Getting There
Down in D.C. (or up, from my perspective), they’re known as “slugs,” commuters who cage rides from drivers trolling for passengers so they can use the HOV lanes into town. According to the information in this article, the term “slugs” doesn’t refer to the garden invertebrates but to the false coinage used in parking meters and pinball machines. Either way, it’s an unnecessary denigration of a resourceful – and resource preserving – practice. Growing up on Long Island, living in NYC, travelling through many metropolitan areas, and now living in Sydney, I’m very used to “car culture,” and how selfish it can be. Drivers do not want to share, and while their may be many reasons for this, there are no excuses. In the U.S., there are those who blame the Eisenhower administration’s development of the interstate highway system for America’s dependence on oil, but I think this misses the point. Individual liberties and the selfish perspective concomitant with any level of privilege become insistent in our lives, and automobile usage over mass transit systems is an aspect of this. It takes me twenty minutes to get from home to the office by rail. It would take twice that to drive. How many of my colleagues travelling over the same or similar routes drive? I’d guess over 70%. And how many of those ride alone? I’d put money on 95% for a significant portion of their journey. Slugging wasn’t seen much in NYC. Instead an underground economy grew up around minivans acting as informal bus lines, supplementing the existing transit system. And carpooling is a practice that never seemed to get its feet, inexplicably. (I was asked shortly after starting in my present employment if I had a car by a colleague who lived in the same suburb; I didn’t. Still, when he had one, and I offered gas money for a ride, his preference for solo driving won over his desire to share car services. Is it B.O.?) Either way – whether paid or unpaid – the needs of commuters are met, so call it whatever you want.

Migrations
Last night we went to see a multimedia poetry event over in Woolloomooloo at artspace, called One Step Forwards Backwards, which represented itself as being a reflection on the “internal poetic experience of migrant artists and writers who are searching for a human space, observing the movement of people and their compromise with the systems that humans create.” I’m not really sure what that means, or if the show actually achieved its aim. I went, however, because the poetry focussed on the perspective of immigrants and because of a statement made in the event’s prospectus that “poetry [has become] an intellectual’s subject.” Now that I’m an immigrant myself, I’ve given a little thought to my status. As an American, I’ve had my immigrant roots drummed into me over the years in such a way and to such an extent that I’ve always felt myself actually to be an immigrant, although my entire life experience up until recently has been entirely different from that of any first- or second-generation (that being the sociological cut-off for assimiliation) immigrant I’ve known or heard of. Admittedly moving to Australia doesn’t constitute the kind of disruption most migrants experience, and my culture shock just won’t compare to that of someone coming from Lebanon or China or Sudan to anywhere else. I’ve moved from one cosmopolitan location to another, both English-speaking, both Anglo-based. There are differences, and I feel them keenly sometimes, but that’s more a sense of the uncanny than anything else, that sense of unfamiliar familiarity. Nevertheless, I feel it, and therefore share something I haven’t really shared before, with a large proportion of the dislocated peoples of the world. What I remain unfamiliar with, however, is the anger this disruption gives rise to. The sadness is not completely shared, but I understand it. The focus on the routines and sense of home transposed as nationalistic pride – the beloved mother/fatherland – I also understand, even if my sense of it is tempered by my political sensibilities. Watching the images projected around the room of Middle Eastern countries, juxtaposed with London, New York, and Sydney scenes, and listening to or reading the plaints of the poets, I was struck by the sense of loss they conveyed and experienced moments of that sense myself in some of the expressions and images. It was disconcerting to see the smoke and wreckage of the World Trade Center pop up in the slides, among the other pictures of bombed-out buildings and bullet holes scattered around Lebanon and Turkey. The projected scenes of tanks and soldiers – all American, run at double-time – also left me wondering: is this meant to convey the idea that America is to blame, that the WTC murders were just the militaristic chickens coming home? I concluded, however, that instead a different meaning was intended, that the WTC in ruins was meant to bond the immigrant’s and the non-immigrant’s experiences of the world with one another: we share death and destruction and the overwhelming sense that the world operates outside our control; it isn’t all here or there, howsoever strange it may be for a Ankaran in New York or a New Yorker in Sydney or a Damascan in London. We are separate from our families and our familiars and we feel it and it affects us, but only if we fail to share what we have in common do we suffer.