Russia and the United States: Imitation Might Be Sincerest Flattery, But Is It Smart?

 Hanna Notte's This Is Not the World Russia Wants (Foreign Affairs) raised everal questions that I am going to throw out into the ether.

First the thesis:

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine marked only the peak of Russia’s long turn toward revisionism. Since the Cold War ended, Russia has sought to shape Europe’s security architecture and impose its will on smaller neighbors. The Kremlin has also clashed with the United States and Europe at the United Nations and in other multilateral bodies. Its leaders condemned the concept of a rules-based international order as a Western invention meant to cement U.S. hegemony. Styling itself as a vanguard promoting a more multipolar order, Russia sought to increase its own global clout, unencumbered by restraints and rules.

But now it finds itself in the curious position of watching the United States behave more like Russia. On the surface, this may seem a boon for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead of contending with a Washington that resists his land grabs and tussles with him in multilateral forums, he has a simpatico U.S. president who appears to ascribe to his might-makes-right worldview. Donald Trump has bashed international institutions in language reminiscent of Russian broadsides, withdrawing the United States from dozens of UN agencies and stripping them of funding while launching a rival conflict-settlement body, the Board of Peace. And he has asserted a right to coerce, even attack, smaller countries in the style of Russia’s bullying.

My questions:

1. Is this a benefical unintended consequence of Trump's foreign misadventures abroad?
2. Can we now see Putin is a fool and Trump is even more foolish calling him a smart one? 
3. What happens to us when China also rejects the rules and begins bullying its neighbors?

 ....And although it has lent Tehran some support in the form of targeting data and operational guidance, Moscow has refrained from intervening directly to defend Iran in the current war. Russia’s refusal to risk entanglement on behalf of its partners has been a matter of political calculation, not just a function of resource constraints. Still, as Moscow sees it, Trump is shaping a world in which “the weak get beaten,” as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a March interview. To ensure that the United States cannot beat Russia, Russian experts and officials have hinted, it must leave no doubt as to the formidability of its nuclear weapons.

And this wants me to substitute Russia for us:

 Instead, by dismantling the post–Cold War international system, Trump is taking over Russia’s mission. And Moscow will have to contend with something messier, a world with no stable frameworks or reliable rules of the game.

sch 5/8 

 

What Has Not Changed In Over 50 Years: Gore Vidal, Garry Wills, Nixon

 I was working on a post, getting distracted by an eruption of pain, when I ran across the first video below.

Garry Wills came to my attention during law school with his Inventing America. I kept reading him over the years, but not exhaustively. 

Gore Vidal, I have been reading since Burr, and have tried to read as much of him as I can.

Because of these two writers, I would not call myself either a liberal or a conservative. I would have called myself a cynic at one time. Today, I will call myself an ironist.

 Vidal and Wills do not meet in the video. Too bad, that would have been an interesting conversation in my opinion. 

I went looking for a possible meeting of the two. No luck. 

However, I thought that I would tack on some of what I did find. Both Wills and Vidal have faded over the years. Vidal is dead, but his work declined before then. Wills is in his nineties which makes him somewhat retired. 

The sad decline of Gore Vidal, America’s most acerbic writer and fearsome feuder (The Independent) does a very good job of summarizing his career (albeit it omits his playwrighting career).

But Vidal was much more than a talk-show star and literary gadfly. He deserves respect for his historical fiction. Vidal’s profound sense of America’s past was demonstrated in his Narratives of Empire novels – Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000) – which, taken together, offer a coherent view of the nation’s decline. I would also highly recommend Essays, United States 1952-92, a deserved winner of the 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Some books, including his religious satire Live From Golgotha, are perhaps best forgotten. 

I did not like The Golden Age; Live From Golgotha, at least, has humor. Here is the conclusion:

Although it is only 13 years since Vidal left what he called “this ark of fools”, he already seems a polymath from a lost age, the sort of acerbic, insightful political commentator missing in a social media age of foghorn popular pundits such as Piers Morgan. But when all is said and done, fame is fleeting; Vidal’s desire to be remembered as the person who wrote the best sentences of his age was always doomed. At Harvard, according to Leslie Morris, the Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, the item that attracts the greatest attention is Vidal’s screenplay for the porn film Caligula – which he himself described as “easily one of the worst films ever made”.

Garry Wills at 90: The influential historian has become his own iconoclast (Chicago Tribune) performs a similar service for Wills.

