February 2008

the nyc subway fare is going up again this weekend, and everyone’s confused about the hike. if the MTA had gone out of its way to make this obscure, they couldn’t have done a better job, but obscurity just comes naturally to that agency.

a fare hike is a fare hike, right? so today’s $2 ride is going to cost how much tomorrow? well, that all depends on how many rides you buy at one time, and only multiple use metrocards are listed on the MTA’s fare-hike site, where the $2 single-ride fare is not even mentioned.

on the other hand, the much-loved but entirely absurd bonuses are going down, from 20% to 15%. so instead of getting, for example, $36 worth of rides when you buy a $30 card, you will now get $34.50 worth of rides, which is 17 rides with a very annoying fifty cents left over on your card. the lines to the token booths, mercifully nonexistent the past several years, will reappear, like mushrooms in the rain, overnight.

it’s also impossible to tell from the MTA website what they mean by the deadlines on the unlimited-ride cards: is that your last chance to activate them or your last chance to use them? big difference between the two, but hey, let’s not waste valuable webspace on clarifications.

i wish the MTA had spared themselves and all of us from another fare hike next year and the year after that, and just done away with the bonuses altogether. bonuses started about a dozen years ago, after metrocards were introduced but not yet widely adopted, as a way of encouraging riders to buy them. now the turnstiles don’t even take tokens and metrocards are the only game in town. so isn’t it time to say “it’s been real” and cut the bonuses? or are they just supposed to be some kind of largesse, to make us feel better about the bumbling, squanderous MTA?

in a system without bonuses we might even be able to get the second avenue subway built before reaching the hundred-years-under-construction mark. conceived in 1929, with ground broken again in the 1970’s there’s still not a yard of track to show for it. MTA says (and have said for decades) that the delays are due to budget shortfalls.

how can it take 75 years to budget for a single project? such a gulliverian level of incompetence is almost enough to inspire awe.

maybe it’s a priority problem, and they aren’t putting first things first, based on this call for artists that i just ran across. guys, just BUILD the fucking stations, please — we need you to get us from one place to another, that’s ALL, we don’t go down in the subways looking for beauty and inspiration. the lexington avenue line (#4, 5 and 6) are the ONLY east side trains between 59th and 125th streets. eastsiders sometimes have to let three or four trains pass before one arrives that has room for another few bodies. meanwhile, on the west side, riders choose among the #1, 2, 3, A, B, C and D trains — more than twice the number of lines in the same size territory. sometimes they even get seats during rush-hour, while their eastside brethren stand in their stations, watching the packed cars pass.

some new yorkers remain refreshingly hopeful, like lew friedman from brooklyn, who wrote in this week’s New York Press that he believes mass transit is a utility, like garbage pickup and police, and as such should be free to everyone. after all, he says, aren’t we already paying for this with our taxes? he compares it to being charged if the fire department rescues your burning home.

i like lew. he reminds me to dream big.

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in this morning’s AMNY is an article titled “Inmate’s sex-change trauma” concerning michelle kosilek, a pre-op m-to-f transsexual who, since 1990, has been serving life in prison for murder.

her hormone treatments were recently suspended and as a result her “breasts have shrunk…facial hair is thicker and scalp hair is thinner”. she is suing the government of massachusetts for “cruel and unusual” punishment, demanding sex-reassignment surgery as well, because hormones alone — which the court mandated for her in 2002 — will not relieve her “anxiety and depression”.

honey, you’re doing life in prison. nobody there cares about your facial hair and NOTHING will relieve your anxiety and depression. you are supposed to be anxious and depressed — the entire system is designed to accomplish exactly that. hadn’t you noticed? prison is a punishment, and punishments don’t tend to leave you feeling good about yourself.

i was pretty surprised to hear that she’d even been getting the hormones. i mean, it’s jail. you’re not allowed to have sex there. you’re not even allowed to DATE there — who CARES what gender you are? in fact, you may as well not even have a gender, you are prisoner number nine thousand four hundred and sixty two and that is now your whole sad story.

