Motormanmark.com

No Child Left Behind (NCLB,) an initiative introduced by both Republicans and Democrats, represented by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, has raised a panicked stampede of emotions from educators that is just delightful to see.  I remember substitute teaching in the day when teachers used to drag themselves into school, half-zonked from partying the night before, slouch in their seats and throw out some make-work for any student who wanted it.  You’d walk down a hallway of just about any school in an un-wealthy area of the city, and you’d see very little going on in just about any classroom door glass you’d chose to glance through.  Lucky for the Board of Ed, schools were off-limits to the public and to any cameras, so this fact was never easily related in the media. 

Still, the teacher-authored book about pathetically poor teaching environments was so common it was a veritable genre, though always ending up with the teacher-hero succeeding in reaching and transforming the students—something that just never occurred in real life, but, thanks to those books and movies, there were plenty of idealistic young teachers who banged their heads against the wall for a year or two before moving on to other careers.  That was me.

In those days, principals could spend very little time at work, teachers transformed playgrounds into parking lots for their cars to make the suburban commute, and very few people gave a rat’s ass what any of the kids were doing with their lives. 

There was already much psychological research that indicated the keys to transformative teaching: group work, personally-relevant projects, enthusiasm, high standards, reinforcement (rewarding kids with praise for doing good work,) and accurate assessments of what a child can do so as to challenge with realistic goals.  Still, few attempted to use these time and energy-consuming tools to change the march of failure, and, to be fair, a single teacher can do little.  You need school-wide change, as students are not going to spend all the rest of their classes goofing off and transform to studious just for your class. 

Every school had a few older teachers who dragged their feet and complained in moaned tones, read the newspaper at their desks, and treated the students like, perhaps, a friendly prison guard would his inmates.  Other teachers would just run through a routine, making no effort to raise enthusiasm in themselves, let alone their students.

No teachers would fight, which was what you had to do just to set the stage for an attempt at real teaching.  It would emotionally destroy you. 

After all, there was no discipline.  Do you have any idea what it takes to motivate a class without discipline?  I will tell you: you must perform.  You must compete for attention with distractions and win.  Your lesson must be more entertaining than the new electronic device in this student’s purse or the story of a new boyfriend that student is about to tell the one sitting behind her.  

It wasn’t just the rotten teachers, (which were I’d say a greater percentage than most educators are willing to admit,) but it was the rotten principals, and the rotten administrators, all the way up to the rotten federal policies. 

NCLB promised to change it all and do so rapidly, as if another generation could not be spared.

And in many ways it has.  For the first time, US educators are being pressed to perform.  The churning changes bubbling up all through the system, even if they are not successful, are creating an environment where at least the status quo will not be tolerated.  Compared to the warehouses I worked at in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Anything is an improvement.  You hear all these educators caterwauling about being forced to “teach to the test,” but it is a great, great improvement from not having to teach at all.

This is not to say the argument has no place.  I am talking pretty strictly about poorly-performing schools.  I have no idea why a school that performs well should need to administer more than one standardized test a year.  But the schools that don’t cut it should be dragged out into the light of day and castigated, which cannot be accomplished without testing.

Mayor Bloomburg wants to chop these rotten schools up and turn them into charter schools.  I do not approve of Bloomburg’s media-sponsored reign, and this can be seen as just another power grab for control by him, but, aware of the actual nature of a poorly-functioning school, I am confident that any fair-minded person who truly cares about the kids would decide that anything—ANYTHING—is preferable to allowing that school to drag on despite the fact that it is failing to improve on standardized tests it cannot even get a passing grade on.

Good teachers are key to achieving success.

We don’t have to acknowledge that, I realize.  The easy way out is to say the truth: that parents are neglecting the kids.  They too often send us poorly-behaved, spoiled, foul-mouthed know-it-alls who have an attention span no longer than the space between sit-com commercial breaks–who went to bed at midnight last night and ran out of the house this morning after ingesting a donut and a Coke.  We cannot be expected to reach them.

This is too easy because it leads to nothing constructive.  With a minimum wage of $7 in your nation, you cannot expect parents–who are only adult versions of their uneducated, poorly-nurtured children, after all–to have enough time free of work to parent the kids properly.  Sure, you can appeal to them, but a good teacher must be prepared to teach kids who are poorly nurtured. 

Otherwise, spare us, and just drag your dead-weight to another career.

And once you accept that good teachers are key to achieving success, it is clear that some very, very special people are needed.  A good teacher is not only a true expert in their subject area but good at communicating with inner-city kids and highly intelligent… and emotionally intuitive… and sincere. 

Though many teachers are kind that does not stop them from being dull-witted.   They may be intelligent, but selfish.  They may be friendly, but foolish.  Immensely knowledgeable, but easily exhausted. 

Teachers need to be experts, communicators, intelligent, intuitive, sincere, kind, clever, generous, friendly, and they need an abundance of energy and enthusiasm.  Think about it.  Turn one of these assets to its inverse and you have a fatal flaw in teaching.  Just one.  A stupid teacher is worthless to a school.  A selfish person, a dishonest person, a person who is emotionally needy or frigid.  People with flaws like these are all around us, thriving.  Teaching is one of the only careers where the professional cannot lack in one area.  It just won’t work. 

Say their only problem is they need affection and are not selfless enough to keep from seeking it from students in exchange for, say, homework—or say their only problem is their parents never pulled them away from the TV, so they don’t enjoy reading and writing, which was not a big problem on their way through college and even grad school, because, as my teacher at Lehman recently confided to the class: “This is grad school.  Everybody gets an A.”  (The same teacher who openly brags about falsifying NCLB assessment tests at the high school where she works.)

Good teaching requires you have it all.  Everyone else is a hack, and really none of them should be teachers.  Teachers like to say a few bad students can ruin a class, but a few bad teachers can ruin a school’s generation of kids.  That’s a fact.  The good news is people who are so well roundedly virtuous are often naturally drawn to this low-paying profession.  The bad news is we have no way of weeding out the worst teachers.  Teaching is so complicated an art that assessment is impossible, (though NCLB has panicked teachers into thinking they’re going to soon find a way.)  So we must run a system with hacks.

And this has brought us to a strange place.  An interesting place.  So interesting, that I recently decided to return to the classroom, which is why I’m now pursuing my masters in Education.  I am hopeful that in such an environment of change I can make a difference that I found such a futile pursuit years ago when absolutely nothing was going on in the NYC school system.

A quick missive to those fellow world citizens wanting to help:  I’ve got an uncle who runs a truly selfless organization that has been providing relief to Haiti since I was a kid.  The organization is Medicine for Peace, (Medicineforpeace.org.) They suffered many losses, but they’re still kicking and could use any help you might offer.  I talked to a friend today who is buying a $1200 computer.  “Dude!” I said.  “You could pay half as much and have the exact same happiness.   And then you could send the rest to Haiti.“  He told me he cell-phoned $5.  He’s a good guy–really–but he could do better.  Right? 

Holy cow!  How could we have missed it?? 

Do you know what “cow pus milk” is?  To increase production, dairy farmers drug their cows with growth hormone so that the mama cow breasts swell up and they make more milk.  Here’s a link where you can see the results of this disgusting practice.  

After watching that horrific video, in my family’s lingo, any milk that doesn’t have a growth hormone disclaimer on the label is “cow pus milk.”   It is very easy to avoid it–nowadays they don’t even have it on the shelf at most NYC supermarkets.

A couple weeks ago, I walked into the Starbucks across from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.  As usual, they were out of milk at the little preparation counter.  I asked the woman pulling lattes, and she poured it in my coffee straight from the plastic jug.

GROSS!  It was cow pus milk!  I couldn’t believe it.  With the money they get for their products, you’d think they could afford to pay the few extra pennies for growth-hormone-free dairy products.  Really–the growth hormone-free stuff is not expensive, like organic, but it is literally a few cents more. 

Is this a new approach Starbucks is taking in these economically-strained times?

If so, it tastes like “New Coke” to me.   As the  recent Starbucks instant coffee taste test seemed so well to demonstrate, and as any fool can tell you, it’s not the taste as much as the trust in high quality that makes Starbucks so desireable.

I emailed Starbucks before publishing this entry, but was answered by nothing but cold, white, pus-laden silence. 

Go ahead.  Don’t take my word for it.  The next time you’re in a Starbucks, ask to see the milk jug first.

 Starbucks Milk Is Cow Pus Milk!

Motormanmark—the godless atheist–has returned to school so has neglected his blog, but finds the time to send out this heartfelt Christmas treat:

The 10 Best Christmas Flicks EVER with scenes that are impossible to stay dry-eyed through (lest your heart be fossilized,) in red italics:

10. 3-way tie: Nobody’s Fool (the last great thing Paul Newman did;) Love Actually (romantic pap, but fun, as Hugh Grant always is;)  Noche de Reyes (unless you’re one of ‘em weasels that don’t like subtitles.)

9. A Christmas Story (unless you were born after 1969.)  Behind the tree.

8. Miracle on 34^th Street… the original, of course.   “Stop the car!”

7. The Magnificent Ambersons (Christmassy, but dark.) When she’s acting like she doesn’t care.

6. Tie: Charlie Brown Christmas/March of the Wooden Soldiers (the classic with Laurel and Hardy)

5.  Pocketful of Miracles  I don’t want to give it away, but trust me.

4.  Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original cartoon, of course.) “It came just the same!”

3.  The Homecoming: A Christmas Story  2 words: “Big Chief.”

2.  It’s a Wonderful Life  The ear boxing.

1.  Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim “Can you forgive a pig-headed…”

I stopped maturing in college.  Other guys I know became men: businessmen, administrative men, corporate men, manly sportsy men,…  Their culture is experiencing a bit of a dip in popularity right now, as many, having lost their jobs, are having trouble hanging onto their expensive/employment-defined personas.  They are reverting, as it is, back to adolescence. 

I can handle one of these businessmen, administrative men, corporate men, manly sportsy men head-to-head, but you put two of them together and I really cease to exist.  Unless there’s another like me around.

You put two over-aged adolescents  in the room with, say, a lawyer-man  and an administrator-man, and fireworks can ensue.  It is delightful fun to follow a diatribe on a man’s golf swing with a remembrance of him losing the side tape to his diaper and making a mess all over the couch. 

Or to laugh out loud at the mention of a 401K, and snort, “I didn’t think anyone still talked about them in public!”

To me, sports/video games, contracts, business models, and excessively expensive play are no more civilized adult human conversation than are Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons, and this is because they are, instead, inorganic diversions from real, relevant thought. 

Some over-aged adolescents are  better than me, capable of holding down a square job for a long time (even earning advanced degrees in meaningless blather like business and economics) without feeling the need to reconcile it with their adolescent nature.  These guys make a decent living–accepted by industry as riverbed stones (they have no interest in stepping into the boss’s shoes some day.)  They are better than me, because, not only do they understand the shallow inanity of corporate/administrative endeavor, but they are able to exercise their will on it to their benefit.

There are really no things that the vast majority of men do that don’t come off as knuckle-dragging chimpine affectations to me, and, unlike a riverbed stone, I cannot get myself to cooperate.  Which is why I do not belong.

I endure my brother telling me he views my life through the lens of games theory and that  I refuse to play the game, because I think I am bound to lose.   Though I reject the idiotic lens, I cannot see why a person even stupid enough to use the lens would want to play a game where they are bound to lose–and why opting out would not be the best option by far.

Anyway, who would choose to play a GAME with their life’s fate??

Someone who doesn’t take their life seriously.

Adolescents are very ego-centric.  They take their lives verrry seriously.

See?  Logical.  Circuitously so.

I’m on an October vacation, so here’s an appropriate blog entry.  Picking your ten favorite books is a little like picking the ten most delicious meals you ever ate.  At least for me.  My brain can completely forget a book, even as it continues to be influenced by the experience of reading it.  Remind me of the title, and my mind gushes with recognition.

So, this is my best stab at it today (I tried to put them in order, but could only get the first one as the best:)

1.     A Christmas Carol - my favorite novel!

2.     Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann - Especially if you are recouperating from an illness.

3.     Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane - Neatest work of genius ever accomplished,

4.     Great Gatsby,

5.     Of Mice and Men,
- Wonderful, foundational classics that, if you somehow missed them in high school, you simply must read, pronto,

6.     Slaughterhouse Five (and just about every other Vonnegut book, )

7.     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison,

8.     Autobiography of Malcolm X,

9.     Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - Incredible read,

10.    Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx - I got so carried away that I bought an accordion!

After a short explanation of podcasting, Motormanmark.com offers the ten greatest podcasting sites on Earth.  (This is an update for those of you who read last year’s entry.)

New to podcasting?  Well, a podcast is a sound file you can get off the internet—anything from interviews to reviews to informative shows or lectures.  All you need is an mp3 player. 

An mp3 is a sound file you have on your computer or in a device you carry (like the old Walkmans.)  Music is sold on the internet in mp3 form, but it is also sold in other forms—like mp4, which are designed so that the person selling it can keep you from listening to it for too long or giving it to a friend.  If it is a file with the extension “.mp3,” though, no one but you has control over it.

Your mp3 player doesn’t have to be a $150 I-pod or such.  You can start with a little $10 item  you get off Ebay or at the local drug store.  You may not be able to use certain online music stores if you don’t buy a certain player, but don’t sweat it—there are loads of places to get free mp3’s.  See motormanmark.com’s essay on intellectual property.

Anyhoo – here I am just addressing the spoken word podcasts that are good for playing on your computer while you are puttering about–or on your headphones while you are riding the bus or whatever.  To download an mp3, go to the link below, right click the “mp3” or “download” area on the podcast’s web page, then select “save target as.”   Save the file to your computer or directly to your mp3 player if you have it plugged into your computer.  You can click on some podcasts and save them as “feeds,” so that every time they’re updated, reminders for new shows will be automatically loaded into your Explorer page’s, next to your favorites menu.

