Yesterday was horrible. I watched those films of the three emaciated Israeli prisoners concentration camp victims, and I totally lost it. It was October 7 all over again, subjected to gamma rays.
You can just scroll down to “At some point in the 1980s” if you want to avoid the preamble-rambling.
Those of us who came to maturity in the wild, frenzied NYC of the 1980s are familiar with Donald Trump’s wild and crazy ideas.
I grew up with Donald Trump. Not literally, but in spirit. Have you ever met someone when you’re well past childhood and it turns out you came of age in the same places and spaces and although you didn’t encounter them when you were a kid, it’s as if you did — you know that person better than you know anyone you met after childhood, even people you think you know intimately?
That’s me and Donald Trump. I’m not bragging. I’m telling you straight.
He and I both grew up in different parts of the borough of Queens. He’s a dozen years older than I but that makes little difference here; as a Boomer I was surrounded by dozens of people in his age group and had a brother roughly his age. Everything about Donald Trump is intimately familiar to me.
Like any place, Queens is a state of mind as much as it’s a geographical location. Let me explain the peculiar dynamics of the Queensite in the great metropolis that is New York City.
Manhattan is the glamor place, the ne plus ultra. You could grow up in a tenement in Manhattan and status-wise, you lord it over someone who grew up in a mansion in one of the “outer boroughs.”
Oh yes, that phrase, the “outer boroughs” — that’s what they call the boroughs that aren’t Manhattan. When you aren’t calling us “Bridge and Tunnel” people.
But — and this is important — The Bronx and Brooklyn have a mystique, an aura all their own to compensate for this. Tough guys, goodfellas, the Yankees, the fabled Dodgers of Ebbetts Field. Before Brooklyn became the Hipster Mecca, it was the borough of goombahs and great pizza.1
Queens is the fourth borough of New York City on the status hierarchy, which is to say, zero prestige.2 It has no Manhattan glamor or Bronx/Brooklyn grittiness. It’s merely a borough of random neighborhoods with zero cachet. I have no statistics to back this up, but I think that many of its inhabitants before the immigrant deluge of the current era were people from Brooklyn who moved further out after WW2.3
Of course, these reputations are show-biz bullshit. There are just as many great pizza places in Queens as there are in Brooklyn. There are millionaire mansion neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Queens is super-diverse in the genuine, non-woke sense of the word. It boasts charming neighborhoods and historic, anthropological, and geographic wonders. Its waterfront, which stretches 10 miles along the East River, is badly developed but utterly spectacular.
You want gritty? Take a walk on Roosevelt Avenue. And we had loads of goodfellas, whole neighborhoods of them.
My native borough is a truly interesting place with bad press.4
And it spawned Donald Trump, the Ramones, and yours truly.
One of these neighborhoods is Jamaica Estates, where Trump grew up. I know this place because a shrink I went to as a screwed up teen lived there. It’s upper-middle-class but not prestigious in the way Scarsdale, Larchmont, Rye, or Bronxville, the richest towns in Westchester County, are. It’s not Greenwich, Darien, or Westport. You say you’re from Darien or Larchmont and people notice. Jamaica Estates? Not so much.
You can look up Trump’s childhood homes on the net. Very nice, but not magnificent. I’m not saying our prez is a poor boy done good, just pointing out that he grew up with a “Bridge and Tunnel” mentality. I did myself. I’ve totally chucked it. I now proclaim my native land proudly — but for years, I did not. I love my old home borough with a searing sense of nostalgia… but I’m getting off the point, which is Donald Trump.
Fast forward to the 1980s, when the Donald became a very famous New Yorker. You could hardly ignore him. I was in and out of NYC, recovering from a subway mugging. Long story for another time. I came back, and from 1995 to 1999, I worked for a Very Large Humanitarian Aid Organization, from which I was fired (another long story for another time).5
My route took me through Central Park to the east 40s. On the way I passed Trump Tower where, several times, I encountered none other than Donald Trump ambling from his limo to Trump Tower, half-asleep, yawning and running his fingers through tousled hair.
I know what you’re going to say: he lived there, so how could this have happened? I don’t know. Perhaps it was during the periods when it was being renovated? Or maybe he had spent a night out elsewhere. He and Ivana were divorced in 1990. He was married to Marla Maples from end of 1993 to mid-1998, but I doubt they spent much time together.
This is my experience of Donald Trump. I know the guy’s way of thinking, his way of expressing himself, I grew up around it, I have observed him for longer than most of you have been alive. And none of his ideas surprise me, because I’ve heard them.
At some point in the 1980s, Trump floated a great idea: he would pay cash for NYCHA — the New York City Housing Authority, which runs a bunch of benighted housing projects in NYC.
I cannot find any mention of this on Google. I can’t find it in ChatGPT. But I swear he said this.
Again: the NYCHA predicament is the classic case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions and is another story for another time.
Trump said, “I’ll pay $20 billion and take this mess off your hands.” Naturally, it was howled down and dismissed.
It’s possible to feel two things simultaneously: I would be opposed to pulling the rug out from NYCHA tenants and the current situation is absolutely unacceptable and cannot continue.
