One of my favorite historical works of political journalism is James Q Wilson's "A Guide To Reagan Country: The Polical Culture of Southern California," published by Commentary in 1967. It was written to explain the political appeal of Ronald Reagan the year after his election to California governor. Wilson saw that appeal rooted in the lower-middle class suburbs where he grew up.
As Mike Bloomberg has forcefully entered the presidential race, we can trace his rise in a similar fashion by looking at the local culture that birthed him. While I am not from Bloomberg Country, I have worked in it for almost a decade as a teacher at a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
If you take a look at the 2009 mayoral election, Bloomberg got the votes of registered Democrats in the Upper West Side, despite being a Republican.
Something about Bloomberg made Democrats vote for him there. What was it?
The Upper West Side is very white and very affluent. At the same time it touts its progressivism, rare for a place where wealthy white people live. But we should interrogate the version of "progressive" politics fancied in that region. Upper West Siders are very pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, pro-immigrant, and anti-gun. At the same time they dislike unions, taxes, and welfare. They were unconcerned about stop and frisk. To their minds the aggressive behavior of the NYPD was totally warranted. After all, wasn't it keeping them safe?
They have also been involved in some ugly incidents around school zoning. White Upper West Siders talk a big game about diversity, but are not all that interested in integrating the public schools. In this regard they do not differ from white Americans in less tony parts of the country.
Folks in Bloomberg Country duitifully vote for Democrats in national elections, but they prefer a version of the Democratic party very different from the one represented by AOC and Bernie. They do not want the libertarian hellscape preferred by the Republican Party, but they recoil at free college and Medicare for All. They tout their opposition to racism, but don't really care about the horrors of mass incarceration.
It's not just a matter of policy, but also of style. They work in the corporate world and thus see Bloomberg as one of them. They want efficient, technocratic leaders who lead with competence, and have little patience for mass politics and the rabble behind them. They don't like Trump, but they fear a social democratic wave almost as much.
The denizens of Bloomberg Country are important because they show issues the Democrats are going to have if they try to move more to the left. The national media spends too much energy going to rural Pennsylvania diners talking to the locals. To understand another, equally crucial demographic, they also need to go to the cafe section of Zabar's.
I am still on spring break, but unable to travel because my wife and kids are still in school. I have been recharging myself by taking a "staycation" of sorts in between getting the house organized and a head start on my school work. This usually involves taking the train from New Jersey to New York City and spending a day wandering around.
Yesterday I took a path I'd never taken before, in search of World War I monuments. I am going to be teaching a short spring session course on World War I and cultural memory, and I thought it would be great to take students to see some of their city's memorials. These monuments are so obscure that I realized that I'd never actually seen many of them. I started the morning by taking the 1 train from Penn Station to 66th Street. I sought out and found a couple of monuments in Central Park, one a memorial grove whose trees have not survived the ravages of time, the other a pretty standard bronze sculpture of soldiers charging.
The small scale of these monuments reflected that they were regimental in nature. I'd heard the biggest local Great War memorial was up in the Bronx, and so I grabbed the 6 train at 68th and Lexington. I deliberately stayed on the local, kicking back and reading a book and watching the people on the train and the Bronx pass by my window once the train crossed the Harlem River. I find reading a book on an empty local subway train to be remarkably soothing, it was about the most relaxed I've felt in awhile. I was traveling in that 9:30-10:30 sweet spot where the last rearguards of rush hour have faded away and there is a blissful stillness for those unchained by jobs to enjoy.
I got out at the end of the line, right by an interstate highway. Due to the decisions of Robert Moses and other planners to build highways along most of New York's coast line, it is a city oddly cut off from the water, despite being built on islands. I had to take a pedestrian bridge over the freeway to get to Pelham Bay Park. I was there to see the Bronx Victory Column, maybe the most substantial World War I monument in the city. It was easy to find, its gold statue shined bright, facing the highway.
The monument is in remarkably good shape compared to other forgotten artifacts in the city like the crumbling Soldiers and Sailors Monument and the aforementioned grove without its trees. Perhaps that's because the monument is borough specific to the Bronx, and thus something the locals can take pride in. It also might be just because it's located in such an isolated place, and so is not a target for vandals. I certainly didn't see anyone else around while I was there, despite the many inviting places to sit.
I was struck by the emptiness of the monument and the park. In the nation's most densely populated city, there was hardly a person to be found. I wandered until I found a path to the bay itself, since there was no signage to point the way. While sitting on a rock gazing absent-mindedly at the water somebody came walking by and I was completely startled, since I thought I was the only person around. On the way back I noticed an old brick wall, whose purpose I could not ascertain. There was a gate at one spot, but what had once been a path was overgrown.
I thought this made sense in light of the monument. World War I is an almost completely forgotten event in American history, but the people who experienced it thought at that time that it was the most important thing that had happened in the world during their lives. As we all know, a much bigger war was on the horizon, and one that provided an easier narrative of triumph for Americans. World War I killed millions worldwide and over 100,000 in this country, but it got lost in the shuffle. It's fitting that one of the more substantial monuments to that war is located in a place that few people ever go.
I took another lesson as well, that most of what we care about is pretty ephemeral. Some days that thought is a sad one, but yesterday under gray Bronx skies it felt comforting.
I was back in my rural Nebraska hometown this weekend for my aunt's funeral. As usual, I was hit hard with cultural whiplash. One day I was riding the subway in New York City, the next I was driving on an empty highway under an impossible large sky.
That feeling hit me hardest on Friday night. I drove my uncle back to his house after the visitation and rosary for my aunt because he has trouble seeing in the dark. His house is out in the country, and I had to drive a little on a gravel road to get there. When I stepped out of the car I noticed two things: the unmistakeable cowshit smell from the nearby feed lot and the primeval darkness. Clouds blotted out the stars, it was the kind of darkness that must have existed before the beginning of the world.
That's the thing about the landscape of the Great Plains, it reminds you of your utter smallness in the scheme of the universe. The fearsome winds, terrifying blizzards, vicious hailstorms, and the ever present behemoth of a sky breed a certain kind of humility. It is a shocking contrast to New York City, with its steel, brick, and glass spires blotting out the sky and every nook and cranny teeming with human life. Here humans are supremely confident, not cowering, and no single inch of space is untouched by human hands. New Yorker are, not coincidentally, the very opposite of humble.
