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Some day I plan to write about this. But there's so much about Rudy and Trump and a bunch of their entourage that is so immediately familiar if you've crossed paths, voluntarily or not, with a certain part of the New York business world and power elite. It's heavily ...
2/ centered in the real estate world but it's not limited to there. It's also the city's big money investor world and the population of lawyers, fixers, press handlers and hangers on who feed at the trough and live in that world. The cardinal thing is the consuming predatory ...
3/ impulse and the unitary nature of the power. Money, political power, secrets - it all mixes together as a common currency and one is easily translated into another much as Euros can be converted to dollars or pesos or rubles or anything else. Facts, tabloid stories ...
4/ things being silly or real or ridiculous is also all boiled down to power. The money, the lawyers, the political muscle. Often times, as this story unfolds we hear people asking, Do they really believe that? Do they know they're lying? At some level these questions ...
5/ are just silly. It's like if you're producing a play, if you're putting up the money, does that mean you believe the dialog accurately reflects something a real person actually said? If you know what a play is obviously this question is a non-sequitur. It's absurd.
6/ And if you understand these people and their context, whether they believe this or that latest story is basically the same thing. The question is absurd. It doesn't matter. This is just New York of course. This is extreme wealth and extreme power. I just focus on ...
7/ this city because it's the version of it I know and - importantly - it's where these guys and their whole world are from. Of course, it's also the world of Fox News. Made for Red State America but very much of the New York City money and power world.
8/ It's not a hidden world either. Indeed, there's a whole trend of high-end, frenetic TV dramas about, the most recent of which is @Succession_HBO. In his classic meditation on the Civil War Edmund Wilson, middle aged and far more cynical than the young man who had ...
9/ written To the Finland Station, cast aside all the gauzy sentiment and idealism Americans like to see in this horrific carnage. He compared the North and the South to sea slugs who kill and consume. “All animals must prey on some form of life that they can capture ...
10/ ... and all will eat as much as they can." Whether or not Wilson was write about Lincoln or human kind or the Civil War, this is unquestionable the ethos of that class.
