the spirit of new york; the shame of unions

So as of today, the Transit Worker Union, Local 100, of New York City is striking. They are doing so in violation of New York law, which prohibits essential civil servants—police, firemen, and transit workers—for resorting to walkouts in service of the Almighty Buck. Indeed, these are not coincidentally also the same three unions which are governed by the state’s blinding arbitration clauses. Exhibiting incomprehensible selfishness and turptitude, the union’s leadership opted to strike in the week before Christmas.

The TWU comprehends some of the best-paid unionized civil servants, averaging $55,000 per annum before benefits, pension, or overtime. All told, their compensation package is worth just shy of six figures. This average includes the janitorial staff, and the essentially unskilled laborers who run the trains: in New York, the subways are basically computerized. Nor is it an average inflated by gross disparity between the skilled ironworkers and mosaicists and these ruder employees; the standard deviation is very low. The TWU likes to take care of everyone.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority was offering increases in wages of 11% over three years, and was still offering free pensions to all workers. IMHO, pensions are an outmoded artifact of a more stolid and vertically integrated world, wholly unsuited to the modern employment environment. That workers expect a company to save money for is outrageous: are these people infants that do not trust themselves to decide how much of their paychecks to spend now and how much to save for later? Given the lachrymal whining of many of their representatives, perhaps infantilism is not so far off the mark. Nonetheless, the MTA was only proposing that employees be required to contribute one percent (that’s one-hundredth!) of their pension value over their careers, and that new employees pay six percent. The MTA also retreated on its demands that conductors and drivers on trains be combined into one position—because neither has much to do in any case, and that the booth staff do “light maintenance work,” which translates to getting off their duff (which is where they sit doing absolutely nothing for about fifty-five minutes out of an hour, based on my random sampling of subway stations over my six years here) and sweep the station up. Heaven forfend.

The TWU wanted more pay increases, less responsibilities, and no contribution to the pension fund. They pointed, principally, the the staggering one billion dollar surplus registered by the MTA this year. Admittedly, I had a lot of sympathy for the TWU’s position there. It was ineffably ham-handed for the MTA to gleefully announce so massive a surplus and hand out customer givebacks just before contract negotiations commence. But the numbers don’t lie: the surplus is the result of one-time revenues and economies of cost that will not exist as soon as next year, when the MTA is expected to return to hundred-million-dollar deficits once more. The MTA is surely corruptly run, and could be considerably more efficient, but the same and worse could be said of the TWU.

At least the MTA, for all its six-figured vice presidents and cushy subcontracting, is not in violation of the laws of the State of New York. Willfully, brazenly, self-righteously in defiance. It is with reason that transit workers are forbidden to strike. Even were the TWU’s demands remotely reasonable, to severely curtail the freedom and liberty of movement of twenty million people in the Greater new York area is unconscionable. Estimates for lost revenues in taxes and productivity are about $400 million dollars per day. Small businesses will be the first to be ruined by the dramatic drop in income in the crucial holiday season. That the TWu’s petty money-grubbing does not elicit the most abject opprobrium society has to offer is appalling. Even their parent union has disclaimed the strike, stating progress was being made, slowly but surely, and the resort to strike was malfeasant and reprehensible.

An injunction issued by a judge fines the TWU one million dollars per day of strike; under the Taylor Law, strikers are fined one extra day of pay in addition to the docked pay. This proved insufficient to deter the avarice of the TWU. The failure is not altogether surprising, since the fine only amounts to one-found-hundredth of the damage they wreak daily on the city. The same judge is now said to be considering jailing top union bosses if they persist in the illegal strike. The TWU only has about 3.6m on reserve, it claims, and does not expect the fines to stand. I can only hope they are centupled and the bums leading the lemmings of the TWU over a cliff to moral depravity are thrown in jail for a good long while.

