Category Archives: Current Affairs

Mamdani & The NY Mayoral Race

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics
Doctored picture used by the Cuomo campaign of Mamdan with a heavier and darker beard.

Those Democrats who think Mamdani will hurt their party are right to be concerned, but they’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. It’s not the skeptics they need to worry about. It’s the fans. Those Democrats who think Mamdani will hurt their party are right to be concerned, but they’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. It’s not the skeptics they need to worry about. It’s the fans. Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in an editorial in the Washington Post entitled How Zohran Mamdani is teaching Democrats to lose.

I can’t speak to how other people feel, but I can say that as a Jewish New Yorker and as a member of a Jewish organization, I think that Zohran has done an incredible job of demonstrating care and concern and shown a real commitment to ensuring the safety of Jewish New Yorkers, of all New Yorkers. Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of strategic communications at Jews For Racial & Economic Justice

I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York, President Donald Trump, after Mamdani’s primary win (and was repeated in August).

Your dedication to an affordable, welcoming, and safe New York City where working families can have a shot has inspired people across the city. Billionaires and lobbyists poured millions against you and our public finance system. And you won. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US representative for New York’s 14th congressional district

The Anti-Mamdani Movement Is Fizzling New York Magazine

Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor of New York City. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – which is the largest Socialist group in the United States – is 33 years old, a practising Muslim, and, surprisingly, he will probably be the next mayor of New York City. And those are not the most surprising parts of the story. He was born in Kampala, Africa, and moved here when he was seven with his parents,  Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University and Mira Nair. The same Mira Nair who is the director of  Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and the Amelia Earhart biopic, Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere.

Mamdani holds political positions that Conventional Wisdom, and a big hunk of the Democratic Party’s leadership, think – maybe hope is more accurate – it should be impossible for him to win anything, even a Municipal Dogcatcher Position. As a short aside, about 12% of people in New York City are Jewish, and 2.4% are Indian, and Mamdani has said both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are war criminals and would be jailed if they came to New York if he were mayor. End aside. And he most probably will be the next mayor of New York City.

Mamdani is running on a platform that includes free city buses and a rent freeze in rent-stabilized housing; he advocates for universal childcare and pre-kindergarten childcare, as well as the construction of 200,000 new affordable housing units and five city-owned grocery stores—one in each borough—to drive down grocery prices. He was also an early supporter of Defund the Police and continues to support public safety reform. He supports a $30 minimum wage by 2030 and proposed giving all new New York City families baby baskets containing diapers and nursing supplies. Mamdani’s platform calls for tax increases on corporations and those earning above $1 million annually. He is running against a lot of very powerful special interests, and I am thrilled that he will probably be the next mayor of New York City.

While I am admittedly biased, the biggest reason I say he will be the next mayor of New York City is that the polls say that. Still, I have other reasons he is likely to become the mayor of New York City: he is young, personable, and, most importantly, authentic; the populace is tired of dour old men running the country for themselves, and Mamdani is running on ideas that are popular even though the conventional wisdom says they are loony tunes.

There is another reason, besides the City of New York’s—and the country’s—general discontent with the status quo, that I think Zohran Mamdani will win, and it is very similar to why Trump won in both 2016 and 2024. To back up a little, there are three ways the Main Stream Media covers elections, and the New York Times and CNN in 2016 are the best examples of that. If they like a candidate, like Hillary Clinton, they give them lots of good, thoughtful – or seemingly thoughtful – coverage. BTW, lots is the operative word in the previous sentence. If they don’t like the candidate, like Bernie Sanders, they ignore him. Just ignore him, and people will forget that the candidate is even running. Or, if they dislike the candidate, like Donald Trump, they will constantly badmouth him. The last way is counterproductive; it ended up keeping Trump in the public’s conscience, and that is what is happening to Zohran Mamdani right now.

A Quick Aside

Current Affairs, War

Last Sunday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) – maybe SBU works better in Ukrainian, Служба безпеки України – conducted a series of attacks on Russian air bases that were home to much of Russia’s nuclear bombers. The attack, code-named Operation Spider’s Web, involved smuggling drone parts into Russia and reassembling them near the targets, which was widely reported in American and European newspapers.

What was not generally reported – at least I didn’t see it in the mainstream media – was that the Security Service of Ukraine hacked the website of the builder of the bombers, Tupolev (officially, United Aircraft Company Tupolev). Besides getting a bunch of confidential information, the Security Service of Ukraine changed the home page of Tupolev as shown above. The owl is a symbol closely associated with the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR), which is the mothership for the SBU.

