Coney Al Jazeera

Sometimes I relate to the newspaper like to a parent. I hold them forever accountable for what they have said. I stopped reading the New York Times when in newsreports after September 11 they would not mention how American money was responsible for the original Afghan jihad.

Today, taking the subway to Coney Island, to the first amusement park in the world, I pick up the paper for the first time in several months. ‘Investigation by Congress Into the September 11 attacks will reach back to 1986’. Why stop at 1986? Why not right until 1982 when the CIA recruited and funded bin Laden to be a leader of the Afghan jihad?

I read on: ‘‘A joint committee of the House and Senate announced that ‘they would search for facts to answer the many questions that their families and many Americans have raised and to lay a basis for assessing the accountability of institutions and officials of government’.’’ Will they investigate this fact: if the CIA had not seeded bin Laden into Afghanistan, and watered that plant through the ’80s, would what has happened in America, still have happened? If bin Laden and the rest of the mujaheedin had NOT been funded to fight the Soviets, would the Soviet Union NOT have collapsed?

The US campaign against the Taliban was long overdue. They were defanging what they had put in the first place. Between the fanging and the defanging, the Afghan jihad destroyed the public culture of Pakistani cities in the ’80s. Cities through which the guns, the arms and money flowed, and new mafia elites mushroomed. Freelance militants also became available to make a living off trouble in Karachi, in Kashmir.

The American families who lost their kin on September 11, demonstrating this week in Washington, must hold their government’s past foreign policies accountable. What is more likely to happen is that the public outcry will not centre around the future of US foreign policies but about making the FBI and the CIA more efficient. Which means the world, America included, will not be a safe place.

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Coney Island was the world’s first amusement park. It was also the first awami beach.

The rides do not look grand any more, but that is because several fires over the last century have wreaked extensive destruction. I rode the Cyclone, a roller coaster that has wooden tracks, and the seats of the rides are upholstered with Rexine, the artificial leather product from the ’50s. I looked around at the park and heard voices in my head from a fabulous documentary I had seen on Coney Island (made by Ric Burns).

By 1895, a spit of land on the foot of Brooklyn had become the most extravagant playground in the country. A summer safety valve for the most explosively packed city in the world. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, there were three million New Yorkers and half of them lived in slums. A quarter of a million people could be found on Coney Island on a summer Sunday.

Thomas Edison’s incandescent light burnt brightly across Coney Island. By 1905 people swam at night because of electricity. In 1896 the movie camera had been invented. Among the first titles the Edison Company offered its exhibitors that summer was, ‘Sea Waves at Coney Island’. It had the tallest structure in the world. Women and men swam on the same beach, held on to each other through the rides. The roller coaster was invented here, so was the hot dog. So was the greatest electrocution in the world. After an elephant killed three men, one of whom had made it swallow a lighted cigarette, the Dreamland Park decided the elephant had to go. The Edison Company invented the largest electrodes ever, and Dreamland sold tickets.

The owners of the three amusement parks vied with each other to build the tallest structures, the brightest spectacles. Several times electrical fires destroyed the Parks, and they rose again. Man-made disasters were popular entertainment. Boer War battles were staged, with the actual veterans shipped in. Sea battles were fought, so were fires in buildings by firefighters, four times a day.

Coney Island took America from the Victorian Age to the Modern World. An anonymous writer from the time called it, ‘‘a blatant, cheap, apotheosis of the ridiculous, a national playground, not to have seen it is not to have seen your own country’’. More than a playground, the great amusement parks turned the machines of industry into the instruments of play. Another writer called it the place where Americans encountered the twentieth century. It was the unofficial capital of the new mass culture.

Today, Americans can encounter globalisation unthinkingly when they fill up a car with fossil fuel. The Enron corruption doesn’t inspire much thinking either, at best a passing ambivalence. They are clearly fearful of al Qaeda’s global reach. I think of how a hundred years ago Coney Island introduced Americans to the twentieth century. Today, when they are grappling with power plays that are part of the package of globalisation, I wonder what medium, what activity can playfully introduce them to a new century.

Hollywood produced cinema fails miserably. George Lucas is braindead. What then, besides learning from the real thing?