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New York
Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took 10 minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had fewer people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some.
Mind you, the Upper East Side, where I live, is also as quiet as a grave, the only sound being the occasional ambulance with its siren on racing for a tea break. Central Park, now devoid of tourists, has never looked better, weeping willows with recently sprouted leaves, birds singing the length of an empty Park Avenue, long green lawns stretching out northwards, cherry blossom galore — it makes one feel swell to be alive. All last week, up before sunrise and training in the park, I thought back to the years when sunrise meant only a struggle to get home. I don’t regret a thing, but still, it’s strange but nice to feel good early in the morning. And notice nature at her best, without pests (people) getting in the way.
Uncharacteristically, the golden geese are fleeing south in April, and by that I mean the fat cats are fleeing to Florida and other points south, leaving the muggers, the homeless, the gang members and Taki behind. Tax-heavy high-cost Bagel may be a magnet for criminals but it’s a turn-off for banks and investment houses that are drawn to low-tax states like Florida and Texas. Here are the facts: crime and disorder are way up, homicides have spiked to 46.7 percent and shootings 97 percent. It is the largest increase in at least 60 years. New bail laws turning every criminal suspect loose have emptied the jails. Homelessness has hit a level unseen since the Great Depression. The Bagel has 80,000 homeless, some of them parked outside glitzy Park Avenue abodes like mine.
Taxes are exorbitant and going up even further. Sales taxes are the highest in the nation, as is the cost of living. What do Bagel-dwellers get in return? From what I’ve seen, soaring crime, public spaces occupied by the mentally ill and the homeless and a non-stop campaign by the news media against white supremacists, a species I have yet to encounter in the mean streets of Noo Yawk.
So what am I doing here when I could be living among the cows in good old Helvetia? Well, it’s a bit like slumming it in the way we used to do when we were young and went up to Harlem looking for trouble. Top businesses are looking for the exits, yet the clowns who rule the Bagel have just pushed through a massive new fund of 2.1 billion smackers for illegal immigrants, and are also pushing hard for them to be able to legally vote.
As in the case of the BBC back in Blighty, there is a chasm between the blow-dried types who report the news and the schmucks who pay for their blow-dries. Thousands of empty store fronts, dirty streets and unsafe subways, black-on-black crime going through the roof, and anarchy during BLM rallies, but the news reports are mostly about law enforcement being a racist occupying force that should be resisted.
I wonder how it will all end. The pages of the degenerate New York Times are stuffed with long boring articles about how witnesses to George Floyd’s death are traumatized and suffering. They are tormented that they couldn’t change that day’s course. Not a word about the deaths of those innocents following the BLM riots. Also, nary a word about the mobs who descend on female police officers’ squad cars as I write and subject them to threats and obscenities.
Incidentally, the rapper DMX, who died of a heart attack possibly following an overdose on the same day as Prince Philip, shared a front-page picture in the moribund Daily News, which in a way illustrates the Bagel’s values. (The New York Post featured a full page devoted to the prince.) The Times included news of the Prince’s death at the bottom of its front page, next to that of DMX’s, and mentioned that the royal family was ‘buffeted by scandal’. DMX had 15 children with nine women, and when asked how he picked the women he wanted to breed with said that he was like a dog: ‘I sniff the ass and wag my tail.’ I don’t know how many of DMX’s fans had ever heard of Prince Philip, or of the UK for that matter.
What strikes me as interesting is that since 2008 blacks and Hispanics have been the victims of 95 percent of shootings, but they have also perpetrated the overwhelming majority of shootings and homicides, 97 and 91 percent respectively. Yet the news media do not report such figures, apart from the Murdoch-owned Post and Wall Street Journal. If you looked to television for your information, you would not be wrong to think the country was inhabited by a 10 percent white populace that terrorizes the 90 percent black and Hispanic population.
Exterminate All the Brutes is the latest ambitious project of a Haitian man, Raoul Peck, a documentary that charts western racism, colonialism and genocide. It started with Christopher Columbus, a white son of a bitch who discovered paradise and turned it over to white brutes like some of us. I haven’t seen it as I only watch TCM, a network that shows black-and-white flicks of the 1940s and 1950s. Someone needs to beat some progressive sense into me.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
