Author Archives: oinsketta

Moral Dilemma

I have gone on at length here about the damage done by concealing crucial information, in public and private life both.   It is impossible to make sense of a situation when the underlying events are secretly redacted, classified, above your need-to-know pay grade.    This obfuscation of what actually happened, what used to be quaintly called “the facts”, can be found in virtually every situation where somebody is brutally, or even gently, fucking somebody else over.   Withholding key information is necessary for the proper functioning of every abusive situation,  every betrayal and scandal, personal, political, environmental, what have you.

Removal of transparency has been institutionalized by the powerful corporate players who sponsor candidates for the legislature, it is now also the rule in the government unlimited free speech money has largely purchased.   It would not do, for example, to have the facts known about the effects of the toxic waste being produced by a fabulous company employing thousands and making billions.   Public relations firms are employed to humanistically spin the work the friendly corporation does, to direct people’s fleeting attention away from the murderous externalities the corporation seeks to conceal. 

An energetic public relations firm has been at work for Koch Industries in recent years, showing actors playing women, black people, minorities of every kind, happily employed in important jobs by beneficent, forward looking Koch Industries– making a better tomorrow today and shit.   

There is obviously no hint in these feel good Koch pieces that the toxic sludge they are piping from the Alberta tar sands they own, across the entire width of the U.S., to refineries in Houston, is the most toxic form of fossil fuel left on earth.  Or that it’s flowing sluggishly (with at least one massive spill so far) across more than a thousand miles of the American watershed.   Forget, for a moment, the raped wasteland the ‘harvesting’ of this toxic prehistoric sludge leaves behind on the Canadian lands owned by the Kochs.  The Americans who are protesting the pipeline are beaten up by privately hired goons, set upon by dogs, by Trump, strip searched and imprisoned for carrying signs stating their case about protecting the water supply.  Nothing to see here.  Koch, making the future bright, for winners.  Whatever else you can say about piping this toxic sludge, the profits it will generate for the two Koch boys will double their already incalculable fortune.

Or as you will immediately learn by googling Keystone XL: 

The Keystone XL oil pipeline will be the safest and most advanced pipeline in North America, providing U.S. jobs, energy security and economic benefits.

Wealthy criminals who are actually prosecuted can avoid admissions of guilt by signing lawyerly agreements where they pay a sum of money without an admission of guilt.  Trump and his dad did that, thanks to the rabid genius of the unscrupulous Roy Cohn, who countersued the government for defamation when the government prosecuted the Trumps under The Fair Housing Act.   Trump Inc. who had been systematically violating the Fair Housing Act long before it became law, admitted no wrong-doing and agreed to have its rental policies and practices monitored to ensure no future violations, but the government blinked.  Trump never had to admit their policy and longtime practice of not renting to brown skinned low-life motherfuckers, no matter how respectable they appeared to be.  Nothing to see here, bitches.  You didn’t prove shit and we didn’t admit jack.  Fuck you!

Political and business obfuscation is ubiquitous, too common to even talk about.   Rule one: never admit shit.  Rule two: when accused of violence, punch the accusers as hard as you can in the face, repeatedly, while kicking them in the balls.   Rule three: no disclosure.  Make me.  I know you are, but what am I?

“Yeah, we violated all 371 treaties we made with Native Americans, so?  They were fucking Stone Age savages who thought the earth itself was a god.  Fucking losers, they didn’t even know how to smelt metal.  Plus, a handful of the survivors became very, very rich, filthy rich, with those tax free casinos.  What are they bitching about?   You can’t bring back the dead.  Fucking losers….”

The moral dilemma I referred to above is in the personal arena.  It is an almost daily torment to me.   Hitler did a nice job trimming my family tree back in 1942 and 1943.  Of what would have been dozens of relatives today, from a once large family, I am left with a tiny handful, most of whom I haven’t seen in years.   The work that Hitler wasn’t able to complete, well, there are other ways to do it, yo.

