Rich people behaving badly, or why America may need an “excess personal wealth” tax. Read these tales and retch.

In our last cranky post, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg was held up as an example of how one individual with too much personal wealth may be using his megabucks to skew an election.

If he either runs as an independent or plays “kingmaker” the will of America's voters is down the toilet. It won’t be whom you want – or what programs you want – that are decided in the Presidential election. It’ll be what Michaeal Bloomberg wants. Worst case scenario? Can you spell s-p-o-i-l-e-r?

Now from reports coming in from suburban Philadelphia and sunny Santa Barbara, some stories that show how a single overly wealthy individual or two can intrude directly, personally and – if some lawsuits hold up in court – damagingly into your own life.

RICH BULLIES NASTILY THREW THEIR
WEIGHT AROUND IN BRYN MAWR, PA,
ANGRY COURT COMPLAINT SAYS

The Philly Main Line case first. It has just begun to play out in the courts. I love it because this is no mere case of the rich picking on the poor. Nope, all this happens at a suburban private school where tuition currently goes to $23,000, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. As described in court papers, it seems like a case of filthy rich bullying that impacts the middle class and the moderately wealthy.

Let’s begin when a group of second grade parents at The Balwin School in Bryn Mawr tried to take out an ad in the school’s annual program honoring their kids’ teacher. It read, "We love you, Mrs. Tollin. Thank you for a wonderful year. Your second-grade class."

The ad was rejected by the school administration. But why?

Turns out, a rich land developer of resort properties, and his divorcing wife had been behaving like boors, the wife charging into school during classroom hours, according to the court complaint – screaming, shouting foul language, interrupting classes, and acting in such a frightening manner that one terrified little kid who had nothing to do with any of this ran and hid in a closet.

But again, why? Well, it all started when the land developer Michael Pouls, and his wife, Sheryl, demanded that the teacher become a diet monitor for their daughter, whom they said had been teased as being fat.

It escalated to the point where, according to the complaint, Mrs. Pouls “allegedly visited Tollin's classroom to ask her to intervene in the Poulses' marital problems and Tollin declined,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer tells it.

Next thing you know, Michael Pouls “complained that Tollin was singling out his daughter by focusing on what she ate at lunch. He told Tollin that he was the child's main caregiver, the suit says, and that she should take orders about her only from him,” according to the Inquirer story. Orders? Do your go to school and order your own kids’ teachers around? And was this teacher damned if she did and damned if she didn’t?

As the newspaper story goes on to tell, the daughter was moved into another class, something the lawsuit says was against the history and policy of the school. But Ms. Tollins could at least say “good riddance,’ right?

Wrong.

AS THE OLD ADAGE GOES,
“FOLLOW THE MONEY”

Some time later, “Sheryl Pouls allegedly stormed into a homeroom parents' meeting in Tollin's room and berated her for not saying hello to her daughter the day before.
“According to the suit, Tollin feared she was going to be assaulted and tried to move away. Sheryl Pouls followed, screaming epithets and shouting: ‘I want you fired or I'm taking my girls and my money out of this school!’ the complaint says. Other parents, it says, pulled the woman out of the room.”

Ah hah! Now we’re getting somewhere! What kind of money did the Pouls’ have “in the school?”

It appears according to the complaint to be a donation several million dollars, which would buy the school an athletic center with the Pouls’ name on it – one of many allegations the Pouls’ deny.

The Pouls, as you’ll read in the Philly Inquirer article, deny all of this, and claim they have evidence that in fact that Ms. Tollin is a bad teacher. But somehow, every time I read this my built-in bullshit detector begins to redline. If the teacher is the horror show that the Pouls say she is, why did the others parents take out an advertisement in praise of the teacher? And why did the school go to lengths to nix the ad?

If you read the full complaint, which I recommend that you do by cutting and pasting the URL below into your browser, I think you’ll find that it rings remarkably credible. http://inquirer.philly.com/rss/news/tollincomplaint.pdf

One might rationally come to the conclusion that the school’s headmistress has been kowtowing to wealthy donors who’ve been behaving like schoolyard bullies – at the expense of the school’s program, other students and reputation of the institution she heads. We don’t know that for a fact, however, because she’s not, uh, available for comment, according to the Philadelphia Bulletin. Why? Because she’s in Europe and unreachable. Yeah, right.

Start searching the caves, boys. She’s got to be there somewhere.


THE FAMILY OVERWEIGHT PROBLEM

The whole issue raises other questions. For example, were the Pouls’ ¬attempting to draw their child’s teacher into their own divorce dispute? And were they blaming the teacher for their child’s weight problem when there clearly is either a dietary problem at home, or possibly a genetic disposition toward overweight?

I ask because my own research reveals that Michael Pouls has allowed himself to be a poster boy for the Pritikin Diet. You can check that out at this URL: www.pritikin.com/eperspective/ 0511/trimFat.shtm

There you’ll learn how Pritikin helped him “lose 78 pounds,” reduce his waist size by quite a few notches, and confess, "I can recall being on Atkins and craving fruit — I needed fruit, but you can't have any fruit on Atkins."

Oh, the poor baby!

If you read nothing else, read the Philadelphia Inquirer article that seems to provide an executive summary of this tale of bullying, bad behavior, and the outrageous power of gross wealth.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/20070610_High_stakes_in_teacher-parent_clash.html


AND MEANWHILE OUT ON THE
WEST COAST – A SANTA BARBARIAN?

In Santa Barbara, CA, Wendy McCaw, divorced from a celluar communications magnate, decided to use some of her 10-figure settlement money to buy a newspaper. Not a copy of a newspaper. The whole kit and kaboodle, from newsroom to printing press.

Reportedly she had no previous journalism experience but what the hay, what’s a billion bucks for if you can’t buy the stuff you want?

Shortly thereafter, all hell started breaking loose at her new toy, the Santa Barbara News Press.

The story of what publishing newcomer McCaw did with her billion or so bucks – from newspaper management to multiple law suits, to labor warfare, to going after beach lovers – is the best argument I’ve ever seen for higher tax rates on huge incomes and wealth accumulations. These should start with taxes on staggeringly high divorce settlements. Not to mention higher – not lower – inheritance tax rates on really, really big sums. And yes, as I just crankily mentioned, high taxes on huge incomes and private wealth accumulations. Enough so that wealth that encourages outrageous bullying can’t exist in private hands.

For some of the ghastly details, as reported by one of the people Sandra McCaw decided to sue for writing the report, go here:
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4226=

And for updates on how things are going at the Santa Barbara News Press, check out this blog.
http://www.west.net/~smith/blog/index.shtml

Oh, and did I mention that Dr. Laura Schlesinger dances in and out of this tangled tale, too? Here’s a “just the facts m’am” executive summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Barbara_News-Press_controversy

And, uh, one more thing. Keep your filthy feet off Ms. McCaw’s beach!
http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=2048

If you like George Bush or Ralph Nader, you’re gonna love Michael Bloomberg pecking away at New York’s and America’s future. Here’s why.

The New York Times on Tuesday discovered what most of us who ride the city’s subways and busses have known for years: A ride during rush hour is torture.

There’s no room. No room on the platforms for more people. Platforms too short for longer trains. No more capacity to add more trains. Busses that pack people in like sardines (and send them flying like loose cargo if they don’t hang on tight enough during start-stop rides through Manhattan traffic.)

To quote the Times:

“From my point of view, this is scary,” said Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, who presented the data to members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board. “This is scary in the sense that right now, on a lot of these lines, we’re several years and a big capital construction project away from being able to provide what I consider adequate service. We’re constrained.”

Mr. Roberts said the data had particular significance in light of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s proposal for a congestion pricing system that would charge most drivers who enter Manhattan below 86th Street — with the intent of moving people out of their cars and onto mass transit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/nyregion/26mta.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

Not only can’t Manhattan handle a significant increase in transit passengers, neither can New Jersey, where Governor John Corzine is said to be stewing at what Michael Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan would to do New Jersey Transit, already stretched to overcapacity.
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_169170029.html

So why is Michael Bloomberg pushing so hard for congestion pricing? One suspects it’s because he doesn’t give a damn for the consequences. He’s hellbent for doing something-or-other in the coming Presidential election, with pundits debating whether he’ll actually run, thus acting as a spoiler the way Ralph Nader did when he paved the way for the George Bush presidency. Or whether Bloomberg is simply trying to play “kingmaker” and decide who else will run, on what platform, in what party – specifics yet to be announced.

What a filthy misuse of his $5 billion fortune! In fact, what an argument for a 90% tax bracket on incomes over several millions of dollars a year and accumulated fortunes over $50 million, to make certain nobody can accumulate enough money to ruin an election that’s a life and death matter for Americans in uniform overseas, of retirement age at home, and in need of medical care anywhere in the nation.

Michael Bloomberg has rushed into congestion pricing the way George Bush rushed us into Iraq – without a timetable, without a damage assessment (or environmental inpact statement in New York's case)without a significant contingency plan other than “we’ll see if it works,” without a measurable standard for success, without regard to the millions of lives it will affect, without regard to the damage it will do to the economy of New York when the straw of ridership breaks the camel’s back and not only the new riders, but all riders, no longer can get to work on time.

