Snowdumb

New York City’s most recent blizzard may be the sixth biggest snowfall the city has ever received, but its likely the worst response on record to a blizzard by people paid to clean it up and keep things running.

More than 48 hours after snow stopped falling, many streets have not been plowed or have not been plowed sufficiently. Mounds of snow normally removed by now still remain. Sidewalks in busy areas of Manhattan (which always gets better service than the outer boroughs) are still wastelands of snow.

The city sanitation department said that they are short staffed, but another city official said that New York has the same number of workers assigned to snow removal as per usual. This could be a work slowdown ploy by sanitation workers and their union to pressure the city to restore budget cuts. Budget cuts and the intensity of the storm certainly play a role in the city’s feeble response, but after two days the city should be in much better shape than this.

Numerous city busses became stuck on unplowed roads—and we’re not talking about obscure roads or small alleys, busses were stranded on First Avenue.

Some subways became prisons. One A train was stuck in Queens for about 10 hours (I’ve been arrested twice and my total time in a holding cell for both arrests didn’t total 10 hours). Other rail lines had horror stories as well. When I arrived at the 207^th St. A train station Monday morning, the stairs had not been shoveled. The Internet was alight camera phone-photos taken by incredulous commuters of snow inside train stations.

When I arrived home from work earlier tonight, cars trying to drive down my street were blocked by Parks Department vehicles. Parks Department employees milled aimlessly with shovels, ignoring the cars honking their horns trying to get down the street.

We are still cooling off under mountains of snow. When the city government collectively shits the bed at a time of disaster, heads must roll.

More Christmas, Less Christianity

It’s the holidays and ’tis the season to celebrate our lives and spread joy to those in it.

While my respect for humanity has not diminished, I have come to appreciate other human beings less. This is especially true when people are in thrall to both senseless spending and senseless charity.

Let’s embrace the celebratory feast of the harvest season and marvel at surviving another year. If you have food in your stomach and a roof over your head on Christmas, you’re doing better than a lot of people. Be happy about that. Buy generous presents for those that you love, but don’t be gaudy about it.

We can do without the mind-numbing consumer nihilism or the hackneyed love fest foisted upon us by delusional Christianity. Both are sad sides to the same coin. Mindless altruism is no less a detriment of character than mindless consumerism.

Grab Christmas by the throat. Open that egg nog, breath deep the evergreen, and station yourself strategically under some mistletoe. Let’s resolve to mulch our enemies along with our Christmas trees.

Here’s to more Christmas and less Christianity. Merry Christmas.

Taking a Leak on Secrecy

Critics of WikiLeaks act as if the Web site is out to flush democracy—and with all the “leaks” and document “dumps” I am overwhelmed by the fantastical bathroom imagery long overdue in our discourse on government—but really miss the scandals that should-have-been.

The latest disclosures by the gadfly Web site have made things tough for the State Department under Hilary Clinton. Certainly we’ve been damaged diplomatically, but certainly less so than by the Iraq war, extraordinary rendition from friendly countries and decades of myopic foreign policy.

Where WikiLeaks really blundered was in its first big release of documents concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It released the names of informers, interpreters and others working for the U.S., thus endangering their lives and making things more difficult for the lives of our military. When human rights groups criticized WikiLeaks for this, founder Julian Assange blamed them for not helping his organization sort through what he had. If you don’t know what you’re publishing, why are you publishing it?

And have the latest leaks been that dramatic or informative? That the government of Afghanistan is horrendously corrupt is not exactly news to anyone who’s opened a newspaper in the last eight years. I’m not surprised that we’re launching missiles from drones in Yemen, and your average Yemeni Al Qaeda sympathizer isn’t either. The revelations about their government lying about it may create some terrorist sympathizers there, but it won’t turn anyone who wasn’t leaning in that direction to begin with.

The usual litany of plastic patriots is calling these leaks an act of treason. In order for something to legally be considered treasonous, I believe that Congress has to legally declare war, something it hasn’t had the courage to do since 1941. Also, since WikiLeaks’ founder is Australian and the Web site’s server is now hosted by a Swiss company, their offenses, whatever they are, are not treasonous. I understand the outrage over disclosing secrets that can endanger American lives, but find it hard to take seriously coming from people who had no problem sending our military into two theaters of war without proper supplies, or on a hunt for weapons in Iraq that weren’t there.

