Other People’s Thoughts
This is the fiftieth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
28 October 2024
***
Other People’s Thoughts I-XLIX:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, L
οχι
Oct 28–“Ohi Day”—marks the day in 1940 when Greek prime minister Metaxas said “no” (οχι, “ohi”) to Mussolini’s demand that he allow Italian troops to enter Greek territory, even tho’ Metaxas knew that, in so doing, he was committing his country to war & suffering. Greece’s principled stance in the face of certain peril is especially worth commemorating now, when we have seen powerful barons of industry abandon any thought of resistance to our own would-be strongman, opting instead to kneel in fear before him. Cavafy has a terse but potent poem about the ethics of saying “yes”’or “no” at crucial moments, which I append below in honor of this day (although in the poem, unlike in 1940, the right answer is “yes”).
Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto
For certain people there comes a day
when they are called upon to say the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has
the Yes within him at the ready, which he will sayas he advances in honor, in greater self-belief.
He who refuses has no second thoughts. Asked
again, he would repeat the No. And nonetheless
that No—so right-defeats him all his life.
— comment and translation by Daniel Mendelsohn
Orwell’s China vs. Huxley’s USA
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture… In Nineteen Eighty-Four people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
New York, 1985, p.80 (from OPT XXI)
時代的預兆
有沒有發現一個現象，以前人民遇到苦難的事，還流行跑到政府門口齊刷刷下跪，後來就不太跪，而是流行組團跑去跳橋跳樓，到最近忽然進化到密集殺官，這行動軌跡，就是從相信青天大老爺，到絕望於前途，到老子以一命換一命，就是時代的預兆。
— 李承鵬，你看那滿天飛來的沙雞，就是這個時代，2024年9月26日
Maus
Look, suffering doesn’t make you better, it just makes you suffer!
— Art Spiegelman
Boris Johnson ‘Unleashed’
This is not “the political memoir of the century” as the Daily Mail has been billing it for the past week. Or, if it is, an unrewarding 76 years lie ahead for the publishing industry.
— Martin Kettle, Memoirs of a Clown, The Guardian, 3 October 2024
Age
Q.: What scares you about getting older?
A.: That my nose and chin will touch.
— Marina Abramović: ‘Describe myself? Long hair, big nose, large ass’
113 vs. 75
… in terms of age, it is absolutely impossible for the People’s Republic of China to become the motherland of the Republic of China’s people. On the contrary, the Republic of China may be the motherland of the people of the People’s Republic of China who are over 75 years old.
— Lai Ching-te, President of the Republic of China
Salman Rushdie’s Late Style
I’ve been thinking what [the philosopher] Theodor Adorno called ‘late style’, and critic and philosopher Edward Said’s famous essay called On Late Style, where he’s talking about what happens to artists near the end of their artistic careers.
Essentially what he says is there are two ways of going. One is serenity, where you are reconciled to the world and reconciled to your own life and and you write out of that sense of peace, and the other is rage. My view is it can be both. It could be serenity at one moment, and rage in another. These don’t have to be permanent conditions.
— Salman Rushdie to publish first work of fiction since 2022 stabbing, The Guardian, 6 October 2024
QE II
“I miss seeing their eyes,” she says, of the crowds raising their cell phones to record her on walkabouts.
— Rebecca Mead, The Unrivalled Omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth II, The New Yorker, 30 September 2024
Tears in Rain
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
— Roy Batty, Blade Runner, 1982
獨立的文化立場，自由的思想表達
華府季風書園，江雪，季風再來 ：一家獨立書店的沈浮 以及公民社會的中國命運，歪腦 WHYNOT，2024年10 月7日
Dear Howard Jacobson
You seamlessly conflate Jewishness and Israel. I assume for you that connection is obvious as it is for the majority of diaspora Jews. So I assume you don’t mind being held accountable for the actions of the current government, given your essay evidences no dissent. However, if you are uncomfortable with the reality of the Israeli state today, then perhaps you should reconsider your allegiance to Zionism – rather than asking to enjoy your nightly viewing without being exposed to its deadly manifestation in the form of maimed babies, among other things.