I shall now list the top ten BESTEST PODCASTS, from the tenth to the first best, Letterman-style:

#10  An Evening With – This interviewer is not at all critical, but his guests sure are!  and, oh, what great theme music!

#9  From Boston… On Point – This guy is a great interviewer—when you least expect it, he asks a question that cuts through all the crap and leaves no room for pasty-faced escape.  He has a great Friday recap of the week’s news.

#8  New York Times Tech Talk – a fun, concise show for the technology lover (even though they do spend a bit too much time talking about cell phones.)  The host grows on you like ivy.

#7  New Yorker Magazine podcasts – Intelligence matters!  Just like the New Yorker, some of these are a bore for less-than-genius people like moi, but the episodes that hit the mark (most of them) reward handsomely.

#6   Two-Way Tie:  Mainstream v. Underground 

NewsHour – Great daily mainstream news stories, individually downloadable, followed by a fun politics discussion every Friday between Shields & Brooks – two very insightful mainstream pundits.

and…  Democracy Now! – Would you like to know the real news??  The news the mainstream media will not tell you for fear of offending corporate America?  Or would you just like to hear Walter Cronkite channeled by a female?  Dig in and dig it!

#5  The World – World news was never so entertaining!  This is a really special show, even if you are intimidated by international news.

#4  Tim Russert is dead.  Throw them Sunday news shows in the trash heap.  This one comes out two days earlier and is a hell of a lot better: Left, Right and Center!

#3 The Ethicist!  It’s only about 4 minutes a week, but this hyper-witty New York Times column is a hundred times more entertaining as a podcast than in print, thanks to the charming vocal ‘tude of its host, ethicist, Randy Cohen.

#2 On the Media – You’d think a show about the media would be a bore at least sometimes, but this show rocks every week (you’d be surprised how many topics can be fit under “media!”)  Fascinating insight.  Reporters never overlook an angle.

(…would’ve easily hooked the numero uno spot if not for…)

#1 BESTEST PODCAST ON EARTH IS….  Hearing Voices!!! Hands down, the very best podcast on Earth.  Find your way into their archives, and you’ll be mezmerized, an hour a shot!

And BOOM!  That’s it. 

Please leave a comment if you have an objection to any of these sterling choices or maybe to offer a better idea—something maybe Motormanmark has yet to learn the greatness of.

WITH FRANK AND SHIRLEY IN WALNUT, IOWA

                             By Mark Crane

     A grain elevator appeared blue, breaking the shaggy horizon that ran between the black fields and the cloudy night sky.  Over the hood, fat, long-legged flies sparkled in the headlights.  They were hovering, soaking in the hot air that smelled of pigs and chickens–before splashing against the windshield.  I flicked on the wipers and pushed the button for that blue fluid to come out.  In three swipes, the pixie remnants of the last half mile were washed clear.

    Newspapers, maps, and cassette tapes cluttered the wide front seat between Gina and I.  Wrecked styrofoam coffee cups spilled from a McDonald’s bag at Gina’s feet.  All that we owned was either on top of the huge-o ‘79 Ford L.T.D. station wagon or stuffed in the back, filling every last square inch of space that was out of the rear-view miror’s line of sight.  Though Harvey, our fat, orange tomcat, seemed to be having a great time creeping atop the boxes, watching out the tailgate window, Gus, a black cat who’d grown little since we’d adopted him a few years before, maintained a pretty high level of terror, remaining curled beneath the front seat, howling any time the car accelerated or slowed.  A hand-painted sign appeared beside the shoulder: CROSSROADS MOTEL - exit 19, 4 miles.

     We rolled into Walnut, Iowa at 9 p.m.–giving ourselves an early break from our usual dawn-to-midnight schedule.  We’d crossed more than a third of the country in four days.  Though we’d been stopping punctually at the various touristy spots along the way to take pictures and walk the cordoned paths, at Lincoln’s Tomb, the Amish Farm, and Gettysburg Battlefield I hadn’t really gotten the feeling I’d mingled with the yokels.

     Before leaving New York, I’d had a clear impression of the cross-country trip scattered with allusively* meaningful experiences, offered to us like stepping stones at places named, “Wally’s Snake Farm” or “Lost River Caverns.”  But, as far as Gina was concerned, the yokels could take a flying leap.  Hourly, she tabulated our credit card debt, which grew each time the guzzling station wagon went dry.  She worried about the 150 thousand mile, ten-year-old engine, and, with each of its congested groans, clinks, and fizzles, she seemed to become a little more impatient with that part of me that would have been relieved to have never found an end point to our trip. 

          The Crossroads Motel came into view, and I searched the flat landscape for its companion greasy spoon where a disheveled but wise old woman served soggy roast beef sandwiches and long-necked beers, but even Walnut had traded in its musty soul to the pop-up plastic sheen of some chain restaurant.

     Gus was howling after the car slowed and we pulled up the motel driveway.  Gina had an arm draped over the back of the seat, her hand holding Harvey below the window.  As we passed the office, our tail-sagging blue bomber was scrutinized by a sixty-pushing woman, leaned over the counter of the motel’s office, aglow in fluorescent light, squinting at us through large bifocals.  I pulled through the car port quickly and found a spot to park that was out of her view. 

     It was beginning to be routine, this checking-into-motels business.  Like a shopping list, desirable features swarmed in my mind:  price, cable TV, movies, queen-sized beds, air conditioning, telephone, and so on.  But, facing the fact we would not be moving on if dissatisfied, I did not complete the chore of gathering the list into my head.

     I’d believed it to be the speed of the car that made the cloud of flies on the highway seem dense, but now, I stepped out into a swarm.  I ducked and hurried across the parking lot, seeing them gathered under the bowl-shaped lighting fixtures that were spaced along the row of rooms.  They filled the beams in swirling tempests.

     The woman at the front desk stuck her head toward me, away from her body, greeting me with twisted lips and an eyebrow lifted, in a way that made me feel like I was late, like she was being generous with her attention.

     “How much do you charge for a double?” I asked through a smile, raising my voice above Oprah Winfrey’s.  It was nine at night and Oprah Winfrey was blaring away in Walnut, Iowa.

     “Thirty-five,” she answered, and she watched me blankly, unconcerned with which way my decision would go, her eyes straining to resist the temptation of following Oprah’s voice back down to its source below the counter. 

     I filled out the paperwork, and she put a call through to my credit card company.  “Lots of flies,” I said, watching her eyes.  She ducked her artificially waved hair-do over the counter as she hurried to jot down the confirmation number she was being fed over the phone.  The flies were crawling up and down the other side of the glass door and windows.  They roamed aimlessly until their suction cup feet gave out and they dropped like acorns out of the lucency.  Looking around the office, however, I could not find one bug inside.  She put down the receiver and slid my credit card, the receipt, and the room key–room 23–across to me without a response.

     An old guy was sitting in a folding chair beside the open door of room 22 watching us–one of those hundreds of vacationing retirees we’d seen on the highway.  I glanced at him a few times as I pulled the car into the space in front of our door.  He sat up straight, his hands clasped on his spread knees, a big grin on his face.  Though I did not make eye contact at first, the old man called out to me. 

          “Hello, Joe,” he called, as I emerged carrying the litter box.  He dipped his forehead at the back of the car.  “That’s sure a big load you’re hauling.”  I smiled and shook my head that he was right.  I hurried into our room behind Gina who brought the carrier stuffed with the cats. 

     “Where you folks headed?” the old man called as the two of us returned for the overnight bags.  A small battery operated fan was blowing up on him from the motel pavement between his feet.  At his side, a gravy streaked plate and a can of beer rested on one of those folding tray tables.  Through the screen door to his room, I could see two electric fans set at different angles atop the dresser and a woman in the back, dressed in a striped sailor’s shirt and shorts, busy at the sink with some chore.  An extension cord ran under the screen door and up behind the old man’s chair to a crackerbox-sized bugzapper that was fastened by a loose section of hanger wire to a beam supporting the overhang. 

          Zap… zap… zap, zap, zap… zap, zap…. 

          The glittery bugs were falling like snowflakes around him.

     “Seattle, we were thinking,” I told him as I checked the tarp on the car’s roof for tears.  “But, we’re stopping at other cities along the way, trying to find a good place to live.”  Gina nudged me aside and opened the back door.  She burrowed under the boxes and bags and suitcases with both hands at first.  She stopped for a moment, breathing heavily, and then crawled in further, her knee pushing against the window crank.

     “You from New York, then?” he asked, poking his chin at our Statue of Liberty-embossed front license plate.  Gina emerged, gasping, a jar of peanut butter clutched in her hand.  She shoved the jar in one of the two overnight bags and carried both the bags to our room.

     “Yeah, well, I’m originally from Philadelphia, Gina’s from Kansas, but we’ve been living in New York for ten years.”

     “Is that right.”  He took a swig of beer.  His eyes passed from me back to our car.  He studied the details from his perch. 

“Sugar,” he called, and I watched the small woman come striding vigorously.

     “Reg,” Gina called, appearing at the door to our room.  She told me calmly, “There is no air conditioning in this room.” 

     The old man leaned forward in his chair, trying to see her.  “Nope,” he called.  “Isn’t it the damndest thing?  It’s gotta be at least eighty degrees and this place has no air conditioning.”  Gina slammed the door shut. 

     The man took the towel that hung around his neck and wiped it over his neatly trimmed grey head.  He pushed a thumb over his shoulder and from under the towel he rasped, “This is my better half.”  He leaned back and said loudly, without looking at his wife, who was in fact standing just behind him, “Sugar, these folks are from New York City.  They’re moving–not sure where to.”  His attention dropped to his hand’s grasping attempts to locate the beer can.  She smiled, as her eyes grazed over me and our car.  For some reason, I stopped fooling with the cord I had been working on tightening.  I sort of posed there, waiting for her decision.

     “Was that the girl I just heard?” she asked with a smile aimed at me.  Her husband nodded and she walked to our room’s door. 

     I leaned my back against the car and lit a smoke, leaving the initial puff in the still air around my face, wondering whether it repelled the bugs.  The old man pulled a six-pack with four beers on it from a small cooler beneath his seat.  “Come on and have a beer wih me,” he offered, quickly turning away, squinting at the highway.  “Oooo, it’s warm.”  He plucked a can of beer off and held it out to me.  “You’d think there’d be some rain behind it.” 

     “Yeah,” I said.  I walked over and took the beer from him.  To create some small-talk, I ignored the fact they were obviously pensioners, asking, “So what brings you out here?”

     He nodded toward their motor home.  It was a humongous thing that stretched from the curb of the walk out across the parking lot, so far that I’d needed to maneuver the station wagon carefully through the narrow lane of blacktop between its end and the cornfield that bordered the lot.  Though it was parked, some motor still rumbled from within.  Air was blowing out a vent in its side.  “I get tired of that fold-out mattress.  Every now and then, I got to sleep on a real bed.”

     “I’d have a glass of beer, if you was to, girlie,” I heard the old woman say to Gina as the two of them edged by me and passed into the old folks’ room.

     I thought of how happy I was to have had the camper parked between our room and the office–happy we hadn’t needed to worry about the manager spying us sneaking in the cats. 

          I thought of these two–confident in the way they just moved into this place.  I liked the way the guy had just parked himself there on the walkway–the way he had called out to me without worrying how I might judge him.

     His head pivoted as his eyes followed another motor home speeding up the highway.  He looked up at me standing beside him as if he’d forgotten I was there.  After chewing a bit on his lower lip, he decided to stick his hand out to me.  As he squeezed my hand hard, he said, “Frank Gallo.  How dee do?”  He pulled my hand across his ribs, bringing me down to him.  His feathery eyebrows hid his eyes as he leveled his sight on the station wagon.  “I want to hear why you are moving all the ways out here.”

     He did not release me as I spoke, bent over, telling him how we were looking for a place where we could get good jobs and, at the same time, be able to afford to rent a house, so we could maybe start a family.  I could feel against my cheek the damp heat of his face.

     “What’s your line?” he asked.  It took me a moment to decipher the expression and another to realize I did not have an answer.

     “Clerical,” I guessed, though I delivered it confidently to him.

     He let me go, shaking his head.  “No,” he said.  “Look at me.  I worked 43 years, and I’d be financially secure even if I cruised around for another 40.  My line was sales.  I seen single guys who were comfortable on clerical work, but men have always kept families strong with good sales jobs.”

     It wouldn’t matter to me, I thought. 

     “You’re talking about a family,” he told me.  “Boy, that means you need a paycheck coming in no matter what–steady.  When you work pushing papers, you depend on the company.  When you are a salesman, the company depends on you.  YOU call the shots, you know?  When you go to bed at night, you sleep like a baby, ’cause you know when you wake up, you’re still gonna be a salesman.  They can’t take it away from you.”

     I pictured myself sleeping with a smile on my face in a large, sturdy house full of children.  A salesman.  They humiliate themselves and don’t seem to care.  They must be getting something out of it. 

          I remembered the time Gina’s cousin came to visit–a waterbed salesman.  He smoked pot the entire time he was with us.  I wouldn’t have a hard time competing with that guy, I thought.

     “And with babies, don’t kid yourself, expenses come up outta nowhere.  But when you’re a salesman, when you need extra money, you just gotta go out and work extra hard.”

     Christmas time.  I could see myself returning home at the end of an extra long day.  My arms are full of gift-wrapped presents.  A Labrador retriever greets me at the door.  Gina asks me to get the fireplace going.  Little Janie at the punchbowl, dropping in cut fruits.

     “Next thing you know, your mortgage is paid up.  You take the kids to the playground, you watch ‘em get over stage fright in the school play….  You walk with your family to church and find it hard to keep your shirt buttoned, your chest is heaving so much with pride.

  “Before you know it,” he said, pulling out his wallet, showing me a photo of him standing in a parking lot of cars at the base of a huge fiberglass sign that read, “Frank Gallo Chevrolet.”  “…you got your own business.” 

          Frank cocked his head in thought, his hands gripping the straps of his tanktop and his craggy elbows sticking out in the air.