As always, the people of New York are standing—and walking”strong. Commentators criticizing the self-congratulation of New Yorkers for their constitution and perseverence in the face of the strike are viscious and ought be ashamed of themselves. Are New Yorkers suffering a far greater burden than Omahans or Angelenos facing a transit strike? Of course; alone in the United States, New York is utterly dependent on mass transit to shuttle the eight million people work in Manhattan but live elsewhere to and fro. As the day has illustrated, not only do New Yorkers eschew cars, but they cannot be used to traffic so many people on and off an island with only nine colnnections to the outside world. The sight of hundreds of thousands of people walking stony-faced across the Brooklyn Bridge, of drivers stopping to make room for the hitchikers lining the roads hoping for a ride in... these are inspiring. New Yorkers live in a uniquely dense environment in Manhattan, and it requires a rarefied soul to maintain sanity when so constantly assaulted by one’s fellow man. But it is in the face of crisis and tragedy that New York is at its finest: strong, severe, indefatigable, passionate, empathic.

it is more true than anywhere else in America that New Yorkers depend every day on the kindness of strangers. But it is more visible than ever in New York when adversity forces such little kindnesses into the spotlight. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I applaud this city for once again rising to the occasion. As for the TWU, it has once again illustrated what malignantly cancerous and vapidly ignominious institutions unions have become. Where once they protected workers’ rights against the abuses of robber barons, now they serve only to eke every last penny from often strapped public government for well-fattened employees at the vivid expense of the greater good. Perhaps this will finally convince legislators to ban the conspiring cabals as an evil society need not tolerate. If companies cannot conspire against their workers, workers ought not conspire against their companies. For shame, TWU.

I would suggest they ought to get a lump of coal in their stockings this year, but I think them more deserving of a bag or burning dog shit.

moonshine plus eight am equals bad

So I'm at the frathouse, drinking the twelvepack of Rolling Rock I got like a responsible human being. You see, I have class the next day early as hell, and I’ll be waking up around 8 AM to accomodate this. And this is my property class, taught by a superlative professor, but also one who delights in asking questions like “I’m looking for someone who is actually prepared for class. Is there anyone like that in here?” So I have to bring my A-game. The only reason I’m even up at the house is because Wednesday is New South Park Night, and it’s just not worth it to watch them without the raucous confrerity of ten people who like the same kind of humor.

So all is going according to plan until James Leo shows up. He’s just finished off another batch of wine—he ferments his own booze, a project he’s been on for a few years now, and he’s gotten pretty damn good at it. This batch is particularly tasty, and he has three bottled with him, and who, as brother Coobank asks rhetorically, can turn down free booze. Three hours later, I’m snozzled and in the middle of an argument about overtime rules of for beirut at the West End. (They hit our last cup, but then on rebuttal both I and Coobank hit their one remaining cup. His partner agreed with us that we righteously won at that point—no overtime—but he argued long enough that we finally said fuck it. Naturally, they smacked us down in overtime. Life’s a bitch that way.)

Which brings us to this morning, when I wake up—miraculously, under the circumstances—with a splitting headache, nearly unmanning nausea, an aversion to light, and the faint taste of wine in my mouth. So the lesson here is: moonshine plus eight am equals bad. Very bad.

one-hundreth of a point to rapture

It’s the fourth anniversary of that first defining event of the twenty-first century, appallingly the terrorist attacks of 9-11. It’s surprising that as I walked past the WTC site, reading the panels commemorating the dead, that which moved me most profoundly was devoted to the passengers of Flight 93, whose plane crash-landed in a remote field in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard. Disproving the admonitions of stewardesses of yesteryear, those on board were on the phone with friends and relatives and learned of the first planes’ impact while they were still in flight. Evidence is naturally spotty on the events which ensued, but it appears that at least a substantial group rushed the terrorists in control of the craft and, in doing so, ended its murderous mission before greater casualties could be incurred.

Somehow this rings even more virtuous, even more heroic than the policemen and firefighters who rushed into the burning building on rescue missions only to be consumed themselves. Emergency personnel, at some level, alreay occupy a higher stratum of heroism in society; while these men were certainly above and beyond the call of duty, it seems somehow less uplifting than the idea that a random sampling of ordinary American citizens, realizing that their options were death now or death later at the cost of many more lives, opted for the former. If that decisions seems easy or blithe, think of the thousands of terminal patients in horrendous pain who forbear euthanasia in favor of wringing every moment from the unkind denouement of life. I think only of what Wilfred Owen called “that old Lie”: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

And now for something completely different.

Also marked by this September 11th was the first Sunday of the football season and the last day of the first week of our fantasy baseball playoffs. Football, as always, is a cause celebrè, an advent to be most eagerly desired, the culmination of a 207-day countdown from the end of Superbowl XXXIX in January. our celebration at Blondies Sports is scarcely muted in deference to the day; nor, to judge from the rafter-to-cellar crowd, are many New Yorkers condemning the return of football to a cinereous drabbery. I still don’t stay the whole the day, though... I’m just not feeling it.

