Another NYC Institution Bites the Dust

One fine spring Sunday evening some friends from work and I were drinking our way across the East Village when we decided to have shot at Mars Bar. We were definitely not made to feel welcome there as we didn’t look the part of the Mars Bar regulars, who always colluded with the staff to give a frigid reception to curious tourists, yuppies and others (my friends and I fell squarely in the indeterminate “other” category).

In later times, dressed in a punk or metal t-shirt and putting up fliers for an upcoming punk rock show, the reception there was better, but never 100% friendly. I was never a regular or the kind of disheveled mess that could pass for a Mars Bar regular.

Mars Bar, a definitive New York dive bar, is now closed. It had long been slated for demolition to make way for one of the latest high-priced apartment buildings that are growing in the East Village like a cancer.

Mars Bar took pride in its reputation as a scummy hellhole. Once I arrived there and was greeted by a friend who happened to be drinking there. We made some small talk and I saw a section of the bar that had empty bar stools where we could sit.

“Let’s go sit down there,” I said, motioning to the cluster of empty seats.

“Oh, no, don’t go down there,” my friend warned me. “Some homeless guy took a piss down there.” Sure enough, a second glance confirmed the bar stools were spotted with the territorial markings of the now-departed homeless visitor.

Mars Bars’ bathrooms were among the smelliest and dirtiest I have even been in, and I’ve been in some really disgusting bathrooms. They were even dirtier than the bathrooms at nearby CBGB, which were infamous for their filth.

The jukebox was well-stocked with punk and metal and there was almost always an interesting conversation to be had. You may not always have the best time or the cheapest drinks at Mars Bar, but it would always be damn interesting.

Since I never went there much even when I drank a lot, the end of Mars Bar will not affect me personally. But I mourn for the New York City that we are losing more and more each day. With every dive bar that closes, a city loses a piece of its soul. Mars Bar was a cheap dive, but it was richer in character than most bars in the city, and we need our dive bars far more than we need our office towers and condominiums.

Getting Gay for Marriage

Here in New York, on the Friday before the city’s Gay Pride Parade, the last members of the New York State Senate who had been holding out switched teams and said they’d vote in favor of gay marriage. Joy permeated the air as people in the Big Apple celebrated: rainbows sprung from the sewers as unicorns danced in the streets and hot lesbian couples made out on every street corner. OK, it wasn’t really that great, but people marked it as a moment of great joy nonetheless. Many New Yorkers wear their progressive politics as a badge of immense pride and it really burned some of them up to have been beaten to the marriage equality glory hole by the likes of Iowa and New Hampshire.

And as it is part of the government’s responsibility to make sure all of its citizens are treated equally under the law, gay marriage is just. Consenting adults should be have the same rights and abilities to have relationships and form legal bonds with one another, no matter how objectionable others may find it. If you want someone of the same gender to be considered your lawful spouse for all legal purposes and business with the state, it would be wrong and un-American to deny you that.

But a larger issue is overlooked among the debating and celebrating, and that is this: Should the government have any right to regulate, approve or conduct marriages at all? I understand your needing a license to drive a truck, perform surgery or even sell real estate. But should you have to apply for the government’s permission to form a partnership with someone you love? (I’m still going to call gay couples partners, not because I like gays any less, but because I love the English language more. “I now pronounce you husband and husband” may be a great leap for equality, but it sounds like fingernails across a blackboard to me).

The question of defining marriage is none of the government’s business. The definition of marriage is often dictated by religious and deeply-held personal beliefs. Why throw the machinery of the state into a moral argument that can’t be won. And whether someone is married or not should not be anyone else’s business. The government should have no say over the romantic relations between its citizens. Why should married couples get tax penalties or benefits for being married? Whether you are married or not is strictly a personal matter.

