New York’s new normal

Ms Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is a 40-year-old with modern Bagelite manners, and by that I mean they are not exactly those of, say, C.Z. Guest or Babe Paley, two ladies who are no longer with us but whose presence in drawing rooms we could rather desperately do with. Ms Draper is angry as hell and has declared she will not take it any more. She was recently charged with grand larceny and petit larceny for snatching a wallet from a Manhattan man. Nothing strange about that: it’s an everyday occurrence in the city that never sleeps. In fact a New York Post columnist wrote on a different matter that no one gets PTSD from ‘getting pickpocketed’. Yes, I agree, but for one small detail. Ms Draper’s alleged victim had just been run over by a truck and was as dead as the proverbial doornail as he lay in the middle of a downtown street. That’s when Ms Draper is believed to have appeared, taken one look and then lifted the poor man’s wallet. After her arrest she was immediately freed under the state’s new bail laws. She had only 50 prior arrests.

What distinguished Ms Draper from other suspected pickpockets who, when caught, usually blame their sleight of hand on nervous tics and other pathologies, was that she blamed the dead man, 62-year-old Jerome Smith. She also claimed that Smith and she used to be an item. As Noël Coward would surely have said: some item. And it gets better – or rather far worse. Smith was hit by a tractor and crushed near a construction site. Draper was caught in surveillance camera footage reaching into the dead man’s pocket and taking his wallet. But here comes the really juicy part. The video showed onlookers cheering her on. And you thought some Mongols in a faraway place long ago acted unreasonably.

Cheering the fleecing of a dead man must be a brutish new low even for New Yorkers. But if you thought that was sick, try Larry Griffin, 29, a parolee who was attacked last week in the subway by a weirdo dressed as a ninja. Griffin was bonked on the head with a knife by the ninja, who got away. Then it emerged that the conked one had been charged back in 2017 for showing a video to a minor that involved him having sex with a chicken. And you thought the Conservatives were funny when picking prime ministers. Over here youngsters keep getting shot and killed while riding the subway, and older women are mugged daily by wackos, while the lefty media is busy censoring and cancelling free speech.

This grievance and victim epidemic has got so bad that the trashy Bagel Times has announced that niche sports play a role in perpetuating inequality. Fencers, polo players, rhythmic swimmers, skiers, squash players, golfers, not to mention real tennis players, will all end up in an American gulag in the near future because some ugly bald-headed nerd in the Times said so.

No wonder the latest polls show that only 7 per cent of Americans have a ‘great deal’ of trust in the media. Hollywood, however, is a different story. It just so happens that a few nights after the Draper horror I turned on my television set and watched a flick that those lowlifes who cheered her on must value on a par with the way I value Gettysburg and The Best Years of Our Lives. No use giving it any publicity; suffice to say that it’s the story of a female who is in debt and goes into crime in order to get out of debt. Stolen credit card fraud leads to more serious crimes and bigger profits. Finally our heroine ends up rich in South America, teaching poor natives how to be rich thieves. Moral of the story: crime pays.

It is said that successful movies are about the change from ‘this to that, poverty to riches, justice to injustice’. It is also said that endings matter most. Well, this was a crappy movie with a crappier message, written by an untalented crap artist who should be forced to watch La Grande Bouffe, a French tale of four men who eat themselves to death in a villa. Ouch!

Actually what these untalented Hollywood types are doing should be called crimewashing. The Saudis practise sportswashing by buying football teams and golf players to help a sports-mad public forgive and forget Saudi crimes against women and homosexuals. Crimewashing in movies helps the public forget the lack of talent among the movie-makers. Back in the good old days such shenanigans would never work. Lack of talent got you a job at Schwab’s drugstore as a soda jerk. Today things are different. Everyone is great, beautiful and talented. Everyone deserves to be rich, and the politicians promise to give more and more money to every Tom, Dick and Molly. Students are relieved of their debt and more handouts are promised. No wonder both the UK and the US are nearly becoming ungovernable.

I write about these freak shows over here to remind Speccie readers that there are clowns everywhere, not only in the British parliament. By the time you read this Rishi Sunak will be PM, and he’d better be able to control the members and the government. Theresa, Boris and Liz were unable to do so, hence the mess. Good luck.