his weapon and was caught by police.
The Police Commissioner went on to say that this clearly was a hate crime. This is the fourth anti-gay crime in mid Manhattan in 3 weeks and clearly the most serious.
Photo from the New York Post of the suspect in police custody
The guy is clearly messed up in the head, but how many want to bet that "Jesus" "told" him to do this?
UPDATE:
The murder victim has been identified. His name is Mark Carson.
The suspect, who was carrying a fake ID at the time of his arrest, has been identified as Elliot Morales. His 2 companions that night are still at large.
Local activists organized a vigil at the murder site last night.
The BBC this morning is reporting shock over a European Union poll on anti-gay violence across Europe. "A quarter of gay people surveyed in a major EU poll say they have been subjected to attacks or violent threats in the past five years," reads the headline. I'm not shocked at all. If anything, I'm surprised that the number is only 25%.
Violence is a constant fact of life for all LGBTs regardless of gender, race, class, age, or nationality. The very real threat of violence is always there, and so much a part of daily life for us that sometimes we fail to even notice it. I remember participating in a kind of sharing group for gay men in New York in the mid 1990s; not a therapy group, more just a get together and share experiences group (the AIDS crisis was still at its peak at the time). The group was mostly affluent professionals in their 30s and 40s, mostly white. I remember a session when the subject of violence came up, and the moderator of the discussion asked if anyone had ever been physically or verbally assaulted for being gay. The first reaction was general denial, each participant said that they had never suffered any abuse for being gay. But then after awhile, the memories and the stories began coming out. By the end of the evening, it became clear that just about everyone in that group had been singled out and abused in some way for being gay. A couple of participants in the group told harrowing tales of being badly beaten. One of them told a story about being very badly beaten in Central Park and barely escaping with his life.
Michael was a regular victim of violence and intimidation in his younger days. The humiliation and assaults he suffered in high school were so bad that he seriously considered dropping out. He still thinks dropping out and getting a GED would have been preferable to sticking it out for another year. In his senior year, he finally had enough. One of his tormentors pushed him too far one day. It took a vice principal and a football coach to keep Michael from drowning the dude in a toilet in the boys' room. Another one that year got a broken nose after he pushed Michael too far. I don't agree with or advocate violence in any way, but Michael did enjoy a few weeks of peace at the end of his senior year. People left him alone.
Since Michael doesn't exactly blend in very well with more conventional crowds, he still can be a lightning rod attracting verbal abuse. Curiously, a lot of other more conventional people love him for it (he's a celebrity at the diner across the street from us with the waitresses, the retirees, the crossing guards, and the city sanitation workers who work or regularly have breakfast there; they always greet him by name).
I consider myself to be very fortunate. I certainly have been menaced and threatened many times, especially when I was younger, but I've never been physically assaulted. I certainly knew a lot of people who did suffer more than verbal assaults, and had the scars to show for it. I remember back when I lived in Kansas City, MO back in the late 1970s, gay men there were very closeted and sitting ducks for violent crime. I knew many who got robbed and beat up on their way home from the bars and discos on the weekends. I knew one young man with a mouthful of silver teeth; he was pistol whipped in the mouth during one such robbery.
I knew lots of trans people who were assaulted so often that they expected it. In New York in the 1990s most of them were prepared for it. The tranny girls I knew all carried pepper spray and many of them carried knives and knew how to use them. They all had many stories to tell about being jumped or punched or stabbed out on the street.
Mindful of all of this, that Good Christian People who've long dominated everything cry that they are "oppressed" just because they now find themselves and their views newly marginalized is the height of unmitigated gall. Tell it to Harvy Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Fanny Ann Eddy, Daniel Zamudio, Matthew Shepard, or David Kato among thousands of others who really did walk that Via Dolorosa all the way to their deaths.
***
So, what are your experiences? Did you ever have to escape with your life? How about you straight folk out there? Did you ever have to take it on the chin (verbally or physically) for being our friend?
Assault on a Russian gay rights activist last year
EXTRA:
I wonder how many people remember this massacre of gay men here in the good ol' USA, the 1973 Upstairs Lounge fire in New Orleans that killed 32 people? This remains the deadliest fire in New Orleans' history. The crime was never solved. Radio DJs in New Orleans made light of the victims. Churches in the city closed their doors to funerals for the victims. Fr. William P. Richardson held a memorial service for the victims at St. George's Episcopal Church and for his trouble was reprimanded by the local bishop and received complaints from 100 parishoners and a mailbox stuffed with hate mail.
