Once upon a time, my justification for Puerto Rico simply being a different country from the United States (regardless of whatever arguments you care to make to the contrary) rested on the fact that our politicians were the kind of buffoons you simply did not see stateside.
A number of you, upon reading that sentence, immediately thought of a bunch of elected officials, celebrities, social media influencers and so on that you personally consider to be clowns. I regret to inform you that where I’m from, we produce a superior, more refined buffoonery, nourished by our volcanic soils, concentrated by our ever-increasing tropical heat, and amplified by the stress of dealing with tourists. One of my very first memories of any Puerto Rican politician is about this weirdo, wearing a ten-gallon hat and plaid shirt and wielding a shotgun in full cowboy cosplay, while tramping around the forests of northeastern Puerto Rico.
Why? I’ll let Wikipedia tell you about Chemo Soto’s favorite hobby:
“During his time in office, Soto became known for his fervent belief in the existence of the Chupacabra. Since the 1990s, Soto claimed that the mythical creature roamed the terrains of Canóvanas. Ever since, he organized various expeditions to search for it, without success.”
The same guy, when Governor Calderón declared him “dead to [her],” responded by organizing a march in which his supporters walked to the Governor’s Mansion. Once outside the mansion, Soto got into a coffin, which they brought into the courtyard of said mansion, at which point he jumped out and asked “am I still dead to you?”
If I have not sufficiently made my point, allow me to note that I’ve spent nearly three hundred words on one joker I remember from my childhood. The boricua sense of humor—that infamous organ we’ve all evolved to deal with the indignity of being the world’s oldest colonial possession, thanks to your country’s 1898 invasion squashing the only 29 days of autonomy Puerto Rico has had since 1493—is simply an incredible catalyst for political tomfoolery.
All of which is to say that you cannot imagine my delight at realizing that, after spending half my life living up here, you gringos finally have your own class of utter bozos in office. Maybe we’re all a little off after COVID; maybe it’s that social media makes them inescapable; maybe this is the United States’ version of those fifth-century Roman emperors with strange penchants for assassinating their best military commanders. The cause is simply outside the scope of this article.
Since, again, most of you are already thinking about your favorite blockheads-in-chief (funny how they’re all in the other party, huh?), I’ll make my intentions clear. We are going to spend the rest of our time together discussing one Eric Leroy Adams, the 110th and, thankfully, outgoing Mayor of New York City, a guy who represents everything wonderful and horrible about our downstate neighbors.
To be clear, I am not going to provide you with any kind of original reporting: everything you are about to see or hear has been covered, usually in fairly serious depth and by people who know what they’re doing. What I want to do is paint a picture of a thoroughly strange man who was not a particularly effective mayor, in part because he was a thoroughly strange man, whose time in office I nonetheless sort of enjoyed, because he made me laugh out loud more times than most actual comedians manage.
On some level, I guess, I’m trying to justify the fact that when he dropped out of this year’s mayoral election (which 6,382 New Yorkers either never figured out or actively ignored, because they still voted for him) my first thought was: “Man, I’m going to miss him.”
Why Can’t He Be Normal?
If you’ve been following Eric Adams for any length of time, you know exactly where we’re starting. It’s the Shohei Ohtani of Eric Adams clips: a powerful generational talent on full display, without arrogance or apology, demanding no more of your time than he needs, simply doing what he does best, and fascinating all of us as he does it.
I’m far from the first person to point this out, but the brilliance of equating 9/11 to a new business opening is that it immediately wipes from your memory the fact that, when asked to describe 2023 in one word, our hero answered “New York.”
Which is, notably, two words.
That’s what it’s like when you sign up for the Eric Adams experience: you strap yourself to rocket with a navigation computer that’s gone rampant and pray to whatever gods you believe in, as the burners all start firing in a pattern that cannot possibly be calculated, that its trajectory will end up somewhat sensical.
Unfortunately, because it’s the Eric Adams experience, the route is going to lead you through Athens, and Istanbul, and Kyiv, and Seoul . . . look, just watch the dang clip until Will Ferrell starts talking.
Which one was your favorite? Was it the one where he mentioned Zagreb while wearing a Croatian soccer jersey? Did you like the understated Irish green cable-knit sweater as he compared New York to Dublin?
I’m partial to the times Adams throws us a curveball and breaks with the formula of “New York City is the [CAPITAL NAME HERE] of America,” such as when he suddenly went overseas a week after he dropped his reelection bid and said, while in the Albanian capital of Tirana, that New York City was “the Albania of America,” or when he compared NYC to Istanbul, which is Türkiye’s largest city—but not its capital.
Speaking of that country . . .
Türkiye and Chicken and Rats! Oh My!
