ABSTRACT
I try not to mourn, I try to organize, in between I make jokes—pointed jokes. Jokes that I wouldn't burden with “resistance” but that at least reframe the familiar as strange, and so undermine the very banality by which hegemony is so often secured. Some of these come to mind as I walk through the public spaces of New York—the train stations, the charged intersections and squares, the marquee buildings—and see the National Guard, dressed in camouflage. They cluster next to clumps of New York cops, collectively alerting us to our need for alertness, their laconic postures surely a pose. I get through these spaces imagining the New Yorker cartoon I could draw, if I could draw: A guy dressed like a fire hydrant or in brick and pizza patterned fatigues tilting back to eye a more traditionally camouflaged soldier in Pennsylvania Station. The caption echoes Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny to read, “Oh, and you blend!?!” The cartoon toys with a deadly serious question. Why would dressing for Desert Storm in the midst of New York City reassure residents and visitors of their safety? There is, of course, an exacting science and art of camouflage that surely has anticipated urban warfare. By what form of trifling with the imagination does the security state authorized—but not inaugurated—by September 11 place such inappropriate bodies in New York's and many other public spaces?