“There you go again with the hyperbole, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, popping up randomly, as he often does.  “You’re going to lose a lot of readers with this Hitler shit.  Hitler, yeah, not a nice man.  Mass murderer, twisted fuck, fine, most people know Hitler was no goddamned good.   You’re not shedding any light here by dragging his hideous face into this conversation.  My suggestion: leave fucking Hitler out of it.”

After a long pause, that included a shower, lunch and checking on the progress of Aaron Judge’s recovery from shoulder surgery, I agreed with my father’s skeleton that the best way to explore this moral dilemma was with a piece of fiction.  A lie, as Picasso put it, that reveals the truth.  And remember, total darkness is the best cover for abuse and shame.

The first time Jim met the man, the man said that Jim was a pussy, a man who lacked the balls to “confront” his girlfriend’s father.  “Confront the bastard!” he told Jim militantly as Jim’s girlfriend smiled and slightly cringed.  Jim felt no need to confront the girl’s father. He’d had dinner at his table, the man didn’t particularly like Jim, and as the father of a young woman who had middle class expectations, Jim thought the man was well within his rights to be wary of him.   Jim was idiosyncratic, disconnected from the general ambitions of the world, though smart.   Jim and his girlfriend’s father got along as well as they needed to, and the romance between his daughter and Jim was going along very amicably, in Jim’s opinion.  Jim told the man he always kept his word to the girl’s father, had her home by the hour he promised, and that preserved the peace and made everything much easier.

The guy who was lecturing Jim about having no balls was trying to convince Jim’s sister, who he’d met weeks earlier, to quit her excellent job, pack her things and run away with him to Arizona.   He was fleeing a failed marriage, it was complicated, he was deeply, deeply in love and he had no intention of meeting the parents of the pretty young woman he was trying to abscond with.

“Phew… that’s some ripe, eh, fiction,” said the skeleton.   

You can’t make this shit up, dad.   From that twisted exchange, an unneeded moral lecture to Jim about something he himself was incapable of doing, the rest followed in a straight line.   A long con game.  Soon he’d lost his job, asked Jim with a smile if he could borrow some money, just for a short time, a couple of months.  Jim was generous, Jim was foolish.   The man took advantage.  Jim became the subject of mounting anger on visits to his sister.  He was cursed as the “fucking Jew” who, years later, still came every month, driving a six hour round trip, just to collect the monthly payment they never mailed to Jim.  

The man was always more comfortable blaming others than taking responsibility for his frequent mistakes.  It is only human to make mistakes, it is inhuman not to forgive, preached the man who did many bad things without ever once apologizing to anyone.

The skeleton of my father nodded from his grave, very satisfied. 

“Nicely turned, Elie,” he said.  “I love that you didn’t even mention the many old friends he ‘borrowed’ money from who eventually abandoned the lying fuck, the several times, that we know of, that he embezzled from a boss who loved and trusted him, the year or more that he pretended to go to work every day while he was fraudulently drawing his ‘pay’ from his dead father’s credit cards.  The $10,000 he borrowed from mom and me towards the downpayment on a home he was pretending they were going to buy, two or three days before he declared bankruptcy.  Particularly heroic, on your part, not to mention the time he threatened to murder his children, his wife, me and mom, and then himself.  Like all desperate, murder and suicide threatening cowards, he could have saved everyone a lot of grief by just snuffing himself first.  So I salute you for not going there.”

Why would I go there, dad?  You know I always take the fucking high road. 

“Just one more reason you sometimes feel so fucking alone, Elie,” said the skeleton, wanly.  “I’m just sayin’… Try not to brood on lost nieces and nephews, eh?”

Guns Don’t Kill People, seriously

I gave an example, in yesterday’s post, of how much anger can be put into a few paragraphs of snappy prose.   It detracted from the larger idea of that post on understanding and learning to overcome angry reactions, and so I severed that part of what I posted yesterday and am re-writing it here, as an example of how anger and fear (and obfuscation by those who profit from those things)  play an outsized role in human affairs, in politics, in why solving a terrible problem can be made to seem overwhelmingly complex.  

