"The Supreme Ecstasy of the Modern World"

Last week my parents came for a visit, and I decided to take them into New York City for a day. Before hitting Broadway, I decided to take them to Top of the Rock, the observation deck on the 68th-70th floors of Rockefeller Center. It's the kind of touristy thing I never do since I live here, but get to indulge in with visitors. 

I was not expecting much from the experience, considering I'd been on top of plenty of tall buildings before. This time, however, I was overcome. It may have been geography. I had been to the top of the World Trade Center while it still stood, but that meant looking at the urban canyons from a distance. Rockefeller Center sits amidst the skyscrapers, and I felt like I could reach out and touch them on that clear day. 

On the ground in midtown Manhattan it is also just easy to miss its grandiosity. Down on the street it's such an unappealing place, crowded, dirty, loud, and corporatized within an inch of its life. Up in the clouds I felt a sublime connection to something higher. It reminded me of how in the 1920s when foreigners steamed into New York Harbor they gawked at Manhattan's skyline, something monumental and totally unprecedented. This was the skyline that inspired the futuristic city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a place embodying new possibilities and new fears all at once. 

I got to thinking specifically of Of Time and the River, a Thomas Wolfe novel ending with the arrival by ship in Manhattan in the 1930s, the narrator gushing over the sight of the tall buildings from the decks of the wondrous ocean liner, calling it "the supreme ecstasy of the modern world." We have become so used to this sight that it does not register in the same way anymore.

I've been thinking a lot about the impoverishment of our politics being rooted in a lack of belief in the future. The fascistic strain embodied by Putin and Trump prefers an eternal present when it is not trying harken back to an imagined past. Progressives, belying their name, lack any imagination. Faced simultaneously with high gas prices and global warming they are ignoring an opportunity to move us beyond fossil fuels and advocating for cuts to the gas tax instead. Across the political spectrum there does not seem to be any interest in building anything, merely maintaining power. 

Staring at the New York skyline from the Top of the Rock is a reminder that things can be built, that the world can be re-imagined. If we want to make the world a better place we need to start thinking as big as the New York skyline. 

Thoughts On An Imminent Trip To Nebraska

Tomorrow I depart with my wife and kids for my rural Nebraska hometown. I am very happy to be seeing my parents and sisters, nephews, nieces, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends again.

At the same time, it is a bittersweet feeling. There are days when I feel like an internal exile. My hometown and the greater New York City area are such different places that they might as well be in different countries. My travels around the country, which have included residential stints in places as far-flung as Chicago and Texas, have taught me that this is a nation of regions.  By that I do not mean the facile "red state versus blue state" cliche. Places where I have lived, like East Texas and West Michigan, have a unique culture that is all their own, even if both are "red" regions.

Like most of my grad school peers, I am living in a place that I never expected to live in, even though I left academia. I certainly enjoy teaching in New York City, and I have learned to love New Jersey. At the same time, it's still easy to feel out of place. This happens most often when I tell people where I'm from, and they treat me as some kind of oddity, or say disparaging things about "flyover country" in casual conversation. I don't think I've ever encountered a group of people more provincial than the residents of the Upper West Side of New York, and that is saying something, since folks in my hometown often treat the world beyond central Nebraska as if it has "here be dragons" written on the map.

I've at least grown a little used to these feelings ever since I moved to Chicago in 1998 and had someone call me "country" for saying the word "supper" and having a clerk stare at me in bewilderment when I asked for a "sack" with my order. What's been a little harder is the feeling that where I am from feels more and more alien to me. Some of this is the natural process of living apart from it for almost twenty years.

It also has to do, in large part, with the growing political and cultural divisions in the country. In my return visits to my homeland, I've noticed an increasing turn inward, party having to do, I suspect, with the aging of the population in that area. It was always a very conservative place, but it has become radically conservative, in the talk radio mode I normally associate with places like Texas. I still remember a couple of years ago being amused and horrified by a flyer posted in my parents' church about an even called "Guns for Life" featuring a minuteman and a fetus. Evidently it was some kind of gun range anti-abortion fundraising event. That kind of thing never would've happened in my childhood. Last year I had to hear a sermon, demanded of the parish priests by the local bishop, attacking the Supreme Court's recent decision on gay marriage. When Barack Obama spoke his infamous line about people in these areas being bitter and clinging to guns and religion, I just nodded in agreement. I have yet to witness anything in the ensuing eight years to get me to change my mind.

