It is strange that I begin my blogging career on such an off-the-wall topic and character. But nevertheless, these strange characters are often where we find some half-way (or all-the-way) decent rebukes and rebukers. Read Mark 1:6 if you catch my drift. The character in mind James McMillan the founder and from what I can tell the sole member of the “rent is too damn high party.” McMillan found himself in the “spotlight” in his 2009 run as the mayor of the Big Apple that Never Sleeps and now again is in the spotlight running for governor of the one and only Empire state.
For those of you curious stop a minute and watch the following link. Laugh, scoff, jeer, do all of the things I did when first watching it, and then watch it again about another 80 times and laugh even harder. We good?
Now, as I sit here tonight I have sympathy for this guy. I laughed at him and wrote him off, but I’m not sure I can or that we should. Does he have a legitimate chance at winning this thing no (maybe DAMN NO) but that’s not the point. McMillan is a politician of a finer sort, a politicians politician if you will, so much so that his party doesn’t have a platform, his party IS the platform. For this I think the guy is right on track.
To the nitty-gritty. McMillan represents his constituents better than (probably) any other candidate in this race. He is speaking for the folks of NYC whose rent is just TOO DAMN HIGH. Ok, you say, they knew the rent was going to be high when they moved to NYC—that’s the perks of living in a big city. I sympathize, Atlanta is a big city and you’ve got to pay to play. But here is the issue, the people McMillan is representing aren’t playing. They aren’t living in ghettos and projects of NYC because they are scraping through Graduate School. No, they are living, stuck, marooned by circumstance. And when someone comes along whose only platform is to say that the rent is “TOO DAMN HIGH,” something sticks. Because we aren’t talking about rent. We are talking about a candidate representing dispossessed people in the process of being dispossessed. The rent being too damn high is a real problem. The rent is too damn high because the paychecks are too small, if they are even there at all. So in the video when Cuomo scoffs at McMillan and says “I agree with Jimmy the rent is too damn high” he isn’t even saying the same thing (or agreeing for that matter). Not even close. Cuomo is bringing home a paycheck (or at least one that provides a living wage) and the rent being “too high” is just an unfortunate reality of big city life. But McMillan is pushing a hard line—what we say most of the time isn’t what we mean.
That being said. Go for it Jimmy, some people are catching your message and it makes some sense. Homosexuals marrying isn’t that big of a deal when you can’t afford to live or feed yourself and family—so if you want to marry a shoe do it.
I’ll continue to laugh every time I watch these clips. I’ll be looking for a sketch on SNL and I’ll be tuning into the Colbert Report to see how you are lambasted. But as Americans and privileged Americans at that, we will take every opportunity to make sure that prophetic words become a joke. They’re easier to swallow that way. Maybe the rent is too damn high because the cost is more than we want to consider. And maybe as Christians, who have the potential to be more articulate, should help Mr. McMillan say what he is really trying to say.
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