If he really and truly wants to reduce traffic in New York, Michael Bloomberg has to start with a massive injection of money neither the city nor the state has to add subway lines, rebuild subway lines, lengthen platforms, put on more trains – and then, only then, start pricing ordinary drivers off the streets. He also ought to limit truck double parking and the way construction sites bleed over into the streets and eat up lane space. That could do a lot more to stop congestion that slamming some lowly commuters from Lyndenhurst with an $8 a day fee.

He could also do a few small things, such as encouraging cycling as an alternative means of transportation. (His plans mention walking, but never bicycles. No, he prefers to arrest cyclists on trumped up charges. Come to think of it, he’s been arresting young black mourners for walking together to a funeral, too.) http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0228246

Right now, all Mayor Bloomberg is doing is turning the streets into speedways for his limo-riding friends, for whom an $8 charge is like eight cents to you and me. And if he has to add lots more of those big, space-eating, slow-moving busses to make up for the lack of subway capacity, he may actually add to the congestion.

Hey, what does Michael care? He’s making a “legacy” for himself. Or maybe a king. Or maybe a spoiled election. Whatev-urrrr.

Some of his supporters will rush to tell you he rides the subway himself.

Yeah? How often? And at what time of day? I get on at Lexington and 77th Street, same place as Bloomberg would get on if he takes the subway to City Hall from the station closest to his multi-million dollar private mansion. Funny, I never seen him on the platform. Not ever.

Hey fellow Lexington Avenue Line riders, how often have YOU seen Bloomberg on the subway? (I used to see the late former Mayor Abe Beame on the subway about once every month. He also boarded at Lexington and 77th and he was indeed a regular mass transit rider. Moreover, he was even shorter than Michael Bloomberg, which is saying something. So it’s not hard to believe that if Bloomberg rides the subway to work at rush hour, people would spot him there.) But finding Bloomberg on the subway at rush hour is about as likely as running into the tooth fairy.

Michael Bloomberg’s “legacy” will be stalled New Yorkers, a stalled economy as businesses flee the city so their workers can get to the office on time, frayed tempers, a worsening of quality of life here, and if the terrorists ever attack the subways, a higher body count.

Listen pal, if you get killed on the subway because of Mike Bloomberg, don’t run and tell me I didn’t warn you.

"Hello, Oxymoron Central? I’d like to enroll The Epoch Times."

On the same gritty Garment District block where a spelling-challenged fortune teller advertises a “$5 speical” and promises to “put your mine at ease”…in the same rundown office building where The New York Crank plies his trade… you’ll find the New York office of The Epoch Times.

The Epoch whut?

It’s a giveaway newspaper that seems dedicated to headlining anything bad they can find about China (not a difficult task) and criticizing immigration laws that would limit the flow of Chinese immigrants – legal or otherwise – into the United States.

I suspect the paper is the propaganda arm of Falun Gong, an outfit that would easily qualify as a creepy religious cult if only Peking’s political bosses would stop arresting and brutalizing them, thus turning them from a nutcake movement into martyrs.

The Epoch Times is also the worst-written paper on the planet. It reads like a high school newspaper edited by B-minus students. It has the news and language sense of a stale piece of tofu.

They can barely give the paper away. It sits in hundreds of freebie newspaper boxes that litter the streets of New York – side by side with real estate magazine giveaways, neighborhood newsrags financed by classified sex ads, and offerings of one-night courses during which Donald Trump will explain to you the simple ABCs of making a billion dollars in real estate. (I wonder if he tells his audiences, “Start with a multi-million dollar real estate fortune you inherited from your father.”)

Usually, The Epoch Times’ headlines about scandalous happenings in China are written in such a perversely bland tone that they’re almost as funny as headlines in The Onion, a spoof newspaper that often goes like hotcakes in adjacent pieces of street furniture while The Epoch Times just sits there.

But the other day, I simply had to pick up an Epochal copy. The lead headline, top right, front page, read: “Man Caught Stealing Epoch Times.”

Hey dudes, it’s a FREE newspaper. How can you steal something the owners are begging you to take?

Well, if you read far enough into the story – seven paragraphs into it to be exact – you’ll discover that the unnamed man was taking these papers that The Epoch Times is trying to give away and then destroying them – same as what The Epoch Times people undoubtedly do themselves with all their uncirculated issues.

If you keep forcing yourself to read the article, there’s a not-so-subtle implication that "stealing" free newspapers is one of the highest priority missions of China's secret intelligence operations here in the United States.

Look, I don’t much like China. I think the people running and regulating the country are a bunch of mean bastards who’d poison your dog with tainted wheat gluten and your kid with lead-painted toys and then shrug it off as business-as-usual.

But with enemies like The Epoch Times, they really don’t have much to fear.

Melodrama in the Hamptons: Restaurant trashes Crank’s girlfriend. Manager "apologizes" with a farewell sneer.

I’ve already taken several swipes at annoying restaurant service, most recently here:
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2007/05/trickledown-incompetence.html

Usually, I don’t name names. I figure it’s not my business to start warning people about specific restaurants. Given enough time, most bad restaurants put themselves out of business anyway.

But a seafood dive called Before the Bridge in the Long Island town of Hampton Bays deserves special attention – and an Oscar for bad performance orchestrated by its person in charge.

Note: This is a unique review. There are plenty of favorable things getting said on the Internet about this house of horrors. For example, here:
http://www.menufrog.com/restaurantdetails.php?restaurant_id=27040207

TAKE A LOOK FIRST
AT SOME OF THE DAMAGE

See that picture above? That’s the top that the Crank’s girlfriend wore when we went to dinner at Before The Bridge. Except those wine stains weren’t there when we walked into the joint.

We were seated at a window, its venetian blinds drawn to keep out the sun. Keep this little detail about the blinds in mind as I tell the rest of the story.

Our waiter, a young, nice-seeming fellow, I would guess in his early 20s, asked us what we’d like to drink. I ordered a glass of Chardonnay. The Crank’s girlfriend ordered a glass of Merlot.

LOOK OUT, CRANK!
THAT THING FALLING ON YOUR GIRLFRIEND
IS A FULL GLASS OF RED WINE!

We waited. After a while, the waiter reappeared with two long-stemmed wine glasses balanced on a tiny tray. He set down the Chardonnay in front of me. Then he lost his concentration for a moment. His tray tilted. The red wine came crashing and splashing down to the table from a height of about three feet.

We were treated to a red wine shower. As you can see, the Crank's girlfriend was soaked with red wine. So were my pants. And so was her $500 cloth Prada handbag. (And don’t even think for a second it’s a knockoff. The Crank’s girlfriend doesn’t do knockoffs.)

To add insult to injury, the now-empty glass of red wine took a final bounce into my glass of white wine and knocked that one over too, spilling its untasted contents into my lap.

Soaking, we both jumped to our feet. The waiter seemed flustered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m, sorry. I apologize. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Okay okay. We’re standing in a river of wine, and all the guy could do was sorry-sorry us to shreds. An alert diner at the next table knew what had to be done next. He handed us his own napkin to help us dry off a bit. It helped, but there’s only so much one napkin can absorb.

The waiter ran off. He returned with an entourage of wait-persons who began swabbing the table. And our chairs. And the floor. We were left to fend for ourselves.

“Send me the bill for dry cleaning your pants,” said the waiter, evidently not noticing the artful contribution he had made to the Crank’s girlfriend’s ensemble. “I’m sorry about this. I’m really sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

AS USUAL, THE PROBLEM STEMS
FROM THE TOP. DOESN’T ANYBODY
TRAIN EMPLOYEES ANY MORE?

Clearly, the guy had not been trained by his manager. Not on how to carry drinks to the table. Not on how to focus on the customer, rather than the puddles on on the table. Not on how to stop apologizing after the umpteenth time and get on with the situation at hand.

Through all of this the head guy – I’m not sure if he’s the owner or just a hired buffoon – stayed out of sight. That’s unusual, since I’ve eaten at Before The Bridge before and he’s usually all over the dining room. I couldn’t have missed him. His uh, remarkable girth has the same impact as the proverbial gorilla in the room. Come to think of it, make that an elephant.

In time, we got fed our dinner. “I can’t believe he’s just ignoring this,” the Crank said to his wine-soaked girlfriend.

“Don’t worry, he’s going to offer to comp the dinner,” she replied.

That wasn’t what I wanted, although a single line of apology from management and perhaps an offer of a complimentary dessert or after-dinner drink would have gone a long way to mollify our feelings.

Instead, we got about a half dozen more apologies from the flustered waiter combined with “How is everything?” queries, until I finally had to tell him, “Look, kid, stop apologizing and asking how everything is. Just stop it, okay?”

HAVE SOME ROPE
WITH YOUR FISH

Eventually, the head guy did come over to our table – but only to pull up the venetian blinds that covered our window. While he was at it, he let the pull cord from the blinds drop in my plate and linger there.

“Hey, please don’t stick that dirty cord in my fish,” I complained.

He muttered something unintelligible and walked away.

That did it! By now smoke was coming out of my cranky ears. We finished dinner. This bill, before tip, came to $100.31. Yes, I tipped the waiter – not generously, but enough to let him know it wasn’t him I was feeling particularly cranky about. Then we walked to the bar, where the person-in-chief was now acting as bartender.

I told him what had happened.

“Your waiter apologized, but not a word of apology from you,” I said. “Not an offer of dessert, not even a cup of coffee. Nothing. Instead, you dropped the filthy pull cord from your blinds into my plate. And when I called your attention to that…”

“I thought you were only kidding,” he said.