The Met Gala or Anna Wintour Has Big Balls

Americana, Art, Current Affairs,

You can’t speak on Black dandyism, Black art, or Black aesthetics without honoring the Black women who shaped, nurtured, and redefined it all. This year, my intention was to uplift and be surrounded by some of the Black women whose brilliance moves me—artists, thinkers, visionaries who carry history and possibility in everything they do. I’ve invited Lauryn Hill, Regina King, Jordan Casteel, Ming Smith, Adrienne Warren, Danielle Deadwyler, Lorna Simpson, and Radhika Jones to my table this year. Thank you all for your presence, your power, and the gifts you so generously share with the world. I’m deeply grateful to have shared this evening with you. Lewis Hamilton on Instagram

Last Monday evening, Michele and I watched the blue carpet extravaganza of the Met Gala on YouTube. If you are not aware of the Met Gala, it started as a dinner party at which the invitees were expected to donate money to the Costume Department of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The dinner party was a low-key affair for wealthy people who loved and bought haute couture clothing. But everything shifted when Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour took over in 1999. Now, it’s a televised fashion event that brings invite-only famous people together for the price of $75,000 a ticket.

Michele and I got interested in the Met Gala when Lewis Hamilton first got invited to the Gala sometime during the late 20-teens. He and Anna Wintour bonded over clothes and, strangely, for me, at least, over tennis, especially watching Serena Williams at Wimbledon. This year, the theme for the Gala was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, and Lewis Hamilton was one of the co-chairs.

These are dangerous times to have a political conversation, especially around DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). It is almost impossible to have a nuanced conversation. It is also a time when companies like Boeing and Google have reneged on their DEI commitments under pressure from the Trump Administration (although Apple didn’t). It is a time when a prudent person running a department in a museum that gets money from the Federal Government would not flaunt their DEI cred, but Anna Wintour is not prudent or timid.

Why Didn’t We See That Train Coming ?

Current Affairs, Politics

Donald Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man. Fran Lebowitz.

I thought Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz were going to win the last election. I even wrote several posts about it, such as Why Harris & Walz Will Win. Unfortunately, the proverb Seeing is believing is backward. Actually, believing is seeing. I live in a bubble of beliefs that define how I see reality. In my reality, my bubble, not being an asshole is essential, and knowing what the job is and how to do it is important.

However, most people who voted in the last election are not in my bubble, and I didn’t see their discontent that trumped Trump’s assholery and incompetence. I’m still trying to figure out why I didn’t see that anger, but I think I’m starting to understand part of it.

I want to start with a story that is not about politics (well, sort of not about politics, anyway). Years ago, in, I am going to guess, 1967, Sam Berland, my boss – I say “boss” because, even though we were partners, he had been my boss at our previous company, and I still thought of him as my boss – and I agreed to take on a third partner. Sam had met a man, who I’ll call Jim, about the same age as me, who worked for a lumber company that had gotten into the recreational land-for-sale business and was now trying to get out by liquidating their holdings. Sam thought Jim would be perfect as a partner and land expert.

Jim’s boss, who Sam knew, gave Jim an outstanding recommendation, as did a co-worker Sam also knew. We hired Jim with the plan of making him our third partner. We didn’t make him a partner, but, in this case, even an almost partner was a disaster, alienating everybody he interacted with, and it cost us a lot of money to get rid of him.

A couple of years later, I ran into the co-worker who had given Sam the excellent recommendation and asked him why he had done that. His answer surprised me. Jim had blown the whistle on a couple of employees who had been skimming money off of the escrows on the land sales, and consequently, Jim was revered by the company’s top brass. But he was a jerk, and none of his coworkers liked him. Jim disrupted the office, but they couldn’t fire him. All they could do was hope somebody else would hire him, so when we came along, they were thrilled and gave us a very positive recommendation.

Because Jim was a jerk and ostracized by his co-workers, he was, in effect, a permanent outsider. He was in the right place to see the employees skimming, but most of his co-workers and his boss were also in the same place. But unlike his co-workers and boss, his vision wasn’t clouded by friendships or the pressure of conformity, and he could more clearly see what was going on.

Trump is like that. Like most of us, he is in a position to see the growing disparity between the college-educated elite rich* and the rest of the country. But he also saw the monetary and psychic damage done by sending good jobs out of the country and letting in poor, desperate people who would work for less money, thereby taking away more good jobs. I keep thinking, Why did he see that pain and anger, and none of us did? He’s a rich narcissist. How did he see what most of us didn’t and many still don’t?

