Glenn has been in New York for just a couple of days now, but Pat and Stu could not help but notice that being the in the city has put him into a bit of a funk. You see, Glenn has been particularly ‘gloom and doom’ this week, and Stu questioned if the trip to the Big Apple had anything to do with it.
“Stu thinks that I should not be allowed to be in New York anymore,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “I think that's what Governor Cuomo thinks as well.”
“There's no place for you here, Glenn,” Stu explained. “And I actually back up the governor. He's a very smart man. You need to get the hell back to Texas… You change when you're here. And I love you, but you turn into a different person, I think.”
Despite the unfortunate politics of New York, Glenn has actually always loved the city. But now it just seems to make him depressed.
“It's just I think… knowing your love of history and knowing your love of this area and your love of the buildings here and the way the city was built,” Stu said. “And I think… it's like you see the history there and then you see what it's become. And it's like you're looking into the future of the country.”
In New York, you have the opportunity to see the past, present, and future in one simple glance. And what Glenn is able to see makes him a “little pessimistic.”
“I had a bunch of people in the office last night. And I said to one of the guys, ‘Come on, you got to sit in my chair,’” Glenn explained. “Because when you're sitting in my chair at my desk here in the office, you see in one window the full Empire State Building… And then you turn the other way and perfectly framed is the Chrysler Building. So it's like the greatest iconic view of the city you've ever seen. And those two buildings tell to story of America in the Great Depression.”
“But at the same time, I walk down the streets and I see the brownstones and I think of Theodore Roosevelt and the gangs of the New York and the early progressive era. Right across the street from our building here, underneath us… is the IRS building… And the giant debt clock is right where we walk in every day,” he continued. “Right across the street is – I can't remember the name of the theater – but it's the place where Margaret Sanger used to go. It was built for the progressives voice to be heard… And so I get into New York, and I've seen all this history right here. [But] everybody of is walking by it not looking up. And they have no idea. And unless you know that history, we're going to repeat it. We're going to repeat it. And so I get a little pessimistic.”
“That's a good word for it,” Stu concluded. “Maniacal is another word.”
Front page image courtesy of the AP