one of kosilek’s complaints is that her (male) genitals, without the treatments, are now regaining “their former size and function” — that’s pretty ironic, considering that kosilek killed her (or, at the time, his) wife for pouring boiling water over those selfsame genitals. make up your mind, honey. do you want them or not?

i think it would be pretty outrageous for tax dollars to finance this kind of surgery for someone doing a life sentence. and before you get out your labels, NO i’m not bashing, i’m a proud member of the GLBT community myself, but that doesn’t mean i have to check my common sense at the door. the government has already spent many twenties of thousands of dollars (in addition to laser hair removal, hormones and psychotherapy) considering kosilek’s gender issues — that money will have been well spent if the court now issues a decision that such treatments are simply out of bounds for anyone serving life. for shorter prison terms it’s reasonable to continue hormone therapy so that the person can pick up where they left off once they’re released.

to think that the government continues to cut meals for senior citizens and lunch programs for kids below the poverty line while keeping trannie prisoners free of depression-inducing facial hair. maybe they ran out of money after springing for all those laser removal jobs?

i would love to hear from any readers who may see this another way. sound off!

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in an article subtitled “ralph nader is no spoiler,” joshua holland condemns those democrats who condemn ralph nader for spoiling (i’d use the word destroying) the 2000 elections. this is all in the context of encouraging old ralph to run again, although holland says straight out that he wouldn’t vote for nader now.

in the most annoying paragraph of this extremely annoying article, holland says:

Many Democrats, in their misplaced pique, also condemn Nader and his supporters in a profoundly bone-headed way — they suggest, or at least imply, that it was somehow the duty of progressive-minded people to vote for the Democratic ticket because of the perfidy of the alternative.

as a matter of fact, josh, it is precisely the “perfidy of the alternative” that obligated nader to leave that race. i don’t have to list the evils of the bush administration; in 2008 they are horrifically well known. and while its true that no one expected the 9/11 attacks (well, no one outside of washington) and the irrationally resulting war on iraq, the fact that bush was an unapologetic warmongerer with an extremely low IQ was clear in 2000.

nader could not have won that election and he knew it. what on earth was gained by him remaining in? is the idea of choice the almighty grail? (i’m looking at the sunday NYT fashion supplement lying odiously on my desk right now — nearly 300 glossy, barely-recyclable pages of clothes most of us could not afford. all the choice in the world. does that make it a good thing?)

according to holland it’s gore’s own fault that he lost the election because:

Al Gore, had he immediately and forcefully demanded a recount of all the votes in the state of Florida, would have won and would probably be finishing up his second term right now.

what makes holland so sure about that? the republican machine’s backroom dealing reached even into the supreme court, to that court’s everlasting shame. the country was in an agony of uncertainty and fear. politicians from both sides were calling on gore to concede (the same way democrats called on nader to withdraw). gore, who puts the common good first, acceded — and to this day it’s not clear what would’ve happened had he not.

one thing IS clear, though: there would have been no need for a recount if nader wasn’t in the picture. and there’s nothing bone-headed about wishing he’d done the honorable thing and thrown his support behind al gore.

think how much perfidy this country would have been spared.

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although i don’t think of it often, i will never forget the day part one of childhood ended for me, as it ends for many young children: i saw my mother crying.

mothers cry? she cries? and grandma too? the world must be broken.

the world, in fact, had broken. on 11/25/63 i was barely six years old, watching JFK’s funeral on a black & white portable TV in the living room, where my parents slept nights on a castro. i barely understood what a president was, and likely didn’t even know we had one until the assassination. but my matriarchs wept all that long day as if their hearts were breaking. i remember how one of the black horses hauling the hearse was unruly, and repeatedly had to be calmed. i remember john-john toddling beside the coffin.

back then, i was astonished to learn that a mother — a grownup! — could cry. today, i am astonished to think of any adult weeping over the fate of a US president (unless it’s over the fact that GWB is still standing).

but barack obama clearly inspires true emotion in human beings, and he doesn’t have to get himself killed to
do it. caroline kennedy believes that he has many of the same qualities of leadership that her father had, and this ability to touch people at a deep level is a big part of it.