     I could see how I hadn’t really been looking at my life strategically.  I could see how lame my usual approach to life was.  It was like I’d written myself off as a victim, and I was trying to figure out the best ways to avoid failure.  I did not have enough confidence in a field to call it my “line” and make it such an important part of my life.  Frank had done so, though.  He’d concentrated all his efforts, and received what appeared to be a big pay-off.  I could see Gina and I leaving a list by the phone for the babysitter.  “We’ll be home by eleven,” I tell her as we head out to some cocktail party.  There’s a dog waiting at the door.  I think, tonight, after the whole family is asleep, I’ll take him down the street without a leash.  I’ll be sipping on a brandy, listening to the breeze pass through the trees.

     “You’ve got to meet the tide,” Frank said, gasping a little, as though he’d said it a million times before.

     “Huh?”

     “You can’t wait for it to come to you.”

     I thought back on that high school summer I sold T.V. Guide over the phone.

          “Sales is a pain in the neck, though.  You got to admit,” I said, planning on going on to tell him how salesmen often don’t succeed and how you have to constantly kiss people’s asses. 

     But, he responded, “–Of course it’s a pain.  I always said it was like getting a lawyer’s pay for being a garbage man.  But that’s life.  When you have kids, you don’t care about how hard your work is.  You just care about being able to provide for your family.  And eventually, it all pays off.  Look at me.”  He stuck his cigar between his teeth and leaned back, his arms spread apart.  “Does this look like work?”

     I could work, I thought.  I had never had a shortage of willpower.  I watched his eyes turn cross.  He stood and walked to the side of the camper, where he crouched for a moment.  The old man unlocked the camper’s door and, without a word to me, stepped in.

     The flies were hovering around my face and I stepped to his seat.  I sat down beneath the bugzapper and thought how the guy had made his life work so well.  It seemed so easy to me, right then.  I felt like I’d just come out of a jungle.  “Sure,” I thought.  “Put me in any city tomorrow.  I’ll have a job by the end of the day.” 

     When he returned, he had a curtain rod in his hand.  He bent over, poking the rod under his camper, muttering about a leak.  “How old are you, Frank?” I called. 

     He nearly wrung his own neck the way his face shot around so fast.  He leapt up, twirling once around in the air and landing with the soles of his shoes clapping rhythmically on the asphalt.  “Seventy-six!” he answered, pulling himself upright with just one slight heaving up of his barrel chest.

     He wanted to know what I’d said under my breath.  “What?  What?” he called.

     “I said, ‘Wow!’  I can’t believe it.  You look no older than sixty.”  He sauntered over to me, a little strain showing as he came closer. 

     He poked me with the curtain rod, as he whispered, “People ask how we go on so long.  It’s all in the head.  You got to be strong upstairs–determined.”

     Frank told me about his children.  Three of them were keeping Frank Gallo Chevrolet going.  The fourth was living in Utah, selling burritos to supermarket chains. 

     Gina eventually emerged with her new pal, Shirley. Shirley was offering her one of their fans.  “Nooo, I think it’s getting cooler now,” Gina said with slightly slurred speech, the way she’d get after having a drink on an empty stomach.  We wished them goodnight and they nodded to us.  Before we were in our door, they were involved in some controversy over whether or not one or the other had plugged in the mobile phone recharger. 

          “Good, sociable people,” I thought.  Just the type of experience I’d needed.

     Our room was simple, and skimpy compared to others we’d stayed at, but cleaner.  Though there were no framed prints on the walls, neither were there any strange stains.  The TV had only three channels, but it was one of those with the radio built in, which I always liked for the mornings when I’d be able to tune in some local flavor.  While I waited for Gina to come to bed, I rifled the nightstand and the bureaus for one of those motel handbooks.  I settled for a map of downtown Omaha in the front section of the phone book.

          The cats were busy exploring the underside of the bed, or perhaps they were frightened by Frank and Shirley’s continued banter that sounded clear, as though the couple was sitting at the table in our room.

     “Remind me to stop in Des Moines and have someone clean out the radiator, Okay?” Frank asked Shirley.

     “Where’s my book?  Did you see my book?” she responded.

     “We could overheat.  Do you know that?  Remind me.”

     “All right, but where’s my book?”

     Gina stretched out on her back, pulling the sheet over her body.  “If we can hear them so clearly,” I whispered.  “They can probably hear us just as well.”  Gina nodded slowly.  Their conversation stopped and I did not whisper anything else to Gina, for fear they’d hear and think we were saying something about them.

     I fell asleep that night, thinking of how surprised Gina would be by the new me.  She’d tell our friends, “And I remember the first day we got to Seattle, Reggie found a job.  The very first day.  He worked like crazy our first year here, and, before you know it, we were able to start a family.”  I’d been listening to her, but I’d been watching the kids romping with the golden retriever in the yard behind our house–a rolling lawn that ended beside a creek.

     The creek turned to a line as I lay there.  The line ran down the center of a highway.  Frank and Shirley were ahead, plowing the way.  I was driving the blue bomber, my foot pressing the accelerator carefully, so as to stay just behind the motor home, because I’d heard you could save gas by driving in the vacuum that followed such behemoths.  Frugal urges, those creations of my more conscious mind, softened as the night progressed into a lack of desire.  I felt how I’d felt as a boy in Pennsylvania, sitting on the front porch, making circles in the dark with the glowing tip of a punk.  I woke cold and pulled the sheet up over a numb shoulder.

     By morning, the flies had been exterminated, perhaps until noon, by the cool air’s lack of moisture.  I woke, repressing my hunger for breakfast with an urge to get going. Without confusion, I washed my face and, as Gina showered, packed.

     Frank and Shirley had not yet left.  When I went out to check the oil and coolant, I found Shirley, sitting in Frank’s folding chair, beside the door to their camper.  He was crouched beside her, again poking the curtain rod at some hidden problem.

     “G’mornin’, neighbor,” he called, as I stepped around between the camper and the station wagon.  He stood up straight.  “Isn’t it a nice one?”  I squinted at the white sky and agreed.  There wasn’t much to say after that and our gaze fell down on the station wagon.

     “Doesn’t that need a little air?” Shirley asked, pointing at our front tire.

     Frank agreed, “I think she’s right, kiddo.  You could use a little air in that one.  How ’bout those springs?  They holding out back there with all that weight?”

     “No,” I told him, as my fingers played, pulling the wipers across our dewy windshield.  “They were shot when we first left the city.”

    “That’s okay,” Frank hurried to say.  “A little bumpy of a ride never hurt anyone.”

     “You two about ready to get on the road?” Shirley called to Gina, who’d appeared in our doorway.

     Gina carried a bag to the car, answering with her first smile of the day, “Just about.”

     “You might better stop in a car wash and vacuum out the radiator,” Frank told me.  He’d found his way around to the front of our car.  I walked over and bent beside him.  Our grille was jammed with bugs–big ugly bugs with long, fat, tan bodies.  Like puzzle pieces, they fit between the squiggly radiator fins.

     “Where you headed?” Shirley asked.

     “Well, we were thinking we’d head up through South Dakota.  I want to visit Hot Springs.  They’ve got a pit of mastedons there they’re excavating.”  She waited.  I added, “And Little Big Horn and Mt. Rushmore are just a stone’s throw away.”

     “Sure,” Frank said, taking a step closer to me, smiling with perfect dentures but godaweful breath.  “That’s swell.  How’re you going?”

     “I think we get 29 in Omaha to route 90,” I said.  I made a start for the front door on an instinct to get the map.  For some reason, I had begun to feel like they were planning on following us.

     Gina came back out, this time carrying the litter box.  “Well,” Frank said, exchanging glances with Shirley.  “We hope you kids all the best.”  He brought his hand around, and, when I moved to shake it, I found a twenty dollar bill slapped into my hand.  I slid my hand out quickly, leaving the money in Frank’s hand.  I immediately regretted it, in a way, because Frank turned red and seemed to feel so stupid.  It was one of those moments that did not work right.

     “We want the two of you to have breakfast on us,” Frank protested.

     I guess I should have just considered myself lucky, grabbed the money, thanked Frank and Shirley, and, with as few parting words as possible, parted.  Instead, I said something stupid like, “No, no, no…  we’re riding on plastic this trip!”

          I have worried since then over whether or not I thanked him for the offer–I can’t remember if I actually said, “Thanks.”  All I can remember is him coming towards me, the twenty still in his hand, with that beet red color in his face and neck, and me, backing up, awkwardly changing the subject, asking, “Frank, what’s the problem under here?”–bending over where he had been poking the curtain rod. 

          We spent a while discussing a cracked hose, which I ended up working on for a half hour–removing the hose, recutting it, and getting the clamps back on it.  I emerged, sweaty and grimey.  Frank and Shirley thanked me, complimenting my mechanical skills. 

          Gina and I were late, though, and we got ourselves into our car. We pulled out, waving to them. 

          I can still see Frank, as he looked in the rear-view mirror, watching us go.  He looked a little bitter.  I turned my eyes ahead, thinking how Frank’s inspirations had not lasted the night with me, which was somehow proof to me that I should not chase them down and try to revive them.  I reached over the seat and flicked open the door of the cat carrier, and then probably started to worry again about the abilities of our ‘79 Ford L.T.D. station wagon. 

          Vrooooom….

I wrote this somewhere around 1990.

There are a large number of US citizens, traditionally referred to as “Middle Americans,” who are engaged in small, private industry-jobs that have an uncertain future and that live and die on the prospects of a marketplace that is unhindered by taxes and government regulation. Even if they live in a rental unit, they live in communities dominated by the concerns of low-income home owners-people who do not know how to get along with more than $500 a month spent on housing costs-to whom the yearly property tax bill is a very big deal. They can’t spend too much breath decrying the expense of the local school system, or the roads, or the courts and emergency services-each of which provides them an obvious benefit. So what do they get mad at?? “Government.” Whatever that means.

Of course, they hate paying federal tax, too. And, as so many of these people have a poor interest in enriching their minds (beyond major leagues, NASCAR, tee vee drama, and so on…,) it is easy for them to imagine evil machinations that are conspiring to victimize them.

These people know they do not belong to the intellectual side of the debate, because they are not interested in truth. They are interested in winning a war against the other side. This is survival to them, not reasoned debate.

It must be understood: they have been losing for 40 years now, when they gave in their first concession by sending their homemakers into the workforce.  Since then, their doom has been further artificially delayed by deficit spending and tax cuts and personal debt.  It is the natural course of the system.  It’s not just them–the entire world is going broke.

The other side of the US political divide is a comfortable, clever culture of US citizens who are right. They have always been right, from McCarthyism to civil rights to Vietnam, from Watergate to the economy to Iraq. And you cannot argue abortion against one of these-I’ll call them “Liberal Americans” (kind of rhymes with Middle Americans)–unless you are prepared to take a very unreasonable stance (ie: holding up bloody posters of fetuses with huge type screeching: “ABORTION IS MURDER!”)

Their people are the cool people on the sitcoms, the television dramas. Their people know how to be funny, write interesting books, and their rich people are the very richest-so rich, they forgot how to be greedy (now, that’s rich!)

Their middle-incomers work for large industries and belong to unions. The urban poor belong to the Liberal Americans whether they like it or not, just as the rural poor are serfs to the Middle Americans, (as rural America is dominated culturally, politically, and economically by Middle Americans.)

The Liberal Americans have been losing money hand-under-fist, too, but not as much as Middle America (…I’ll get to that.)

After every election, there is a reassertion of dominance in this country. When Middle America wins, they run around like monkeys and try to unscrew all the jar caps and rummage through the sideboards for valuable trinkets. When Liberal America wins, they sit back like the dominant, silverback gorilla, resting on their laurels, trying to show by better behavior that they belong where they are-trying to validate their place with their high virtue so that they may never lose it again–while all the little gangs of Middle American chimps scamper around the bushes organizing groups for cheap-shot sneak attacks.

What about the unifying forces of God or Country, you ask?

Middle Americans would just as soon live in the USSR as they would in a USA dominated by liberals. And any reasonable assessment of their fiscal philosophy from Ronald Reagan on (deficit spending and borrowing,) would demonstrate clearly they favor their own frivolous enjoyments over their country’s or their children’s future.

And they do not even believe in God. It is an identity to be a God believer. They do believe they believe in God, but there is nothing about them that objectifiably demonstrates they believe in God, rather than that they are just playing a role. When they are sick, they may pray, but they find their way to the hospital. Though they may pray for good things to come, you won’t see them put any money on the results of prayer.

They believe in sports. That they’ll put money on.

And they don’t act more morally than, say, an atheist. Maybe they care, but there is nothing in their warmongering and capital-punishing actions that show they really do believe in the “sanctity of human life.” They may talk a lot of religious garbage against gay people and in favor of marital fidelity and against abortion, but there are just as many gays among them, just as many infidelities, and just as many abortions, as in other communities. They yap against pornography, but their highways are aswim in porno palaces and strip clubs. They thieve and cheat and shoot each other just like the rest of us. Here, in godless New York City, where I live, we have a very low per capita crime rate compared to absolutely anywhere you might choose for comparison in the Bible Belt. 

If Middle Americans really believed there was a god going to take a vengeance on them some day, do you really think they’d still act the way they do?? Abso-tutely not.

God-believing is a role. We Liberal Americans don’t see it, because we believe all people need to balance their identity with their rationality. Middle Americans do not do that. It is culturally impure to them for a person to question what he identifies with. They don’t ask themselves, “Do I really believe in God,” any more than we ask ourselves, “Instead of walking to the john, why shouldn’t I go take my next dump in the parking lot?”

What happened when the president used “empathy,” one of the most central personality characteristics of Middle America’s professed god, Jesus Christ, when he proposed the characteristic he most sought in a new Supreme Court justice?? They responded like rabid dogs.

Have you ever seen a people to whom moral suasion holds less sway? It has so little effect on the reasoning of Middle Americans that we don’t even try it any more. When was the last time you heard a Democratic leader reason that we should have health care to take care of our fellow citizens who have none? Nooooo. It’s to save money. That’s why we need it. So Middle Americans can have more MONEY.

