Haunted by Memories

Haunted by memories of civilization

A little more than a year ago, my life had comforts which simply do not exist in El Paso Texas. Indeed, they probably don’t exist in this bellicose, cruel country of three letters.

I could, of a Saturday morning, walk around the corner to a park where children played and pensioners sat on benches feeding pigeons. A short walk—five minutes at most. And further on was a long street with shops. At the end of it my bank and a small collection of shops. A collection too gentle to be called a ‘mall”. And I could buy shoes or greeting cards or stamps at the post office. And there was a bakery there as well—a bakery, the sort of institution that sells fresh bread, once again something that does not exist in El Paso, Texas. (Well, yes, you can buy tortillas. But not the sort of bread I have in mind, fresh bread with a crust--and when the make the tortillas, do they use lard? Lard is a common ingredient in local restaurant cooking and has serious health consequences.)

Not only are there no comparable shops in El Paso, Texas. Whatever stores there may happen to be are far away, not within an easy walk. And I stress, such grocery stores as there are sell inferior goods. The fruit and vegetables are not fresh, and the shelves are full of various forms of artificial and manipulated food products. (And what of the phenomenon of genetic modification? In the land of the free we are unprotected from that threat.)

When I lived in Vienna, walking down the street from my apartment, again an easy five minute walk, I could catch a streetcar. And streetcars in Wien are not like the ugly buses in El Paso. They are not high up off the ground. No need for a ridiculous and time-consuming ritual accompanied by obnoxious beeping sounds: beep-beep-beep, the bus awkwardly tilts to one side, the driver gets out and helps someone enter the bus, beep-beep-beep, an obnoxious loud tone to increase the unpleasantness of waiting outside under the hot sun. A ritual which slows down the already slow travel of the loud unruly buses (unruly because the buses jerk like cattle cars whenever a driver slows down, knocking things off the seats if anyone is foolish enough to rest something there in a careless manner). The streetcars in Vienna are low to the ground; that it is not necessary to climb up into them. It is not necessary for them to be tilted with a noisy procedure. Apparently Rube Goldberg is more popular in El Paso Texas than in Vienna, Austria.

And the street car itself is almost silent. Again completely unlike El Paso’s noisy dirty buses.

And once I am in the street car I can easily go anyplace in Vienna. I won’t have to wait in the blazing sun or rain or wind unprotected because if there is a stop, at least in the most central part of the city, there will be a shelter. And there are not long waits. In El Paso they seem to have decided to take advantage of the long waiting times by building terrible buildings with miserable food and a television. Of course, I escape to such buildings when the sun is hot, but inside them it is desolate, a wilderness. Why would I want to watch television? Why would I want to eat junk food? The point is not to view the internet while I wait for the next bus! That doesn’t make public transport good. Good public transport means short waiting times. The managers and supervisors and politicians responsible for El Paso’s lousy bus system seem to have have things completely backwards. They should not be proud that they have provided such buildings. That's no reason to be proud. They should be embarrassed because they have not provided swift, efficient forms of transport---but only noisy, ungainly, polluting monsters. And if the politicians spend money to create even more highways, the shame piles higher.

(We should note in passing that the El Paso managers have decided, for whatever reason, to push the idea of "clean" (sic) natural gas. An omnipresent slogan. Is natural gas clean? Many water supplies in the United States have been damaged by the way in which companies get the gas out of the ground. Who supplies El Paso with natural gas? How do they get it out of the ground? Is it really "clean"????)

Whenever I walk anywhere in El Paso Texas, the walk itself is ugly . I walk down a barren flat space of concrete with shiny reflections from metal objects, many of which move by quickly and threateningly. The noise is that of someone else’s music played at a volume aggressive and indifferent to the wishes of any involuntary audience. I am in constant competition with enormous vehicles. It is not a relaxing or pleasurable experience to walk on the sidewalk in El Paso, Texas.

The vehicles themselves make noises in addition to the pilot's arrogant imperialistic invasion of my ears, in an impotent attempt to display his feathers.

In Wien other people would be doing what I am doing, walking to a tram stop, or simply taking a walk, or on their way to a grocery store.

Last night as I walked past the local high school, a collection of macho men had their large trucks parked there, and they were standing or leaning against their vehicles doing nothing. Maybe since the weather was a bit cooler, they were simply enjoying the ability to sit outside without roasting under the painful burning sun.

In any case, they were obeying the local commandment: no vehicle, no person. A typical case of the local rule: without a self-piloted vehicle of glass and steel and plastic, a person is naked, without rights, and without dignity.

They were not in their vehicles, but the vehicles were nearby, prominently displayed. And they were lounging about, as if they saw themselves as part of an eye-catching advertisement: healthy virile young man with his fancy car.

I remember one day in the spring last year in Vienna, when three women walked by with children, covered from head to toe, but in spring colors. Like three flowers: violet, pink, and yellow. My more racist and narrow-minded acquaintances often made disparaging remarks about the low quality of my neighborhood—too many foreigners, from Yugoslavia, Poland, Slovakia, Bosnia, or Croatia, or even Iraq. But it suited me well. My nearest neighbor was Italian and I often heard Slovak and Polish in my building. There was a vitality that El Paso lacks.

In part that is because when I ride the bus the people on it seem to have been beaten down by their work. And I believe that many of them are being exploited on a daily basis. That part of El Paso’s economy is unforgivably ugly. But it is, apparently, something we do not speak about. An ugly fact, a wart at the center of an ugly face that wants to be a beauty.

Oh yes, I heard nasty remarks from Austrians about recent immigrants. But, consider what I have already said. What was available in my neighborhood was a richness that simply does not exist in El Paso Texas.

A quality of life unimagined by the residents of El Paso Texas—unless perhaps a dentist or doctor should happen to visit the city, and enjoy it as part of an “exotic” vacation…..But the dentist or doctor does not ever stop to ask: why could we not have that sort of quality of life here? Perhaps because in this competitive wilderness the dentist or doctor is content to say: I have more money than most. But does the dentist or doctor stop to ask whether he is missing something in this capitalist dog-eat-dog jungle? Probably not! Neither the word nor the concept of solidarity are to be found in this miserable hell. There is no room for justice when the shelves are stuffed with boxes of sickly sweet chemically modified products derived from grains that were once actually beneficial to human beings. A more thorough hell, an assault on human dignity and culture more brutal can be imagined, but to do so would require imagining an act of overt brutality or violence. What we have here is a silent kind of violence, a thoroughly dishonest form of violence.