They take some getting used to!
How New Yorkers see the United States.
If three New Yorkers enter a taxi without arguing, a bank has been robbed.
Phyllis Diller, New Yorker.
“Why does a woman work ten years to change a man, then complain he’s not the man she married?• Barbra Streisand, New Yorker
In 1965, I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The UW, to further integration (this was 1965 lest we forget), assigned dormitory rooms as best they could to integrate the regions (not the races. Remember, in 1965, northerners weren’t racist). So Michael Fredenthal (son of artist, David Fredenthal)–East Coast, cosmopolitan and Jewish–became my roommate. He yearned to be me; i.e. salt of the earth, genuine (?); I yearned to be him, i.e., sophisticated, worldly, European. We traded my worn blue jeans (three pairs) for his tweed double-breasted suits (two).
New Yorker friends dropped by the room. Visualize six nineteen-year-old Donald Trumps, argumentative, confrontational, rude, crude, and smoking Old Gold cigarettes, attending the UW because the Ivy League schools had a Jewish quota. I, a non-smoking, non-drinking Wisconsin-polite farm boy, came to the UW to play football.
We came near to blows. I took exception to their descriptions of my sisters‘ virtue, my mother‘s cooking, my genealogy, and my general Midwest yokel ways.
I lifted (the lightest) one by the neck. They were confused, surprised, apologetic. “Hey, you should hear me talk about my mother!”. You want a cigarette? You want we talk about the Leibowitzers?’
This is my conclusion based upon my life experience: New Yorkers are aggressive, confrontational, insulting, abusive (and loud) in the kindest way possible- a disagreeableness, I suspect, inculcated from their mother’s milk (or Similac :-)]. In summary, I ve dated New Yorkers, lived with New Yorkers, worked for and with New Yorkers, had New Yorkers work for me, and …….
I
I married a New Yorker!
They do take some getting used to.
And then there is Donald Trump
Why does Donald Trump inspire loathing among the American artist-actor-academic-newsroom (and wannabe) demographic? Yes, he is a brash, opinionated, rude, crude, aggressive, insulting, deeply opinionated, and argumentative loudmouth. Probably more New Yorker than the average New Yorker, but
Donald Trump is neither Hitler nor Stalin nor Mao Tse-Tung…
But yes, he too takes some getting used to.
US elections are binary. It was either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Bitch all you want; it’s very American. But he’s still the president.