Thankfully slower, you might say: For six decades, including 30 years at Northwestern, Wills was an intimidating, supremely confident, fearless intellect, a provocative iconoclast so prolific that his 50-odd books include classics (“Inventing America,” “Nixon Agonistes”), game-changers (“The Kennedy Imprisonment”) and one Pulitzer winner (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”), as well as works on religion, theater, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, politics and religion, politics and paranoia, opera, the A-bomb, the Greeks, the Romans. To say he challenged conventional wisdom is to understate the subversion that Wills became known for: His books advanced the idea of Nixon as the sympathetic “last liberal” and Reagan as a self-mythologizer. He argued a president is not really a commander-in-chief. He argued the United States does not have a Constitution if one politician holds the unilateral authority to launch nukes. Here was a Catholic who wrote a book on why we didn’t need priests. Here was a pacifist whose father taught boxing.

Here was a conservative — “I’m still conservative by temperament” — recruited to the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. himself, who would then be arrested for protesting Vietnam. Here was a historian summoned to the Obama White House in 2009 to give a new president some advice. The room included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley and Wills, and when it came time for him to offer wisdom, he told the president to get the hell out of Afghanistan, quick.

The closest I came to Wills and Vidal crossing paths is in Garry Wills says people are being taken in by the Buckley myth (HNN excerpting part of a New York Review of Books essay (which may be behind a paywall).

I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public. There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal. One of the broadcasts, which the documentary makes much light of, took place while police and protesters were battling in the streets of Chicago—and things were not going so well inside the TV studio either, since at one point Buckley said to Vidal, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” 

sch 5/6 

 

5/9 - 5/11: Sleepwalking; How Indiana Sucks; Woodrow Wilson Sucking; Iran; Lady Chatterley; Cadillac Ranch

Do I go to Liturgy this morning? It is an hour off, but I am getting light-headed.

I finished revising “The Unintended Consequences of Art” yesterday. After that Iw ent off to Walmart. When I got back here, I got off the computer and started reading and started to fall asleep. Off to bed, thinking I would sleep the night away. That was around 8 PM. Only I was awake at midnight. 

It has been over 12 hours since I ate. Liturgy requires fasting. This might be causing my lightheadedness. 

I did not go to church on Sunday. My driver was ill and I was having a resurgence of pain in my posterior. Thinking I needed to do something constructive, I worked on “The Unintended Consequences”. I was not writing from scratch, so I expected to get the thing done. Nope. I remained lethargic all day. I had this same problem this past Thursday and Friday. 

Saturday I did get to Liturgy, Payless for groceries, and then nothing much done for the rest of the day but a few pages of “The Unintended Consequences”. MW called as I was applying an ice pack to my problematic area.

Another reason why living in Indiana sucks: Hicks Commentary: The Anti-Philanthropy Monopolists of Indiana.

At the same time, Indiana’s five largest nonprofit hospitals earned net income of more than $1.8 billion. These were: IU Health ($1.13 billion), Parkview Health ($279.3 million), Ascension St. Vincent ($250 million), Franciscan Health ($45 million) and Deaconess Health ($109.8 million).

To add insult to injury, these hospitals received donations from in-state residents and philanthropies that range from $101.7 million to $121.7 million. After all, they are “nonprofits.”

My favorite example of this is in Muncie, where the philanthropic community proudly reported that in 2023 it donated $21 million to causes within the county. In that same year, IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital reported $58 million in net income.

Creating a local monopoly unfettered by state enforcement of antitrust laws is a great gig.

***

One piece of good news is that the Indiana legislature is slowly taking them to task on these problems. But, they continue to engage in anticompetitive practices at a scale and pace that would’ve made John D. Rockefeller blush. In fact, when I teach two chapters of monopolization and antitrust, I’ve substituted Indiana’s hospitals for the textbook case of Standard Oil v. U.S.

That 1911 case saw Rockefeller’s company sued for vertical foreclosure (like buying up physician practices), predatory pricing (like undercharging competitors to run them out of business) and secret rebates to suppliers (like facility fees, anti-steering clauses in hospitals or turbo-charging list prices). This case set the stage for antitrust enforcement that seems to be dormant in Indiana.

It’s the best classroom example of anticompetitive behavior in America today, and that’s a damning fact about Indiana.

