MAMDANI THE MESSENGER: It was a moment. By that, I am referring to last Tuesday evening when the election results came pouring in. Although “Sanity” wasn’t listed by name on any of the ballots, it was the clear winner. But as the election results kept rolling in, I kept wondering: Was it just a moment? Could it last?
I won’t lie. I got misty. Artesian, even. Here we were — right in the lull between Halloween and Thanksgiving, two of the most extravagant celebrations of American excess, short of Christmas itself — and the Trump White House was going to the mattress to secure the right to starve its own citizens.
Yes, I am biased, but no, I am not exaggerating.
Federal attorneys are demanding that a federal judge order states to repossess any of the Food Stamp Program funds — partial payments though they were — that somehow got deposited into the accounts of any of the 41 million food stamp recipients across the country. Of those, by the way, 55,000 live right here in Santa Barbara County. (For more, please read Christina McDermott’s article on page 10.)
Things like that, I thought, only happen in “shit hole countries” run by guys who idolize other guys named “Vlad the Impaler.”
In last Tuesday’s “moment,” I tuned in to New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the alleged fire-breather who will burn our country down. It was the first time I’d listened to him at length.
Admittedly, I was prejudiced. His mother is famous for directing Monsoon Wedding, one of the greatest Indian movies ever made. For many years, the soundtrack of that film — it’sphysically impossible not to dance to it — provided the musical wallpaper in the Welsh family home. With a mom like that, how bad could Mamdani actually be?
A stupid question, I know.
What I don’t know is if he’ll be a great mayor or a terrible mayor. I am told he is a gifted and voracious listener; it’s obvious he has a great smile. And man, he can talk. He talked of the Yemeni bodega owners, the Mexican abuelas, the Senegalese taxi drivers, the Uzbek nurses, the Ethiopian aunties, and the Trinidadian line cooks. The words “we” and “love” cropped up a lot. It felt real. He talked about people who said such things as “I used to love New York, but now it’s just a place where I live.” They, it turns out, are the lucky ones. The other ones he mentioned drive two hours to work in the city they used to love.
Who was this guy, I wondered, some weird polyethnic reincarnation of Walt Whitman — New York’s all-time poet superhero?
“I have one final request,” Mamdani said. “New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count. Held it because we cannot afford to exhale.”
Naturally, he had to drop an H-bomb or two. “Hope is alive,” he said. “Hope over big money and small ideas.” Hope that the future could be something better than “more of the same” or “a future of less.”
Hope as a decision? I need to chew on that one.
We live in crazy times. It’s easy to get unhinged. This Tuesday was Veterans Day. It began as a way to honor the sacrifice of those killed in World War I. Depending on your math, that’s as many as 22 million people. Throw in World War II, and it’s another 85 million. In roughly 30 years, what we used to think were the most civilized nations on the planet managed to kill 107 million people.
As we snip away the constraints of restraint, we may discover all that’s really not so long ago.
And Zohran Mamdani, we are told, is a crazy man?
Beyond his message, Mamdani’s real genius is that he is who he is — both as messenger and as message. What he decidedly is not is an impersonation of what he thinks voters want to see. That, perversely, is Trump’s genius, too.
But when Mamdani got down to brass tacks, my eyeballs started rolling. A rent freeze for two million tenants? Free daycare? Fast and free bus service? Yeah, right. In Santa Barbara, the bubble of all bubbles, we have been deliberating over the future State Street — bikes or cars?
Five years later, and we’re still asking the wrong question. Rent control? Like Fox Mulder from The X-Files, I want to believe. But don’t show up with some one-size-fits-all ordinance that fails to address the very real and Santa Barbara–specific concerns of our mom-and-pop landlords. Lip service to that is a deal killer.
It was then that he repeated the famous line: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Mamdani credited “a great New Yorker” for having once said it, but not by name. “Who said that?” I wondered. The great New Yorker in question happened to be former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who just happens to be the father of Mandami’s chief rival, New York’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Right now, we’re in the throes of another moment. There will be many more to come. Some will be sublime; others, obscene.
Hope is a decision?
I better think on that.
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