I lost a week in fantasy football a few years back by three-hundredths of a point, because Shannon Sharpe, in his penultimate year in the NFL, ran six yards instead of seven on his last carry; that margin, coming in the eleventh week of the season, lost me my first game of the year—I’d been running a ten-week winning streak. It seemed unlikely that I would ever top that kind of photo finish. But this September 11th, we’re out to do the impossible. It’s the final day of the first week of fantasy baseball playoffs, and my opponent, George Ruiz, and I are tied six categories to six categories; we’re tied in the remaining two (wins and saves, since you asked). The tied persists to the end of the day, throwing the week to the tie-breaking category, our seven-day mean Earned Run Average... which I’m leading by exactly one-hundredth of one point. So I advance to the next round of the playoffs, on the tie-breaker, by one-third the margin of my last hairsbreadth match.

Random. Almost like an act of God. One-hundredth of a point to rapture.

two scenes for the big easy

I’ve been feeling as though I ought to write something about New Orleans’ inundation, but I wasn’t quite sure what. What to say that hasn’t already been said by people with far wider readerships than me? This weekend’s crop of New York Times editorials, penned by a group never particularly fond of the president, were scathingly vituperous and even somewhat bewildered at the sheer indolence of the administration in facing the catastrophe. The punditocracy doesn’t know why Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, seemed so blitheringly incompetent and ill-informed at the first major test of his agency’s responsivity to crisis; neither do I. Few try to explain why Bush seemed first to studiously avoid the problem, and then, even when forced to Louisiana by the weight of public outcry, restricted his visit to grinning photo-ops and glib platitudes in such bad taste even Pat Robertson (he of the suggestion we assassinate the premier of Venezuela) would wonder how Dubya got his foot into his duodenum with such ease. An exemplary scene: the commander-in-chief, standing on a spic-and-span runway, about to flee the benighted city, commenting on the destruction of former Senate majority leader Trent Lott’s manse, noting that it would be rebuilt soon bigger and better. Rebuilt, of course, because the honorable gentleman from Mississippi has the kind of cash to do that. Once the screened porches were back up, Mr Bush averred, he would hie southward again, presumably with more alacrity than the brief trip into the anarchy now regnant.

Those who did not have Mr Lott’s resources were those who victim to drowning, rapine, or exposure largely because they lacked the means and were left adrift by a government in studied sloth. As one or another of those bilious columnists this weekend said, “the rich left the poor to die.” It doesn’t seem that far from the truth. The poor are, by virtue thereof, generally the last in the pecking order, but it seems depraved to abandon them to their deaths. Stockpiling stragglers in the Superdome and leaving them to stew in their own ordure is too great a degradation to expect of us. These travails, far from over, have brought bright light unto a lacuna of leadership staggering in its breadth and obliviousness.

Not to dwell on the negatives so long as the Bush-bashers, the response of the nation has been heartening. Before the hurricane hit, the umbrella group to which Fordham University belongs, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, was arranging for the transfer of all the students in Jesuit schools to sister institutions around the country. Fordham will be getting more than a few. Across the nation, almost every college and university has opened its doors to house and school its students until they can reopen (optimistically) in the Spring. Bureaucracies have been ignored and short-circuited, and the Louisianans are beginning classes along with everyone else, in some semblance of normalcy. This is truly a great achievement.

A scene from today: I am sitting in the back yard at the frat, the remnants of the annual Labor Day BBQ scattered around, sipping on the last of the beers and generally shooting the shit about baseball and the upcoming football season (our fantasy draft is this evening). A stranger wanders in; at first we think it’s a potential rush with a very bad sense of punctuality, but he quickly introduces himself as Shir, a visiting Zete. From where, we ask blithely. Beta Tau, he replies, and one can actually gauge the degree to which the lessons of yesteryear were internalized by the time it takes faces to sag momentarily. Beta Tau is our Tulane chapter. We press through the questions: are you alright; is everyone alright; what was it like? He seems casual. In the event, he originated in Boston, so when given the choice of institution at which to spend the indefinite future, he opted for Columbia. He isn’t so much visiting as moving into the house for the next four months... at least. So we have one more Zete in das Zëtehaus, one that seems like a chill and laid-back guy, with a distinct and yet wholly unstereotypical accent to remind us that he’s only sojourning here from the Big Easy.

