Tuesday, October 4, 2016

MANHATTAN REVISITED: A 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IMAGINARY EAVESDROPPER'S REPORT


"I'm not looking forward to the day some bigshot decides to rename the street where I live as either Trump Boulevard or Hillary Clinton Boulevard. I'll have to spend lots of time and money to change my printed home address on my stationery and my home address listing for all of my friends and relatives and associates."

"I wonder what will happen to all of those tenants of Donald Trump if he actually gets elected? Will they be mailing their monthly rent checks to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C.? I hope not, since the federal bureaucracy is notoriously slow to process everything."

"I'm fortunate, in that I'm not among those New Yorkers who might be referring to Trump as 'my landlord' and 'my President' in the same breath. If I were a tenant of his and he gets elected, President Trump might order the CIA to harass me during my sleep inside my condo unit if he ever decides I'm not a big fan of his."

"To me, the biggest issue in the campaign is which candidate will do the most to improve taxi service here in Manhattan. I will be very relieved when we get a President who finally solves our taxi service crisis."

"If Donald Trump wins, you can be sure he will promote each of his resorts around the world as often as he can. Whenever he takes a Presidential vacation, he will insist on staying in one of the hotels that he owns. To me, that's not Presidential style. He should be promoting his competitors' hotels if he's our head of state. I think they call that statesmanship, when you promote your arch-rivals much of the time. Presidents are supposed to be magnanimous, but I doubt that Trump would even admit that there's a hotel or resort out there not owned by himself that is better than any of his Trump resorts."

"Hillary Clinton probably has an Enemies List of her own for American citizens born in this country who offend her. I'm so grateful she's not a landlady, since if she were one and I were living in one of her apartments, she might punish me by refusing to fix my toilet when it overflows. My toilet overflows about once per week inside my unit. Maybe the Mayor dislikes me, and that's the deeper issue with my toilet. Maybe he's colluded with a corrupt plumbers union to wreck havoc on my toilet when I'm away from my apartment. I often get the impression that someone has been inside my unit when I was away. So naturally I have my conspiracy theory to explain it all."

"I don't understand why neither of the two candidates is saying that the Arab countries should be urged to fight their own battles in the Middle East. Wouldn't it be great if Arab nations united to fight against Arab militants without any need for additional American financial support or military support?"

"It seems to me that either way, there should be a New York State Reconquers the White House parade after the general election. Maybe they could call it an 'Empire State Returns' parade, complete with special confetti from the local newspapers. The thought of it gives me goosebumps, particularly since we're guaranteed of a New York victory in the Presidential campaign."

"My 10-year-old son, Carl, says he wants to see Donald Trump win. Carl says he wants to hear President Trump declare loudly to each of his cabinet secretary appointments, 'You're Hired!---and if you don't meet my expectations, You're Fired!" Carl says it will be very entertaining to watch President Trump greet each of his cabinet secretaries that way at a special televised media event for each of them."

"I would define paranoia in New York City as worrying that the cockroaches you find inside your apartment unit are actually artificial insects planted there by your enemies to secretly photograph confidential info about you when your guard is down."

"What's annoying about Harriet is that she doesn't even have any sense of who her enemies are here in Manhattan. How can anyone be so fatuous and naive that they would be completely stumped if I ask them to list five of their leading enemies here?"

"I think the biggest issue for me is which candidate, Donald or Hillary, will give me the fewest reasons for waking up with fear and dread on my face in the morning. That's the bottom line, what I call the Dread Factor."

"I find it intriguing that Hillary is associated with the most literate state in the U.S., New York, and also with the least literate state in the U.S., Arkansas. Isn't that an intriguing duality, that she has played the role of a Hillbilly and can now play the role of a Princess?"

"It probably isn't fair to Hillary to say that she was First Lady in the least literate state in the U.S. I am fairly sure that Mississippi has more illiteracy per capita than Arkansas has. But it is impressive that she has somehow toughed it out in the Ozarks in order to now claim the role of an Elegant First Female."


"If Donald gets elected, they'll have to re-write the book on American Statesmanship. I dread the first time he hosts a visiting head of state and publicly announces that his guest should be very grateful that President Trump didn't put poison in his guest's drink. And everyone is going to assume this is New York-style hospitality, so it could backfire against our entire metro area, since everyone associates Trump with Manhattan."

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please Leave Your Comments Here.