NY Primary

I’ve pretty much stopped posting here or anywhere else because—well, what’s the point? Masked bounty hunters are snatching people off the streets; not just climate science but cancer research is being demonized and de-funded, the newspapers are full of juicy details about the Bezos Sanchez nuptials while the Democratic party argues about whether they can engineer their comeback by attacking trans youth or disowning AOC. It’s just depressing as hell, and note that I didn’t say a word about Israel, Iran, or Ukraine.

When I got interested in poetry in highschool, I found a Modern Library anthology of modern verse in our house that was edited, I think, by Conrad Aiken. Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo” (a poem that has surely been scrubbed from every anthology in the world, as, I would bet, has Vachel Lindsay himself) was prominently featured; so was “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” (as in Willian Jennings Bryan, who is mostly remembered as the bad guy in the Scopes trial, but who was the dark horse that galvanized the Democrats with his “Cross of Gold” speech in the 1890s). I didn’t know who he was at the time, but its depiction of the hope Bryan inspired among the debt-ridden farmers and cattlemen in the nation’s interior and west inspired me:

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.

But then Mark Hanna and Wall Street rode in, and spent and demagogued McKinley into the White House, crushing all those tender hopes.

Then Hanna to the rescue, Hanna of Ohio,
Rallying the roller-tops,
Rallying the bucket-shops.
Threatening drouth and death,
Promising manna,
Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;
Invading misers' cellars, tin-cans, socks,
Melting down the rocks,
Pouring out the long green to a million workers,
Spondulix by the mountain-load, to stop each new tornado,
And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,
Populistic, anarchistic, deacon-desperado.

McKinley, of course, is Trump’s great hero because of his tariffs. Remember those? They were a big story a couple of weeks ago.

No, it’s not great poetry, but reading about Zohram Mamdani’s upset victory last night, I felt some of that same hope rising in me.

So here’s a true story that in retrospect seems like the only story. A couple of weeks ago, a college kid knocked on our door. He was canvasing for Cuomo, he told my wife, and wanted to know how we were voting. My wife told him he was out of luck; that we weren’t even ranking Cuomo. “Neither am I,” he said. “I hate Cuomo. I’m a paid canvaser and I’m just doing this for the money. I’m ranking Mamdani first.”

Funny story, right? And then Saturday, a young woman showed up to canvas for Cuomo and I talked to her. And the conversation went EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. “I hate him,” she said. “I’m not even going to rank him.” I don’t know what the end of this story will be. Maybe Adams and Sliwa and Cuomo will all cross-endorse each other and run the election as a referendum on anti-Semitism, since we know that the only reason anyone would vote for a Muslim would be because they hate Jews and Judaism. Maybe Jamie Dimon will threaten to move JP Morgan/Chase out of the city if Mamdani wins. Maybe Eric Adams will say that a vote for Mamdani is the moral equivalent of a vote for Strom Thurmond. Maybe Mark Hanna will come back from the dead and beat the cheapskate, blatherskite, populistic anarchistic deacon-desperado Muslim.

I don’t know. But I’ll take my hope where I can get it.