And to give myself the opportunity to imagine Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, shot through the voice box with a perfectly placed small caliber bullet as he is spouting his shit about how guns don’t kill people and only lying fucking Jew agitators like sneaky unAmerican Saul Alinsky could even claim that they do.

America leads the First World in gun violence by a very healthy margin.  In America, our gun homicide numbers are off the world chart for similarly wealthy nations (some very poor countries have higher per capita gun murder numbers than we do, but we’re working on that).   Year after year we are alone as number one in death by gun among the high-income countries, by a gigantic margin.  We lead the industrialized world in the same Bunyanesque way that the year Babe Ruth first shattered his own home run record he hit more home runs than any other team in the American League [1].

Those who love guns, and those who profit handsomely from their unfettered sale, are, eh, up in arms about the unfairness of including the vast number of American gun suicides in the U.S. statistics of annual gun deaths.   Suicide by method other than gun is a shaky proposition, the success rate is surprisingly low.   Suicide by gun has an 82% success rate.   In contrast, overdose and poisoning have a less than 2% chance of success (1 in 50) of killing the would-be suicide.  Don’t take my word for it, here’s a Harvard study.

It’s unfair to lump gun suicide and gun homicide together, claims the NRA, because including the thousands of desperate losers who kill themselves every year with guns artificially inflates the gun death numbers to make it look like we have a plague of gun violence in America, when actually it is only mentally ill people who misuse guns to kill themselves that make it falsely seem that way.  Less than half the total deaths are the murder of somebody else, (and many of those killings are justified, probably) argues the NRA, and so it’s misleading and very unfair to include in gun death statistics the deaths of those who kill themselves with a gun.  Also, very unfair to point out that the majority of suicide attempts are unsuccessful while the vast majority of gun suicide attempts are successful.

We can bat statistics back and forth, as we do, but every time there is a slaughter by a deranged white man with a military assault rifle, usually acquired legally, the sickening public conversation is identical.   A majority of Americans want restrictions on the number of mass killing assault weapons legally available to violent men.  Congress always votes any restriction on gun ownership down.

The sanctity of gun ownership, extending to assault weapons capable of spraying deadly fire over a large area, was established not that long ago by a convoluted Supreme Court ruling in which the brilliant, evil Antonin Scalia construed an absolute right of individuals to own guns from his learned reading of the Second Amendment, which begins:  A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state…  Scalia took from this language the intent of the framers to create an unassailable, constitutionally guaranteed right of every individual American to keep and bear whatever kind of arms he wants.   The NRA has the Second Amendment as its catchphrase, but, full-disclosure, they only use the dependent clause.  Their version reads simply, like the version Scalia endorsed:  The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.  

Guns are seen as the ultimate personal protection by many Americans.  They feel they need protection from intruders, lawless thugs, even, God forbid, a government run by an illegitimate African Muslim intent on prying their guns from their cold dead hands.  It is fear that makes Americans crave powerful weaponry to keep themselves safe, anger and fear that makes them reach for their guns.   It’s as if these patriots don’t realize how easily a truly repressive government could send a Hellfire missile, launched out of a drone, to take out you and your ten well-armed buddies making a stand for the sacred Second Amendment with your AR-15s, even if you each had a hundred high capacity clips and a bump stock for each of those assault rifles. 

The National Rifle Association cries that it is unfair, unAmerican, yea, unChristian, to restrict the rights of an American to own any kind of gun he wants.  Guns are not the problem, says the NRA over and over.  The problem, according to the NRA, is that some people, a statistically tiny percentage of the tens of millions of responsible gun owners (who own the more than 300,000,000 privately held American guns), misuse guns to sometimes do unspeakable things, like shoot their mother in the face and go to the local kindergarten and spray the classroom walls with the blood of young children.  The problem is not guns.  The problems is that fucking liberals, fucking clueless about the violence we are all up against, constantly try to “exploit tragedy for political gain”.  It’s not the fucking guns that are the problem, it’s the fucking misguided bleeding hearts.

