November 05, 2004

WHY THE LUXURY LIBERALS STILL DON'T GET IT--HUGE EGOS

On the day after the election Joseph Berger, reporter of soft news for the New York Times, did a post-election psychoanalysis of the soul of New York City—well not exactly New York City: most of the article was taken up with the fragile denizens of the Upper West Side.

The Upper West Side is the epicenter of Luxury Liberalism in America. It extends along the Hudson for two Miles from Lincoln Center to Columbia University. It has block after block of huge apartment buildings filled with old, high-ceilinged, spacious apartments, each one worth a gazillion dollars, and owned by celebrities from Hollywood, Broadway, and the media—print and broadcast. Probably most of the upper echelon of the New York Times lives there. ABC News is located there. And thousands of patients and their analysts live there.

Take Zito Joseph, shaken to the core by the election results, he is one of Mr. Berger’s disconsolate cases: " ‘Everybody seems to hate us these days,’ said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist….

“Dr. Joseph, a bearded, broad-shouldered man with silken gray hair, was sharing coffee and cigarettes with his fellow dog walker, Roberta Kimmel Cohn, at an outdoor table outside the hole-in-the-wall Breadsoul Cafe near Lincoln Center. The site was almost a cliché corner of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with a newsstand next door selling French and Italian newspapers and, a bit farther down, the Lincoln Plaza theater showing foreign movies.

“ ‘I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland,’ Dr. Joseph said. ‘This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland.

“ ‘New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us,’ he said.
“His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. ‘New Yorkers are savvy,’ she said. ‘We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say.

" ‘They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. ‘When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp.’

“Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.

" ‘People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities,’ he said.”

It was wise of Dr. Joseph to retire from his profession at an early age, HORSEFEATHERS’ believes. Lacking insight, he is also, apparently, unfamiliar with the diagnostic category of “narcissistic personality disorder,” which describes a person with the following traits: has a grandiose sense of self-importance; believes that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, associate with, other special or high status people; shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

It sounds to HORSEFEATHERS like Dr. Joseph and Ms Cohn were made for each other.

And so we must take our leave of New York’s Upper West Side where all the women are strong-minded, all the men are overweight, and all the children are spoiled.