Suburban view of ground zero

Kvetching is an honored tradition of all the boroughs of New York City. It is the Jewish practice of questioning how one can in fact sing the praises of Zion by the Rivers of Babylon, or Tevye in the Fiddler on the Roof, suggesting to the high heavens that it would not have been such a bad idea had he been born a rich man! In modern Jewish therapy, kvetching is the art and discipline of creative complaining. The sons and daughters of Abraham are well known for inventing and patronizing the comfort of the 50-minute couch!

On a 10-day mission of mercy to the Big Apple, I had enough time to reflect on the significance of 9/11 ground zero in lower Manhattan, but instead of focusing on the core source of American anxiety, I was confronted by the vitality that is present at the street level in metropolitan Midtown, NYC, and storefront level of suburban New York.

Coming out of getting a Chinese visa on 42nd and 12th Ave., I was struck by the composition of the folks that were inside the waiting room with me. There were the eastern European Hasidic Jews with their shteimel (black hat, the tradition that birthed the dashiki and the fedora), curly locks, long beards, and totally black attire from frock to boots, applying to go to Guangzhou while their more traditional yarmulke (black skullcap) wearing brethren clutched their papers for Shanghai. Not genially in speaking terms, they were joined by two kufiya-wearing (white skullcap) Muslim traders who were in line, too, as they gaze toward the commercial and industrial possibilities in the land of Cathay.

Then there were the arts and letters professionals who are exploring the wisdom of the East, including my seatmate who was heading for Hong Kong to hobnob with colleagues, professionals who have since joined the Atlantic-facing architects who had proven their mettle in the likes of I.M. Pei and Maya Lin.

Of the people who belong to a national community that numbers one-out-of-five residents of the planet, the descendants of the Qins and Hans and their numerous minority cousins are themselves amply represented in every borough of the city. The folks from Yunnan who would not normally be able to verbally communicate with their Hakka, Fujian, Mongolian, Manchurian, Turgic, and Sichuanese comrades, have since been banded together with the unifying force of a common written language in the imaginal Middle Kingdom of Planet Earth.

With a swine flu epidemic afoot across the North American continent, I have refrained from descending into Manhattan and its crowded environs, giving my perspective a closer view of the suburban setting, particularly around Spring Valley 40 miles northwest of NYC.

Spring Valley, dominated by the yarmulke-wearing crowd in the 60s, has rapidly expanded to include their Hasidic brethren/sistern, as well as the Francophone Haitians, the Iberian Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and MexTex, pockets of subAsian Islamic merchants and professionals from the Bengal to the Indus Valley and the Kyber Pass, and the ubiquitous Chans and their chopsuey shops, along with the Kangs and their bulgogi and kimchee offerings. Scattered Pinoys and their redolent bagoongs (salted-fish sauce) made my presence in the community possible as I accomplished my task in Manhattan with the gracious hosting of former classmates from way-back-when in Ilocandia.

Spring Valley is surrounded by the ethos of the “new” as communities sprouted around it with names like New Hempstead, New Clarkston, New Square and New City. New City even enjoys the misnomer of “Gaza Strip” for its new multi-dwelling Hasidic residents, but the nation of immigrants of JFK Jr. are no longer just the people of European descent that peopled the boroughs of New York and Boston. The swahili of West Africa is now neighbor to the putung hua of Shejiang in China! The glocal village of the 21st century is alive and thriving in the primal city of the United States of America, New York City and its environs!

Sigmund Freud is often quoted as suggesting that “the first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” The civilizing process is vigorously working itself out in the villages and hamlets of the Yankee pockets of Americana, and perhaps, were one to really locate the geography of its ground zero, of the heartbeat of America, one will have to move beyond the memorial grief and shivers of fear emanating from the south end of Manhattan, into the hearts and minds of the residents that ply their trade along 42nd St., and the storefronts of the commercial centers of places like Spring Valley.

Which is not to say that all is hunky-dory in the land of the free and the home of the brave. From Spring Valley into the city, one can drive down through the scenic Palisades Parkway by the Hudson, with its five-bedroom single family unit homes housing the proverbial “two-garage, two cats, 2.2. children, and a boiling chicken-in-every-pot” dwelling. How sustainable this is as the future of communities of glocal America is a critical political, economic and cultural issue.

For all of Donald Trump’s commercialism, the Trump towers along the Hudson river parkway may offer a better option for urban settlement, albeit these ones are of the upscale models, than the isolated manors that dots the countryside of the eastern seaboard from Maryland to Maine. Along the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway are the escapist settlements of car-driving nuclear family units which the current economic crisis has since called into question, its dependence on gas-guzzling, inefficient, and polluting motor transport soon hopefully to be consigned into the annals of Smithsonian history.

I suspect that this telling of NYC equally applies to the situation in the windy city of Chicago and the Bay Area of San Francisco, even the polluting air of the City of Angels, and the gargantuan pretensions of Dallas. The reality of Spring Valley is itself a microcosm of the suburban dwellings of farmland Midwest America, in the ecotopia of the Pacific West, the pueblos of the Southwest, the parishes of the delta South, and townships of the foothills of the Appalachian south East.

In this season of kvetching in the time of the swine flu and anemic Wall Street, we locate the ground zero of America not in a piece of Manhattan real estate but in the throbbing heartbeats of America. Might that Chamolinia of the Marianas really join as a family member these emerging glocal settlements of contemporary America!

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[I] Vergara is a regular contributor to the[/I] Saipan Tribune[I]’s Opinion Section[/I]