The street layouts in my hometown exacerbate the feeling of smallness that the landscape inspires. The streets, even residential side streets, are extremely wide, wide enough for at least four cars. The houses are set back far from the curb. Walking on the sidewalk one feels disconnected and lonely, rarely encountering other people or even that many cars. The crowds of the big city are often cultural shorthand for alienation, but I have those feelings ten times more when walking the empty streets of my hometown, which can only be described as lonesome.
It's such a contrast to my morning commute, spent to cheek to jowl with strangers on the commuter train and subway, followed by a nine block walk up Broadway. In that short time I smell not cow manure but the enticing odors of bacon egg and cheese sandwiches being made in food carts and coffee breezes wafting from the open doors of the greasy spoons and Starbucks to the sidewalk. I take a peek at the marquee of the Beacon Theatre, and dodge the workers bringing in palettes of food to Fairway and Zabar's. I turn the corner and go down 81st street, the cliffs of New Jersey across the Hudson in the distance.
After my latest trip home I realized that I crave the contemplative humility of the rural landscape I grew up in as much as I do the eternally lively city streets and their excitement. I have yet to find a place that brings them together, so I have resolved to live in one landscape and visit the other, and never forget to remember what I appreciate about both of them.
Yesterday I took the train from New Jersey into New York City to attend the immigration protest at Battery Park. For those of you who don't know, Battery Park sits at the extreme southern tip of Manhattan, so named for the batteries of guns there placed to fend of an invasion from New York harbor.
I am not going to write about the protest, you can read about that in innumerable other places. No, I want to write about the Battery itself. It was probably the most apt place in this country to have a protest to defend immigrants and immigration. Millions and millions of people first set foot in America after docking in the harbor well before the Statue of Liberty was there. For that reason I often get emotionally overwhelmed when I look at the harbor.
It was the first thing in America that my German and Swedish migrant ancestors gazed upon. Could they have even contemplated one of their descendants would be standing there 100 years later as a migrant from the middle of the country? I also get overwhelmed thinking about the fact that so many African slaves used to work the docks on the harbor, and they too first set foot in America there. They were bought and sold just up Broadway on Wall Street, the street named for the wall built by slave labor.
It is an eerie place. Once you reach the Battery, the skyscrapers of downtown melt away, and you find yourself in open ground, with water on three sides. It can be a jarring transition, and I often feel almost naked standing there, especially on a sunny day like yesterday. There is a real energy in the air that is inescapable. I do not believe in ghosts, but there are places where human history has left behind a psychic atmosphere, I am sure of this. I've felt it too at the Bloody Angle at the Chickamauga battlefield. I remember standing there where a horrifically savage fight had taken place, and my skin started tingling. The place still remembered what had happened there.
I get that same feeling when I go down to the Battery. I can feel the spiritual residue of the hopes and fears and pain of the people who passed through and by it vibrating in the air. It is a reminder that New York harbor must still be a golden door of hope, not a mockery of this country's stated but unheeded narratives about itself as a nation of immigrants and land of opportunity.
Last night I went out with some friends to play bar trivia, but between the end of school at seven o' clock, I had some time to kill. I decided to go on an urban ramble, perhaps my favorite solitary activity. Now that I have a family, the opportunities for it are far too rare. I started off by heading to The Strand bookstore, one of my happy places on this earth. Whenever I step through its doors my serotonin levels just shoot through the roof.
After that I wasn't sure what to do, and I aimlessly and stupidly caught the 4 train going north, which was crowded cheek to jowl. I found escape at 59th street and Lexington, knowing that I had to somehow get over to Amsterdam Avenue and 96th Street, about three miles away. I decided that I would hoof it with a stop at 72nd and Broadway for some delicious hot dogs at Gray's Papaya. (No urban ramble is complete without street food.) I thought about cutting over on 59th and gazing at the Trump Tower, aka Eye of Mordor. I was morbidly curious and felt like gauging the mood outside, but then decided that I wasn't up for seeing Cthulu and the madness that might engender. I walked up to 61st, then cut over to the park.
By that time the cold winds, now full of winter's bite, started lashing my face, but I didn't mind. There is something I love about Manhattan on nights like that, the cold wind fitting so well with the cold stone and steel of the city streets on the elegant but quiet uptown streets I was walking. I eventually cut into the park around 68th street, never having been in it when it was this dark. There were few joggers, and only a couple of solitary bikers. It was both exciting and scary to be so alone surrounded by the dark in the middle of the megalopolis. I was achieving the kind of revery I seek in my urban rambles, the time for reflection I need now more than ever. I have let cyberspace invade almost every moment of my shrinking free time, and desperately needed a break.
I decided to cut up to the 72nd street transverse, so that I could gaze at the Bethesda Fountain, one of my favorite spaces in New York City, much less the world. The terrace surrounding the fountain has a kind of lush elegance so indicative of its Gilded Age origins. The angel in the fountain is a believable angel, wearing a modest dress Tony Kushner described as "homespun." If angels could come to our rescue that's how I would imagine them. That statue also played an important role in his play Angels in America, which might be the most profound statement we have about Reagan's America. In this time of trouble I went to the fountain for a moment of grace. I was surprised not to see it lit up at night. Standing there in the eerie early winter dark, the angel was sleeping and distant, like Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" constantly shrinking from the human wreckage piling up in front of it.
Needless to say, I did not get my solace. I trudged on, and suddenly I didn't see any other people in the park, as if the great city had been hit by a neutron bomb. Without doing to intentionally, I came across Strawberry Fields and its quiet dedication to John Lennon, which seemed both poignant and feeble in the dark, absent the people and musicians and shysters surrounding it during the day. I emerged from the park into the urban noise, crossed Central Park West, and strode past the gates of The Dakota, where Lennon was senselessly killed. Searching for grace, I was reminded of the cruel indifference of the universe to our lives. There have been far too many reminders of that sad fact of life in the last two weeks.
Imagine what happens when these drunk assholes get politicized
Last night I went to the Mets-Cubs game with my dad and an old friend I've known since my grad school days. The game was a lot of fun (well, at least for the Mets fans in attendance), and we were seated around reasonably polite people. The mood drastically changed when we got onto the Long Island Railroad train to take us to Penn Station. The car ahead of us was full of some insanely loud preppies evidently having a full on party on the LIRR. If this was the subway and these kids weren't white they'd probably be cuffed by the NYPD.