— Louise Adler, Dear Howard Jacobson, don’t let historical hatreds cover Israel’s cruelty, 13 October 2024
四通橋事件兩週年
今天是永留青史的一天。
清朝保留了明朝留下三百餘年的地名“菜市口”，
北京卻鏟掉四通公司捐建不到40年的三個字“四通橋”。
— 高瑜
刀郎
刀郎突然封神是因為他給廣大屌絲韭菜們提供了情緒出口。屌絲順利開心時聽鳳凰傳奇，心灰意冷時聽刀郎是順理成章的。在當下這個新文革時代，經濟大蕭條，失業率狂飈，大學生只能送外賣，屌絲們鬱悶啊！
刀郎的歌好比傷痕文學，給廣大屌絲受傷的心帶來了撫慰。 所以刀郎成為屌絲的精神教父容不得半點非議也是正常。
刀郎的歌有兩個主題，一個是對女神求而不得的哀怨，一個是對欺負自己的惡霸敢怒不敢言的憋屈，只能酸溜溜的指桑罵槐。那個馬戶，又鳥，髒東西就好比阿Q的名言：兒子打老子！
— 張奇
回應：
刀郎的歌引起廣大共鳴，是唱出了命運的無常和人生的艱辛與無奈，不是什麽撫慰。如果你敢回到大陸做出彭立發的舉動，你才有資格對刀郎評頭論脚。
— 芒鞋竹杖
Of a Certain Age
I’M AT THAT STAGE IN LIFE WHERE I STAY OUT OF DISCUSSIONS. EVEN IF YOU SAY 1+1=5, YOU’RE RIGHT — HAVE FUN.
— Anon (often misattributed to Keanu Reeves)
The Seventh Day
What happened in June 1967 transformed Israel into a conquering power, into an instrument for the violent domination of another people. This, I fear, may be the ruin of the state of Israel; Jews here may go the route of the white minority in South Africa. The occupation corroded Israel’s social fabric, and it has led to a belief in the utility of military force to solve political problems. … The most fateful day in Israel’s history was the seventh day, by which I mean the day after the Six Day War (of 1967). On that day, we had to decide if the war was a war of defense or of conquest. And we decided that it was a war of conquest. What started on the seventh day eventually brought about the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the war in Lebanon (1982-1985). Ultimately, Israel may find itself locked into a war to the finish with the entire Arab world, from Morocco to Kuwait. Internally, these same ideas and policies lead to fascism. And there is always the possibility that the U.S. may pressure Israel by cutting back aid.
— Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Liberating Israel from the Occupied Territories, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol.15, no.2
The People’s Car
On April 20, 1939, Ferdinand Porsche [originally from Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire] gifted the first finished Volkswagen, a black Beetle convertible, to a delighted Hitler on the führer’s fiftieth birthday party in Berlin. Göring received the second, and Goebbels the fourth. The ‘people’s car’ was not, in fact, delivered to the people. Only 630 of them were built during the Third Reich, and they all went to the Nazi elite. The 340,000 Germans who signed up with the DAF’s program to save for the purchase of the car were bilked 280 million reichmarks. [an enormous sum worth a bit over US$ 2.5 billion in today’s money].
The Beetle resumed production in 1945, the factory for a time controlled by the British.
— David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires, 2022
One intellectual excitement has been denied me
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
— H.A.L. Fisher, History of Europe, vol.1
The Soap-opera of the Devil
“Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks.
—Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
Tell Truth to the Powerless
On the last page of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.’
— Neal Ascherson, Scoops and Leaks: On Claud Cockburn, LRB, 24 October 2024
Guilty of Journalism
I want to be totally clear: I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today, after years of incarceration, because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.