First, like Jim, Trump was an outsider for most of his life. An ill-mannered guy from Queens, trying to make it in Manhattan society but never fitting in. Like Jim, Donald Trump was not hindered by friendships or the pressure of conformity. He was an outsider and felt mistreated; more importantly, he felt disrespected.

It’s easy to say that Trump projected that feeling of being disrespected onto the people he wanted to attract, and this may be true. But it is also true, and may be hard to admit for most of us, that we college-educated elite rich* don’t respect or value people who aren’t as educated, nor do we consider them worth listening to. I know that all of us do respect some people who aren’t college-educated, but that is only after we get to know them as individuals; as a group, we don’t listen to them or interact with them. Trump did and does.

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

*Even though it is buried in a footnote, I want to be clear: we are the elite rich, and while we might not think of ourselves as rich or elite, we are definitely rich compared to people living paycheck to paycheck or afraid of losing their homes if they get sick.

Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Carter, and The Press, Still, Mostly About Carter

Americana, Current Affairs
Carter (1 of 1)

Summer is for dating, fall is for mating. Tamara Keith on NPR is a reference to Bernie Sanders not being a viable candidate.

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 last Tuesday, and I want to say something about it besides Happy Birthday, Jimmy, Congratulations. I wrote the paragraphs below in September 2015 when Bernie Sanders was running for President, but the core of it is President Jimmy Carter. 

What most pisses me off this primary season, even as the Bernie Sander’s crowds get bigger, is hearing a pundit say, Of course he can’t win, or even, get the nomination.  And the bigger the crowds, the louder they seem to say it.

As people – politicians, movie actors, athletes, even The Kardashians – move into the collective conscience, a sort of collective shorthand takes over. The press, but it is more than just the press, decides on one simple story, and all the complexities are washed away. Now it is the craziness of Donald Trump or the vague sleaziness of Hillary Clinton; it used to be the naiveté of Jimmy Carter.

My first and lasting impression of Jimmy Carter was that he was far from naive. I first heard him talk in January of 1975, about 21 months before the 1976 Presidential election. I was driving across Nevada on my way to Sun Valley, and just after Lovelock, it started to lightly snow. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random Southerner talking about US foreign policy. I kept driving, and the snow kept lightly falling – heavy enough so that the countryside became magically covered and light enough so the highway was kept clear by traffic – and I kept listening. The speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, was brilliant, thoughtful and knowledgeable. As I cleared  Winnemucca, still heading east, I started to lose the signal, so I pulled over and listened to the final minutes by the side of the road, heater running, anxiously hoping it wouldn’t keep snowing.  It was so bizarre – sitting in the car by the side of the road, in a snowstorm, in the middle of Nevada, listening to a talk on how to change our foreign policy – that I still remember it.  In the end, I learned that the random Southerner was Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, and I was smitten with him. I still am.

Part of my smitteness is that I am a sucker for Southern populists. I like Huey Long – Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life’s work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing – even though I know a refined and educated person shouldn’t like somebody like Huey Long. I was and am a fan of Bear Bryant – If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you. And, as might be expected, before I turned on him for Vietnam, I liked Lyndon Johnson over the Kennedys.

But I also remember that speech by Jimmy Carter because it was the most coherent speech on foreign policy that I have ever heard. Carter had been an officer aboard a nuclear submarine, and he had obviously thought about foreign policy and about nuclear war with the total carnage it would bring. It seemed to me that Carter was a peacenik who had actually thought about the problem.  By the time I got back to the office a week or so later, I was telling everybody I knew that Jimmy Carter should be our next president.

The most common reaction I got was laughter, but Carter ran a brilliant, if sometimes very rough, campaign, making enough converts to become president. Starting as an almost unknown outsider, a born-again Christian outsider from the deep South, Carter surprised the establishment press, and I don’t think they ever forgave him for that. Today, partially because of the press’s simplified picture of him, Carter is considered a mediocre president at best, and his decency as a human is regarded as Jimmy Carter’s main legacy. But much of what people didn’t like in 1976 is now starting to seem like prophecy.

Even when we know better, much of what we were told and believe about the Carter presidency comes from the press simplifying a complex man. His honesty and his openness – he was the first, and maybe the last, president to be interviewed in Playboy and the first to wear jeans in the White House – were painted as weaknesses. We want our politicians to be transparent, yet we want them to be powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, as Nathan Heller pointed out in The New Yorker, and telling the truth is not managing the information.

We are given cartoons of complex people and complex situations, and all nuance is lost. Happy Birthday, Jimmy, and I wish we had listened to you more.