As bad as they were, a group in our car was worse. At first they looked like the usual drunken louts who show up to sporting events, and who I've had the displeasure to share trains home from Citi Field before. However, I noticed one of them wearing a red Trump cap and one of those camo baseball jerseys. Next to him were a much more obnoxious group, chanting "USA USA USA" for no reason. Whenever I hear that chant something inside of me tenses, since I know I am in the presence of a mob. Soon enough, while staggering about openly drinking beers and screaming obscenities in front of kids who'd gone to the game with their parents, chants of "Let's Go Mets!" and "USA" faded into "Build the wall! Build the wall!" I so badly wanted to say something, but this brand of Long Island shithead would've used it as an opportunity for a beatdown. With zero police or conductor presence, I wasn't about to risk it.
I did, however, get to thinking about the Trump phenomenon. These white men from the notoriously segregated Long Island (wearing Jose Reyes jerseys in two cases*) were asserting their dominance and privilege on the train. These were the same kind of assholes I had encountered after Mets games before. However, Trumpism had politicized them. I felt like I was watching American brown shirts in their natural habitat.
This incident is evidence of the larger effect that Trump's candidacy is having. Even if he goes down in flames in the general election, he has brought white supremacist nationalism into the political mainstream. He has enabled the forces of bigotry and intolerance in ways I have never seen in my lifetime. The only solution is to go out into the open where these people have emerged from their caves and sewers, and destroy them. It is not enough to defeat Trump; Trumpism must be ripped out root and branch. If not, new demagogues will come and more hate will flow.
In 1978 Kiss was riding on top of the world. Their mix of catchy hard rock, shock horror/sci-fi tropes, theatricality, and clown makeup was like a tactical pop cultural ICBM aimed right at the sweet spot of suburban 70s adolescence. Late in 1978, perhaps consumed by hubris, each member of the band put out their own solo record simultaneously. If they had done a double album with each member getting a side it may have worked, but not too many people were going to plop down full price to hear a Peter Criss solo album.
While Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have always been the core creative force of the band, the best song to come from those records by far was Ace Frehley's "New York Groove." In fact, I think I like it better than any of Kiss's songs. It has a glam rock stomp that betrays its origins: the song was originally performed by minor Brit glam band Hello in 1975. Frehley himself was the product of the Bronx, and he gives the song a bit more of the local swagger. It's skanky rhythm and funky feel instantly put me in the mind of New York City in the late 70s: a place simultaneously collapsing and acting as a cultural supernova. I'm not sure if I would have liked living there, but its contradictions and the amazing things it produced still fascinate me.
I hear in this song a kind of New York that's now been practically gentrified out of existence. "New York Groove" personifies the city as a swaggering street hustler with drugs and a roll of bills in his pockets and a bulge in his pants just living for today. A more accurate song today would personify the city as a financial analyst getting some cash from a Bank of America ATM and walking to get a cold brew at Starbucks while checking stock prices on his smartphone. I heard the song this week at a Mets game. The team broke a losing streak, and as fans filtered out of the stadium, the PA played "New York Groove," an almost perfect choice. New York doesn't have the same groove today, but this song still does.
There are many grimy, dirty places in Penn Station, but there is none more obscure in its dirt and grime than the Hilton Passageway.
In a station full of bustle and crowds, it is often almost completely, eerily empty. I discovered it only after about six months of commuting. I take New Jersey Transit to Penn, but when I get out I have to get to the 123 subway train, which is on the other side of the station, about two short New York blocks. The obvious way is to walk down the main concourse, flanked by cheap eateries and curious retail establishments, from the shoeshine place that sells umbrellas on rainy days to the subterranean Kmart. (More on the main concourse in a later installment of the Penn Station Project.)
One day I figured out that there was a shortcut through a dirty, almost deserted hallway with exposed pipe. It’s usually full of wheeled carts carrying piles of trash bags, which had me initially assuming that it was a service entrance for the custodial staff. I soon discovered that it was a perfectly legitimate path to cross the station, but one so hidden and dirty that people easily overlook it. Some of the wiser homeless people in the station seem to have discovered this.
I love this space for many reasons, not least of which is that there are multiple signs alerting passers by that they are in the “Hilton Passageway.” Did Hilton Hotels actually pay for this? Is it an homage to Conrad Hilton? Does it have nothing whatsoever to do with him? I haven’t the slightest idea. I love it too because of its quiet in a place where the crowds are maddening. It is my morning contemplation chamber, that little space between the train and the subway where I can think a little about the day stretched out before me. At the end of the day its quiet squalor is a sign that I am about to go home and be delivered from the working world.
It is not a space for the faint of heart, though. The pipes are exposed, and giant formations of lint and dirt sometimes sway in the wake of the blown in air that feels drained of oxygen and tastes like iron filings. I feel terrible for the people who work on this level of the station, as they are deprived of oxygen and sunlight, and would not be surprised if decades of prolonged exposure didn’t turn them into Morlocks. It is the ultimate rebuke to the decision to tear down the original Penn’s marbled glory. Even though I have learned to love it, it’s really more a case of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else.
For my first entry in my Penn Station Project, I thought I would highlight one of the few places in Penn Station that are bright beacons in an otherwise dark and awful place.
During my first few months of commuting through Penn Station I would walk from the New Jersey Transit terminal to the 123 subway line via the main hall past all of the stores and restaurants. I soon discovered an alternate route through an exceptionally dingy, empty corridor that dead ends at a side entrance to the subway line. Right at that dead end sits one of the great curiosities of New York and perhaps the world, Tracks Bar and Grill.
Although it is embedded in the least attractive corner of Penn Station, the outside is all shiny diner chrome and neon beer signs. In the dank corridor one is greeted by the sign I've posted a picture of below:
In this cave of despair there is indeed a raw bar, good food, and some very tasty pints of beer. ("Gold Medal Guinness" another sign exclaims, and I have no reason to doubt it.)For awhile I avoided it, thinking there was no way that Penn Station could possibly contain such a safe harbor. Then one Friday I was meeting my spouse after work, who was coming in from Jersey. I got to the station too soon and found myself with some time to kill. I figured what the hell, and went into the bar. I was pleasantly surprised.