Why shouldn’t we torture people, President Obama?? Is it because it is unloving and cruel?? Noooo. You’ll never even hear the word “cruel” pass his lips. We don’t torture because if we do that, they will lose respect for us and organize more gangs of evil against us and then Middle America will be less safe.

Middle America does not fear God.

I’ll tell you what Middle America fears. Middle Americans are rightly scared of losing control over the government’s benefaction to private industry. Private industry is suffering right now and is on a steep downward decline (as is the world economy, regardless of the media’s recession recovery hype.) The Liberal American base is an integrated interdependent system that supports major industries, union jobs, and the urban poor alike. The cities must function in order for major industries to function. Rural industries and communities can suffer and no one will ever know or care, but them.

Middle America is yearning to extend a dying lifestyle, and there is nothing we can do to show it compassion, but encourage exodus to the cities. A lifestyle where a guy drives a hundred miles to work every day, by himself, in an SUV is not sustainable. Even if his wife works, too. It is just too wasteful. And then they have some kids and they grow up and expect to do the same. In a world where babies starve and billions pray for a drink of clean water, they expect to afford a college with a health club and football team and apartment-style dorm living. Then, soon after graduation, they expect to gather the resources to build a house made of a hundred thousand dollars worth of materials-each individual component having in its production its own dire effect on the environment-and then drive all over the place in their air-conditioned gas-guzzler shopping for mall junk to fill up the house on their weekend respite from jobs that are a hundred miles away.

It is not sustainable. How clearly can I say this? Capitalism requires growth! Capitalism requires GROWTH! Remember Bill Clinton’s mantra?? “Growth, growth, growth!” In a capitalist system, without growth, you wither and die. The Earth is a closed system. It cannot sustain growth. Eventually everything is owned and exploited and growth must end.

When you get to the end, you must hope (and pray, if you are one of those people who identifies as a God-believer,) that there is still enough time and resources available to make it possible for you to convert to a society based on harmony rather than growth, something you probably will not be able to do without first controlling world population and waiting for a huge number of people to die off.

The ascension of the Middle American lifestyle has gone, and it ain’t coming back.

You can only feel so much compassion for people who are deaf to moral suasion and who are so anti-intellectual that they are always wrong.

Just as we were their little Dr. Scholl’s inserts for the last eight years, I say let us wipe our feet on them. In the crapper with cooperation. This is a war they will not stop until we are all dead, and the time has come that we assert our dominance, now that the cities have grown to overpower Middle America in national politics. To hell with all this middle-road pap about incrementalism-giving the health care industry the great booming profits of increased member rolls, and then waiting for the next time to make them honest.

If we are going to subsidize these industries so as to have a national employment program, instead, let’s let all these Middle Americans lose their jobs-as HMO clerks and drug company administrative assistants-first, and then hire them to construct cooperative self-supportive living communities.

To hell with paying people to junk their cars by subsidizing their purchase of new cars.  Instead, pop a heavy tax on gasoline and use the money to revamp mass transit. Enough bending over backwards to support wasteful, self-defeating Middle American lifestyles.  Pay for their bus fare one-way to any major city. 

And as for health care, damn incrementalism. If they will not give us national health insurance, let ‘em swing for another four years of health care price hikes and let another however many millions of ‘em lose their mortgages to medical costs and let ‘em spend another four years paying through the nose for hospital emergency room care of people who are too poor to afford a doctor’s office to visit. If we don’t have the votes for national health care, we need more votes. Maybe by next election there’ll be enough squalor in Connecticut that they’ll finally vote out that Lieberman creep. I’d say with all their financial crises, Florida is a sure bet to tip blue, as are half of the states still left with Republican and wishy-washy Democrat senators. They need to suffer first.

Actually, on that point, I may be very wrong. It may be a poor assumption that just because a state suffers financially it will turn left. Do US politics provide what people want or what the political institutions are willing to offer? All these Democrats and not enough votes for national health care. It’s disgusting.

In today’s Times, Maureen Dowd worries about internet slander and the ability of people to hurt one another with anonymous speech.

Seems to me there is a point at which an insult becomes detached from its victim. It’s the difference between saying somebody is a convicted felon and that they smell like fish. One of those statements is a lie, and the other is an insult. One of them can be damaging, and the other can only be damaging if the person hearing it (unless they’re an imbecile,) already feels the way you want them to feel about the victim. So, to just address the prior, I think the internet is pretty well understood to be a zone where you’ve got to question the voracity and intentions of all involved. Slander–even if it is truly slander–is weak here. Not much to worry about.

Dowd, whose very livelihood is being threatened as we speak by the internet (a point a columnist-reader should always keep in mind,) brings in a very inappropriate reference to Lori Drew’s taunting a little girl to the point where the child committed suicide  to strengthen her case for government control of the internet. The vulnerability of children is a whole different can of worms than the vulnerability of Times columnists. As I asserted in my blog on Drew’s conviction, there should be a law inspired by this case, a federal felony against menacing a minor or encouraging a minor to act against his/her own interests–regardless of the internet.

But why won’t we ever see it? Because the US media empire is nothing but a rabid dog at the door of the innocence of every child in this country, panting at the PG-13 door to expose them to prurience and violence and insipid claptrap. Its sacred devil is censorship, though everything we see and hear is censored by what is the most compelling, the most impulsively assured of hooking one into consumer behavior. If we, instead, censored for what is the most educational, informative, thought-provoking, inspiring, and enlightening, yeah, we’d have less media consumption, but, don’t you see, that’s just FINE.  Maybe we’d start learning how to be social again.  The quality of media consumption should be worth our effort.

And we’d be raising kids who are much better protected, intelligent, and ready to handle all the garbage we’ve stacked up for them to deal with.

Gov. Paterson is blind, and that matters.  That’s the unspeakable truth that is missing from the media accounts of the governor’s recent meltdown while being interviewed about his dismal poll ratings.  The governor, who has served well up until now, as state senator and vice gov, threw down the racial card and said the media was inflicting a racial bias against him.  He tried to lump in Gov. Patrick of Massachusetts and the president with himself, but, sorry governor, that just ain’t the way it is.  The truth is, people were probably doubtful, like me, from the start, that a blind man could handle such a job.  We gave him a chance, got a little misty-eyed at his inaugural—wanted very badly to believe it could be true—that the seemingly impossible could be…  But, think about it.  You can’t see.  You cannot SEE.  And you are leading New York State.

Sorry.  I have always admired David Paterson.  His father was a saint.  But, it’s true: people in this country do always (except, I’d say for our fine prez) rise to the level at which they are incompetent.  Vice Gov was Paterson’s peak.   Attorney General was Spitzer’s.

A blind man can do amazing things if driven.  But look at the state of the state legislature.  It’s a filthy mess.  And what does Paterson do??  He appoints a vice governor, which any fool can see is directly against the state constitution. 

(The media, which, according to Paterson, is so racist, doesn’t say a word about how ridiculous the move is.  They just respectfully wait for the courts to articulate it.  Which is really a very rotten way to run a society.  Why can’t such things be spoken???)

The fact of the (unspeakable) matter is a blind guy is handicapped enough that he does not have the ability to input information quickly and efficiently  enough to be the governor of NY.  Is that so awful?

If you think I’m full of it, you really need to think more about what a governor must do.  Just for example: He must memorize loads of info, and be able to use it.  If he’s busy memorizing speeches (because he is totally incapable of using a teleprompter—Paterson doesn’t even read Braille) when can he do this?  He can’t even read the newspaper–he has somebody read the to him.  And do you mean to say eye contact doesn’t mean anything significant to a New York politician’s prowess?  The state Senate is like a shark pit.  (Aloft in an ocean of slime.)

This, like so much in the papers today, to me, is like the emperor who wore no clothes.   Everybody is talking, but no one is talking what is obvious.

Why are his poll numbers poor with Blacks?  I’ll tell you why.  Because he is a rotten governor, and they can see it, and it is obvious to Blacks, too, that a blind guy cannot run NY state.

It is taboo to say blindness is a handicapping disability.  So, let’s all chase down the race angle.  Uh, no governor, actually I agree we are NOT a post-racial society, but, please stop dragging that red herring all over the place and take a good (metaphorical) look in the mirror.

–notice: this was not written by Motormanmark, but by a substitute, anonymous poster. (Whew!)

–notice: this was not written by Motormanmark, but by a substitute, anonymous poster. (Whew!)

I am thinking of my beautiful son and daughter this morning, the two I no longer see. 

I spent eight years fighting the courts that granted my former wife a custody order, and in doing so took me from my kids. 

Until custody is decided by a court, each parent has what is called “natural custody,” a term most judges and lawyers don’t like to hear since it isn’t the result of any legal decision.  After the court makes its own custody decree–what often is a judge’s fairly to completely subjective reorganization of the family–the resulting legal relationship is all very cut and dried.  Anyone not in that court order has no legal right to parent that child.  (And all the judges and lawyers can breathe freely.)

In a New York State divorce court, if you leave the marital residence first, a legally savvy and vengeful spouse can cut you out of your kids’ lives (egged-on by the prospects of a generous monthly support payment for the next 20 or so years,) by claiming simply that the two of you don’t get along.  In that case, the court must rule against shared custody.  It doesn’t matter if your spouse drove you out of the home with threats of physical violence or even if the court ordered you out because it wanted to spare the children acrimony–even if it’s not you who is producing the acrimony.  As long as she’s still living in the original marital residence and is not a drug addict or something the court will give her sole custody of the kids. 

I opted for the feminine pronoun because, as a former Court Clerk for New York State Family Court I have observed (just as transpired in my own case) that in cases where the residence of the kids is disputed, judges give a “temporary” order of custody to the mother that has the effect of creating a legal residence for the kids away from Dad.  If not based on gender, this bias is based on something just as disconnected from legal rationality–I’d suppose something best expressed as the softer nature of the female flesh. 

This system-wide barrier to shared custody is the law in about half the states in this country, the other half each having legal precedent or even a joint custody amendment to their state constitution that says one spouse must prove there is something wrong with the other for the courts to refuse to split parenting time.  It isn’t exactly a coin toss whether or not your kids get to keep both parents–the states that respect a child’s right to shared custody are almost always less densely-populated, where the influence of feminist lobbies like the National Organization for Women are too thinly organized to sway policy significantly.

With an order allowing overnight “visits” every other weekend, and one off-week dinner, I may seem overly emotional, I know, when I say they took me from my kids, but don’t go with that.  That impression only feels like common sense, thanks to the stereotypes: the abusive man, the child support-shirker; the ex-husband who is eager to accept conflict as a passionate substitute for the lost love; and, of course, as a sure-fire last resort, the morose, clinging father whose devotion to his children is nothing less than mawkish.  Or else, I may seem emotional because my reaction is not typical, since, in this New York City where I am living men still gladly give their life’s focus to their careers, and most men welcome being removed from their kids lives, being freed to chase their financial dreams all the more.

Among the mores of the current society, the thought is taboo and an insult to many normal and happily functioning people, but still, it’s true: visitation is only a peek at parenting.  I cannot steer my children in any meaningful way; I can just remind them of the role I am supposed to be playing–let their heads get some snapshots of a person they admire.  I can’t make sure they get their homework done; I can’t get to know their friends; I have to be constantly–and awkwardly–catching up on the details of their changing lives.

I will allow myself the selfish indulgence to say visitation has been a continual source of pain for me.  The briefness of the time we spend together is a reminder of the injustice, and in its context I believe my children have seen me as victim.  I don’t think they ever had a good sense that the order was rather against their own interests.  They were so young when the first visitation order was put into effect that it is all they can remember.  They switched from one home to the other seamlessly, more pleased to switch to our home because they saw it less–it was more of a novelty.  Even though visitation allowed them to see little of their new younger siblings, a boy and a girl of my marriage to the stepmother they “visited” with for as long as they could remember, they were uncritical and content to remain subjects of their condition.  And of course they did—they were busy growing up.

In court I argued for a very simple week-on, week-off arrangement under which every Friday after school they’d be picked up by the other parent to go to the other home, an option the court would not consider, because the mother—the “custodial” parent–opposed it.

The only wild card in custody cases that can overturn legal precedent is the wishes of the children themselves–and they must be older kids for even that to carry much weight.  The kids said they wanted it, they had known I wanted it and that their mother did not want it.  It was easy for their mother to urge them not to “get in the middle,” and hard for me to let them know that’s where they have always been without shaping their opinions.

During the most recent trial, a two-year Family Court custody trial, the judge conferenced with the kids, but, uncoached by me, though they did not oppose my proposal, they did not advocate strongly for it, which would have been the only hope for a significant change–and even at that, a very slim hope.  The judge never ruled against me–though she made it clear on the record she would–but left the case without disposition.  It wasn’t that she was negligent with her paperwork–she was simply keeping the courts free of my threatened appeal, an attack on the court’s refusal to hear the Constitutional issue of whether a child’s right to a father and a father’s right to parent are unalienable.

Not that she ever feared I have a case.  She was just keeping me out of the courts.  Regardless of the US Constitution, the appeal would be hopeless.  Unless a judge has flagrantly disregarded vital legal stricture, poorly-funded appeals in non-criminal matters, however virtuous, do not ripple the surface of the state legal tide.

So, when the new school year approached the September before last, exhausted of legal options, I came to face an alternative I had avoided since first being relegated to visitor by the courts six years before: to stop visiting my kids. 

At 11 and 13, they were older.  They were old enough to advocate for their own interests.  My thought was that if I was unwilling to be a visitor rather than father, my children might compel themselves to face-off with their mother. 

And they might not.

I told my kids at the end of our two-week summer visitation that there was no more I could do.  I would not pick them up again until their mother agreed to share custody.  I told them they and I would not be visitors in one another’s lives.  I told them that I had exhausted any legal options and that only they might hope to correct the problem.  I explained everything as thoroughly as I could to them, and they had little to say in return but that they believed they could sway their mother–as if it would not be a problem.  After they left, I realized my son had packed his schoolbag with some of his most special possessions.