My mother's mother once told me Woodrow Wilson was the greatest President. Her father was elected Ripley County Clerk in 1912; I have assumed he ran as a Wilsonian. I had to read a biography in college; the author I have forgotten, but the book was short.  Gore vidal also did his bit to diminish Wilson. My views have changed; my admiration is far more qualified than my grandmother's. Points for the League and anti-trust; demerits for segregating DC, for his arrogance, and for persecuting Debs. American Heritage just published Woodrow Wilson Reconsidered; which lays out succinctly why Princeton needed to take his name of its institutions. Important, yes; not great in the sense of living up to our better angels.

Though he stood athwart it over his long career as a political scientist and through both of his presidential elections, the great civil rights advance of the Anthony Amendment ranks also as a defining element of Wilson’s legacy. The amendment’s ultimate success shines more brightly for having overcome his stubborn opposition, and the racist motive that lay behind it.

This, Wilson’s greatest moral failure, set twentieth-century America on a tragic course that we in the present day still struggle to correct. Long after his death, as his grievous faults come into focus alongside his positive achievements, the schoolmaster president continues to teach us. 

Iran and the Revolution by Homa Katouzian review – how the Islamic Republic was born hits on a point that I think has been forgotten about Iran:

All revolutions are accompanied by a degree of self-deception: without that, they would never succeed. Katouzian gives the best description I have seen of the odd alliance between the rebarbative ultra-conservative clergy and the leftwing Iranian intellectuals who managed to persuade themselves that Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran would open the door to democracy, liberty of expression and true socialism. “Why are you so bloody optimistic?” I asked a British-educated former member of the Majlis, or parliament, who had just got back to his flat, sweaty and exhilarated, from welcoming the Ayatollah in the tumultuous streets of Tehran. “Anything is better than the shah,” he answered, “and Khomeini will be easy to get round. He’s just a bigoted old ignoramus, after all.”

Having met and interviewed Khomeini outside Paris at Neauphle-le-Château a couple of weeks earlier, I wasn’t convinced, and I was right. My friend died in Evin prison a year or so later, in a way I prefer not to think about; Khomeini stayed in power until his death 10 years later, and handed on the system which has lasted, largely unchanged and certainly unmoderated, until today. As Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are discovering, merely chopping off the regime’s head is absolutely pointless. Its strength goes far deeper than that.

The Iranian Revolution did not start a religious revolution than the Russian Revolution started as a Leninist project. But Khomeini and Lenin were the ones steadfast in their pursuit of power.

 Lady C by Guy Cuthbertson review – how Lady Chatterley’s Lover rocked Britain may be the best recommendation for a novel I thought was dull.

I saw this when I was 14 and had no idea what it was until Springsteen released The River: Cadillac Ranch. 

 

sch 5/12

 

TJ 2010 - Part 5 of 5

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

This is a long, long piece written while I was in pretrial detention but is not actually notes about pretrial detention. I quite preposterously labeled it as autobiography. However, the first 36 pages are missing, and so are the years 1978–May 1982. 

This is continued from TJ 2010 - Part 4 of 5.

sch 5/4/2026] 

In the decade before incarceration, I came to believe that my ambition to prove myself to friends and family by getting to law school created the real harm to TJ and me. That if I had been more flexible with my career choices, we would have stayed together. Not much I can do with that insight at the time. However, that insight might date the beginning of a sincere disenchantment with the practice of law. That conflicted with my need for economic survival. That need meant pushing any resentments about practicing law as far back into my brain as possible,

Music stopped being so important to me as it had been with TJ. I divide my bands into pre-TJ and after TJ. I had my stereo system stolen in the autumn of 1983, and I never tried to replace what TJ helped create.

TJ was the benchmark against what I judged all other women. The cruel, the stupid, or the plain boring never got a bid. Those with kind hearts, a lively sense of humor, and an adventuresome personality were biddable. They were 5'6” or taller, and being in good shape only made them more likely. Exceptions existed on superficial things (a certain blonde comes to mind), but the substantive exceptions reinforced the rule. Even my ex-wife had comparisons to TJ.

I saw TJ three times after January of 1985. The first time was around Christmas of 1985. She was pregnant with Mike's child. (This one did not miscarry, and she should now be about twenty-four years old. Yes, time flies.) All I remember is me telling her that our lives were diverging and we would soon be strangers to one another. I made her cry one more time.

 The next time came in 1989, when TJ set me up with one of her neighbors in Florida. I flew down there. After all, who better to trust for selecting a blind date than an ex-girlfriend? I was a flop. The high point was hanging out with TJ and Mike and getting to see Pet Cemetery with the blind date. There was no sex. Nice girl, but the whole exercise degenerated from harum-scarum adventure to ponderously dull discomfort on both sides of the equation.

