Europeans have been hungering soooo long to laugh at the US and now the Idiocracy, and its followers, have provided many more reasons than are needed.
I kind of wonder about the bar/club explosion in the EV anyway. It is like half the establishments are sort of like mimicing what NYC nightlife is supposed to be. The EV nightlife scene, I mean just the physical environment with smaller streets, architecture still on a human scale, -is not really meant to be capable of existing as a kind of college and up-scale-comes-slumming it bar mall. And it all feeds into the old thing about gentrification, which is a word that hardly connotes the real violence being done to the community.
Two weeks ago I was walking home down Ave B to 2nd Street chatting with Miguel Algarin, the founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I was making a joke about,"Hey Miguel what public program do you think the city stole money from to put this new tar on the Avenue from Houston to 14?" He just said, "Its only being done because there are so many more white people now."
'Gentrification' is an equivocation used to blandly cover for the outright racist tactic it really is. That racist tactic is to, in effect, dilute the current population of the area, destroy family unity, de-centralize the concentration of non-white residents and therefore impede the efforts by thier own neighborhood groups to practice protection and leadership through the many community cultural centers that used to exist. It is all replaced by a creeping commercialization and replacement of real culture with ersatz culture - it used to be art galleries and now its bars and clubs. In the EV terrain, if you think about it, a gallery or a bar (even more so now with the crackdown) is just a complicated method to hold down a piece of real estate.
So, in a kind of weirdly funny way, the current crackdown on the EV bar scene is actually, and I am completely sure not intentionally, acting to inhibit the cultural violence being done to the original majority group of residents in the area. The crackdown is impedeing the violence done to the culture through 'gentrification' which is the White Order's catchphrase for what is actually ethnic cleansing. To this aspect of the crackdown, I have to paradoxically say, "YAY NYC cops!" Even though it is absolutely not their intention.