New York City

“A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”

Ken Kalfus' ingenious new book about an explosive divorce might be the best novel yet about 9/11.

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Maybe you think that comparing the bitter divorce of a New York City couple to what’s currently known as the war on terror is a bit overblown? I thought that myself about one passage in Ken Kalfus’ brilliant new comedy of manners, “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,” in which an estranged husband walks up to his wife in their contested Brooklyn Heights two-bedroom and tries (but fails) to set off a suicide bomb. Or at least that’s what I thought until recently, when news came of an explosion that destroyed a Manhattan townhouse. When the building detonated, the first thing bystanders must have thought was: terrorists! Instead, the culprit was a man so infuriated about losing his beloved home in his divorce that he decided to blow it up, and himself along with it.

Most likely, critics will say that “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” is a novel that compares divorce, American-style, to geopolitics, 21st century-style, and that it shows how Sept. 11 has infected the very fabric of our personal lives. Almost, but not quite and not so conventional or narcissistic. Kalfus, an endlessly ingenious writer, is not trying to say something about divorce by likening it to the so-called clash of civilizations. Instead, he’s showing us that the far-off national conflicts we find so baffling and complicated actually work a lot like a really bad divorce. Switching the polarity of the metaphor makes sense because, let’s face it, most of us know a lot more about divorce than we do about the Middle East.

Joyce and Marshall, the couple in question, have found themselves stumbling from the fairly amiable realization that their marriage has lost its savor to a hatred that has “acquired the intensity of something historic, tribal and ethnic, and when they watched news on TV, reports from the Balkans or the West Bank, they would think, yes, yes, yes, that’s how I feel about you.” It’s gotten so bad that when each one mistakenly thinks the other has been killed in the Sept. 11 attacks — he worked at the World Trade Center; she almost boarded Flight 93 — they secretly rejoice.

How these two came to detest each other so much is a bit of a mystery to both. Joyce muses that if someone asked her why she and Marshall divorced, she’d find it hard to respond: “An answer would have required that she revive long-dead arguments and ‘issues,’ none of which seemed like just cause, or at least enough cause to justify their impoverishment and the intensely complicated arrangements they would now have to devise involving the kids.” The resemblance between this situation and standoffs in certain hot sandy countries is acute. “If you isolate each of our betrayals and self-indulgences,” Marshall tells his lawyer, “the mean things we’ve said to each other, the errors in judgment — on their own, they’re quite heinous. Yet neither of us did anything to the other that wasn’t in the context of something else.”

Among those betrayals are Joyce’s telling an FBI agent on whom she has a crush that her husband might have sent an envelope of white powder to her office during the height of the anthrax scare. For his part, Marshall taps Joyce’s phone, and uses the information he gets from that to sabotage her sister’s wedding. Joyce seduces Marshall’s best friend (married to her former best friend — the couple took Marshall’s side in the split). Marshall, who fancies himself a savvy day trader, hacks into Joyce’s 401K account and redistributes her investments into a bunch of crappy stocks.

Not all of these schemes play out entirely according to plan. The best friend turns out to be pursuing his own line of revenge against his wife, and Marshall’s worst-case investments start performing like gangbusters. Plus, there’s blowback: Joyce gets the unwelcome intimation that “every human relationship is a conspiracy,” and Marshall is shown just how poor a handle he has on the stock market’s fluctuations. Meanwhile, their two children, Viola and Victor, draw pictures of the flaming World Trade Center and play a game involving holding hands and jumping off their grandmother’s porch — and their parents barely notice.

Some of the parallels Kalfus suggests are frank: “What had he done to her?” Marshall wonders. “What had he done to deserve this? Why did she hate him so?” Others are marvelously subtle and droll, as when 4-year-old Viola, trying to puzzle out what’s going on between her parents, concludes that her 2-year-old brother is the problem: “The only solution — and this, she thought, must be the subject of her parents’ secrets, their frustrations, and their bad moods — was to remove Victor from the household.”

Besides the endless and illuminating permutations of its central metaphor, “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” also features some of the best fiction writing yet about Sept. 11, worth celebrating for its utter lack of cant and self-regarding weepiness. Kalfus’ description of Marshall’s escape from the World Trade Center is harrowing without melodrama, but perhaps more daring is his willingness to tweak us for our less noble responses to the attacks. He writes about the surreptitious thrills ordinary people got out of their contact with heroic firefighters and federal investigations, and the way everyone seemed to want a piece of the big event, no matter how tenuous their connection, like the man who tells Joyce all about being stranded in Atlanta on Sept. 11:

“Joyce realized he considered himself a significant actor — a victim — in the September 11 tragedy. And didn’t she think she was a victim too? After all, she had seen the buildings fall, with her own helplessly naked eyes. She was supposed to have been on one of the planes. But so what. Every American felt that he had been personally attacked by the terrorists, and that was the patriotic thing of course, but patriotic metaphors aside, wasn’t the belief a bit delusional? There was a difference between being killed and not being killed. Was everyone walking around America thinking they had been intimately, self-importantly, involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center?”

