I promised myself (and you) that I would not write anything more on The Donald. One post (see August 25, 2015) is more than enough. Every additional word written about Trump wastes a moment of time on an attention whore who thrives on self-glorification. Elementary psychology tells us that the best way to extinguish a phenomenon is not to reinforce it.
On the other hand, what might have happened if the Allies had not banded together to fight the Axis powers? As veterans of “the Greatest Generation” would be quick to point out, inaction may equate to appeasement.
This is a good example of the general principal that one cannot live by the conflicting dictates of quotable wisdom alone. Nor of behavioral psychology.
In the face of such contradictions and conundrums, I have often found it useful to read selected portions of the New York Times with some regularity. After a while, the articles seem to free associate with one another in productive ways, much like my patients and I do in a psychoanalytic session.
So it was when I noticed the following: “Tourists Have Landed in Queens. They’re Staying”. (August 25, Kirk Semple), and ”Donald Trump’s Old Queens Neighborhood Contrasts with the Diverse Areas Around It.” (September 22, Jason Horowitz.)
On the other hand, what might have happened if the Allies had not banded together to fight the Axis powers? As veterans of “the Greatest Generation” would be quick to point out, inaction may equate to appeasement.
This is a good example of the general principal that one cannot live by the conflicting dictates of quotable wisdom alone. Nor of behavioral psychology.
In the face of such contradictions and conundrums, I have often found it useful to read selected portions of the New York Times with some regularity. After a while, the articles seem to free associate with one another in productive ways, much like my patients and I do in a psychoanalytic session.
So it was when I noticed the following: “Tourists Have Landed in Queens. They’re Staying”. (August 25, Kirk Semple), and ”Donald Trump’s Old Queens Neighborhood Contrasts with the Diverse Areas Around It.” (September 22, Jason Horowitz.)
I was born in Brooklyn and lived in Flushing, Queens from the age of three till I departed for college at seventeen. Trump grew up in Jamaica Estates, an enclave of what we called “private houses” in the midst of the potpourri of small row houses, apartment buildings, retail shops, warehouses and factories that made up the rather mundane borough of Queens.
I grew up in Electchester, a co-op development of three and six story apartment buildings built by the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), Local 3. I was a bit intimidated by Jamaica Estates. My high school girl friend lived there in a small and unpretentious home. I envied her family’s "private house" with its direct access to a small yard. I never saw the outside, much less the inside of a magisterial home like the Trump's.
I attended Jamaica High School, a local public school. Trump attended the New York Military Academy, a prep school sixty miles north of the City in Cornwall-on-Hudson. Strangely enough, Jamaica High School closed a few years ago; the New York Military Academy abruptly closed this September. Trump credits the Academy with taming his rowdiness and giving him the discipline he needed to succeed, but refused to rescue the financially insolvent institution, though it would have taken only some millions of his multi-billion dollar fortune. He did offer a building, no doubt to be named after him, but the Academy needed cash.
The most intimate I ever got with Jamaica Estates was the downstairs of my girl friend’s modest home. I never even saw the upstairs. Unfortunately for me, Ellen was not on the fast track of mid 1960’s dating customs.
Queens was not known for anything except La Guardia Airport, a little sister to Idlewild, or as it was later re-named, Kennedy Airport, the prestigious hub of glamorous cross country and international flights. La Guardia, by contrast, was home to the prosaic northeast corridor shuttles between New York, Boston and D.C. I lived not far from humble La Guardia and Queens College, a satellite campus of the public City University of New York.
It seems fair to say that my Queens and Trump’s Queens were two different boroughs. He was probably as little familiar with mine as I with his. The 1960’s lifted the profile of Queens with the coming of Shea Stadium, new home of the New York Mets, and the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. My Queens was a neighborhood of Jews, Irish Catholics, other European immigrant families and a bit beyond, African Americans. Later came an influx of Asians, Hispanics and other ethnic groups that made downtown Flushing look like the poster child for New York the “melting pot.” Life outside of Jamaica Estates has only become more multi-ethnic in the past half century.
It was with some shock that I absorbed Kirk Semple’s revelation that the tourist guide series Lonely Planet crowned Queens, “the New York equivalent of a flyover state," the number 1 travel destination in the U.S. for 2015. A month has not been nearly enough time for me to recover. Lonely Planet and other boosters cite it’s multi-ethnic street life, the Noguchi, Louis Armstrong and Queens museums; the zoo; Citifield, home of the NY Mets; the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, which hosts the U.S. Open, and a major hotel building boom.
