Blithe Spirits

 Today’s New York Times has two articles worth noting:

1) 

Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together. (1)

Trump claims that what he does is the “weave.”

“You know, I do the weave,” [Trump] said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. . .”

The weave, Trump proclaimed, is rhetorical genius, admired by English professors:

“. . . it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’” (2)

Now, I want to declare here—for the record—that I am not a member of Trump’s Shelley reading circle.

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Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

*

2)

The Undoing of New York Nightlife’s Lawyer King

Sal Strazzullo made a flashy career of representing minor celebrities and those in their orbit. His own affluence was a facade. (3)

Sal Strazzullo was an Italian-American boy from Brooklyn. He worked his way through law school, taking classes at night. Upon graduation, he set up his practice in a not-very-glamorous section of Brooklyn, handling mundane cases like “drunken-driving charges and a dispute between neighbors over a fig tree.” Eventually, he got a case that shoe-horned him into a different world: “the glittering world of New York’s night crawlers and minor celebrities.” 

He did so well that he “was renting a penthouse in Battery Park City for $12,000 a month.” Or so it seemed:

the custom suits and luxury cars, prosecutors said in an indictment, were a facade propped up by years of fraud.

The reality was that Strazzullo was stealing millions of dollars, even from members of his old Brooklyn neighborhood. 

Strazzullo will never be tried for his alleged crimes—he committed suicide in a car parked “behind his parents’ home in Bath Beach, Brooklyn.”

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I have two take-aways from this story:

First—the values of Italian-Americans in Brooklyn are far superior to those of the bubble world of Manhattan’s glitterati.

Second—as a general rule, never trust your money dealings to anyone who drives a better car than yours.

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(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/us/elections/trump-speeches-weave.html

(2) What were the names of those professors again?

(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/nyregion/sal-strazzullo-brooklyn-lawyer-theft.html