EXTRA:
I sometimes think that gay men in particular have a conditioned reflex not to take ourselves or our experiences seriously. Never is that more clear than when it comes to the violence that many of us have experienced and which menaces us all. We can't even remember what happened to us individually or collectively.
I wonder if anything similar is true for lesbians? I suspect this might also be true for trans people. What do you think?
Michelangelo Signorile reminds us how far Minnesota has come in so short a time.
Minnesota is the first marriage equality state in which just a few short months ago analysts were still predicting gay marriage would be banned in the state's constitution in a ballot measure. And that dramatic turnaround underscores how rapidly public opinion is changing everywhere. Just two years ago Minnesota's then-Republican-led legislature voted to put a gay marriage ban on the ballot in 2012. Of the four states voting on gay marriage in the fall of 2012, Minnesota was viewed by political analysts and many gay activists as the long shot for a win by gays. But, in addition to beating back that measure, just six months later the Land of 10,000 Lakes has shown us what equality is all about.
Minnesota's marriage equality win also represents a stinging blow to the anti-gay evangelical right. This is the state that brought us Michele Bachmann, a GOP member of Congress who was running for president just a year ago, and an evangelical Christian who made her political career by pushing boilerplate religious bigotry about gays, including comparing them to Satan. With a husband, Marcus, who runs "pray away the gay" clinics in Minnesota, she's been a leader in the religious right across the country, even often taking credit for organizing anti-gay activists in Minnesota to get the marriage amendment on the ballot last fall. It was the hope of anti-gay forces nationwide that Michele Bachmann would keep the tide of gay marriage back. But the floodgates have opened.
My picture of the top of the new WTC from Calyer Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
"A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay." -- architect Cass Gilbert
The new World Trade Center really has topped out this time. The final 2 sections were hauled up to the top of the spire and bolted on early this morning. The building is not finished. The top of it isn't even finished. The broadcast ring is still under construction, and it won't be until next year before enough of the interior is completed to open. Still, this is a major milestone in the building's construction.
My pictures taken today, May 10, 2013, about noon of the topped out World Trade Center; taken at my usual spot by the East River Ferry port in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Pictures taken this morning by a park ranger on Ellis Island of the topping out of the new World Trade Center:
My pictures over the years of the death and resurrection of the World Trade Center:
This is the only picture I have that I took of the old WTC, a picture from the roof of my building at 256 East 10th Street in July of 1994.
This is a detail from that 1994 picture.
One of my pictures of the destruction of the WTC on September 11th, 2001; the second plane crash.
From Liberty/Zuccotti Park in 2011; I was on my way home from a visit to the Occupy encampment there.
From the East River Ferry port in Williamsburg, September, 2010
From the same place, February, 2011
From the same place today, May 10, 2013
I must confess that I've very much enjoyed watching this prodigious project go up; so much so that its completion will be an anticlimax for me. I've never seen so large a construction project in all my life, and I'm sure I will never see anything like it again.
I don't know if there's ever been a major building that has been through such a life, death, and resurrection cycle as this. The only ones I can think of are all from far back in history. The Parthenon was one such building and Chartres Cathedral was another, buildings that replaced earlier monuments destroyed by catastrophe. Of course this building does not measure up to either of those monuments which set standards for architecture for centuries to come. No one will ever say that about this building. I seriously doubt that this building will last as long as both of those have. I don't think terrorists will destroy it again. I think it will simply become obsolete, and probably sooner rather than later. The World Trade Center was not built for the ages, neither this one nor the first one. It was and is again a commercial venture built in an era that doesn't really believe in anything like "the ages." Now, and only now, is all that matters. We are afraid of the past, and we don't really believe in the future, certainly not like our grandparents did even 50 years ago.
That doesn't necessarily mean that this huge pile of steel and glass is meaningless. I can think of no other commercial construction project anywhere at any time involving so much tangled and powerful emotion. There is no other commercial project anywhere incorporating death and resurrection imagery, and even a cemetery, at its center. This office complex and transportation hub is also the final resting place of more than a thousand people, and a memorial to thousands more. So many emotions of grief, anger, and injured national and civic pride are incorporated into a commercial project that may not be able to fully carry them all.
