Gotham in Decline

Those of us who grew up in New York City in the 1980s have troubling memories of a grimy, graffiti-ridden urban landscape where danger was a part of everyday life and you could not walk the streets without anticipating the possibility of becoming a victim of harassment or worse.

The election of Rudolph Giuliani in the 1993 mayoral race drew howls of outrage from the left, but under Giuliani, and his police commissioner William Bratton, the city at last began to make steps to becoming slightly more civilized and habitable. The tough approach continued under Michael Bloomberg, but it came to an abrupt end under Bill de Blasio, who rejected tough policing as unfair to minorities in New York. De Blasio did not seem to understand or care that while crime and disorder affected almost everyone, those who benefited most from a decline in the homicide rate were precisely the city’s racial minorities.

Now, at the end of De Blasio’s awful tenure, incidents happen every day that cannot fail to summon memories of the 1980s.

Germany’s Man of the Hour

The Economist of December 11-17 features a profile of Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The article, “Enter the Quiet Man,” presents Scholz as a moderate pragmatist with a strong work ethic. According to the article, some of Scholz’s fellow Social Democrats find him a bit too moderate, far from the politician who would be needed to spearhead a reenergized European left.

Or at least that was the case until the Covid pandemic came along, the article tells us.

On North Korea

Another article in The Economist, Sunflower state ,” presents the findings of researchers from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, an organization based in Seoul. With neither the freedom to choose between a vocation and spending time with family, nor the competitive salaries that they might be earning in western countries, men in North Korea may come to feel something the class-tinged resentment that finally turns one of the protagonists of Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite homicidal. But overthrowing a totalitarian regime by force from the inside is arguably an even more doomed proposition than acting out a revenge fantasy against a callous and snooty upper-class family.

On Joan Didion

The website Book and Film Globe, edited by Neal Pollack, features my thoughts on the passing of Joan Didion, the pioneering and prolific essayist, memoirist, critic, and novelist who showed us all how porous the borders between fiction and nonfiction narrative really are. To read Didion is to see that there is no reason an account of a trip to El Salvador, a Doors rehearsal, a Bay Area courtroom during a trial of Black Panthers accused of murder, or a stint in New York City during a tender and impressionable time of life cannot have all the passion, drive, and power of riveting fiction. Since Didion’s passing on Thursday, December 23, tributes have come pouring in from critics, journalists, editors, and publishers all over the world, and I tried in my Book and Film Globe piece to convey at least some sense of why readers are so passionate about the late celebrity.