6 Little-Known Weird Tales From Famous Weirdos
6
The Rent-Is-Too-Damn-High Guy Scaled The Brooklyn Bridge
2010 was a relatively relaxed time in American politics. We had enough breathing room to turn our attention to the race for governor of New York and to Jimmy McMillian, who was running on a simple platform: the rent is too damn high. Even if you weren't plugged in to your TV hard enough to catch him at the debates that year, you still surely saw his face reproduced in memes during the decade to come. A lot of things (and people) were too damn high, it seemed, and our age's documentarians were keen to make this known.
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Today, you can become a joke candidate simply by opening a gimmick Twitter account ("I'm the first gamer candidate, lol!"). It's easy then to think that Jimmy McMillian just popped up one day with a zany beard and a catchphrase and then, having exhausted everyone's patience, dropped the act. But McMillian went on running for public office again and again during the 2010s, for mayor, governor, and city council. He even ran for president in 2012, and though he was a Democrat, he ran as a Republican to avoid knocking Barack Obama off the ballot.
And all of that, the 2010 race included, was mere epilogue to his longer career as a perennial candidate who never won a single race but who still ran for decades. In 1993, he had his eyes on becoming mayor of New York City, and he wasn't attracting much attention. So he tied himself to a tree, blindfolded himself (possibly he had an accomplice in all this), and doused himself in gasoline. Still unable to attract people to his cause, he next climbed up a cable of the Brooklyn Bridge. Some sources say he armed himself with a machete. Police eventually got him down, and somehow, this encounter ended without his death -- or theirs.
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