Who says that Tucson isn’t hip, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, avant-garde, at the leading edge of progressive thinking, and in touch with the zeitgeist of college-educated youth on economics, diversity, and social justice?
It’s actually ahead of New York City.
Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist and a Muslim of East Indian descent, has won the NYC Democrat primary against Andrew Cuomo, my paisano in skin shade and ethnicity but not in politics or ethics. One of Mamdani’s campaign planks among other socialist planks was free bus rides.
Tucson already has free bus rides.
Mamdani has also pledged to enact even tighter rent controls and lower the cost of living in the city by nationalizing (city-izing?) grocery stores, among other crackpot ideas.
Well, Pima County has already committed hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing in metro Tucson, because, after all, the government has done wonders with housing and mortgage rates over the decades.
New York and national media have described Mamdani’s base as educated members of the working class who can’t afford to live in the city, such as—I kid you not—software programmers and artists.
Huh? Those are working class?
My dad was a tile setter, my fraternal grandfather was a coal miner, and my maternal grandfather was a waiter. I’ve mistakenly believed all these years that they were working class.
If they can’t afford to live in NYC, why don’t the NYC software geeks move to Austin, and the artists to Santa Fe?
To demonstrate our IQ, my wife and I moved in the other direction. We moved from Phoenix to the Jersey side of metro New York in 1981 and would go on to live there for ten years. At the time, the city was at its nadir of progressive rule. It resembled a dystopia.
Taking a bus into the city and getting off at the Port Authority Bus Terminal was like stepping into Bangladesh, except Bangladesh was safer. The terminal was rivaled in nasty conditions by the third-world conditions at Newark Airport at the time.
Upon exiting the bus terminal, the first memorable sight was a homeless guy sleeping on a tattered recliner on the sidewalk. Attached to the recliner was a patio umbrella. A prime location, for sure. As they say in real estate, location, location, location.
In Tucson, the best real estate for the homeless is covered bus stops.
Driving into Manhattan on weekends was also special. The squeegee men would surround our car upon exiting the Lincoln Tunnel and engage in their extortion racket. Pretending that they were offering a windshield-cleaning service, they would either spit on our windshield or threaten to spit on it. We and other drivers quickly learned to hand them a couple of bucks before they could spit.
We would park our car in a public parking garage near Times Square. The garage reeked of urine. Come to think of it, all of Times Square reeked of urine, or whatever the odor was. The main business at the time was peep shows.
Our choice of transportation from there was either a taxi, the subway, or walking. Taxis were expensive, not air-conditioned in the sultry summer, and akin to a demolition derby. Subway cars were covered in graffiti and grime, and the subways smelled worse than the sewers when I worked for the sewer district in my boyhood home of St. Louis to earn money for college.
We usually chose walking, being careful to avoid streets covered in piles of garbage.
Sometimes we’d walk uptown to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; other times we’d walk downtown through the Village.
The World Trade Center towers were still standing then. One evening, when my mom was visiting and Kim was out of town, I took Mom for dinner at the Windows on the World on the 100th floor of the WTC. We arrived at sunset and had a table with an uptown view. The city looked like a jewel and smelled okay from that altitude.
At an adjoining table, the bejeweled female companion of a middle-age guy was passed out with her head on the table throughout the dinner.
In the middle of dinner, my mom began choking. I asked her, “Is something caught in your throat? Can you breathe?” She nodded yes to the first question and no to the second. I told her to stand up and then proceeded to do the Heimlich maneuver on her. A large piece of lamb flew out of her mouth like a Tomahawk missile. Neither the wait staff nor other diners showed any concern.
New York is indeed a sophisticated city.
After Kim and I returned to Phoenix in 1991, another paisano, Rudy Giuliani, became mayor of NYC. He cleaned up the city, prosecuted the Mafia, dramatically cut crime, and unleashed prosperity by reversing leftist lunacy. Ironically, he would later exhibit lunacy himself and destroy his reputation by his legal machinations on behalf of fellow New Yorker, Donald Trump.
Tucsonans shouldn’t be miffed that Mamdani stole Tucson’s idea of free bus rides. After all, as socioeconomic conditions in Tucson show, the Old Pueblo not only stole the failed progressive policies of 1980s New York but has doubled-down on them.
When Mr. Cantoni is not picking up litter in his adopted hometown of Tucson, he can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.
Social and economic misfortune is the last thing we should wish upon our starboard countrymen, but when you see them doing stupid stuff that’s failed repeated during the last century, one has to just let the baby touch the stove; the lesson and empathy come afterwards.
From where the delusion comes that Tucson is “hip, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, avant-garde”. I just had a cross-country trip to Virginia and back and have seen many cities. In comparison, Tucson is a dump!
Uncle Craig, YOU ARE OVER THE TARGET!
nice save – how many more years did mom live?
this Tucson think is nothing new – move on to the next taco stand. Drugsters in the alley – dead people in the bushes – then shines to their demise glorification of the their passing.. hey they’ OD’d of their own cause and accord – SAD NO DOUBT – not much to remember except the CITY DID NOTHING TO STOP IT. Being ‘armed’ is becoming a way of ‘life’