— Julian Assange, Council of Europe, 1 October 2024
That small, immortal band
With his Don Giovanni Mozart enters that small, immortal band of men whose names, whose works, time will not forget, for they are remembered in eternity. And although, once having entered, it is a matter of indifference whether one is placed highest or lowest, because in a sense they are equally, because infinitely, high, and although it is childish to argue over the highest and the lowest place here, as if for one’s place in line at confirmation, I am still far too much a child, or rather, I am like a young girl in love with Mozart and must have him placed highest whatever the cost.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1843
西湖夜遊記
壬子七月，予重來杭州，客師範學捨。殘暑未歇，庭樹肇秋。高樓當風，竟夕寂坐。越六日，偕姜、夏二先生游西湖。於時晚暉落紅，暮山被紫，游眾星散，流螢出林。湖岸風來，輕裾致爽。乃入湖上某亭，命治茗具。又有菱芰，陳粲盈幾。短童侍坐，狂客披襟。申眉高談，樂說舊事。莊諧雜作，繼以長嘯，林鳥驚飛，殘燈不華。起視明湖，瑩然一碧；遠峰蒼蒼，若現若隱，頗涉遐想，因憶舊游。曩歲來杭，故舊交集，文子耀齋，田子毅侯，時相過從，輒飲湖上。歲月如流，逾九稔。生者流離，逝者不作，墜歡莫拾，酒痕在衣。劉孝標云：魂魄一去，將同秋草。吾生渺茫，可喟然感矣。漏下三箭，秉燭言歸。星辰在天，萬籟俱寂，野火暗暗，疑似青燒；垂楊沈沈，酣睡。歸來篝燈，斗室無寐，秋聲如雨，我何如。目瞑意倦，濡筆記之。
— 李叔同，1912年
DJT
Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power.
— Adam Gopnik, The Case for Catastrophism, The New Yorker, 21 October 2024
Trump
A level of moral squalor so profound.
— Fran Lebowitz
Over there
“Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.”
— Tony Burke, Australian Minister of Immigration
No Other
The global romance with Western political leaders of non-Western ancestry has already soured. Obama heralded a “post-racial” age, but after the demagogic flourishes of Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and Vivek Ramaswamy, politicians of diverse origins incite fear of a sinister regression rather than hope for social justice. Scribbling the words “FINISH THEM!” on an Israeli artillery shell bound for Lebanon, Nikki Haley, the second Indian American to compete for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, helped outline what a “brown Nazi” might look like in the future. Whether crowing about her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a torchbearer for torture; promising to shoot intruders in her home; or vowing to make the US military “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” the first Indian American presidential candidate from the Democratic Party shows few signs of defying the steadily dominant far-right ideals of violent hypermasculinity.
— Pankaj Mishra, The Flailing Superpower, The New York Review of Books, 7 November 2024
懵懂
Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism.”
A greater problem is that intellectual as well as political elites in the West have very few means to understand, let alone explain, the rest of the world. Mainstream journalists try to capture the speed and scale of an ongoing world-historical transformation—the rise of the Global South—through quantitative analysis. They offer statistics about the growing share of foreign trade of China, the expanding size of the Indian, Brazilian and Indonesian economies.
— Pankaj Mishra, The Last Days of Mankind, Online Only, n+1, 28 September 2024
A Cat is a Cat is a Cat
Qiao Yan had a pet cat, which he found remarkable, and he called it ‘Tiger Cat.’ A guest suggested, ‘A tiger is not as great as a dragon; let’s rename it Dragon Cat.’ Another guest said, ‘For a dragon to ascend to heaven, it must float on clouds; it would be better named Cloud.’ Yet another guest remarked, ‘Clouds obscure the sky, but the wind can disperse them; let’s rename it Wind.’ Another guest added, ‘When a strong wind rises, walls can shield it; let’s call it Wall Cat.’ Another guest said, ‘Though the wall is solid, the mouse can burrow through; let’s plainly call it Mouse Cat.’ An elder from the east scoffed, saying, ‘The one who catches mice is a cat; a cat is simply a cat. Why lose its true essence?’
