I’ve written before about how Bloomberg and the forces of the New New York Order have done a thorough job of “cleaning up” the city. Like eager beavers, The Joneses have white-washed graffiti, planted trees, installed bike lanes, torn down raggedy old newsstands and replaced them with glass boxes, and bulldozed neighborhoods to make room for bigger glass boxes–all of it shiny, happy.
With four more years of Bloomberg, they’ll be turning their full attention to you and me. For what good is a sleek, streamlined city if it’s full of people who clash with the decor?
Smoking will be banned from parks and streets. Smoking gives you wrinkles, and an oxygen tank is not an acceptable accessory to wear with a little black dress. Of course, it’s the working-class and the poor who cry foul on this one. Said one construction worker to the Times, “What–are they talking about having a body-odor ticket ?” Hey, that could be next.
New York’s health commissioner, Thomas Farley, announced he is targeting citizens of the outer boroughs, to steer them towards the more superior shapes of their (thinner, richer) neighbors in Manhattan. The Neighborhood Retail Alliance calls this move “a government sponsored exercise regime in order to engineer a healthier citizenry.”
That phrase sums it up. You are being engineered, by the government, to look like the Ideal Manhattanite–slim, sleek, cool as glass.
If you want to see what the outcome will be, click on over to Svedka’s Bot Builder, where you can “party like it’s 2033″ (Bloomberg will be in his 8th term?) and see what happens when you combine your DNA with a condo tower . It’s nothing new, really, the Clone Wars of New York have been raging for years now.
It’s tough to fight against it, because trees are nice, bicycling is good, smoking is bad, etc. It’s so very black and white. Right?
But the Orwellian undertones aren’t buried so deep. And we have to wonder what it is in Bloomberg’s psyche that is making him launch this campaign against the messy.
In The Huffington Post awhile back, Dan Pashman posed the theory that Bloomberg, a junk-food junkie, “is essentially turning his own self-loathing on the rest of the city . He’s asking us to pay for his gustatory transgressions. Bill Clinton felt our pain. Bloomberg wants us to feel his.”
And this is what narcissists do. Filled with self-loathing they cannot tolerate, they project their “bad” insides onto other people and the external world. With the bad pushed out, the narcissist feels a brief relief. But here’s the rub: The narcissist also needs to be mirrored by that same world. In order to maintain the narcissist’s vulnerable self-image, the exterior must be ideal.
So the mirror–in this case, New York and its inhabitants–must be renovated, all of its dirty, messy chaos erased and replaced with squeaky-clean order that the narcissist can idealize and, through its reflection, see him/herself as perfect, too.
“Human perfection,” says the ad campaign for the movie Surrogates , “What could go wrong?”
ryan