Okay, folks. A restaurateur who simply assumes he’s blown a couple of customers so there’s no point offering a gesture of apology is one thing. Maybe it’s one thing even when he’s staring directly at their ruined clothing. But a slob who drops venetian blind pull cords into your food and either doesn’t notice it or thinks it’s a big joke is another thing entirely. Plus, the pull cord and the wine add up to two things.

If he believes that a frequently-used rope draped across your main dish is no big deal, and if he thinks disgruntled customers with ruined clothing are no big deal, I tremble to think about sanitation in his kitchen.

THE HEAD GUY OFFERS
A PARTING SNEER

I crankily told him I was angered past all redemption and that I intended to blog about this experience.

“Have a nice summer,” he sneered as we walked out his door.

Fine. Never try to mollify a justifiably irked customer when you can sneer at him. If I had any doubts about posting this piece, his sneer nuked them into oblivion.

On the drive home to a different Hampton where the Crank's girlfriend's has a weekend retreat, we commiserated about the evening.

“Serves me right,” she said, in her wine-stained ensemble.

“For what?” I asked.

“For ordering red wine with fish,” she said.

What? A disastrous war in Iraq isn’t enough? Now he’s rekindling the cold war with Russia!

The casualty figures from Iraq are getting so bad it's easy to get a deep-down, bottom-of-the-gut sick feeling every time you look at them. Each day, more American kids are dead. For what? (More Iraqis are dying every day, too.)

The Iraqi civil war, whose existence once was denied by the administration, is now so bad that the locals are busy blowing up one another’s mosques. As one acquaintance of mine remarked, out of the side of his mouth, “Good thing they have us to persecute them, otherwise they’d spend all their time persecuting each other.”

So in the midst of this what do we need more than anything else? Right – renewal of the nearly forgotten cold war with Russia.

This new ham-handed tactic of ours springs from Boy George’s brilliant idea to place anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Iron Curtain satellite countries. The administration purports that the sole purpose of these missiles would be to shoot down Iranian nukes aimed at the United States. Only a few small problems with that one, starting with the fact that Iran doesn’t have ICBM capabilities.

Second small problem, even if Iran ever figures out how to make a nuclear ICBM: if a missile from Poland hits a nuke from Iran while it’s sailing over Russia, who gets nuked? Can you blame the Russians for feeling antsy? Shoot those missiles down over the ocean instead? Nah!

Third small problem: Imagine if Russia set up a weapons system only miles from our border in Mexico, claiming the anti-nukes were only there to shoot down Chinese missiles. Would we believe it? Would we allow it even if we believed it?

Vladimir Putin attempted to defuse the issue in a meeting with Boy George. Condoleeza Rice responded essentially by poking Putin in the eye. She changed the subject to Russia’s execrable human rights record. Two problems with that.

First, it’s a non-sequitur. Second, given our recent record for secret prisons, water torture and other human rights abuses, we seem to have the equivalent of a dungeon calling a Siberian salt mine black. (You’ll find URLS you can cut-and-paste to read more about Condi, Boy George and Putin below.)

Somehow, the Bush administration’s clever propensity for turning everything – absolutely every last damn thing there is – into a life-threatening disaster brings to mind an old song that once ridiculed a Democrat. Fortunately, it can be easily updated to describe the disaster that is George W. Bush and Friends.

President George Bush
Had brains made out of mush
He started fights with everyone
(“Just bring ‘em on,” he said)
And he said,
“You know I’m pro-life
“And so’s my lovely wife
“But we won’t be safe
‘Till everybody’s dead.”

P.S. Look, I know this is pathetic, but I still – after a year of blogging – haven’t figured out how to imbed links into text on my Mac. Sorry sorry sorry. So if you want to refer to the URLs below, just copy and paste them into your browser.

There’s plenty more where these come from, but you’re a big kid. I figure, if you’re still hungry for more after reading these, you’ll find ‘em on your own.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/05/31/russia.tensions/index.html


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/31/AR2007053102391.html

Go git ‘em Larry!

It may interest my friends who ply the direct response advertising trade to know that this ad by the publisher of Hustler Magazine is pulling responses like crazy.

The ad “has yielded about 200 tips so far,” Flynt said.

“He said he’ll let them continue to trickle in over the next two weeks or so before his team begins to follow up on them. ‘We’ll be lucky if we get 2 to 4 percent’ hard leads that could yield a payout,’ he said.”

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2007/06/11/flynt_ad_yielding_tips.html

I’m going to skip all the advertising shop talk about response rates versus conversion rates versus return on investment. All you need to know is that if Larry were selling life insurance by mail right now, he’d be doing great.

If Larry is telling it straight – and I sincerely believe that he is – we’ve got four to eight really juicy scandals coming.

Will they be Republicans or Democrats? Will they be pious Christian Coalitioners or closet atheists? Adult liasonists or pederast slimeballs? In S&M costumes or just plain nekkid?

Will they be getting it for free or paying for it? Straight or gay? And if gay, will they be openly gay members of Congress like Barney Frank? Or could we have a few really fun surprises coming, preferably in the White House cabinet or Dick Cheney’s or Alberto Gonzalez's office? Hey, come to think of it, what about lust with animals?

And will there be pictures? You know what I mean by “pictures” dontcha? Come to think about it, how about tape recordings of heavy breathing? Or videotapes?

Stay tuned.

"Sopranos" Producer David Chase Puts A Contract Out On His Audience

Somebody ought to talk to David Chase. With a pipewrench.

With the whole nation sitting up on Sunday night to see the grand finale of The Sopranos...with people making book on whether Tony gets hit or rats out his own people to the FBI to save his own hide...with eight years of loyal Soprano-watching audiences demanding a grand finale...

Chase pulled the ultimate copout.

Nothing happened.

Actually, it was worse than nothing. In the last few minutes of the last episode of The Sopranos, the screen suddenly went blank and silent.

Big joke on the audience. Get it? A lot of us went crazy thinking our TVs had suddenly died, or the cable company went kerflooie.

That's not drama. That's sadism. That's an attack, an attack against the very people who supported you and stayed loyal to you all these years

Film snobs may argue that Chase did that to let viewers come to their own conclusions, write their own ending.

I crankily declare that Chase is a little rat. No worse, he's a rat's turd. We paid our admission and he turned off the projector. That's the equivalent of putting a contract out on his own family.

So let me tell you what, David Chase. Don't come around my TV set no more. If I see you, if I see any program you're behind, it's dead. Got that? Dead. I'm going to blast it with my remote like it's a clay pigeon.

You're finished, Chase. You'll never eat calzone in this town again.

More meat for conspiracy theorists: The Bush Administration, Condi Rice’s State Department, and those awful RFID passport delays

Look dude, let’s get this straight. I’m not saying there actually is a conspiracy. All I’m saying is, the news about Americans facing huge delays in obtaining passports could get you thinking like a conspiracy theorist. Got that? Thinking like one is all I said. Thinking.

The news?

The State Department suddenly finds itself facing an “unprecedented demand” for passports, after new U.S. Government rules require passports for citizens visiting Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico. Those are places where you used to be able to cross back and forth with nothing but your driver’s license and a smile.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/washington/07passport.html?em&ex=1181361600&en=ff62d217ac815dff&ei=5087%0A

I’m not saying this is wrong. Al Quaida and possibly some other nasty people are out to get us. We don’t want them slipping across the border with nothing but a bomb, a discount certificate for flying school lessons and a forged driver’s license.

But wait a second!

All you have to do is look at winter traffic to Cancun and the Caribbean to know that humongous numbers of people who once never bothered getting passports now will need them. Not to mention the tourists who want to enjoy Canda.

So why the delay? Why is the State Department telling Americans it will take “at least 10 weeks” to get a passport when it only used to take two? Why weren't they geared up for this?

Is it that the old Bush Administration incompetence again? Did they merely forget or fail to foresee that insisting more Americans carry passports would increase the demand for passports? I mean, duh!

Or is it…

CONSPIRACY THEORY #1: The Bush Administration doesn’t want Americans to leave the country.

Why? Maybe because we’ll find out how many foreigners have suddenly begun hating us since the Bushies began tearing apart all the good will America had built up over the years.

MAYBE IT’S THE IMBEDDED RFIDs
THAT ARE TRACKING YOUR EVERY MOVE

New passports will contain an RFID, which will enable the government to know where you and your passport are at any time.

According to the Bushies, “"The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure…It's yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally."
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/10/65412

Yeah, sure. How does the RFID know you’re who you say you are? Unless…

CONSPIRACY THEORY #2: While you were asleep, the government secretly and surgically imbedded an RFID in your brain that matches the one in your passport...

Nah! Forget that one. I’ve got better, based on the RFID in your passport.

Such as…


CONSPIRACY THEORY #3: The Bush administration is out to catch you doing sex tourism so they can throw your butt into the hoosegow.

Go to a bordello in Bangkok and Uncle Sam’s Big Brother will be watching via satellite and waiting to bust you. Or it could be…

CONSPIRACY THEORY #4: The Bushies are out to find out who’s a closet gay and out you.

Go to a gay bar, and suddenly the satellite tracking your RFID will beep a creep in the White House and the government will know exactly where you are. If you’re in the military, you didn’t tell. and nobody asked, you’re still no longer safe. Now they won’t have to ask. They’ll know you were in the bar where everybody wants to dance with Dave. If you’re a gay closet Dem, you’re dead political meat, so to speak. Not only that, but it could be…

CONSPIRACY THEORY #5: The government is checking out cheating spouses who say they’re traveling “on business.”