Screen shot 2018-02-26 at 6.59.14 PM.pngsource

Everybody who goes somewhere with a gun intent on killing as many people as he can is always in a rage.   He is mad.  He can’t think straight.  We are the only wealthy democracy in the world whose lawmakers will not address this homicidal madness.  We easily lead the rest of the high-income world combined in annual gun murders, even leaving out the thousands of suicides.  After every massacre those who profit from gun sales tell us it is not time to talk about keeping guns out of the hands of violent maniacs, out of respect for the poor families of the victims of the random violent maniac.

It is easy for the average citizen to get mad about this NRA rope-a-dope bullshit that the NRA and its generously paid minions do every single time after a mass killing, though anger by itself is not very effective for fighting back.   Propaganda, mass media spin, a powerful political machine and massive campaign contributions work better in this particular debate, apparently.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre had this typically defensive comment about so-called American gun violence, in the aftermath of the most recent mass shooting in an American school, the slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where one severely disturbed asshole with a semi-automatic weapon (never used in hunting or conceived of by Scalia’s infallible Founding Fathers) killed seventeen while wounding everyone else at the school:

“As usual, the opportunists have wasted not one second to exploit tragedy for political gain.  Saul Alinsky would have been proud, the break back speed of calls for more gun control laws and the breathless national media eager to smear the NRA”.

What a whining whore LaPierre is, him and his almost $1,000,000 annual salary as the chief spokesman for the freedom of some Americans to kill other Americans, or themselves, with guns.   I thought dropping the name of that Jewish idealist and community organizer in there, as symbol of vicious haters of our God-given American freedom, was a very nice touch and a cool dog whistle to his red meat eating base.  Much better than openly calling all of us who want an end to America’s violent gun culture a bunch of sneaky fucking America hating Jews, in my opinion.

I wonder how old Wayne would feel if somebody shot him in his smug fucking face, or one of his kids (if any) in theirs.

Better still, what if the shot didn’t kill Wayne, just destroyed his larynx, a surgical shot from the side, with a small caliber gun, just rendering him permanently incapable of speech, shutting him the fuck up?  There’d be a tad of good old American frontier justice in that, would there not?

There is no simple end game for gun violence in a country like ours, with as many guns as citizens (some own 100 guns, many own no guns).   For starters, instead of an extremist-imposed national right to concealed carry of hand guns even in places that have banned them, I’d like to see a ban on guns in America, except for traditional weapons for hunters.  I’m not a hunter, but I know a few who are decent, law-abiding citizens, responsible gun users — and staunch environmentalists.  To enforce the gun ban I’d impose mandatory prison time on those insisting on their phantom Scalia-created right to own and wield the most powerful legally available military assault weapons and hand guns, especially semi-automatic ones.  

Well, since that ban won’t ever happen in a competitive, commercial nation where the gun lobby is so powerful, I guess I’d settle for fucking Wayne LaPierre’s voice box being ventilated by a good shot with a precise knowledge of human anatomy.   We should all remain aware, if that terrible thing ever happens, that it won’t be the gun that renders LaPierre speechless, it will be a bad guy with a gun, no matter how good his intentions may be.

(Angry enough for yuh?  Ahimsa is sometimes a wrestling match with killer passions.   The hardest part of trying to be truly non-harming is having to listen to supremely certain motherfuckers like Wayne LaPierre and other constantly whining victims of the Liberal Conspiracy Against Real American Values.)

 

[1] there was one NL team in 1920 whose players combined to hit more home runs than Ruth that year.  The Philadelphia Phillies, led by a player who hit 15 home runs and one who hit 14 (nobody else in double figures, though outfielder Casey Stengel added a career high 9), hit 64, as a team, to Ruth’s 54.  No other major league team equalled Mr. Ruth’s home run total in 1920.

Anger Makes You Mad

Neuroscience has identified the part of the brain that lights up when we are angry — the insula, deep in the cerebral cortex.   When the insula is aglow fight or flight chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol are released and the mind is literally disabled from making fine, or even gross, distinctions.  