Sadly, as much as I would like this to be all pussywillows, cat-tails, soft winds and roses, it’s impossible to discuss Hizzoner (did you know that’s what newspapers down there call the mayor? Unserious city) without mentioning that he was embroiled in a weird corruption scandal involving some Turkish businessmen, who may or may not have committed some campaign finance fraud on his behalf. We’ll never “legally” know, because the Department of Justice dropped all charges against him earlier this year, and the case was dismissed with prejudice.
I’d rather not get into the details of that, because they’re not funny. What is funny is that Eric Adams’ response to this, as far as the layperson can tell, was mostly to fly a lot on Turkish Airlines. Here’s a representative quote from the federal indictment against him—which, as you by now have come to expect, he referred to as “the federal government intends to charge me with crimes.”
. . . during the July and August 2017 trip, Adams’s Partner was surprised to learn that Adams was in Turkey when she had understood him to be flying from New York to France. Adams responded, in a text message, “Transferring here. You know first stop is always instanbul [sic].”
When Adams’s Partner later inquired about planning a trip to Easter Island, Chile, Adams repeatedly asked her whether the Turkish Airline could be used for their flights, requiring her to call the Turkish Airline to confirm that they did not have routes between New York and Chile.
(N.B. this makes it sound like he was just a very insistent customer. He was not paying for basically any of this—we have the texts between his assistants and the airline managers, all of whom were extremely clear-eyed about that fact.)
If you don’t fly a lot, you may not be aware that the point of a flag carrier airline is not to offer routes that take off and land at countries other than the one whose flag you’re carrying, and in fairness, Eric Adams isn’t exactly high on the list of jet-setting politicians, but “you know first stop is always Istanbul” is one of those things I’m going to hear in my head for the rest of my life.
On to a different animal, literally: other than making Turkish Airlines happy, Eric Adams’ other obsession is rats. He’s declared war on them; he’s said they think they run the city; he appointed a rat czar; he compared rats to the Rebel Alliance, which are (if you’ve been living under a rock for the past 48 years) unquestionably the good guys in Star Wars, and to drive the point home, referred to NYC’s sanitation department as “the Empire,” also known as the genocidal fascists from Star Wars.
Anyway, how did he choose to exterminate rats? With a trash revolution.
No, really, that’s what he said, to the tune of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Note the voiceover he added, in which he says “there are two types of Americans: those who live in New York, and those who wish they could.”
Given that no one recognizes Puerto Rican passports, guess that renders me stateless.
In case you thought that Star Wars thing was a one-off, he called the big dumpsters Empire Bins. Yes, he meant that Empire. Again.
Lastly, while we’re on this animal theme, when called on the fact that he was clearly not a strict vegan, since he ate fish, Adams first denied that he’d ever said he was a vegan (which he definitely had, crediting it with putting his diabetes “in remission,” which is technically correct but a very strange way to phrase that), then said:
“If I see a piece of chicken, I’m going to nibble on it.”
This is the funniest thing a politician has ever said. No, it’s funnier than that.
Also funnier than that.
Stop arguing.
What Else?
Becoming a History Man for Eric Adams (clearly the most use I’ve ever gotten out of my history degree) means recognizing that, no matter how hard you try, there will always be things he says or does that elude categorization, so I’ve resorted to a good old bullet point list. Adams . . .
- Adams took his first three paychecks in cryptocurrency, then bragged about it when crypto had one of its periodic peaks.
- Adams believes there are ghosts in Gracie Mansion.
- Adams claimed he carried a photo of a police officer who had been killed in the line of duty in 1987. This was not true; his aides printed out a photo and artificially weathered it with coffee.
- Adams founded an organization with the laudable goal of mediating the relationship between the NYPD and Black communities in the city, and then gave it the worst name anything has ever had.
- Adams recorded two of the weirdest house tours of all time, one of which was ostensibly about searching a child’s room for contraband, the other of which failed to convince a single person that he was actually living in Brooklyn and not New Jersey.
It occurs to me, as I wrap this up, that most of you reading this know me on some level. Logically, you will think that I am being mostly (or entirely) sarcastic when I talk about how much I appreciate this man and his extremely odd energy. I want to assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
In fairness, that’s probably because I am not a resident of New York City, and don’t intend to be if I can help it, so I didn’t actually have to deal with him being the mayor. That helps cast him as “that weird guy who lives downstate and says things that only sort of make sense,” instead of “that annoying guy who cuts library budgets and lets people rot in jails that need to be closed.”
But I am a resident of this country, at least for the time being, and after years of watching from the Caribbean Sea, embarrassed for my home island and wondering if we’d ever have a serious and sober political culture like what I thought the United States did . . . well, I’m just happy we’re all in the same boat now, partly thanks to this perfectly imperfect oaf of a mayor.
Good night, sweet prince, and flights on Turkish Airlines sing thee to thy rest.