I last saw TJ in 1995. T2 had taken me along on vacation to Florida. I talked her into driving down to Orlando to meet with TJ and her family. We all went to eat out at a Chinese buffet. T2 was on edage. She could not understand how one could stay friends with a former lover. TJ remained her usual friendly, gracious, vivacious self. I could tell she was happy with Mike. That she was happy made me happy.

But all that came to an end. I represented Mike in a child support case that did not go the way TJ thought it should. She wrote me a letter complaining about the outcome. I read only the first page condemning me and never read any further. Like most clients, anything that went against them was the attorney's fault. Later, her oldest sister told me that TJ had told Mike not to pay child support until he got visitation, and so caused the problem. That was 1996. I never spoke with TJ again.

For all that happened, I never felt any anger towards her. Our failure was my failure. What I had with her was a respite from all the demands and responsibilities imposed by the family, or that I accepted from the family. When I let the family responsibilities intrude, there was a rift between us. Only then did peace escape me.

One memory kept recurring as I wrote this. I am walking south on the fourth floor of Ball State's old East Quad. TJ stands in the corner next to my classroom. I am in a bad mood. I had been wanting this copy of Bob Dylan's "Words and Drawings", and I had stopped by the bookstore on the way to class. TJ's brown eyes are downcast as she listens to my complaints. Then that smile that could swallow me whole lights up her face. Those big brown eyes glitter as she hands something to me. She had been the buyer of the last copy of the Dylan book. I still have that book. When my stepson tore the book's spine, I felt part of me was torn.

 [I still have the Dylan book. It is one of the few books surving my incarceration and divorce and various moves before all of that. TJ and I spoke a few times after I was released. She surprised me by knowing I had been arrested; I guess she did keep some tabs on me. I sent her an early version of my "Dead and Dying" stories, and have heard nothing further from her. Messages left on her voicemail were not returned. In the past year, or two, her phone number changed after 40 years. There is no indication she is dead, but I have no means of finding out why she went silent. It would take a personal visit to find out what happened, but I have neither time nor funds to do so. Then, too, if I did have time and money, I cannot find in myself the energy to do so; her disappearance bothers without being an obsession. Another friend gone. 

By the way, describing A- as my ex-wife makes me want to put the date of these notes to July or August of 2010.

 

 sch 5/4/2026.]

TJ 2010 - Part 4 of 5

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

This is a long, long piece written while I was in pretrial detention but is not actually notes about pretrial detention. I quite preposterously labeled it as autobiography. However, the first 36 pages are missing, and so are the years 1978–May 1982. sch 5/4/2026] 

 About this time, TJ met Mike. Things were a bit tense with me being away from her for the first time in years and years. She thought I might be straying. I never had any suspicion of her until just before the start of law school. TJ and I had a date, and I came down to take her out. I stopped at Anderson to see a friend of mine, flirted a bit with this woman in his office named Michelle Moon, and then went to meet TJ. She was not there. She at Mike's. I got mad. I went back to Anderson. I wound up taking out Michelle and spending the night with her. I also spent the following night.

 I hope everyone recognizes this type of behavior does not help fragile relationships. It did not help me and my relationship with TJ.

 TJ helped me move to Valparaiso for law school. Her parents brought her up one weekend. (The last home game of the Chicago White Sox was that weekend; TJ's father was a fan.) That was the last time we were together. She was firmly unconvinced I was not chasing other females. Then I came home for Thanksgiving Break.

That Thanksgiving Break, I learned that Mom was dying and TJ no longer loved me. A good time was had by no one during that break. I was more than a bit out of my head and acted the ass.

 I gave TJ and me one more try on New Year's Eve. Mike was there when I arrived, and so I left with a promise to return. TJ was a mess. Obviously drunk and angry, TJ had taken a steak knife to her wrists. Her cousin Julie was also there. The cousin told her that her maternal grandmother had to pull me off her cousin. It did not matter to her whether this was true or not (and it was not). Julie had given TJ some pills to calm her down. Instead, TJ learned a serrated steak knife is no good for a suicide. The pills had no calming effect. By ourselves in her parents' living room. TJ started kicking at kick. For the first and only time in my life, I let someone try to hit me without hitting back. While attacking me, she accused me of sleeping with every woman I knew. I walked out at 1:30 AM on January 1, 1985, and told Mike she was all his.

