A Crazy Bitch Named Sandy

            Despite hopes that Hurricane Sandy would be a dud to New York like last year’s Hurricane Irene, New York was struck hard by the hurricane. Many parts of the city experienced intense flooding unlike the city has ever seen in its history.

           

            The wife and I are among the extremely lucky ones to have undisturbed power, cable and Internet throughout the hurricane. The most stress we faced was when we had to pause a streaming Netflix movie to tape up our windows during a very windy time. It’s been shocking to see images online of areas one is familiar with sitting under several feet of water. It is a luxury to have power and an Internet connection right now. I am very lucky to have a job where I can work at home. I am very lucky to even have a job at all right now.

            Eight people dying in a storm is terrible. But considering wide swaths of the city were flooded, hundreds of homes destroyed and hospitals evacuated, it’s damn impressive the body count is so low.

The weather kicked our city’s ass, but we don’t sit around feeling sorry for ourselves; we get back to work. People are already making plans and trying to figure out how to get things done without subways, which is no easy task. The MTA, never one for punctuality and particularly bad at dealing with the weather, will take a few days to get back up and running.

In New York, it is only a matter of time before things are back to business as usual. The city is too busy to be too sentimental for too long. New York runs on a constant buzz and bustle, and it takes major disasters or terrorist attacks to knock it off kilter, and then never for very long. 

Franken-Prepared

New York is in the midst of a mild “Frankenstorm” fever. Approaching storm fronts may dump  multitudes of rain and/or snow on our metropolis in a day or two, and New Yorkers are waiting to see what gets canceled when and what the latest forecast might reveal.

The panic that gripped New York prior to hurricane Irene last year has yet to grip us in the specter of the Frankenstorm. The supermarkets were not running out of bread and bottled water, though governors of New York and New Jersey have already declared states of emergency. While the disaster preparations by the government are the same, this has not seized on the consciousness of the citizenry in the same way, at least not yet, despite having the cool cache of the “Frankenstorm” moniker.

There’s a resignation to these kinds of disruptions in New York, though we are not normally subjected to the disasters that they have in hurricane alley or on the more volatile Gulf of Mexico shoreline. New York is geologically very lucky.

So now we run through a multitude of “what if…” scenarios in our minds. What if the subways are shut down Monday? What if they only close off the area where I work? What if power is knocked out? I’m hoping that no closures or suspension of mass transit is necessary, because I don’t want to have to work from home. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to try to reconfigure my home computer setup for my work needs. I can do it if I have too, though, and working from home during a storm beats being unemployed during a storm.

One interesting phenomenon that many might be unprepared for: During times of emergencies, cell phones may not be working. Too many calls overload the cell phone towers and most cell phones become useless. We saw this in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and a few years later during the East Coast blackout of August 2003. Many people are now without home phone lines because they use their cell phones more often than home phone lines. That’s something to keep in mind and an interesting phenomenon during a time of great technological transition: that some with superior means of technology will be worse off because of it in this rare instance.

I have enough weapons and Diet Pepsi to survive a Frankenstorm and a half. See you when it’s over.  

Misplaced Guilt Problems

            Perusing the vastness of social media, a phrase has caught my eye a few times and has been repeated enough to call it a trend. The phrase is “Middle Class Problems.”

            Except that isn’t the real phrase. It’s a glossed-over sanitized version of a more apt, accurate and original term that caught on first.

            The expression is “First World Problems,” not “Middle Class Problems.” To be really hip, write it without spaces and with a hash tag (#) to replicate the preferred style of the Twitter social media site. #Firstworldproblems. “There is too much guacamole on my omelet,” is a good example of such a "problem."

I’m old enough to have gone to grammar school when the schools were still teaching students real subjects. Sure we had our share of lame love-in student assemblies from time to time, but there were some facts that they didn’t hide from us. One of those facts is that we, being Americans, lived in the First World. That meant that we lived in a country where widespread famine and disease were eradicated, political decisions were made nonviolently and the basic necessities of life were easily obtained by almost all of the population. Those countries that suffered from widespread poverty, famine and disease were Third World countries. Those were the countries we were thankful not to live. It was a testament to how lucky we were to live in the First World. We weren’t taught to be ashamed of that, but to be grateful for what we had, because there were many people in the world who did not have that.

            The Second World, we were told, consisted of countries like the Soviet Block, that were developed but still lacking in many things. Once the cold war ended we saw just how second-rate the Second World was, and while our government had lied to us about a lot of things, the horrors of Communism turned out to be every bit as bad as we were told.

            Nonetheless, there was no moral judgment or implied superiority in this division of the world. It seemed to make perfect sense and was instructive to us. There is nothing about “First World Problems” that ought to offend anyone unless you’ve actually been caught complaining about how the sound of your maid cleaning your house woke you up.  Living in the First World is a good thing. No one asks to be born where they were. There are millions of people who would love to live in the First World rather than where they’re living. Why would it be wrong to say so?

            There’s no reason to feel guilty about living in The First World or declaring it so. Developed Western Civilization gets to give the nomenclature to its own standard of living, and we have our shit together better than anywhere else; that’s fact. Trying to shame us into ignoring that or saying otherwise doesn’t bring indoor plumbing to the people of the Serengeti. It’s more misplaced guilt that has no place among a sane, self-confident people.

            And in fact, the phrase “First World Problems” is not a boast of wealth, racial superiority or some other politically incorrect geographic prejudice, but an acknowledgement of our society’s own fixation with the trivial. It at once exposes and parodies the shallowness and self-regard that comes with great material success and the corruption of societal excesses. It’s the snarky, electronic media equivalent of your mother reminding you not to be such a shallow jerk; there are starving kids in Africa, you ungrateful snot.   