There are no good alternatives, only bad and worse.  I believe the bad option is my refusing to cooperate any more with the worse, a legal mutilation of our relationship.

That was a very long time coming, and I’d been actively controlling the situation by putting it off.  The children were always too young to deal with their mother themselves; had I never cooperated with the court orders, the kids would have simply forgotten me, so I had to accept visitation through their more formative and vulnerable years so they would have a choice in the matter some day.  We did the best we could during that time, me working a midnight shift and shamelessly abusing the sick leave policy on my job to spend as many full days as possible with these two who have always been at the center of my life.

I have heard little from them since, once meeting my daughter accidentally on the street, and once, my son dialed me by accidentally pressing the wrong button on his cellphone.   Though I have encouraged them to contact me any time, I don’t contact them myself, for fear they come to view such limited contact as our proper relationship.  It is important to me they understand I have been removed. 

It is a dear loss to me that I feel all the time.  I have denied myself the pleasure of enjoying the contact I could have with the children I have given so much to, because I am certain it would not be best for them to have sporadic contact with a father who is unessential, who can be borne out by, at the most, a mere 2-days’ penance.  I do not want me or the family they share with me to be a novelty in their lives.  I will not do it.  And so I cannot reach out to them, as I will not have this framed as though it is an injustice to me.  They have to see it as an injustice to them.

It has been two years, and they are living happily and comfortably in a wealthy suburb in a 3-income household (their mother’s, stepfather’s, and my $850-a-month child support.)  They know all my thoughts, and exactly why I have decided not to visit or contact.  They know more than anything that I love them and miss them dearly.  I was never able to raise them the way I’d wanted, but that time is over.  They are at a time in their lives when children do not do a lot of thinking about their parents.  I don’t think they need me in their lives, the effect of the visitation order over the years having been to make me unessential.

It is an interesting brain twister: you remove a man from a child’s life, one day of a month.  The next month, two days.  And so on.  At which point is he no longer essential? At which point is he no longer a father? 

Still, by refusing visitation altogether, somehow I feel like I’ve preserved my fatherhood.

A very common response I’ve gotten from strangers online is that I am being emotionally “selfish,” poutingly taking my ball and going home after losing in Family Court.  There is a certain ego inherent in this.  Fatherhood is something that ceases to exist once you let someone else define it for you.

As I do every day, I am thinking of my kids, the two I no longer see, making sure there’s nothing I missed, some detail I may have overlooked. 

Mark Crane     Motormanmark.com

Please indulge me for a few moments:

The US is entitled to all of the resources it can score.  The US is entitled to live wastefully, by dint of its hard work.  The US can shut out its neighbors, walling their millenniums-old migration away by virtue of exclusive nationalism.  The purity of goodness in our nation entitles each of us to practice a nationalistic identity over one that is universal.  The US is entitled to enjoy itself mindlessly while children starve in foreign lands, as long as it salves its conscience from time to time by reaching down into its pockets, past the wallet for to spare some loose change, because, after all, what can really be done??  Besides, it is not our fault that we are first in line at the world’s trough.  The US is entitled to practice autonomy from the rest of Earth’s citizens.  By dint of its extreme virtue, it can unilaterally bomb foreign civilian populations, (like those in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan,) as it sees proper, slaughtering people with machines by the thousands.  And it can ordain other nations, (like Israel,) with any of these same rights.

All the world is interdependent.  All economic booms are either expensive (they expend/waste) or inflated (full of nothing, borrowing from the future.)  In a closed system (Earth,) there are no gains to be made, but the existential gain of harmony, towards which we are not advancing.

These Sunday morning dingalings—the David Brooks’s, the Cokie Roberts’, the George Snuffleupagus’s—whose function it is to present us US citizens the menu choices we have politically are like those images you can only see if you cross your eyes.  They are not real.  Their world is not real.  It is all an invention that, elementally, fails the loving ideal.

Not that they lead.  They follow along helplessly as we all do.  Their job is to paint mythological word pictures to make it all seem sensible.  Like the first primate to discover a tree moved not because the wind was blowing, but because there was some Great Person up in the sky who decided to make it move.

Sunday morning magical  thinking.

The president, called for a national dialogue on race, which, as my faithful readers know, I faithfully answered.  Now, at his news conference, he seemed to think the arrest of Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was a case of racial profiling, and used the word “stupidity” to describe the mindset of arresting officers.  I believe it is now a time for a national dialogue on cops, and here, I offer the opening volley, as frankly as possible: 

Having been both the victim of false arrest and, as a former probation officer and court clerk, as having been a law enforcement officer, I can contribute the following two bits, which you can take straight to the bank.

Police officers are accultured very much like teammates on a rabid rugby team, but that the goal, rather than to win the championship, is to arrest criminals with the least vulnerabity shown. The vast majority of people who aren’t overly-aggressive in a dysfuctional way will not ever apply for this job, let alone make it through training. Cruel people make great modern cops.

It’s no secret. Any good cop will tell you this.

But, Professor Gates needs not worry about patrolmen, unlike his racial brothers who are arrested in hordes all over our country, all day long, every day of the year (don’t take my word–just go take a seat at your local criminal court and observe the tide that never ebbs while the mostly-White law enforcement professionals pass their days earning good money off the industry.)

Unlike them, Gates was important enough to be arrested by a Sergeant.

Sergeants are less aggressive, less cruel, and less stupid than most cops. That’s why they get to wear white shirts.

So, Gates probably told somebody off. Maybe he yelled a bit, right? (The police report claims he berated cops, following them out of the house, ignoring warnings…) A man on his own property should have the right to tell off a cop. If the cop doesn’t like it, he should vamoose. He wasn’t invited, his name’s not on the deed, he’s not welcome. If he doesn’t like the founder of the feast, in the words of the late, great (and simultaneously godaweful,) MJ, just beat it.

But Stormtrooper cops come along with a badge of pride made out of tissue paper. Any street bum will tell you the first thing you must do with them is submit. In a land where sophisticated weapons designed for the mass slaughter of human beings are sold like salt water taffy, if you are a cop, you look on any failure to show complete submission as being capable of turning your switch off should you be so “stupid” to let your guard down.

Click.

Dummy.

You can’t expect cops to be Conan the Barbarian one moment, and then, the next, to put up with a more-intelligent, pip-squeak, famous professor telling them off with words they do not know.

So, you see, as in all my blogs, the US world-conquerin’, gas-guzzlin’, gun-lovin’ populace is to blame.

But, hold the boat. Did I just sidestep the racial issue??

It’s a red herring. Not that I am insensitive to the issue. If Gates was pulled over for failing to signal a turn or running a yellow light here in the Bronx, we could assume profiling was the issue. Black men are subjected to inappropriate suspicion by cops ALL THE TIME, but, well, let’s define our terms first:

The issue of profiling nowadays has less to do with institutional racism or purposeful racism and mainly to do with the failure of inner-city cops who spend their shifts in conflict with Black men to exercise the sophistication necessary to avoid falling into a routine behavior of assuming non-uniformed Blacks to be criminal. Having the same experience as White officers, Black officers profile Blacks, too.

So, is this media circus based on a case that has anything to do with racial profiling? It seems to be more the case of the media, only capable of dealing in simple spoon food, avoiding tackling the real, much more complex issues (because US citizens do not like reading long, complicated news articles where more-intelligent people tell them things they do not know.)

The famous professor was breaking into his home, as a neighbor reported seeing 2 men breaking in, so a cop can’t be blamed for his suspicion. Once Gates identified himself, (which he at first supposedly refused to do,) profiling cannot occur. Profiling has to do with assuming something that is wrong. Gates wasn’t busted for burglary, but DisCon. He wasn’t improperly suspected–he lost his keys and busted in.

Maybe there was racism, but no one–including the president–has heard such allegations.

To a reasonable person, it sounds like the famous Professor Gates acted angry (maybe justifiably, but, in any case, certainly within his rights–there’s no law against being even unreasonably angry in your own home,) and was arrested for not allowing the cops to walk away with their self-respect (remember, cops often lose their self-respect if you merely curl your eyebrow.)

Right?

They humiliated him because they didn’t like his attitude, something that cops do without blinking, all over this Land of Freedom all the time.

You could find more racial injustice by picking one criminal court case at random than by buttering this rich, famous guy’s media event with sympathy.

But, nobody’d buy your newspaper. Who wants to read about Jimmy Butler–who never got to call a sergeant–who was arrested because he was an a street where cops were sweeping up people after a drug bust?

“Why? Because I’m a Black man in America?” –What Cambridge, Massachussets cops got from Professor Gates the first time they asked for his ID.

“Yes, sir, officer. Should I reach in my pocket now for it?”–What we say in the Bronx.

Would you rather have friendly cops like they have in Ireland?

Good–so would I. Now all we have to do is outlaw guns, flush all this stupid violence from our Hollywood culture, make parenting classes mandatory and hold parents legally responsible for their children’s misdeeds, annnd… Oh, yeah, fire all the cops and hire sociology grads to take their place as Gardas.

Be a good lad, and fill me up another.

JUNGLE FEVER AT MONTEFIORE MEDICAL CENTER

        by Some Prior Incarnation of Mark Crane

Having always regarded myself as one rugged outdoorsman, I derided my wife for insisting I take our 1 and 3-year old kids to a campground rather than just stalking out into the woods somewhere and pitching a tent.  It wasn’t long, though, before Internet searching revealed to me most parks around NYC actually forbid “primitive camping,” as they call it. 

Weenies. 

I ended up settling for a fishermen’s campground just outside New Paltz that offered, “No pizzazz… just peace, quiet and beauty unlimited.”  And, after packing up my two kids, our gear, and, after stopping for bacon, hot dogs, and marshmallows, I set off on a journey, sight-unseen, to the “haven,” as its internet ad claimed, oblivious to the fact that it would be the petri dish from which would blossom the worst health-related crisis of my life. 

The place was run by a grandmotherly-type of old lady who made it plain using merely her eyebrows how she disapproved of such young children being cared for only by a man.  She would hear none of my requests for a more remote spot and gave me a site in the center of her strip of woodland, converted from an abandoned coal mining operation by a lawnmower and a few advertising signs.  The flyer she gave me scolded, “Children may not enter mine shafts.”  Read: leaf-covered, unmarked holes in the ground. 

And it was there, surrounded by plush carpets of poison ivy, beneath a crystalline sky certainly ruled that night by Scorpios that I was bitten on the ankle by a mosquito.  Jungle fever.

Three days later, I complained to friends at work that I’d only had two beers the night before and did not deserve such a hangover.  The next afternoon, Thursday, I was pouring perfectly good bottles of stout down the kitchen sink. 

Friday, noon: Showtime. 

The headache was unbearable.  My job is so simple.  I just sit in a seat and type short bits of information between long paragraphs of legal mumbo-jumbo to create petitions for people who are seeking a child support-related ruling from Bronx Family Court.  But I couldn’t bear to go on.  I was sitting there, sweating like a beer ball, eyeing my petitioner–a corrections officer, built like a pro linebacker.  But he wasn’t going to sign the form just yet.  He was gonna read the whole thing.  His fingers stroked his lips as he studied the dense text. 

Just sign it. 

I mean the guy’d probably submitted at least three or four petitions identical to this one in the past.  

Somehow, he eventually did sign the form and I was able to scuttle him out of the seat.  I mentioned to my boss I was out sick and I hurried up to the sign-out book.  Then, down the fire stairs I flew, somehow sensing I should hurry.  But, as I fell against the push bar and the outside door swung open, my eyeballs were rammed back into my head.  They call it “photophobia,” an abnormal sensitivity to light.  Spinning there, on the sidewalk, pawing at my eyes as only Bela Lugosi could do, I oriented myself through my fingers, and hobbled on towards the subway.

I never wanted to go to the doctor.  I waited as long as possible, until 7 that night when my brain had become seismic, the silt raised by the eruption being cold nausea. 

Since my HMO is HIP, I called the “HIP-Help” line first.  “Is it the woist headache ya effer had in your life?” the first medical expert along my journey inquired. 

“Uh, yes.”

“It says here, if it the woist ya effer had in you life, you should call 911.”  Well, I could forgive that.  Of course, the “HIP-Help” line probably gets a hundred calls like mine a day, out of which one is probably from a person about to drop dead, so, I figured, they were just insuring themselves against liability.  I found out their Yonkers office was still open, and, grinding my teeth against the pain and queasiness, I drove the few miles north.

Lucky me.  There were only two other people in the waiting room.  Medical expert #2 saw me without much of a wait.  She saw, but she did not touch.  She stood there a few paces away, her hands in her pockets. 

“Is it the worst headache you ever had in your life?” she asked.  She gave me a referral and sent me to Montefiore Hospital.

I arrived at the hospital in terrible shape.  The headache was so severe that I was unable to stand up and telephone my wife from the waiting room as I had promised, though I had a quarter in my grasp and the phone was just over my head. 

The intake lady at Montefiore was kind to me.  She said I was “hot to the touch” when I failed to measure a fever and she marked my form “urgent” and set me down in a plastic chair among people who were just about to be admitted. 

From 10:15 to 12:30, I waited in the worst agony, swimming in pain, going in and out of awareness, watching, one-by-one, all those people go their “urgent” ways but I played the wallflower.  Finally, when my name was called, after a glaring once-over by the supervisor there I was sent back to the general waiting area, informed bluntly, as an explanation, that they’d “lost track” of me.

I waited on until 1:30 a.m., the sickness having taken pity on me, leaving me be enough that I felt up to returning home and was able to float some hope that the whole sickness had blown over.

5:30 a.m. I was back in the emergency room, the sickness worse than ever.  I had to wait only about an hour this time, huddled over in pain, chilled to the bone.  Regardless of the chills, they had me suit up in one of those thin hospital gowns that barely make it across your chest and leave your back and butt exposed to the air.  I ignored the bloodstains on mine since it seemed as though they’d been through the laundry a few times since. 

