Al-effing-York

I think I am starting to actually hate the place that I used to think of my town and center of the world. Granted, the center of the world part was long ago. But coming back to New York used to evoke warm feelings from me, even in odd moments. In the mid-90's I once flew back from SF to La Guardia. It was a muggy August, and I had the good luck of going from the terminal right into an air-conditioned cab. As we got into Manhattan, I could see a lot of garbage around and the cabbie, who spoke English, told me there was a sanitation strike. Arriving at the corner of 8th Avenue and 23rd Street, I paid him and opened the door. Immediately my nostrils were assaulted with the combined smells of urine and rotting meat. You know my first thought? "I'm home."

Today I flagged a cab and when I was about to put the suitcase on the seat with me, the cabbie, some Indian or Pakistani guy whom I could hardly understand, waved me to put it in the trunk. So I went around and put it in the trunk, closing it firmly. When I was getting back in, he started to lecture me about closing the trunk too hard. I exploded. Who the fuck does this cabbie, and a foreigner at that, think he is? And now he expects me to pay him to take me somewhere. I left. I think my exact words were, "I don't need this shit. I'm outta here." I got the luggage out of the trunk. And slammed it shut.

The next cabbie was some kind of Muslim, with his woven cap and scraggly beard, reading the  paper about Koran burnings. But he gave me no guff and took me where I wanted. I think I am actually starting to hate not only Islam, but Muslims. In the end, wherever they gather in numbers, don't they always bring trouble?

Then I popped into a sandwich shop to get something to eat on the bus. The guy at the cash register, ethnicity unknown but definitely not American, could hardly make himself understood by either the customer ahead of me or me. And when I got on the bus, he'd given me the wrong sandwich.

This kind of reflection and emotion makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. We have been fed the line that any disapproval or lack of enthusiasm about foreigners or people of color is the worst possible sin. Part of the liberalism that makes Western suicide not only palatable but, to those who are erasing themselves and their civilization, even noble. Apparently Cardinal Kasper has been bumped from the papal entourage now heading for England when he opined, quite rightly as far as I can tell, that entering London was like "being in a Third World country."

As for me, it does not make me happy to go to a place I once thought of as home find myself increasingly a minority among strangers and many strangers whom I imagine consider it their divine mission to replace me and mine. No sane human would be.

I think I might hate New York.