Sons of Anarchy

I just finished reading a rather astonishing call-to-arms from a blogger who is fond of historical allusions, yet is either oblivious or dismissive of the more recent history of mobs breaking glass. The blogger, Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Alabama, calls upon the "modern Sons of Liberty" to "Break their windows. Break them now". What he is doing is inciting individuals to go to the homes and offices of members of Congress, specifically those who voted for what he labels as "Nancy Pelosi's Intolerable Act" (Health Care Reform), and then break the windows of the buildings. Now the first thing that comes to mind is whether or not Mr. Vanderboegh himself intends to cast the first stone in defense of liberty. My guess would be probably not, but you never know.

Exactly where were all of these "modern Sons of Liberty", or Three Percenters, over the eight long years of George W Bush's Reign? They didn't find anything "intolerable" about any of his acts? Vanderboegh invokes the sacking and burning of Massachusetts Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson's home in August of 1765 by the original Sons of Liberty, presumably to lend some heroic luster to what amounts to acts of vandalism. Nice try Mike, but chucking a brick through Nancy Pelosi's window and then running off like a common thief is not going to transform you into Sam Adams. Of course you could always use an empty Sam Adams as your projectile, but then you'd have to forfeit the 5 cent bottle deposit. Whoever said "Freedom isn't Free" must have anticipated your splendid rebellion.

My suspicion is that a couple of centuries, and much mythologizing, have combined to scrub away the sins of those original Sons of Liberty. Thomas Hutchinson, whatever his failings as a man and as a governor, was a learned man who had been working for years on a history of the Bay Colony. He home contained a valuable library and things of beauty, not to mention his family. A family that was forced to flee for their lives as a drunken mob attacked their home and proceeded to pillage and burn it down. The first thing they went for was the wine cellar. After it was over, the manuscript for his book lay trampled in the mud. To me, the sacking of Thomas Hutchinson's home was an act of barbarism.

Patriot leaders, like the aforementioned Sam Adams, sought to harness the power of the mob to incite a revolution. But the last thing they wanted to see happen was a social revolution, one that might threaten the sanctity of property and their own privileged positions. As a result, most were horrified by the spectacle of mobs of rabble putting elegant homes to the torch. It was all to easy to imagine their own homes meeting the same fate. Instead, they wanted a revolution that would leave the existing social structure intact. A conservative revolution, if you will. And that is exactly what they achieved.

Urban Cowboys

I've been working through all of my accumulated hours of videotape these past weeks. This video is a highlight reel of Andrew's baseball season from the Spring of 2005. I was working at Hill Holliday New York at the time, and one of my coworkers put this terrific video together. I have since taught myself how to make movies, but my efforts never seem to quite measure up to the always excellent results that Annie achieved.

The location of the baseball field is Murphy Brothers Park, on the East Side of Manhattan, nestled alongside the FDR Drive at 18th Street and Avenue C. The brick buildings behind the field are Stuyvesant Town, and you can also see the ConEd Plant looming behind the fences. It may not look like a Norman Rockwell painting, but it is baseball just the same.

Wise Guys

Earlier today a viewer made a rather unexpected comment regarding one of my youtube videos. The video in question is titled "PS 40 5th Grade Play", and is exactly what the name implies. I taped the entire play, trimmed it down to about 7 minutes, and then uploaded it to my youtube channel. Anyway, the viewer's comment was "This was the school that mob boss Lucky Luciano attended". And, lo and behold, it appears that he is correct.

Did anyone know that NYC has a museum dedicated to organized crime? I made that discovery while attempting to verify my viewer's claim. The grandly named Museum of the American Gangster is housed in a former speakeasy, and is located at 80 St. Marks Place in Manhattan. If you follow this link to their web page about Mr. Luciano, then you will see that he did indeed attend the same school as my son Andrew. It would seem that the famous Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky attended PS 40 as well, and the school is where the two boys began a life-long friendship.

I recall reading something several years back about efforts to build an organized crime museum out in Las Vegas. And I remember thinking that a museum like that belongs in New York City. Nearly all of the iconic mob figures hailed from NYC, including Chicago's Al Capone, who was born in Brooklyn. I'm not certain what happened with the Vegas project, but I am very much looking forward to paying my first visit to that former speakeasy.