Doctors poked and prodded and told me I probably had viral meningitis.  You get a virus, for some unknown reason it goes to your head instead of your chest, and it infects the overlapping dermal tissues that encase your brain, causing pain and distortion.  Since I’d already figured this out with my wife and a 15-year-old family medical guide we have, and since my head was torturing me, I just rolled my eyes and urged them to hurry.  Finally, after way too much futzing around–almost as an afterthought–they shot me up with a painkiller, Demerol.  This they should have done at 10:15 the night before, because, after a 5-minute period of intense nausea, the Demerol pulled my brain out from beneath the pylons providing me the relief I’d been seeking–the only real relief I needed medically it would turn out. 

Ah, but hospitals don’t run so simply.

Just as I was getting all fuzzy from the Demerol, the doctor handed me a clipboard and showed me a spot where to sign.  I never got a copy of that mystery form, but I do remember seeing a line on it allowing them to sell any “products” they were to remove from my body in the course of my care.  I remember wanting to cross that part out just before I signed it.

Next step?  Lumbar puncture.  Yeah, that’s what they call a spinal tap so the patient doesn’t get all panicky.  The spinal tap was not to cure the viral meningitis–there is no cure for that.  They just allow it to run its course.  No, the spinal tap is so they can be medically certain before they let you out of the hospital that you’re not one of the rare cases of bacterial meningitis that fool them. 

So, I took my lumbar puncture like a man, helped by the smooth craftsmanship of the doctor who performed the procedure, and then they sent me up to my own “isolated” room. 

By this time, I had described my symptoms in detail to different hospital personnel perhaps eight times (counting the two separate intake workers.)  Each time, they noted that I was suffering from chills but they never brought a blanket or turned down the AC in their refrigerated work areas.  My room’s window air conditioning unit had the control knob removed, just as had been the case at the hospital my mother died at in Philadelphia.  Seeing that missing knob brought back the frustrations I’d felt trying to make Mom comfortable. 

And it didn’t stop there.  Immediately, medical students started visiting me.  My mother hadn’t been able to get a moment’s rest during the few months prior to her death for all the medical students who would come by.  And they’d never say, “Uh, excuse me, but may I examine you for the next hour or so for the sole purpose of furthering my experience in the medical field?”  No.  They’d always act like they were working on her case.

At Montefiore, I was lead to believe that every person who passed by my door was in charge of my case, though I suspect no one was.  At first, three “doctors” came in.  The only one that didn’t look like she needed her nose wiped was the “floor doctor,” I guess in charge of all the patients on the floor.  She didn’t stay very long and she just gave a short speech about my condition that I believe mainly served to educate the other two “doctors.”  The next “doctor” was an Italian guy who couldn’t have been a year over 21.  As soon as the floor doctor left, he stepped up and informed me he was my own “personal doctor,” wincing over his shoulder at the older woman’s failure to include the detail.  He then introduced an Indian co-ed as a “doctor” who would be “monitoring” my case. 

If I hadn’t graduated college more than 10 years before, I think I would have been in love.  She immediately started feeling my stomach until she found my liver.  She told me it was fatty and slightly enlarged.  I will say no more about that session, but to say I was more than pleased for her to practice on me for the duration of my stay.

The only person who made any real decisions about my case was the emergency room doctor, who seemed truly capable but like a shadow, vanished.

Any questions I had had to be asked of these floor doctors who didn’t seem to have the slightest clue about viral meningitis.  What caused the illness?  How long does it last?  How contagious is it?  How do the symptoms differ from the bacterial sort?  Why am I still in the hospital?  Why do I have a bag of sugar water hooked up to my arm when I am perfectly capable of drinking fluids?  Not that they didn’t answer the questions.  They’d just answer in the vaguest terms, leaving every possible door open in case they were wrong. 

I suspect the reason there was no clear person in charge was because they don’t want to pay such a highly knowledgeable doctor to chat with people.  They just stick him in the emergency room and have him run like a gerbil.  Or maybe they don’t want there to be a person who you can press any issues with.  It’s particularly hard to complain when no one is in charge.

For the first several hours in my room I went in and out of deep waves of severe pain and nausea, though I was somewhat medicated for both.  At about 6 p.m., I felt the first raw, unmedicated knife in my head and it took more than 20 minutes for them to come with the pain reliever (they’d switched me to Perkaset??, which might as well’ve been M&M’s because I did not feel it even after the thirty minutes or so it requires to take affect.) 

During this period, I was spending a great deal of energy trying to get the staff to make me warm.  But my pleas for them to turn off my AC unit (no knob,) were ignored, and no one ever returned with the blanket they were nonetheless happy to promise me. 

Eventually, an intern told me in a sympathetic way how the linen cart was empty, so it really was impossible for anyone to help me.  “That’s okay,” I responded understandingly.  “I’m just gonna put my clothes on.  They’re in a bag under my bed.” 

In an instant, the guy was back with another one of those shrouds they put on you, promising me two of them would make me plenty warm.

By the time 7:30 p.m. rolled around, I’d been in the hospital for more than 12 continuous hours (though, of course, on all their paperwork they gave themselves the credit of caring for me since 10:30 the night before–before I went home due to their lack of interest in helping me.) 

Just about that time, I was coming out of the 6 p.m. bout of unendurable brain pain.  Panting as the pain backed off, I sat up in bed and looked around the room.  A TV over my head did not work. I tried to get out of bed, but fell back limply.  Ah, they hadn’t told me about this symptom–you get all weak and feeble.  My head was spinning as it occurred to me: I hadn’t had a damned morsel of food since… I couldn’t remember when. 

Should I buzz the nurse?  Oh, I buzzed her so much when I was complaining about chills and the lack of pain relief.  She might start to resent me…. 

I buzzed her, and, when she told me it was too late for me to get dinner,  I just asked for some menus so I could order something to eat from a local restaurant.  She said she would, but she never brought the menus.  I buzzed her in another 20 minutes, after a pep talk with myself, urging myself that to eat was a basic human right.  This time she came, holding out one Chinese food menu to me. 

Now, if she had been at my job, I would have brought her a selection of the many we all choose from when we order out.  “That’s it?” I said, depressed at the idea of trying to digest something salty and greasy at such a tender moment. 

The nurse sarcastically replied, “Well, I guess you want me to bring ALL the menus?!” 

I’m no pushover.  I told her, look.  I’ve been in this hospital for more than 12 hours and nowhere at no time did any person offer me food or a menu or anything more than a bag of sugar water hanging from a hook. 

“No?  Well, you need to ASK for it.  Did you ask someone?”  I explained I was barely conscious for most the time when I was here and in severe pain.  But isn’t food part of their plan to make me well, I wondered.  Or do they prefer me weak and incapable of showing self-reliance? 

She left my room, promising to bring me a sandwich, but she did not return. 

It wasn’t until 10:30 that night, when my wife, who had been on the phone with me, called the nurse and threatened to call the Board of Health, that the nurse came in with my sandwich–some rubber strips of turkey between Wonder bread and a side order of Jell-O as a bonus.  I told the nurse I needed breakfast, too, and I should fill out a menu or something so there are no screw-ups in the morning.  She assured me I had nothing to worry about.  I told her I’ve been waiting for my nausea medication for over 4 hours, but no one’s ever brought it.  She answered she’d look into it and left me to chew up the tasteless sandwich.  At first bite, the next wave of jungle fever commenced. 

She called me on the intercom to tell me she wouldn’t be able to bring me the nausea medication, since there wasn’t any at the nurse’s station.  I answered she needn’t worry about the nausea medication any more, I just got sick.  In a panic, she responded I should wait to eat another bite, promising she’d bring me the medication pronto, which she did.

Sorry, but I’m going to need to switch tenses now:

1 a.m.   I’ve somehow eaten the entire sandwich (in a fierce effort to spoil their plan to starve me.)  I’ve been in and out of consciousness and feel half-dead.  But I am aware something is different in my dark room.  I gaze up to find the nurse there, standing over me, her eyes closed, she is pitching from heel to toe, her hands held out stiffly near my IV of antibiotics (which they are administering in case I have bacterial, rather than viral meningitis, though they all know for a fact I have viral meningitis.) 

She wakes, finishes whatever she was doing then pads out the door.  I look down and see I am bleeding into the IV line, there being more than 2-feet of blood already in the line.  I get up, pinch the line where the blood meets the antibiotics, and ring for the nurse. 

When the nurse comes, she blames me, as I am starting to see is her style.  “When you get up to go to the bathroom,” she says.  “Don’t hold the IV pole with that hand.”  She’s lamely trying to say I was bleeding into the line because I raised the arm above the IV bag, thereby causing a backflow.  This not only being impossible on top of it being pure hogwash, I make little effort to put her in her place. 

I just say, “I was laying in bed,” in a salty tone and wait for her to fix whatever she did and leave.  All I can figure, looking back on it, is that she must have dropped the bag on the floor or spilled some of the fluid when she was hooking it up. 

7 a.m.   “My” doctor visits.  I implore him to make sure I’m served breakfast.  I explain to him the lack of food does not make it easier for me to endure the periods of pain.  His eyebrows soar and he says, “I indicated on your chart you were to have food.”  I don’t answer immediately, a little amazed that they don’t assume you need food.  I then tell him please just make sure they bring it.  “Well, that’s not my job, that’s the nurse.”  I tell him the nurse doesn’t think it’s her job either–that she’d explained the food service worker should have noticed my room was occupied. 

He tells me he’ll look into it.

9 a.m.  The nurse brings in a platter with a coffee, an orange juice, a bowl of disgusting gruel, and a fancy cover over the main entree.  After she leaves, I lift the lid and find one piece of French toast, cut in half and stacked atop itself.  I grab the top half and bite it.  It tastes like cleaning fluid.  I buzz the nurse.  “I am going out for breakfast.  You have brought me a meal meant for an old lady dying of cancer.” 

“Well, what do you want, then?” the nurse answers over the intercom and eventually I order some more food through her.  But, I know this will continue through lunch and dinner.  I know I’ll never be able to relax and focus on getting well.  I will leave.

A little later, some older Indian doctor from HIP comes and tells me I’ll be out in one more day.  I tell him I want to leave now.  Just then, some young Indian guy comes into the room, ignoring me, saying to the HIP guy how he’s brought his “team” with him.  Sure enough, eight or nine med schoolers–most of them Indian (I don’t have the slightest idea why so many of them are from India–even the hospital priest is Indian)–come following him in the door, all gawking at me, studious looks on their faces, notebooks at the ready.  He introduces himself as a “specialist in infectious disease,” but he has no more of a clue as to what caused my illness than any other of the countless “doctors” I have seen.

The HIP guy says I can leave, though the infectious disease guy objects.  I get up and start packing, but I have to conceal the fact that I’m falling over and the room is spinning around.  My butt is sticking out, which is humiliating with all these people around (not that there’s anything wrong with my butt,) but I somehow manage to keep up my composure long enough to get these people to give up their plans for a free medical sideshow. 

As they walk out, I think about my poor mom and how they made her endure all those visits and how they kept her room cold and fed her crap and how they came into her room every three hours around the clock to take her blood pressure and temperature regardless of whether or not she was sleeping.

I wonder how a person less capable than myself would have served their time at Montefiore.  Maybe they just would have assumed they were being fed through the IV. 

Maybe they would have stayed cold without a blanket and caught some kind of secondary infection as a result.  Maybe they would have stayed on a few days longer than I had and been the subject of so much more poking and prodding and questioning by “teams” of med students. 

Now I’m spending a week in a New York State Park rental cabin on Lake Taghkanic, getting bitten by all sorts of bugs, but swiftly improving in health and vigor. 

I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and drinking beer and eating pretzels after the kids are in bed (For the abuse to my liver, I send my sincerest apologies out to you–you know who you are.) 

It was a devil’s triangle: the HIP-Montefiore-jungle fever axis? I sailed into.  The winds of fate blew me there; I had no choice.  But I leave my lessons for all you potential patients–stay home!  Don’t go to the hospital.  Ignore your wife!  Stay home!  It will blow over!  For God’s sake–stay home!

From the Fort Wayne Dispatch, 12/23/1971:

Contributor offers this remembrance from when he was home in Wisconsin on his first leave from Army Training at Fort Jessup, Louisiana, Christmas, 1934:

Opache, Wisconsin, where my father opened his first dry goods store. It was home, then, even though you know I was raised in Seattle.

I was sitting there beside the Christmas tree.  Mother was pleased with me and we were talking some when in comes a gang of young men none of which I as much as knew by name.  Some were employed by Daddy, that’s all I knew.  To my surprise, they burst in and said they were there to get me out.  They said who’d I think the sheriff had cornered up at the dead end on Milkstone Road near Pluggs Creek, but Machine Gun Kelly, himself, and they were there to get me since I was an officer of the US Army.  And they shoved a loaded shotgun right in my hands there in the living room.

I was a very young man, still–so young as to be trying very hard to act the part of a man, so I said nothing but shoved right out the door, first in line.

There were about five Tin Lizzies—they called them that because before the auto so many horses were named “Elizabeth”—five waiting outside and everybody hopped right on–me on the buckboard of one of them, and next thing we’re all flying up this dirty road—like they all were in those days, just dirt blowing everywhere and if there wasn’t a full moon you wouldn’t have seen two feet ahead, car lights or no car lights.

All the autos go slow when we get about a quarter mile from the road, and then they pull over.  We all come together, and the lead guy there, a big, ox of a man ran the county road crew—what was in those days a peach of a job to get.  He whispers.  Strange out there with the crickets singing in the dark woods and you hear all these other men around you only rustling, not even daring to breathe loud, and then this big guy whispers to the group, so to tell the truth I didn’t even hear his instructions—I just followed what the others did. 

There were seventeen men there that night, counting myself.  Every one of them had a rifle or a shotgun.  

Well, we fanned out, climbed up over this little hill, and there I could see under some trees in the darkness the gleam of some big shiny sedan.  We all looked at each other, then started creeping through the high grass.

