The Plague in New York, the Pox on America

“With our political and cultural situation having deteriorated far beyond where it was two decades ago, it is my hope that the long-overdue national cleansing and cultural revitalization this pestilence brings in its wake will last.”

It is ironic, is it not, that in this time in which we found ourselves most isolated from one another, we felt, at least for awhile, closer to each other than we have in many, many years?

Let us be frank: Pre-coronavirus New York was a city of pigs, the hog-wild epicenter of a nation increasingly resembling an unkempt, unrestrained pigsty. The standard of what had become acceptable public dress and behavior had deteriorated to the point where I would be pleasantly surprised if a subway ride or a walk along city streets did not yield some species of mild-to-moderate disgust. The onslaught could come at any moment. Everyone from Madison Avenue-clad teenage girls to immigrants just off the proverbial boat was spewing George Carlin’s seven dirty words in every possible configuration. Obese women—growing, with every passing year, more obese and more proud of themselves for their bodies that could have been showcases in a special exhibition devoted to the display of a health epidemic—were walking around in rolls-of-flab-baring crop tops and booty shorts that were a lot more booty than shorts. The customary gait of many grown men had become grotesque, some having taken to strutting around like pro wrestling villains sauntering down the aisle, while others duck-walked like toddlers, unable to propel themselves forward in any other manner due to their pants sagging below their underwear. For both genders, dirty, scruffy, dressed down, and tatted up had become an actual fashion choice. Rhetorical stylings had undergone a similar deformation, with scraggly white hipsters doing their best to imitate the latest in ill-bred, lazy-tongued ghetto slang while increasingly many people below a certain age were having a hard time enunciating more than a few consonants.

In the standards of appearance and conduct, in the arts, in sportsmanship, in every aspect of society, refinement was out; vulgarity was in.

Drugged-out zombies were sprawled out on subway steps or teetering in the middle of the sidewalk. Homeless nut jobs, drunks and junkies emboldened by the class-baiting, race-baiting Mayor de Blasio’s utter refusal to deploy cops to keep ordinary tax-paying citizens safe from harassment and the streets free of filth, were proliferating all over the city, filling and fouling up every spare corner, laying across entire subway benches with their massive stashes of trash in tow, making station platforms reek worse than the public restrooms at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Subway turnstile jumping had become a status symbol in certain circles. On streets and on trains, more and more seemingly normal people, having taken their cue from low-class thugs, had concluded it was okay to play their music or videos out loud for everyone to hear. Occupying multiple seats on crowded public transportation—or even placing feet on seats—was now just the way many people sat in the ordinary course of things. Routinely elevated speaking volume had become yet another form of encroachment upon other people’s space and peace of mind. In the standards of appearance and conduct, in the arts, in sportsmanship, in every aspect of society, refinement was out; vulgarity was in.