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  • Mayor Eric Adams is a Corrupt Piece of Shit

    There are a lot of reasons to dislike Eric Adams as a mayor of New York. As a mayor of any city, really. He ran as a Democrat, and governs like a Republican. He says and does silly shit, which is almost charming until you remember that (a) he doesn’t think it’s silly in the least, and (b) he’s the mayor of the largest city in the country. He also thinks that God talks to him–told him he’d be mayor some day–which if true proves that God does indeed have a sense of humor.

    All of this is easily explained: Eric Adams is so inflated with self regard that he thinks his copious lies somehow make him cool. There is a picture of a beloved statesman somewhere in his head, a beloved statesman who isn’t good at much other than cutting ribbons and giving repetitive speeches at flag-raising ceremonies for other countries, and he’s just trying to act (poorly) the part.

    He’s also a corrupt piece of shit, with bribery and campaign finance violations leading his resume. He is so famously corrupt and surround by toadies as corrupt as himself, that the intrepid HellgateNYC created a single-purpose site called Eric Adams’ Table of Success, breaking down all of the toadies and their various corruptions, both heinous and mundane. His reward for this was a Federal indictment.

    And yes, the Trump DOJ magic-wanded the charges against Adams, such that Adams has not been cleared but might be if licks every last piece of crud off of Trump’s boots–a fate so cowardly that it is only exceeded by the extent Adams will go to avoid being asked questions by the people whose jobs it is to do so. (Unless the questions are asked on FOX and Friends.)

    For all those reasons, I dislike Eric Adams. However, there is a reason that I really fucking detest Eric Adams. I wrote about it in June of 2022, and I am reprinting it here:

    ABOUT THAT TWEET

    A week and a half ago my old friend Dan Enriquez was murdered on a Q train on the Manhattan Bridge, headed for the Canal Street Station. And since Dan was murdered on public transit, his murder is more of a public matter than a murder of Dan, or me, or you, would have been if it had transpired in a non-public space. And since it was a public matter, Mayor Eric Adams had some things to say, as Mayor Eric Adams does.

    My friend Dan.

    I tweeted angrily in connection with this whole situation, and it got mildly viral despite itself, so instead of tweeting further or responding to responses, this is to explain of what I meant, now that I’ve had a week and a funeral to think it over.

    What happened was, our mayor, who is a regrettable oaf, was speaking to the press the next morning. As he said the boilerplate stuff a mayor says–terrible loss, heart goes out, etc. — he added, “I thank God I’m the mayor right now.” This made me angry. To wit, if you asked Dan how Adams was doing as mayor and whether God should be thanked or not, he wouldn’t answer, because he was murdered on a subway train.

    And this is not to say that Adams could have prevented Dan’s murder. A man has been charged with the murder, but nothing like motive is apparent. The Mayor, the Chief of Police and others made a big deal about bail reform after the alleged shooter was arrested (which arrest came after a buffoonish attempt by the Mayor’s crew to get the perp to surrender directly to the Mayor), but this particular fellow had twice posted six-figure bail, so unless bail reform means “no more pre-trial releases,” it would not have saved Dan’s life.

    So I’m not angry that the Mayor didn’t do enough, or anything like that. What I resented was that Adams felt that the discussion of Dan’s murder was an excellent time for Adams to talk about how awesome he thinks he is. That, to me, was tap dancing on Dan’s grave. Adams was treating talking about Dan’s murder like he treats everything no matter how somber or inane: another really fun thing a mayor gets to do.

    What I really wanted to tweet, to the Mayor particularly, was that he should go fuck himself, forever, or at least until such time as some incompetent public official with a personality disorder absolutely clowns it up while talking about the murder of an old friend of the Mayor.

    I am not speaking on behalf of Dan’s family or his partner, and I’m not speaking on behalf of Dan’s friends–he had a shit ton of them. I knew Dan from Williamsburg, and we were part of a big mess of friends that did everything together. Everything nice said about Dan is true. He was generous and curious and stalwart. He was laid to rest on Tuesday. Nothing anyone, including Mayor Eric Adams, can do that will make him less dead.

    But I want to be clear that when I’m saying mean things about the Mayor, I’m not saying them on Dan’s behalf–I doubt he’d approve. And I’m not representing myself as the Public Face of the Friends of Dan Enriquez. I’m just a guy who was lucky to know Dan. And Mayor Eric Adams is a guy who needs to learn that the hard part of being mayor is that it is literally never about you.

    Rereading that, I stand by it.

    For what it’s worth, the flunky who tried to orchestrate the shooter’s public surrender to Adams, Bishop Lamor Whitehead, was later convicted of wire fraud, extortion (while invoking connections to Mayor Adams) and other charges, and sentenced to nine years. Donald Trump has yet to pardon Whitehead, but give it time.