I positioned myself behind a big rock with this other fellow, John Mertram was his name. And I got my gun as quietly as I could up there along my arm, resting on the rock.  I remember like it just happened, me peering down the barrel, wondering what kind of ammunition I had in there, lining up the little ridge with the notch, taking aim at the driver’s doorway, which was wide open, but everything else was so dark that’s all I knew.

The wind was blowing and that’s all you heard.  I really didn’t expect to have to shoot.  I figured we had him surrounded so he’d give up and we’d all be in the papers having captured this deadly bandit.  I would help put this no-place town on the map.

Then, through the quiet, I hear, clear as a bell, like he’s right there in front of me—which he was—his voice—just his voice–a low tone but loud enough to make all the crickets shut up:

“I’m going to kill all you–” and he used a cuss there I won’t use now, but he called us something very bad.

He gave us maybe five heartbeats to try to puzzle over just how he knew we were there, and then, how he had it planned he was going to go about fighting us all at once….

Next thing I knew it was like somebody threw a load of dynamite in the furnace.  Blam!  Blam!  Blam!  Blam!  Blam!  Blam!  It never stopped.  I never even had a thought about pulling my trigger because all the rocks around me were exploding and didn’t stop exploding.  I didn’t lift my gun in defense of my new pals because it was all I could do just to keep from having my head blown off. 

Like it was a memory—not like I was hearing it—but, like I only heard it after it was over, I heard the sound of that big black car plowing right up the road, passing right by the sheriff’s car and on up and over the hill.

That was the last Opache, Wisconsin ever saw of Machine Gun Kelly. 

I still have several pieces of lead in a cup at home, pulled from my shoulder.  I got my picture in the paper under the caption: THE ONE MAN WHO LIVED WHEN OPACHE SHERIFF TRIED TO CAPTURE MACHINE GUN KELLY.

And you still can’t find Opache on a map. 

All through history, people have been living off things they stole from others.  From the “great” Egyptian and Roman civilizations, that featured people living in splendor off the backs of slave labor, to the British Empire, that went around the world with its Navy and its weapons, subjugating and enslaving vulnerable indigenous people and looting their lands of all available resources, to our own country, which, was, of course, built off slave labor (the White House was built by slaves,) and which has used immigrant and foreign labor in much the same way–in the most successful, bountiful societies, people have always stolen the source of their comfort.

The interesting thing about the United States is how close we are to slavery and how far we see ourselves from it.  It doesn’t involve Blacks mostly, any more.  Today, our slaves live in densely-populated foreign countries, so we do not have to see them or their suffering.  But, the in-person slavery of Blacks can be seen clearly as a component of the current credit crisis.

“Jim Crow” is a term used loosely nowadays to mean the period after slavery where US Blacks still lived in subjugation.  The federal government did not protect their voting rights, their rights to employment or housing or their property or commercial rights.  During the period immediately following the Civil War known as Reconstruction, political attempts were made to give Blacks political parity with Whites.  They elected representatives by majority vote, and, when they won, Whites rioted and forcibly drove Blacks out of crucial areas, committing acts of arson and mass murder all through the South.  When the Supreme Court was faced with the issue of whether the feds had the right to prosecute in cases where the states neglected to protect its citizens, it ruled (in United States v. Cruikshank,) the feds did not.  As a result, violence against Blacks was legally re-institutionalized in the South, the KKK became a fixture as respected as Disney, and Blacks were guaranteed another hundred years of servitude.  So, Jim Crow, seen clearly, is just an extension of slavery, a crime that has never been made up for—as the land stolen from Reconstruction-era Blacks was never returned, and cannot legally be recovered (due to the statute of limitations,) just as Blacks cannot legally recover the fruits of their ancestors’ labors.

Jim Crow was a lot more serious than most think.  It wasn’t sleeping in buses and drinking from a pipe rather than a water fountain.  It was institutionalized subjugation, as real as Roman slavery.

But our American Dreaming never seems to end, so after the Sixties social revolution, after the feds took up their responsibility to protect the rights of Blacks (and women and, to a lesser extent, immigrants,) in the workplace and marketplace, what was to be done to make up for that new shift of balance between the financial benefits of subjugation and the comfortable lifestyle we were so used to??

Here I must go off on a little tangent:  To a US citizen, there is a kind of cultural fantasy world of expectations.  We expect to some day live in a house on a plot of ground.  Many expect the plot of ground to be covered with green grass (thinking it looks nice, I suppose.)  There are people who are ridiculously driven towards this materialistic dream, like a guy I know in upstate New York who lives in a roomy house beside a lake.  He has a large lawn all around it, and he burns gallons of gasoline driving around the land, keeping the bright green grass freshly trimmed.  Though he commutes 125 miles a day (each way) to work, he spends enough time at home to  work around the grounds like a full-time landscaper.  He doesn’t play golf on it, roll around on it, or do anything else useful with it, for that matter.    It is his house, his lawn, his pride.  When he dies, someone else will buy it. 

When I was a kid, the nuns at school painted the Soviets as people who menacingly wanted to force us all to live in houses that looked exactly the same.  Which is pretty much what we were already, in terms of the wanting-to-live-in-houses part, and, nowadays, you take a ride around suburbia and get a look at some of those residential developments, and they’re pretty much just what my little eighth-grade mind was picturing.  

US culture expresses materialistic excess in many other forms, like buying big, stupid cars, clothes, and toys, driving everywhere, all the time, polluting the air like it is some kind of fourth disposal dimension that has no effect on us, and, generally, just having fun.

So, in order to continue this excess with less slaves around, what were we to do??  Coinciding quite well with the effects of the first toothy civil right’s legislation, Ronald Reagan ushered in a new way of thieving: borrowing from our children.

Over the next 25 years, US debt would shoot straight up to the stratosphere, to 11 trillion bucks, when it had never been more than one trillion.  

We would honor other people’s rights to buy a house and car (just like us,) shop in the malls, and send their kids to college, yes, but it would not come out of our taxes.  No, we’d just make credit easy—make the money out of borrowed value.  Our children would pay for it.  You might see this in a positive light, that we are so positive-thinking here in the USA that we believe for a certainty that our children will find ways to spin gold (though that wouldn’t solve the problem—now, if they could spin food or oxygen, that would be something to work with.)

I’m not saying that the recent end of Black slavery in the US has left us in this trouble, though.  There are so many other contributing factors, as slave labor around the world is more expensive, and worldwide commodities are becoming more scarce.  But, the legacy of Black slavery is a factor people here in the US just never see.

It is important to see so that we realize that our Dream is not and never was real.  For the immigrants in the Early 20^th Century that saw the Dream realized, it was really off the suffering and theft of others’ labors.  When we corrected the problem domestically, our success was still heavily in debt to people living in poverty elsewhere in the world, working to create our wealth.  Then, when this all ran thin, like a heroin addict, we took out credit cards in our children’s names, using their social security cards, and, like there was no tomorrow, fed our insatiable thirst for consumption.

To imagine a world free of slavery will be to dream of harmony and cooperation, not success and progress.  Just as my desires are at the heart of my need to subjugate others, so my ability to be selfless is at the heart of my ability to live in harmony.

There were never the resources available to fund the Hummers, the large houses, or even the White middle-class standards of a generation ago.  We have never lived with the thought in mind that if we, individually, live excessively, one of two things (or both) must result: 

1.    We will consequently require another person to live at a loss, or,

2.    We will expend a resource, which is one small step towards the certain eventual consequence of our closed-system of a planet becoming uninhabitable.

We need a new Dream, one that encompasses everyone.

When President Obama was sworn in, we invited several friends to watch with us at our apartment.

At one point, they played the Star Spangled Banner on the TV, and one of us stood to attention right there in the middle of the living room, her hand on her heart.

It took me by surprise.  I’d forgotten people do that.  I think Archie Bunker used to do that.  My dad, who was a veteran, did it, too.  People do it at pro sports games.  Oh, yeah, and we did it in school all those years ago. 

I now remember a basketball game at the Garden in the 1980’s when I didn’t stand and people started throwing things at me.  I can’t remember why I didn’t stand.  

Arthur Miller used to tell a story where he, as a boy, nudged in to take a look at a man who had been killed on the street.  His grandfather pulled him away by the collar, sternly instructing, “Stay away from crowds.”

Now, I had an instant to decide: Do I leap to my feet, letting my friend remind me of my allegiance to a country I could now be especially proud of, now with the election of my political saviour?

Certainly, the Ethicist would have me stand, if not for love of country, then for support of my guest.

I did not.

And I wonder why I feel anxiety over it.  I do in my heart reject patriotism as the “last refuge of a scoundrel” and “the hatred of every country but your own” and all that, and I do believe we should all spontaneously declare ourselves world citizens and work together to demolish the national boundaries that perpetrate war and poverty and starvation and pollution on our planet.

Then again, I do love my country, as I do all the abstract conceptions of my society beyond the people I actually interact with.  I love my world, of course, my city…, I love my continent.

North America rocks!

Before the Obama speech, I would have thought my instinct not to stand for the song had to do with not wanting to live in a society where people had to do something like that.  If you don’t, people get to throw things at you.  That’s surely not “…the la-and of the freeeeeeee!”

That theory could be tested.  If no one could see me—if, at the Garden, I had been sitting in the rear row and so felt no pressure to stand, would I?  No.  But then, if no one could see anyone, who would stand?  The whole point is to stand so that everyone can see you and you can see everyone else standing.  It’s not about standing.  It’s about everyone observing everyone standing.  It is about agreeing to be unified. 

And the pressure to conform is inherent.

To stand is to make a statement only you know the meaning of, and to stand is just as much to make others feel you support their statements.

I think it’s safe to say I do not support what many are saying when they are standing for the national anthem.  

In my Media, PA hometown, patriotism was a big deal.  Every July 4th we’d have a town-wide celebration that was extravagant– a large parade with fire companies from all over.  Kids’d decorate their bikes.  Later in the day, the fire companies would compete to put out car fires they’d set behind the court house, and then there’d be fireworks in the park.  It was a blast. 

I loved my family first.   Then, I came to love my town.  And Batman.  As I grew up and became more aware of my country and church, I learned to truly love them, too.   That was a simpler time, though, when things were so easy to understand.  As we grow up, we must make the intellectual effort to continue to grow and leave behind the security of having things easy to understand.  To neglect that development as so many do is cowardly.

In the sixth grade, perhaps for the first time becoming aware of my world, I refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.  The teacher sent me to the principal, and I told him I was mad at our country for the way it was killing all those people in Vietnam.  He was a nice guy.  He sent me back without a reprimand.

Even though I hopefully believe our country stands for something particularly good, now, patriotism is an exercise as devoid of meaning as saying “Bless you,” when someone sneezes.  I practice it, to a point, fondly, sentimentally.

I do not love my country any more than I love my world or my state or my city.  I love my country, but that doesn’t mean anything.  It doesn’t mean my country is always or even usually right or more worthy of existing than the rest of the countries of the world.

If I try to search for meaning on Independence Day, I find it in a Memorial Day or Veterans Day-type honor of the sacrifices made by the soldiers who have died or fought or currently fight for my sake, which is a worthy subject for reflection on any day of the year, but not the real purpose of July 4th. 

The 4^th is celebrated in a way that boasts of the country’s “glory.”

To tell ourselves there is something glorious or even ideal about our nation is like dressing a chimp for dinner.  The results of human schemes have rarely been glorious.

Our country’s merits are relative, depending on who you are.  Many people have lived amazingly bountiful lives as a result of the USA, (a narcissistic goal, beyond a point.)  But to a child right now starving to death in the Central African Republic, the USA ain’t squat–and to the living parent of an Iraqi, Vietnamese, or Lebanese youngster who will, in the words of Neil Young, “never grow up, never go to school, never fall in love, never learn to be cool…,” thanks to a US cluster bomb, the USA is evil incarnate.  It isn’t hard to understand that.

We may be, at best, arguably better than other nations that have achieved our same level of human rights.  Maybe we even led the world to some good things.  As a remembrance of the better parts of our history, July 4th, then, has a place.

…Although, you could argue it is more productive to practice a remembrance of one’s mistakes, rather than one’s successes so as not to repeat them (just as, for example, our Iraq misadventure correlated so closely to the idiocy we practiced in Vietnam for lack of a halfway-decent national historical awareness.)  Not that anyone would want to be frying hot dogs while reflecting on the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, child labor, jim crow and lynchings, the 4 million civilians slaughtered in the Vietnam War…. 

On Independence Day, our citizens practice the superstitious religious exercise of identifying good away from evil.  We see this clearly when lapel pins become an election issue and people throw stadium trash at Motormanmark, the anthem loafer.  The Buddhist concept of opposites coexisting tells us that, in creating a national identity worthy of idolatry, we are just as well creating some opposite identity, just as unrealistic.

The very worst that humans have dreamt up politically, from Nazism to Stalinism, has been organically human, not infected with evil, but rather fear, laziness, and stupidity.

So, it is only right, I may argue, that we celebrate our country’s bravery, hard work, and intellectual industry—not to boast or to brag, but to inspire our children to look for those best qualities as they learn what it means to be a good citizen of their country and of their world.

Happy Independence Day, USA! 

Michael Jackson was iconic, yes, but not because of his success.  Not because of his pop sensibility.  MJ was iconic because he acted out the Black tragedy, USA.  He was a Black kid who went beyond all that Negro gratitudinal success—the kind of success that had Hattie McDaniels weeping at the Oscars—the kind that had Sammy Davis Jr licking Richard Dicking Nixon’s hand.  Michael Jackson did it all.  He was able to be how we felt—and even more: just who we wanted to be.  He wasn’t Black.  He was everyone.  As if.  As if a Black kid could be everyone and still be a Black kid.  But not that his change of skin color, et al, was not as much an act as it was an impulse.

I just heard cool Quincy Jones sentimentalized about his “little brother.”  What the hell’d he ever do for Michael Jackson other than use MJ to build his own reputation??  Quincy Jones wasn’t spit before Thriller.   If he gave a whit about MJ, he would’ve said, way back in 1980: “What the hell’re you doing to your skin???”