Like all good bars do, it exudes warmth, the kind of human warmth that pushes drunks to pay extra to get loaded at a bar, rather than more cheaply at home. The barkeeps are almost invariably middle-aged Irishwomen, quick on their feet and friendly. Since I only go to Tracks every once in a blue moon I am pretty anonymous, but the bartenders seem to know practically everyone else on a first name basis. While Tracks is always crowded, the bar is incredibly long (105 feet, supposedly), and I have never failed to secure a seat at the rail. Almost no one sits at the small cluster of tables by the door. People aren't there for the much-lauded raw bar, any food consumed is in the interests of soaking up alcohol.
Tracks is full of a kind of special energy one only feels in the presence of people getting off of work and taking a slight detour on their way home. Guys in paint-stained Carharts lugging lunch boxes rub shoulders with men in navy suits and loosened ties. The talk is fast and lively, the smiles plenty, and vibes are good. Most of Penn Station is a kind of dehumanizing nightmare, the kind of place you are just hoping to rush through on the way to someplace else. Tracks actually invites you to linger, and in the low light amid the joy of a Friday happy hour with some very high quality Guinness in your belly, it's easy to forget that you are in the bowels of Penn Station. This last Friday I sipped a wonderfully creamy pint of Guinness in that glorious moment that is as far away from work on Monday as you're gonna get. Tracks is not the best bar in the world, but it is pretty damn high on the list when it comes to the best place to have a pint with strangers on a Friday afternoon. As I ambled over to my train that warmth stayed with me, and I could look out of my train window at the desolate marshes between the tunnel and Newark with a smile of bemused contentment.
Editor's Note: I am currently reading the book Looking For America On The New Jersey Turnpike by Angus Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland and am blown away at how they are able to derive so much meaning from such a mundanely inhumane institution. This morning while reading the book on the train I had an "a ha!" moment: shouldn't Penn Station get similar treatment? I then remembered that I have not the time, talent, or resources to write a similar book about America's busiest train station. I then remembered that I at least have this humble blog. I plan on making the Penn Station Project a running series. Today is the first chapter.
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Penn Station might be the most unloveable place of its importance in the world, on par with Heathrow and LAX, but worse because it isn't even allowed to be its own space. It is first and foremost the basement of Madison Square Garden, an afterthought beneath The World's Greatest Arena.
It is even more unloveable for being a poor replacement for what had been one of the most impressive train stations ever constructed. The original was completed in 1910, a Beaux Arts beauty made of pink marble and meant to symbolize permanence. In perhaps the greatest crime against New York's built environment ever perpetuated, Penn Station was torn down in the mid-1960s, its marble and famed eagles dumped into a swamp in New Jersey. In less than sixty years a great monument to the ascendance of rail travel had been obliterated, a sign of its obsolescence in the age of the automobile.
The new Penn Station would be part of a multipurpose space, a concept so beloved by architects and urban planners of the day. On top would be Madison Square Garden and a tall office building, jammed beneath, like an unwanted child, would be Penn Station. Never mind that 650,000 people pass through it everyday, more than the number of passengers at all three major New York area airports combined. Before 1963 travelers to New York would emerge from the tunnel under the Hudson into a spectacular cathedral to trains, a grand place befitting a world-dominating city. Now they are disgorged into a dirty, grungy rabbit warren with claustrophobically low ceilings and foul air.
I pass through this place twice every day. I am in it so often that I my brain doesn't really register what my eyes see. I once joked that I could walk through Penn Station and pass right on by Dick Cheney administering fellatio to Satan. I know there are hundreds of thousands of fellow commuters who have the same relationship to the place that I do. I would like to slow down a bit and actually take a look around. That's what this series will be all about.
I am a craven addict, and as hard as I try to stay on the wagon, I just can't help myself and fall off. My addiction is following electoral politics, especially presidential elections. I am fully aware that the monied interest really call the tune, and that most Democrats are just softer-edged purveyors of neoliberalism, and Republicans its 180 proof version. Perhaps it's the real life drama that draws me in, or the knowledge that despite our system's limited options, elections do indeed have consequences.
The Republican party in recent years has found itself in a bit of a paradox. By firing up their base and spending a free flow of corporate dollars, they can handily win midterm elections, which usually have low turnouts. They lose in presidential elections with a more moderate electorate, and are harmed by their shriller appeals to white racial resentment. Some have wondered whether it is possible for the Republican party in its current iteration to win a presidential election.
The key for GOP success can actually be found in New York City, supposedly a liberal bastion. While the Big Apple has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold since the party's birth, between 1994 and 2014 no Democrat held the office of mayor. Both Giuliani (1994-2001) and Bloomberg (2002-2013) won office by emphasizing "law and order" and economic growth. Both sought support from the gay community, and Bloomberg also became a national voice on gun control. Essentially, Bloomberg embodies the "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" consensus that I discussed awhile back. He also illustrates some deeper and more disturbing facts. White "liberals" will vote for a man who vigorously supports "stop and frisk" and other aggressive modes of policing that rely on racial profiling.
There are a lot of affluent (or at least middle class) Democrats who fervently believe in meritocracy and are highly skeptical of any social solution that involves helping those below them on the social ladder. At the same time, they are cool with gay rights, pro-choice, skeptical of religion, in favor of gun control, and against strict enforcement of drug laws. They aren't vulgar Randians who want to privatize Social Security or destroy the state university system a la Paul Ryan or Scott Walker, but nonetheless prefer lower taxes over reducing inequality, which actually threatens their position. At the same time, they find the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to be completely unpalatable. In the olden days, pre-Reagan and Gingrich, these people would have been liberal Republicans.
In the current climate, the GOP needs a presidential candidate who can peel off some of these voters if it wants to win. This is difficult, because in order to get the nomination, Republican candidates have to take positions on gay rights, abortion, immigration, and guns to the right of Attila the Hun. This, of course, is why the big money donors are going wild for Jeb, despite America's lack of enthusiasm for another Bush presidency. As seemingly moderate as he is, Jeb is still not going to attract enough of these voters, and if Hillary gets the nomination, he will have no chance.
The Clintons are the ultimate triangulators, constantly selling progressives out if it means making a claim to be the representative of "moderation." Bill Clinton did more to achieve a balanced budget than any other president in decades, deregulated banking, signed NAFTA, and slashed welfare. He occasionally threw a bone to progressives with signing the Brady Bill and his failed health care proposal, but his legacy looks an awful lot more like Eisenhower than LBJ. You can expect more of the same from HRC, which means the Democrats could keep winning electoral battles at the national level while losing the war against conservative ideology.