Check into a hot pillow joint with a chick and suddenly word creeps back to the Christian Coalition, which then e-mails your wife. Or maybe you get electronically reported to the CIA. Next you know, you get paid a visit by a shadowy CIA agent. He tells you, “We’d hate to have to tell your wife about that blonde, the orange thong you bought for her, and the strawberry-flavored whipped cream.

“So next time you visit Paris, we want you to go to such-and-such a mosque and start voicing sympathy with Al Qaida. Infiltrate them and report back to us. If you get caught, we will disclaim all knowledge of you. If they behead you, tough luck, Charlie. But don’t worry, we’ll make some feeble protest about your death after the fact.”

CONSPIRACY THEORY #6: It’s a way for the Feds to figure out who’s sneaking into Cuba.

The whole world’s allowed to visit Cuba, except us “free” Americans. Lots of Americans go anyway, via Canada or Mexico. The Cubans don’t stamp American passports. They simply stick a separate paper visa in your ID and off you go to see whatever Fidel hath wrought, and maybe to take a gander at an antique T-bird or ’54 Chevy. When you leave, you leave the paper visa, too.

A few years ago, at an open meeting of the New York Cycle Club in Manhattan, three different people put on slide presentations in one night about their bicycle tours of Cuba. During the Q&A session that followed, one smartass in the back of the room stood up and said, “You do realize, of course, that three members of the club work for the FBI and two are in the room tonight?” There was a lot of nervous laughter. A couple of guys hurriedly put away their pads and ballpoints.

No more, pal. A blood hound in the Hoover building down in D.C. will find you out faster than Lance Armstrong can race downhill on the Alpe de Huez. After which, refer back to Conspiracy Theory #5.

CONSPIRACY THEORY #7: The U.S. Government’s intentions are pure, but Al Qaida is planning to track the chips, single out Americans abroad, and kidnap us, blow us up, shoot us or behead us. And those sleeping-at-the-switch Bushies won’t figure it out until hundreds of us leave our noggins in Nuremburg or some other foreign locale.

CONSPIRACY THEORY #8: Las Vegas is going to change its advertising slogan. What happens there will no longer stay there. In fact, it will go straight into a dossier that has your name on it.

If you want to add a few conspiracy theories of your own, feel free to submit them.

Until then, happy travels.

What will I do if elected President? None of your damn business! says Fred Thompson. Just what we need. A King George IV wannabe.

The following is stolen verbatim from: http://theCarpetbaggerReport.com

>>”Fred Thompson received a warm welcome at a fundraising dinner for the Virginia Republican Party over the weekend, offering up red meat — and little else — for the GOP faithful. Asked by a reporter afterwards what he would do as president, Thompson said, “Well, I’d do lots of things.” Asked if he was prepared to share some examples, he said, “No.”<<

600,000 Americans get their identities ripped off in the mail and this doofus gets upset it’s even reported. Problem is, he’s Postmaster General.

I note almost wearily that yet another Republican appointee has been bristling, essentially declaring that reports of harm befalling thousands of Americans via his department is nobody’s damn business.

This didn’t garner any significant space I’ve noticed in most of the daily press. All the more reason for reading publications like Ad Age’s online edition, which covers some hidden pockets of news while the rest of the press is snoring.

The story in today’s issue was headlined, “Postmaster General Takes Umbrage With Wachovia Ad.” The ad, he said, is “really doing a disservice to the American people."

The gist of the story: A Wachovia ad that suggested mail theft is a major cause of identity theft really gets Postmaster General Potter’s goat. That’s because mail only accounts for four percent of identity theft, he insisted.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=117007

I guess Postmaster Potter figured nobody would do the math. Well, he was wrong. Here’s the math:

According to the Gartner Group, a respected survey research firm, “Approximately 15 million Americans were victimized by some sort of identity-theft related fraud in the 12 months ending in mid-2006…”
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501912

Now, let me get out my handy-dandy pocket calculator here. Four percent of 15 million…hmmm! That comes to 600,000 people.

Six hundred thousand people! Why, that’s more than the entire poulation of Denver, CO. More than the entire popualation of Long Beach, or Sacramento CA. More than Minneapolis,MN. More than Las Vegas, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Witchita, Omaha, Atlanta, or New Orleans, to name just a few.
http://www.psigroup.biz/megap/wave1_200-500.php

Imagine if the entire population of your own town woke up one morning and discovered their identities had been ripped off.

There’d be hell to pay.

Instead, Postmaster Potter has arranged for you to have higher postage rates to pay. But what can you expect? When you have an idiot at the top of the Government, you’ll find idiot appointees all the way down.

New York Times Book Review falls prey to Lit Crit Technobabble Madness. This man is partly responsible.

I’ve already taken an oblique swipe at gibberish that passes for literary criticism, churned out in universities around the world. You'll find it here:
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2007/05/poetry-that-bears-witness-to-horror.html

However, that was only a swipe made in passing while I was discussing a book of poems that I favored.

Now it's time something got said about the whole genre of lit crit technobable, and I have to warn you that the subject is making me feel violent.

But first things first.

The purpose of literary criticism when it started was to help people understand literature better – why it affects us, its context in history, its relationship to current events.

Lately, the field has been seized by fiends whose sole purpose seems to be obfuscation. They appear hell-bent not on clarifying what literature is about, but on making their own literary criticism impenetrable. If they happen to celebrate impenetrable fiction while they’re at it, so much the better.

They speak, as I’ve said in a previous post, in tongues. They have their own secret language. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a secret handshake, too. They display a certain smug attitude – “Well, if you can’t understand what I’ve written, it just proves I’m smarter than you are.”

They are no longer opening the gates of literature to the world. In fact, they are slamming them shut, attempting to lock out anyone who doesn’t find profound meaning in the meaningless jargon of their field.

As long as this game was limited to a group of insignificant and mostly obscure academics, it was hard to care very much. You can read the Journal of the Modern Language Association and others of its ilk, or you can trash it. Not much harm done either way.

But now the New York Times has fallen prey to this idiocy. Yes! The effin' New York Times!

Last Sunday, I was sitting with a copy of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, when suddenly I discovered my eyes crossing. I was trying to navigate my way through this passage:

“Such a capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence reveals the extent to which Davis’ fiction is influenced by her work as a translator. Apart from Proust, her credits include French thinkers and writers like Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor and Michel Foucalt. In reading Davis’s stories, therefore, we are likely to be reminded as much of the poststructuralist emphasis on language in the works of Blanchot as of the antinarrative impulse of French nouveau-Romanists like Butor.”

I should have set fire to the Times Book Review and tossed out the window the instant I came across Foucalt’s name. It was a warning, like an air raid siren before the bombs begin falling.

“Anti-narrative impulse?” “Nouveau Romanist?” “Postructuralist emphasis on language?” Gimme a break! No wonder the circulation of The New York Times is dropping like a shot.

This impenetrable review was written by Siddhartha Deb (that's his picture at the top of this post) who began his career as a journalist in Calcutta. He should have stayed there.

He was praising a book of stories that, judging what I can make out from Deb’s review, are also impenetrable: “Stories” by Lydia Davis.

To quote Dreary Deb again:

“Sometimes a title can be nearly as long as the story, as in,’Mother’s Reaction To My Travel Plans,” whose entire text reads: ‘Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!’ We could almost text-message it, but then we wouldn’t get the effect of the surrounding white space, against which the words seem to suggest an almost gnomic quality. We might miss the exclamation marks, the italics…”

Or we might miss wanting to vomit over all Deb’s jargon-filled praise of practically nothing.

I’m not worried about Davis, the author of "Stories." Despite the acclaim she has received not only from Deb of the Doldrums, but also Salon Magazine, I guarantee you that if her work is taking her in the direction of "stories" like “Mother’s Reaction…” she is destined for the trash heap of literary history.

But Deb’s editor at the New York Times Book Review is another matter. He ought to be busted back to police beat and put on two years’ probation there. If it then turns out he also can’t tell nonsense prose from a rape case, fire the idiot! (I hope you haven’t missed my very clever exclamation mark and my post neo-modernist omission of italics. Whatever the hell that means.)

As for Siddhartha Deb, he is a more serious case. He came to this country on a literary fellowship and now he is poisoning impressionable young American minds, encouraging by example nonsense prose in the guise of expository writing not only in the New York Times but also in The Boston Globe, the Guardian, The Nation and the New Statesman. No wonder the President of the United States can't make a coherent argument for any of his policies! No wonder politicians doubletalk! They learn it in college

I am tempted to pray for a vigilante squad of Writing Police, who would seize people who scribble in jargon and bash them over their head with their own laptops until consequent brain damage obliterates phrases like “anti-narrative impulse” and “postructuralist emphasis on language” from their vocabularies.

Trickledown Incompetence

I was in Santa Monica, CA on business a few weeks ago. I took a stroll along Ocean Avenue, a pretty boulevard with upmarket hotels and shops overlooking the Pacific. All you had to do to consider it idyllic was ignore the hundreds of homeless people who camp under the palm trees each sunset in an adjacent park.

But more about that later.

Right now I want to talk about a national malady called Trickledown Incompetence.