can you imagine weeping over hillary clinton? seriously. even if you’re planning to vote for her. it’s unthinkable.

ah,
you may be saying, but a bunch of teary-eyed sentimentalists are no use to this country. what good is inspiration? we need policy! we need experience!

yet policies and experience, without the gift of inspiration, are usually ineffective. look at what happened to al gore! the man is a genius who more than deserved the nobel prize, the work that he has done is making a huge positive impact on the planet. but he couldn’t do it from his VP position and he couldn’t get elected as
president precisely because he does not have that charisma. (i’m setting aside the fact that the election was rightfully his and was stolen by sordid backroom dealmaking in florida. if he’d gotten the lion’s share of the popular vote, those manipulations simply would not have been possible. i will never forgive ralph nader for his pigheaded refusal to withdraw from that primary, god damn him to hell — do you realize we WOULD NOT HAVE A WAR IN IRAQ RIGHT NOW if nader had done the right thing? unforgivable.)

barack obama is a man of thought, honesty and humility, who doesn’t need a focus group to decide what’s
coming out of his mouth next. compared to what we’ve tolerated in our so-called leadership the last few decades, that is a huge leap forward, and at this point a high level of personal integrity is quite enough for me. when is the last time we had honesty in the white house? even bill clinton, the best president we’ve had in recent memory, was full of shit about half the time. THAT is what we need to change, and i believe that’s exactly the kind of change obama is talking about.

i’m having a phone party in my apartment on sunday, march 2, to call democratic voters in texas on behalf of the obama campaign. if you’re around NYC and would like to join us, the invitation is here.

maybe i’ll get to meet a few of you then?

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there’s an obnoxious article in today’s Daily News entitled “Hepatitis A-List Scare” about a situation at a very upscale club in NYC called Cafe Socialista.

apparently one of the bartenders came down with Hepatitis-A (the mildest form of hepatitis; it resembles a slight case of the flu for a few days after which you’re fine AND have future immunity — unless maybe you’re 90 years old or ill for other reasons, in which case it can hit harder.)

the club followed all the right procedures: the bartender is on leave until he recovers; the hosts of all events he served in the past several days were notified. true, they’ve gotten a fine now because there wasn’t enough soap in the employee’s bathroom or something, but in short there were no egregious violations, and the club clearly did not cause the bartender to become infected, he picked that up all on his own. (hepatitis A is commonly caused by eating infected seafood.)

but OH the gnashing of teeth! oh the threats and cancellations! how dare the servants in a high-end club be subject to this — don’t they KNOW who they are dealing with?

demi moore, madonna, liv tyler, ivanka trump, kate hudson and many other glitterati were at the events in question. and in an extraordinary (and unnecessary) quick-response, the health department set up a site for free vaccinations today. seems to me that madonna could likely afford to get her own hepatitis shot; she can probably get a private doctor to deliver it with comfort and convenience in her penthouse. likewise the rest of them.

in a high profile club like Socialista, it’s extremely unlikely that any of these people caught ANYTHING from this bartender, soap or no soap. after all, they’re not exactly stirring the drinks with their fingers, are they?  think of the silver-plated martini shakers, the plates of canapes balanced on white-cloth-draped arms,  the tongs, the cherry dispensers, the every high-end implement that can be imagined. this is not some down-at-heel corner bar where the grumpy proprietor flings two-day-old lemon slices into your watered-down martini with his grubby, nicotine-stained fingers, no. this is a place for the creme de la creme, and no expense nor convenience is spared.

now, if this HAD happened at some low-end chain like McCann’s, where the patrons likely would be quite grateful for the notification as well as the free vaccine, do you think they’d get either one, much less a two-column story on page three (page THREE, mind you) of a large-circulation daily?

oh, let’s not bother to answer that question, it’s too discouraging.

let’s just mention that it’s not until page 16 of that selfsame newspaper that we learn how the US embassy in Belgrade was stormed and someone’s charred remains found inside once the shooting stopped. how a pregnant 14 year old girl was found murdered and stuffed in a boiler, probably by her father.  how hot food deliveries for elderly centers  are being significantly reduced. (page 23 for that one, and possibly the money saved on this will help fund free vaccinations for the Socialista elite.)

so many deaths and trials and tribulations, all so much less significant than the fact that poor demi moore may get a stomachache this week.

