photo credit: HAWK KRALL

Baghdad With Cheesesteaks

Someone gets shot; Center City shits itself.

by Steven Wells

OMG, someone got shot right outside the PW office. What the hell is going on? Won’t someone please think of the journalists? Like now. Before I get hurt. For God’s sake, people, it’s time to wake up. Before this place turns into London.

What? London in merry ol’ England? With its foggy cobbled streets, chirpy cockney urchins and cheerful unarmed bobbies? You might have heard that the NFL staged a regular season game in London recently. And that in a press conference to promote the event Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder said that he was surprised to learn people in London spoke English.

And then he followed up with: “I know [Washington Redskins linebacker] London Fletcher. We did a football camp together. That’s the closest thing I know to London. He’s black, so I’m sure he’s not from London.”

That’s London—the most multicultural city on the planet. The same London that’s been on constant guard against terrorism since the 1970s. Where the “bobbies” (Londoners actually call them Old Bill or the Filth) walk ’round with Heckler & Koch submachine guns and very itchy trigger fingers.

There are no ghettos in London. On every level it’s way more integrated than any big American city. But there are drugs, poverty, oppression and desperation. And areas respectable folks avoid at night.

I used to live in one—the Holloway Road. We had a bondage brothel upstairs which not only served as a rehearsal space for hot British pop combo the Libertines but also serviced a regular stream of priests, vicars, imams and rabbis. And it was a rare day I’d not hear “Suck you off for a fiver?” from one of the area’s many dissolute crack whores.

Then one morning some idiot boarded a double-decker bus right outside my flat and shot the driver. So there’s me ready to slope off to the shops only to be greeted with a scene straight out of a movie—dudes in white space suits in my front yard picking up shell casings behind a cage of black-and-yellow “POLICE—FUCK OFF!” tape. And a burly uniformed officer in a bulletproof vest telling me to (and I quote) “Fuck off back inside and mind your own fucking business.”

So I got kinda nostalgic last week. And it kinda reminded me of this life-or-death, World War II-style existential struggle with “Islamofascism” we’re meant to be having.

Center City is America. “The neighborhoods” (cute euphemism) are Iraq. And we need to keep all the violence in Iraq. So we don’t have to fight the bad guys in Center City. Or something.

This city is almost as fucked up as my analogies.