In the Marvel movies (all nine dozen of them), the characters will sometimes refer to the alien attack on Manhattan that took place at the end of 2012’s “The Avengers” by gravely calling the event, simply, “New York.” Scarlett Johansson explains to a magic, talking raccoon that Robert Downey Jr. is looking off into the middle distance because he’s traumatized by “New York” or something.
I find this irritating, partially because it just makes for syntactically awkward sentences to use the name of a place for the name of an event. Much more important, I dislike it because I am from Manhattan, and I remember when nonfictional death flew in from the sky. It didn’t change how we used our city’s name or cause us to define our home by that event. “New York” did not become a byword for the worst thing that has recently happened in New York.
I write this sitting in my mother’s hometown of Charlottesville, Va., where I am visiting for a few days. I grew up coming to this place, which is a thriving little city based around probably the best public university in the country, or at least certainly the one with the best architectural use of brick. The trees around here have their own special shade of green. Downtown, there are no fewer than three old book shops I love. Parking is a mess. Some of my friends are still here, as are a few good restaurants.
And yet when I hear the word that is the name of this place, the bookshops and the trees and the fat cat and the people who live here are not what the word “Charlottesville” refers to. Like ScarJo in the Marvel flicks, we have started to use the name of this place as a byword for an event, specifically the event that took place on Aug. 12, 2017. Violence came to Charlottesville in the form of white supremacists rallying, menacing, marching, fighting. One of them murdered Heather Heyer. Now, when a writer wants to say neo-Nazi types are having a resurgence in America, he might remind us that we are living “after Charlottesville.”
Perhaps this is the easiest way to communicate quickly and remind someone of what happened that day, which was real and is not to be forgotten or diminished. But somehow turning an entire place into a byword for horror diminishes what happens there every other day, which is of course everyday life. I’m glad that in this universe, as opposed to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an attack on Manhattan didn’t turn the name of my home city into a word for that attack, because “New York” means so much more to me than 9/11. It’s a shame for my mom’s home city to become a word for an evil attack.
