That was the question faced every week by NYC native Chuck Connors in the 1960s TV western Branded. Yesterday, New York City’s idiocratic mayor Eric Adams essayed an answer: when you’re branded, you talk about how great you are and how not so great somebody else is.
Having just returned from a Caribbean junket to hurricane-damaged Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Adams gave a press conference on Tuesday for the apparent purpose of reminding the world how much he and his city just plain care.
Speaking outdoors in the heart of Washington Heights (aka “Little Dominican Republic”), Adams alternately called New York City “America’s City” and “the International City,” apparently believing those terms mean the same thing.
Of course, hizzoner couldn’t help but make the whole thing seem to revolve about his own royal self, declaring plaintively:
I am a mayor that has gone through a lot and I want to help people who are going through a lot. Far too often in my life, no one was there and I don’t want to have a city where we are not there.
(So, when you’re branded, you make sure you don’t have a city where no one is there? Okay-y-y. . . .)
Adams’s remarks made news when he ad-libbed a curious dig at (of all places) the state of Kansas, which he charged out of the blue “has no brand.” New York City does have a brand, so that makes all the difference to Adams.
Commenters quickly helped the mayor understand exactly what that brand is: crime, filth, rats, absurdly high prices, crushing taxes, murder, homelessness, witless self-serving politicians, unlivable sh*thole, that sort of thing.
Not all the resulting furor came from conservatives. Left-leaning author Don Winslow tweeted in response this question to the mayor:
Do you think it is possible for you to stop saying stupid things every day that help Republicans and hurt Democrats? You don’t need to crap on Kansas to pump up NYC. That clip will be played by Republicans for years. You’re terrible at this.
Adams has a brand all right. But, speaking of stupid, he just needs to go with it what a certain out-of-Kansas scarecrow once sought: a brain.
Pop-culturally, of course, it’s neither Branded nor The Wizard of Oz that politicans like Adams remind one of. It’s the 2006 dystopian comedy Idiocracy, about a dumbed-down America ruled by idiots. Adams’s own slogan, “Get Stuff Done,” might well have been a motto used by President Camacho himself.
For more, see Fox News.