And for all its faults, and assuming the worst about its founder and its intentions, having information public is better than not in a democracy. We the people should always err on the side of free speech and free access to information. However bad too much information can sometimes seem, it’s always better than the alternative.

Prohibition Is ‘Loko’

Here in New York, while our infrastructure crumbles, our city and state governments go broke, schools fail, crime increases, and unemployment remains high, our political leaders busied themselves engaged in modern-day prohibition and forced an alcoholic beverage off the shelves.

Store owners have until Dec. 10 to sell whatever Four Loko they have left. The beverage, which contains generous helpings of alcohol and caffeine, has been called “blackout in a can,” by drinking aficionados and moralizing politicians. Several other states have moved to ban the drink and others like it.

Without getting into the argument against the ban on alcohol for people under 21, the more recent problem of young people harming themselves with these drinks could be solved by enforcement of already existing laws. Also, now that it has been outlawed, stores are going to sell out of Four Loko fast, and more kids will be encouraged to drink it to see what the fuss is about.

Somewhere people are hard at work thinking of the next legal way for people to annihilate their brain cells, because people will buy products that get them drunk and/or high. They always have, always will. You can outlaw anything you want; people are going to find new ways to fuck themselves up. Have faith in the powers of human invention and the drive to escape reality. A year or two from now, the government will ban something new.

Also, doesn’t it occur to anyone in government that Americans have the right to be drunken idiots? It’s our right to poison ourselves slowly with tobacco, alcohol or (in my case) caffeine. So long as it’s not poisonous or fraudulently labeled, the government should not interfere with our right to drink disgusting drinks until we puke ourselves.

Do not give one inch on anything. If it’s legal today, make sure it stays legal. Yesterday it was clove cigarettes. Today it’s Four Loko and similar drinks. Tomorrow it will be double cheeseburgers. They’ll pry a bottle of Diet Pepsi from my cold, dead fingers.

Smart Phones Do Not Make Smarter People

Bowing to the demands of the modern age, which accelerates in its adaption of new technologies at an exponential rate, I recently became one of the last of my friends to upgrade to a “smart” phone.

I am not at all what technology experts call an “early adopter” of technology. I would have been fine to do without a cell phone, except that everyone insisted on using them and I got tired of looking like some kind of crack head bum in search of a working pay phone.

The term “early adopter” refers to people so obsessed by technology that they will wait in line for six hours to spend too much on a piece of technology that will be obsolete in two weeks. Were you one of the first on your block to own an iPhone? Congratulations, you’re an idiot. The iPhones are becoming obsolete faster than they can make them, and one of the newer versions was plagued with problems.

I had planned on holding out for at least another year before buying a smart phone. I thought that maybe the prices would go down some more or technology would improve somehow just enough to make the added expense negligible. But I relented under peer pressure and an attractive brochure in the mail.

Improved technology has created a convenient universe of irresponsibility. The convenience of communication has devalued that communication. It no longer matters for many people to be on time for meetings or events. They figure that if they send you a text message around the time they were supposed to meet you, it is the same as showing up. Since technology exists for our convenience, people think everyone and everything else exists for their convenience also. Cell phones and Internet-capable hand-held devices have only further discouraged people from planning ahead, which is not a good thing. If anything, we as a society do not spend nearly enough time on thinking ahead.

Texting is one of the most despicable forms of communication available today, and is used with great fervor by the younger generation (the younger generation today includes anyone who graduated high school after 1995). I absolutely refuse to use the shorthand that is so common among texters (e.g.: - r u going 2 bed? – OMG, me 2!), as this is the language of cretins and pre-pubescent girls. And as someone who prides himself on decent writing, I want to use proper capitalization and punctuation at all times, things that texting on a regular cell phone makes very difficult to do at all and impossible to do quickly. I was content to do without texting, but too many people insist upon doing it, and I had to get an unlimited texting plan lest my phone bill be too high.