So I am left negotiating two worlds, one where a public attack on gay marriage is mandated, another where it would be thought of as hate speech. (And trust me, I am well aware that other people have much harsher negotiations due to race, sexuality, etc. I'm just thinking out loud here about regional differences.) I wish there was a way to bring the best of both of them together. Rural Nebraska has got to be one of the most culinarily benighted lands in the nation, a place where cheese is a spice and corn is a vegetable, as a friend back home likes to say. Here in New Jersey, on the other hand, there is amazing food from a variety of culinary traditions, so much that it never fails to amaze me. On the other hand, the people of my homeland have an admirable humility, and are much, much less obsessed with status and material possessions as folks are here in the Northeast. (This is perhaps one reason why Trump has not won any states as of yet in the Great Plains.) The way people in these parts view one's college alma mater as a reflection of their value as a human being never fails to disgust me. People back home are a lot more rooted. Unfortunately, that rootedness often expresses itself in an exasperating narrow-mindedness. People in both regions by and large don't understand the other. New Yorkers think of rural Nebraskans (if they ever think of them) as a bunch of dumb hicks, and Nebraskans think of New York as some wretched hellhole of immorality and degradation. Both are completely wrong, and both will never change their minds.

I know I will keep going on, enjoying the pizza and diversity in my new homeland, but silently shocked at the materialism. And I will go home tomorrow and enjoy the easy-going social interactions but be ready to be exasperated at the politics. Perhaps I'll just be satisfied that as an internal exile, I understand a lot of places a whole lot better than people who have lived there their entire lives.

Penn Station Project (Beer Coolers)

The above picture represents one of my Friday afternoon commuting rituals.  If I'm not able to do happy hour with some of my colleagues, I brown bag a tallboy can of beer on the train ride home.  This is technically against the rules of New Jersey Transit, but only the written rules.  It is not in violation of the unwritten rules.  As long as I keep it hidden, don't litter or spill, and not bother anyone else, the conductors will turn a blind eye.

Vendors in Penn Station are well aware of this.  When you walk down the main concourse, you'll notice various pizzerias and sub sandwich shops, all of which have massive plexiglass, open-topped coolers full of ice and tallboy beer cans.  They also have beer taps, and I have seen some people walk away with massive Big Gulp sized containers, sipping their beer through a straw, which I refuse to do. This practice seems much more common among the riders on the Long Island Railroad, make of that what you will.

Not all of these places in the concourse are created equal.  Many offer only Yuengling as the sole alternative to Bud Light.  A couple of places, however, regularly have craft beer of top quality available.  I have no idea what the names of these places are, I just know them by sight and by their location on the concourse.  For a short glorious time one of the places was stocked with Bell's beer, a label I consumed with much gusto when I lived in Michigan, and which isn't easy to find in these parts.  For a couple of glorious Fridays I ended the working week sipping on a smooth Bell's brown ale, remembering the past and drifting into a zone of mental relaxation.

That's why the conductors will never bust me and the other tired people nursing beers on the train.  We tend not to be boisterous (those are the folks getting on the train wrecked after happy hour), but introspective.  This also happens to be why I never stick around to take the trains that leave around 7 on a Friday, since they are full of drunk yahoos.  I like stepping off the train, feeling refreshed and I little buzzed, ready to greet my wife and kids and enjoy a relaxing weekend together.  I hear that a removal of the coolers is in the works.  Why can't they just let us worn out commuters enjoy this simple privilege?

Cranky Bear On Cruz and "New York Values"

[Editor's Note: Cranky Bear is an angry, impolitic friend of mine who is constantly sending me missives for this blog.  I don't publish them all, but I think Cranky was so upset this time around that I felt like throwing him a bone.]

