Thus says the LORD:
Woe to the city, rebellious and polluted,
to the tyrannical city!
She hears no voice,
accepts no correction;
In the LORD she has not trusted,
to her God she has not drawn near. ZEP 3:1-2, 9-13
The city was always an asylum. On television on Election Night, the world (sic) they used was bubble. But what a bubble.
New Yorkers woke up on November 8 in what seems now like a fairy-tale fog, convinced, as ever, that the future belonged to us. By midnight, the world looked very different, the country very far away (and the future, too). Eighty percent of us had voted against the man who won, and 80 percent, it seemed, were already hatching plans to leave — for Canada or Berlin or anywhere else we imagined we could live safely among the like-minded. That was when the text messages began coming in from old friends in Wisconsin and Texas and North Carolina and Missouri. They were watching the same returns we were, in the same apocalyptic panic, and all making desperate plans to come to New York. For them, the city was still the same fairy tale. David Wallace-Wells in New York (emphasis and parenthetical my own)
Boy, are people unhappy that Trump won. I believe that David Wallace-Wells, the author of the passage above and editor of New York magazine, as well as contributing writer to The Nation, Salon, Slate, Atlantic and every other tony, high-brow, damn-your-eyes soapbox of the elite in this country, was so upset that he screwed up the second sentence ( world, for word), as well as got the date wrong for the Dawn of The Donald.
Hey, I am no one to point fingers at the odd typo, or slight misrepresentation, but I am only a 'blogger' and a working stiff. I live in Chicago's Morgan Park, kind of like Queens in New York City. I voted before November 8th, and I was surprised by the election results as Mr. Wallace-Wells, but for different reasons.
Wallace-Wells weeps of waking November 8th in the firm belief that Hillary would continue the defense of abortion, offensive art, illegal aliens, religious suppression in all things, Marxist economics, globalism, endless wars and the American oligarchy. The Dream denied. Dang.
That said, Mr. Wallace-Wells writes a pretty nice little rant filled with good-old anti-Irish race cards and KKK memes for those of us voted off-the island of Manhattan by Wallace-Wells and calling the magically once far-flung personalities on the island of Manhattan to flock to the Resistance!
Before Eric Garner and before the ground-zero mosque, before Rudy Giuliani called Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary “sick stuff” and before Trump called for the execution of the Central Park Five; before Abner Louima and before stop-and-frisk and before the Crown Heights riots; before Stonewall began with a police raid; before redlining; before the 1927 Klan riot, when Fred Trump was arrested wearing white; before 38 were killed by a 1920 bomb detonated by anarchists outside J. P. Morgan; before 120 died, mostly free black men, mostly at the hands of Irish New Yorkers raging through the city, resisting enlistment in Lincoln’s war to free their brothers; before all that, when Peter Minuit of New Amsterdam legend established the city as a sanctuary for mercenary commerce on a seaboard being settled, in every other colony, by religious ideologues, it was not by war or raid or smallpox but merely by submitting an exploitatively low bid. Those 24 dollars were consecrated into acquisitive legend almost immediately — a fabulous deal, a terrific deal, and also, sort of, a con. It set a template New Yorkers would emulate for centuries, as the city’s big-tent open-mindedness covered something darker: violence of certain groups against others, neighbors exploiting neighbors for the prize of living among one another and maybe even conquering the world. This makes for a very particular kind of tolerance. We tolerate living around bad guys doing bad things, in part because we can always tell them to fuck off. And often do.
Millions of dreamer-hustlers came anyway — from 1892 to 1954, 12 million through Ellis Island alone. Elsewhere in the country, new arrivals had set up shop and claimed primacy where they landed. Here, newer waves just kept coming, swamping the claims of those who came before, wave after wave, Irish and Germans followed by Russian Jews and Armenians and Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and Greeks, tidal waves leveling into ethnic palimpsests of communities so enormous and elaborate they might have been called whole civilizations just 500 years before (Kleindeutschland, the Five Points, Central Park’s black Seneca Village). When the country closed its borders in the spirit of “racial hygiene,” the immigrants were followed by American freaks, fleeing suburbs and parents and finding refuge here.
Native-born New Yorkers can seem precocious marvels to newcomers, but they rarely hold the city’s gaze for very long — ask Andy Warhol (from Pittsburgh) or Madonna (Detroit), Zora Neale Hurston (from Notasulga, Alabama) or Langston Hughes (Joplin, Missouri), Truman Capote (New Orleans) or Dorothy Parker (Long Branch, New Jersey), or even Andrew Carnegie (Scotland) and J. P. Morgan himself (Hartford, Connecticut). Nobody knows any Dutch, which meant nobody has really come first, when you think about it, which means nobody really owns the city, even the obscenely rich who talk like they do. The city is so much a hot spring of immigrants and migrants and arrivistes, self-inventors and refuge-seekers and self-mythologizers, that no one can ever feel quite comfortable or secure, no matter how royally statused. The churn is eternal and the envy general, like antibodies to complacency. No one is immune to insecurity, not the sons of tycoons or the daughters of mayors or the offspring of artists and musicians raised as downtown royalty on lower Fifth Avenue. Not even the golden-haired boy born into a real-estate fortune in the glorious sun of the white man’s mid-century boom who built a gold-plated empire for himself out of the resentment he felt staring out across the East River at Manhattan from Queens. And who wanted, even more than to conquer the Manhattan skyline, to watch his own tabloid fantasy become “real” in the pages of the New York Post. BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD is surely, even now, the greatest day of the president-elect’s entire life.
Yep, elites ain't happy.
In a few days, after someone reads this piece to Bruce Dold, I expect that Mary Schmich and Eric Zorn will do a series of similar chit-chatty exchanges about how stupid, ugly, racist, homophobic, non-Dreamers living in Portage Park, Mount Greenwood, Peotone and Crescent City worked that Russian fake news on all of the Hamilton Attendees, Pastor Pfleger Partisans, and Oak Park Rangers making Trump supreme, though losing the popular vote. Damn Alexander Hamiliton, the real one not Lin-Manuel Miranda, who should be on the Ten Spot rather than that Federalist, and his Electoral College!!!!
It hurts.
Hey, It gets better.
Journalists will be breaking each others necks to see who will write the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich of this millennium, and activists can sit again at the feet of Bill Ayers and learn about timers and detonators. It's all good.
Anyway, David Wallace-Wells invites other Cities, noting that New York is not Guam, but the Philippines:
And we also know that we are not in fact alone — that New York is not an island but an archipelago. Our mayor has resister-cousins in Chicago and Los Angeles and Providence, San Francisco and Seattle and Minneapolis — and those are just a few of the cities mobilizing themselves as immigrant sanctuaries. We know that the number of Democratic counties has shrunk over the last decade or two, as entrepreneurs and other hustlers flooded into cities, and we know that the counties that went blue in this election account for nearly two-thirds of the American economy. We also know that Peter Thiel was basically the only Trumper in Silicon Valley. If you have to live in a bubble, really, you could do worse.
Kerr-Plop, Rahm is already cutting deals and pencil necked geeks of the Valley are paying court to the Grand Fuhrer of Wallace Wells' thought piece. Owwww.
I noticed that David Wallace Wells never mentions Queens.