Most people who get married don’t have a city clerk marry them; they go to a church or chapel most of the time. Let everyone get married on their own time and with their own money and file their marriage/gay marriage/partnership agreement with their city clerk. Their documented vows constitute a legal agreement that can be enforced in a civil court without any commentary on the morality of homosexuality or the validity of anyone’s marriage. Gays can call their unions marriages and religious fundamentalists will disagree, but so what? Why should they fight it out with our tax dollars in courts or state legislatures?

And the religious right has itself partly to thank for the gay marriage cause. I don’t think gays by and large wanted to get married until people started telling them they couldn’t. Gays and lesbians viewed traditional institutions like marriage and child-rearing as trappings of a stifling religious society that rejected them. They didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on weddings or be hassled by their parents about grandchildren. But times change, and marriage is now embraced by the gay community as a measure of their equal standing with the straight world.

And so state-by-state the U.S.A. will wage a gay marriage debate, I only wish we weren’t burning up our scarce tax dollars to do it.

Farewell to a Brilliant Jackass

Important and beloved people that have recently passed away include Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov and a Soviet dissident in her own right, and Clarence Clemons, saxophone player for the E Street Band.

Though he will likely not be afforded the same praise and headline space as these or other recently-passed celebrities, Ryan Dunn of “Jackass” brought laughter to a generation that had grown cynical and helped change television for the better.

When I first heard about “Jackass,” I was very skeptical. MTV had been shoving “reality television” garbage our way for years and pioneered the shallow, self-absorbed and vapid genre and brought it new depths quickly (“The Real World” and “Road Rules” etc.). But Jackass spit in the face of MTV’s other programming, and brought slapstick comedy back into America’s living room in a big way. Without “Jackass” much of what is funny on television today wouldn’t be on. There would be no “Tosh.0” without Jackass, and I’d even argue that “Jackass” helped push the envelope of what could be said and done on regular television. How can a standard cable channel censor the word “shit” when they’re willing to produce video of people literally eating shit for money (cow pies in “Jackass 2”)?

A tragic death is always more tragic when the deceased is younger than you, and Ryan Dunn is the first member of the “Jackass” cast to pass away. He was 34 years old and died in a car crash near his home in Pennsylvania.

He was one of the cast members that we could relate to most easily. He never exhibited the celebrity ego of Bam Margera or the Hollywood ambitions of Johnny Knoxville. He went into every new experience with wide-eyed innocence that brought the audience in with him and put us on his side. While we laughed at the antics that often left him in pain, we were always aware somehow that Dunn was on our side.

Dunn took some of the worst punishment in the “Jackass” films, taking it up the ass, literally, by placing a toy car in his ass for the first film. He did it for our amusement and we were laughing with him as much as at him.

“Jackass” is beloved by millions because it is funny and because it gives many of us a chance to live our juvenile fantasies through the cast. During the week we sit in cubicles or in small offices and think about crazy fun things we would do if we weren’t burdened with the responsibilities of making a buck. If I dropped through the ceiling of my office in a ski mask pretending to be a burglar or sprayed a coworker with a fire extinguisher, I’d be shown the door and be out of a job. Dunn and the other Jackasses made a very good living doing the goofy shit that would be pathetic for grown men to do if they weren’t being paid millions of dollars for it.

It’s possible that Dunn died while driving drunk, as news reports have been quick to point out that he posted photos of himself drinking before the crash (the show is called “Jackass,” not “Genius”). If that’s true then it’s an even sadder end to a well-lived life.

All Politics (and Food and Education and More) is Local

At a time when advances in technology have brought the world closer together, people with an eye for the future are becoming less global and more local in their outlook. New York is no exception.

One of the most noticeable is with the food we eat. Technological advances in agriculture allow farmers to grow food that won’t spoil as fast and can survive in more extreme climates, and suit the tastes of Americans. We can get fresh fruit all year round that can be shipped to us from tropical climates.