Lonely Planet says it is trying to get a head start on the hip and cool. “Not in a million years,” as they say in New York, would I ever have thought of Queens as hip and cool. My intelligence network almost has me convinced that Brooklyn has become hip and cool. But Queens, really? Really?
So what do Trump’s Jamaica Estates and the destination resort of Queens have in common? Mr. Trump’s neighborhood may be the symbol of the “one percent,” walled off from the rest of us socially, psychologically and geographically. Trump is the insider whose first declaration as a would-be presidential nominee served to demonize and ostracize those who live outside “the Wall,” those who have dared to come into our land and diversify it.
The so-called moderate Wall Street wing of the GOP looks safe and sane by comparison, but it shares with the “populist” Trump wing the pressing need to exclude the not-like-us: for Trump, the unwashed and dangerous Hispanic immigrants, the weak-kneed intellectuals who like to think before they act, the stupid people who don’t know the first thing about driving a good deal; for the Wall Street wing, the poor, the workers of modest means, the addled climate change worriers, the believers in science, in human capital over financial capital.
With apologies to its caring and open-minded inhabitants, I think the Trumps of Jamaica Estates want to build an even more impenetrable wall between their enclave and the rest of us. The most ruthless and self-promoting insiders see the outsiders as goods to be exploited for money and power.
A third New York Times piece, Readers React to the News of La Guardia Airport’s Planned Overhual (Eric Copage, July 29) informs us that there is a recently reactivated debate over the fate of deteriorating La Guardia Airport. Some want to renovate, rebuild and renew it. Others want to gut and abandon it. Here is both a concrete example and a metaphor for the current schism that weakens and coarsens our society. The moderate wing of the GOP, a place my father-in-law called home, inhabited by those who had some concern about those outside the wall, the centrists who would have considered rebuilding the La Guardias of our country, has all but disappeared. In its place we find two radical conservative wings: one run by greed obsessed billionaire capitalist oligarchs like the Koch brothers; the other by xenophobic, phony billionaire populists epitomized by Trump.
My father was a sheet metal worker. I grew up believing in the importance of unions in protecting the rights of workers against the power of corporate America. I was a liberal by birth. Nothing I have experienced since then has persuaded me to change my childhood political persuasions, especially not the dangerous antics of bad actors like Donald Trump and Scott Walker. I welcome the governor back to my home state of after his failed campaign to extend his vindictive smashing of Wisconsin unions to a more sweeping national beat down of workers. This is the same governor who has refused Medicaid funding that could extend heath care to thousands of financially disadvantaged citizens. He may come home a bit more humble, but I have no doubt that his pride in quashing the less fortunate and less well-endowed will remain intact.
I left Queens many years ago as a teen bound for college. Now I am a physician and a psychoanalyst. I live in a very nice “private home,” but I still feel a strong kinship with the Queensmen and women who live in the vibrant and diverse communities beyond the enclave of the well-to-do. The price of higher taxes is more than worth my allegiance to the Democratic party, a body politic that still has some caring bones in it.
I have more reason than ever to shun the current day version of the GOP, in particular the demagogue Mr. Trump who is the latest, meanest, most know-nothing manifestation of its insulation from common sense, caring, and fact, and from the needs of the hard working people who live outside the wall.
I grew up in Electchester, a co-op development of three and six story apartment buildings built by the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), Local 3. I was a bit intimidated by Jamaica Estates. My high school girl friend lived there in a small and unpretentious home. I envied her family’s "private house" with its direct access to a small yard. I never saw the outside, much less the inside of a magisterial home like the Trump's.
I attended Jamaica High School, a local public school. Trump attended the New York Military Academy, a prep school sixty miles north of the City in Cornwall-on-Hudson. Strangely enough, Jamaica High School closed a few years ago; the New York Military Academy abruptly closed this September. Trump credits the Academy with taming his rowdiness and giving him the discipline he needed to succeed, but refused to rescue the financially insolvent institution, though it would have taken only some millions of his multi-billion dollar fortune. He did offer a building, no doubt to be named after him, but the Academy needed cash.
The most intimate I ever got with Jamaica Estates was the downstairs of my girl friend’s modest home. I never even saw the upstairs. Unfortunately for me, Ellen was not on the fast track of mid 1960’s dating customs.