喬奄家畜一貓，自奇之，號於人曰虎貓。客說之曰：虎誠猛，不若龍之神也，請更名曰龍貓。又客說之曰：龍固神於虎也，龍升天，須浮雲，雲其尚於龍乎，不如名曰雲。又客說之曰：雲靄蔽天，風倏散之，雲故不敵風也，請更名曰風。又客說之曰：大風飆起，維屏以牆，斯足蔽矣，風其如牆何。名之曰牆貓可。又客說之曰：維牆雖固，維鼠穴之，牆斯圮矣。牆又如鼠何。即名曰鼠貓可也。東里丈人嗤之曰：噫嘻。捕鼠者故貓也，貓即貓耳，胡為自失其本真哉。
— 劉元卿，《應諧錄 · 貓號》
The Ending of Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility
The wide south garden was before him.
The lawn, with the hills behind it, blazed in the summer
“We have had cuckoos since morning,” said the novice.
The grove beyond the lawn was dominated by maples. A wattled gate led to the hills. Some of the maples were red even now in the summer, flames among the green. Steppingstones were scattered easily over the lawn, and wild carnations bloomed shyly among them. In a corner to the left were a well and a well wheel. A celadon stool on the lawn seemed so hot in the sun that it would surely burn anyone who tried to sit on it. Summer clouds ranged their dizzying shoulders over the green hills.
It was a bright, quiet garden, without striking features.
Like a rosary rubbed between the hands, the shrilling of cicadas held sway.
There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing.
The noontide sun of summer flowed over the still garden.November 25, 1970
— 三島由紀夫《豊饒の海》
The Myth of Genesis All Over Again
How we have traveled, Mel! Always fleeing, always seeking, always deceiving ourselves, never arriving. Anchored to the Past, dreaming of the Future, and — in some fatal, blind sense — oblivious to the Present.
Lists of regrets, manufacture of dreams! I say to myself: Why did I leave Santa Monica? Beaches, white foam, Topanga, friends, the exhilaration which saturated every day. Bah! But what madness to leave San Francisco! Aerial, hilly, New Jerusalem. Or why did I not stay in the wilds, in the backwoods of Canada, a lumberman and poet? Or was not the real spitefulness ever to leave London — my only, wondrous London — my home, and the home of my people? Or was the real and ultimate sadness to grow up, to leave the Magic Region of childhood, the time of wish-fulfilment and infinite power, the feeling of love and an endless future?
Idiocy! It is all idiocy and vain regrets. Fatally easy to transfigure the past, to see in it millennia of epic happiness followed by cruel unmerited expulsions. It is the myth of Genesis all over again.
— Oliver Sacks, from a letter to Melvin Erpelding, a friend, December 1966, New York City
Ye-mulke
It’s remarkable how outlandish some of Safran’s efforts still are, 20 years on. Take the episode of John Safran’s Race Relations, his TV series about dating across cultures: he visits an Israeli sperm bank to make a donation but gets his Palestinian boom mic operator to masturbate into the cup instead. He then travels to the West Bank to donate his own sperm – their shared attempt to create “Jalestinian” children who would, presumably, heal divides. It was shocking in 2009 and it is shocking now.
— My week at Kanye’s: John Safran on his time squatting in the rapper’s mansion
Never Judge a Book by its Contents
Every form of collecting is an effort to stop time, but book collecting is a singularly hopeful incarnation of that wish. It is nourished by twin beliefs: first, that our most glorious ideas and fancies have been bound together in crushed morocco or polished calf—sacred repositories that must be conserved against fire and water and forgetfulness. And, second, that ownership of great literature in its most talismanic form will ennoble you. Horowitz cultivates these credos in his clients, yet his usual practice is to wrest books from the grip of one, bestow them into the hands of another, then wrest them back for a third. …
Even as book collectors have, over the centuries, shifted shape from rectors to hedge-fund managers, they have remained driven by an impulse that is both febrile and fastidious. Traditional collecting aims at first editions in “pristine” or “mint” condition; the booksellers’ wry joke is “Never judge a book by its contents.”