The smart phone should enable me to send text messages without losing my mind. So far, instead of making errors by not hitting the right button the requisite number of times, I’m making errors by hitting the wrong buttons on the very small screen keyboard. Technology is always finding new ways of improving your life while at the same time annoying the shit out of you.

The Answer to Bullying: Ass-Kicking Gays

A recent spate of suicides by gay teenagers has our media and our left-leaning political leaders up in arms about gays being bullied.

When I was a freshman in high school, someone threw a grape at me in the school cafeteria. The grape hit me in the face and I picked it up to throw it back. A much larger senior stood up and said he had thrown it at me. Without thinking, I threw it back at him, which was his excuse to charge at me. I got my skinny freshman ass kicked, and it sucked. But that didn’t matter. I showed everyone I was willing to take on someone bigger and stronger, and no one ever picked a fight with me in high school ever again.

Middle school and high school are like prison. You have to show your fellow inmates you’ll fight back, or you’ll forever be stepped on. It doesn’t matter if you lose; it matters that you fight back. Verbally or physically, people need to stand up for themselves.

Bullying has been with us forever, it was going strong when I was growing up and will be with us generations from now. The answer to bullying is to make sure we have kids who are confident in themselves and think independently. Let’s spend more resources raising kids who think for themselves and fight back.

We don’t need to wear purple, wave rainbow flags, or weep about how special and beautiful everyone is. Too much of our culture already celebrates the effeminate and the weak. We don’t want children who are mindlessly accepting any more than we want children who are mindlessly hateful. And we don’t want to tarnish our freedoms by passing more unconstitutional hate crime laws.

The truth is not everyone is special and lovable. There are plenty of useless people in the world who don’t deserve our sympathy. What we need to stop this allegedly epidemic bullying of gays are more badass gays.

And so I present to you some proud members of the LGBT—now called the LGBTQA(WTF)—community who will serve as better role models for our homosexual youth.

1. Gary Floyd: If you think it’s tough being openly gay today, try being a gay, communist punk rocker in Texas 25 years ago. As the lead singer of The Dicks, Floyd denounced police, homophobes and other things that annoyed him without apology. The Dick’s song ‘Saturday Night at the Bookstore’ is a frustrated gay rant that is one of the angriest and most punk of punk rock songs. Another openly gay punk band from that same era was The Big Boys, also from Texas. Big Boys singer Randy “Biscuit” Turner, who passed away in 2005, was also a noted skateboarder.

2. Pat Patterson: Lots of gays have survived bullying and the disapproving stares of the general public, how many have survived an alley fight match with Sergeant Slaughter? Pat Patterson’s homosexuality was considered an open secret in the wrestling world for many years, and he continues to work in wrestling today as a talent scout and producer. Chris Kanyon more recently made news when he came out of the closet. Like body building and lots if not all other sports, pro-wrestling has long catered to homophobic fans at the same time it has had a consistent gay following.

3. Bob Mould: Bob Mould is where wrestling and punk rock converge. As the singer and guitar player for the punk band Hüsker Dü, Mould allegedly kicked anyone in the head who spit on him (spitting on your favorite punk rock band was a big tradition back in the 1970s and early 1980s). He later went on to be a writer for World Championship Wrestling.

4. G.G. Allin: I know, I know, G.G. Allin was a bisexual and a violent drug addict who threw poop at people. But so what? Who was going to bully a naked man covered in his own blood and feces? G.G. Allin would punch you in the face at his show and then let you perform fellatio on him afterwards. Even at his worst, Allin’s music beats anything by Clay Aiken.

5. Wanda Sykes: the world of sports provides us with plenty of tough lesbians. Wanda Sykes stands out as an outstanding comedienne. And surviving in comedy, especially when performing at a lot of black comedy clubs where hecklers are notoriously merciless, is tough.

6. Christopher Marlowe: Marlowe was one of the bravest writers ever. He lived in the time of William Shakespeare and some conspiracy theorists claim he is the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays. He was gay and an atheist when both could get you killed legally. Marlowe worked as a spy, was accused of blasphemy and was murdered mysteriously. What poets and playwrights today have half that courage?

