Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

8. A CITY THAT ONLY ONCE WAS:

The 'Watchdogs' of the press are anything but. What they are, instead, are a bunch of bloviating, sheeny materialists with no goal other than destruction and making their own fortune. It has become 'verboten' in Amerika today to point out WHO they are, as a class and a people, so I won't. Any first-page scan, here, of the NYTimes or the Wall Street Journal will tell you. We have become so shuttered and closed-by-enforcement in this land today that a person cannot even obliquely claim to point out a truth when it stares them in the face. Journalism today practices two things - either froth or destruction. They advance a leftist, socialistic, material cause or they distract. Fingering the common herd of humankind as idiots, they steer their mass-heads wherever they wish - and the horde follows, distraction after distraction. Just look at the daily news feeds of the mainstream papers, as a very cheesy example. No truth, no substance, just furtherance of agenda and carping.

I spent time in the east 90's and 80's of Manhattan. Carl Schurz Park, Gracie Mansion. Hell's Gate watching the river traffic. Also went to the Morris Jumel Mansion, Sylvan Lane, The Grange, City College - all of that uptown stuff from the past which incongruously exists to this day amidst the soiled wreckage of a landscape befitting a theme park named 'Garbageland'. Charm has, most certainly, left us. Any vista which may once have been has been obliterated. A jumble of noise, junk, trash, poor-man's culture, and gutter-critters abounds. Hugely propagating masses - kid after kid, an endless fraternity party, evidently - swarm the streets. They downgrade any cultural attributes which ONCE may have been present, and - stupidly - the city itself attempts lamely to mark off historic spots which may once have had some validity, with signs and markers and attempted restorations - all in the middle of a rancorous horde of dolts who haven't a clue as to either what once was here, America's past, or historical awareness or sense of validity. They just 'got' here, and could care less about how or by what means this nation constructed itself. It's a sorry shame - and of course this being liberal, socialistic leftist New York - the social-service constructs (which may ONCE have had some reality and use) have degenerated into a cess-pool of graft and corruption costing billions - but these people nonetheless have their hands out and they get what they can. The City of Manhattan foolishly undergirds a massive social-program and assistance system which would once have made Bulgaria proud - tattered and decrepit buildings, ruined hulks, littered and fouled streets, government school enclaves, social centers, hospitals, all pitted and sagging by mis-use and authoritarianism. It makes me foul and sad to witness it.

Freedom used to allow, in its concept, the Freedom of being free from government, as an individual. It does that no more. Decrepit social welfare, and all its indigents, are everywhere in one's face. Any grandeur which may have once been is shrouded now in doom.
I saw once, old man District Attorney Robert Morganthau in Carl Shurz Park. He was walking very slowly, with a cane, up a few stairs along one of the paths in the trees along East End. On either side of him was a person, a male and a female in this case, handsome and natty-looking middle-aged assistants helping him along. I didn't know if they were aides, or perhaps adult children of his, or whatever. They all looked nice, smiled, and kept on their way. Life goes on, I suppose. Personified in him was an entire older, more gracious way of life through a city that only once was.