Archivo

The Imperial City: Rewriting New York

“The Way We Are”

Leonard’s lament about the state of New York (state of New York, not New York State):

We live in an imaginary city, where the only politician not in jail ought to be…where the unions don’t care, the schools don’t work, the cops deal drugs …and I can’t leave home without stepping over the body of a runaway or derelict.

He laments about the power brokers and celebrities who see the city as nothing “…more than a machine for generating money. (Marshall Berman)” as well as the novelists (Tom Wolfe) and magazines (Dissent) who turn the grit into something "magical." He goes on to write, “And because none of these pop heroes [Trump, et al] ever take the subway, there isn’t a Bernie Goetz to shoot them.” I love that.

New word: omophagous = the eating of raw meat (Leonard uses it to describe George Stenbrenner, Donald Trump and Al Sharpton)

New learning: Marshall Berman is the Distinguished Professor of Political Science at CUNY, also a philosopher and "Marxist Humanist"...whatever that is.

This guy even looks like a Marxist:

He wrote a book called, Adventures in Marxism the: "The essays in Adventures in Marxism, which span from a portion of Berman's 1963 Oxford thesis to a reconsideration of the Communist Manifesto on its sesquicentennial in 1998..." Subject matter for the next target of this blog? Hmmmm...