All this is old news, but worth repeating:

The Bush administration incompetently started a war, managed by incompetents who couldn’t think ahead five seconds to what they’d do once they blew up half of Iraq. And those incompetent dum-dums never imagined that enraged Iraqis, instead of scattering rose petals at our soldiers’ feet, would be blowing up our guys up with IEDs.

The Bush administration based its decision to go to war in Iraq on incompetent interpretations of incompetent intelligence. It was provided by an incompetent CIA director. Well, it’s true he had to act incompetently or he’d get fired. But you’d figure a competent guy in that position would resign in a huff. He didn’t.

For in-your-face incompetence, there was nothing – and still is nothing two years later – like the “You’re doing a helluva job, Brownie” management of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

The past couple of days, we’ve been hearing about the deliberate hiring of incompetents in the Justice Department. Monica Goodling, graduate of a fourth or maybe seventh rate religious law school, was in charge of deciding who would or would not be a good local U.S. Attorney. Monica worked for Alberto Gonzales. She’s an – let’s call her what she really is, either a nearly brainless bimbo or a clever but poorly educated liar and career assassin. Well, let’s be kindly and charitable and assume she’s merely a brainless bimbo and not a corrupt and lying thug.

Goodling, that brainless incompetent bimbo, has been testifying before Congress that she, uh, “went over the line” by violating Federal law in her hiring practices. That’s called “lawbreaking” where I come from, folks. But gee, she’s so cute and sweet sounding and blonde, the Republicans on the Senate committee that was taking here testimony tried to give her a pass.

The trouble with incompetence is that it’s like water. It follows the law of gravity. You get an incompetent president and the next thing you know you get an incompetent Secretary of Defense and an incompetent Attorney General below the President.

From them you get incompetent generals and Monica Goodling. Next thing you know, you’re in a restaurant on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, CA, suffering through completely incompetent table service.

To get back to where I started, incompetent table service is what happened a few weeks ago. I walked into this nice-looking Italian restaurant on Ocean Avenue. I ordered two courses: a salad and a braised lamb shank.

I stuck a fork into my salad and poof! A sub-waiter who looked as if he came out of a casting call for Fawlty Towers holds a steaming lamb shank literally inches under my nose and says, “Are you ready yet?”

“No," I said politely. "As you can see, I just started my salad.”

The wait-captain ran up to my table and apologized. “I’m sorry sir. He’s new here. I’ll have him take that lamb shank back and bring you a new one when you’re ready.”

I thanked him. I took two more forkfuls of salad. And poof! There was the same sub-waiter again, with the same lamb shank, a little less steamy this time.

“Ready yet, sir?” He asked.

“No no no. I’m still eating my sald. Look. See that stuff on my plate? It’s salad!”

The wait-captain reappeared, at least making an attempt to seem horrified. “I’m sorry,” he said, “some people just don’t listen.”

He hustled the sub-waiter away again and I went back to my salad. Two forkfuls later – you guessed it!

This time I felt myself rising to my feet. I felt my arms waiving wildly in the air. I was about to explode. The only reason I didn’t was, I was afraid I might kill somebody on the waitstaff and then have to get defended by an incompetent lawyer.

The fourth time the lamb shank came (by now a genuinely different one, and steaming again) there was only a little bit of salad left on my plate. I figured, the hell with it. It was either start eating the damn lamb shank or start throwing dishes. I ate the lamb shank before I finished my salad.

Unlike money, which under the Bush Administration trickles up from the poor and middle class to the filthy rich, incompetence always seeks its own level. As the old Italian saying goes, “The fish rots from the head.”

So I blame George Bush for everything. I blame him for the war. I blame him for the nearly incomprehensible size of the national debt. I blame him for the huge economic pressure on the poor and middle class in a time of plenty. I blame him for a still-devastated New Orleans. I blame him for the Justice Department scandal. I blame him for blonde bimbos. I blame him for the hordes of homeless people sleeping in what ought to be one of the most beautiful little parks in California. I blame him for a U.S. Supreme Court that’s starting to make Neanderthal inroads into years of established constitutional law. I blame George Bush for mindless water torturers in secret prisons. I blame him for our failing healthcare system.

And most of all, I blame him for an idiot waiter in a Santa Monica restaurant, shoving a lamb shank in my face, over and over again.

It’s time Congress stiffed Bush with an act of impeachment.

Learn how to get rich quick in real estate. Join your teacher in Bankruptcy Court. Or prison.

I'm indebted to "Investment U," a newsletter of a stock advisory service called The Oxford Club, from which I've stolen the following:

Of course, these “no money down” gigs have been going on for decades. And the results are generally not what anyone would call enviable.

Forget about the outcome for the students. Take a look at what’s happened to the authors who sold the books and promoted the seminars. According to author John T. Reed:

Albert Lowry, author of “How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1987.

Craig Hall, author of “Craig Hall’s Book of Real Estate Investing,” declared bankruptcy in 1992.

Bill “Tycoon” Greene, author of “Two Years for Freedom,” was convicted, fined and sentenced to prison. (He later escaped from a minimum security prison and is believed to be living in England.)

Tony Hoffman, author of “How to Negotiate Successfully in Real Estate,” filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for his company in 1986.

Wade Cook, author of “How to Build a Real Estate Money Machine,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1987 and 2003.

Dave Glubeitch, author of “The Money Game,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1987.

Dave Del Dotto, author of “Cash Flow System,” was charged by the FTC with misrepresenting products in 1993. He filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1995.

Charles Givens, author of “Wealth Without Risk,” was successfully sued by a former customer for giving bad financial advice. He filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1995. He died pending trial.

Sonny Block, author of “Inside Real Estate,” was indicted in May 1995 by a federal grand jury for fraud and fled to the Dominican Republic to avoid prosecution. He was eventually deported to the U.S., but died pending trial.

Ed Beckley, author of “Million Dollar Secrets,” declared bankruptcy in 1987 and was sentenced to federal prison for wire fraud.

Robert Allen, the author of “Nothing Down” and “Creating Wealth,” declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in May 1996.

"Deaf Photog and Blind Editor Overcome the Odds Together”

That was the headline of a recent story in the magazine Editor and Publisher.

What I want to know is, what’s so newsworthy about the story?

Any celeb who ever said to a photographer, “Hey, please stop stalking me,” knows all news photographers all deaf.

And any reporter or writer who ever submitted a memo for a story idea and never heard back from his editor may have suspected the oaf is blind.

Or maybe the editor was too busy sending a reporter out to the remotest wilds of East New York at 2 AM to wake up a couple, tell them their kid just got killed and a car crash, and ask, “What kind of a boy was he?”

In my big city newspaper reporting days, more decades ago than I care to mention, my night city editor did that to me. I was new at the game and did as I was told, making my way through remote slums in the wee hours.

When I came back to the city room (they didn’t have “newsrooms” in those days) of my evil night city editor’s henchpeople said, “Hey kid, you did pretty well. Those are all accurate quotes.” Sure they were. But how was he so sure, I asked.

“Because we’ve been calling the parents. We could have done the story on the phone. We just wanted to see if you had the guts.”

Don’t even get me started on copy editors, literary agents, or graphic designers who come back with complaints like, “Hey your story is too long to wrap around the picture I have in mind for it. Cut 300 words.”

Anyway, if you feel you must read the full Editor & Publisher story about deaf and blind news coverage, you’ll find it here:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003585581

A bum gets burned on a bum rap. And then burns himself passing the buck. It’s his usual sleazy behavior.

I don’t like Rudolph Giuliani, the former Republican Mayor of New York who’s now a potential Republican Presidential candidate.

Yes, he put on a great and admirable display of leadership immediately after the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster. He actually came off – at least for a few days – as sympathetic and likeable. And yes, under his administration the crime rate began to fall, policing got better, quality of life crimes lessened significantly, and prosperity grew here in New York grew. All good things.

But generally, Giuliani’s behavior was sometimes irascible, sometimes sleazy, occasionally in defiance of law, and largely focused around what was good for Rudy Giuliani. More about that later. First, an issue for which Giuliani is taking a rap he doesn’t deserve – and then reverting to his weasely form in dealing with the issue.

THE CASE OF THE MISPLACED
"WAR ROOM." OR WAS IT?

This has to do with the location of the mayor’s Emergency Operations Center – a radiation protected, supposedly blast-resistant, communications equipment-bristling, semi-secret “war room.” It was here that Mayor Giuliani was supposed to have been able to take charge of New York in case of atomic blast, citywide rioting, unprecedented flooding, or invasion by – I dunno, Martians, maybe.

As it happens, it was located at 7 World Trade Center, one of the neighboring buildings that were flattened and burned out by the falling debris from the 1 and 2 World Trade Center twin towers.

Hey, it’s easy to Monday morning quarterback this decision. On the negative side, it’s true as critics point out, that the World Trade Center had already been the target of an Al Quaida attack – a truck bomb that went off in a garage under one of the two towers. So maybe the Command Center should have been someplace else.

Brooklyn has been mentioned as a rejected location for a command center in the "he said/she said/they said/you said” accusations that have been flying around.

But there were also valid reasons for using 7 World Trade Center. It was close to City Hall and other municipal offices such as the Police and Fire Departments – a very quick drive or relatively short jog away. 7 World Trade Center itself was home to the New York offices of various Federal law enforcement agencies – you know, the ones that as it turned out weren’t speaking to one another, enabling the 9/11 plot to hatch, free from Federal interference.

