THE SNAPSHOTS I took in NYC last week, after I lost my regular camera in a whitebread Conn. hotel, are now back from the lab, scanned, and submitted for your approval.

Yeah, I went to Ground-0. The memorial skylights, by the way, look from afar frighteningly like twin Bat-Signals–only, of course, there is and was no superhero to answer the call; only regular folk to recover and clean up.

After 28 weeks, the world’s most infamous hole in the ground is still a haunting, eerily quiet place, where the aggression and freneticism of the rest of Manhattan is completely gone.

In one of Ian Fleming’s original novels, an abducted and blindfolded James Bond realizes he’s been taken to New York solely on the basis of the background noise he hears around him. The master spy wouldn’t now recognize this particular part of New York, by sound or sight.

He would, however, certainly recognize the good old American spirit of commercial exploitation, alive even under the most morbid of circumstances.

For seemingly decades, NYC was regularly vilified and demonized by right-wingers as the home base of Those Damned Liberals and everything that could conceivably be blamed on same. NYC was also regularly denounced by heartland left-progressives as a cesspool of corrupt politicians, loose morals, and soot. (Neither camp, of course, was particularly fond of the city’s many unassimilated immigrant groups.)

The prog-left learned to love New York again sometime in the early ’70s, after Beat bohemianism and the anti-suburban backlash had pretty much taken over left-of-center aesthetics. The right’s reattachment to NYC took much longer, and is largely due to a few influential people–most notably Rupert Murdoch and his political proteges, who repackaged the Big Apple as national HQ of the rabid-right “news” media. (Though it surely helped that the late-’90s hypercapitalism was so thoroughly centered in the NYC financial markets.)

So when the terror attacks came, New York had already again become the cultural capital of both the “Blue” and “Red” Americas.

As late as the pre-Y2K scare, certain left and right radicals openly dreamed of a destroyed Manhattan that would give rise to a purer, rural-centered nation.

Now, the most aggressive campaign of “patriotic” jingoism in most of our lifetimes is premised upon sympathy for Manhattan’s victims and survivors.

If anything good can come out of this gruesome series of events (and the subsequent domestic authoritarian power-grab drive), it’s a partial erasure of the phony “culture war” divide used by cynical politicos (including the Murdoch proteges) to keep us apart and manipulable.

We really are all in this thing together, and we’ve all got to stand up in defense of freedom. Including (despite what the right-wing media says) the freedom to dissent.