[Vision2020] A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

> A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America
>   By Joseph Berger
>   The New York Times
> 
>   Thursday 04 November 2004
> 
>   Striking a characteristic New York pose near Lincoln Center yesterday, 
> Beverly Camhe clutched three morning newspapers to her chest while balancing a 
> large latte and talked about how disconsolate she was to realize that not only 
> had her candidate, John Kerry, lost but that she and her city were so out of 
> step with the rest of the country.
> 
>   "Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?" she said. 
> "New York is an island off the coast of Europe."
> 
>   Like Ms. Camhe, a film producer, three of every four voters in New York 
> City gave Mr. Kerry their vote, a starkly different choice from the rest of the 
> nation. So they awoke yesterday with something of a woozy existential 
> hangover and had to confront once again how much of a 51st State they are, 
> different in their sensibilities, lifestyles and polyglot texture from most of 
> America. The election seemed to reverse the perspective of the famous Saul 
> Steinberg cartoon, with much of the land mass of America now in the foreground and 
> New York a tiny, distant and irrelevant dot.
> 
>   Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in 
> Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In 
> both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) 
> Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense 
> that perhaps Middle America doesn't care as much about New York and its 
> animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the 
> World Trade Center.
> 
>   "Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old 
> retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a 
> terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 
> 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' "
> 
>   City residents talked about this chasm between outlooks with 
> characteristic New York bluntness.
> 
>   Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was 
> sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, 
> at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln 
> Center. The site was almost a cliché corner of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with a 
> newsstand next door selling French and Italian newspapers and, a bit farther 
> down, the Lincoln Plaza theater showing foreign movies.
> 
>   "I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a 
> good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of 
> redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of 
> religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."
> 
>   "New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where 
> we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's 
> going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
> 
>   His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended 
> that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans 
> might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas 
> people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."
> 
>   "They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I 
> feel I'm in a time warp."
> 
>   Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception 
> that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.
> 
>   "People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to 
> gravitate toward cities," he said.
> 
>   Like those in the rest of the country, New Yorkers stayed up late watching 
> the results, and some went to bed with a glimmer of hope that Mr. Kerry 
> might yet find victory in some fortuitous combination of battleground states. But 
> they awoke to reality. Some politically conscious children were disheartened 
> - or sleepy - enough to ask parents if they could stay home. But even 
> grownups were unnerved.
> 
>   "To paraphrase our current president, I'm in shock and awe," said Keithe 
> Sales, a 58-year-old former publishing administrator walking a dog near 
> Central Park. He said he and friends shared a feeling of "disempowerment" as a 
> result of the country's choice of President Bush. "There is a feeling of 'What do 
> I have to do to get this man out of office?'''
> 
>   In downtown Brooklyn, J. J. Murphy, 34, a teacher, said that Mr. Kerry's 
> loss underscored the geographic divide between the Northeast and the rest of 
> the country. He harked back to Reconstruction to help explain his point.
> 
>   "One thing Clinton and Gore had going for them was they were from the 
> South," he said. "There's a lot of resentment toward the Northeast carpetbagger 
> stereotype, and Kerry fit right in to that."
> 
>   Mr. Murphy said he understood why Mr. Bush appealed to Southerners in a 
> way that he did not appeal to New Yorkers.
> 
>   "Even though Bush isn't one of them - he's a son of privilege - he comes 
> off as just a good old boy," Mr. Murphy said.
> 
>   Pondering the disparity, Bret Adams, a 33-year-old computer network 
> administrator in Rego Park, Queens, said, "I think a lot of the country sees New 
> York as a wild and crazy place, where these things like the war protests 
> happen."
> 
>   Ms. Camhe, the film producer, frequents Elaine's restaurant with friends 
> and spends many mornings on a bench in Central Park talking politics with 
> homeless people with whom she's become acquainted. She spent part of Tuesday 
> knocking on doors in Pennsylvania to rustle up Kerry votes then returned to 
> Manhattan to attend an election-night party thrown by Miramax's chairman, Harvey 
> Weinstein, at The Palm. Ms. Camhe was also up much of the night talking to a 
> son in California who was depressed at the election results.
> 
>   When it became clear yesterday morning that the outlook for a Kerry 
> squeaker was a mirage, she was unable to eat breakfast. Her doorman on Central Park 
> West gave her a consoling hug. Then a friend buying coffee along with her 
> said she had just heard a report on television that Mr. Kerry had conceded and 
> tears welled in Ms. Camhe's eyes.
> 
>   Ms. Camhe explained the habits and beliefs of those dwelling in the 
> heartland like an anthropologist.
> 
>   "What's different about New York City is it tends to bring people together 
> and so we can't ignore each others' dreams and values and it creates a much 
> more inclusive consciousness," she said. "When you're in a more isolated 
> environment, you're more susceptible to some ideology that's imposed on you."
> 
>   As an example, Ms. Camhe offered the different attitudes New Yorkers may 
> have about social issues like gay marriage.
> 
>   "We live in this marvelous diversity where we actually have gay 
> neighbors," she said. "They're not some vilified unknown. They're our neighbors."
> 
>   But she said that a dichotomy of outlooks was bad for the country.
> 
>   "If the heartland feels so alienated from us, then it behooves us to wrap 
> our arms around the heartland," she said. "We need to bring our way of life, 
> which is honoring diversity and having compassion for people with different 
> lifestyles, on a trip around the country."
> 
> 
    

V2020 Post by Ted Moffett
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