Fireworks and Nasality

I was going to write about fireworks. I was going to tell you that every time you sit with your loved one(s) on a grassy lawn, oohing and aahing at the spectacular display overhead, you’re exposing yourself, never mind the environment we supposedly all obsess over, to a sinister mix of heavy metals—arsenic, mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium, barium, and strontium among them. I was going to write about this and more, when my attention became diverted by the mayor of the town where I was born and where I live, and I just became so irritated that I decided fireworks would have to wait for another time.

You may have heard of my town’s mayor, Bloomberg, and you have surely heard of the town itself, New York. To my dull mind, Bloomberg’s popularity is a puzzle. Sure, he’s super-rich. And people, we people, love wealth, the more blatantly displayed the better. We may not have it, but we can aspire to it. We’ve always been that way, since the first cave person managed to get more mastodon than anyone else: look at all that marbled meat...from there it’s a straight line to the pyramids, then Versailles, and the Trump Center and large nasty vehicles that use up much metal and fossil fuel. One display more nonsensical and disgusting than the next. So Bloomberg, with his zillions ($20 billion or so), fits right in in terms of wealth-bedazzlement.

But here’s my point: I would think all this would be, if you’ll forgive the phrase, trumped by his voice. How can anyone, even the wealth-obsessed, hear it without snickering? When he’s aggravated, which is not infrequently, it’s Mickey Mouse on helium. High-pitched, whiny; the rest of the time it’s just nasal...even if the guy were the proven, personal representative of God on earth I could no more follow his direction than I would shoot off fireworks in my closet.

Wait, I hear you say. The man has a disability, that we grant you, B.V. And he’s short, and somewhat...rat-featured. But a squeaky voice does not a lousy leader make. Claudius, emperor of Rome, stammered and his nose ran when he was excited. And Dick Cheney is weight-challenged and can’t aim. But such ailments did not prevent these fine leaders from doing their duty and slaughtering opponents, protecting the privileged few, etc...and nasality didn’t prevent Bloomberg from keeping NYC streets mostly free of protestors during the 2004 Republican Convention

—which cost the city untold millions during the convention itself and subsequently millions more when the scruffy malcontents had to be paid off because their constitutional rights had been violated—nor has it stopped him, in action after action, in whisking Manhattan clean of the few people not making 200Gs or more....think of what he’s done in that regard, you say:

• enabled the sale of Stuyvesant Town, one of the last bastions of what is laughingly called the “middle class” to a developer who is now already caught up in ousting longtime current residents
• manfully fought for landlords who discriminate against impoverished tenants
• maintained New York City’s status as “one of the most segregated cities in the nation”
 • kept New York City number one: we have the “highest rate of discrimination against prospective Hispanic home buyers among 20 cities, and the fifth-highest rate against African-Americans.”

Squeaky Mike has presided over the transformation of New York City into a stratified hierarchy where the super-rich lord it over the rest of us. And he keeps up the perverse fiction that he, a greed-head possessed of unimaginable wealth, is a man of the people, by boasting about his subway-riding habits (omitting the fact he takes a limousine from his town house to the subway).

You gotta admire the nerve of the man. And be stunned at the electorate that loves him.