The lessons of New York’s carnage

I am seriously thinking of visiting a shrink (just kidding) as I now have definite proof that I am crazy. Instead of remaining in England and going to Badminton for the Duke of Beaufort’s seventieth birthday bash and catching a glimpse of the love of my life, Iona McLaren, I find myself in a rotten place where a small headline in the New York Post announces: “sixteen shot during bloody day in NYC.”

All I can say is that the Bagel’s salad days are over. The streets are awash with homeless druggies who are violent and perform their functions right out in the open, even on Park Avenue. Random violence is an everyday happening on the subway, and unhinged whackos, when they’re not attacking them, shout at women and children. So commonplace are shootings that a man who shot ten people last April on the subway is no longer even mentioned. Creeps attack mostly women or the aged in all five boroughs, and if they’re arrested, they are often immediately let go following the recent no-bail laws.

And yet here I am, a Bagel bum, braving loons all day and night in a crappy city instead of being at Badminton — and for what? Why leave a peaceful London full of friends to come over here and be forced to look over my shoulder as I walk the streets? Once upon a time, walking up and down Fifth, Madison and Park Avenues was a pleasure. They were packed with beautiful women dressed to the nines doing their shopping and whatever else women used to do before #MeToo turned them into aggressive harridans. (They look different, too, these days, with tights making them resemble female Soviet shot-putters of the 1950s.)

Never mind. There are lessons to be learned from all this carnage. The mayor, whose name is Adams, is an improvement on the last one, but that’s like saying being eaten by a shark is better than being dragged underwater and torn to pieces by a crocodile. Instead of fighting the war on out-of-control crime, Adams has turned the city into a vast welcome mat for migrants who have slipped into Texas and New Mexico. At last count, two million have come into the States this year alone, four million since Biden took over. And you thought Britain was in trouble with only thousands having crossed.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that if you have more criminals on the street, you have more crime. Bail reform in 2020 allowed 2,000 career criminals and repeat offenders out of the pokey and into polite society. So what do you think happened? Duh! Crime went through the roof, into double and triple digits. As I write, a heroic sixty-one-year-old female firefighter, a mother who risked her life back on 9/11, is stabbed to death while lunching by a man she’s never seen before and for absolutely no reason. Murdering a heroic firefighter-paramedic, and a mother to boot, has to be the most egregious of crimes. But the killer’s mental health is bound to be brought up by some do-gooder. Baloney like, “He was a good son,” is certain to be mentioned. I’m so sick and tired of do-gooders, and the excuses they come up with, that I find myself wondering what they’d say if they’d had a taste of what the victims have suffered.

Then we have the toxic notion that borders are illegitimate, as are boundaries, and that national sovereignty is itself a racist construct. This is prevalent both in the US and the UK. Who and what are we? That’s an easy one: the Bagel Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC. And, of course, that nice guy in the White House who spoke so movingly after the recent state funeral in London about what a great queen Marie Antoinette was and how he’ll miss her. My, things have changed. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, claimed that in America, nature was weaker, less active and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions than in the Old World. The number of species was fewer and the animals much smaller.

Unfortunately for the count, he presented his case in the presence of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson at a dinner party in Passy. A playful Franklin, sitting with the rest of the Yanks on one side of the table, asked the Frogs sitting on the other side to stand up at the same time as the Americans. The latter towered over the Frogs, who all looked like shrimps.

Franklin and Jefferson were Brits who died Americans. Both were close to six feet tall, and we certainly could use their oversized brains today.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2022 World edition.