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paterson the black lieutenant governor of new york state, is being sued for discrimination. he dismissed a photographer and hired another; white guy fired, black woman hired.

his defense? he “didn’t know” what race either of them were because he is visually impaired.

mr. paterson, that sorry-ass defense is the best evidence of guilt you could possibly have offered. why?

the former is named Joseph Maioriello, and he served the state for 26 years before being fired for poor performance.

the replacement is named El-Wise Noisette, and she came from the office of Carl McCall, another top black politician.

the citizens of new york state and the servants of the court are not idiots. it’s an insult to us all that you even dare to present this kind of bullshit. “oh, i don’t see very well, how was i supposed to know what color they were?” just come the fuck ON.

names aside, your sense of hearing would likely be enough to tip you off. for reasons i don’t understand, east coast blacks almost universally adopt a version of southern accent in their everyday speech, a mannerism both unique and immediately detectable, one that cannot be confused with a true southern accent.

i wasn’t aware of this lawsuit, and had no opinion on patterson’s guilt or not in relation to it — until i read
his ludicrous defense. one presumably has to have some intellectual chops and some insight to make it to lt. governor without being able to see. obviously patterson is no fool, but his fool’s defense makes it
quite clear that in relation to this case, the man has something to hide.

what is state government thinking, anyway, putting a blind man in charge of the photographers? as they would corpspeak it on wall street: he “doesn’t have the right skill set” for that role.

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there’s a new mortgage plan (though scheme might be a better word) on the table that promises to solve the current housing “crisis”. it involves using the GNMA and section 8 (read: welfare) housing law to refinance all defaulting mortgages at 1% over 30 years.

it will cost only $150 billion, which the federal government will pay. which i (and you and you and you and) will pay.

the biggest beneficiaries here are, of couse, the megabanks and hedge funds that invested in these mortgage debt securities in the first place. many of the rescued homeowners will lose their houses anyway. why? because they bought houses they KNEW they could not afford in the hopes of flipping them for quick money. the sale of the house, in other words, was going to pay for the purchase of the house. like having your cake and eating it too? precisely.

what’s more, the institutions that invested in those mortgage-backed securities knew they were buying the equivalent of junk bonds. these people do finance for a living — did they somehow miss the fact that the entire mortgage industry had gone from one where two late payments to Macy’s ten years in the past might disqualify someone with a great credit rating from getting the loan, to one where “no money down” ads were trumpeted, like Crazy Eddie commercials of the seventies, from every car radio and tabloid? did they somehow not notice, those giants of commerce?

i am not interested in spending $150 billion to keep Citigroup prosperous. i am not interested in refinancing mortgages that are practically guaranteed to default. i didn’t run out and get an interest-only loan to try and make a quick $150k on a 12-month flip and i don’t feel like paying the tab for those left standing when the music stopped (as every rational person knew it eventually would). there is this element of uncertainty around investments, after all: the greater the potential reward, the greater the risk. are we supposed to spend tax dollars now to shield real estate speculators (whether homeowners or securities traders) from risk? they certainly didn’t share any of their profits during the boom.

and now it’s bust. i say, let it be.

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brian nichols’ defense has cost more than 1.2 million dollars and the trial hasn’t even started. is unlikely to ever start unless the state of georgia wins the lottery.

nichols, on trial for raping his ex, escaped from a courtroom, killing the judge and four others in a multiday rampage before being recaptured. he acknowledges his guilt, and is willing to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, presumably without chance of parole.

but no-oooo, that’s not good enough. georgia must have its death! an eye for a fucking eye, damn you! none of this allowing the defendant to choose his own sentence — what do you think we are, a bunch of country bumpkins?

but death sentences, as we know, must be defended to the death — and not a public defender in the county will touch this case. they all loved the judge, you see. so bring in the shysters, who have dropped their hourly fee to a mere $175 for this good service.

