Political news right now is a vast, flowing, torrid and seemingly neverending river of shit, so it only makes sense that our own river of shit in Brooklyn may only get worse under an upcoming Trump administration. From DNAinfo today:
The long-awaited federal cleanup of the Gowanus Canal could come to a near-halt during the Donald Trump administration, but state environmental officials vowed Tuesday that their agency stands ready to step in and fight for the blighted waterway.
President-elect Trump said on the campaign trail that he wants clean air and clean water, but also claimed that global warming was a “concept” created by the Chinese and vowed to dismantle the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
That last promise is one that has Gowanus worried.
Why would Donald Trump ever care about the health of a notoriously polluted waterway in his home city? There was a time we could laugh him off as a Mr. Burnsian cartoonish villain of a developer, chuckling maniacally from a boardroom as polluted sludge is pumped into a waterway. That was before he lied and conned his way into the most powerful office in the world. It’s all fun and games until someone actually builds their machine to block out the sun.
Reminder: Luxury development is popping up along the banks of the canal, advertising the promise of a clean waterway to come in the near future that will turn the area into a verdant esplanade. That was maybe always an ambitious sales pitch, and they’ve already been perfectly trolled by neighborhood graffiti that declared “Welcome to Venice, Jerko.” While it’s tempting to point and laugh at these residents as the biggest losers in this situation, the actual real losers are all of us, every minute of every day, for the next four years.
There is one thing that could inspire federal government help of the canal cleanup: Trump’s son-in-law, fellow slumlord and ruiner of a beloved New York City newspaper Jared Kushner, has a stake in luxury development around the site.
Maybe taking a nice long swim in the Gowanus doesn’t seem like such a bad idea any more.
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