It sure seemed like it. We didn’t seem to learn much from the experience, either, but then how much can anyone grasp about what’s really going on when they’re at war? “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” is about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own until the reasons for continuing it (“If we leave, my comrades will have died in vain,” and so on) become entirely self-perpetuating. That’s what happened in Joyce and Marshall’s divorce, and who among us hasn’t been there — or somewhere a lot like it — at least once?

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

In the Middle: Episode 1 – Happily Ever After

Henriette and Kevin have been married for 27 years. Kevin recently moved down the street because he says he's gay

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Jon Huntsman for New York City mayor?

Yes, please. It would be very funny to see him lose

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Jon Huntsman for New York City mayor?

Yes, Jon Huntsman should definitely run for mayor of New York, because I never tire of watching Jon Huntsman get rejected by voters. The best part of a Jon Huntsman campaign is when his well-heeled supporters very sincerely and tragically argue that the fact that no one wants to vote for Jon Huntsman is a sign that the Republic itself is in peril. They would get so sad and melodramatic when he got 10 percent of the vote.

Now, there is no evidence that Jon Huntsman is planning for run for mayor of New York City, but one of his annoying daughters tossed this one out there last night:

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Michael Bloomberg plays the endorsement game again

The billionaire mayor meets with Mitt Romney as both campaigns practically beg him for his support

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Michael Bloomberg plays the endorsement game againMitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama (Credit: AP)

Mitt Romney yesterday had a “private” (well-publicized) meeting with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that was a pretty obvious attempt by Romney to win the for-some-reason “coveted” Bloomberg endorsement. Mayor Bloomberg is not actually the hugely popular and universally respected national figure that anti-partisanship zealot pundits think he is — only around 20 percent of Americans viewed him favorably in 2010, and a 2011 poll says he’d get a mere 10 percent of the vote in a three-way presidential race — but those anti-partisanship zealots represent an important constituency of “rich people who run the media,” so a Bloomberg endorsement would be a strong signal that Romney is moderate and wise and prudent and so on.

The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.

But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.

“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”

I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.

The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.

The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!

The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

New York’s dying signs

A Brooklyn designer dedicated to saving local lettering talks about what we lose when corporate logos take over SLIDE SHOW

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New York's dying signs (Credit: Molly Woodward/Vernacular Typography)

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This originally appeared on Jeremiah Moss's blog, Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.

Vernacular Typography is the creation of graphic designer and Brooklyn native Molly Woodward, who has spent the past decade taking photos of the city’s “found lettering.” All over the city, and the world, local signage is disappearing and being replaced with mass-produced signs and the brands of global corporations. Molly is trying to preserve it–and she has a Kickstarter campaign to help do that.

I asked her a few questions about “endangered local signage.”

How are you defining “Vernacular Typography”?

I guess it should technically be Vernacular “Lettering,” but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn’t have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it’s just any visual representation of language.

How do you think New York City’s vernacular typography differs from other cities around the country and the world?

New York’s vernacular typography is unmatched in terms of intensity and variety of signage. On any given block, you can see the city’s forgotten history through the layers of still-visible signage in basically any medium. The typescape is also much denser than in other places because the city evolves so rapidly and retail turnover is so high.

Which New York City typefaces are your current favorites?

I’m partial to the type and signs I grew up seeing every day, most of which have disappeared (Gertel’s Bakery) or whose surfaces seem to be slowly melting away (Ideal Hosiery).

I love any type that somehow still clings to life or relates directly to a time and place (Horn & Hardart Automat).

And of course, you can never go wrong with beautiful neon (Montero’s).

What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A sense of the city’s history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don’t see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

I think there’s less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there’s less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

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Jeremiah Moss is the pseudonymous author of the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. He has also written about the city for The New York Times.

NYPD must spy on all Muslims to protect us from Iranian photographers

New York City's own constitutionally iffy intelligence agency justifies itself with fear-mongering

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NYPD must spy on all Muslims to protect us from Iranian photographersRay Kelly (Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid)

The NYPD is less a “police department” than a secretive and unaccountable international intelligence-gathering organization with a large minority-frisking division and the firepower of a mid-sized army. Lately they have been facing a bit of criticism for their style of intelligence-gathering, which seems to be done with more gusto than concern for civil liberties or… accuracy. Sometimes the NYPD’s muscular-but-stupid approach to spying gets them in trouble with the FBI. And when the organization that fights terror by recruiting shady weirdos to try to trick random Muslims into saying “jihad” into tape recorders says your practices are counterproductive and out of line, they are probably pretty counterproductive and out of line.

But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

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