The ’70s Again, with a Transgender Bonus

[Valin]

Quadrant Magazine:

Muggers are prowling Central Park once more while public nuisances shake down New York's motorists and crime soars. Welcome to the increasingly bruised Big Apple of Mayor Bill de Blasio, his progressive agenda -- and the inevitable results

Roger Kimball

July 06th 2015

 

Welcome to the 1970s! In New York, anyway, one of the decades Tom Wolfe denominated “purple” has made a stunning comeback. Consider crime. After a precipitous decline that began under the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani and continued under Michael Bloomberg, violent crime has soared in the city. From May 2014 to the end of May this year, shootings increased almost 10 per cent while murders jumped a stunning 19.5 per cent during the same period. Meanwhile, Central Park has once again become a haven for thieves and muggers. “Police are investigating another mugging in Central Park,” begins a May 20 story in the New York Post, “the latest in a string of robberies that has residents on edge.”

 

Ah, the good old days! It used to be that when you drove into New York, you would find yourself besieged after crossing the tunnels or bridges into the city by a phalanx of “squeegee men”, mostly unemployed, mostly black chaps who assail motorists with a spray bottle and window squeegee. You’re stopped at a light and they pounce: squirt, squirt: a soapy film dribbles across your windscreen accompanied by a minatory demand for payment to skim it off. “Squeegee men are back terrorizing NYC streets,” screamed one headline. Over at National Review, Kevin Williamson noted this dubious renaissance and reported on a novel variation:

 

 

Squeegee Man is making a comeback, both in his traditional form … and in a new, mutant form: Sunday Hijacker. Sunday Hijacker is cleverer and more cynical than his predecessor, and his modus operandi is to make a scene inside a church during worship until somebody pays him to go away. Screaming, knocking over furnishings, and threatening violence are his shtick.

 

 

Wot larks! If you visited New York in the 1970s or 1980s, you’ll remember the hordes of homeless people congregated in doorways and over subway grates? They’re back! In the 1970s, we owed their presence partly to the courtesy of President Carter, who decided, like the new-age psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, that mental illness was a “myth” and that these folks were better off on the city’s streets than burdening the state’s hospital budget. Rudy Giuliani thought differently, and his “broken windows” policing policies help rid New York’s streets of these unfortunate people, just as those policies made quick work of the three-card-monte hucksters, the panhandlers on street corners and subways, the tramps, hustlers, thieves and aspirant muggers that made New York one of the dirtiest and most dangerous cities in America.

 

(Snip)

 

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