...New York’s most colorful mayor since Fiorello H. La Guardia. Tall, squinty-eyed, baldish, with a nimbus of gray and a U-shape smile more satanic than cherubic, Mr. Koch told a story like a raconteur in a deli, kvetching and ah-hahing with the timing of a Catskill comic.
Baldish? Does the man in the picture above look baldish to you? Or does he just look ... bald?
It reminds me of this scene from -- where else? -- Seinfeld (jump to about 2:28):
On a more serious note, from another piece about Koch on the Opinion page:
One of his most emblematic, contradictory comments came in a Brooklyn “town meeting” in the early 1980s, where I watched him field questions from politically conservative, white ethnic and Jewish constituents. A man complained about new hiring standards to increase female and Hispanic representation in the police department: “Mr. Koch, why do you lower the height requirements just to include them? We need policemen who are big and tall and command respect.”
The speaker was barely finished before the mayor raised his eyebrows in
mock astonishment. “Have you ever seen a 5-foot-4 Puerto Rican with a
gun?” The audience roared; his aides winced. Happily for them, no big
media were present, sparing liberal New Yorkers the spectacle of a mayor
using racism to defend affirmative action.
And isn't that what all this Second Amendment stuff is really about? When you cut through all the baloney, isn't it really about white people being afraid of black and brown people with guns?
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