9245. A CITY THAT ONLY ONCE WAS

9245. A CITY THAT ONLY ONCE WAS:
There are always so many things to consider  - any one angle can really get a person  -  these days  - in big trouble; it's not like it used to be at all. And no one used to really even consider where they were headed with anything. It was a lot like the old -free-form stand-up comedy  -  where a guy would just come stumbling out onto stage, simply being whatever he was, and begin going at at. No real forethought : a person just grabbed at the thoughts passing through the head and instantly made something of them. It worked. It's impossible that way now; everything needs to be reviewed and counter-watched, just in case. 'Normally, yes, that would be very funny, but there's a person in seat 3D who is very sensitive on that subject, and that person is offended and has complained. We're going to have to ask you to leave.' And so they shut down your act and the next day some jerk in the newspaper begins a report about your bad attitude or anti-Semitic or anti-Socratic or anti-Synchrnoic or anti-Cybaritic outlook (they'll find something) and you want to reply and say 'my mother was a slave who married her overseer who then took her to Germany and made her convert and then she got a job cleaning the showers in some camp, what she thought was a Summer camp but turned out wan't that at all and then she got run over by a Mercedes and the hospital refused her treatment and she became suicidal and jumped off the bridge at Frankfurt-au-Main but all it did was get her accused off hot-dogging for pity...' Blah, blah, see what I mean?

The 'Watchdogs' of the press are anything but. What they are, instead, are a bunch of bloviating, sheeny materialists with no goal other than destruction and making their own fortune. It has become 'verboten' in Amerika today to point out WHO they are, as a class and a people, so I won't. Any first-page scan, here, of the NYTimes or the Wall Street Journal will tell you. We have become so shuttered and closed-by-enforcement in this land today that a person cannot even obliquely claim to point out a truth when it stares them in the face. Journalism today practices two things - either froth or destruction. They advance a leftist, socialistic, material cause or they distract. Fingering the common herd of humankind as idiots, they steer their mass-heads wherever they wish - and the horde follows, distraction after distraction. Just look at the daily news feeds of the mainstream papers, as a very cheesy example. No truth, no substance, just furtherance of agenda and carping.

I spent time in the east 90's and 80's of Manhattan. Carl Schurz Park, Gracie Mansion. Hell's Gate watching the river traffic. Also went to the Morris Jumel Mansion, Sylvan Lane, The Grange, City College - all of that uptown stuff from the past which incongruously exists to this day amidst the soiled wreckage of a landscape befitting a theme park named 'Garbageland'. Charm has, most certainly, left us. Any vista which may once have been has been obliterated. A jumble of noise, junk, trash, poor-man's culture, and gutter-critters abounds. Hugely propagating masses - kid after kid, an endless fraternity party, evidently - swarm the streets. They downgrade any cultural attributes which ONCE may have been present, and - stupidly - the city itself attempts lamely to mark off historic spots which may once have had some validity, with signs and markers and attempted restorations - all in the middle of a rancorous horde of dolts who haven't a clue as to either what once was here, America's past, or historical awareness or sense of validity. They just 'got' here, and could care less about how or by what means this nation constructed itself. It's a sorry shame - and of course this being liberal, socialistic leftist New York - the social-service constructs (which may ONCE have had some reality and use) have degenerated into a cess-pool of graft and corruption costing billions - but these people nonetheless have their hands out and they get what they can. The City of Manhattan foolishly undergirds a massive social-program and assistance system which would once have made Bulgaria proud - tattered and decrepit buildings, ruined hulks, littered and fouled streets, government school enclaves, social centers, hospitals, all pitted and sagging by mis-use and authoritarianism. It makes me foul and sad to witness it.

Freedom used to allow, in its concept, the Freedom of being free from government, as an individual. It does that no more. Decrepit social welfare, and all its indigents, are everywhere in one's face. Any grandeur which may have once been is shrouded now in doom.I saw once, old man District Attorney Robert Morganthau in Carl Shurz Park. He was walking very slowly, with a cane, up a few stairs along one of the paths in the trees along East End. On either side of him was a person, a male and a female in this case, handsome and natty-looking middle-aged assistants helping him along. I didn't know if they were aides, or perhaps adult children of his, or whatever. They all looked nice, smiled, and kept on their way. Life goes on, I suppose. Personified in him was an entire older, more gracious way of life through a city that only once was.