Queens was not known for anything except La Guardia Airport, a little sister to Idlewild, or as it was later re-named, Kennedy Airport, the prestigious hub of glamorous cross country and international flights. La Guardia, by contrast, was home to the prosaic northeast corridor shuttles between New York, Boston and D.C. I lived not far from humble La Guardia and Queens College, a satellite campus of the public City University of New York.
It seems fair to say that my Queens and Trump’s Queens were two different boroughs. He was probably as little familiar with mine as I with his. The 1960’s lifted the profile of Queens with the coming of Shea Stadium, new home of the New York Mets, and the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. My Queens was a neighborhood of Jews, Irish Catholics, other European immigrant families and a bit beyond, African Americans. Later came an influx of Asians, Hispanics and other ethnic groups that made downtown Flushing look like the poster child for New York the “melting pot.” Life outside of Jamaica Estates has only become more multi-ethnic in the past half century.
It was with some shock that I absorbed Kirk Semple’s revelation that the tourist guide series Lonely Planet crowned Queens, “the New York equivalent of a flyover state," the number 1 travel destination in the U.S. for 2015. A month has not been nearly enough time for me to recover. Lonely Planet and other boosters cite it’s multi-ethnic street life, the Noguchi, Louis Armstrong and Queens museums; the zoo; Citifield, home of the NY Mets; the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, which hosts the U.S. Open, and a major hotel building boom.
Lonely Planet says it is trying to get a head start on the hip and cool. “Not in a million years,” as they say in New York, would I ever have thought of Queens as hip and cool. My intelligence network almost has me convinced that Brooklyn has become hip and cool. But Queens, really? Really?
So what do Trump’s Jamaica Estates and the destination resort of Queens have in common? Mr. Trump’s neighborhood may be the symbol of the “one percent,” walled off from the rest of us socially, psychologically and geographically. Trump is the insider whose first declaration as a would-be presidential nominee served to demonize and ostracize those who live outside “the Wall,” those who have dared to come into our land and diversify it.
The so-called moderate Wall Street wing of the GOP looks safe and sane by comparison, but it shares with the “populist” Trump wing the pressing need to exclude the not-like-us: for Trump, the unwashed and dangerous Hispanic immigrants, the weak-kneed intellectuals who like to think before they act, the stupid people who don’t know the first thing about driving a good deal; for the Wall Street wing, the poor, the workers of modest means, the addled climate change worriers, the believers in science, in human capital over financial capital.
With apologies to its caring and open-minded inhabitants, I think the Trumps of Jamaica Estates want to build an even more impenetrable wall between their enclave and the rest of us. The most ruthless and self-promoting insiders see the outsiders as goods to be exploited for money and power.
A third New York Times piece, Readers React to the News of La Guardia Airport’s Planned Overhual (Eric Copage, July 29) informs us that there is a recently reactivated debate over the fate of deteriorating La Guardia Airport. Some want to renovate, rebuild and renew it. Others want to gut and abandon it. Here is both a concrete example and a metaphor for the current schism that weakens and coarsens our society. The moderate wing of the GOP, a place my father-in-law called home, inhabited by those who had some concern about those outside the wall, the centrists who would have considered rebuilding the La Guardias of our country, has all but disappeared. In its place we find two radical conservative wings: one run by greed obsessed billionaire capitalist oligarchs like the Koch brothers; the other by xenophobic, phony billionaire populists epitomized by Trump.
My father was a sheet metal worker. I grew up believing in the importance of unions in protecting the rights of workers against the power of corporate America. I was a liberal by birth. Nothing I have experienced since then has persuaded me to change my childhood political persuasions, especially not the dangerous antics of bad actors like Donald Trump and Scott Walker. I welcome the governor back to my home state of after his failed campaign to extend his vindictive smashing of Wisconsin unions to a more sweeping national beat down of workers. This is the same governor who has refused Medicaid funding that could extend heath care to thousands of financially disadvantaged citizens. He may come home a bit more humble, but I have no doubt that his pride in quashing the less fortunate and less well-endowed will remain intact.
I left Queens many years ago as a teen bound for college. Now I am a physician and a psychoanalyst. I live in a very nice “private home,” but I still feel a strong kinship with the Queensmen and women who live in the vibrant and diverse communities beyond the enclave of the well-to-do. The price of higher taxes is more than worth my allegiance to the Democratic party, a body politic that still has some caring bones in it.
I have more reason than ever to shun the current day version of the GOP, in particular the demagogue Mr. Trump who is the latest, meanest, most know-nothing manifestation of its insulation from common sense, caring, and fact, and from the needs of the hard working people who live outside the wall.