A truly angry parent may actually be physically incapable of seeing the harm in venting against a young kid who has provoked them to rage.  Incapable of seeing the damage done by slapping the kid, or locking the kid in a dark closet and turning the music up to drown her screams or raging wildly against the child’s sense of self. 

This shut off of the moral faculty when rage is upon us seems like an obvious point, but it really isn’t.  Angry and “mad” are synonyms, but even that is only a hint of the obvious.  

The other side of being angry is that we instantly justify our anger, even though these deeply-held justifications often don’t bear much scrutiny.  All available evidence, when we are mad, points to our being absolutely right to be angry.   The urgent reason we feel angry couldn’t be more obvious, to us.   It’s telling, and very human, that the only non-physical faculty that continues to work when we are enraged is our homo sapiens ability to justify ourselves.

This trait, rage making one resolute and incapable of seeing another person’s point of view, is what makes war possible.  It explains mob lynching and every other atrocity.   Rage makes people support deadly policies of all kinds.   We don’t see the victims of war, lynching or deadly policies as humans with souls as unique and precious as those of the people we love.   We see them as irredeemable fucking assholes who deserve what they fucking get.   If Donald Trump had a massive stroke during a nationally broadcast speech, many Americans would feel no empathy for him, some would even laugh.   Reminds me of a great line of Trump’s, from early in the presidential campaign when he was picking off his Republican opponents one after another.

 I think it was Ted Cruz, right before he was voted off the island, who introduced a woman, I think it was Carly Fiorino, as his running mate (turns out Carly introduced “our next president” Ted Cruz — ed.).   The woman turned on stage and seemed to fall into a manhole.   She stepped forward and just went down.  Trump showed the great clip to his crowd at a rally.  The crowd loved it.  He pointed out that nobody on stage had gone to help her.  “Even I would have helped her,” Trump said with a smile and a little shrug.  “Even I!”   Cracked me up.    

My grandmother, no stranger to anger, liked to calmly say, after she’d provoked me with some harsh comment about my work ethic, “I know, I know… the truth hurts, I know…”   I’d sputter on in defense of the thing she had just attacked and she’d smile, and nod, and sympathetically tell me that the truth hurts, that she knew, she knew.   I loved her, but that was some hard to come back from shit.  

There is this, though: the things that will make us most angry are things that attack us where we are most vulnerable.   A shameful secret, dangled sadistically.  Noting a particular weakness we know we have.   Bringing up something painful in a way that seems unfair.   Making an issue of our greatest fear.  

I’m no expert on anger, but I have studied it for many years, since it played a terrible role in my life going back to my earliest days.   It turns out there are ways to avoid an angry confrontation, methods to defuse anger rather than escalate it.  

The intellectual part is hard enough, recognizing the maddening principle at work, the exact, familiar thing that pisses you off, before the anger takes over, and then learning what you need to say and do next to avoid escalation.   That intellectual understanding is crucial for de-escalating the situation.  It’s hard, but over time we can get better at recognizing the signs that we are about to get mad and take the steps that have worked in the past to calm our reactions.

The emotional component of anger is the truly hard part to master.   The overwhelming feeling of injustice hits us hard out of nowhere.  Suddenly we are under attack, the stress chemicals flowing, the insula lit up, the justifications for our anger mounting aggravatingly.  That, my friends, is the fucking hard part.   Something to think about while you consider how you feel about the idea that anger, even rage, is inevitable in human affairs.   I would not concede that in my own relations.

 

 

“The Record”

For the record, I should note that generally, except for a few technical, crucial, implacable details set forth in the official record, for the general public there is really no official “going on the record”.   The exact content of the official record is something for very well-paid lawyers to argue about with the government’s lawyers.  The general public is often allowed a single participatory session to express its opinions on the matters under debate/ They speak “on the record”, but strictly speaking, their contributions to the record do not include any direct input into the debate, except through the votes of their elected officials (all of whom, in this case, appear to weaselishly favor a secretive economic development plan their constituents hate in overwhelming majorities). 

