The “Real” America?

This morning pointed me to a Daily News story in which Mayor Bloomberg described my birthplace, Staten Island, as “more real America, in many senses, than any other part of this city.” Staten Island was a haven for Tories during the Revolutionary War and has not improved its outlook since. The Island votes consistently Republican in national elections and most Democratic pols in the borough run on the Conservative and Right-To-Life party lines as well. And growing up there in the 1960s and 70s, I lived in a segregated neighborhood and went to segregated schools until I escaped to Brooklyn when I went to college.

This, apparently, is the “real America” to the Mayor, despite the Island’s continual bleats about seceding from New York City. (Apparently, some Islanders think their property taxes are too low and their police and fire services too professional.)

And now Bloomberg is parading around in a cowboy hat celebrating his capture of the Country Music Awards from Nashville. Now, I play a lot of (traditional) country music, and it’s tremendously popular in the city right now, but I think Nashville probably has more of a claim to that music than New York City does. And I think a billionaire who lives on the Upper East Side has no business in a Stetson.

When are Bloomberg and Giuliani going to figure out that no matter how much ludicrous posturing they do, and no matter how many boots they lick in the national Repugnant party, they’ll never get over being ethnically, religiously and politically at odds with the red-meat Christian Taliban types who run the GOP nowadays?