But is that really the fault of the buildings if they cannot successfully carry all that emotional weight?
Our largest and most ambitious buildings reflect our deepest and most sincere convictions. Nothing else could possibly sustain the energy required to build such things. As I've said many times, the towers looming over Manhattan and city centers around the world are our real cathedrals reflecting what we really believe despite what we say we believe. The World Trade Center, all of Manhattan's towers, and every skyline proclaim our faith in the transformative power of money, the god who really does work the miracles, and upon whom we all pin our hopes for salvation. Money may not be a transcendent god, but it is a god nonetheless. The power, and the success, of that belief drives these buildings upward. Just as much as in the days of temples and cathedrals, our own pride drives these things up as well. They are huge monuments of ego, individual and collective. Our belief in money and success is not prepared to deal with death and catastrophe. The ambivalence of this project reflects our ambivalence about those issues. We don't believe in misfortune any more than the ancients did. We no longer believe in curses from angry gods repaying us for transgressions, but we cling to no less a superstition that says that we are all the sole authors of our destinies.
Art and architecture are vainglorious things, and huge prodigious constructions like this one are especially vain and hubristic. And yet, we should all be poorer without them. There is not a single monument on the earth that doesn't have some smell about it. Monuments ranging from the Great Wall of China to the US Capitol were built with slave labor. The Parthenon was paid for with embezzled funds. The people of Reims rioted over the taxes levied to pay for their cathedral, and the people of Laon killed their bishop over the taxes he levied to pay for his cathedral. In our admiration for the dark spirituality of Hagia Sophia, we forget that it was originally the Emperor's palace chapel and reflects the imperial ambitions of Emperor Justinian who had it built. Even the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright carry their taints of corruption. And yet no one is sorry that any of these were built. We are more sorry when they are destroyed.
I thought of this scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis today:
What I've always thought curious is that this version of the story is closer to Jewish rabbinical understandings than to Christian interpretations. In the Midrashic literature, the Tower of Babel is indeed a rebellion against God, but the rabbis saw it as the creation not only of human pride but of cruelty as well. One story says that the Tower rose so high that it took a year to hoist bricks to the top. As a result, each fallen and broken brick was given a funeral while fallen workers were thrown out with the rubbish.
I don't see the World Trade Center as any kind of rebellion against God (our age doesn't believe in God anyway). I don't see it as any great pyramid built by toiling slaves. Compared to the thousands upon thousands who toiled on ziggurats and pyramids in ancient times, the World Trade Center is being built by a small army of skilled and highly paid specialists, almost all of whom are unionized and display the union insignia prominently at the construction site.
I do see the Tower as the creation of pride and hubris.
Perhaps Wagner comes closer to our tower in the final scene of Das Rheingold (Wagner goes great with New York's architectural and engineering prodigies). The storm clouds and mists part to reveal the newly completed Valhalla. It is the work of the giants Fafner and Fasolt. It was paid for by gold stolen from the Rhine Maidens. The giants quarrel over the gold and Fasolt lies dead reminding all of the crime that underwrote Valhalla's construction. Loge recoils in revulsion at all of this as the Rhine Maidens sing mournfully of their stolen gold. Wotan salutes the magnificent new fortress and leads the gods over a rainbow bridge into Valhalla at the conclusion.
Indeed, there was a lot of scandal and pride behind the construction of the first World Trade Center, the complete destruction of an entire neighborhood on the lower West Side. There were the Rockefeller brothers Nelson and David using their money and influence on state and city governments to use eminent domain laws to clear residents out the proposed site. Only a small Greek Orthodox church was spared. I doubt you will find anything better in the history of any other prodigious construction in history. These histories are witness to basic human animal selfishness and to the crapulence of the universe.
Great monuments, great art, and other great accomplishments are more often than not testimony to what we can do despite ourselves.
EXTRA:
Here are the Port Authority's usual faint-inducing close ups of the installation of the final piece of the spire yesterday. These also give you an idea of just how big all of this is.
Was the crew that put the cap stone on the top of the Great Pyramid of Khufu this proud and this happy? Probably not. The crews that put the last stone in place on the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral or the cross on the top of Saint Peter's dome probably were.
