Stay off our streets. Please. We don’t tolerate fakers, pretenders and phonies who come as if they belong but never paid their dues.
Riding our subways, eating our hot dogs, mingling with the locals in Brooklyn and the Bronx – you can’t really suppose that’ll do the trick.
So forget your posters and slogans that wowed them in Bridgewater, Iowa.
We’re wise to the difference between the real deal and a yokel. We may be smart-alecky and brash, but we visit the sick and we’ll also give you the shirt off our back. We’ll take that instead of the smooth-talk that brings blood-libelous false charges against the Jewish people, Bernie.
We have no tolerance for backstabbers.
We’ll match our rudeness against your snoozing while Benghazi burned, Hillary.
We can spot a flim flam routine a mile away.
We have enough Three Card Monte Street Hustlers. Or had them until Rudy busted them, once and for all, or so we thought, until you two came along… came along schnorring for votes and whoring for Primary delegates toward a Democratic National Convention that misses no opportunity to jeer the Jewish State whenever Israel is mentioned.
In “The Days of the Bitter End,” the best novel I ever wrote about the days of my youth in New York, I said that the same thrills can never come round again.
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We don’t like sneaks, Bernie, and we don’t like cheats, Hillary.
Still true – but also true that this is still a town of big dreams. New York is always different but New York is always the same. No time for Babbitts who come with a Willy Loman pitch to sell goods that what nobody wants. New Yorkers can’t get romanced with a smile and a shine.
We invented Advertising and the Huckster trade, right there on Mad Ave., but we don’t like sneaks, Bernie, and we don’t like cheats, Hillary.
That is so backwoods, so Hicksville. Rehearsals are over. This is Broadway, remember. You can’t make it there with an act so sleazy.
Small-timers, singles hitters, don’t get cheered around here. A strike out is okay. It proves you tried. But hypocrites have no shot.
Not today and not then, back when New York was my New York and Lenny Bruce (as I wrote) was shpritzing his Seven Forbidden Words on Bleecker.
No, New York never changed. Not really. The young got older, that’s all. It can be a town without pity but mostly it’s a big-hearted town. Everybody gets a chance and it’s always worth a try. Some succeed. Many fail. That’s not New York’s fault. That’s life.
Bill de Blasio, you say? Or Mayor Pu**, as the New York Post calls him – yes, that was a mistake. Don’t expect us to do it again with more corrupt Liberals.
We’re big. It’s the Democrat Party that got small. Listen to this:
“America will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
That was JFK, of course, Hillary. That was a Democrat without the Socialist/Communism, Bernie.
Please don’t bring up the joke about the out of towner on Broadway who asks: “Excuse me, Sir, can you tell me how to get to 72nd Street?”
“Or should I just go to hell and take a hike?”
Funny, maybe, but it’ll do for a hint.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the international classic “Indecent Proposal” now followed by the prophetic newsroom thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com