Is New York The Most American City?

I love New York. I’m just down here for a couple of days before a cruise. New York is truly a Mecca of capitalism, real capitalism. Forget about the crony capitalism that takes place daily between Wall Street and Washington. There is individual convenience stores and restaurants that are owned by thousands of individual owners. Even people running the hot dog carts have gone into business for themselves. Despite how expensive New York is. These small places have food that isn’t outrageously expensive and it has a wide variety of ethnic food that other parts of America can only dream of. There seems to be a good restaurant on every street corner: Italian, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, Ethiopian, kosher, El Al, or delicatessens.

For some reason Americans might love the idea of New York, remember GW Bush and Rudy Giuliani 911 everything changed, but they seem to hate actual New York. They view it as America’s Sodom and Gomorrah and probably in part it’s because of the numbers of foreigners that live in the city. The New Yorkers could not hope to round up all foreigners because really where would they begin. In much of the rest of the country they talk about their great love capitalism even as their lives are controlled by the big box stores. When it came to putting a mosque near ground zero it wasn’t the New Yorkers who seemed to be making a ruckus out it but more often it was people from Kansas or Alabama who often had never set foot in New York and who lived miles away from anything a terrorist would want to blow up. New York is truly the heart of America in its best and worst. It is a place of survivors. It is loud and brash. It is America.