For someone who blogs, I took my sweet time joining Twitter. Once I realized that some things I wrote were being discussed there, I decided to jump in, and have stayed in because it is usually the best way for me to keep up on the public discourses left out of the mainstream media. It's also been good for connecting with what's going on in the world of the activist Left, something I had lost track with after leaving academia.
This has also been a little frustrating because of some of the tropes people I actually like have been engaging in recently. I would often see protest movements denounced as ineffective, and elections as meaningless. While I understand the limits of what peaceful protest can do (as someone who protested the coming war in Iraq in 2003), I also know what they can truly accomplish (as someone who engaged in protests and walkouts that led to a teaching assistant union.) The attacks on protests seemed to be a kind of knee-jerk anti-liberalism just as annoying as that emanating from conservative circles. Since the major protests have started in the wake of the Garner and Brown travesties, I have not been hearing much about their usefulness from those Lefty quarters, and with good reason.
The same goes for Left critiques of electoral politics. Don't get me wrong, I barely have any love for the Democrats, and I think the two parties have a lot in common when it comes to complicity in maintaing inequality. However, I have never been so invested in Leftist ideology to claim that elections somehow don't matter. If you need proof that elections really do matter, and that there are real, fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats, take the case of the mayor of New York. Bill de Blasio has fought to end the stop and frisk practice and in the wake of the Garner ruling has been openly sympathetic with protestors. One gets the sense that he will fight to bring some real change out of this.
Compare this to the recent, noxious pronunciations of Rudy Giuliani, who has essentially blamed the death of Garner and other black men at the hands of the police on the canards of black "dysfunction" and "black on black crime." Lest we forget, Guiliani was twice elected mayor of New York City. It is easy to imagine the reaction to the Garner case and ensuing protests if he were mayor today. The NYPD would be out in full military regalia, batons cracking, tear gas launching, and pepper spray blasting in the faces of protestors. Imagine too if someone like Ed Koch, who played a role in vilifying the innocent Central Park Five and exploiting white racial fears, were mayor again. Based on Mayor Bloomberg's constant defense of stop and frisk and police aggression, we certainly know how he would respond to the situation. Just ask the Occupy protestors.
The fact that de Blasio is mayor today, and that these men aren't, is truly important and significant. It's a sign that progressives need to put resources into the local and and municipal level, where a small amount of resources can go a long way, and can certainly help reign in our out of control police departments. Elections matter, elections have consequences, and elections have to bring change, it's just that the right people have to be elected. If more women and men of de Blasio's stripe get voted into public office, I see a lot of good that can happen, and a lot that will be ignored or shut down if they don't.
Growing up out on the Nebraska plains in the 1980s, I always thought of New York City as a singularly lawless and dangerous place. I still remember seeing a commercial for the Friday the 13th sequel Jason Takes Manhattan, which shows a character running scared into a convenience store screaming about how a madman is trying to kill her, and the jaded clerk just huffs and says "welcome to New York." That image was also reinforced by more benign entertainment like Barney Miller, where the crime-ridden streets of New York were played for laughs. I remember news stories about the Central Park jogger and the panic over "wilding," the racist attacks in Bensonhurst, and Bernard Goetz blowing away muggers on the subway.
Of course, the raw numbers show that violent crime was indeed a lot higher in the Big Apple back then. There were 2245 murders in the city in 1990, compared with 332 in 2013. It is arguably the safest big city in America. It is curious then, that today brought news that the NYPD's police sergeants union had written a letter to the Democratic National Convention telling them not to have the party's 2016 convention in Brooklyn because it was getting too dangerous. This brazen action, which is appalling in that it goes so much against the city's economic interests, was intended to spite new mayor Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio has not been a zealot when it comes to putting a leash on the police, and he has even endorsed the controversial "broken windows" strategy. However, he did campaign against stop and frisk, and has been critical following the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the police. This force, so used to acting with impunity in the last two administrations, would rather harm the city's quest for an economically beneficial convention than be held accountable in any way for its actions. (Today also brought news that the NYPD's internal review board is throwing out an increasing number of citizen complaints of wrong doing.)
Critics of de Blasio have a very powerful cultural memory on their side: the jump in crime that affected New York from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. Essentially, the cops are telling people "unless you give us free reign to do anything we want, we'll be headed straight back to the bad old days." It also hurts de Blasio that periods of high crime are associated with other liberal mayors, like David Dinkins and John Lindsay, despite the fact that crime was already going down in the Dinkins years before Giuliani showed up.
There's another element at work here, one that those pushing back against police oversight are well aware they are using: racial fear. Lindsay, Dinkins, and de Blasio all came to power with the overwhelming support of black voters, and all came into office promising to heed the voice of that constituency, the one historically worst protected and served by the police. What the police sergeants union is really saying is "don't put the leash on us, because "those people" will run wild given half a chance."
Time will tell if this strategy works, but the fact that many supposedly "liberal" people in NYC voted for Bloomberg, a staunch defender of stop and frisk, is a sign that it just may be successful. The murder rate is actually down this year, but the lenses of racial fear can very easily obscure reality.
My daily commute from the Ironbound in Newark to the Upper West Side of Manhattan has become so rote that I hardly notice anything along the way to work and back. While on the train I am absorbed either in a newspaper or book, headphones firmly planted on my ears. Once my morning train pulls into the polluted, congested rabbit-warren of Penn Station I am focused on rushing through its grimy tunnels to get to my subway train. In that state of single-minded focus, I get tunnel vision, and I don't notice a whole helluva lot.
However, on Friday, I saw something that I could not ignore. As I bounded through the subway turnstiles and rounded the corner to the stairs to the uptown bound 3 train, I saw a homeless man (an all too common sight in Penn Station) sitting dejectedly between an incredibly gaudy poster for the reality show The Shahs of Sunset. The whole poster was gold colored, with the titular reality tv personalities standing confidently around a pyramid of glasses brimming with champagne. It is an image that so perfectly captures the amoral, materialistic excess that is the one value that our feckless economic elite holds scared. That image made quite a contrast with the indigent man forced to bed down in a dirty tunnel.
I am well aware that New York City presents examples of its extremes of wealth and poverty every day, signs and signals that have become so common to me that I barely notice them anymore. This particular sight has stuck with me because it's indicative of the ways our entertainment industry aids and abets the increasingly ironclad class system in our country. There are so many reality television shows about wealthy bores with endless reservoirs of crass narcissism. I know people who claim to like them who say they see them as ways to mock the wealthy, or as simple escapism. However, the more we see such self-centered materialism on television, the more that behavior is normalized and even implicitly justified.
