The way the world ends
This last week's been a journey, as I joined CBS Eye on the World With John Batchelor to talk about refugees, migration and American fears, spoke with Jumanne Williams on FAQ NYC as he prepares to run for governor next year, and got quoted in Olivia Nuzzi's excellent [New York Magazine profile of inexhaustible gossip monger Cindy Adams] (pictured here with Roy Cohn back in the day) (https://www.thecut.com/article/cindy-adams-ny-post-gossip.html/):
One frequent target of the tabloids put it this way: “Do you matter in New York City if Cindy Adams doesn’t shit on you? It’s a rite of passage.” Daily News columnist Harry Siegel said he finds value in her “crazy, garbled Winchell shorthand” because she reflects the thinking of her social circle, “a bunch of guys like Trump and Catsimatidis” who exist mostly in analog. “This is where their information is flowing through. She is still, at 91, a conduit for that,” Siegel said. “It’s all through her narrator voice. None of the sentences have all that much meaning. Everything’s soup — but it’s very useful soup. It’s this general mushy-minded understanding of older people, and all of them are talking but I’m not privy to those conversations.” The tabloid target agreed. “People are more likely to see you quoted there than in The Atlantic.”
And, speaking of figures from previous eras, my Daily News column on what sould be the last days of Governor Andrew Cuomo starts with T.S. Eliot and ends with L. Cohen:
A hollow man’s long goodbye: Gov. Cuomo’s ignominious end
This is how it ends for three-term imperial Gov. Andrew Cuomo, not with a bang but with a whimper.
That’s a nasty joke that suits the moment, with U-Haul trucks appearing at the executive mansion on Friday and the clock ticking on the final days of the two weeks the governor gifted himself in the course of resigning from that office while Cuomo’s people keep pushing the ridiculous idea that “this is the first sex scandal in history in which there wasn’t any sex” as if abusing his power over women who he hired because he wanted to sleep with them was just fine since he apparently didn’t succeed in pestering or pressuring any of them into doing so.
Cuomo has no other home to move to, though he’ll leave this one with an annual $50,000 public pension along with the $2 million he’s still due to collect for his quickie How I Beat the Virus book — never mind that New York had the nation’s highest death count last year or that he used government staffers to help him write it or that the publisher stopped promoting the book and doesn’t plan to reprint or reissue it because of everything that’s come out about his efforts to cover up nursing home deaths, which remain the subject of a federal investigation.
Suffice to say that he’s in a much better position than all the renters (and their landlords) counting on the $2.7 billion in federal rent relief that Cuomo has almost completely failed to get into the hands of New Yorkers.
He doesn’t have to go home, like the bartender says, but he can’t stay there. He’s not planning to be gone for long, though. He’ll take a staggering $18 million in campaign cash with him, and while Cuomo himself has laid low, he’s dispatched his remaining surrogates, most of them on the public payroll, to follow his father’s old enemy Roy Cohn’s advice: “no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.”
So even with Kathy Hochul taking center stage as she prepares to assume power, there was senior adviser Rich Azzopardi writing in The News about how Cuomo was railroaded by a cabal of socialists, and Secretary Melissa DeRosa tweeting up a storm about Cuomo’s accomplishments, and lawyer Rita Glavin putting on still another presser to put out even more insinuations about Cuomo’s many accusers.
A man who’s spent his life on the public stage and whose family has governed New York for the majority of my lifetime is built to go on endlessly about being New York Tough, but he simply isn’t tough enough to accept his loss or really any responsibility for his actions.
Anyone who’s heard Cuomo talk understands how much he loves the sound of his own voice and the feeling of command coming from behind it. He’s telling New Yorkers that there are no goodbyes, only see you laters — maybe even next year.
He’s been sorry, he’s been angry, and he’ll be anything it takes to keep people listening as his voice is finally drying up.
“The Hollow Men” was the title of T.S. Eliot’s 1924 poem, which famously concludes:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
But it’s the start of that poem — about, among other things, nation-states set adrift, hopelessness, and a failing marriage, all themes Cuomo can relate to — that keeps running through my head as this supposedly indispensable man drags out the end:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
As a hollow man makes his overdue exit, I’ll end by adapting a great closing line from another poet:
That’s all. I won’t think of you that often.
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