 I drove all the way to Andersoncrying. I never cried that much in my life.

So that covers my life between nineteen and twenty-four. Nothing looms so large during those years as TJ. Her shadow still touches me. Those who think history does not matter need to think again.

My history to this point affected my relationship with TJ. I heard the tone of voice my Mom used when she talked about putting Dad through embalming school. When TJ offered to support me so I could write, I turned her down. I presumed that if I took her offer and the relationship soured, she would have the same resentment towards me as my Mom had towards my Dad. Hindsight tells me that it would probably have been less than the resentment I saw the morning of January 1, 1985. As it turned out, I never furnished another fiction project until almost ten years after our breakup. That project only was finished thanks to it being a collaboration. Only incarceration has allowed me to write, as TJ saw me writing.

Likewise, my relationship with TJ shaped my future relationships. Yes, Cat Stevens captured some truth in “The First Cut Is The Deepest.” (Yes, Cat Stevens did the song before Rod Stewart and Sheryl Crowe.) Cliches are truths. Live long enough, and we will endure all sorts of cliches and perhaps become one too.

After TJ, I did my best to avoid anyone seeing a husband. I made it clear that I was not looking for anything but fun. Translate fun as sex, and certainly nothing serious worked fairly well for most of the years between 1985 and 2010. That I did not always follow this rule may have been my ultimate downfall.

 Plesae do not think I did not become emotionally attached. I did all too often, but I kept my mouth shut more often than not about how deeply I became attached to anyone. Between 1985 and 2005, I proposed marriage to four different women. One rejected me out of hand (T1), and another turned me down as not being serious (LAH). Of the other two, one accepted only to change her mind after living with me (T2). After all, I did not think I was truly worth marrying. That everyone was better off after me rather than with me. TJ found greater happiness married to Mike than she did with me.

 [Continued in TJ 2010 - Part 5 of 5. sch 5/4/26.]   

 

New York Property Taxes and Whiney Billionaires

 The title is precisely how I when reading CNN Business's What everyone is missing about Mamdani’s plan to tax Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthous, I came to this paragraph:

Left unsaid by both sides: Griffin’s 23,000-square-foot penthouse, the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, is valued at just $9.4 million by the city for tax purposes.

Huh?

The kerfuffle masks the larger problem with New York City’s broken property tax system, which undervalues high-end condos and overtaxes renters. Little of the city’s most expensive real estate is actually taxed at its market value. This creates a powerful incentive for the world’s richest people to park their money in New York City real estate and contributes to the housing crisis pricing out everyday residents.

That is a problem. Frankly, it seems strange New York would have screwed up like this if you exclude the rich using their wealth to avoid fair taxes. 

And if that were not enough to point out the whiny nature of billionaires:

aire Ken Griffin's (left) $238 million penthouse.
Getty Images
New York — 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood outside a luxury skyscraper in Manhattan for a video on Tax Day to deliver on his trademark plan: “We’re taxing the rich.”

The skyscraper, located on ritzy Central Park South and built at a cost of $1.5 billion, seemed a fitting symbol for Mamdani’s video announcing that New York City at long last would institute a so-called pied-à-terre tax on second homes of the city’s wealthiest.

Mamdani singled out billionaire financier Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse as a prime example of the “fundamentally unfair system” that allows the city’s richest to store their wealth in homes that sit empty most of the time.

Griffin and opponents of Mamdani were enraged. Griffin said Tuesday that the video was “creepy and weird” and New York “doesn’t welcome success” under Mamdani. He said his investing firm Citadel plans to expand in Miami over New York City in response.

Left unsaid by both sides: Griffin’s 23,000-square-foot penthouse, the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, is valued at just $9.4 million by the city for tax purposes.

The kerfuffle masks the larger problem with New York City’s broken property tax system, which undervalues high-end condos and overtaxes renters. Little of the city’s most expensive real estate is actually taxed at its market value. This creates a powerful incentive for the world’s richest people to park their money in New York City real estate and contributes to the housing crisis pricing out everyday residents.
Griffin's penthouse at 220 Central Park South was the most expensive home purchased in America.
Griffin's penthouse at 220 Central Park South was the most expensive home purchased in America.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

A pied-à-terre tax “can play well politically, but it doesn’t get at the core problem,” said Jared Walczak, a Senior Fellow at the right-leaning Tax Foundation. “In a better designed New York property tax regime, these homes would be taxed higher.”