Also, 7 World Trade Center was not one of the twin towers. To rule it out you’d have to posit that A) Al Quaida would try all over again to bring the towers down by a different means B) the Federal Government under George Bush would be completely asleep at the switch C) that this time they’d hijack a bunch of planes and fly them into the towers D) these “fireproof” buildings would then collapse, their structures virtually melted by the flames and E) that falling debris from the first two structures would completely destroy neighboring structures.

GIULIANI SAYS SOME HAPLESS
SCHNOOK MADE HIM DO IT.

If you could posit A, B, C,D and E, you’d be the world’s greatest seer and medium. That’s really all Rudy Giuliani had to say in his defense of the choice of 7 World Trade Center. But no.

Instead, he whines that in effect, an underling working for him sort of, well, uh – made him do it. That was the recommendation, and how was he supposed to know better, Giuliani snivels.

Baloney, says the former underling, Jerome Hauer, who was Giuliani’s first director of emergency management. Others are weighing in on one side or another.

You’ll find URLs referring you to some of the details of finger-pointing at the end of this article. What’s important to note here is that finger pointing – passing the blame for bad things that happened on his watch to somebody else – is a hallmark of the Giuliani modus operandi. And for that matter, getting rid of underlings who are getting too much praise for doing good work is also part of his style.

“EVERYBODY SAYS YOU’RE DOING
A GREAT JOB. SO YOU’RE FIRED!”

Take the case of William Bratton, the first police commissioner under Giuliani (now chief honcho of the LAPD.) It was Bratton, recruited here from Boston, who dreamed up a new style of policing, patrolling and arresting quality-of-life criminals. That's one of the things that helped bring on a quick and wonderful reduction of the crime rate.

Almost everybody liked Bratton. Almost everyone praised him. And that really got Giuliani’s goat. Clearly Rudy wanted all the praise for himself.

Poof! Bratton was fired. Pretty soon, top NYPD administration was peopled with a number of hacks, one of them, Bernie Kerik, said to have Mafia ties and certainly problems with corruption and his own income taxes.

Hey, no matter. By following Bratton patrol policies, the cops were able to keep the crime rate down, and now Rudy Giuliani could get all the credit.

COMMISSIONERS WHO’D BETTER
“TAKE A BULLET” FOR THE MAYOR

Giuliani wanted to make sure that nothing bad got blamed on him. The word was going around that interviews for various senior appointive jobs in his administration began with the question, “Would you take a bullet for the mayor?”

The meaning of that question was, “If something gets screwed up in your department, even if it happens because the mayor ordered it to happen, will you take all the blame and not mention you were doing this on the Mayor's orders?”

Rudy’s philosophy of life (“It’s all about me”) even extended to his own family. During Rudy’s inaugural, his seven year old son – remember, only seven years old – stole the show by mimicking his father’s gestures. Guess what? Rudy deported his own son. Well, only to a boarding school, but that was it. The poor kid was never seen in public again until his adulthood, when he proclaimed a rift with his father. Gee, no kidding.

The message was clear. Don't poke fun at Rudy Giuliani. Even if you're a little kid. Even if you're his own little kid.

ATTEMPTED MUNICIPAL
COUP D’ETAT

There was also the little matter of trying to overthrow the city constitution. We have term limits here. At the end of his second term, Rudy suddenly went looking for a way to stay on as mayor after his elected term ended. In effect, he was feeling out the reaction to what might have been a municipal coup d’etat.

Imagine if the President of the United States did that. If it ever happens, this country stops being a democratically-elected republic and becomes a dictatorship.

So I’m horrified by Rudy Giuliani’s attempt at candidacy for President. He’s a potential dictator. He deserves to remain in private life with his third wife, enjoying icy relations with his kids.

But he doesn’t deserve flak on his choice of an emergency command post. As some wag said about the behavior of prosecutors and police during the OJ Simpson trial, “They’re trying to frame a guilty man.”




More on the potential national and international disaster that is Rudy Giuliani here:

On the World Trade Center command post flap:
http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/giuliani-911-and-the-emergency-command-center-continued/#more-1999

On Giuliani’s mayoral temperament
http://www.cercles.com/review/r27/siegel5.htm

Why lots of New York cops hate Giuliani
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/nyregion/14giuliani.html?ref=nyregion

On Giuliani trying to feel out a municipal coup d’etat
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/terror/aftermath/1062396.html

Picture of Giuliani’s 7 year old son upstaging his dad, for which he was deported to boarding school:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/us/politics/03rudy.html?ex=1179460800&en=42ddb6d7cf8e2100&ei=5070

Fly me to the moon, George. In other words, I love your syntax.

Wasn't it Frank Sinatra who sang a song called "Fly Me To the Moon?" And wasn't the key refrain, "In other words, hold my hand. In other words, I love you?"

The phrase "in other words" is now popping up with alarming frequency in other words -- the words of President George Bush. In fact, it's popping up so many times in a short speech that I'm ready to fly to the moon, provided I can take his Iraq policy with me and leave it there.

In other words, his speech patterns are getting weirder and weirder.

I'm grateful to New York journalist and advertising writer Richard Rosenthal, who sent me the following "other" words:

>>This is your president speaking: the utterances of George W. Bush either April 9 or 10, 2007 as reported in the Congressional Quaterly, taken from a transcript of his talk at an American Legion post in Fairfax, VA


>>"This is a -- this is an unusual era in which we live, defined on

September the 11th, 2001. See, that's a date that reminding us the

world has changed significantly from what we thought the world

was ... My attitude about the world changed, and I know the attitude

about the world from a lot of folks here in America's attitude

changed ...



>>"I vowed that day that we would go on the offense against an enemy,

that the best way to defeat this enemy is to find them overseas and

bring them to justice so they will not hurt the folks here at home.

In other words, we don't have the luxury of hoping for the best, of

sitting back and being passive in the face of this threat. In the

past, we would say oceans would protect us and, therefore, what

happened overseas may not matter here at home.



>>"That's what changed on September the 11th. What happens overseas

affects the security of the United States ...



>>"I vowed that, 'If you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty

as the terrorist.' That's a doctrine.



>>"In order for this country to be credible, when the president says

something, he must mean it. I meant it. And the Taliban found out

that we meant what we said. And therefore, we ended al-Qaida's safe

haven in a failed state.



>>"The two points I want to make is, doctrine matters; and secondly, a

failed state can lead to severe consequences for the American people ...



>>"In other words, there was reprisal ...



>>"In other words, the lack of security would have created an

opportunity for extremists to move in ...



>>"In other words, in sending troops in, it is -- I recognize that this

is more than a military mission ...


>>"In other words, this operation is just getting started ...


>>"In other words, part of the effort is not only to provide security

to neighborhoods, but we're constantly training Iraqis so that they

can do this job ...


>>"So, in other words, it's a combination of providing security in

neighborhoods through these joint security stations, and training ...


>>"I'm always amazed at the men and women who wear our uniform. Last

week, before I went down to Crawford -- for a snowy Easter, I might

add -- I was in California at Fort Irwin. And I had a chance to visit

with some who had just come back from Iraq and some who were going

over to Iraq. And it just amazes me that these young men and women

know the stakes. They understand what we're doing. And they have

volunteered to serve.


>>"We're really a remarkable country and a remarkable military. And

therefore we owe it to the families and to those who wear the uniform

to make sure that this remarkable group of men and women are strongly

supported -- strongly supported, by the way, during their time in

uniform and then after their time in uniform through the Veterans

Administration.


>>"I tried to put this war into a historical context for them. In other

words, I told them that they're laying the foundation of peace. In

other words, the work we're doing today really will yield peace for a

generation to come."<<

Results of Bush free trade policies and laxness on food purity: First your cat dies. Then your dog. Next? Maybe you.

One of the problems with laissez-faire capitalism is that it fails to account sufficiently for the bottomless pit of evil that is home to men with dollar signs in their eyes.

It doesn’t matter if they’re American or Chinese. If they can make a buck and you die from their efforts, tough luck for you, pal.

A case in point is the melamine-infested “wheat gluten” and “rice gluten" that have been making their ways into the food chain via producers in China.

Melamine is essentially a high nitrogen chemical useful as a fire retardant and a pesticide. The latter use ought to be enough to raise government radar antennas in Washington to full mast, but hey, sleeping at the switch is a Bush administration specialty.

At any rate, some Chinese producers have been mixing melamine into wheat gluten and rice gluten because it tends to “fool” some lab tests into thinking it’s protein. The formula seems to be “less protein + more melamine = more profit.”

The Chinese producers are thrilled, because they’re making bigger bucks. The importers are thrilled, because they can buy and sell a bit cheaper, increasing demand for their services. The food processors are thrilled, because cheaper product in means higher profits out.

Or at least they were until the scandal broke.

The U.S. Government Departments of Commerce, Argiculture, Homeland Security? Well, as usual, they were too busy hiring good little Republican aparatchiks to take notice.

Sometimes I wonder if they weren’t also thrilled because some Republican and Bush campaign contributors were making bigger profits. I can’t prove that, although I wish some enterprising journalist would. The pattern certainly seems to fit.

Then the dogs and cats started dying. I dunno about you, but I got scared right away. I was leaving town to do some traveling, abandoning my blog for a while, but in my notice that The New York Crank would be on hold for a while I wrote, “…if poisoned wheat gluten could kill cats and dogs, it might be killing people, too? I mean, do you know where the wheat gluten in your bread comes from?” You’ll find it here:
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2007/04/announcing-short-and-cranky-damn-hiatus.html

While it depresses me to tell you so, hey dude, I told you so. Since then, guess what?

