POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE OF DECENCY By Lucy Baker Since I moved to New York, I've started to enjoy sending postcards to my friends. While email may have eradicated the necessity for actual letters, there is something about postcards that can't be duplicated electronically. Good postcard writing is its own unique art form. You have a limited amount of space, usually about 4 ½ x 3 inches, to convey your message, and it better be one that you don't mind the mailman reading. The postcards I like best are vintage ones in black and white or Technicolor, but those require special trips to weekend flea markets and parking lot antique fairs, and it can be hard to find ones that aren't already written on. For day-to-day postcard correspondence, I usually just go to the drugstore and buy the ugliest, tackiest one I can find, stopping short of the ones with pictures of enormous breasts or ass cracks. Last week I got a thank you note from my friend Jill, who's in grad school at the University of Oregon. It was a really sweet card with little flecks of gold inlayed in the paper. I decided to fire back with a postcard of the 'New York nightlife' variety, all the better if the image was blurred so as to indicate the fast pace of the city. On my lunch hour the next day I went down to the Rockefeller Center concourse to peruse the selection at the little pharmacies and newsstands. I looked all over the place and came up empty handed. Where were all the cheesy shots of Time Square and the Brooklyn Bridge? There was even a dearth of Statue of Liberty pictures. All I found, rack after rack, were postcards of the World Trade Center. This bothered me for two reasons. One, because I'm pretty far left of the middle politically speaking, and images of the twin towers superimposed on billowing American flags fail to instill within me even the most negligible amount of patriotism. And two, because it struck me as outrageously gauche. On a certain level, I can understand the postcards with pictures of the buildings pre-attack. For some people they're probably cathartic. They are supposed to make you feel wistful and think things like I will always remember and We shall rise again . But what about the postcards with pictures of the attack actually underway? The worst one I saw was segmented like a strip of film, the first frame was of a plane heading for one of the towers and the last was of it crumbling to the ground. What kind of a person, American or otherwise, wants to send someone a photograph of one of the most tragic occurrences in history? What on earth would you possibly write on the back of that postcard? "Went shopping at Macy's and took 'Seinfeld' bus tour - hilarious. Tonight: 'Cats'" ?
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