7. Rob Halford: Lead singer of Judas Priest, Halford is one of the gods of heavy metal. “I don’t know why so few people caught on,” he said after coming out of the closet in the 1990s, “I was always dressed like one of the Village People.”

U.N.Diplomatic in New York

September in New York brings many things: cooler weather, the start of the school year, the football season. It’s also the time of the United Nations General Assembly, which brings diplomats and heads of state from all over the world.

The U.N. General Assembly is a useless exercise in pompous self congratulation that brings few results beyond tying up traffic on the East Side of Manhattan and costing New York taxpayers millions. It brings New York incompetent diplomats we don’t need to listen to their leaders give speeches few will listen to and fewer care about.

Having worked at J.F.K. airport for two years, I can tell you first hand that diplomats are some of the most arrogant and obnoxious people you will ever meet if you’re unlucky enough. Many of them have diplomatic immunity, meaning they can not only get away with serious crimes like murder and assault, but they can park wherever they like and never pay a parking ticket or have their cars towed. They are rude and boorish, and they’re getting worse.

There are countries that owe the city millions in unpaid parking tickets and fines. Mayor Giuliani raised a stink about this a few years ago, but got nowhere with this.

And what has the United Nations really accomplished? The U.N. can only do what its most powerful member nations allow it to do. Can you name anything that the U.N. has done that individual countries could not have done on their own?

If these privileged ambassadors and self-important diplomatic staff would leave their bubble and live life like the rest of us, they would see ordinary people of many different nations getting along in ways they could never figure out.

People from many different nationalities manage to get along and get by in New York City, not because we like each other, but because we’ve got shit to do.

The common struggle to survive in a tough environment creates an unspoken understanding among working people. Your average immigrant in New York would make much better use of free parking than any diplomat, and has a much better work ethic and character too.

If the United Nations wants to remain in New York, the U.N. staff should start abiding by the same rules as the rest of us. Let them surrender their diplomatic immunity, pay their parking tickets and accept the rule of law as it applies to anyone else. It would be the diplomatic thing to do.

Save the Korans (Or Not)

We can all rest easy now that the leader of a small Florida church has been dissuaded from burning a copy of the Koran by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The government had warned that the incident would be a recruiting boom to Al Qaeda and put the lives of our troops in danger.

This sad spectacle is the latest in a ridiculous cultural war that obscures real issues of government policy. It also points out a sad double standard in the new politics of taking offense. If carried out consistently, the Obama administration will have time for little else but begging Americans not to be offensive. Good luck with that.

The President goes out of his way to preach religious pluralism and insists Americans not equate the relatively small numbers of murderous fundamentalists with all Muslims, yet our Secretary of Defense has to go begging because the Islamic world thinks a small-time religious fanatic in Florida is representative of the entire Christian world? Has the Secretary of Defense placed a call to the crazy church in Kansas that sends its small band of followers to picket military funerals, praising each service member’s death as divine retribution for America’s acceptance of gays? That’s pretty offensive too. Luckily, we have the Patriot Guard (lesson: the key to dealing with offensive speech is more free speech).

If one reactionary minister can endanger the lives of our troops with a silly offensive stunt, our problem is not the reactionary minister. The same First Amendment that allows misguided Muslims to build an Islamic center a few blocks from where thousands were murdered in the name of Islam also allows malevolent Christians to burn Korans. If Muslims around the world can’t get that concept through their kufi-clad heads, then they are the problem, not the random leeches sucking publicity from the latest mosque controversy.

Since there’s now a precedent for the Obama administration to personally appeal to people who plan to offend Muslims, I thought I might get in on the act. Not to be outdone, I sent the following message to the White House through its official Web site:

“Since a reactionary pastor in Florida earned a phone call from Secretary Gates with his threat to burn a copy of the Koran, I hereby declare my intention to defecate on a copy of the Koran on Sept. 11, 2011 unless President Obama calls me and kindly asks me not to. Thank you.”

I included my phone number so the President can call me. My email was also a part of the online form. I really hope the President phones me; I only have one copy of the Koran and I’d rather not poop on it.