New York City’s tax system requires luxury condos and co-ops like Griffin’s to be assessed based off the hypothetical income they would generate if they were rental properties, far underestimating their actual sales value.

Large apartment buildings also face higher effective tax rates than single-family homes under the city’s laws. And people living in predominantly Black neighborhoods pay higher property tax rates than wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

Property taxes are the largest revenue source of New York City’s budget, and the city’s complex laws are widely considered flawed. But progressive New York City mayors have unsuccessfully sought reforms for decades.

A pied-a-terre tax will help raise funds for the city and encourage primary residency in New York City, said Moses Gates, vice president for housing and neighborhood planning at the Regional Plan Association. But it’s “not a substitute for comprehensive property tax reform.”
Who’s leaving cities?

New York lawmakers have floated various tax proposals on pied-à-terre homes for more than a decade. They’ve all met fierce opposition from real estate interests and raised alarms about wealthy residents fleeing the state.

The New York City comptroller said a pied-à-terre tax could generate approximately $500 million annually from an estimated 11,200 second homes with market values above $5 million.

“There is sometimes a theatrical component of this, where the wealthy are treated as engines of economic prosperity,” said Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at Brookings and author of “The Price of Democracy” on America’s taxation history. “The presumption with leaving is they will take economic growth with them.”

New York City’s wealthy are critical to its tax base, but it’s families with young children that are the economic engines of cities, she said. They are many cities’ highest earners, biggest spenders and future workers – as well as the people leaving high-cost metros in droves.

In New York City, households with young children are twice as likely to leave as those without young children, according to the non-profit Fiscal Policy Institute.

“New York’s pattern of out-migration is primarily a result of an affordability crisis in the state, particularly for families,” the organization said in a 2024 report.

New York City has also been losing wealthy residents, but few people move solely because of taxes.  

What started this was this kerfuffle was this:

  Mamdani singled out billionaire financier Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse as a prime example of the “fundamentally unfair system” that allows the city’s richest to store their wealth in homes that sit empty most of the time.

Griffin and opponents of Mamdani were enraged. Griffin said Tuesday that the video was “creepy and weird” and New York “doesn’t welcome success” under Mamdani. He said his investing firm Citadel plans to expand in Miami over New York City in response. 

sch 5/8

 

 

 

TJ 2010 - Part 3 of 5

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

This is a long, long piece written while I was in pretrial detention but is not actually notes about pretrial detention. I quite preposterously labeled it as autobiography. However, the first 36 pages are missing, and so are the years 1978–May 1982. sch 5/4/2026] 

Then I met Phyliss and did something stupid. For the longest time, I could not even mention her name for my shame, but leaving her out will render what follows inaccurate.  And it is not like my earlier embarrassments are not now wholly overwhelmed by my crimes.

Phyliss was the new and only waitress on my shift. Thing began with her when she sat in one of the bar stools and asked me for a neck rub. While I stood behind her massaging her neck, she slipped her hands towards me and began massaging my privates. Her reaction created a reaction she liked and I did not dislike. After the shit hit the fan, I said to a friend, “I was tossed a football. Was I supposed to do? Drop it?”  (The correct answer to the last question is "Yes”).

I think we were together no more than three times. It was purely about sex. Phyliss was getting a divorce or was recently divorced. (Too much time has gone by; all I have is a fleeting memory of a husband no longer on the scene.) She lacked TJ's body, being shorter, smaller, and a bit less firm. Her conversation was limited to the trivial and inane, contrasting harshly with TJ's intelligence. She thought my apartment would look so much better with a velvet painting of Elvis sums up her tastes. All she had going for her was her sexual aggressiveness, of which she had plenty. The last time we were together, she spent most of the night and left me incapable of sex with anyone for a few days. I never sought her out afterward. Never seeing her again seemed like a good thing. 

 TJ confronted me about Phyliss. Being mortified by the time we had spent together, thinking I had insulted TJ, I lied. Thereby, only postponing trouble.

We had now made it to the late summer of 1984. We were engaged again. I was bound for law school. The Islande became The Bull and Brew and then went out of business. TJ took a job at another Muncie bar. I had moved to Greentown at Dad's request, but I got down to Muncie as often as possible. It was understood we would marry the next year.

Phyliss came to work at the same bar as TJ.Phyliss let TJ know exactly what she and I had done. When confronted by TJ, I made an unwelcome confession.

[Continued in TJ 2010 - Part 4 of 5. sch 5/4/26.]