Is there some kind of demographic shift at work here? Dr. Bein *** Ironically, novelist Norman Mailer ran for Mayor of New Your City in 1968-69 on precisely the opposite platform of making New York City the 51st state and leaving the North behind. Mailer complained of “upstate legislators who don’t care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money.” Mailer’s “Power to the neighborhood” campaign proposed a radical concept: republicanism. He promised if elected to empower citizens “to work for their deepest and most private and most passionate ideas about the nature of government, the nature of man’s relation to his own immediate society.” In Mailer’s failed campaign we hear echoes of upstate New Yorkers today. Manhattanites, Mailer said “have no purpose other than to watch with a certain gallows humor the progressive deterioration of their city.” In other words, the citizen’s interests aren’t served by their out-of-scale government. ***
Posted on: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 23:41:44 +0000