Giotto, Ascension of Chist, from the Arena Chapel, Padua
Margaret Watson out on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota gives what I think is the best Ascension Day sermon I've ever read.
I strive never to speak of that "better place" the other preachers speak of. I think it only encourages despair. And all kinds of poor theology. But that "better place" is ingrained in the psyche of the People --the campfires that burn and sparkle above us proof that our ancestors are waiting for us. In a better place --where there is no sighing or crying....
I do speak of God knowing, personally, all our suffering --as even Jesus wept at the death of his friend. I do speak of things --seen and unseen, right alongside us. I do speak of God taking a cold, rock hard tomb and making it a place of new life. I do speak of grieving in a holy way, full of honor and respect --not lost in masking the pain, but making room for God in that pain. What I am left with this morning is the certain understanding that the body is holy --that life is sacred. It is the 40th day of Easter. It is the Ascension --one of the most ancient holy days in Christian Tradition... and the People suffer. And weep.
I'm reading Isaiah Berlin's Against the Current, and it is giving me a renewed appreciation for that very messy thinker Montesquieu. He was the polar opposite of someone like Sayid Qutb. He was a multiculturalist avant la lettre. Montesquieu believed that it was more important for people to be free to err than for them to be compelled to be correct. In that belief he made himself the enemy of all the 'terrible simplifiers' of the modern era be they religious or ideological. The radical revolutionaries regarded him with as much suspicion as the monarchist reactionaries. And yet, it was not any moral relativist who declared that "outside the law is tyranny."
The exact motivations of Boston terrorists remain unknown, but it looks increasingly likely that militant Islamism was involved, that apparently they saw the attacks as retaliation against the USA for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Curiously, the situation in their homeland of Chechnya seems not to have been a factor, so far. The Tsarnaev brothers spent most of their lives in this country, and had only a tangential relation with their homeland. The driving passion seems to have been a broader sense of Islam under assault by Western colonialism.
Where did this idea start?
Sayid Qutb is a name that might be familiar to some who regularly read this blog, but I'm sure remains largely unknown to most Americans, and to most Westerners in general. He may well turn out to be one of the most influential thinkers shaping the early 21st century world. He may be as important an influence upon our time as Marx or Lenin were on the early 20th century. Sayid Qutb was the spiritual and intellectual father of militant Islamism.
Born the son of a landowner and government official in a small Egyptian village, Qutb was a prolific writer; a poet, scholar, essayist, and theologian. He wrote his most influential work toward the end of his life, most of it while in prison. He wrote a 30 volume commentary on the Quran, whose title in English is In The Shade of the Quran. He wrote another very influential book on political Islam titled Milestones. He worked much of his life for the Egyptian Ministry of Education. It was in that capacity that he visited the USA in 1949 to report on American methods of education. He was horrified by the materialism and the loose sexual mores of American society. Qutb never married and seems to have been unusually squeamish around women. He was always a prudish and fastidiously puritanical man. He was also a staunch and ferocious antisemite. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood after holding out for a long time despite repeated invitations. In the end, Gamal Abdul Nasser executed him on a treason charge in 1966.
It was Qutb who saw through Nasser's Baath Party Pan-Arab nationalism as mostly a self-serving exploitation of nationalist emotion by the military. It was Qutb who first proposed a Pan-Islamic identity, a revival of the old vision of a unified Caliphate to challenge and to ultimately defeat the imperial powers of the West. Qutb went even further to propose a revived Islamic civilization to oppose the influence of Western secularism and Western liberalism. He categorically rejected the Enlightenment liberal values of the West. He also rejected universalist influences within Islam, especially the Sufis. Under the influence of 19th century Islamic thinkers from the Deobandi School in India, he turned his wrath upon Muslims who cooperated with the West, or who made any accommodation with Western values.
When Qutb compared Islam to other systems, he did not compare it to Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism; he compared it to socialism and capitalism. Qutb saw Islam as a social and political order as much as a religion. Indeed, in the Muslim world, there is no clear separation between religious and secular as there is in the West. The Caliph in the Muslim world was both Pope and Emperor. There never was any separation between the two. The idea of Islam as an all-encompassing religious, legal, social, and cultural order is at the heart of Qutb's most influential book Ma-alim-f-il-Tariq or Milestones.
