“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard,” Peter O’Toole said in “My Favorite Year.” Recently, barbarism took a life two miles from New York City’s southeastern border. Nothing comedic describes a Big Apple culture increasingly rotten at the core.
On the dawn after Thanksgiving, 2,000 shoppers at a Valley Stream, Long Island, Wal-Mart awaited its opening. Restive, they pined for goods that to empty people make life full. “Open up!” shoppers screamed. Nothing counted but a bargain on those Wrangler jeans, that Samsung 50-inch plasma HDTV: superficial, like the mob.
At 5:03 a.m., a 34-year-old, 6-foot-7, 270-pound Haitian temporary worker opened the electronic door. Promptly the madding crowd trampled, then crushed, Jdimytai Damour. “They walked all over him,” said a sister, sobbing. Did the mob even know? Its savages didn’t care.
Vainly paramedics sought to help the victim. Told of his death, shoppers refused to leave. “They kept shopping,” said a bystander. “A man was dying. It isn’t right.” A Roman soldier once asked Judas, “What kind of person are you, if I may ask?” Damour’s death bares what kind of culture the New York City area’s has become.
Every burg at one time or another braves violence by one individual to another. Valley Stream’s was communal barbarism. Its law of the jungle would never stain Plains, Ga., Jimmy Carter’s home; or Hope, Ark., Bill Clinton’s; or Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin’s. What Palin said this year was right: Small-town America is more decent, and polite.
Intriguing is why other urban areas are less savage than New York. In Charlotte, no horde would kill for a $5 sale. As Theodore H. White wrote in 1960, Wheeling still has “the (nation’s) best-mannered and courteous (people).” Minneapolis lives “Minnesota Nice.” Mayor Rudy Giuliani had to wage a campaign asking New Yorkers to seem nice. Said a shopper upon Damour’s death: “I don’t like the chaos – but I do like the deals.”
How did Apple culture become animals’, except that comparison would anger the nearest zoo? Some blame “lack of security.” Curious. Salt Lake City doesn’t need a SWAT team to stop mob murder. Psychiatrist Candida Fink cites groupthink’s “no off buttons.” Funny. Buffalo’s keep people from being treated like lint on wool. Such illogic would let Heidi Fleiss trace prostitution to a hangnail at age 9.
The 800-pound elephant is that New York mocks right v. wrong. Like kindness? Magazines like The New Yorker cherish attitude. Character? Cable TV and tabloid print teach that if rude is good, lewd is better. The New York Times’ Charles W. Blow assails “rigidly applying yesterday’s … morality to today’s … mores.” He wrote that before immorality doomed Damour.