    Dan is doing whatever fun stuff angels get themselves up to, and Eric Adams has yet to fuck himself to my satisfaction.

  • The Model UN Story

    Inauguration Day came and went and it was worse then anyone but the most pessimistic (or prescient) predicted. And since then it hasn’t gotten any better. So that brings me to The Model UN Story.

    I was in Model United Nations when I was a kid. Model UN, if you are not familiar, is this thing where school kids from all over the region get all dressed up in business clothes and convene in a central location and roleplay the United Nations for a weekend. Each “delegation” from each school is designated an actual UN member to “play” for the weekend. There is a faux-General Assembly, there are break-outs into ersatz special committees, younger kids ferrying messages back and forth as “pages,” etc.

    It must be the case that some of the kids at those Model UN weekends went on to be politicians or government officials or even diplomats, but as most of us there were positively drowning in hormones, mostly we were flirting in the way that young teens (somehow, this was a junior high-aged thing, and not high school-aged) flirted at the time: by passing notes and giggling.

    Harmless good fun! Nevertheless: this was in the mid-1980s, so the Cold War was ongoing, and served as, at the IRL United Nations, kind of the organizing principle of the interactions between member states–Eastern Bloc vs. Western Bloc.

    It was expected, of course, that in the course of pretending to be your delegation in this pretend General Assembly, you would try to act in the same way as the actual delegation would act in real life. If, say, you were supposed to be Japan, then you’d research the issues actually facing Japan and Japan’s stated positions on matters of the day and conduct yourself Japan-accordingly.

    There was a delegation that weekend that was assigned — I forget which nation, but it was a small country that was not really aligned with the Eastern Bloc or the Western Bloc. Let’s call it Fredonia.

    So first Fredonia announces that it is aligning itself with the Soviet Union (as it was known at the time), and joining the Eastern Bloc.

    And then it was announced that Fredonia was elected to be the new leader of the Eastern Bloc.

    By the end of the conference, Fredonia announced that a unified Eastern Bloc had certain demands–money? land?–and the failure to comply with such demands would be interpreted as a declaration of war against the Eastern Bloc and its various nuclear-armed constituent states.

    To state the obvious, this was not a reflection of international relations at the time. It was the result of the efforts of a kid who realized that no one was going to say no.

    That was ridiculous. By dint of will, Imaginary World Fredonia brought the imaginary planet to the brink of thermonuclear war in the course of two afternoons. The conference ended without any resolution or consequences, but it was all silly and it almost got in the way of our note-passing. But I do remember thinking: Why aren’t the grown-ups doing something about this?

    It was a lesson in good faith, and the limits thereof. We were all tasked with playing by the same rules, which were to try to role-play in such a fashion as to honestly reflect the world at the time. And all it took to upend the entire thing was a little bad faith: a willingness to disregard propriety, and a refusal to be cowed by the possibility of consequences.

    Good faith only works if everyone does it, and guardrails only work if they are consistently enforced.

    The first Trump administration was bad enough, but was constrained from the really heinous shit by the intersection of (reluctant) institutional respect for good faith and (reluctant) enforcement of guardrails. That intersection is four years in the rearview mirror. The failure to anticipate the actions of a second Trump administration are a failure of imagination.

    And since we’re on the topic: during the depths of the first Trump Administration, I took the guided tour of the actual United Nations, up on the East River. It is quite a sight to see if you have any love for Mid-Century Modern design at all, but most importantly: it brought me to tears, that representatives of the peoples of the world would come together and at least try to give the common good a global spin, that nations would try to hammer out common principals — like “Peace, equality and dignity on a healthy planet“. And there are legitimately bad people our there that think that’s a bad thing.

    Cried my eyes out.

  • Happy January 6 Day!

    That I do not need The New York Times to confirm for me that the attack on the capitol on 1/6/21 was a violent act of treason planned and fomented by Donald J. Trump and his flunkies and coordinated with right-wing militias does not abdicate The Times from it’s willing assistance in whitewashing the event in the years that followed.

    Publishing a couple hundred chin-scratching words on how January 6 could have possibly been memory-holed is a glaring insult to the pantheon of the Barest Minimums.

    Myriad factors explain [Trump’s] stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

    Actually, considering how factor-rich our crumbling polity currently is, the conversion of the insurrection into yet another moaning grievance actually is just about the least of the factors. It’s not so much a factor as a footnote. In other words, come the fuck on.

    The Times (and the other surviving national news organizations) are not the recorders of history: they are the arbiters of history. The framing of the events by the legacy national media of Jan. 6 managed a certain clinical worry, a subtly raised eyebrow, but it paled in comparison to the five-alarm, stop-presses flooding of the field that ensued when the editorial corps discovered that Joe Biden was born in 1942.