It’s been discovered that melamine is making its way into hogfeed and chicken feed. And now fish feed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_he_me/food_contamination

And moreover, it now turns out melamine is working its way into plain old wheat.

Which means just about everything you might enjoy eating is poisoned. Every-damned-thing.

That, of course, has awakened our Republican administration. Somebody’s eyelids fluttered open long enough to say, according to an Associated Press story:

“The level of contamination is expected to be too low to pose any danger to human health, said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection.”

Yeah, just the assurances you know you can trust from those wonderful folks who gave you A Helluva Job Brownie, Mission Accomplished, WMD in Iraq and other tributes to forked tongue politics.

Hey, wasn’t America once the breadbasket of the world? Aren’t we still subsidizing farmers not to grow stuff? Why do we have to buy wheat and rice from China in the first place?

Laissez-faire free trade is the answer. The doctrinaire belief is that the market always speaks to the benefit of the consumer. A bunch of corporate sleazebags let poison creep into the food chain? Hey, no problem because the free market will take care of it. People who learn the stuff is poisonous will stop buying it.

Sure, after we’re all dead.

Here’s what we need:

1. America needs a five year ban on food or food ingredient imports – whether animal or human food – from any country that lets poison creep into the stuff living things ingest here. China, that means you too, you greedy poisoning bastards!

2. America needs food testing on all agricultural products. Al Quaida doesn’t need a bomb, it turns out. All it needs is a bag of fish food to start wiping out Americans.

3. America needs rigid, rigid, rigid FDA enforcement. You don’t “work with” people who poison you. You pop them in the pokey and feed them their own glutenized bread and water. That rule most certainly should extend to American citizens. People who import, distribute, or mix poison into the food supply are serial killers. No pun intended. (But hey, what really is in your corn flakes?)

4. America needs clear source labeling law that affects all food – every damn morsel – that Americans eat. This includes most especially beef, poultry, chicken and fish. But it also extends things like bread and breakfast cereals, all of which contain grains and glutens. The label should clearly and readably state the source of all ingredients. “Wheat gluten” is not enough. Is it Chinese wheat gluten, “wheat gluten of unknown origin” or “American wheat gluten?” The difference could mean life or death for you.

5. Support for the American family farmer. Not the agri-business combines. I'm talking about individually owned farms with net income of $200,000 or less. There are fewer and fewer of those every year. But we need more and more. If we ever get into a hassle with China and we start relying on some mega-manipulative argri-business trading company to import all our food, we’re royally screwed. You think energy dependence is a problem? Try food dependence.

We don’t need less government. We need more government, protecting what we put in our mouths.

But from the Bush Administration? Don’t hold your breath.

More Psychic Ding Awards: for a nutty judge, a witchy broadcaster and bringers of frivolous law suits

Hey, first principles first. This Cranky blog strongly favors class action liability law suits. The New York Crank is firmly convinced that law suits are often the best protection we have against some of society’s biggest and scummiest thugs – corporate America.

But even before we get to corporations, consider medical malpractice insurance rates. President Bush would have had you believe, when he was railing against high insurance rates for medical malpractice, that the cost of your medical care is through the roof because sleazy lawyers are suing doctors left right and center.

There are a few little holes – say, the size of an Iraqi car bomb crater – in that argument. First of all, the primary cause of increased medical malpractice insurance rates, when they happen, is bad investing of premium dollars by insurance companies.

The truth is, the number of malpractice suits has remained pretty stable while the cost insurance has risen. The reason: when insurance companies don’t make enough money from their investments, they keep their profits up by raising their rates. Check some of the story out here:
www.centerjd.org/air/StableLosses.pdf

The good news about medical malpractice suits is that hospitals and doctors are on notice that if they screw up – through carelessness or plain incompetence – the malpractice lawyers will sue them from here to hell. And that awareness helps protect you from sloppy or unethical medicine whenever you step into a doctor’s office or a hospital.

Moreover, even if malpractice rates were up because of an increase in successful law suits against doctors (which I repeat, is not, not, not at all the case) the government ought to be going after improper peer review and licensing procedures for physicians, not the consumer’s right to seek redress. And doctors aren’t the only example.

Think of all those cars that used to explode when rear-ended – until auto makers got sued into building safer cars. Think of the poisonous pharmaceuticals – Thalidomide’s history of deforming fetuses comes to mind – and of manufacturers who’d gladly dispose of chemical waste by letting it leach into your drinking water, if a whole bunch of us couldn’t get together and sue them into kingdom come.

Okay, all that said, there’s an old principle of English common law that says something like this: “Even the lowliest whore in the Strand may sue a prince or an earl.” Meaning that anyone can sue anyone else for anything in the world. You may lose your lawsuit, but you can’t be stopped from suing.

For example, a judge who belongs in a nuthouse may cheerfully and frivolously sue a hapless drycleaner. Such appears to be the case of a Washington D.C. judge, Roy Pearson, who is suing his neighborhood dry cleaner over a pair of pants. He’s demanding for his “lost” pants – which the dry cleaner claims were returned to him – a mere $65 million. Yup, you read that right. Sixty-five million bucks. For a pair of pants.

This would be a huge joke, if not for the fact that the husband-wife-and-son dry cleaners, Jin Nam Chung, Ki Chung and their son, Soo Chung, have had to pay lawyers every step of the way to stave off financial ruin. They’re just about ruined anyway, even though their last offer to settle the suit – just to get rid of the madly suing judge and his insane flap over a pair of pants – was $12,000.

You want to address inequities in the legal system here? It has nothing to do with your right to seek a class action suit against a deep-pocketed corporate malefactor. It has a lot to do with the right of a malefactor to keep forcing you to pay for legal expenses to defend yourself until he destroys you financially regardless of the facts, or who’s right or wrong. Blame the lowly-whore-in-the-Strand principle of law. Incidentally, for Judge Pearson, there appears to have been no significant out-of-pocket costs. This particular denizen of the Strand is representing himself.

The solution has already been invented – in England, the same country that invented the whore-in-the-Strand principle. Losers pay all legal costs. To which I might ad, the same jury that tries the case ought to be able to assign punitive damages to victims like the Chung family. That would discourage Pearson’s kind of venomous frivolity fast.

As it is, I do hope the local bar associations in the area will demand that the judge step down from his bench – and that they disbar him, rip his robes off his back, and roundly boo him as he runs down the street in his shorts.

He also gets a psychic ding from the fortune teller on the block where The New York Crank’s offices are located. Specifically: May he have recurring nightmares that the entire planet is pointing fingers at him and jeering. And when he exits from his home each day, may he see his nightmares coming true. And may many of the jeering populace show up at his disbarment proceedings. Ding!

For more about this horror story paste this in your browser and bristle at it:
http://my.earthlink.net/article/str?guid=20070503/46395e40_3421_133452007050377044224

Incidentally, the propensity to sue people for telling the truth seems to extend not only to lowly whores in the Strand but to wealthy divorcees in Santa Barbara who buy newspaper companies with their divorce settlement checks. Check out this nasty story (You may have to register first):
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-mccaw19dec19,1,7280559.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Finally, there’s, Nancy Grace. If you don’t know who she is, print out her photograph, below, and take it back to Mars with you.



The scowl you see is every bit as nasty as the TV manner of this former prosecutor manqué. How manqué? Well, consider this entry from Wikipedia:

"In a 2005 opinion, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of appeals said Grace 'played fast and loose' with her ethical duties and failed to 'fulfill her responsibilities' as a prosecutor in the 1990 triple murder trial of Herbert Connell Stephens. She failed to turn over evidence that pointed to other suspects to his defense. The court noted that it was 'difficult to conclude that Grace did not knowingly' elicit false testimony from a police investigator that there were no other suspects despite strong evidence to the contrary."

Why she didn’t end up on trial for obstruction of justice and malicious prosecution beats me, in light of the above. Nancy’s modus operandi seems to be, find them guilty first, hang them second, determine the facts third – or now that they’re hanged, why the hell bother?

Alas, although the Georgia jurisdiction where she once practiced evidently sleazy law on behalf of the people has said good riddance to her, she has been welcomed into the open arms of CNN.

For a while I thought I was the only one who happened to notice she had a habit of trying cases on-air, without benefit of a defense attorney, or a judge, or a jury. But finally, some of the press has picked up on her, by virtue of a suicide by a woman named Melissa Duckett.

Grace, according press reports, lured Duckett, the mother of a missing child, onto TV with considerably less than fully truthful promises about the purpose of the interview. Then Grace badgered Duckett if Grace were – well, describing Grace as prosecutorial would be on the mild side. She acted more like the waterboarding supervisor at Abu Garib.

Result: Duckett, who was never charged with anything, tried for anything, found guilty of anything, or had any compelling evidence against her regarding her daughter’s death that I know of, committed suicide at her grandparents’ home. Next day, Grace aired the interview anyway. A real sweetheart, this Nancy Grace. She’s all eye of newt and toe of frog, if you ask me.

Anyway, you’ll find some of the horrifying details, as reported by the Associated Press, here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/21/america/NA_GEN_US_Missing_Boy.php

And even more if it, here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/15/MNGSAL67FH1.DTL

My local midtown fortune teller, who has been spending some of her evenings sitting on a bridge chair outside of her place of business now that the weather has turned warmer, agreed to a superduper psychic ding for Nancy Grace.

