This nation has a very fundamental problem. Its best city—New York City—exists in a northern latitude so extreme that it is a frigid sub-Arctic wasteland for half the year. Why don't we rebuild somewhere down south?

I can already hear the objections. "New York City is not the best city." "We have plenty of good cities in warm places already." "New York City is not even that cold." Please. I would greatly appreciate it if we could conduct this conversation entirely within the realm of reality.

If you don't believe New York City is America's best, grandest, most fully realized city, the beating heart of this nation's art, culture, business, and thought, then fine. Go live in Phoenix or whatever. You don't need to be reading this post at all. (Except for the fact that you have nothing better to do, because you live in Phoenix or whatever.) Are there good cities in warm places? Sure. Some pretty decent ones, here and there. If you put together the most attractive and vibrant portions of Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, and... wherever doesn't suck in Texas, without all the urban sprawl, you could piece together a single fairly tolerable city. But you can't. And it still would not bear any resemblance to the metropolis that is is New York. America's only real metropolis in a sunny place is Los Angeles, a vast agglomeration of neighborhoods of varying quality sewn together with highways and plagued by a fatal set of geological fault lines and juice stores. The sort of people that live in America's best city, New York, are naturally turned off by the essence of Los Angeles, that's why we live in New York. Los Angeles' weather is ideal. If Los Angeles was as cool a city as New York, no one would live in New York. QED.

The fact that nearly ten million good-looking people tolerate today's sidewalks coated in an ice-encrusted layer of snow covering near-frozen slush lakes is de facto proof that New York is America's best city. If it weren't, we would get the fuck out of here, pronto.

So why, pray tell, did we as a nation allow our best city to be located in such a freezing fucking location? Well, I would begin tracing the line of blame with Henry Hudson, and continue it straight on through to Robert Moses. Piss poor planning is frankly the only way to characterize it. You'd think nobody ever stopped to regard their frostbitten digits during one of the annual ice storms and said, "You know what? Let's pause right here and move this whole act on down to San Antonio or thereabouts."

Fortunately, it is never too late. America is a big country. We own Hawaii. We have plenty of open space. We have a wide variety of microclimates to choose from. We'll pick a nice spot on the water, with plenty of sunshine year-round and a distinct lack of ice storms, slush apocalypses, and "wintry mixes." Fuck winter, and fuck its mixes most especially. Drought, tropical diseases, hurricanes, and/ or earthquakes are a small price to pay for being able to live somewhere that does not cause acute Vitamin D deficiency from persistent lack of sunlight.

Is there already another, less impressive city extant in the spot we choose? No matter. Don't think of it as "San Diego"—think of it as "an area that will soon be bulldozed to make way for New New York City." Gone will be the sprawling detritus of lesser America. In its place we will painstakingly construct a jumbled super-urban metropolis that spreads for hundreds of square miles in all (sunny) directions, like a high-rise-laden squid that has made its inky escape from the Northeast, bringing along all of its charms and none of its fucking ice. Once construction is complete, the residents of New York City will undertake an orderly relocation to our glorious new environs. All future growth in America should be confined to an area south of 35 degrees North latitude. As for the state of New York and the rest of the northeastern U.S., we will leave it to the wolves and the Bostonians. This climate is not fit for humanity.

[Photo: Flickr]