And while our cabinet members are busy making sure private citizens don’t do anything to offend Muslims, do you think they might get around to wrapping up a nine-year war that has killed thousands more Americans and still hasn’t found Osama Bin Laden?

If everything that happens in this country that offends Muslims required cabinet-level action, our government would have melted down a long time ago. The fundamentalists who would take offense enough to a Koran burning to become violent are already radicalized and nothing our government does will ever appease them. We won’t win the war against Islamic extremists by making ourselves less offensive to Islamic extremists.

Gotham as Ghost Town

The second half of August is when a lot of things slow down in New York. Working in the financial district, the city can seem like a ghost town this time of year. Absent is the usually high-octane bustle and constant presence of crowds that characterizes daily life in the city for most of the year.

One friend remarked that Labor Day weekend is the best weekend to enjoy New York. Everything is still open but lots of people are out of town, so everything is less crowded and therefore more enjoyable.

I thought I was going to get out of the city more often this summer. Getting out of New York is very necessary to preserve your sanity, especially during the summer. I managed to get out of town a few times this summer, but not as often as I would have liked.

New York City is one of the worst places for it to be hot. The concrete and asphalt absorb and reflect the heat. Tall buildings trap car exhaust and other pollution, and there are millions of other people around contributing to the stifling misery.

And sadly, New York is in the midst of another heat wave. I don’t know what measure meteorologists use to declare a heat wave, but for me it’s two consecutive days where the temperature reaches or exceeds 86°F. The hot weather is not my friend.

If you enjoy sweat pouring down every part of your body while you share a concrete oven with 8 million of your closest friends, then New York City in the summer is for you.

A SCREWed Life

Growing up in New York, SCREW magazine publisher Al Goldstein came to represent pornography, vulgarity and New York City itself. I recently finished reading his book ‘I, Goldstein, My SCREWed Life’ and I highly recommend it.

Goldstein presented himself as a stereotypical New Yorker. He was loud, boisterous and crude. He was an overweight, cigar-smoking slob who was infamous for launching tirades against airlines, health clubs, ex-wives and former employees, among others. He was feted by Howard Stern and fellated by Seka. His TV show, “Midnight Blue,” spurred millions of copycats and helped pave the way for porn’s permanent place on cable television.

One of the things I remember about him best from those days was his sterling defense of pornography. “Sex is a positive, happy thing,” I remember him saying. “What’s wrong with looking at pictures of vaginas in my newspaper?” Beyond the obvious First Amendment argument, Goldstein’s argument in favor of consuming porn was the best one. Sex is a natural thing, so why be ashamed of it? If it weren’t for people having sex, none of us would be here*. When I was a shy ten-year-old kid who loved tits, Goldstein was a hero. He was “sex positive” long before the term was invented. He was among the first to recognize and rail against the unholy marriage of radical feminists and evangelical Christians in their quest to use the law to suppress free speech in the name of protecting women from dirty movies and magazines.

Anyone who has looked at pornographic materials in the last 40 years (which is anyone who isn’t blind or living in a horribly repressive society) owes a debt of gratitude to Al Goldstein. One of the reasons we can enjoy the abundant pornography we take for granted today is because Goldstein, SCREW co-editor Jim Buckley and others (like the more famous Larry Flynt) fought for our rights years ago, often at great financial and personal cost. Goldstein and Buckley faced up to six years in jail for publishing a newspaper (yes, this happened in America).

And for all of Goldstein’s vulgarity, please note that the pornography and vision of sex he presented to America was a more real and vastly superior brand compared with what is popular today. I’ll take the realistic-looking women from the pages of SCREW over the silicone and botox filled automatons of today.

Goldstein was no angel, and he makes no effort to hide his many vices and excesses in his memoir. He even quotes from a book written by a former staffer that depicts him as a giant mouth whose personality is overtaken by a tremendous appetite.

