News aggregator apps can convey a twisted worldview at times, a skewed appearance of priorities. Then again what do I know. Maybe a boat capsizing in Lake Tahoe and someone getting laid off from Microsoft really are more important than overnight bunker-busting in Iran. That is how the headlines landed on a certain news app I use.

I don’t know what’s happening over there, or over here for that matter. In the old days most of us had a single source, or two. A single newspaper and a single television newscas. Today every possible angle on a situation is blasted at you, with lies and disinformation far more desperate for engagement than the truth.

Does Iran really have sleeper cells in the U.S.? Will they come after us at random? They got at Rushdie proving the threat, at least, is certainly real.

When the first Gulf War commenced I was living at the Parc Lincoln, the first extended-stay place I had in New York. I heard about it on the radio. Lacking a television I went outside, onto Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, expecting some sort of activity or communal sense of concern or engagement with the fact that our soldiers were going into harms way. 

I found no such atmosphere. I guess no one even knew at that point, as word did not travel at the hyperventilated speeds we’ve come to expect. On 9/11 I had a similar expectation, that a deliberate attack such as occurred would cause maelstroms in Manhattan. I found none on 34th Street but of course there was plenty happening downtown. Colossal incidents tend to happen in a what amounts to a small square of space, or in the case of 9/11, two squares of space. Or three. 

There was one time I really felt all of New York around me come together was during the O.J. Simpson slow-speed Bronco chase. I was on a bus and every which way I looked it seemed there was a television turned on and tuned to O.J. Outside restaurants and random places with televisions in the windows small crowds had gathered.

I was on a crosstown bus, probably the M79. When it emerged from Central Park and moved on toward Madison Avenue there seemed to be televisions everywhere, seen through apartment windows, in open-door restaurants and cafes. It was likely not as everywhere as memory serves it up but the coagulation of strangers around this rather surreal slo-mo “chase” was definitely real.