While advances in technology were great, the abuses of that technology in the interest of profit margin have corrupted the purpose of agriculture: to bring healthy food to people. Warnings about pesticides, genetically modified food and serious questions about general food safety have caused people to turn to local food sources. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms that provide food to its local member customers are increasing in popularity. And a new identity has been embraced: “Locavores,” are dedicated to eating all of their food from within their local area (local area generally being defined as within100 miles; I know of no one brave enough to eat a tomato grown in Greenpoint’s natural soil).

While “locavores” have possibly discovered a way to be more obnoxious in restaurants that even surpasses the most grating vegan or vegetarian, they are on the right track. The future will be more localized.

The institutions that were supposed to create a more globally efficient and harmonious world failed miserably at both. People have lost confidence in large multi-national institutions and are looking for ways to do things on their own. We see it starting to happen with food, education and politics right now.

Over the next several years home schooling will not just be for religious fundamentalists anymore. We will begin to see home schooling start to take shape among secular and even liberal-minded people who otherwise would have sent their children to public schools. Public schools in many cities will become more dysfunctional. New York City is somewhat of an exception here because there is a multi-tiered school system where a handful of very competitive high schools continue to draw great students and do a great job teaching them. This doesn’t mean

New York is also ahead of the curve in that charter schools are going to take over more and more from public schools. Public schools have become too bloated a bureaucracy to survive in these continuing austere times. New York can afford the schools better than many places and we can’t really afford it right now.

One big sign for me of the increasing failure of centralized institutions was the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Here we had a government engaged in two overseas wars and fretting over Iraq’s border security while one of our major American cities drowned. The federal government (with the exception of the Coast Guard) was useless during Hurricane Katrina, but thousands of volunteers loaded up U-Hauls and pick up trucks with water and medical supplies and headed for the stricken Gulf Coast, and hundreds of local police and fire departments from around the country sent help.

More and more, the U.S. government appears to be a crumbling empire unable to secure its own borders or serve its own citizens. Just as the Roman Empire devolved into a series of feuding Italian city-states, it’s possible to see a United States fragmented along ethnic, religious and political lines. People are more likely to live in areas that are politically hegemonic; recent studies have showed electoral districts being won by larger and larger margins. Several states have nascent secessionist movements that come from both sides of the political spectrum. Increased cultural diversity creates more insular behavior, even between people within the same cultural or ethnic groups.

Here in New York City, while our stronger local government has insulated us from some of the worst of the federal government’s dysfunction, the can-do spirit of New Yorkers is already hard at work looking for local solutions to our problems.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Bullets

Earlier this week, President Obama said he would not release photos showing Osama bin Laden’s dead body. The President should know: The First Amendment does not negotiate with terrorists.

Obama deserves all the credit coming to him for Bin Laden’s killing (anyone trying to give credit to George W. Bush should stop now and save themselves the embarrassment), but he is not the nation’s censor or moral scold.

The things our government does with our tax dollars are, except in cases of national security, public information. Obama doesn’t have a choice in the matter; no president does. The Freedom of Information Act ensures that we can all admire the bloody sight of bin Laden’s bullet-marked face. Democracies can’t survive when leaders get to decide what the public gets to see about what they do.

Furthermore, the rationale behind not releasing the bin Laden photos is somewhat absurd. The President claims that doing so would harm our interests in the Arab world and among Muslims because it would inflame Arab and Muslim sensibilities. The larger and more substantial policies that have angered Arabs and Muslims for decades—interfering in Muslim countries, giving carte blanch to Israel—will continue unabated, but we’re supposed to pat ourselves on the back because of how sensitive we are to their sensibilities because we’re not publishing a grisly photo of bin Laden.

If the President’s portrayal of the larger Muslim world is to be believed, then bin Laden was rightfully so reviled that showing photos of his corpse should not offend anyone. Fanatics who would be offended by publishing these photos are going to hate us anyway, so why should be bother trying to appease them?

There is no shame in relishing the death of an enemy like bin Laden. He slaughtered thousands of innocent people under the delusion that he was doing holy work. Our obligation to his memory ended when he left the realm of decency and humanity.