If Oprah had a touch of true Christian charity, when MJ told her in the interview he had vitiligo and that’s why he’s coloring his skin, she would’ve said, “ Well then why aren’t you painting the White spots Black rather than the Black spots White?!”  She didn’t get into it.  If you remember that famous interview, she just let it all slide.  She should NOT have.  She should have slammed him with it.

Don’t even let me start talking about Dianna Ross.

For nearly thirty years now he has been twisting, the hanged man, a public spectacle, a fool, alone. 

He was never real.  He was a show, put on by a rotten crumb of a father who didn’t give a d*mn for any one of his kids, really.  …Who, to give Joe Jackson the benefit of the doubt, was probably screwed up too much by the rotten, racist US society he was born into, so much that he couldn’t hope to be a loving dad. 

But there was sexual deviancy in Michael, too.  Not just the emblematic self-loathing Negro.  But a man who despised innocence so much that he just had to ruin it.  Joe Jackson.

A child molester hates his victim so much because he hates his own weakness as a child when he, too, was victimized.

Michael Jackson was hateful, and now he is dead.

Joe Jackson still lives.

Joe Jackson lives in the phoniness of every slick show that, in its pretense to glory, avoids the opportunity to live the danger of the real, the insecure existence of the honest, the self-effacing sincere. 

Let’s be honest about Michael Jackson: There was never anything glorious about MJ;  There was nothing about his success that transcended the frame of ever-cheap pop culture.

And those very problems are ours, and there’s how he’s an icon.

On the occasion of the deadly crash of two Washington D.C. Metro trains, which obviously happened on a curve as photos of the crash clearly show, I republish this investigative piece about the routine killings of humans by New York City Subway trains.  As the media ponders the great “mystery” of this crash, you can wonder why a simple rule is not imposed: that the operator of a train maintain a speed only fast enough to control what is plain to see in front of the train, just as a person does in an automobile.

DEAD MAN’S CURVE AND THE KILLING OF MARVIN FRANKLIN

By Mark Crane  Motormanmark.com

A sample of notes on subway killings that I took while reviewing incident reports down in Brooklyn sitting up on the top floor of Metropolitan Transportation Authority-New York City Transit (MTA-NYCT)’s corporate tower:

• June 23, 2007 – 63 year-old passenger, Judy Desilva is killed as a northbound D train enters 155 St. station.  The train operator reports as he entered “on a right hand curve” he observed the victim attempting to climb up from the roadbed, but could not stop his train in time.

• March 8, 2006 - A train operator on an inbound 7 train entering the 103^rd St./East Elmhurst station reports: “Entering 103 St. station around a curve, I noticed an object that appeared like a person and I immediately placed my train into emergency.”  “Emergency” is full train-activated braking.  The unidentified victim was killed.

• December 18, 2005 - A track worker walking the tracks discovers a body of a passenger under the third rail, south of Fordham Road on the D-line.  After investigation, remains from the passenger are found on the undercarriages of six trains, each which in succession have run over the victim, not one train operator able to notice the body.  The incident report states: “The area is very dark,” and “The only reason he spotted the body was that he smelt an odor of burnt flesh.”

I would say policies that involve life and death should have responsible oversight.  However, I’ve found the truth is, after these types of killings, policy is questioned only internally.  And almost always, subway killings are ignored by the media and investigated by the police with no more scrutiny than is afforded a common burglary.

On April 29, 2007, Track Worker Marvin Franklin was killed by a subway train that was moving within the posted speed limit.  Due to the speed the train was traveling, the train operator did not–and could not–see Mr. Franklin in time to keep from hitting him and a coworker, (who survived,) even though the workers–both wearing reflective safety vests– were occupying the track before the train appeared. 

Since this was the second track killing of an employee in less than a week, workers were outraged, and in the intense media glare that followed, MTA-NYCT, breaking with the usual routine of drying-compound scattering and paper shuffling, pledged to conduct an inquiry.  By the end of July the six employees MTA had dressed up as investigators concluded the killing had been caused merely by rule violations.

The Board concluded the train operator had a view of the roadway that was “inhibited” by the curve, and that, considering conditions such as sight lines and allowable speed in the area the train operator “…could not have avoided making contact with the employees.”  But this was not a revealing factor to this investigative board–it was only mentioned in the final report in an effort to acknowledge the train operator bore no responsibility.

Here, to determine the causes for a man’s killing by an MTA subway train, a board is assembled of only MTA employees, which in itself is absurd.  Then, in the text of the board’s report they do find their way to the cause–the fact that the train was going too fast for the train operator to stop when he came in view of the men, but not one board member recognizes the significance of this main causal factor.  It is never mentioned in the report again, as if the speed rating of the track is set by God, as remote from our control as the tides.  In fact, none of the board’s recommendations address excessive speed ratings for curved track, nor do they address or even discuss the poor view afforded by these 25+ year-old trains.

Instead, the board suggests myriad rule changes to increase oversight of workers’ attention to following the rules that keep them away from moving trains.

DEAD MAN’S CURVE

There exists in the subway a condition I call “dead-man’s curve,” as subway trains are routinely operated, within the rated speed limits set by MTA-NYCT, over curved areas of track that do not allow a train operator to see a pre-existing obstruction on the roadbed in time to stop the train.

Subway trains weigh 400 tons, and so they take a long time to stop once the brakes are applied.  If you are a train operator operating a train through one of these sections of track, you do not have the control necessary to avoid contact with whatever waits around the bend, whether it be a collapsed track worker, a passenger retrieving a dropped cellphone, or a terrorist-planted derailing device.

Take, for example, the express tracks on the Upper West Side’s #2 & 3 lines.  Those trains travel through 40 mph-rated curves–lightspeed to a train operator.  A passenger on the last car of that train knows as much as the train operator about what is just 25 feet ahead on the tracks.  And, at full brake, that train will put about three 70-foot-long cars over any obstruction before coming to a rest.

TUNNEL VISION

Evidently, the MTA’s theory of operation is that accidents are avoided by control of what gets on the roadway, not by expecting a train operator to maintain the control necessary to be able to avoid an accident. 

This is consistent with the fact that management neglects actual sight conditions in the operating cabs.  On the older subway trains, which amount to a full 61% of NYCT’s rolling stock, cab windshields are scratched and dirty.  Unlike the 1921 Dodge, the first automobile to have a windshield-washing feature, there is no convenient way to clean the hard-to-reach windshields of these trains.

Windshields stay dirty (MTA Subway crews are not even provided squeegees;) wipers are poor and only cover about 70% of the glass, even though above-ground operation amounts to 40% of the average run. (The windshield wipers on the “redbird” trains that were scrapped only five years ago had a comical rocker arm that required operators to manually swipe the windshield with a free hand, though subway operation is already two-handed–one of them on the brake handle, the other locked on the dead-man power controller.) 

Further, modern boy scouts carry stronger flashlights than the headlights on these trains, and poor cab designs leave reflections from the train interior beaming off the inside of the windshields. 

Here is a cellphone pic a train operator sent me showing the notorious cab door window reflection that train operators must endure, glowing off the inside of the windshield as a train enters a station with a curved platform.  This pic was recorded off the same train class as the train that killed Track Worker Franklin.

Even on a straightaway, it is a challenge for a Train Operator to see the roadbed clearly for just 40 feet, let alone the distance one might see from, say, a car or a truck windshield.  And on their way along structures above ground, these trains have no visors or sun-blindness protection.

Each of these conditions could easily be retrofit-corrected, and, in fact, each were corrected in the design of the newer trains MTA purchased ten years ago, but they’ve not lifted a finger to begin adjustments to the remaining and majority 30 year-old fleet they keep committed to.

Either the MTA brass has a romantic fantasy that train movement is an act of nature or they just don’t give a damn about the hapless and often anonymous victims that end up blood-on-the-tracks.

DRYING COMPOUND ON THE TRACKS

In flagrant violation of the law, MTA has refused to produce the majority of the records I’ve requested through the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL.)

Still, they did provide enough records for me to determine that four people are killed by being struck by NYC subway trains each month.   MTA claims 42% of these killings are suicides, but refuses to show records to represent how such a determination was made.  Even if the cases MTA claims to be suicides are suicides, and even if no suicides would have been avoided by correcting the issues I raise, that still would leave an average of 2 ½ killings a month that are not suicides—that might be prevented by simple, inexpensive policy and equipment alterations.

I have written to a wide array of public officials, each who might choose to accept some responsibility to address these issues, from the secretary of the federal Department of Transportation to Mayor Bloomberg to City Council President Christine Quinn to MTA CEO, Eliot Sander, and MTA-NYCT’s own President, Howard Roberts, and I have been ignored by each of them.

The fact is, there is no one responsible to oversee MTA’s response to track killings.  There is no agency who accepts responsibility to even take a complaint that MTA subways are routinely slaughtering homeless people and transit workers without taking appropriate avoidance measures.

State officials are aware of this lack of oversight, and in 2007 they approved a Track Safety Bill (S4580/A8945 ), legislation that provides oversight by a 3-member panel made up of one MTA rep, one Albany rep, and one union rep.  The panel, which applies only to worker safety, however, is assigned no responsibility for which it can be held accountable, as it operates only discretionarily and serves really just to quiet the one voice that might complain about subway killings–the Transport Worker’s Union, Local 100.  By including one of the union’s vice presidents–a train operator who can be assumed to know as much about forensic accident investigation as any other average Joe–and paying his expenses, the board puts a loving arm around its union buddies.  This panel also wields a double-whammy of chilling power against an employee seeking to report conditions the MTA or Local 100 would prefer stay under wraps. 

You see, the union does not have a dog in the fight against subway killings.  The union is there to protect members against discipline, not to promote public safety.  For every subway worker killed by a subway train, there are 125 subway users killed, and for every person killed by a train, there are a hefty number of possible cases of disciplinary action against active union members who could be blamed for failing rules in a way that contributed to the killing (ie: flaggers, the train operator, signal operators, etc….)  MTA wields a notoriously punitive management, which, according to Local 100 President Roger Toussaint, had 15,000 outstanding disciplinary cases in 2005 among a worker pool of 33,000.

A good example of the effete nature of union participation in oversight occurred during the investigation into the death of Marvin Franklin.  When that 6-member board piled into the train operator’s cab, they noted only that the windshield was “clean,” not noting the large reflection that is standard in that train’s class and exists on the same windshield.  They concluded the headlights “were on,” but made no measurement of their strength.  The union rep who was the only non-MTA executive on the board–that same train operator I mentioned before–did not make a peep. 

You may remember wide reporting of the board’s findings, slamming blame on supervision, but leaving Local 100 members virtually unscathed.

Take a look at the report.  You can download a pdf file of it HERE.  It carefully aims its investigation to a very limited area: the work site.  The board is not assigned to investigate the matter as a subway killing, but as a work site killing.  All recommendations have to do with work sites.  Conditions this killing shared with those four deaths a-month I mentioned earlier are carefully excised from consideration at the board’s conception.  In fact, MTA has never conducted an inquiry into a killing of a subway user of the type of the two they conducted into the deaths of the two track workers.  Considering the documents I viewed, it seems MTA merely fills out a few forms and turns the page.

MY CONCLUSIONS

In response to my FOIL request, MTA-NYCT generated a list of all track killings between January 2002 through October 2007, with notes for each–a list of 301 killings (you download a pdf of this list HERE.)  They then let me inspect a stack of carefully selected documents–mostly incident reports–from an apparently random selection of 23 track killings (while their Deputy FOIL Officer sat beside me, watching over my shoulder trying to read the notes I was taking.)  In addition, I had access to the detailed investigations of two train killings of track workers occurring in the same week in April, 2007, Mr. Franklin’s killing being one of those.   I combined these with the 23 case files to make a unit of 25 cases to survey.  MTA response to my FOIL requests took so many months and provided such a small proportion of the requested documents that a comprehensive survey of subway killings leading to today was impossible.  Still, the documents provided me with enough information to indicate a survey with a free reign of documents would be likely to produce the following conclusions: 

1.  Subway killings occur at a much higher rate on sharply curved areas of track, even though such areas of track make up only a minute percentage of system lay.  By my best estimation, curved areas adjacent to passenger platforms only account for about 25% of subway stations, and, obviously, a much smaller percentage of system lay (train tracks need to get to where they’re going, so they generally are laid as flat and straight as possible.)

In my survey, 48% of the killings occurred on areas of track where the train operator’s view of the road is limited by a curve.  As would be expected, when killings MTA designates to be suicides are excluded, the part of the sample occurring in such areas goes up to 60%.

Curved track is speed rated throughout the system with the purpose of minimizing train vibration and mechanical damage to the equipment, but clearly no effort has been made to limit speeds to allow the train operator to anticipate track condition.  In curved areas of particularly high speed, no apparent efforts have been made to limit access of personnel or trespassers.

Though every year passengers are killed by pitching their heads out over the tracks, looking in the wrong direction for approaching trains, high-speed-rated and/or curved platforms feature no protections for passengers straying too close to the platform edge.

Though MTA-NYCT has agreed to retrieve fallen items from the tracks for passengers, it provides no such notice, as it easily could, in-station, on the wall over the tracks or, better yet, between the running rails.  Every year, passengers are killed retrieving their property in-station.   

2.  Subway killings are much more likely when the train involved is one of the older variety with the conditions I have described that limit/obscure/distract from a train operator’s view of the road ahead.

In my survey, 88% of the killings were caused by the older trains, though they only account for 61% of the active fleet.

Most train operators assert the older trains generally have better or, at best, equivalent braking ability when compared with the newer trains.  In fact, in rainy/snowy weather, the newer trains have serious, MTA-acknowledged braking problems that the older trains just never experience.  Understanding this would lead one to expect more killings to result from operation of the newer trains, not the older trains.

I wonder whether a New York City accident on a par to the D.C. smash-up will be necessary before MTA New York City Transit wakes up and changes its reckless policies.