Islam is as large and conflicted a universe as Christianity. It was never any kind of unified monolith, no more so than Christianity ever was. There is a whole range of belief from the most liberal universalism to the most reactionary fundamentalist anti-modernism. There is the mystical universalism of the Sufis, the apocalyptic and messianic traditions of the Shia, and the militant anti-modernism of the Salafis. The major difference with Christianity, apart from beliefs, is historical experience. Most of Islam lived through the experience of colonialism. Western Christianity did not (though Eastern Christianity did).
Islam, like all the religions of the earth, is struggling with the challenges of modernity. Most people in the world still pin their hopes for a better life for themselves and for their children on modernity. The proof of that can be seen in the millions of people who continue to pour into the world’s cities from the countryside. Even the most anti-modern fundamentalist of any religion values the power and the productivity of modern science and technology. Muslims, like people everywhere, must deal with the nihilism of market capitalism and with the relentlessly cold and impersonal quality of modern life.
Islam is now going through a serious internal struggle over how to face modernity. The added combustible ingredient in this is the experience of colonialism. Science (if not quite the technology it produces), liberalism, and feminism are considered Western imports and corruptions imposed by infidel outsiders (never mind that there are awakening expectations among the urban professional classes who make even the most reactionary regimes work, and among women who form half of their populations).
Qutb’s writings speak powerfully to this sense of outrage and alienation.
Curiously, most of those attracted to terrorism are not the beat-down poor of the Muslim world, but people like the Tsarnaev brothers, educated and relatively privileged people. Osama bin Laden came from one of the richest families in the world. Ayman al Zawahiri is a former Egyptian physician. Mohammed Atta, one of the pilots in the September 11th attacks, was from an affluent Egyptian family and was a student of urban planning in Germany (his professors described him as “brilliant”).
Qutb himself was from rural Egypt, but also from a privileged upbringing.
These are the same sorts of folk who were once attracted to militant Marxism in the early part of the 20th century, and who are still drawn to Anarchism in the West.
Perhaps it was Qutb who created today’s militant Islamism by combining the rage of the colonized with something very much like Western political ideology, together with the anti-modern Islamic fundamentalism that had been around since the mid 19th century. I wonder just how broad the appeal of this blend really is in the Muslim world. While violent Islamist movements like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Shabab in Somalia, and others continue to proliferate and attract fanatically devoted followers, I couldn’t help but note the very muted reaction in much of the Muslim world to the death of Osama bin Laden. The loudest and most violent protests against bin Laden’s death were not in Cairo or Karachi, but in London. There seems to be an equally powerful reaction against the fundamentalist revival brewing in Iran, and a smaller reaction growing out of the urban/rural divisions in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world. It remains to be seen how all this will play out, and how it will affect the rest of us outside the Muslim world.
EXTRA:
What about 'Christianism?' Is there anything quite comparable to Islamism? Yes and no. I think the main difference is the experience of colonialism drives the passion and the appeal of Islamism. There is no corresponding experience in the Christian West. That said, there certainly are fundamentalist movements with political ambitions, and they are almost all in the USA. The USA and India are the only 2 countries outside the Muslim world that have politically powerful fundamentalist movements.
Probably the closest thing we have to anything like what Sayid Qutb dreamed up is Christian Dominionism. Like Islamism, it proposes to tear down any distinctions between secular and religious law. It is not quite as carefully thought out as Qutb's Islamism. Like Islamism, it is driven by anger and resentment over transformations in modern life, but the experience of being colonized is lacking. There is a very extreme and even violent form of Dominionism, Reconstructionism, that is very similar to the doctrines and practice of the Taliban. Like the Taliban, the Reconstructionists would make adherence to their form of Christianity compulsory and punish breaches of the moral code with the most draconian measures possible including frequent use of the death penalty.
There is a streak of racism in Christianism that comes to the surface in Christian Identity movements. There was also a strain of racism in Qutb's writings as well as strong antisemitism.
These Christianist movements are all confined to the USA, so far as I know. I know of no international influence or any interest in these movements from abroad. Like the American Communist Party, they are mostly marginal, impotent, and inept. They are occasionally dangerous as was seen in the Atlanta Olympic bombing of 1996.
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