BEg2 ch 30 aftermath p2

[Mark Kohut]

I was staying on Christopher Street that week. I cannot forget the smell...

On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 3:07 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?
> --
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>