Ten years ago, when I saw Penn & Teller at the Beacon Theater, I thought I was the shit because I had a slightly better seat than Al Goldstein. He was one row behind me. He was dressed in shorts, hiking boots, and a red, white and blue sequined jacket. Of course, I went home alone and he was with a hot girl who was maybe a third his age. Six years later, Goldstein had been personally bankrupted by lawsuits and criminal charges of harassment. He was destitute and in poor health.

A few years ago, I made a flyer to advertise a show that my band was playing and the flyer featured a photo of Goldstein giving the world the middle finger. I emailed him a copy of the flyer and he said it was wonderful. That’s one of the best endorsements our band has ever had.

Last I heard, Goldstein was living in an apartment in Far Rockaway. If his doctors let him eat it, I’d like to treat him to a delicious pastrami sandwich at Katz’s.

*I understand that today there is a small minority of people who were conceived by in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and lesbians with turkey basters (I have considered trying to make a career out of being an inexpensive sperm donor for lesbians). These people’s lives are just as valuable as anyone’s, but I refuse to live in a world where the majority of people were not created through good, old-fashioned fucking.

Bleachers in the Sky

I recently flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma and back, and with the connecting flights that made four plane rides overall. Air travel has not improved much since last year. I was able to actually reserve a seat instead of waiting by the gate for a last minute seat assignment, so that’s a small victory.

But the airline caste system is alive and well. The division between first class and coach class is made more glaring by the efforts the airlines have made to squeeze every penny out of beleaguered coach passengers ($25 to check one bag = outrageous).

First class passengers get their own flight attendant, who serves them drinks as they relax comfortably in large seats, watching the rest of us slobs file in. I hate them. I want to spit in their smug faces, piss in their complimentary drinks and strangle them with their own neck pillows. But we can’t do that in this day and age, especially with homeland security being what it is (I stood behind a crippled old woman in Tulsa who was made to go into a magnetometer and put her hands above her head— serves her right for packing a metal hip at the airport—so even when security is running smoothly, it is still completely retarded).

The most galling example of this was on a plane where the door was situated between first class and coach. After we landed, a flight attendant blocking the aisle with her body so that we scum of the coach class could not start to leave the plane until a sufficient number of first class passengers got off the plane.

So I think airline passengers should borrow from the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium. A great tradition at Yankee Stadium, which I’m told has carried over to the New (not the real) Yankee Stadium, is this: at the start of every game, the rowdy “Bleacher Creatures” in the right field bleachers chant “Box seats suck! Box seats suck!” towards the privileged box seats close to home plate.

It’s a great tradition, as the people sitting in the box seats tend to be mindless beneficiaries of corporate largesse or disinterested scions of privilege with no passion for or knowledge of the game. The great baseball owner Bill Veeck observed, “The knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.” And that’s as true today as when he uttered it.

At a certain point before each flight, after everyone is seated but before the flight crew begin the safety information, coach class should begin a chant of “First class sucks! First class sucks!” This could be a great tradition. It would create a greater camaraderie among the masses in the steerage of coach class. It is protected speech beyond the authority of the government and in large enough scope the airlines could not stop it or sanction passengers who participated. And the snobs in first class would benefit from some humbling as well. So please join me in this, unless I get lucky and get upgraded to first class.

Yankee Losses

The New York Yankees lost two legendary fixtures within the last few days.

Bob Sheppard had been with the Yankees well before Steinbrenner bought the team in 1973. While he never amassed the wealth of George Steinbrenner, his life shows that he was a man with better perspective and an intact moral compass.

He was a teacher first and foremost, and took joy in helping people improve their speech and elocution. After he retired, Yankees—most notably Derek Jeter—continued to use a recording of him to be announced. I’m privileged to have attended games at the real Yankee Stadium and listened to Bob Sheppard announce games.

It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, so don’t read the following aloud: As a lifelong Yankee fan, I hated George Steinbrenner. I’m far from alone. Lots of Yankee fans have hated George Steinbrenner with a passion for years. It’s true he took a losing franchise and made it a winning team again, it’s also true he treated people like dirt, the fans most of all.

He fired Billy Martin so many times I lost track (six). He insulted Joe Torre, one of the greatest managers to ever wear the pinstripes. His quest to wring even more money from the richest sports franchise in the country included battling a cable company’s resistance to charge more money for the YES network and leaving millions of New York fans unable to watch games on television for at least half a season.

