Sometimes, one has something to say on a topic but it doesn’t merit a whole essay. Tis the season. While I live well away from NYC and visit infrequently now, I still regard the place as a peripheral stomping ground. My mother spent a significant part of her youth growing up on Statin Island though that had no direct impact on my upbringing. Even though I’m entirely pessimistic about the short-term prospects for the city, I have some small hope that the social tide will eventually turn away from the current trajectory of ruin. They may yet get a small window of opportunity before plunging into ultra-Gotham.
The Mayor
I’ve been watching the evolution of news in New York City as Mayor Mamdani flounders. $ Billions here, $ billions there, much of it robbed from essential services and big chunks $ begged off of Governor Hochul to the detriment of the rest of the state and because she can never say no. I doubt she has a brain but she certainly has no spine. The end result of all of this isn’t socialist utopia, it’s pure grift. Rhetoric about ‘for the people’ is just optics and they hardly bother to be compelling about it anymore. The redistribution of wealth is from the people, the producing class, to the mayor’s friends, pets, and mostly shadow orgs. In all of this is a strong side of promoting Islamic conquest in NYC and setting up the city’s Jews for an eventual pogrom, yes, a real one, not figurative. And that’s about it, that’s all there is here. NYC is not turning socialist after all. It is turning poorer and stupider and uglier as money, intelligence, and their main squeezes pack the U-Hauls and get out of Dodge.
Jews
Speaking of Jews, I’m baffled by the Jews of NYC. Of course, they’re far from homogenous but traditionally, they’ve always been Democrat. Nothing scientific here but the read I get, primarily from following events via the New York Post, is that they are all now at least marginally aware that progressive liberalism of which they are charter members, has turned against them in biblical proportions. They see this, they blink, a few of them voice their concern, occasionally a little alarm, and they do nothing. It’s like the city is prepping the gas chambers around them and they just sit there watching it all happen. I can’t and won’t predict the scale of real violence that might someday be unleashed against them, or when, but it’s building and I believe it’ll happen relatively soon. Someday, mark my words, the Jews of NYC will have their apartments and stores ransacked and they’ll still be supporting Democrats. It’s like some kind of guilt or extinction complex.
Colbert
Speaking of progressive liberalism, there is Colbert, now gone from the airwaves. A more deserving riddance was hardly ever had. It’s not that he was a bad comic but he was. It’s not that he was a smooth approachable progressive liberal, because he wasn’t. He was simply an arrogant dogmatic tool. He once had talent. Ironically, if he had had a more sophisticated approach to liberalism embedded in the manner of his natural former talent, he could have advanced his cause more effectively. Rather than working the pregnant pause, the side glance, or the double entendre, he adopted the charm of a death camp comandante. Colbert in the end was just a mean fool.
Jerry Saltz
Speaking of beauty, I’ve had some thoughts on my mind about New York art critic Jerry Saltz, friend of Bill [Clinton – back in the day]. I follow him on FB as he’s a public figure, is published, and is a working member of the art trade. I mention him here because, besides being part of the NY intelligentsia, his social and political disposition strikes me as a typical New Yorker. He’s a passionate Trump hater, but yet is occasionally thoughtful. He’s essentially a degenerate soul but also mainstream. He has blue collar roots but he somehow mastered the academic lingo that curators speak to one another which is mostly made-up bullshit to the average man. He appears to be watching the gradual ruin of NYC vis a vis the mayor he backed, and remains conspicuously silent even though during his campaign, he was gleeful that Zo would burn it all down. In the manner of his trade demographic, he loves the notions of socialism – this comes natural to poor artists – but also has that typical burning envious love hate relationship with wealth. His appetite in art is for the pervy, nihilistic, and edgy sloppiness but he occasionally escapes to beauty of rural Connecticut. At the end of the day, who’s side is he really on?
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A helpful introduction to the author in my ABOUT