Andrew is quite impressed that such a infamous character attended the same school that he just graduated from this past year. Andrew has heard of Al Capone, but not Charles "Lucky" Luciano. I told him that Luciano helped us with the invasion of Sicily in WWII by establishing contact with his counterparts in Italy, and urging them not to cooperate with the Germans and Italians defending the Island. Whatever he did was deemed valuable enough to spring him from prison, but he was deported to Italy immediately. Meyer Lansky is an equally fascinating character. I think that he was the inspiration for the Jewish mob boss in The Godfather movies.

Andrew took on the role of President Kennedy in the play and delivered a condensed version of his inaugural address. He enjoyed playing the president, but I suspect that if we had known this sooner, Andrew would have made a pitch for including the school's most notorious alumni in the play. He already had the dark suit; all that was missing was the fedora and violin case.

The Bronx Is Up and The Battery's Down

Through trial and error, I have been steadily teaching myself the intricacies of transferring video footage from analog to digital. Providing one has the correct hardware and software, the process is not that difficult. The problem is knowing what to buy and making sure it is compatible with my operating system. Connecting a VCR machine to a computer struck me as alchemy at first - it seemed impossible that it would actually work. But, the video embedded below stands as happy testimony to my success.

My obsession with all things NYC-related remains undiminished. This video sat for years in an analog format collecting dust, until I decided to bring it into the light of day via the magic of youtube. The footage provides a window that affords us a rare glimpse of the city as it appeared more then a half-century ago. And, even more remarkable, it is in full-color. We can be thankful that the producers of this film had the foresight to capture that world before it disappeared forever.

Embedded below is "The Vanishing El"...

Funny Money

A North Carolina Congressman has introduced legislation to replace Grant's likeness, with that of Ronald Reagan, on the $50 bill. I must confess that I was indifferent to this idea initially, but that changed when I read this op/ed piece by historian Sean Wilentz, posted on the NYT's web site. Wilentz does a terrific job of setting the record straight as concerns the much-maligned reputation of Ulysses S Grant. And, in the process, he exposes this proposal as both a travesty and an injustice.

Let them name another ship, freeway, or airport after Reagan, if they must. But, leave him off our currency please. Doesn't anyone see the irony of putting this man's face on a bank note? He ran up record deficits throughout his two terms in the White House. The Right's repeated efforts to deify Ronald Reagan grow ever more tiresome. These characters just can't get over the fact that FDR was the greatest American president of the 20th century, and nothing they do can change that. Roosevelt liberated Western Europe from the Nazis, while simultaneously crushing the Japanese Empire. And Reagan? Well, Reagan did dispatch a fleet to tiny Grenada to chase away some Cuban construction workers, and at the same time, gave Clint Eastwood a neat idea for a movie.

ICE, ICE, BABY

It seems inexplicable to me that this country is unable to build even a modest version of a true high-speed rail service, one that measures up to the ones found in a half-dozen other countries. The closest thing we have is the Amtrak Acela service between Boston and Washington, DC, and that would be considered a regional express service, at best, if compared to what exists elsewhere in the world. In order to have true high-speed trains, you need dedicated right-of-ways, free of slower moving trains, like the freight trains that share the rails with Amtrak.

The author of the opinion piece that I link to above has the right idea. If you only going to allocate 8 billion dollars to promote high-speed trains (a pittance if ever there was one), then your best bet is to spend it all on upgrading the one rail corridor we have that approaches world-class standards. Instead the money is being dispersed among 31 states, only two of which have so far come up with concrete proposals. The Amtrak Northeast Corridor is not even included in the dispersal of funds.

As you view the slideshow that I set up to the right of this post, question why it is that we lag so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to high-speed rail service. And particularly think about it the next time you are forced to take a plane to travel less then 500 miles, a trip that typically involves more time getting to and from the airports, then actual time spent in the air. There is a better way, and all that is lacking is the national will to make it happen.

ACTA NON VERBA

I came across an hour-long interview that Robert Moses gave in 1977, when he was close to 90 years old. I couldn't detect even a hint of decrepitude in the man; his mind was razor-sharp and all of the personality traits typically associated with him came across clearly. Moses was by turns witty, defensive, erudite, cruel, and above all else, remorseless. Listening to Moses school the youngster interviewing him was great entertainment. You've heard the expression "trying to nail jello to a wall"? Well, that is a pretty good way of describing what I just watched. Time and again, the interviewer, Robert Sam Anson, would gamely attempt to steer the dialogue where he wanted it to go, and each time Moses would deftly fend him off. It was clear to me that, regardless of what Anson might have thought of his subject going in, by the end of the hour he was visibly awed by the defiant octogenarian sitting across from him.