I spent a few hours today writing a statement for the record on that matter of urgent public concern, written comments had to be in within a few days of last night’s public meeting.   Good day’s work for a Friday.   In one way writing a statement for the record was a gesture of futility and, at best, a symbolic protest.  In another sense, and the way I thought of it, it was my clear duty as a citizen and neighbor to write on our mutual behalf.   I’m always happy to use my writing to try to convince someone to do the right thing.  This writing is partly sad, and partly also, writing it is a very helpful meditation exercise — feeling my way toward the connections to make this story more personal, a story to move an emotional individual toward mercy and away from a knee jerk to violence.

Anyway, I sent a copy of my previous post out to several friends and to my sister.  I wanted to let them know what I found myself up against, what I learned, how clearly I hopefully was able to describe it, and to eventually get a pat on the head or two from even one or two of them.

To my lawyer colleague and friend of almost half a century I offered the link:
Check this shit out, for a short busman’s holiday.   Anonymous frontmen for some Jareds and Donalds have their beady eyes on my neighborhood, and they spent $1,000,000 in public funds laying out a radical rezoning plan.   We’re all about to be fucked, so I went on “the record” the day after the sole “Public Hearing” into this matter of public concern the public had no other input into.

To my sister, who had recently compared me to her husband, a man she described as sitting in his easy chair and yelling at the TV, I wrote:

You can either yell at the TV or take action of some kind.  The most recent action I’m taking is to put my opposition to the planned sale of my neighborhood “on the record”.  I was encouraged that the public hearing last night was packed.  I think the facts I set out below speak for themselves, as did many of the community residents who spoke very well last night in opposition to this boondoggle for rapacious wealthy fucks.  150 neighborhood people signed up to speak, I heard about the first 40, then went home to start putting this together as my public comment.

The fucks will probably ram this corrupt rezoning plan through, because that’s what the lawyers who work for the Jareds and the Donalds get paid to do.  These types are allowed to ram rezoning plans down the throats of local opposition because their poop emits no foul odor and so forth.  The sweetness of their excretions does nothing to relieve the rest of us of our duty as democratic citizens to oppose their foul, if odorless, plans.

>Anyway, read on for the sickening/encouraging details.

To a thirty-two year old neighbor, an ecologist and an idealistic environmentalist, son of two of my oldest and dearest friends, I wrote:

Don’t know if you made it to the meeting last night about the proposed rezoning of Inwood.  To my surprise there was a raucous, standing room only crowd in the auditorium of the school across from the 9 cent store on Broadway and Academy.   150 people signed up to speak (I made it through the first 40 or so), so I contented myself with submitting this comment for the record.   You have until the end of February to submit a written comment, if you are so inspired.

 

Written Statement to Community Board 12M

It was gratifying to see the standing room only crowd at the public hearing at I.S. 52 last night, in spite of the opaque public notice of the hearing, to discuss various ULURP application numbers.   People turned out en masse to resist a plan that puts neighborhood residents and small businesses last as developers plan to profit off the largely unexploited northernmost section of Manhattan island.   150 people signed up to speak to a boisterous crowd, many of whom held signs that said things like “La Gente Antes de Lucro” (“People Before Profits”).  The rest of us were told we had a few days to submit a written statement for the record.  I had a chance to review a few of the hundreds of pages of dense bureaucratic documents prior to the meeting.  There are some devilish details in there.   I’m determined to write a cogent, one page statement for the Public Hearing Record today, to wit:

I submit this comment as part of the public record of the 2/22/18 Public Hearing on the Inwood Rezoning Proposal.

Inwood is a small, fairly quiet working class community, with old residential buildings and a large, beautiful, well-used park.  It is no mystery why it would be so desirable for real estate developers.   The unique charms of the NYC neighborhood I’ve called home for more than forty years are currently protected by zoning laws that have largely prevented it from being overrun by developers like the ones hatching the current plan under discussion.   

