“There Are More Than
Three Worlds”
A continuation of Leonard’s compare/contrast of Wolfe and Dissent and his spirited (and very
sarcastic) attack on the power base of NYC for ignoring the real problems of real New Yorkers while celebrating the fiction of Wolfe and (as he
sees it) Dissent condemning the
welfare mother as a “parasite” for taking advantage of aid to dependent
children. He is much more direct this time in his criticism of the Regan
“counterrevolution” and mayor Koch (“Crazy Eddie”) who he sees as completely in
bed with the big real estate developers and Wall Street moguls leading one side
of a cultural war between the 3.5M tourists coming to see Times Square as
“Disney World” and the 2.3M “newcomers” who have turned NYC into a
“minority-majority.” He sends up Dissent
(which he refers to as a novel) as more of an intellectual-left culture
magazine than a force for change…and interestingly refers to Columbia as “…our
favorite slum lord.”
Leonard has a passage about half way in that reads exactly
like Charles Grodin’s character, Marty Blum, going to the White House to find
some room in the federal budget for the imposter president in Ivan Reitman’s
1993 film Dave:
We might scrounge the money…$500MM in mysterious
unspent revenues mostly from ‘Big MAC’, World Trade Center and Battery Park
City surpluses…a half billion on capital gains tax…tax cooperative apartments…that’s
another $60M…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoRHwIMYlbc (link to Dave clip)
In his call for this new approach Leonard writes, “We are
talking about more than anybody now in power has the inclination or the guts to
attempt. What we need is a change of philosophies and philosophers.”
New word: strophe and antistrophe = the first part of a
Greek ode (…and the part that follows)
New
learning: Commentary from December 9, 2008 NCPA:
Columbia University is buying up property in the
neighborhood of Manhattanville, leaving it trashed and vacant, so that the area
can be declared "blighted." If that designation is made, the
state will be able to take all the remaining well-kept property (property
owners do not want to currently sell) in the area, hand it over to the university,
and only then will Columbia clean up the mess.
It's a curious situation -- the government punishing a
landowner who takes care of this property and rewarding an owner who does
not. But this is the through-the-looking-glass world of New York eminent
domain law…
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