Each day when I go for coffee and sit on a bench in Washington Square Park, my mind veers towards a variety of experiences and subjects. There is no neat divide about what I reflect on, with the personal often flowing into the political. Sometimes I conjure up images of good friends who have died, the number mounting with each passing year, and the sense of loss never quite disappearing. Other times I recall memories of pleasurable—even exhilarating—times my wife and I spent walking the streets and parks and sitting in pubs and cafes of London and Paris. More often than not, I have been able to imagine those weeks and months we spent in Europe as idyllic, so everything about them gets heightened and the prosaic becomes magical; the quotidian morphs into an adventure—with the dark European moments that occurred never invoked.
Meanwhile, besides those memories, there is the daily life I lead, which is much less venturesome and more predictable than it was even five years ago. But I still try hard to vary my days’ activities. Recently, I went to a film screening at the offices of Criterion. It is a company whose streaming library contains more than 1,000 classic and contemporary films that one can see on television, and it also distributes new art films.
I have gone to few screenings since COVID, but this time they were showing the film “Afire,” made by the fine German director Christian Petzold (e.g., “Barbara” and “Transit”), which moved me to attend in person. The screening room contained only two other people—young freelance critics—with whom I exchanged film talk about Petzold and favorite directors Mike Leigh and Ingmar Bergman. I felt as if I had suddenly shed many years, to a time when I attended many more screenings and wrote and talked about films more frequently and passionately.
When I leave the screening room, I walk to the Union Square Market, which is just a block away. A familiar place, but one I always take aesthetic pleasure in, and I love to observe the range of people who shop there. Sitting on my walker’s seat at the market, my mind shifts to politics and I think about the subway choking death that has aroused intense debate.
There have been too many simplistic responses to the death of Jordon Neely: from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying the man “was murdered,” to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis defending ex-Marine Daniel Penny as having done the “right thing.” The papers are now filled with letters talking about the fear engendered on subways by out-of-control, mentally disturbed, often homeless people.
There is no denying the reality of the public’s anxieties about being threatened by homeless and mentally disturbed people on the subways. It’s a population that surged during the pandemic and has remained ensconced on the subways, even as the COVID threat has diminished. Even though robbery and grand larceny, common types of major subway crime, dropped recently, however, rider advocates and former transit employees say New York subway passengers encounter mentally ill and homeless people more often than other Americans.
Still, given that reality, there is no basis to celebrate Penny’s behavior, which was an excessive response to Neely who threw his jacket down and yelled that he was hungry and ready to die when he entered the subway car. Innocence and guilt are hard to allocate in a charged situation where our political biases and demagoguery blur retrospective judgment. As I think about the circumstances involved, I am left bereft without simple answers. Easier for me to think about the horrific alternatives we face with candidates like Trump and DeSantis.