The lack of transparency of the Inwood Rezoning Proposal is striking — the meeting was called for a public hearing to discuss ULURP applications identified by number only.  No plain English/Spanish abstract of the proposal was made available for consideration before the public hearing.   The details of the ambitious rezoning plan must be gleaned from a few hundred pages of bureaucratic text, some of which I was able to ​read (CEQR No. 17DMEOO7M) at the doomed Inwood Public library prior to the public meeting.  The details that follow come from that report.

New affordable housing:  25-30% percent of the proposed construction, meaning 75% would be “market” or luxury units, radically changing the character of this stable, ​working class neighborhood.  The building of 3,804,435 sq. feet of residential space would increase the population of this small area by more than 12,000.   An additional 50 tons of solid waste per week would be generated by this increased population.  50+ passenger car equivalents per project peak hour on already crowded mass transit would be required to transport commuters.  The A train is already one of the worst running​, and most crowded, in the city, there are often no seats on the train at eleven pm.   Air quality:  “proposed actions generate vehicle traffic exceeding emissions threshold.”   

The rezoning plan would quietly make the Inwood Public Library “collateral damage” depriving us all of a valuable public resource.  The children of our community would be denied a place to get books, to do research and study, in a neighborhood whose schools have already closed their libraries.  The representative from the Economic Development Corporation spun the planned demolition of the neighborhood’s library (“the library project”) unconvincingly:  “the library project creates more than 100 affordable housing units”.   No plan for an interim library was presented.  Presumably the rebuilt library would be housed on the first floor of the large, 75% market/luxury high-rise to be placed on the library’s current footprint and that of the adjacent property.  There are provisions in the plan for the construction of a private school and a “community center”, presumably for the benefit of the some of the 12,000 new Inwood residents.

We read that because the commercial/residential mix would not “directly displace 500 or more residents” many disclosures in the application can be skipped. Shadows longer than 50 feet would be cast by new construction made possible by the rezoning, removing sunlight from streets, necessitating the inclusion of more bureaucratic language in CEQR No. 17DMEOO7M.  Proposed “sidewalk widening” is no answer to severe crowding, noise, pollution, increased sewage flowing into an old, overtaxed sewage system.   We don’t need pedestrian malls or doublewide sidewalks in Inwood, we have a beautiful park for strolling in.   We particularly don’t need this constriction of our streets if vehicle traffic is expected to become much worse under the plan.

This is a plan that puts the interests of wealthy real estate developers first, local residents and business people of Inwood last.   City Councilman Ydanis Rodriquez tried to spin the question as largely a matter of perception: fear of gentrification, perhaps fear of progress.   There is often something irrational about fear, although we have all seen such “progress” all over the city.   It benefits the rich while hurting everybody else.   This is a plan I’d expect from Bloomberg’s real estate cronies, or Trump’s.   It must not be allowed to happen in Northern Manhattan.  Please vote “No” on the Inwood Rezoning Proposal. 

NOTE:  crap, forgot to attach this document  much referred to by many of last night’s speakers!

Smiling Partisan Creep

I don’t really want to get into politics here anymore, but I read about a remark from Mitch McConnell just now that made my fists involuntarily clench.   McConnell, oddly enough, had warned Obama’s people that any action taken against Russian interference in the 2016 election would be denounced as a partisan political act. 

The president recently lashed out at his predecessor, Barack Obama, for not doing anything to stop Russian meddling in the 2016 election.  Reports came out that U.S. intelligence agencies briefed Obama on this meddling in the summer of 2016 and that he failed to adequately protect the election from it.   Trump blasted Obama with a few harsh tweets, as is his style, dating back to his Birther days.

One reason there was no bipartisan action taken to protect the 2016 election from foreign influence was that Obama was politely but firmly told to fuck himself when he asked GOP lawmakers for their support.   Mitch McConnell, a smug man with a face only his mother could resist punching, reportedly told the president no when Obama’s people asked for bipartisan support of an aggressive response to Russian interference in the 2016 election.  As the Washington Post reported:  

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.

