Last picture shows

What do oyster beds have in common with independent movie theaters and foreign film cinemas? Both are headed for extinction because of mindless environmental damage or cultural injury.

Even mainstream cinemas are vanishing. There’s only one left in the Bronx, which has more residents than Dallas. If you don’t get your jollies from air-headed violence featuring equity-casted superheroes getting the better of special effects-generated apocalypses, there’s just a handful of venues remaining. 

When their base clientele of senior citizens dies out, just dry bones and abandoned box offices will remain. On a Friday night, the audience can often fit into one of those telephone booths we used to have back in the day of touch-tones and common courtesy.

In this city of more than 60 billionaires and over 700 souls each with over $100 million in net worth, why is there not a single civic-minded philanthropist who will subsidize these theaters? It’s an ominous indictment of societal emptiness and shallow priorities.

Urban civilization will always carry on, though it may not meaningfully endure. The pursuit of status symbols is all-consuming.

Hugo Boss is still popular among the bourgeois fashion subscribers, even though this company was the clothier to Hitler’s mobile extermination units. Its namesake founder was a passionate and unrepentant Nazi acolyte. Mercedes and BMW cars are still coveted from Mamaroneck to Great Neck, despite their history of forced slave labor. And it’s been only a few years since the Bavarian government bailed out the family business of Auschwitz’s Angel of Death.

Life goes on. That was then and this is now. Forgive and forget. Move with the times, eh? If we boycotted every corporation or government-sponsored racket with blood on its hands, like Dow Chemical and Union Carbide, we’d have to roll back the industrial revolution and revert to knuckle walking.

While we’re on the topic of carcinogens and fumigation, what insecticides are the city using this summer in its blitzkrieg against mosquito larvae in our parks and neighborhoods? Have the ingredients been independently vetted and verified to be safe for people, pets and wildlife? 

They all have tongue-twisting elaborate chemical names and the products are festooned with disclaimers and warnings to elude laymen and casual label readers.

If you want full disclosure about functional lethal chemicals, look no further than Florida’s capital punishment cocktail. It is increasingly the go-to tool of annihilation of criminals convicted by as few as eight of a 12-person jury. A unanimous verdict was required by law until Governor Ron DeSantis last year lowered the threshold, aghast that a single juror, unalterably opposed to the death penalty under any circumstances, could sabotage the interest of justice by pretending to be otherwise to get over on the jury nullification tool.

Relying on witness testimony to determine culpability is a tricky business, even when the stakes are not so high. 

When I was a late teen, approaching sundown on a midsummer afternoon, I took my mild-mannered dog Morgan to a small, enclosed park abutting a middle-class apartment house.  Within minutes, police swarmed around and interrogated me as though I was Whitey Bulger. Multiple residents had identified me as a serial intruder. I had never been near the premises before. 

A cautionary tale about wholesome skepticism and checks and balances.

When DeSantis leaves office in 2027, he will leave behind at least one sound proposal: the imposition of term limits for members of Congress. This should be expanded to almost all elected offices on every level of government.

It could be fine-tuned under certain conditions, but there should at least be a pause in the continuity of what is often euphemistically called “public service.”

Their trappings of power are almost guaranteed to lead to their constituencies being entrapped by the clout and machinations of the opportunists they elected. Elected officials are nurtured by their institutional entrenchment, enriched by donations, fortified by media access and emboldened by a generally lazy electorate that almost automatically renews their subscription to power over them.

When voters pull the lever, it’s the successful candidate who gets the leverage.   

Our country has two power grids: one relates to the delivery of energy for appliances and the other one draws the current to political egos. Behind every leadership surge is closed-circuit partisanship.

The human family is not what it’s cracked up to be. But it’s cracked up. The overrated bonds of fellowship have been downgraded somewhat by national duty. Sad to say we simply cannot sustain unlimited immigration any longer.

Mass, unselective deportation, even of undocumented immigrants, is morally heartless and logistically impossible. But known violent felons need to be humanely removed. That is the proper responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Andrew Cuomo, involuntarily retired governor of New York State, called ICE officers “thugs” and prohibited state and local law enforcement from cooperating with them. The effect was to blindfold, gag and handicap legitimate law enforcement. Without a doubt, lives have been lost as a result. The forbidden lines of communication and coordinated operation must be re-opened now.

ICE must be curbed and monitored, but its core mission is sacrosanct.   

Fears of global conflict have escalated recently.  The recent presidential debate has been a red herring exploited to fan the flames of perceived instability. The televised discourse was by no estimation on the level of the Oxford Union. It was a snapshot which has been gratuitously enlarged to pass as a revelatory picture.

The event was more about throwing a political football than about worthiness to carry the nuclear football.   

A war of obliteration will be disallowed by any commander-in-chief.  Nobody wants to preside over a bummer annihilation that would require the breed of golden retrievers to re-evolve from scratch.

At the 1824 Vienna premiere of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, one of music’s consummate masterpieces, the deaf composer led the orchestra that he couldn’t hear. When the music stopped, he persisted waving his arms to wild applause as though the music wasn’t quite done.

Perhaps President Biden had a medical episode. Maybe it compromised what might have otherwise been a deserved ovation. But it did not echo the composition of his legacy. He is owed some nonpartisan charity without condescension.

Biden is no Beethoven. Neither is he SpongeBob’s starfish Patrick.  

The greatest world-class athlete can be felled into total dependency at any moment by a misstep on a rumpled rug. We are all vulnerable. We need to stop sniping and gloating and instead show some grace when our mere rivals stumble.

There’s still time for fortune’s destination to right itself.