New York City has always afforded a sort of lawlessness superimposed on a veneer of normality.
There’s a reason all the mobsters have wives and kids and homes in the suburbs.
It is the same reason a house was always a central character in ‘The Godfather films.
Whether in a New York City borough or the shores of Lake Tahoe, homes served as a grounding element and a symbol of the American Dream.
It also had the effect of making gangsterism generational and allows duplicity and living out two separate lives in tandem.
The mistress and the wife for example, is a central tenet in the American patriarchal psyche.
That is how the New York City area can give us so many characters that make for a lot of cringe and a lot of connection with the American public.
Men like John Gotti and Donald Trump and how they became almost folk heroes of sorts for a certain demographic of mostly white males.
What Joseph Campbell would so brilliantly illustrate in ‘The Power of Myth’.
Trump is not a smart man but he was and is an instinctual one, and he came to his ascension of wealth and notoriety at the same time as a certain infection seemed to be brewing in American culture. (I am using the word “culture” more in terms of yeast instead of the kind that produces symphonies and museums. I mean the kind that things grow in and not up and out of, more akin to moldy bread than Mozart).
‘Famous for being famous’ as the saying goes, fame not as a by-product of acumen or talent but simply a means to an end.
Allen Weisselberg drove in from the Long Island suburbs to serve as a chief capo for Donald Trump for over four decades.
Recently convicted of engineering a 15 year long tax fraud scheme on behalf on the Trump Organization his trips will be cut short now for a 5 month stay on Rikers Island.
He was never removed from the Trump Organization’s payroll and will likely be released before serving his full term.
Never missing a paycheck and seemingly keeping his mouth shut as to the full extent of his boss’s criminality.
That same mafia mentality seems to be the guiding principle behind the now majority party in the US House of Representatives.
The GOP fails to protect this nation’s children by refusing to stand up to their big donors at the NRA.
They refused to protect American families by supporting CDC guidelines concerning wearing masks and allowed anti-mask and anti-vaccine rhetoric to fester during the largest public health emergency of our lifetimes. (With a possible exception being the AIDS crisis which was made exponentially worse by Ronald Reagan’s homophobia and his administration’s criminal lack of action. “Silence = Death” as ACT UP would say, finally shaming our institutions into action).
This time the regressive posturing of the GOP was done to aid their leader, Donald J. Trump’s political fortunes.
The GOP cared more about helping the most deviant, inept and criminal president in American history get reelected than they cared about saving lives.
Trump lost anyway but not before Republicans all across the country attempted to help him cheat and subvert the electoral will of the American people.
When that didn’t work they attempted a coup d’etat and sitting members of the US Congress, some newly elected, helped aid an insurrection.
They promoted violence to further their own ambitions (see Josh Hawley’s fist in the air to show solidarity) and they also ran for safety when the danger they had helped to unleash became real (see also, Josh Hawley).
Much of the GOP’s strategy has always been about launching cultural smoke bombs.
An outrageous tweet, and impeachment investigation or a piece of legislation that has no chance of passing the Senate but is designed to play up cultural differences and gain some momentum from the ‘anti-woke’ crowd.
They are masters at this not because of any particular intellectual cunning but simply because of the way our current media systems are structured.
‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ so goes the old adage and its come to be the defining principle in much of our current political communications ecosphere.
It’s a phenomena that is well-known on both sides of the aisle.
One recent example being a tweet sent by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), a cartoon character of a congressman who wouldn’t be in office today without a highly gerrymandered congressional map in his home district designed to benefit Republicans.
Though admittedly Texans innate love of for toxically masculine cosplay doesn’t hurt either.
Not to mention his live action campaign ads where he skydives out of airplanes to ‘attack the libs’, displaying the Marvel comics iconography that has become such an easy sell on the conservative circuit.
Mr. Crenshaw asked via tweet when the FBI was gonna raid Joe Biden’s home over the classified docs that were found in the D.C. office of the think take he established with UPenn when he left the Vice Presidency.
An office he has not occupied since he became POTUS and one in which the handful of documents were found in a locked closet not kept in various locations, including the basement of a members only private club in Palm Beach.
One that caters to the glamorous subset of international money launderers and espionage influencers that have turned South Florida into the new promised land for the world’s pariahs.
The kind of crowd Trump not only swings in, he actively courts.
The FBI and National Archives were notified promptly and the less than ten documents were returned, as is protocol.
Dan Crenshaw understands it is a false equivalency to make the comparison with Trump’s case which involved obfuscation, defying a subpoena and moving documents to evade the National Archives attempted retrieval of the more than three hundred, some highly classified, documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
President Biden’s response to the documents being discovered is the exact opposite of Trump’s actions.
Dan Crenshaw and the rest of the GOP know it but the tweet was enough to stoke the fires of ‘whataboutism’ that are engulfing our political landscape and impeding our progress.
Digital warriors will of course flood his replies or retweet his sardonic and snarky smoke bomb of a tweet to both increase their interactions and feed the beast of clicks and likes in the age of online influencers.
The age of ‘whoever lies the loudest, wins’ that Trump has ushered in, with an able assist from Fox News, Steve Bannon and various other scoundrels, have left us in a dangerous new era where media entities and individuals need scandals not only survive in this algorithmically driven political climate but to thrive.
Just look at how CNN breathlessly jumped into panel discussions lasting most of the eight o’clock hour when news of the Biden document story broke.
You could almost sense the anchors and pundits attempting to will it into some sort of Watergate redux live on the air.
It is not a scandal of that magnitude nor will it ever be, they’re chasing dragons that don’t exist, just like Hillary’s emails and the Benghazi hearings.
It’s much ado about nothing but it will generate profits for the punditry class and MSM, and allow chaos to cloud the skies over the Capitol.
Just like the smoke that almost swallowed that magnificent dome on January 6th, 2021.
Those MAGA attackers where chasing lies as well and willing to damage our democracy on behalf of a demagogue.
May better minds and purer hearts prevail.
Yes, I like your last line. May better and purer minds and hearts prevail over the brain eating slimy mold culture that is the current rethug party of tfg.
“May better minds and purer hearts prevail.” Indeed! Thank you for your insights, Noel. We need to focus on the good that is happening across the aisle and around the City. POTUS is accomplishing many great things and we just don’t hear enough about them from the MSM.