    Elevating a collective dropping-of-the-ball in the coverage of Jan. 6–and Trump’s fascist reveling in the actions of his own personal brownshirts–to some mystical, unstoppable act by a political genius who it turns out actually is tall, handsome and svelte is a naked act of burying the lede.

    The story is not that there’s nothing that could have been done to accurately report and frame the significance of the first armed assault on the seat of our government in our lifetimes. The story is that The New York Times didn’t even fucking try.

  • The New Gilded Age

    [This is a thing that I wrote for a website called the Awl. At the time it was published, March 18, 2011, I thought it was a fun little thing that was maybe overstating how bad things were, and how bad things would become. I was wrong!]

    Is it inappropriate to invoke the phrase “CLASS WAR” these days? It’s scary, that’s for sure — what kind of war is actually fun, other than maybe a thumb war (if you have agile and forceful thumbs)? Why fuss and fight when you could be teaching a child to read, or livetweeting? And issues of class, they seem very out-of-date, very subject of the college class to which you didn’t pay attention, very “Allentown,” and not the city but the song by Billy Joel. A class war is not how you want to spend your day off, or even your community service. Sadly, it’s not unfair to bring it up. Whether you are a Milwaukee middle-school teacher or a middle linebacker for the Bills, there are issues between labor and employer. You don’t necessarily have to pick a side, but you do have to relegate yourself to hearing about it for the foreseeable future. Remember when politics was lite and bubbly and mostly revolved around flag pins and the wattage of one’s smile? Those times are gone, just like that “Pants On The Ground” song. The class war is here to stay, and who knows how it’s going to end?

    Let’s just assume, because we’re pessimists who have been fed a steady buffet of disappointment for our entire lives, that it’s going to end poorly. Let’s hope for the best (and by all means keep watching The Daily Show With Jon Stewart or whatever else rouses you for a short flicker), but let’s prepare for the worst. Let’s look on the bright side.

    The Gilded Age wasn’t really all that bad, when you think about it!

    The Gilded Age, as we know, was that period of American history prior to the turn of the last century that witnessed incredible economic expansion coupled with an oppressed working class employed under repressive and horrific conditions. It’s funny to think of, that an era could be known simultaneously for unimaginable prosperity and for a huge caste of Americans whose ninety-hour work weeks did not pull them from poverty, because it kind of implies that there was a period between then and now when that was not so. The reason why this happened back then was this legal concept of “freedom of contract,” which means that the employer can do whatever they want to do always and the employee is equally free to do whatever they want, as long as what they want to do is quit. But it’s a snazzy turn of phrase, and that’s the first thing that will be decent about our looming New Gilded Age: the nomenclature is catchy.

    Take also the term itself: “Gilded Age” was coined in part by Mark Twain, so that’s an enormous plus, as Mark Twain is Mark Twain. It’s also an early example of snark (which was called “irony” back then), a play on the term “Golden Age.” At the time people would mash a thin layer of gold onto something to make it look like it was made of gold through and through, instead of just making it out of plastic like we do now. This was known as “gilding” and thus Twain’s snark is the good kind that is gonna hurt in the morning, if you know what I mean! So if we have to have another Gilded Age, at least we can quietly snicker to ourselves as we say it, which will surely be a comfort to us while we are standing in the bread line or edging the sidewalk of a hedge fund manager’s mistress’ second home.

    This is not necessarily to say that we will all be bread-line-standers, or mistress-sidewalk-edgers. In this New Gilded Age, some of us might get to be mistresses! Sadly, others of us might get to be the sidewalks. Employment opportunity might not be as bad as it is now, but that’s not really saying a lot. But if it does come, this ascendency of the already ascendant, mistress/sidewalk is going to look like a great entry-level position with decent bennies and room for advancement.

    And it won’t all be work. Some of the unintended consequences of a New Gilded Age might be not as bad as the direct outcomes (company towns, debtors prisons, the grippe) we cringe from. For example, we’d save whatever we were paying on union dues, which we could spend on exciting and increasingly complex gadgets that don’t really do much but become obsolete in six months — or on gruel. As all the workforces slowly merge into one giant workforce, working for the same global titan of business, we’ll be freed up from having to worry about things like career and ambition. In fact, with the sixteen-hour workday, we’d also be freed up from free time, and the crushing anxiety that comes with it. Presumably, we’d also be issued uniforms, hopefully something flattering. Uniforms would be cool in any context, as long as they have collars to pop. And this could very well be a boom time for religion, masses are going to need some serious opiates with all that crushing tedium. Maybe even the megabarons will take pity on us and found a new church, something casual but flashy, hopefully with gambling.

