"The Staten Island Ferry remains a potential terrorist target"
About this Quote
Calling the Staten Island Ferry a “potential terrorist target” is less a piece of intelligence than a piece of politics: a sentence engineered to make risk feel immediate, local, and therefore actionable. Vito Fossella isn’t talking about an abstract transportation asset; he’s pointing at a daily ritual for New Yorkers and quietly asking them to picture it ruptured. The power of the line is its banality. Of course a crowded, symbolic, publicly accessible vessel is a target. Saying it out loud performs vigilance, and in the post-9/11 New York political ecosystem, vigilance is a form of credibility.
The specific intent reads as twofold: justify security spending and position the speaker as a guardian of the commute. “Remains” does a lot of work, implying an ongoing threat that outlasts news cycles and demands sustained attention (and funding). “Potential” is the key legal-political hedge: it amplifies fear without committing to a concrete claim that could be challenged. It’s a warning built to be un-disprovable.
Subtextually, the ferry stands in for something larger: the vulnerability of everyday civic life. It also smuggles in a constituency cue. Staten Island has long carried an outsized sense of being overlooked by City Hall; naming its ferry as a frontline target elevates the borough’s concerns to a national-security register.
Context matters: a politician speaking in an era when “terror target” language could unlock federal dollars, justify policing expansions, and shift debates from service quality (late boats, overcrowding) to existential danger. The line works because it turns infrastructure into theater: the commute as a stage where leadership proves itself by narrating threat.
The specific intent reads as twofold: justify security spending and position the speaker as a guardian of the commute. “Remains” does a lot of work, implying an ongoing threat that outlasts news cycles and demands sustained attention (and funding). “Potential” is the key legal-political hedge: it amplifies fear without committing to a concrete claim that could be challenged. It’s a warning built to be un-disprovable.
Subtextually, the ferry stands in for something larger: the vulnerability of everyday civic life. It also smuggles in a constituency cue. Staten Island has long carried an outsized sense of being overlooked by City Hall; naming its ferry as a frontline target elevates the borough’s concerns to a national-security register.
Context matters: a politician speaking in an era when “terror target” language could unlock federal dollars, justify policing expansions, and shift debates from service quality (late boats, overcrowding) to existential danger. The line works because it turns infrastructure into theater: the commute as a stage where leadership proves itself by narrating threat.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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