Monday, August 28, 2006

Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers! (Remember them?)

Perhaps this is an ironic dispensation but its message at least deserves a hearing.
NYC, particularly Manhattan, is becoming a class-stratified, far-too-expensive chalet for the nouveau riche and their gentrifying minions. It has become the haven of the affluent, especially those matriculating into overrated, astronomically pricey insitutions of higher learning. Look at the East Village: it is now the provenance of NYU students with expense accounts, crushingly bourgeois attitudes,
and the imposture of their species. The lesson of downtown? A smoothie bar is the death of a neighborhood, indeed, death of a community. Most of the real estate on and below 14th St. (I'm only harping on NYU because I frequent its vicinity moreso than other school environments) has been upended, demolished, and built anew to accomodate the collegiate gentry. Gone are the many rock clubs, dive bars, bookstores, and flea-bag art joints. I propose a solution: citizen action committees to bring back the violence, decay, drugs, and insanity that once characterized the region. Organized vice will wipe out the cancer of NYC's failed modernity. Talk to anyone who lived downtown in the seventies and early eighties: they will tell you how life was dirty, dangerous, and delightful. We cannot enjoy ourselves anymore because we cannot afford it; neither can we enjoy the style of life now being created. Bring back the sleaze, stilettos, and razors, people will flee, property rights will go down, the rich and scared will vanish, and we can indulge our fantasies of creation, knowing that, at last or again, a true city flourishes.
--Martin Scriblerus