and now the defense fund is out of money. so nichols — and others — will sit in limbo until someone in georgia takes their head out of their ass.

this is a situation that, for two reasons, has no business existing, much less having millions of tax dollars squandered on it.

first of all, there shouldn’t be a death penalty, and god knows the Justice Project and others have turned up enough cases of false imprisonment (and subsequent releases, often after decades behind bars) to reveal the fragile nature of the thing we like to call justice. i don’t think the govt, state OR fed, should be in the murder business under any circumstances (not death row, not iraq), but setting all that aside, so many proven false positives over the years tell us just how little faith we can put into the sacrosanct trial-by-jury process, and for that reason alone the death penalty must be done away with.

yet, if it isn’t (as it shows little sign of being), someone tell me what sense it makes for an admittedly guilty man to seek life in prison (in georgia, no less) rather than just getting it over with? does he actually look forward to decades of cell-checks, saturday nights in the movie room trying not to get buttfucked, repetitious days filled with little or nothing, never again to have a delicious meal, and probably few that can even be called decent? to shitting and showering in public?

if all else fails, i’ve got an idea where georgia can find the money to finish this miserable transaction: let’s cancel the famous congressional steroid hearings — a travesty if ever there was one. as little as i might want my hard-earned tax dollars to go to mr. nichols’ defense, i’d rather that than see them squandered on an endless investigation about whether or not millionaire athletes are enhancing their performance. every year a new record is broken, and humans don’t evolve that quickly, it’s pretty obvious that some kind of
enhancing is going on somewhere. let them have at it, i say, let them buy their steroids in Duane Reade and shoot up in the dugouts. shut down the investigation, deregulate the substance and tax the shit out of it (as we should already be doing with at least marijuana, but that’s another blog) and send some of the cash to the bankrupt georgia criminal justice system.

in a country full of raping and murdering, where it’s no longer safe to go to a college lecture for fear of being mown down by automatic weapons in the hands of a soon-to-be-former classmate, where every year more teenagers (and many not even yet in their teens) commit suicide, where the bridges are crumbling and the water mains are leaking and the steampipes are blowing up right next to grand central station — in such a country, how much do steroids really matter?

and how much, in that context, does the fate of brian nichols matter?

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that’s right - barack obama is not black. why isn’t he?

well, he’s not white, everyone seems to agree, even though his mother was white. so how can he be black just because his father was?

and he’s not exactly african-american, either, in terms of his cultural heritage, since he spent most of his childhood in jakarta. indonesian-american is closer to his experience, but they don’t have a very visible community here, if they have one at all.

it really makes me tired, this annoying american habit of calling anybody black who had even so much as one pure black great-granddaddy, and it’s one of the most racist practices i know — racist and invisible, because everybody buys into it.

turn it around: magic johnson is white, because he had a white great grandmom. sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? i mean, LOOK at the man. well, look at obama. for that matter, look at halle berry. i didn’t know she was “black” until somebody told me.

so if you can’t tell what so-called color-cum-race someone is without reading their pedigree, how much meaning does it really have? i say none. i say we stop the labeling and the nitpicking and the scrutinizing.

my maternal grandfather was born in the hills of puerto rico, a pure-D jibaro if ever there was one. his darkish skin was just that — darkish, like Wonder Bread toasted to perfection. my mother came out a slightly lighter shade of gold, and then married my half-irish father, whose childhood nickname was “whitey” (a nickname no kid would likely tolerate today). i’m not a ghost, but my skin is pretty light, and nobody’s ever taken me for anything but white. yet the one time i visited puerto rico, to attend a wedding with my grandmother, i met quite a few blood relatives and most of them were darker than obama’s father.

let’s all get over it, shall we? the color of your skin doesn’t mean a goddam thing because it doesn’t reliably reveal your heritage. and if cultural heritages can be as mixed and unexpected as obama’s and mine, they don’t mean a goddam thing either. there’s no indonesian-american day parade. there’s no box on the application for half-puerto-rican quarter-irish-quarter-italian, there’s probably no box on the application that fits the exact person who is you.

if obama wins, he won’t be america’s first black president.

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