And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”

The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

source

Hey, McConnell should know.   Just ask Supreme Court justice for life Neil Gorsuch.   Like our current president, McConnell is a man who has never been wrong, certainly not on matters of partisan politics.

 

Shitbox v. Loxbox

The tiny car Harold Schwartzappel pulled up in on 190th Street to rescue me from a deluge may have been a Fiat, or a Renault, or possibly a Peugeot, whichever company made a cheaper model circa 1964.  My father referred to Schwartzappel’s car as a shitbox, and compared to the well-appointed cars my father always drove, it did seem like a tin can as I got in and slammed the flimsy door.   

The engine of the shitbox had been rebuilt by Harold, if I recall correctly.   My father knew almost nothing about car engines, though he’d worked in his uncle’s garage for years.   The first car my father had was a big, bulbous orange and white Pontiac my parents called the Loxbox.  I recall sitting in the back seat of the Loxbox as a young kid.  The seat was upholstered in soft leather.   I don’t think the Shitbox was upholstered at all.

My father was happy to drive around in the American Dream, while Harold, a confident tinkerer who spoke several languages and played many musical instruments, made do with his Shitbox.

Two or Three Approaches to Dealing with Vexation

When dealing with a problem we can assemble all available information, analyze it as best we can and honestly discuss all options for solving the problem.   We can select only the information we agree to put on the table and talk about that, a more limited approach.   We can agree not to talk about controversial or embarrassing subjects and agree that the problem is not something we will ever solve.   I’ve always been in favor of the first approach, though it is no longer generally accepted as the way to solve problems.  The second and third ways are much more common.  These approaches apply to solving problems in our civic and personal lives.

As a citizenry we no longer expect disclosure from the powers that rule us, we expect spin.   We are not given access to all of the pertinent facts, we are given a few facts in the context that will cause us to hopefully buy those facts, as presented.   There is a fundamental divide in how people approach the things that vex us: we can yell at the television or we can read, analyze, discuss and write.  

For those who yell at the television I will say this: at least you’re paying attention. 

There is a divide between the open and closed approaches, a vast, deep chasm.  There is no bridging this gap, sad to say.   The advocates of a closed approach have their compelling reasons: often involving something embarrassing, shameful, illegal or otherwise painful that must be concealed.  The advocates of transparency can be said to be unaware that all the rules of human society have changed– we live in an endless, brutal global war against violent extremists and the expectations we had before Terror are no longer reasonable. Transparency is a luxury people up against Terror can no longer afford.  

This same divergence in approach applies in personal life.  Some things are just too threatening to put on the table.  So we agree not to discuss them.  It doesn’t mean the things are no longer threatening.  It means they are safely taken off the table as things we may talk about.   It depresses the hell out of me, sometimes, that information people need to make intelligent decisions about their lives is withheld from them, by deliberate policy, by an unshakable decision.   But on I march, as though the hell wasn’t depressed out of me.

Controversy in America 2018

barring gun purchases by people on the terrorist no-fly list

You would not think something like this would be controversial in a nation that girds itself against terrorist attacks and has long been ravaged by regular mass shootings, at schools, workplaces, movies, malls.   You would not think something like this would be a partisan issue, anywhere.   If the government has the right to maintain a list of people it suspects of terrorist ties, what theory ensures the right of these possible terrorists to have and to hold the most deadly guns the law allows?

Is it just me?  I know back in the day a well-regulated state militia was essential for putting down slave revolts.  I am well aware of the mythical American hero, the unblinking rugged individual putting his life on the line without a shiver, standing in the center of dusty Main Street, facing down evil with a Colt 45.   I get that one man with a gun, with no hesitation to kill, has always been the equal of several more powerful men with legitimate grievances.   I understand the outsized role the gun has played in American history, and how the gun has been romanticized and fetishized.

What is controversial about:  barring gun purchases by people on the terrorist no-fly list?   Maybe fucking Wayne LaPierre can explain that to me and my stymied countrymen.