I wonder for all those folks down N'Awlins way who aren’t being kindly shepherded by their almæ matræ into new environs, for those who don’t have a frathouse at whcih to ride out the winter in every city. I suspect there were children left behind. This is America. We must do better.

continuity of emergency rooms

It’s funny... I’ve spent six years living by Columbia, mere feet away from St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, which proudly advertises itself as the “University Hospital of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons”. I always thought this was mighty convenient, given the association of college life and stupefyingly amusing injuries (eg dropping a fire hydrant on your foot), bar fights eventuating in serious scalp wounds, and even the extremely serious. Even during my time living on 113th, when there was a near-constant flow of ambulances with sirens screaming down the street at 1 AM, I liked the certainty of having an emergency room less than a football field’s length away.

I was feeling as though I was going to miss the now-reassuring cadence of red and blue lights and ululating tones moving down to Fordham, but no sooner do I arrive than I notice there’s just as amany ambulances on 60th as there were on 113th. It’s not till I stroll down to 59th a few days later to get some soap that I see why: there’s a hospital just a block away from me again. It seems vaguely familiar... and claims to be the University Hospital of the... you know. It’s St Luke’s-Roosevelts again. Right next door. Just like always. Guess they have two campuses.

How’s that for some continuity?

ships passing in the night, davis-style

So I come out to the Bay Area a day early, since I've got some time coming to me at my job, and I figure it'll be fun to take a little trip up northeast. One of our neos (new members of the frat), by the name of PETA (don't ask the provenance of the name) is living for the summer in Davis, that delightfully rural college community (UC Davis, natch) about twenty miles out of California's august capitol, Sacramento. I end up having to rent a car from an absurdly skeezy rental outfit, since Enterprise, which is about the only rental agency which will serve the highly-beset-upon under-twenty-five crowd, doesn't have anything except a tricked-out SUV. Since gas is about a quintillion bucks a gallon these days, I have to demur.

It's still a sweet drive, and I get a good deal on a hotel in Dixon, a town even smaller than Davis, if such a thing is credible. Nice place, though, a good ol' Sac exurb. (Said hotel is completely full, which speaks to its quality, as does the fact that it evidently provides free wireless internet service, by which means I type these words presently, without even advertising that extraordinary benefit.) Central Cali is about as western (in the sense of “western” in “spaghetti western” rather than "“western China”) as anyplace in the world: basically rural communities largely dominated by the farmland which provides such agricultural dominance to the Golden State.

But I don't end up getting in touch with PETA until around 9, by which time he tells me that he's got to be a-crashing, since he works construction and needs to wake up around 4:30 or some similarly ungodly hour. I have to admit that I'm imbibing a few in some dive in Sacramento with a couple folks about as sketchy as my car rental agency, and that there's pretty much no way I can get to his place in time to accomodate his sleep schedule. Alas... I will be only a ship passing in the night (actually, a green Toyota Camry passing in the night), hurtling down I-80 towards San Francisco. I did get a chance to grok his nabe, though; it's a nice-looking place. And with my visit to UC Davis, I've now hit up every one of the nine UC campuses except Santa Cruz (and, I guess, UC Merced, the one opening this year to make the total ten).

And temperature in inland California—the central valley—is about 95 Fahrenheit. Nearly anywhere else in the nation, that would be intolerable... oppressive. Here, though, it's exhilarating, because there's no humidity. At all. It's good heat. God bless California.

And now for something completely different: tonight, watching Family Guy on Adult Swim, Comedy Central gave a shout out to Lance Armstrong, ending it with “like he actually reads these”. Why don't you think he does, Comedy Central? Not all ships pass silently in the night. Some of them toot their foghorns. Maybe Lance is tooting for you.

of cel phones and crobars

Note to the world: if you're planning on getting drunk and leaving your cel phone sitting on a bar somewhere, try to make sure that bar is at your local watering hole so that there's some chance of getting it back. When you leave it at one of the biggest club franchises in the world, Crobar—with installations in London, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, and most critically here, New York—there's basically no hope. By today, my friends are already getting crank calls from the miscreant. One such friend, nicknamed “Hooch”, gets a particular quantity, probably from a curious fellow wondering what's at the other end. I don't mind losing the phone; it was a piece of shit I wanted to replace anyway. But the numbers... all my phone numbers... irreplaceable.