May 15, 2023

If, in 1984, an inventive New Yorker set his time travel machine to the year 2023, the city in which he arrived would confound him.  Although the New York City of today looks much like that of 1984, our time traveler would have a hard time understanding the people, almost as hard a time as H.G. Wells‘s “Time Traveler” did when his machine arrived in the year 802,701.

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The public response of the average New Yorker to the arrest of former Marine sergeant Daniel Penny calls to mind the “Eloi” response to Wells‘s Traveler.  The Eloi were the little, pretty people of the future whom the Time Traveler encountered.  “Once the favored aristocracy” says the Traveler, “the Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.”

The passivity of the Eloi allowed the subterranean Morlocks, once their servants, to become their masters.  “Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew,” says the Traveler.  “They were becoming reacquainted with Fear.”  Unfortunately for their future, the Eloi had lost their spines.  Eloi males no longer had even the instinct to rescue one of their own from peril or to defend themselves from the creeping cannibalism of the Morlocks.

Enter the Time Traveler.  Writing the The Time Machine in 1895, Wells endowed his protagonist with those many virtues expected of an Englishman in the age of Victoria and Kipling.  Tempted to leave behind the chaos he found in the future, the Traveler feels honor-bound to intervene; to save the Eloi from extinction; and, in the process, to show them how to save themselves.

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After serving four years in the Marines, the 24-year-old Daniel Penny arrived in New York City almost as innocent as Wells’s hero and likely as brave.  “I have always been inspired by the ambition and grit,” he posted on social media.  “After high school and unsure of my future, I enlisted in the Marine Corps in search of adventure.”  In the Marines, Sergeant Penny served as squad leader on two deployments.

Unlike most young men of this era, Penny pulled his inspiration from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a novel that at its most literal interpretation would have reinforced his Marine Corps values.  As Penny learned during this past week, if not before, his values and those of his fellow New Yorkers were as out of sync as those of Wells’s hero and the Eloi.

In subterranean New York, Penny came face to face with a modern Morlock, Jordan Neely by name.  Neely had been arrested 42 times in the past 10 years and had a well documented mental health history.  The NYPD knew he was dangerous.  They had arrested Neely most recently in November 2021 on felony assault charges after he punched a 67-year-old female stranger in the face.

Two years later, Neely was roaming free.  After 20 years of good governance, the left took over New York’s City Hall with the installation of Bill de Blasio in 2014.  Since then, the Morlocks of New York, armies of them, have been emboldened to terrorize the Eloi on the streets and on the subways.  Hardly a day passes without some new video surfacing of a Morlock striking or threatening an Eloi while the other Eloi pretend not to see.

It seems somehow appropriate that Neely died on May 1, the ultimate feast day on the revolutionary calendar.  Eleven days later, the Morlocks’ enablers got their way.  Manhattan‘s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, feeling the need to sacrifice a white man to the woke gods, charged Penny with manslaughter.

Penny clearly did not intend to kill Neely.  He expected to restrain him until the police arrived.  I suspect that from what he learned in the Marines and in the books he read, Penny had been trained to intervene when a madman threatens to kill the innocent people around him.