“May the estate of Melinda Duckett, which has filed a law suit against Grace, trounce her so badly and make her such a liability to her own and other networks, that she’ll have to open a dry cleaning store to survive.

"And may she then get sued by a nutty judge."

Poetry that bears witness to horror

If I learned one valuable thing as a college literature major almost a half century ago, it was that I don’t have a clue what makes for great poetry – or for mediocre poetry. Nor for that matter, can I distinguish between great and mediocre literature or even good and bad literary criticism.

The “New Criticism” school of structural analysis that was still popular in my distant undergraduate days was no help at all. The New Criticism methodology seemed akin to explaining the beauty of a tulip by ripping off its leaves and measuring its pistils and stamens.

You ended up with quantifiable but completely unhelpful information, and you pretty much ruined your enjoyment of the tulip.

I find the current “lit crit” wave of “deconstructionism” (or at least it was “current” last I was trying to pay attention) even more useless. Decontructionism speaks in tongues. Its mad prophets pull apart the tulip, chew and swallow its parts and then vomit up an ugly mess of impenetrable babble. Some years ago a deconstructionist literary journal published a send-up of itself after a peer review panel failed to detect that the densely written jargon they approved for publication was a leg-pulling hoax.

So all I am left with is an all-too-familiar “theory” of literary aesthetics. Alas, I could have arrived at it without my struggling father having flushed a considerable fortune (at least for him) down an intellectual toilet on my behalf. Specifically:

I don’t know much about literature but I know what I like.

And furthermore, very occasionally, I even know why I like it.

With that lengthy know-nothing’s caveat in mind, I want to call your attention to a small and in some respects curious volume of poems call “Wall Street Sonnets du 11 Septembre,” by Eugene Schlanger. (Photograph of the book above.)

No, the title is not an act of franglais pretentiousness. It’s the consequence of a curious publishing method at a company called Underbahn that I’ve been told prints its books in French in the United States and then transports the books for sale in Paris. Schlanger writes in English. Each poem in the book appears in both English and its French translation.

AND SO?

Well, for openers, my best guess after reading the poetry inspired by 9/11 is that some of it is pretty good. Let me offer you a few small tastes from the English pages.

From the poem “Porters and Promotors,” comes an observation I will mention again later:

“This death was an egalitarian act,
Uniting porters and promoters, the rich
And the illiterate, cops and fire chiefs
In a wealthy smoldering tangled mass…”

Or from another poem called “Afternoon Interlude at Trinity Church”:

“…I knew a man who was vaporized
And one day I may meet Audrey
His widow, in Brooklyn, and sigh.

“In this Episcopal church, a decade ago,
Desmond Tutu railed against Apartheid
From the lectern; Gallatin is buried in
The North yard; but these obese tourists
Do not remove their FDNY caps, somber,

“Yet peacefully (or painfully) unaware of
American commerce and art and history…”

It’s all sometimes wry, sometimes touching and sometimes irate stuff, as properly it ought to be.

True, it lacks the emotional thrust of a question reportedly asked by a child, as she stood with her mother on a promenade across the East River in Brooklyn about a mile away, watching the 9/11 horror show. According to this story (I haven’t been able to track down its origin) mother and daughter saw several people in the distance, their clothes on fire, leaping to their death from 92nd story windows of one of the towers. And the little girl asked curiously:

“Mommy, why are the birds on fire?”

In the end, it is the naïve soul, not the poets, who unwittingly craft the most powerful lines. Which brings to mind…

DYBBUKS, A NOVEL
AND ANNE FRANK

I’m currently reading a bitter but nevertheless brilliantly funny novel from the 1960s, “The Dance of Genghis Cohn,” by Romain Gary. It’s narrated by the ghost of an extermined Jewish comedian, now a dybbuk who inhabits and manipulates the mind and the body of the Nazi war criminal who shot him to death.

Yes, it’s an emotional experience that simultaneously makes you feel rage, relish the dybbuk’s revenge, and rail at the futility of both. But nothing that I know in Holocaust literature fuels emotions more than the sweetly-written “Diary of Anne Frank.” And even that pales by comparison with filmed footage of what the Allies found when they liberated the concentration camps.

So now to the question, often implied but rarely stated bluntly in book reviews: Why should you buy this book?

For the answer I have to refer to my own recollections of Schlanger’s obese tourists near the Ground Zero site.

Shortly after 9/11, New York was flooded with tourists who wanted to see Ground Zero. I know this first-hand because I occasionally volunteer as a tour guide for a non-profit organizations that boosts New York City tourism, and I led several visitors to the wreckage. Inevitably, as the visitors pointed their cameras toward the rubble and twisted steel I saw them get stopped by policemen, who would say something like, “Have some respect. They’re pulling body parts out of there.”

The tourists deferred to authority. They had no choice. The people stopping them were armed cops who for justifiable reasons were not in a good mood. All the same, I’m not sure the best way to respect the victims of 9/11 was to avoid recording what the terrorists had done to them.

We live in an era where denial and revisionist lies are standard operating procedure for propagandists of all stripes. Holocaust denial has grown from a cottage industry to an international enterprise, currently funded and cordially hosted by Iran. All you have to do to retch at the twisting of truth is to examine some holocaust denial websites. (And no, I most definitely will not aid their cause by providing any links) One such website helpfully explains that the gas chambers were not for exterminating people, but rooms where mattresses were disinfected for the benefit of the Jewish guests at Buchenwald.

Fortunately, the WWII Allies captured and in some cases recorded film footage, as well as paper records and grisly artifacts such as human skin lampshades – tangible evidence that belies the holocaust deniers. All you have to do to understand the reality of the Holocaust is watch ten seconds of documentary footage showing bulldozers pushing a mountain of corpses into a ditch for mass burial. (Screen “Judgment at Nuremberg” some time.)

AT SOME POINT, DELIBERATE DENIAL
OF THE OVERT TRUTH
ITSELF BECOMES A WAR CRIME

Had it been up to me, there would have been an army of volunteers not only leading tourists with camera to the horrors of Ground Zero, but insisting – insisting! – that they take photographs. I want records! Graphic, irrefutable records. And I want them in every attic trunk, every shoebox, every library, every computer and personal electronic archive on the planet. Just as there are Holocaust deniers today, there will be attempts at 9/11 denial half a century from today. In fact, they have already begun, spawned from the ashes of 9/11 and hatched by hate-filled opportunists.

The denials began only days after the twin towers fell. LeRoi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, started putting out viciously libelous propaganda in a poem called “Somebody Blew Up America,” virtually claiming – on the basis of self-invented evidence – that Israel was behind the day’s events.

To fire him, the Governor of New Jersey had to eliminate the post Jones/Baraka occupied as the state’s Poet Laureate.

Similarly, Ward Chuchill, a University of Colorado professor, declared the incinerated victims of 9/11 to be “little Eichmanns.” His complaint seems to be that they deserved their awful deaths because their jobs generated profits, which helped support capitalism, which in turn supports the U.S. economy, which in turn generated tax money, which in turn enabled George Bush to fund his war in Iraq.

Never mind the true sequence of events (The Iraq invasion happened after 9/11). Never mind the lengthy and improbable nexus that Churchill creates, or the fact that some of those “little Eichmanns” were there to cook meals, bus tables, or (horror of horrors!) to administer pension funds. Schlanger has put his finger on it. They were truly the “porters and promoters,” and anything but an army of Nazi apparatchiks.

Churchill’s mean-spirited hate speech (an appropriate redundancy if ever there was one) resulted in getting him fired from a state university by the Colorado governor, but he gained the support of 199 of his fellow faculty members. They all ought to be be chained to their chairs and forced to watch, with their eyes taped open, an endless loop of 9/11 nightmares, most especially footage made by a French documentary group which was at the World Trade Center on 9/11 by coincidence. The horrifying sound track of bodies crashing to the concrete from above is all you need in order to infer the responsibilities and limits of academic freedom.

I wish the 9/11 holocaust deniers – Leroy Jones, Ward Churchill and his supporters and perhaps many not yet born – could be confronted at every turn by photographs of the dismembered body parts of the victims who were roasted and smashed to death thanks to Bin Ladin’s scheme from hell. Let the deniers’ progeny demand of those little Ward Churchills and Leroi Joneses, “Daddy, why was this a good thing? Will I some day have to fly out of a building with my dress on fire?”

In the meantime, Eugene Schlanger bears witness in his own way. He gives us an imperfect but still nicely crafted poetic cudgel to reinforce humanity’s defenses against those who would deny 9/11.

So I encourage you to buy his book. Here and there you’ll find little tributes to his politically conservative economic outlook that I do not much care for. I encourage you to buy the book anyway. Save it, preserve it and give it to your children. (There’s a URL below where you can order.)

The future will cry out for the voices of witnesses. Schlanger’s is one of them. Would that we had more.



You might want to check out these URLs. Just copy and paste them into your browser:

To Order “Wall Street Sonnets”-

http://www.opinionjournalbookstore.com/cgi-bin/Shopper.exe?preadd=action&key=0977422445


On Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiri_Baraka

On Ward Churchill and his college faculty supporters:

http://home.comcast.net/~jackott2/a_house_of_cards.htm

Churchill on “Little Eichmanns”:

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/mn/sept112001/somepeoplepushback.html