Batavia, NY: Old-Lady-Punching Capital of the World

I would like to see a breaking point in our perception of suburban and rural crime. This is one of those things that I realize I’ve been observing all my life, but that I only notice the real significance of once I encounter an example of it that cannot be glossed over. Then I hope my personal breaking point precipitates a more general one.

I just encountered a story that, as luck would have it, comes from my general area and happened on Christmas Eve, as well. It seems that in a Wal-Mart in Batavia, NY a seventy year old cashier named Grace Suozzi asked to see a receipt from twenty-six year old Jacquetta Simmons for purchases she had made in the electronics department. Simmons, amidst much shouting, refused to produce the receipt, though she did indeed have one. Suozzi stepped towards her as she moved towards the exit, and Simmons punched the old lady in the face.

Shocking story, right? Now, tell me this: Would it be less shocking if it happened in New York City? How about if it was specifically the Bronx? Detroit? Please comment if you answered yes to any of those questions; I would really like to hear your explanation.

Personally, I say no. No it would not have been any less shocking if it had occurred elsewhere. Situation the event in the middle of a war zone, and punching an unarmed seventy year-old woman in the face is still quite reprehensible. No matter where the attacker lives, I’d be pretty amazed to witness somebody demonstrating such an abject lack of conscience, restraint, and considering the presence of many, many witnesses, an interest in self-preservation.

However, the coverage of the story by ABC affiliate WHAM-TV suggests otherwise. It’s not the deplorable viciousness of the act that’s surprising, it’s the fact that a deplorably vicious act would occur in Genesee County, and a town of just over 16,000 people. After describing what occurred, the reporter explains, “The news of what happened spread throughout Batavia through word of mouth and Facebook.”

From there, she turns to testimonials from two representatives of the Batavia community, starting with Dawn Williams, the owner of a local salon, who says: “It’s hard to believe that it happened in Batavia. I mean it’s something you see that happens in the city or the big cities, but not here.”

Given the careful distinction between “the city” and “the big cities,” I immediately recognized that, why, in the first place, she must be talking about me! I live in Buffalo, which I gather is “the city” as far as Western New York is concerned. And yet, I can’t seem to recall having ever seen anyone punch an elderly person in the face. Much less have I heard of such a thing happening repeatedly, as is implied by describing it as something “that happens.”

The other Batavia resident that was interviewed for the story, Clifford Shultz, was initially more measured with his commentary. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like he was going to comment just on his shock at what happened, regardless of where: “I mean on Christmas Eve, a twenty-six year-old lady punching a seventy year old woman, I mean, that’s kind of, you know, shocking that something like that would happen.” He paused there, and then added, with great emphasis, “around here.”

D’oh. Almost had it there, Clifford. The correct answer was, it’s kind of, you know, shocking that something like that would happen… anywhere on the planet. You see, punching an elderly person is kind of an exceptionally bad criminal act, based purely on what it is, not where it occurred. I don’t care if you live in Shanghai, Buffalo, Batavia, or Centralia; if you fracture an old woman’s face, the jaws of onlookers will drop, and then they will surround your car to prevent you from leaving before the police arrive. That’s what happened in this case, and maybe that’s what makes the story unique to Batavia. In other areas, the attacker and her male companion might just have been beaten unconscious. But I’m pretty confident that respect for our elders is a sufficiently ingrained ethic throughout Western civilization that nobody who did such a thing would walk away without incident to herself.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Shultz, your living in Batavia is completely irrelevant to this story. Commentary about different patterns of criminal activity in urban and remote areas has no place here. This is a unique story about someone punching an old woman, and sorry folks, it happened in your town. Yet I’m more generous than Ms. Williams, as I’m not going to take that as grounds for generalizing old-woman-punching as a Batavia activity. I don’t think Batavians go around doing that sort of thing for sport; I just think something awful happened in their Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve.

Giving Mr. Shultz the benefit of the doubt for his commentary, I would not be a bit surprised, based on the abrupt way he added his last two words, if he had been coached by the reporter to make an issue of the town’s identity. And it would be all that much less surprising because we’ve all seen this sort of thing before. Most times there is a crime in a small town or suburb, the media emphasis goes to how anomalous it is for something bad to happen in what is usually a quiet community. Well, yeah. Lower population + less poverty = lower crime rates. But still, surprise, surprise: human beings are capable of terrible things. Moving house doesn’t really change that.

The media’s addition of special significance to crimes that occur in small towns is not just irrelevant; it’s manipulative, biased, and downright illogical. It establishes a narrative whereby every crime that’s committed in a small town is just an exception to the usual peacefulness of the place, while every crime that’s committed in a city confirms to presumption of urban violence.