Not to preach too much of a jeremiad, but I really and truly think that there is a moral cancer in our society that I fear may be inoperable. Greed and selfishness have become virtues, and the plight of those who suffer from the greed perpetuated in this country are left on the dung pile to rot. Even worse, many more people would rather follow the lives of materialistic moral cripples on television rather than contemplate the man sleeping in a dirty subway staircase, or bother to think they are much more likely to be in his shoes than topping off a champagne pyramid. Until there are more people who feel moral outrage at elites living to excess while others starve than there are people who follow what TMZ has to say about the Real Housewives of New Jersey, nothing is going to change.
Although I live in Newark, I take a great interest in New York City politics, partly because I work there, and partly because it's such a multifaceted and interesting topic. Throughout the city's history, there has always been a fundamental tension between its chaotic nature and the need to govern it. For a long time, New York oscillated between machine and reform mayors, from the drenched in corruption Jimmy "Beau James" Walker to the exuberant progressivism of Fiorello LaGuardia. The machine mayors promised patronage and protection, the reformers called for efficiency and good government.
In recent years, however, this cycle has been broken, and the New York mayoralty has been the province of authoritarian technocrats. That's only fitting, since New York City has become the global capital of globalized capitalism, a city emblematic of our current political economy where elites and their monied allies make all the decisions with little to no input from the people affected by those decisions. Both Giuliani and Bloomberg -who have collectively occupied Gracie Mansion since 1994- have ruled with a strong hand, usually in the interests of the financial and real estate industries.
While crime has dropped under their tenure (something that began, it must be said, during the Dinkins administration), New York City is increasingly becoming a city of haves and have-nots. The only new housing being built is either subsidized or luxury, and cage-like micro-apartments now have Bloomberg's approval. The middle is being squeezed out of existence, with the city doing practically nothing to stop it. Bloomberg has been very skilled at keeping this particular subject at bay by burnishing his social liberal credentials at every turn.
By hitting on side issues that liberals love, Bloomberg avoids criticism for policies openly hostile to the city's less advantaged. He has been a vocal advocate for gun control, healthy eating, anti-smoking, and education "reform." In all of these cases, be it through ending smoking in parks, banning big gulps, or closing schools left and right, he has preferred authoritarian, top down solutions. It's the same authoritarian tendency behind the use of the stop and frisk policy, a policy that many white liberals are willing to overlook. After all, they're not the ones being subjected to police harassment. While I appreciate his work on gun control, the school closings and stop and frisk far outweigh his moral stand on that issue.
Right now the mayor's office has a completely dysfunctional relationship with the people of New York. For decades now, mayors have ruled an authoritarian fashion. The have worked almost exclusively for the interests of affluent Manhattanites, practically ignoring the will of the middle and working classes in the outer boroughs. (Apart from the brief tenure of David Dinkins, that's pretty much been the case since Ed Koch took office in 1977.) While the machine mayors of the past could be corrupt, they often handed out goodies to their working class constituency. Reform mayors, LaGuardia in particular, could also have a populist streak in them. I am amazed that such a big and diverse city is currently being operated for the benefit of so few. It doesn't have to be that way, as any examination of New York's rough and tumble political history shows.
This year's election is actually a referendum on the authoritarian technocracy that has dominated NYC's politics. Some candidates, Joe Lhota especially, still carry that torch high. Others, especially Christine Quinn, look more progressive at first, but deep down they are pseudo-liberals anxious to be part of the city's elite power structure. They are playing to the political winds, which are increasingly blowing for change, but from where I stand, they don't seem to want to change much. Unfortunately, I fear that the more liberal Democrats will cancel each other out, and the final race will be between Quinn and Lhota. I hope that's not the case, because if the forces of authoritarian technocracy are defeated in New York, it might embolden others around the country to reject phony ed "reform" and to demand better conditions for the middle and working classes. That, in a nutshell, is why the New York City mayor's race is so important.
This week my job began again after the summer break, so I have been making my morning rail commute from Newark to New York City after a long hiatus. This means the twice daily slog through Penn Station, a place I have grown to know intimately, and to dislike with the intensity that only familiarity can understand.
It is a perpetually busy place, the most patronized train station in the United States, servicing hundreds of thousands of passengers every day. You wouldn't know such a thing approaching it on foot in midtown Manhattan, since the station sits underneath Madison Square Garden, like an afterthought. The original Penn Station, built around a century ago, was a grandiose, gorgeous marble colossus, a kind of pilgrimage cathedral for those coming into New York City for the first time. In one of the most heinous crimes against taste and historical architecture every committed, the station was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for the current multi-use site, the kind of postwar all-purpose space that manages to do several things wrong at the same time.
In the main Amtrak area they have put up photographs of the old station (like the one above) in all of its glory, which mock the modern-day traveler and commuter, surrounded as s/he is by the functionalist dystopia of the current station.
Today the most important train station in the nation's biggest city is effectively Madison Square Garden's basement. Like a lot of basements, it's grungy and lacking in charm. It's also laid out in a highly haphazard fashion, which I learned the hard way, since I have to get from one station to the other in order to transfer from my train from New Jersey onto the 123 subway line. The most obvious path from one to the other is the main promenade, which is usually so crowded that it takes forever to fight through the masses on my way to the subway. (More on the promenade in a second.) I tried to find a different path, and soon discovered that I could avoid the crowds by winding my way through low-ceilinged corridors that run through past the Long Island Railroad terminals. There's lots of exposed pipe and air conditioning vents with a fearsome amount of lint waving from them. The floors in these pathways look like they haven't been cleaned since the Ford administration. I have seen dried puke so old it was calcified on more than one occasion. In the winter time homeless people bed down on these same floors, and I often have to be careful not to step on them.
However, once I finally complete the journey to other end of the station, I do at least get to see some surreal sites. Sitting right next to the subway turnstiles is a fancy raw bar in what must be the most incongruous location possible. I have long wanted to have a meal there, wondering who else would stop for fancy dining at the end of a dingy corridor that most of the shlubs who use Penn Station are unaware of. Also, standing right there, are people hawking the local free papers (Morning Metro and AM New York), which are mostly made up of advertisements for things like treatments for vericose veins.
