The Edge of the World


“Boycott shampoo!
 Demand the REAL poo!”
- Bumper sticker


            Walking in Central Park in the spring, one is surrounded by natural beauty. 
            Everywhere you look the symphony of nature seems to be playing and the electric pulses of the hooked-in world seem to vanish.  From certain vantage points even the buildings surrounding the park disappear behind the trees and for an instant one is lost in untainted wilderness.
            Except for one problem…Central Park is man-made.  It is as much a piece of the Gizmos as the bright lights you go there to avoid.
            The park was an idea – a construction – based on the fact that great cities like Paris and London had great public parks and New York should too.  In 1853, 700-acres from 59th to 106th Streets were set aside for the creation of the park. Writer Frederick Law Olmsted and English architect Calvert Vaux won a competition with their so-called "Greensward Plan" to create a “democratic development of the highest significance…"
            It was a complex plan including separate circulation systems for pedestrians, horseback riders, and pleasure vehicles, crosstown traffic hidden in sunken roadways, and artfully placed shrub belts to block out the city.
            Before construction the area was cleared of its poor inhabitants, mostly free African-Americans and German or Irish immigrants. 1,600 working-class residents were evicted under the rule of eminent domain and whole communities were torn down and removed to make room.  Half a million cubic feet of topsoil was transported in from New Jersey, ten million cartloads of material were removed from the site, and more than four million trees, shrubs, and plants were planted.
            This was techno-industrial construction at the highest level.
            All so visitors to the park might repose of a Sunday afternoon amid “the pleasures and simplicities of nature,” as a writer at the time suggested.

            A stroll through Central Park raises an interesting question about where the Gizmos ends and where the natural world begins.  And the park itself is only the most obvious example.  After all, a drive in the country is guided by GPS, a day at the beach includes summer reading on a Kindle2, a hike the mountains is enhanced by the shuffle of songs on an iPod. 
            Nature itself is a bold idea and worthy of our faith, commitment, and reverence.  But its defining contour is so intertwined with our emergent technocosm that it is difficult to mark their boundaries.
            The word that comes to mind here is hyperreality as used by the French writer Jean Baudrillard to mean that the fake has become more real to us than the real.  The was on TV more important than the real one; the media hype the reality and the reality a pale reflection.  This is generally applied to places like Las Vegas where the New York New York Hotel gives you the experience without the visit.  But increasingly we have the Vegasing of the whole whopping world in which everyone is touched by technology all the time, everything is designed and fabricated, and everything we know from the rings of Saturn to the secrets of our own DNA is established by images in the media.  The Gizmos rules.
            As the difference between the real and the fake vanishes, the distinction between the vivid and trivial looms.  If it seems to matter in any way, has any kind of impact, draws our attention, then it is as real as plastic to us and so rumors are real, even if they didn't happen and history is fake even if it did.
During World War II, in one of many attempts to confuse the British about their actual forces, the German high command hit on the idea of setting up a false airstrip filled with fake fighter planes.  The planes were simply wooden shells painted to look like actual fighters in air surveillance photos.  Hundreds of them filled acres of a false airport, some or them moved around occasionally with a tractor so that all the aerial photos would not look identical.
The British were only fooled temporarily.  Once they realized that the number of planes at the strip never varied, they caught on to the deception.  Naturally, the first thought was to ignore the bogus planes and concentrate on the real deals elsewhere in the German countryside.  But then the question was raised...if they did not bomb the airstrip, wouldn’t that make it obvious that the Brits knew that the planes were fake?  That would force the Germans to find a new diversion, drawing even more Allied attention in a false direction. 
So the British command decided on this basis that it was better to give the Germans a false sense of security by making them think the Allies were fooled.  But when the plans were drawn up to bomb the phony airstrip, the British general in charge of military supplies balked.  Why waste real bombs on a fake mission to destroy fake planes, he asked?  Thus was the decision reached by a real army in a very real war to drop fake wooden bombs on fake aircraft to convince the enemy that they themselves had been faked out when in fact they had not.
            The perfect modern moment.
            I still love Central Park, by the way, and go there to get in touch with the earth, even if it is only a pale echo of what I know from the Nature Channel.

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