However, though I don’t have specific statistics to bring to bear on this, I’m rather certain that there’s about as many people in cities not committing crimes as there are in small towns. It seems to me that if violent crime is an anomaly, it is an anomaly to the human race, not to certain subsections of it. And if it is a general rule, it is a general rule for the same.

To think of the situation otherwise, as we so often do, is to perpetuate false distinctions among people according to some ephemeral concept of regional identity or town pride, while in reality the relevant distinctions among people are circumstantial, and though they are difficult to pin down, they are concrete. That’s the sort of thing that can be clarified with facts rather than divisive spin. And the former is supposed to be the purview of journalism, even though it rarely is.

We've Got Guests! Clean Your Town!

Listening to the radio this morning, I was treated to another bout of unintentional humor from the city of Buffalo. Apparently there’s going to be something opening in Buffalo on October 16th called the National Preservation Conference. They mentioned this on the local NPR station, WBFO in the context of a story about how Catherine Schweitzer, the local co-chair of the event, is trying to impress upon everyone the need to clean up their neighborhoods. They even termed it an effort to “make Buffalo sparkle.” I’m afraid it’s going to take quite a bit more than a spit shine and some elbow grease to make a city with a thirty year history of rapid decline suddenly coruscate beneath the admiring eye of a handful of out-of-town visitors. It’s classical Buffalonian behavior to voice such optimism as to suggest that that’s exactly what we can do, though.

What I found humorous – hell, downright hilarious – about this story was the simple fact that I was essentially listening to an entire city population’s surrogate mother trying to tell them to clean their rooms because we’re going to have company. I don’t think anybody who recorded or ran this story thought much about the implication that came along with it, that we just aren’t at all used to having visitors. I found myself very much wanting to ask Ms. Schweitzer if she kept to this same practice in her own home, waiting until the day before the in-laws were set to come over for Thanksgiving dinner before imploring her household to clean up a little.

Mind you, I’m in no position to judge such behavior. I’m just the same way. There are times when I am assiduously organized and I vacuum and dust according to a regular schedule. But there are also long spates of time during which I don’t do a thing to keep a nice house, precisely because I rarely expect to have anyone over. Then of course when someone announces that they’d like to visit, I find myself scrambling around trying to conceal the evidence of my own squalor.

On the other hand, I don’t really understand the impulse to put one’s home into a state that is unfamiliar even to oneself just to impress guests with a false personal image. The reason I’m ashamed of my clutter and dirt when it builds up is because should anyone see it, they’d be getting a one-sided vision of me and my lifestyle. I’m really not like that. I truly have every expectation that I would always be better than that if I had the least bit of regular traffic over my floor to provide me with that motivation. I clean things up for myself sometimes, but if you don’t plan your visit accordingly, you only see the version of me that drops the dishes in the sink and then goes right back to work and subsequently neglects them for a week, the version of me that keeps a year’s worth of magazines in a lopsided pile next to the doorway, the version that buries things that he uses beneath things he doesn’t want.

In the case of Buffalo, though, what other version is there besides the one I know, with all its filth, decay, degradation, and neglect? How are we supposed to portray ourselves? As the long-ago city that I’m told once stood on this spot in the 1940s? Or as the theoretical place that we might be the median income was an order of magnitude higher, if our industries had never collapsed, or if anyone actually came here or had reason to?

See, I wouldn’t be criticizing Catherine Schweitzer here if it really was as simple as a friendly warning that we’re bringing out the good china tonight, so we might want to pick up a little. She said “make Buffalo sparkle,” and then she gave some examples. She was compelled to particularly emphasize Court Street, which she pointed out was a pedestrian thoroughfare, then proceeding to complain that it was lined with giant planters that are standing completely empty, and as far as anyone can tell always have been. She mentioned a Verizon phone booth that was standing crooked after being hit by a car. For those who don’t want to disappoint Ms. Schweitzer, she would like these things to get taken care of in the next two weeks. Also, reaching into the rather more mundane, she chided people to pick up all the scattered trash, although she didn’t mention whether she meant from their own yards, from the vacant, crumbling building on their left, or from the vacant, crumbling meth lab on their right.