Henry E. Huntington, a railroad and streetcar magnate whose book collection would form the basis of the Huntington Library, once remarked, “Men may come and men may go, but books go on forever. The ownership of a fine library is the surest and swiftest way to immortality!”
— Tad Friend, A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending, 21 October 2024
Art Prices
Art prices are largely about voyeurism and toxic snobbery. They are what you see when you peer up the anus of ‘culture.’
— Robert Hughes
Location, location, location
I’d worship the ground you walk on, if you lived in a better neighborhood.
— young Billy Wilder to a potential love interest
Hermès
I got caught mispronouncing rich people’s stuff.
三和大神打油诗
橋底寒窯寄此身，
風餐露宿度昏晨，
繁華世界無心顧，
只盼天明暖幾分。
或
橋底寒窯寄此身，風餐露宿度昏晨。
繁華世界無心顧，只盼天明暖幾分。
破被難遮寒刺骨，殘羹怎解餓侵魂。
唯期好運悄然至，苦盡甘來笑語存。
或
橋下棲身夜未央，寒風瑟瑟透薄裳。
世間紛擾皆如夢，人情冷暖盡成霜。
回首前塵空自嘆，放眼天涯路茫茫。
窮困潦倒何所懼，且將心事付詩章。
Hope
… so long as humanity lives, we cannot help but hope. Hope and literature have in common that they require a tenacious effort of the imagination. Dealing with historical events means somehow finding a way to narrate the past while addressing the present. To fix our gaze firmly onto history, questioning it, is also really to question human nature. I am always drawn by the way humanity can embrace the past while moving forward towards new life.
— Han Kang, novelist and Nobel laureate
石筍
當你是我們的朋友離得越遠
思念得越是深沈當我們陰陽兩隔你越是杳無音訊
存世的一切氣息越發彌足可珍多少人的一生
只是一炷香空洞地消隕
那互相繚繞的煙塵
只為烘托廟宇里端坐的鬼神
把虛構的命運
交托泥胎去掌管和過問你的一生
卻在大地與山巒之下的孔洞中
用生命的水滴
一點點澆築一根石筍為拯救那隨時的塌陷
你努力成為柱石
無論完成與否
你都成了你心中的那個真正的人這塑造了你自己的品格
也讓我們都看見了你堅實的心在一個崇尚灰飛煙盡
斷滅論橫行的時代
積攢不下任何溫存一代代人終會一根根耗盡
互相繚繞出虔誠的氣氛
他們活著的苦難既然不會被廟宇收容
死後永遠也無法借此還魂但水是生命之源
哪裡有大地和山巒下的孔洞
哪裡就有拯救與詰問
那曾經乾涸的你
一定會隨著水脈的孕育
重新實現你的柱石之心繁華可以捏造
廟宇可以渲染
一炷炷香可以互相捏造出迷幻的氣氛
到處是雲里霧裡
迷失命運的人們
人間有時越來越無法相信但你離去的一年中
當我們看見大地與山巒之下
每一個孔洞里
總有一根根像你一樣的人
水滴不斷地澆築著一根根石筍
這山河卻依然可以重新相信於是
我們鼓起勇氣把你深情地紀念
看你那高傲的墓碑
又堅定地矗立成另外一根石筍
生撐山河
死擎天垠
— 錯河，2024年10月27日（李克強忌日）
Time Turned to Fable
When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there’s a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.
—Noe, in Niall Williams, This Is Happiness
Madison Square Garden, 27 October 2024
Trump may be thinking the rally will help him mobilize thugs to violence when he contests his loss and we should be wary of that. But he has provided on the eve of the election the best case why he must be defeated that has ever been presented. In the end, because what unfolded was so foul and so offensive and threatening to so many of us, I believe that is why we will someday conclude that for all intents and purposes Trump’s final political act occurred on the biggest stage in America’s biggest city, a couple of blocks from Broadway.
— David Rothkopf, Donald Trump’s Racist NYC Rally Was Vile. It Was Also Political Suicide, The Daily Beast, 27 October 2024
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