BEg2 ch30 aftermath p3

[Michael Bailey]

Paragraph 3:
“For a couple of days, the West Side Highway falls silent. People between
Riverside and West End miss the ambient racket and don’t get to sleep so
easily. On Broadway meanwhile it’s different. Flatbeds carrying hydraulic
cranes and track loaders and other heavy equipment go thundering downtown
in convoys day and night. Fighter planes roar overhead, helicopters hang
battering the air for hours close above the rooftops, sirens are constant
24/7. Every firehouse in the city lost somebody on 11 September, and every
day people in the neighborhoods leave flowers and home-cooked meals out in
front of each one. Corporate ex-tenants of the Trade Center hold elaborate
memorial services for those who didn’t make it out in time, featuring
bagpipers and Marine honor guards. Child choirs from churches and schools
around town are booked weeks in advance for solemn performances at “Ground
Zero,” with “America the Beautiful” and “Amazing Grace” being musical
boilerplate at these events. The atrocity site, which one would have
expected to become sacred or at least inspire a little respect, swiftly
becomes occasion instead for open-ended sagas of wheeling and dealing,
bickering and badmouthing over its future as real estate, all dutifully
celebrated as “news” in the Newspaper of Record. Some notice a strange
underground rumbling from the direction of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx,
which is eventually identified as Robert Moses spinning in his grave.”


Hops around, doesn’t it?
Effect of the 24 hour news cycle. Language is mostly respectful; glancingly
perfunctory only once: “boilerplate.” Grappling for a thoughtful stance as
in “tragedy for those who feel, comedy for those who think” ?

There’s what looks to me like a “one, two” pattern to the sentences.

West Side Highway quiet / hard to sleep

Broadway different / ground traffic / air traffic and noise filling the air
(technically a “one, two, three”)

Firehouse deaths / neighborhood outpourings of sympathy  ( 1 & 2 in the
same sentence)

Corporate memorial services / child choirs extremely busy singing patriotic
songs

And finally,

Machinations of real estate greed over the newly vacant site, bickering
(with another deprecating reference to the uncritical stance of the
“Newspaper of Record”) / Robert Moses spinning in his grave

(He’s probably not outraged at any of the proposed uses, but at the lack of
central planning & the undecorousness of it all?)