    Here’s an even bigger side effect. One of the industries that fueled the original Gilded Age was the railroad industry, as rail barons gridded the nation with the means to move large quantities of stuff great distances all at once. This is a sector that would be fantastic to see recreated in this 21st Century: infrastructure. No matter how gainfully we are employed (or underemployed), we still have parents living in Virginia to visit or a Jeff Mangum show to drive to, not to mention a need for water with which to make our Country Time lemonade. And if our new overlords have any sense of nostalgic integrity, then they will take a break from their planet-sized concerns that make money by moving money from one place to another place and earn another couple billion by improving our bridges and natural gas fuel lines. Then maybe we’ll all get to where we’re going without plunging into a ravine and turn on the oven without the city block exploding. The upside: not being dead, which is a valuable one in any time period.

    If you think about it, the entire aesthetic of steampunk is derived from the technology and style of the Old Gilded Age, with the goggles and the levers and the steam and the punk. So if we have to have a New Gilded Age, that means we will not only have to Google “Beaux Arts” but also we’ll get to have a New Steampunk! Every day will be like Boing Boing!

    Ultimately, maybe the best possible outcome of an extended Gilded Age is this: evolution. It’s controversial, somehow, especially if you’re afraid of science, but the concept of natural selection is still the most popular explanation for the change in species over time (and theorized by Darwin during the Old Gilded Age, coincidentally). Maybe, just maybe, the conditions created by the New Gilded Age, the serfdom, the futility, the washed-out sepias and greys, are the conditions necessary for us to evolve into our ideal selves: losing both pinky toes, but gaining secret mind powers. A pinky toe is a lot to lose (let alone two!), but with our new secret mind powers we can maybe rejoin that class war we lost all those years ago and finally have a chance of winning. Or at least, have a chance of winning without having to try too hard, because trying hard is a drag. Secret mind powers would make the whole enterprise an awful lot easier, and we’d still have time left over to watch “Castle.”

    Of course, a New Gilded Age is not written in stone; it is only very very likely. It may happen — or the plutocrats may have a sudden and uncharacteristic attack of conscience. And if it is coming, who knows if it happens tomorrow, or just the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, we should bend our backs to the task of welcoming the new era, with dignity and resignation. Remember that Nikola Tesla found his footing in the Old Gilded Age and then spent the rest of his life getting screwed by Edison. If Tesla could suck it up, so can we, and if we can’t make awesome out of a Gilded Age, then maybe we don’t deserve to have a class war in the first place.

    Top and bottom photos via Wikimedia Commons.

    [The piece was edited, and the photos selected, by Carrie Frye, who was and remains a magician at the whole editing thing.]

  • Hello world!

    “Hello world!” is the WordPress placeholder title for the first post of your brand new blog. It’s a little bit aspirational, if you ask me. Presumably any friends and family who intentionally or otherwise click a link to a blog can be denominated as “world” but it sure means something different than it did back when “blogger” was a thing kids wanted to be when they grew up.

    I am well acquainted with the world–I’ve been soaking in it for decades–and I like to think that the world is passing familiar with me, which, if that’s a thing you care about, it’s also a question you might not want answered to your face.

    “Hello world!” isn’t much of a prompt. It’s not quite the cool-uncle “What’s up?” of Bluesky, or the baffling “What is happening?!” of the current Twitter, which works better as a last-straw declaration than it does an invitation to post–design not flaw, at the risk of imputing anything like intention to the big brains who run that platform. But “Hello world!” was sitting there staring at me in the CMS, so I guess it’s the prompt I deserve.

    My name is Brent Cox and blogging is a thing I have done, as is writing for magazines and websites and variety shows and all that sort of thing. At some point that whole need to express myself devolved into being on social media platforms, which I came to find out too late was no replacement for the stuff that came before. It’s a great way to make friends, if you are lucky enough to find your cohort!

    And then plus also you start to realize–in the back of your head, during the Twitter clout-chasing–that everything in the world stopped getting better. In fact, everything in the world was getting worse. And Getting Off a Good One was no longer the comfort it used to be.

    Those blogger-wanting-to-be kids are now grown up, and none of them ended up becoming bloggers. Even the bloggers aren’t bloggers anymore. Kids today? In my limited experience it seems to me that kids today want something that is not so much a vocation as it is a ticket out, something to elevate themselves from what’s left of an American life after the billionaires took it all for themselves.

    So yeah, the Slow Degradation of All Things, that’s the beat I’m choosing, if it’s fair to call “blogging” something worthy of a beat.

    Hello “world”? Hello world!? [Running in place coconut noise.] World: hello!