Gotham Diary:
What If
9 January 2012
When Kathleen left for the office this morning, I got out of bed, where I’d spent several very comfortable hours breathing and having mildly bad dreams. On the thirteenth day of my cold, bad dreams were about as interesting as anything else in my ravaged head, and I was tempted to write about them. Happily, I picked up the Times instead.
Rachel Donadio’s story about young Greeks going “back to the land” — to the island of Chios, to be precise — was intriguing but incomplete. I wanted to know more about the new tools, particularly what the French handily call informatique, that the over-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings are bringing with them when they take up heliculture. What we would call “smart farming.” Then there’s the sad story of Edul Ahmad’s many victims, out in Queens; Guyanese immigrants, they trusted a flashy rogue wheh he misled them about the affordability of housing, and now their mortgages are being foreclosed. David Dunlap writes about the burning of the original Equitable Building in January 1912, a disaster that would have branded itself more indelibly in the city’s sense of history if it hadn’t been for what happened at sea four months later. The ruined Second-Empire structure, claimed to be fireproof, was quickly replaced by the massive building that remains at 120 Broadway. This was where my father’s office was, the first time he brought me into the city to see where he worked. It was only about forty years old at the time, but it seemed awfully old-fashioned, with its Roman marble lobby and its thrilling elevators, each one manned by an operator.
But I would not have been more surprised by the Titanic‘s steaming into New York Harbor than I was by Bill Keller’s call for Hillary Clinton to run as Barack Obama’s Vice President in November. The idea, Keller says, “has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction” — which is why I don’t read political blogs anymore. Now that Bill Keller has dragged it into the middle of the room, the prospect of Clinton’s candidacy is so attractive that Obama’s people ought to be getting on it right now. (Better yet: Obama fires all of his people and hires Clinton’s.) The scenario outlined in the Op-Ed piece is preternaturally politique: Hillary resigns from State; Biden takes State; Biden keeps State when Hillary becomes VP. Nothing less than a White House endorsement of the scheme will restore my confidence in the second technocrat in the Oval Office — a president whose record seems now to be almost as disappointing as that of the first, Herbert Hoover.