On the morning I woke up early to see Michael Bloomberg and Boris Johnson speak, people were still angry at Kanye West for interrupting Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards. They probably still are. Swift’s partisans confuse me: the notion that a musician’s right to thank her agent and awards voters is god-given and inalienable is, to me, a curious one. Still: David Brooks and Gail Collins debated the issue on one of the Times’s too-capacious blogs, and President Obama even piped in.
It seems a question of context: Swift, a pretty blonde teenager, was accepting an award for a music video about the prom. West was confrontational and (as was later reported) drunk, abrasive to viewers’ sensibilities. A superstar changing the predictable awards-show script seemed subversive, eerie in how much it shocked. It was like September’s other outrage, Rep. Joe Wilson’s interruption of Obama’s address to U.S. Congress, in its brazen denial of the sacredness of cultural institutions, its lack of deference to our secular demigods.
All this was vaguely on my mind as I walked into Low, but even your humble cultural critic has to stop thinking of Kanye sometime. I was looking forward to a lofty exchange of ideas about, say, congestion pricing. I sat through boilerplate about “Mayor Mike” by professor and former Bloomberg advisor Esther Fuchs, whose vague enumeration of all the ways her friend had improved New York smacked of young Swift’s thanking all the fans. I remained optimistic.
Then Boris Johnson, mayor of London, began addressing us in the discursive, jocular style whereby trifles are said with style, verve, and an assured remove from concerns or thoughts. At one point he talked about how London was exporting chocolate cakes to France. I remember an interlude about public housing, which in London assuredly does not resemble “hobbit-holes.” Bloomberg made stabs at engaging Johnson, who seemed trapped, blissfully, in his own world.
Audience question time! I was excited for a moment that did not resemble a Fuchs-led Bloomberg re-election rally or an Oxbridge tea party at which Johnson was the most precocious schoolboy. I even got in line, to ask the sort of dull, deferential, yet (to me) important question of how New York could better accommodate young college grads looking for work and cheap lodging. Most questions were along similar lines, asking for a straightforward answer about sustainability and getting just that. A questioner a few places ahead of me in line, though, decided to change the tone forcefully.
Addressing Johnson directly, the long-haired gentleman in a white T-shirt said that his humor had gone “over our heads,” though I found Johnson’s humor disappointing in its predictability but wholly understandable in its motive. He then asked Mayor Bloomberg why the mayor had not met with a specific homelessness advocacy group, citing figures about the mayor’s campaign promises which Bloomberg was quick to correct, leaving the larger question unanswered. The speaker disregarded his own error and asked the same question, again, as a follow-up.
Bloomberg did a bureaucratic parry; I was too focused on reconfiguring my question in my mind (should I open with “Mr. Mayor” or “Mayor Bloomberg”?) to hear exactly how the mayor dismissed the activist, again. The speaker, having no further recourse after rephrasing his question once more and being met with a now irritable mayor, closed with a loud but unwavering “Mayor Bloomberg: you lie,” and strolled out of the hall smiling, his point made. “I’ve heard someone else say that recently,” Bloomberg said, a laugh line, save the laugh.
My companion at the event, better versed in city politics than I, said that the activist had a fair point, errors and irritating monopolizing of the speakers’ time aside. “Imagine how many panels he’s been to where Bloomberg has ignored him. He just wanted to get his voice heard.” I thought Bloomberg’s grasp at humor had truth in it—the intrusion seemed, at the time, as unwelcome as Joe Wilson’s, or as Kanye’s. Maybe I was just mad that there wasn’t time for my question to be answered, though I can imagine what Bloomberg might’ve said. As the pain of not making it onto NY1’s telecast has faded, I guess I can see my companion’s point, or am at least a bit more sympathetic to the activist. Homelessness is a more worthy, more real, issue than anything that came up that day, in a panel as tightly scripted and mutually admiring as any awards show. The mistake the activist made when holding the microphone was to confuse entertainment with real life. But that’s common enough, these days, to be forgivable.
Daniel D’Addario is a Columbia College senior majoring in American studies and English. He is the managing editor of the Columbia Political Review. The Unbearable LOLness of Being runs alternate Mondays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com
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