on what it means to belong

what significance does it have to have been born somewhere? along with all the other corners of the soul which the financial crisis has prompted us to search, our citizenship, and to what or whom we now owe allegiance, has come to the fore once again. the most popular buzz word for this identity crisis is, of course, globalization, but it's another catch phrase, 'world citizenship', that i have in mind right now. i was actually brought to write this by a comment dave made on a very short post of mine about montreal made a while ago. dave, defending the point that people from new york are completely out of touch with reality, made what i consider a huge overreach when he said that choosing to identify yourself with a place automatically makes you representative of it. after uncurling my fingers from around his imaginary throat and stopping to think it through, i realized it was worth postponing his violent death to gather my thoughts. here they are, in the order they came to me.

now, most of you know that i have a pretty strong stance on the dynamic between locals and newcomers in my home town, strong enough, anyway, to make it a constant source of amusement to some. most of the time i couldn't care less about seeming like a whinging geriatric waving his cane at the march of time; i know i'm right, i know you're all philistines; what, me worry? sometimes, though, it rankles to know that something that feels very significant inspires none of the same sense of urgency in others. i usually let the feeling pass, dismissing it as wounded pride or else channeling it into an overwhelming counterattack of vitriol designed to inspire the recipient to suicide (the best defense is still offense). i realize now, however, that my initial reaction deserves thought, and having given it is fair share, i've come to the conclusion that the fact that my existential crisis means nothing to others has a lot to do with the fact that the attachment i feel to the five boroughs is exceptional. the fact is, you hate calgary and you've been waiting to escape it for a long time. that's why, though nobody could answer what the source of their affection for montreal was--it's a nice medium-sized city--they nevertheless were ecstatic and have been ecstatic to have moved to montreal. i asked for specifics and didn't get any, so i can only conclude that the culprit is something less substantial and more irrational, something like an image. what, after all, did you actually know about montreal before you arrived? you'd heard about it, you'd seen it in movies; it had been packaged in certain guises for an audience outside of it, an audience very hungry for whatever was under the wrapping.

image is the fundament of modern consciousness. image is the source of our explanatory metaphor for everything. think about what you know of china; think about the jokes you make about china--kung fu, rice, let a hundred flowers bloom--and how much you are dependent on a streamlined visual interpretation when you come to think about it. it's not the process of simplification or stereotyping that i'm talking about. i know enough to believe that reducing 'dimensionality', to borrow a phrase from the hard sciences, is a mechanism of the mind, and a useful one at that. it's the mode of delivery and the information it chooses to deliver that i'm referring to. nobody makes a choice to move to montreal thinking, "i've heard that the metro runs every six minutes during rush hour. boss!" the things that actually constitute quotidian life, things which are largely the same no matter where you are, are not selling points in brochures. you all chose to come to montreal because it had an image that you liked: it was 'diverse', it was a 'cultural' center, blah and blah and onwards. this kind of language has been adopted by nearly any city with international ambitions, no matter its disingenuousness (madison, wisconsin, for instance, claims to have both the most restaurants and the most diversity in restaurants per capita in the world), and it has been used to sell you an image. this is an image that you bought, disliking where you were from, and believing that where you would end up would be an unmeasurably vast improvement. not, of course, that you could say what it was about your new location that really did it for you, or that really revolutionized the way you lived. no, it wasn't that things had fundamentally changed; it was more that you had achieved the image marketed to you and were basking in its glow--at least until the glow faded and you began again your search for greener pastures.

this kind of advertising relies heavily on two principles also ubiquitous to modernity. one is middle-class dissatisfaction. children of the moderately well-to-do grind at the bit to be let free from their 'stifling' surroundings, convinced, as they are, that their environment does not understand why they are different and, of course, superior. and, to all of you who want to hit me with the long-view, simple demographic trends prove that it is especially within the last handful of decades that internal population movement has shifted from intra-city or region to extra-state or country. first it was affluence moving from cities to suburbs, and now that suburbs are supposed to be the pits for budding intellectuals and all other manner of the self-absorbed, it's back into those gritty cities for a little face time with 'culture'. kids with money need novelty like they need something shiny on christmas. they don't put down 'roots'--a word also used by the person i apparently hate most in the world, david--because they don't know what those are. roots go deep: for someone born and raised in a suburb, what is invisible to them is that their are there and will always be there. you don't escape your values or expectations that quickly, no matter what clothes you choose to wear this season.

