{"id":9024,"date":"2013-02-01T11:14:28","date_gmt":"2013-02-01T11:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/02\/01\/ed-koch-1924-2013\/"},"modified":"2013-02-01T11:14:28","modified_gmt":"2013-02-01T11:14:28","slug":"ed-koch-1924-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/02\/01\/ed-koch-1924-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Koch (1924-2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here<\/a> is my favorite Koch quotation:  ''Listen, I love Boston,'' Mr. Koch said. ''It's a wonderful town to come up and visit, on occasion, but it's not New York. Boston is a very nice town, but compared to New York it's Podunk.''<\/span><\/p>\n

That's Koch for you. Outspoken.  Testicular.  Not that I agree with the jibe.  I'd take the Athens of America over the Big Apple any day.  I was offered full funding to  attend graduate school both in New York and in Boston. So in the spring of '73 I made the transcontinental trek from Los Angeles by thumb and 'dog' to check out both places.  The dismality and crowdedness and dirtiness of NYC with smack addicts on the nod in the subway decided the question for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

My Boston years were blissful.  A great, compact, vibrant town, the hub of the universe and the Eastern hub of the running boom.  A great town to be young in.  But when it comes time to own things and pay taxes, the West is the best, <\/em>but not so far West that you end up on the Left Coast.  (Trivia question: which member of the 27 Club uttered the italicized words and in which song?)<\/span><\/p>\n

Roger Kimball<\/a> on Koch:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Koch was a species of liberal that scarcely exists anymore on the national stage: a liberal, as he liked to put it, \u201cwith sanity.\u201d The sanity acted as a prophylactic against the sort of racialist identity politics that  helped make the mayoralty of David Dinkins, Koch\u2019s successor, such a conspicuous disaster. It also underwrote his relative independence as a political actor. Thus Koch, in 2004, crossed party lines to endorse George W. Bush, not so much because he agreed with all of Dubya\u2019s platform but because he understood that that United States was under threat from a mortal, if also amorphous, enemy, and Koch was an unembarrassed patriot.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A sane liberal.  A dying breed.  'Sane liberal' is becoming an oxymoron and 'liberal loon' a pleonasm.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
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\"\"<\/a>Ed Koch, 1924-2013<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>'Leftist,' not 'Liberal'<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is my favorite Koch quotation:  ''Listen, I love Boston,'' Mr. Koch said. ''It's a wonderful town to come up and visit, on occasion, but it's not New York. Boston is a very nice town, but compared to New York it's Podunk.'' That's Koch for you. Outspoken.  Testicular.  Not that I agree with the jibe.  … Continue reading “Ed Koch (1924-2013)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}