As much as I dislike my slog through Penn Station, I felt a little sad this morning because the guy usually handing out AM New York wasn't there today. I loved seeing him because he really went after his job with gusto, bellowing out "AM New York, read all about it, AM New York!" in a tough Noo Yawk accent that made his words sound almost like a threat. I don't know if he got paid extra for handing out a higher number of papers, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was the best selling vender in the city. Hopefully he's found better employment, or gets to hawk papers in a spot with more air and light.
When I come back to Penn Station after work, I play a little game I call "Subway Olympics." I try to position myself so that I jump on the right car where I get on at 72nd street, and find a spot by the door so that when it opens I jump out first and am within steps of the stairs leading down off of the platform. I then dash down the stairs as fast as I can, take a sharp left turn, and jet through the turnstiles like a runner hitting the finish line. Others seem to have the same idea, I've only won gold a handful of times.
When I go home at the end of the day I usually just walk down the main tunnel of the station to the New Jersey Transit terminal, rather than negotiating the corridors, which are much more crowded in the late afternoon, making them unbearably stuffy. Right where I get off the subway there are usually musicians playing with amps, and often surprisingly poorly for having the best busking location in the city. I also must dodge oncoming commuters, get around slow-moving tourists, and generally hustle in order to get to my train on time. As I do, I pass through one of the more surreal shopping and dining experiences this world has to offer. There are several little bakeries, one of which actually sells some tasty empanadas (I was really hungry late at night one time.) There are all manner of convenience stores, many of which have big tubs of ice out front spilling over with tall boy cans of beer. When I look closely at my fellow passengers on a commuter train home, I will see a few of them discreetly sipping these from brown bags.
Amidst the smaller stores sits a K Mart, just the retailer you'd expect to find in a dingy underground train station. There's also the usual and unusual fast food. You can grab grub at McDonald's and KFC, of course, but also Nathan's Hot Dogs and Tim Horton's. (The latter is a personal favorite of mine from my trips to Canada.) All that food attracts more than people, of course. I'll never forget seeing a dead rat splayed out on the steps leading from the Amtrak terminal to the main tunnel, right around the corner from the Auntie Ann's where I sometimes grab a pretzel for the ride home.
In a few weeks, once I make the commute more regularly again, I'm sure my eyes will get less sharp and my senses numb. I might not see the dried vomit, dead rats, and brown bags anymore. I won't smell the stale sweat of tightly packed human bodies, or the sweet scent of fresh croissants, either. That blase insensitivity is the price Manhattan extracts for the exhilaration of its endless spectacle.
It was a year ago today that I interviewed for my current job. I fell in love with the school immediately, but worried that I would not be able to make the transition to high school teacher, or that my lack of experience in the field would prevent me from getting hired. Thankfully I got the position, and have been rewarded with a wonderful work environment and the chance to teach some fantastically engaged students. It also meant escaping from my own personal hell in Texas, where I had been laboring within a tyrannical, bullying department at an almost comically reactionary institution located in a backwoods crudhole of town. I wrote the following back then as I contemplated going to work in the Big Apple, a place I had a long and complex relationship with. A year on, I must say I love the place even more despite the fact that its familiarity has eroded some of its mystique.
***
I am a very happy person this evening. I got offered the job in NYC, and have officially decided to take it. Obviously, I am overjoyed at finally being able to live with my wife, and with being able to work for a school that really seems to share my values (i.e. giving a damn about real education and treating students like human beings instead of slabs of meat.) However, I do feel a certain special giddiness about being able to get up and go to work in New York each day.
It's a city I have really grown to love first hand over the past few years, after decades of admiration mixed with an inferiority complex from afar. Those who are from the city or its surrounding area probably can't understand the bundle of emotions that the Big Apple invokes in the culturally advanced children of small heartland towns. For those in the provinces without cultural aspirations, they see New York as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" to quote Obi Wan Kenobi. To them, it is the ultimate foreign island within the United States, a space of constant transgression full of homosexuals, immigrants, and effete intellectuals. This is why I find it so ironic that the people who seem to hate all that New York represents are the ones most likely to claim the legacy of 9/11 and get their knickers in a twist over the supposed "Ground Zero mosque." (I love Buck Owens, but even I can't forgive the following song.)
If you grow up in the cultural fringe but want to rebel against it, there is perhaps no better way than to embrace the city most reviled by rural America's most reactionary denizens. Growing up I had a certain obsession with the city that grew out of movies, books, music, Saturday Night Live, and broadcasts of games from Yankee Stadium. Taxi Driver was one of the first truly artistic films I saw as a teenager, and one that stamped a certain image of New York on my mind: a dangerous, sleazy, violent, yet exhilerating place. I got much the same vibe from one of my favorite bands, The Velvet Underground, whose junk-sick sounds were inseperable from Manhattan's dark heart. If you asked me when I was 21 to describe New York City, I would have played you "Sister Ray." On a similar, gritty note, back when I was 16, I would have spun "The Streets of New York" by Kool Rapp G and DJ Polo.
There was another New York of my imagination, of course. This New York was the cradle of culture, the epitome of the modern world at its most modern, from the 1920s to the 1950s. It was the place where all my favorite writers seemed to have lived at one point or another. It was jazz, art deco, and subways. It's where Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and countless others came to make there mark. Even though the city intimidated me in its distance, its size, and foreigness, I secretly harbored a desire to "be a part of it," as the song goes.
At the age of 19 while attending a college debate tournament in Princeton, I was lucky enough to have a couple of days to play around in the city. The first day was kinda touristy, we hit Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, and yes, the World Trade Center. I still remember standing in the observation deck looking out over the city, an endless undulating maze of skyscrapers stretching on to the horizon. The buildings seemed like giant file cabinets where people were stored, a thought that profoundly disturbed me at the time. Still, to this day, despite my love of the city and ease with which I move about it, I get a certain feeling of extreme alienation, of being but a small, insignificant blip in a startingly fast-moving, indifferent panorama.
Our second day in the city was more fun. My debate partner was quite the social butterfly, and she made quick friends with a Jamaican debater attending an Irish university who had done an internship on Wall Street. I've forgotten his name, but he was a good guy and a great guide to the city. We got under the surface of the city and strolled through places like Greenwhich Village. I was more of a goofball in those days, and while I am embarassed to admit it now, I must report that on the subway I got some of my friends to join me in a chorus of "New York, New York." Some the passengers threw loose change at us, I think as a compliment, or at least a slight recognition of our outsider's enthusiasm for Gotham.