Steinbrenner and his offspring tore down the House that Ruth Built and replaced it with an expensive “mallpark” that has hurt local businesses and cost cash-strapped New York City and New York State billions in tax breaks, cut-rate land sales and public infrastructure improvements. The Yankees, who technically rented the old, real Yankee Stadium from New York City, were tens of thousands of dollars behind on their rent. They paved over public parks and broke their promise to replace the park land before the new stadium was built.

Yankee fans and other New Yorkers will be shedding tears for Bob Sheppard; George Steinbrenner, not so much.

Explosions for America

Another July 4^th has passed, and so I have spent another weekend in the countryside with friends, celebrating the independence of my country by blowing up a small part of it.

Actually, my friends and I did not blow up any piece of America, though we set off some very pretty and mostly legal fireworks for a gathering of friends. It was a relatively mild affair, as there were children there to enjoy the show and our host puts too much work into maintaining his property to have his n’er-do-well friends damage it. No one got hurt and no one called the police.

Growing up in Yonkers, the neighborhood teenagers invested heavily in massive amounts of fireworks. I would come out of my building on the morning of July 5^th to find the gutters littered with spent firecrackers, red M-80 shells, and the exploded waste of an evening of gunpowder-fueled debauchery. Once, I noticed that one of the heavy steel garbage cans that served the apartments was face down in the street, blown apart and looking like a discarded banana peel. As a youngster, I yearned to be one of the adults lighting the firecrackers to the disapproval of my parents. Now I am and it’s awesome.

Sure, there are plenty of idiots who blow their arms off or set fire to themselves (full disclosure: a cinder from a sparkler I was holding burned a hole in my shirt this year; I was unharmed), but the overwhelming majority of firework celebrations go off without incident.

The night was aglow this past weekend with firework celebrations sanctioned and unsanctioned, legal and illegal. There aren’t enough police in the world to stop every American from setting off fireworks. And it was a glorious sign that the American spirit is alive and well.

Fireworks are Americans telling their government that we don’t need or want its approval in how we define and exercise our freedoms. It’s we the people taking the celebration and the meaning of America into our own hands. We’re showing our government and the world that we’re not afraid of fire, not afraid of things that go boom, and just not afraid.

Don’t Bust These Ghosts

When you first come across a Ghost Bike—a bicycle painted entirely white and chained by the side of the street— in New York you may think it’s some kind of odd art project, a waste of a perfectly good bike dipped in paint as a way to impress you with the decadent brilliance of the artist. At least that’s what I remember thinking the first time I came across one. Then I noticed some flowers and a sign that had been added to a street sign and realized it was a memorial to a cyclist that was killed.

There are plenty of cyclists in New York who deserve some hurt: delivery guys who ride on sidewalks, stupid kids who ride the wrong way in the street and speedo-clad Lance Armstrong wannabes who think they’re important because they were dumb enough to spend $1,000 or more on a damn bicycle. Sadly, these are usually not the people who get killed riding their bikes.

Like with much in life, it’s often the people who deserve pain the least who get it the most. It’s not the asshole illegal immigrant delivery boy who gets beaten by the cops, it’s an earnest Army vet trying to promote bicycle riding. It’s not the douchebag who thinks he’s in the Tour de France who gets flattened by a city tow truck, it’s a doctor out for a weekend ride with his wife, staying in the bicycle lane.

The Sanitation Department recently planned to take away the ghost bikes, but changed their plans when faced with the prospect of explaining their actions to the families of killed cyclists. It’s good that these memorials are staying put. It will put a little seriousness and perspective into our daily lives.

I have several friends and coworkers who are avid cyclists. They all have horror stories about being hassled by the police, threatened by rogue cab drivers, nearly killed by ignorant drivers or caused to crash by oblivious pedestrians. But they all love it and wouldn’t commute to work any other way ever if they could help it. Despite all the risks, I’m eager to give cycling a try. It looks very liberating: no longer at the mercy of MTA incompetence, having the mobility of a car without the stress of having to park it or buy gas. There’s a strong case for riding a bicycle.