Cranky Bear here, with some bourbon on the rocks and a bone to pick with one Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz.  Y'see last night I's watching the dumpster fire otherwise known as the Republican presidential debate, and witnessed Teddy boy say something that was completely obnoxious even by his standards.  Ol' Ted was questioned about his "New York values" comment, implying that Trump embodied those values, and thus was not representative of the people of Iowa. Given the opportunity to apologize, he did what every asshole does when they get caught: he doubled down.  He hit the "New York values" thing even harder, possibly because his head was swollen from just having made Trump look ridiculous with the issue of Cruz's eligibility.  Trump then turned it around hard on Cruz, invoking 9/11 and winning the crowd over.  Cruz was given another opportunity to walk it back today, and instead he wrote the smarmiest, most dickish nonpology I've ever seen, starting off with "I apologize to the millions of New Yorkers who have been let down by liberal politicians in that state."  He goes on to attack Andrew Cuomo for not supporting fracking, saying he's sorry for New Yorkers for losing out on jobs.  The man seems to relish adding injury to insult.

And you know what?  It will probably work out for him.  The hard right wing base of knuckle-dragging troglodytes just loves it when someone refuses to back down after being "politically incorrect" aka hateful/racist/super-dickish.  When Trump started insulting John McCain's military record, for instance, it garnered him MORE support.  Cruz has been paying attention.  Like all good sociopaths he knows the fastest way to tell people what they want to hear so that he can use them, even if he is doing it in the most two-faced way possible.  For example, he attacked Lawrence Tribe, who has questioned Cruz's eligibility, for being a liberal Harvard law professor, when Cruz himself was a graduate of Harvard law!  He rails against "New York values," including "concern with media and money" when he himself got a giant loan from a Wall Street bank and also goes to New York on the regular to ask for dough from fat cats. Not to mention the fact that he's just as big a whore for the media as the rest of gang vying to be president.

Cruz has three real talents.  The first is that he sells his bullshit so convincingly that people think he actually believes it, and the second is that he has learned how to sound like what a stupid person thinks a smart person sounds like.  The third, as I've mentioned, is that he knows how to push the right buttons with the drooling goobers who make up the fanatical base of the conservative movement.  He started the night last night by preempting a question about jobs so he could rail about Americans temporarily taken prisoner by Iran, and to basically promise that such behavior would result in a war if he were president.  Thus his announcement of such a blood-thirsty and potentially disastrous stance was met by wild cheering from the audience.

Cruz's attacks on New York are part of an old and successful strategy by conservative politicians to appeal to tribalism, whether it be Nixon's "Silent Majority" or Sarah Palin's "real America." While they are promoting policies that will destroy any chances of upward mobility for their supporters, they turn around and assure them that they stand for people "like them" and are against "those other people."

Okay, okay, at this point I am sounding more like my friend Werner than myself.  Now time for a little of that old time Cranky religion: Ted Cruz, please go fuck yourself. You are a two-faced lying asshole dripping with smarm and mendacity.  You want to know what New York values are, you slimy sack of shit? This morning on the subway I was surrounded by a multi-ethnic melting pot of hard-working people up before the break of dawn. I said hi, as I usually do, to the immigrant proprietor of the sweets stall by the Penn Station turnstiles.  When I go get a cup of coffee at the place near where I work, the manager always asks about my kids.  I have seen a man RUN to help a complete stranger who had slipped on the ice on 81st street.  I have seen heavily armed National Guard troops in Penn Station help direct lost tourists through its confusing tunnels.  I've lived all around this country, including Texas, and no one place has any kind of advantage when it comes to morality or decency.  To tell the people of this nation that people in New York are somehow deficient in this regard is a fucking lie that you are telling to exploit the resentment of the hate-filled trash that buy into your bullshit.

And one last thing, Teddy boy.  Dried cumstains like yourself never miss an opportunity to exploit the memory of 9/11 to justify your boners for war, Islamophobia, and the surveillance state.  Well guess what, you don't get to do that anymore.  9/11 is not theoretical or symbolic in the New York City area.  People actually DIED here by the thousands.  The scars are still there on the face of lower Manhattan.  If New Yorkers exist so you can insult them in your sick political game 364 days of the year, you don't for one fucking second get to claim their memory when September 11th rolls around. And you know what, Ted? Don't worry about apologizing.  After this election ends and you've lost, just please just go away and never come back.

Cranky bear out.