However, my attitude about New York got a bit resentful as my twenties went on. Much of this had to do with my years spent in Chicago and my great love for the City of Broad Shoulders. (Even today I feel like I am cheating on Chicago by making New York number one in my affections.) Chicagoans are loathe to admit it, but they have a certain inferiority complex when it comes to New York born out of decades of condescension. I also resented the very real snobbery I was forced to endure over the years from people who would cast aspersions on my home state without ever having been there. New Yorkers seemed to me the most provincial people in America, all the while claiming to be the most cosmopolitan.
And while that "everything is better in New York" attitude still bugs me, I've learned to get over it. There are many wonderful ways that my wife has made me a fuller and better person, but one of the best has been her rehabilitation of New York City in my eyes. Our first real date was there, and even if the city wears me down, I will always think of it as the place where the greatest love of my life was kindled. Come to think of it, I am not going to "be a part of it," but I am really coming home.
I have a confession to make. Ever since moving out here to New Jersey, I have been strongly tempted to become a fan of the New York Yankees. It is only appropriate for me to voice this confession during the Lenten season, when Jesus fasted for forty days in the desert, while the devil offered to turn stones into bread and to give control over the world. The dreams of a baseball life made easy, and an end to the long fasts of bad seasons and to attain the power of a perennial contender, threaten to turn this fan's soul to the dark side
I have been surprised by these temptations, since I had always considered myself immune to the lures of "Satan's jeweled crown" as the Louvin Brothers song goes. For years, I thought of the Yankees as the enemy, a an arrogant franchise able to throw money around and buy the World Series, rather than winning it fair and square. They were run by George Steinbrenner, a vulgar, authoritarian jerk whose teams succeeded in spite of, rather than because of, his decisions. His obstinacy prevented revenue sharing in major league baseball, greatly increasing the gaps between the haves and have nots. Yankee fans were the worst kind of front-runners, the type of people who cared more about being on the winning team than about the game itself.
However, as I learned from watching Star Wars films as a child, the Dark Side is easier and more seductive. I still remember my one trip to the old Yankee stadium, and seeing the banner behind home plate proclaiming the Yankees winners of twenty-six World Series titles, about a quarter of all the World Series' ever played! As a White Sox fan, I have typically expected my teach to fuck up, even in 2005 when they won the title. Sitting in the stands at Yankee Stadium, I could tell that the fans fully expected their team to win, and that anything else was a terrible failure. That particular game was a blow-out of the Devil Rays (before their name change and improvement), and the Yankee faithful bellowed a kind of bloodthirsty howl that must have been heard at ancient Roman gladiatorial contests. In Yankee Stadium I felt like I was part of a community of winners, perhaps the most seductive thing the Yankees offer their fans who, like the rest of us, live lives of quiet desperation.
How wonderful it must be to know that the owners of your team will pay top dollar to retain rising young players, rather than trade them before they hit free agency. How comforting it must be when your team is willing to make any acquisition necessary down the stretch to win the pennant. Most baseball fans, especially those in small-markets, are used to seeing fire sales of young talent in the late summer months, and must comfort themselves with the mantra "there's always next year." For these fans, a wild card berth is cause for celebration; for Yankees fans, anything less than a title is a failure.
How could I possibly justify rooting for the bad guys? I'd like to think my main reasons go beyond the delights of being on the winning team. In the first place, I must admit that my attraction to the Yankees has deep roots. My immersion into baseball and baseball history roughly coincided with the decline of the Yankees franchise in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As I learned about the Bronx Bombers' storied past, I felt that baseball was missing something if the Yankees weren't great; it just didn't seem to be right that they were a last place team. Thus in my mind wanting the Yankees to be good meant I wanted baseball to be made whole. It didn't hurt that I had a deep fascination with New York City itself at that time. In high school or college (I can't remember which), I bought a Yankees cap and wore it out. I remember rooting for them in the 1995 playoffs and 1996 World Series, and catching hell for it from other baseball fans.
After moving to Chicago, the White Sox became my team, and thus my only rooting interest in the American League. Despite that fact, I had a great deal of admiration for the Yankee title teams of 1998-2000. In a time of steroid-inflated biceps and over-reliance on the home run, they won by playing team baseball and doing the little things well. It was hard not to like guys like Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Paul O'Neil. It was especially difficult to dislike Joe Torre, a once hard-luck manager who seemed to have tamed Steinbrenner's worst impulses and molded a team based on cohesion rather than ego. Of course, that didn't stop me from being overjoyed at their defeat at the hands of the Red Sox in the 2004 play-offs.
Some of my other major reasons are purely practical. I've committed myself to living in the New York City area for the forseeable future. As a sports fan, it's hard to live somewhere long term and not have a rooting interest in a local team. When I was affiliated with a university, the choice was made for me, but I am no longer in that position. As I get older, baseball is the one professional sport I really, truly care about, partly because the NFL's technocratic violence no longer appeals to me much. That leaves me with the Yankees or the Mets. Over the past few years, I've tried to claim the Mets as my National League team. Truth be told, their new stadium is kinda lame. Beyond that, their ownership is implicated in the Madoff scandal, and is currently completely dysfunctional. Most importantly, I have many more Yankee fans in my circle here than I do Mets fans.
After all, isn't sports fandom really about community? My continued devotion to Husker football, thirteen years after leaving the state of Nebraska, is a kind of cultural glue that allows me to more easily connect to my father and other members of my family. That fandom I did not choose, like the Roman Catholic Church, it was chosen for me. It is the one sports connection that I will never shake, since it's practically in my blood, and that's not necessarily a good thing. By choosing the Yankees, aren't I just electing to more closely tie myself to the community I already live in? Isn't team loyalty a kind of fetish?
Ah, here are the sweet words of the Father of Lies, taking my weakness, vanity, and lust for power and glory and calling them virtuous. Satan, be gone with you! You can keep your crown, encrusted with twenty-seven championship jewels. I shall continue my time in the baseball desert, spending the next season watching Jake Peavy and Gordon Beckham fail to fulfill their promise, groaning at yet another Adam Dunn strikeout, mourning Mark Buehrle's loss to the Marlins, and observing with dread the great Paul Konerko's slide into old age. I might even wander over into the Mets' unforgiving wilderness, to take on the role of a baseball St. Anthony. Blessed are baseball's poor in spirit, for they are the true fans. Or, as Met Tug McGraw once said, "you gotta believe."