            The refusal to use the term when that’s what you mean is the worst kind of moral cowardice. First of all, though they are surely related, economic class and the different spheres of the developing world are not the same thing. Being middle class in the U.S.A. is nothing at all like being middle class in Ethiopia. But living in the First World means living in the first world not matter what you’re class. In their effort to not offend, these phrase murderers are substituting a subset for a set, and it doesn’t follow.

In fact, using the phrase “Middle Class Problems” as a substitute puts the user in the worst of all categories: enjoying the benefits of living in the First World and most likely not doing anything of consequence to improve things for those people starving in other parts of the world, somehow needs to alert others to their superior sense of moral rectitude. Thanks for the implied moral lesson, now go send all your co-op groceries to Somalia. Don’t have the international postage coupon to send your artisanal cheese to Africa? First World Problems. 

The Brooklyn Nets Deserve to Fail

The Barclays Center has officially opened, and this upcoming N.B.A. season will be the inaugural season of the Brooklyn Nets. If ever a team deserves to fail, it is the Brooklyn Nets. Their very presence in Brooklyn is a monument to the worst elements of power in our contemporary New York. It is a case study in abuse of eminent domain, with the government forcing people from their homes so that property could be handed over to a private developer for private profit.

            Wherever your previous sports loyalties lie or whatever your political persuasion, there are enough reasons for everyone to want to watch the Nets drown in sorrow and mediocrity. Hating the Nets could be as proud of a New York tradition as having your heart broken by the Knicks.

The Barclays Center looks like a giant rusted George Foreman Grill that’s been fitted with a toilet seat. It is covered in large poop-brown tiles and screams BARCLAYS CENTER at passers-by with large light blue lettering. It looks like it was designed by Frank Gehry’s retarded cousin (Gehry was initially tapped to design it, which is bad enough). The designers couldn’t have put together a more fitting eyesore for the occasion.

Uglier than the building itself is how it came to be there. Never was there a more perfect illustration of government corruption, crony capitalism, racial pandering and ugly architecture in these five boroughs. 

            The stadium is the centerpiece of the “Atlantic Yards” project, a scheme hatched by developer Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner at the height of the housing boom in the early 2000s. The scheme was to get public backing for a sports stadium to bring professional sports back to Brooklyn and then use that to build lots of upscale condominiums and turn a big profit.

Ratner managed to get some people to sell to him legitimately. Work crews would install scaffolding around recently purchased businesses in order to get the area declared “blighted,” which would allow further land grabs for the purposes of rebuilding an area the very same developer helped destroy. Getting your politician friends to force homeowners to sell their land isn’t capitalism.

The government didn’t invoke eminent domain in order to build a hospital, a bridge, a highway or even a public pool. Instead it forced people to sell their homes to a private developer so he could build for private gain. Will Brooklyn see more money from the area now that there’s a stadium there? Sure, but so what? Should I be forced to sell my favorite guitar to Eric Clapton because he’ll play it better and make more money with it? 

            The stadium will be open to the public that can shell out money for tickets, of course, but the profits all go to the owners. It is not owned by the people of New York or Brooklyn. It will be a financial windfall for the owners, but it’s not going to give much back to Brooklyn. It’s not a victory for capitalism either. Capitalism is buying the land honestly from willing sellers to build your stadium.

            Local landowners and residents fought in court for years to stop the Atlantic Yards project from taking their homes, but to no avail. No court stopped the project, even though its backers were shown to have lied numerous times about the environmental impact of the development. And Forest City Ratner has yet to deliver on key promises it made to solidify political and public support.  

            With a few notable exceptions, New York City’s political leadership supported the project. Remember when conservative activists secretly recorded an ACORN official giving advice to a would-be pimp exploiting underage girls? That ACORN is a corrupt recipient of public graft surprised no one who had followed the Atlantic Yards debacle closely. The activist organization was bought and paid for by the developers and dutifully parroted the mantra about jobs.

            Most of the holdout homeowners were middle and working class whites, and

the buying of ACORN also helped draw a racial dividing line in the issue. That made it easier for liberal politicians like City Council speaker Christine Quinn to back the project. Black activists and politicians like Rev. Al Sharpton touted the project as something that would bring jobs to poor blacks.

            Ratner bought the help of Brooklyn-born rapper Jay-Z, who owns less than 1% of the Nets but is one of the most public faces of the project.  He is opening the new stadium with a series of concerts. An overrated rapper who owns high-end night clubs and the like, Jay-Z made a more honest living when he sold crack.

There’s not much mention of any of this in the coverage of the arena now, except the brief asides that the stadium is “controversial.” The New York Times, whose headquarters was built by the same developer, had a feature story on the different cultural foods available at the new stadium. At least the presence of turkey meatballs is news fit to print.

            Many fair-weather Knicks fans have already jumped ship and are sporting the obnoxious black and white logos of the Brooklyn Nets. I have friends who should be smart enough to know better bragging about scoring Jay-Z tickets.

If he has not been cremated, late Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch would be rolling over in his grave at the sight of Brooklyn Nets t-shirts emblazoned with “No Sleep Till,” a reference to the Beastie Boys’ song ‘No Sleep ‘Till Brooklyn.”

It’s like being in the land of the pod people, where slack-jawed consumers take what you give them and hand over their money like trained animals. Am I delusional to think that New Yorkers were once made of stronger, smarter, more skeptical stuff? It would be forgivable to steal from such plump suckers if the Nets didn’t trample over people’s rights and build a shit-stain of a stadium to really blight once-proud Brooklyn.