UP@NIGHT

M. Slonecker

“That’s the problem with being born in New York…You’ve got no New York to run away to.”

A line from the novel, Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles.   (Reviewed by Liesl Schillinger in today’s New York Times Book Review.)

After a taking a hiatus from blogging, I thought that I wanted to return with a some sort of scathing political commentary, filled with wit and an almost adolescent exuberance.   But then I spied this billboard along the West Side Highway.   I was horrified.  The Birthers had infiltrated the heart of New York City, my town, and were in the process of disenfranchising the place.   Never again would we vote in a national election.  Never again would someone from the five boroughs become president.  We aren’t in America.

But then I reconsidered.  More likely this was the work of an insidiously clever Republican operative.  He knows that Donald Trump is a danger to the Republican chances in 2012, if only because of the hair, which looks just like his half brother’s (this is not intended to be a factual statement), the very former governor of Illinois.  You know, what’s his name, Blagojevich.  If only natural born Americans can run for president, and if New Yorkers are not Americans, then as a native New Yorker Trump can’t run for president.   QED   And every Birther, including Trump, would have to agree.

A further clue to this dastardly mischief is supplied by one word from a sibling billboard.

   Although there is much evidence to support the operative hypothesis, I grant that it could be wrong.  It would require the operative to be too clever by half, and judging by the recent budget that the Republicans put forward, we can’t assume that anyone in the GOP has the extra half going for them.  So who did the deed?  It’s possible, just possible, it was a New Yorker with some extra attitude

Oh, I can understand why New Yorkers might have attitude.  After all, why would they have put Times Square, the Empire State Building, King Kong, Broadway, the UN, Wall Street, Steven Colbert, Lincoln Center, Batman, Superman, the Statue of Liberty, and the Yankees (of course), etc., here if this wasn’t actually the center of the planet?  Why else would “New Directions,”  the club from Glee, have to travel to New York to compete in the national finals?   And let’s face it, when the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, everything else is just anti-climatic.

But just because NYC might be the center of the planet doesn’t mean it isn’t in the United States.  Where else would it be?  So let’s be clear.  The sign should have read, “If you leave New York, you will have to live somewhere else in America.”  Unless of course there is a Republican operative out there who is too clever by half.

We will remain vigilant at UP@NIGHT.

Here is a piece of trivia worth knowing, at least for philosophers, engineers, and bridge lovers. John Augustus Roebling (born Johann August Röbling), the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, was something of a polymath. Before emigrating to the U.S. from Germany, in addition to engineering, he studied philosophy with G. W. F. Hegel, the notoriously difficult and challenging early 19th century German Idealist philosopher. According to a PBS documentary on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, it was Hegel who told the young Roebling that he should go to America. And so he did.

Next time that you have an opportunity to drive or walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, don’t forget to thank the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the man who gave you, “what is actual is rational and what is rational is actual” (The Philosophy of Right). He knew enough to send Roebling to our shores.