BEg2 ch 30 aftermath p2

[Michael Bailey]

Paragraph 2:
“The plume of smoke and finely divided structural and human debris has been
blowing southwest, toward Bayonne and Staten Island, but you can smell it
all the way uptown. A bitter chemical smell of death and burning that no
one in memory has ever in this city smelled before and which lingers for
weeks. Though everybody south of 14th Street has been directly touched one
way or another, for much of the city the experience has come to them
mediated, mostly by television—the farther uptown, the more secondhand the
moment, stories from family members commuting to work, friends, friends of
friends, phone conversations, hearsay, folklore, as forces in whose
interests it compellingly lies to seize control of the narrative as quickly
as possible come into play and dependable history shrinks to a dismal
perimeter centered on “Ground Zero,” a Cold War term taken from the
scenarios of nuclear war so popular in the early sixties. This was nowhere
near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat
“Ground Zero” over and over do so without shame or concern for etymology.
The purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up,
scared, and helpless.”

That last sentence resonates with Maxine’s dream from the previous chapter.

The first sentence also has a grabber of sorts, imho: “finely divided
structural and human debris”
Yick!

Technically, a colon after “uptown” wouldn’t be amiss, but the use of the
following sentence fragment resonates with other fragments in the air.

“A bitter smell…that no one…has…in this city smelled” - but plenty of other
cities, n’est ça pas?


Personification? - “forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize
control of the narrative”
Or are we not talking about abstract forces, but rather forces of the armed
variety and their chain of command. But not to worry, they all work for us
civilians, right?