The Donald Trump, Cuomo-Nixon, Dead Tree Parks Department Blues

Two years ago, the New York City Department of Parks cut down a
tall, leafy mature tree that stood here. Recently, they replaced it
with this obviously dead sapling. More complaints below.

If it seems I’ve been posting to this allegedly political blog at an unconscionably slow pace recently, you’re absolutely right.

I have a theory about why I feel about as incentivized to post most days as I feel a yearning to hike up to Central Park and take a long drink of water out of its algae-choked lake. Yes, you guessed the reason.

Donald Trump.

Trump not only sucks the oxygen out of the room, he also sucks it out of human brains. How long can anybody go on even thinking about that zombie, much less writing about him regularly? 

I wake up each morning wondering, “Now what the hell has he done?” I rarely have to wait until nightfall before I find out. It’s usually another dispiriting commission of horror-by-tweeting, if not by firing of somebody who sneaked into his administration despite demonstrable competency, if not yet another new diplomatic or racial contretemps.  

Whatever the news, our phony president will label it as “fake news” the minute it boomerangs back on him and whacks him in the teeth.

So I need distractions. That’s why last night, here in New York, I sat down to watch a one-time-only debate between the Democratic Party’s primary candidates for governor of New York, the incumbent Mario Cuomo and his challenger, the actor Cynthia Nixon.

The Cuomo vs. Nixon prizefight

Prior to watching, I felt that although I vastly prefer Cynthia Nixon’s political outlook to what I regard as Andrew Cuomo’s crass opportunism, she simply lacks the political and managerial chops to be a successful governor. I mean, one rank amateur in a position of considerable political power these days is more than enough.

Her inexperience was already showing before the debate. She is pitifully under-financed, inept at raising funds from small contributors the way Bernie Sanders can, and uninspiring despite her mostly spot-on political positions, her name recognition, and the fact that I’d really like to see a woman take charge in Albany. 

So it was my intention to vote for Nixon in the primary, not in hope that she’d win it (she can’t possibly) but as a way of demonstrating to Cuomo that some of us loyal Democratic voters think he’s a bit too much of a hack apparatchik and a phony. We need a better Democratic governor overseeing a vast infrastructure, most of it in a condition of decline, decay and decrepitude. And no, decline, decay and decrepitude is not a three-headed redundancy. Each word has a slightly different meaning.

Zinger for zinger

both turned out to suck

Unfortunately, the “debate” was one of those shouting matches that turn far too many TV discussions into a chaotic approximation of  a callithumpian. Instead of intelligent debating points, we got an exchange of insults, put-downs, and zingers. This all confirmed  my deepest fears, that Nixon is an unworthy featherweight, and Cuomo is a mindless weathervane whose direction can be divined by checking on which way the political wind is blowing. A plague on both of them.

Which leaves me….what? Nada, that’s what. I can simply withhold my vote in this primary. Come the actual gubernatorial election, I will not, in good conscience, vote for any Republican at this moment in American history. Perhaps I can find some weird rump party to throw my vote away to. Is there still an American Vegetarian Party? (Not that I’m at all a vegetarian.) Is the Rent Is Too Damn High Party still active in New York State? Or do I have to write in Weird Al Yankovich’s name to express my rage and frustration?

I think that I shall never see

my Parks Department plant a tree

Go to the New York City Department of Parks website and you can find a one-paragraph prose poem in honor of of trees that ought to be entered in a Most Promising Nine-Year-Old poetry contest — assuming we ever get around to having a contest in celebration of immature authors who praise the obvious. I quote:

Our street trees are living breathing parts of our communities (though they often go unnoticed). They bring us shade in the warm months, shield us from the cold in the winter, and provide fresh air for us to breath all year long. To better grow and protect our urban forest it is important to get acquainted with your NYC trees.

This is why I was surprised, in fact startled — no, in fact shocked!— when more  than two years ago, the very same Department of Parks came down our street with a truck and a chain saw and sawed down two gorgeous, leafy old trees that had provided not only shade, but also some respite from the clouds of carbon monoxide  and other noxious gasses that passing cars vomit into the faces of passing pedestrians.

No doubt the tree-killing parks department would claim that the trees were “diseased,” whatever that means. They were big, sturdy, leafy, and in no visible danger of falling that I could see. Moreover, subsequent events convinced me that this city’s Department of Parks wouldn’t know a thriving mature tree from a chewed up pencil.

More than two years after they cut down the leafy trees, after constant badgering and pleading by individuals, and at least one building’s co-op board, and my City Councilman, the city came by last spring and planted two frail-looking saplings. One may yet make it, and twenty years from now — far beyond the time I am even vaguely likely to be alive according to  the actuarial tables — we may yet have a full-fledged adolescent tree growing in that spot. 

The other? That little toothpick of a disheveled sapling looked dead when they planted it. I didn’t say anything because, hey, what do I know about trees? But despite all kinds of rainfall, and sunshine, and summer warmth, its pathetic leaves have not un-shriveled. They just limply hang there, brown, brittle and lifeless. I am finally coming to terms with the fact that the parks people spent God-knows-how-many dollars to cut down a living tree and replace it, more than two years later, with a dead tree.

I suppose I could get my City Councilman back on the case. Maybe  if I did, a year or two from now somebody would come by again and cut down the dead sapling. And then, with continued badgering, they’d come by two years after that, and plant another sapling.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if that one turns out to be dead, too.