VOTE NEW YORK!!!

[Alan Sondheim]

VOTE NEW YORK!!!


It's easy to vote this election! Vote the New York way! We're the smartest
city in America and that makes New York State the smartest state! (In
spite of Albany!) We have the major museums! The biggest shows! In this
city we have neighborhoods from over one hundred and twenty countries!
Where I live we have the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Mark Morris
dance studios - a huge building devoted to one company, built from the
ground up! New York Dolls! Bella Abzug! We have radio stations for every
taste! Our cultural economy is tremendous - where else can you find
regularly, at a thrift shop, Benjamin and Frege, Pavese, and Madison's The
Hermeneutics of Postmodernity? We have the major newspapers, magazines,
cultural journals, anywhere in the English-speaking world! We are the home
of Yiddish theater and hiphop and just about every form of jazz ever
created or discovered! We're the city that produces around the clock, that
never sleeps at night, that constantly moves, dances, and thinks! Our
daily news is almost always political, and our ball team is one of the
best in the country - so good in fact, that we let Boston have the series
this time! And we're liberal enough to tolerate a bit of fascism as Bush
and his cohorts coughed their way through a national convention! Bill
Clinton! The West Village! Civil right and wrongs! We've got the best
artists, and poetry begins and ends here, no matter what you heard about
the west coast! Our art's so important Terry Allen had to make fun of it!
We've got institutions like St Marks and the Met (which? opera or museum,
take your pick) that are nowhere else to be found on the continent! And we
take our politics seriously without moronic lip-service to god and
country! We'll pledge allegiance if the country deserves it! We know the
flag's a piece of cloth! We'll stand tall for or against the powers that
be, and we'll lead the country in demonstrations if we have to! Vote for
us and let us decide! A vote for us is a vote for justice everywhere -
we've got the best law schools in North America here - even Derrida came
and spoke over and over again, Kristeva just did her heart-stopping tour!
We take nothing from no one! We've had the Talking Heads! If we're going
to have a mob, we're going to have the best mob in the world! If we're
going to dig up dirt on someone, we'll do it to the bottoms of our
pockets! If we're going to riot, we'll be second to L.A. but nowhere else!
Saturday Night Live! Springsteen just across the river! We move furiously
on public transportation! We have one of the lowest crime rates in the
nation, and one of the smallest ecological footprints anywhere! We have
some of the best universities in the world, some of the most committed
filmmakers, and our writers are second to none! Look at me, at Franz
Kline, at Charlie Parker, look at the Harlem Renaissance, look at Walt
Whitman, look at the Brooklyn Bridge, and marvel, marvel! And of all the
places in the country, we never lost our cool over 9/11 but took it
bravely and intelligently in stride, even when our thug of a president
came down to make political capital of things! We have Olmsted-designed
beautiful parks, we've got the Jamaica Bay marshes, the Rockettes, even
dancing Santas! We tolerate heterosexuals and just about anyone else; even
men and women can get married, and there's never been a question of gay
rights, which is our fight and yours, although you might not know it! We
question our race relations, our sexual relations, our religious
relations, up front and in your face! We don't file style but make it, and
you can't follow it if you don't live here, because you don't have the
energy! Everyone comes here sooner or later and does something, and even
if they leave, they're never the same again! We're smart when it comes to
voting, we know the ecological score, the home security score, better than
most; we know the foreign policy score, we've got the United Nations, and
there's less trouble in the streets in that regard than anywhere else in
the USA! We're remarkably tolerant and we recognize our faults and work on
them, hard as hell, even in the onslaught of Republican slaughter in an
unjust war! Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground! And we'll tell you
this, that Bush is NOT our president, that his country is NOT our country,
no matter what you hear! We're too smart for that! Sorry Toronto,
Montreal, L.A., Chicago, we're the cultural capital of North America!
Kathy Acker! Apollo Theater! We're the synaptic pulse coursing through
your heart and your neighbor's heart and everything good and bad brought
to you in the name of capital, progress, liberality, liberalism,
liberation, fury, rap, fashion, power, electric culture, Broadway
universe, WiFi universe, mass transportation, just the good life with
thrift-shop books and the headquarters for the Daily Show! NBC ABC CBS and
radio radio radio! Forget Hollywood, that has-been home of cocaine creeps
and heroine harries. Come visit, bring your cash, you'll need it, and we
need it too! Whatever you heard, you don't have to watch your back here!
We're the Soul of the world! We invented Soul! We got Catholics, Muslims,
Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Witches, Warlocks, Santeria and more!
And when you vote Democratic, just think, you'll be voting with the best
of what this place has to offer, this United States, which may not be much
outside of the five boroughs, but it's all we've got! So let us lead you
to the promised land, and Vote New York, Vote New York, Vote New York!!!!


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