I’m often struck, when using a Chinese IP card, by this graphic. Sure, it’s collage, not collision. It’s trying to say “live the reality of global connectedness,” not “don’t forget that you live in the shadow of globalized terror.”
And yet, that plane is clearly about to take out a chunk of Brooklyn. Did it just miss the targeted Freedom Tower? Or the Brooklyn Bridge? Or is it merely crashing like Dumbo (Disney’s, Banksy’s) into Dumbo’s converted warehouse condos, and why?
Sometimes when I phone home with one of these, I hear for just a moment echoes of the voice of a Shanghai cab driver who, maybe six years back, followed up the #1 Shanghai cab driver question of “where you from?” not with the usual “America’s great!” and queries about favorite NBA teams or if I’d been to Seattle where the driver’s cousin lives or whether I thought Shanghai girls were pretty, but with a delighted statement along the lines of: “They blew up the WTC! Osama! Ha! Boom! The great America, ha! Osama! You really had it coming! Ha!”
I think the cabby assumed that I’d take deeper offense than I did. I was indeed momentarily surprised (I think I was too tired to be “shocked”), but he did have something of a point, in his way, and my being outraged certainly wasn’t going to save any lives or change any minds, and feeling deeply sad, as I also did, is too stifling an emotional state to allow the spark of anger to catch. Besides, it was kind of funny, too – a nice little set piece about our comically mutual impotence as possible foes, heroes, or villains. I paid my fare and left him to his cab.
I can imagine expat and Chinese acquaintances alike dismissing the suggestion that my driver’s outburst really meant anything at all: small sample size, bad apple, a glitch in the recording, a non-representative hate hiccup, schadenfreude, crazy, bitter – but certainly not representative of anything. Chinese people love America, after all. It’s absolutely true based on my mental survey of cab drivers over the years, not to mention fruit vendors, IT guys, college students, and so on. I know this because they say it so often. And I always respond that I think Shanghai and China are pretty right on, too, so they know that yes, everything’s cool between us.
Likewise, I imagine expat and Chinese acquaintances alike dismissing the notion that my IP card has anything to do with anything at all. It means nothing. The fact that I find it both really sad and kind of funny – absurd – confirms its lack of meaning, even.
But still, I want to know what the China Telecom design team behind my IP card’s design was thinking. Not “what were they thinking?” in any indignant sense of how could they? It is indeed most probable that nobody thought anything beyond something like “thrown-together clip-art collage that represents instantaneous global connectedness and communication.” Having worked with Chinese designers, that’s totally believable, but nevertheless I’m thinking some kid from the office must have cracked the obvious bad joke, yeah? Maybe smoking with his buds in the stairwell in the midst of talking girls and World of Warcraft? Yeah? I would have.
Despite the insistence of my imaginary interlocutors that such things – passenger jets diving into Brooklyn, rogue Shanghai cabbies praising Osama’s big hit – really mean nothing at all, I prefer to range over the available counter-takes: continuous global disconnectedness and miscommunication, warping perspectives, dreamed threats, the non-stop return flight of the repressed, the accident, clotted resentments, the telecom invocation of some dumb mundangel of death, sloppy “we’ve-seen-too-many-movies” broken mind melds, the placid surface of commerce-as-final-human-reality punctured by insane grasps of (for and at) history — all of it, no matter how intentional, how accidental, no matter how anything at all. It’s the only way these things begin to make real sense, the sense in which they may as well violently stop, whether within our connected/disconnected (and tapped?) global mind or without it, and in so stopping, continue the work of history, making and unmaking us itself in all our infinitesimal, paranoid days.