I forget to pick up around my apartment and then find myself scrambling to do it when someone is on their way over. I get that; I can accept the same behavior on a citywide basis. But I can’t quite imagine myself waiting until my mother calls and says “I’ll be over this afternoon” before I, for instance, hang the door back on its hinges, or pick up the broken glass off the carpet, or shot-vac the flooded bathroom floor. I’m not sure that I can say the same for Ms. Schweitzer, and I’m honestly very interested to know what her guiding impulse in this case is, apart from being charged with a task tantamount to trying to get Salt Lake City, Utah geared up for the National Homosexual Monogamy Convention. Did she suddenly acquire the opinion that our urban blight and infrastructure problems are important things to deal with now that somebody’s going to be in a position to judge her personally for them? Or is it just that she actually hadn’t realized what this place actually looks like until some outside influence compelled her make an objective assessment?

Knowing what the people in this town are like, I’m genuinely worried that that’s exactly what it was.

Other Views on the Below

I continued to follow the Buffalo rebranding story after my comment last night, and I'm pleased to see that many others are recognizing it as terrible, if for somewhat different reasons. There is an excellent tearing-down of it at WNY Media. The article is very thorough and well-thought out, despite not addressing the major issue that I expressed about it in my post yesterday.

The WNY Media piece also brings up a small meme that spread over Twitter in response to the press release, using the hash tag buffslogan to suggest satirical alternative brands for the city. Scrolling through those posts turns up a handful of real winners, like:

“Buffalo: Your city’s unemployment is low because of our people.”

“Buffalo: Come see what the rest of the country is laughing at.”

“The city that never wakes.”

“Buffalo: You come for the wings. You leave shortly afterwards!”

“You’re always fifteen minutes from being fifteen minutes further away from here.”

“Buffalo: Coming soon.”

“Buffalo: We’re here, fuck it.”

And there’s definitely something to be said for this contribution: “But seriously, Buffalo, no one cares what your slogan is. They just want to not be sad as a result of their visit.”

The satirical treatment of this topic also came in the form of a sendup of the video that came out alongside the unveiling of the brand. The video at that link makes some very amusing comments, but ultimately I feel that it gets away from itself as it goes on. Still, it’s really nice to see anyone doing satire about Buffalo, because laughter really is a wonderful way to address problems.

I remember that when I had just discovered Mike Polk’s absolutely brilliant Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Videos, I searched for Buffalo on Youtube, wondering if anyone had attempted similar satire of this similarly crumbling rust belt town. What I found instead was several doting tribute videos, many of them emphasizing Buffalo’s sports fandom as an admirable feature of the city’s very character, and as something that proved it to be a great place to live. But it has long been my feeling that sports fanaticism is a direct side-effect of living in a faded, downtrodden place. Knowing that there isn’t much else to be proud of or to hope for, you channel all of your hope and positive spirit into the performance of sports teams. But that’s just another form of self-delusion.

Apparently a couple of radio personalities on Buffalo’s sports talk station WGR devoted a sizable portion of their air time this morning to the discussion of the video that Visit Buffalo Niagara had released, which they derided for its failure to mention either the Bills or the Sabres. Now, granted these are sports talk guys, so as a rule, that is all they think about, but still this is a truly asinine complaint. As terrible as the For Real campaign is, that’s the one place where it’s got it right. Buffalo needs to put focus on different things – things that don’t strike us with the knee-jerk reaction of stadium excitement – in order to broaden its appeal beyond the reach of people who actually live here. Nobody’s going to travel to Buffalo, NY to see an NFL or NHL game. They can do that at home or in a city with more to offer besides.

Tragically, though, Buffalo is the sort of place where some very vocal people, though complaining about something that has certainly earned criticism, will attack it from exactly the wrong angle. The WGR personalities, and no doubt many other locals, look at a very bad piece of creative marketing, and decide that what’s wrong with it is that it is too high-brow, too distant from the familiar. The last thing we need is to keep on channeling our energy through the same useless outlets.

Buffalonians need to come to a breaking point in their understanding of what they’re up against, but some of them have much farther to go than others. Despite all of my criticisms, I’ll say this for Visit Buffalo Niagara: at least they’re actually trying something new. They just fucked it up, that’s all.

Change, Where Needed Least

The local tourism board has unveiled a new brand identity for the city in which I begrudgingly hang my hat. In my frank and honest, opinion, it is a stunningly awful, sorely misguided attempt at marketing a severely damaged city. The slogan that apparently emerged not from a journal kept by a marketing director on a bender, but from several brainstorming sessions comprised of a variety of advertising professionals was “Buffalo. For Real.”