I think that Trump never got that NYCHA idea out of his mind. It’s been seething and bubbling there for a generation or two, and it is the seedbed of the Gaza plan.
And:
IT’S A GREAT IDEA.
The “Palestinian” situation is intolerable. It’s intolerable for Israel, it’s intolerable for the Middle East, it’s intolerable for the world. It benefits only mentally deranged, sick souls.
Now, I realize that destroying the Palestinian stranglehold on Gaza is only a part of the process. This will take a great, multipronged, multigenerational effort, but it’s the necessary first step. Trump has truly cut the Gordian knot, in theory.
The difference between NYCHA and Gaza is that the vast majority of NYCHA tenants are simply poor people who have been hoodwinked into thinking that their situation is forever. They haven’t hurt anyone. They are simply dependent and gullible — as most of us are to some degree. They are truly more sinned against than sinning, and one hopes that when the situation is brought to an end, it’s done so in a way that causes minimum damage.6
Not so the people of Gaza. The last few days have been indescribable. Truly. I cannot describe the rage I feel when I saw Arbel Yahoud in that seething mass of savages. When I saw the pitiful remnant of the Sharabi family displayed, flanked by thugs in masks waving automatic rifles. How sturdy and well-fed those thugs looked! Truly, victims of famine. Don’t tell me that they have mothers too — their mothers are crowing in triumph now. Their mothers filled them full of this poison. And a new generation is being poisoned to take their places.
I’m not putting links — you can look them up yourselves. I’m out of energy.
I’m out of fucks too.
The people of Gaza deserve nothing. My final shred of sympathy — even self-interested sympathy — was used up, cauterized, obliterated, in the last few days.
And yet, I believe in this generous, humane offer. After being complete psychopaths for at least four generations, the “Palestinians” get a shot at a better life. What do they give up? Their guns. I know that they won’t give up their insane ideas, but they’ll be sent to places where they’ll be watched, suppressed, and periodically bombed to smithereens with the world looking in the other direction.
I can’t think of this happening to a nicer group of people.
Yet, I’m OK with this offer because I think it’s truly the only path out.
This, plus modernity, will take care of the rest. Unlike Elon, I think that radically lowered birth rates are great. It gives the Earth a breather and humanity a chance to sort things out. Please tell me how less Muslims is a bad thing, especially Palestinian Muslims. Put your ideas in the comments, I swear I’ll consider them rationally.
If modernity and being cut from the most generous welfare the world has ever seen can lower the Palestinian birth rate to Iran’s, dayenu. Good police work will take care of the rest.
I’m not so silly as to think that “Palestinianism” will completely die. Wherever there are mentally sick, resentful people, “Palestinianism” will flourish. But they won’t be in control.
People like Calla Walsh are our problem, not the “Palestinians.” We can deal with them. Just enforce our own laws.
I know that evicting them from Gaza, if it happens, is only the end of the beginning. Many things must be done. Relentlessly, with no let-up.
Their permanent refugee status must be ended. Their funding sources must be found and extirpated. (Qatar, I’m thinking of you when the words “regime change” come to mind.) The leaders must be hunted down and exterminated. The savages who surrounded Arbel must be wiped out. Ditto the ones who taunted Eli, Ohad, and Or. No mercy. In fact, I’m sick of the phrase “no mercy.” Is there a place you can go beyond that? I’m there.
I have a tendency to promise to write something and I never do. This time it’s different — I have a lot of poison that’s been welling up inside and what happened with Arbel and the others forced me to acknowledge it publicly. Tomorrow, I’ll write about the Jewish/Israeli left response to the brilliant Trump Gaza plan. I’m out of energy now. Tomorrow. 7
My mother (Dodger fan) grew up in Brooklyn, my father (Giants fan) in the Bronx. When I was a wee lass, he took his kids to the Polo Grounds to see the infant Mets. I can even remember Casey Stengel, the Old Perfesser!
As opposed to Staten Island, which has less than zero prestige. It is the last and least borough, is the accidental borough; really, it should belong to New Jersey, but it became incorporated into New York City by some political fluke. Ignore it; we New Yorkers do. That’s why I discuss it in a footnote.
This describes my parents and almost all the folks in my first neighborhood.) If you were from the Bronx you moved north. If you were from Brooklyn you either stayed put or moved east — to Queens or over the city line to Long Island.
Like Trump?
I can’t divulge the details. The VLHAO would have grounds to say that I was a classic disgruntled employee and they, saints that they were, did what they could to accommodate me, the ungrateful wretch. Yet again, another story for another time — but I have to say that not one revelation about USAID surprises me.
Yes, I know that a lot of bad and crazy shit goes on in the projects. Do not put a comment here lecturing me about that. But most of the people are just trapped with a bad element. They “manage the conflict.”
But I’ve already written the first line: “I never knew hate until I saw Arbel Yahoud’s abuse in Gaza.”
Interesting story. I agree. What we need here in the UK is a Trump, instead we have a commie Prime Minister.We are on the path to hell.
Excellent!