The Democrats Are Still The Party of Richard J Daley

During the last five years Republicans have been taking radical actions on the state level, fulfilling Tea Party ambitions that have been thwarted in Washington.  The new wave of conservative governors and legislators has enacted a massive wave of abortion restrictions, has gutted social services (with Kansas as a prime example), busted public worker unions, and slashed money drastically to public universities.  Just this week it appears that Scott Walker is trying to essentially destroy the public university system in Wisconsin, and Sam Brownback is willing to keep massive tax decreases in place that have made it extremely difficult for the state to finance itself.

You would think that in response to this onslaught that Democrats would be using their power in Blue States to enact a progressive agenda.  If you thought that, you are sadly very wrong.  Democratic politicians in blue states and cities that vote overwhelmingly for their party have turned around and offered conservatism lite, as opposed to any kind of progressive agenda.  In Chicago Rahm Emanuel has sought to fire unionized teachers and replace them with Teach for America recruits.  In New York Andrew Cuomo keeps pushing the testing of teachers, despite the positive results so far on previous tests.  His bloodlust for teacher firings must be filled, I guess.  Other Democrats are more concerned about lining their pockets than anything else, as this week's revelations about Sheldon Silver revealed.  Here in New Jersey local Democratic bosses like Joe DiVincenzo and George Norcross continue to support Chris Christie in a cynical power play.  With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?

Rahm Emanuel, who's re-election bid as mayor of Chicago is less than a month away, is perhaps the best example of the continuities of the worst aspects of the Democratic Party.  Chicago is as true "blue" as they come; I can't imagine a Republican ever getting elected to be mayor of that city.  At the same time, it has been ruled for decades by Democrats who have impeded progressive political action at every turn and have favored corporations over their own people.  Rahm has attacked teachers and privatized key public functions of the city while refusing to listen to calls to reign in police violence.  He is governing much the same as his predecessor, Richard M Daley, who never met a corporation that he didn't like.

Of course, little Richie never lived up to his father Richard J Daley's reputation.  The elder Daley ruled Chicago with an iron fist from 1955 to 1976, and in the process became one the most important Democrats in country, despite holding only a local office.  As the book American Pharaoh points out, he used his immense power and ability to tap federal largesse to keep the city segregated.  Interstate highways formed walls between black and white neighborhoods, and massive housing projects warehoused the black poor.  Today it might be easy to look at his racial politics and see a man from a bygone time, but modern Democratic mayors have done little or nothing to fight the growing waves of gentrification that bring segregation in their wake.  They are more likely to welcome it for boosting the tax base.  Just like Daley, politicians like Cuomo and Emanuel are primarily interested in one thing: the preservation and expansion of their personal power.

They are allowed to do sobecause the old party apparatus has a stranglehold on Democratic institutions on the local level, and because too many rank and file Democrats are unwilling to push for better.  Back when I lived in Chicago, at a time when Richie Daley's administration was allowing mass transit to rot while throwing out tax giveaways to Boeing, most locals seemed to respond with the old chestnut "Chicago is the city that works!"  As long as the Loop looks spiffy and they have jobs, these types won't complain.  Organized labor is so cowed that even though the likes of Emanuel and Cuomo have been actively hostile to unions, they still fall in behind them.  By undercutting labor these modern day bosses have effectively neutralized the one institution that has any chance of challenging them.  It's hardly a surprise that Democratic bosses like Norcross and DiVincenzo have been Christie's buddies, they're cut from the same venal cloth.

Bill de Blasio gives me hope that genuine progressives can gain power in Democratic strongholds, but he has faced an unprecedented rebellion by police for daring to publicly utter the obvious truth that blacks and whites have a different relationship with the police.  He is effectively being punished for not governing in the style of Emanuel in Chicago, where the cops still have free reign.  If he governed like Richard J. Daley, "shoot to kill" order and all, the police would be just fine with him.

Progressives rightfully fear the things that Walker and his radical ilk are doing on the state level, and rightfully excoriate the inability of the president and Democrats in the capital to consistently push a progressive agenda.  Something they ought to be paying more attention to is that in supposedly "blue" territory like Chicago and New York, that the Democrats are still the party of Richard J Daley.