Most of New York’s power elite got bamboozled by the COVID commissars, and they’re paying the price. From Dr. Naomi Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:
Photo by Miikka A. on Unsplash
I stepped back into Manhattan and Brooklyn last week, down to the city from my life in the deep upstate woods. I was revisiting the world of privilege that had ousted me in 2021, and that had been so confident and even smug right up until and into the “pandemic.”
It’s haunting, what that world seems like now.
I know some readers must be thinking, Why have compassion for, why even bother with the fates of, wealthy liberal elites — those who aligned for the past three years with a million lies, and who only grew wealthier and more status-secure as a result of the depredations of the recent past?
I hear you.
But I feel the need, as a witness to this dark time, nonetheless to describe what I saw. When an empire’s elites lose confidence or all sense of purpose, history reveals that it is hard for that empire to survive. And the collapse of confidence I saw, may show a movement in the life of the nation away at least from the complete madness and denial that has gripped this world since 2020.
Brian and I attended an evening gathering of New York City thought leaders, and old-school society leaders. It was in a private home, and convened by the same glamorous group that had dis-invited me from its “list”, due to my naughty vaccine status, in 2021.
I felt that it was important to show up now, and see what had happened to this world in the meantime.
I felt myself step back in time, to pre-2020. There was the familiar swish of the cab that let Brian and me off at an elegant corner on the Upper East Side. There were the obsequious doormen on either side of us, gesturing us forward, into the marvel of the intact Art Deco elevator. They did so with a theatrical servility that I now understand, after my three years in exile in “the other America”, to be purely gestural, and in fact to be deeply ironic.
There was the doorman standing inside the elevator, whose entire job involved pressing the ancient buttons — a flagrant display of conspicuous consumption. There was the door of the elevator opening directly into a penthouse, rather than into a hallway lined with apartments. That private-elevator marker, like a “Park Avenue Classic Six” apartment, or a dedicated parking space in the garage, is a sought-after status symbol, in a city that has little physical space in which to display variations on wealth.