First of all, this is a terrific example of the danger of mistaking something for simplicity when in fact it’s over-simplification. There is an absolutely unsophisticated connotation to a brand of this sort, one that could only have been bested by settling instead upon “Buffalo. For Really Reals.” The phrase “for real” is not only grammatically flawed, it conveys no information. It functions, at best, as an interjection, and in the long run, perhaps I will be one of the people to get the most mileage out of this brand, in that it will be a nice alternate for the word “fuck.”

“You live in Buffalo? That sucks.”

“For real.”

And that’s the real (for real) crux of the problem. My very first reaction to this was to observe that the people in charge of promoting Buffalo and dressing up its numerous, deep-seeded flaws had decided upon a brand identity that encourages people confronted with it to think about the things least worth emphasizing for the sake of tourism.

You know what I think of when I think of Buffalo, for real? I think of crumbling buildings scattered throughout the cityscape. I think of debilitating poverty hanging over many of its residents from cradle to grave. I think of the sixth greatest level of segregation in the United States. I think of population decline, unemployment, poor infrastructure, appallingly corrupt politicians, and vacant retail space in the city’s only commercially viable areas. I think of the death of the American city.

Somehow the video that Visit Buffalo Niagara released to coincide with this new found brand identity manages to begin by trying to speak to the exact opposite, portraying Buffalo as unique and distinctive, in contrast to the “sameness of the interstate.” It also encourages the poisonous notion that there is somehow a real America and a fake America, and that the roughshod, poorly positioned people and places are somehow more genuine than people with an urban identity or a measure of social mobility.

There’s something ironic about the fact that Buffalo tourism wants to emphasize the reality not just of this town but of an ostensibly overlooked national character, because actually acknowledging the ignored reality would entail clearly recognizing all those terrible things I mentioned above. Acknowledging the ignored reality would be in stark contrast to the broader goals and worldview of Visit Buffalo Niagara and all those who narrow their vision to focus upon the tenuous handful of nice things this place has going for it and claim therefore that Buffalo is really a great town.

“For real” doesn’t really work as a brand identity, because the impulse to attach a cheerful, positive brand to a place like this relies upon a great deal of delusion. And that sort of delusion is evident throughout the tourism video.

"Now, some might say time has left our town behind," the narrator says near the halfway point of his excruciating four minute monologue. "Prosperity has moved on, our moment passed. And no one would argue that we haven't had our share of hard knocks. Yet, despite the odds, we're still here."

Despite the odds, we're still here? Much like the slogan itself, this means nothing. Are we to believe that the odds were once in favor of the city of Buffalo being wiped completely off the map? We're still here, sure, because despite the best efforts of population trends, not everybody can leave all at once. But those of us who have both the will and the means to escape have done so, and we will continue to do so unless something fairly dramatic happens - something far more impactful than a whole lot of optimism about a new brand identity. Yes, we're still here, but what isn't here is much that makes Buffalo worth living in, or even visiting. For real.

Tag, You're Art

There's some interesting news from the art world this week. Apparently the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has just opened the first exhibition of graffiti art at a major museum.

Naturally, this has sparked a certain measure of controversy, with some people viewing it as glorification of petty vandalism. But I think that's nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction from people who haven't given graffiti a fair and objective hearing as an art form.

As with much art and most media, there is tons upon tons of terrible, hack-quality graffiti. But anybody who's seen the works of some of the really accomplished graffiti artists and who is able to divorce his judgment of artistic merit from his personal pique at bad experiences with private property being tagged cannot possibly deny good graffiti's status as art.

It generally angers me when I see the tags that show up all around Buffalo. On one level, it's irritating to observe wanton disregard for other people's property, but that concern is secondary to my annoyance at the absolutely awful quality of the tags that most culprits cover the city with. If you're going to tag something, it ought to be public property, but more than that, if you're going to tag anything at all that's publicly observable, it ought to contribute a positive aesthetic to the landscape.

I've always said that I wish there were public officials whose job it was to not just wash clean every instance of graffiti from public buildings and underpasses, as happens on a regular basis, but rather to judge the aesthetic quality of everything slated for destruction and to only get rid of what lowers the standards for how we engage with our surroundings. It doesn't seem fair to place every tag and every unsolicited mural in the same terrifically broad category. Some of it has the potential to actually improve the artist's neighborhood, or to express something of public interest, and to sandblast everything that's drawn in spray paint all at once doesn't just discourage graffiti, it discourages the improvement of outsider art.

This museum exhibition is a definite step in the direction of what I've been advocating. It separates the artistically meritorious works from the childish scrawls, because the old impulse to just call graffiti graffiti and wash your hands of all of it is simply untenable when you've seen what some of the true artists can do.