Mosque at Ground Zero: Dumb Idea or The Dumbest Idea?

Muslims have every right to open a mosque near Ground Zero. They should have the good sense not to.

Opening a mosque near the World Trade Center site would be like building a German beer hall just outside the gates of Auschwitz or opening a U.S. Army recruiting office in Mai Lai. After all, a majority of Germans today were born well after the Second World War and had nothing to do with the Holocaust, so why shouldn’t they show the world that they are good people and serve tourists some delicious beer and pretzels?

Muslims in New York want to open a large mosque and Islamic center two blocks from the site of the September, 11, 2001 attacks, in a building damaged in the attacks no less. They’ve been met with enormous criticism, of course, but may go ahead with the plan anyway.

Proponents of putting a place of Muslim worship close to where thousands of people lost their lives at the hands of Muslims argue that the mosque would serve as a more accurate representative of Islam, and that the work done by the September 11^th hijackers in anathema to the true nature of Islam. Assuming that the intentions of these ambitious Muslims are pure, they could not be more misguided.

True, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are opposed to extremism and are decent people. To say otherwise would be ignorant. But it would be disingenuous or else willfully ignorant to pretend that Islam is at an equivalent stage of moderation of Christianity or Judaism. Extremism plays a much larger role in Islam, and Islam has a much higher percentage of violence-prone adherents than other religions. Critics of Christianity and Judaism do not require 24-hour security protection. Christ, who is considered divine by Christians (Mohammed is revered but not a deity in Islam), is regularly pilloried in various media without his detractors fearing for their lives.

Putting a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center will only show Muslims as triumphant, entitled and lacking in any decorum, class or common sense. By their very insistence that the mosque be near ground zero, the Muslims who want to build it will completely undercut whatever sympathetic message they hope to deliver.

To most non-Muslims, Islam does not mean peace today. It won’t mean peace tomorrow. Wanting it to be different will not make it so. And you can talk about the majority of peaceful Muslims until you’re blue in the face, but when your religion is enormously influenced by crazies and you’re across the street from some of their most deadly work, your message will rightly fall on deaf ears.

Instead of spending time and money to try to convince people that Islam means peace by putting a mosque across the street from one of Islam’s most infamous atrocities, supporters of the downtown mosque should spend their time and effort on making it true that Islam means peace. Right now it doesn’t, not by a long shot.

(FYI: the illustration above comes from the very sick but very funny Web comic Electric Retard - not for children and not safe for work; you've been warned)

By The Time I Get To Arizona

Last week, Arizona’s governor signed an illegal immigration enforcement bill into law that has put the issue of illegal immigration and the movement to grant illegal aliens amnesty front and center. Congressional leaders even spoke of putting the immigration bill before Congress ahead of an important energy bill.

It’s a sign of how desperate things have become for states along the Mexican border that state governments are trying to do what the federal government has refused to do. The job of enforcing and protecting the country’s borders is rightfully that of the federal government.

With the President promising “immigration reform” in the form of an amnesty program, the government has cut back on enforcement measures, leaving individual states to deal with overcrowded schools, bankrupt public services, and the families of its murdered citizens.

The states have tried to do whatever they can do deal with crowds of illegal aliens coming their way, and this bill in Arizona is the most stringent so far, though far from the Nuremberg-style law that its critics accuse it of being. It will be litigated to death and may never see the light of day, but it’s a law that prods Arizona police to do what the federal government refuses to do with any consistency or competence: get some kind of handle on our out-of-control illegal immigration situation.

Kowtowing to both Hispanic ethnic tribalism and corporate wage-busting greed, President Obama promised to pursue an amnesty bill that would legalize millions of illegal aliens at a time when real unemployment is still well into double-digits. He hinted at a threat of using civil rights legislation to thwart the Arizona bill. Arizona’s governor signed it anyway.

Critics call the Arizona law racist, fascist, and everything except what it is: a desperate act by a state pushed to the brink by decades of border negligence and a federal government in the thrall of its own windy rhetoric and at the service of its corporate donors.