the second argos to marketing's argonauts is free movement itself. internationally, people refer to this as globalization, but i'm not so convinced that europeans and americans trading places overseas a global trend makes. until large colonies of minnesotans set up shop in mozambique, while mozambiquers take over the twin cities, highly specific will this trend stay. no, the globalization i'm referring to is intranational, and it's part and parcel of the very obvious process of erosion which regional particularity has succumbed to in the past half of a century. this process is partly technological and partly aesthetic--since memphis is dallas is seattle is sacramento, it's hard to determine why anybody should feel particularly attached to the streets they done come up on. it's also correspondingly more obvious why people flock to a few key locations in search of something unique. if only they realized that they and so many of the people they thought they were fleeing had the same idea, they might realize that they were pretty much indistinguishable from those people, and would start taking west kansas city's real estate market more seriously.

canada may not have an imagination, as dave seems confused as to what that might be, but america does, and at its peak is new york city. people like me have the misfortune of being from somewhere that the unwashed hordes west of the hudson are screaming like mad to get into, all of them intoxicated by not one but many images of new york, images that are contradictory--both dirty and high-rolling, mean and dangerous while with a $40 glass of chardonnay in its hand--but are reconciled by the irrational constant present in the human mind. most especially, in their search not just for image, but for identity, for the salve which will cure their affluent discontent, they seek desperately to fill the gaps in themselves with the place they arrive at. you must understand how bizarre that looks from the inside looking out. new york as a phenomenon is bizarre, because to the local, it's just like anywhere else: you get friends, you get a place, you get a job and you get by. there is nothing magical about tall buildings or bars with no last call, and you could honestly give a fuck about museums. most of them are uptown and packed, and how many times can you see a stuffed mammoth or a suit or armor? you eat pizza if you're out with your friends and you don't think about how good it is; you don't think that the restaurants around represent such stunning diversity because they just serve food, food you eat when you're hungry. the turkish guy who gives you a gyro doesn't make your neighborhood some kind of modern babel. he gave you a sandwich and, furthermore, he probably lives in queens because he can afford to put his family up there.

in the end, the projects are quiet buildings you hang out in because the cops don't check them out too much, and broadway is a street you avoid at night because it's packed and the guys pushing comedy club tickets on the corners annoy the shit out of you. life, in other words, is life, and you don't worry about it too much. it therefore becomes all the stranger to see wave after wave of experience-seekers pouring in, not only because they all sound like something out of a surfing movie, but also because in their craving for a location that complements their self-image, they avoid everything that makes the city a regular place. it's like they are deliberately avoiding the rituals of everyday life; they build tacky theme bars and galleries in warehouses reserved for junk deals, and you gotta think to yourself, why? what hunger drives them on, and what is that they expect will satisfy it?

what's missing for the local, and why we can't understand, and are often offended by, outsiders, is the image of new york, and the uprootedness of the newcomers. equilibrium, however, persists, while the subculture they build for themselves remains small and confined only to the shittiest parts of the city. if they want to pay through the nose to live in a dump, well, they're just suckers. the problem for us is when the pressure from the outside changes from a slow, dull thud to an unstoppable force, as the suburbs begin to claw and bite their way in. to see all of these kids so frantic to start living THE life is, again, bizarre, unbelievably so. to see them put brooklyn on their shirts and call themselves new yorkers, when they live a life so completely removed from ours and so out of synch with the way the city itself is and has always been, is bizarre. and when they decide that the real city is, well, not right for them, and isn't going to be the city anymore? well, you know the rest.