ESPRESSO SHOTS, NOT GUNSHOTS

I just finished reading an AP article about how retailers, specifically the coffee chain Starbucks, are finding themselves caught in the middle of the gun control debate. The trouble stems from the increasingly militant stance that members of the so-called "open-carry" movement have adopted in recent months. 43 states now have laws permitting gun-owners to brandish loaded guns in public, and many of them have interpreted that right to include carrying the weapons into places like stores and restaurants. And, if local laws do permit open-carry, the law does extend to retailers and the like, unless the business decides to ban the weapons from their establishment. But, that is a position that many retailers are reluctant to take, presumably out of fear of offending some well-armed potential customers.

Starbucks attempted to take the mushy middle of the road approach (we obey all local laws), and predictably, ended up pleasing neither side. Gun-owners insisted on bringing their weapons into the coffee shops, and gun-control activists began pressuring the chain to ban customers carrying guns. And while I find the idea of armed customers sipping their coffees around me, as I get my morning cup, somewhat disconcerting, I did think of a specific gun-related incident that took place in a coffee shop and that got me to thinking.

This past November, a man walked into a Lakewood, WA coffee shop and methodically gunned down 4 local police officers as they sat drinking coffee and working on laptop computers. I do seem to recall that one of the officers managed to return fire and wounded the gunman, but the officers essentially didn't stand a chance. They were totally unprepared for what happened and all 4 were killed. Now, would the outcome have been any different had there been an armed customer on the premises when the shooting started? That is impossible to answer obviously, but it is worth considering. A lot of variables come into play. If 4 trained and armed law enforcement officers were unable to save themselves, how likely is it that a plumber with a pistol strapped to his hip would have fared better? My personal opinion is that our hypothetical armed customer would have become victim number 5 in short order, had he tried to intervene.

Let's Go To The Fair

I've always been fascinated by the 1939 World's Fair which was held on the site of an ash dump in Queens New York, a landmark immortalized in the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The dump was miraculously transformed, for the Fair, into what is today Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, an oasis of greenery and fresh water in the middle of Queens. The park also served as the site of the 1964 World's Fair, and the iconic landmarks that remain today date from the later Fair. For fairly obvious reasons, the '64 Fair does not invoke anywhere near the level of affectionate nostalgia that is typically associated with the '39 Fair.

The 1939 World's Fair took place against the backdrop of the looming Second World War, the shadow of which was inescapable. It also coincided with the Great Depression, which had been going on for a decade by that point, and full economic recovery was still several years in the future. So understandably, people were eager for anything that might take their minds off of their immediate concerns, while simultaneously holding out the promise of a better tomorrow. The 1939 Fair fulfilled both of those desires, as demonstrated by the two gentlemen offering their own memories of the Fair in the videos that I am embedding at the bottom of this post.

As you watch the wonderful color footage of the Fair, pay attention to a couple of things. First, notice the almost-total absence of any litter or trash blowing about on the ground. 1939 predates the birth of our modern packaging industry, an industry that is a decidedly mixed blessing. We pay a heavy price for convenience, as one look at our blighted landscape of today will quickly show. And it isn't just the Fairgrounds that are free of trash. The footage of the city streets that you will see shows the same thing.

Next, notice how well-dressed everyone at the Fair is. I firmly believe that there is a strong correlation between the way people dress, and how they conduct themselves in public. When citizens dressed in a civilized manner, they tended to behave accordingly. Today, when you have the spectacle of people attending church in t-shirts and sweatpants, it is no wonder that our society has suffered a complete breakdown in so many respects. The plain truth is that most people today dress exactly the same for almost any occasion, a deplorable trend if ever there was one.

HEY, TAXI!

I came across a delightful video on youtube called "Driving Around New York City - 1928". It is great fun and wait until you see who the cabbies second passenger is...

NY Post Stuyvesant Town Video

I just came across a youtube video, posted a year ago, that is narrated by the NY Post's Max Gross. It is a useful, if brief, look at the history of the development up to the present day, or at least 2008. The video touches on the massive relocation of people that preceded construction, and it also mentions Met Life's initial policy of not renting apartments to African-Americans. Gross then makes the rather astonishing claim that Stuyvesant Town is now "one of the most diverse communities in Manhattan. I lived there for 15 years and have no idea what he is basing that conclusion on.

Nevertheless, the video is interesting and informative, and well worth a viewing. I will embed the youtube video below:

Glory Days

There was a time, in the not-too distant past, when the New Jersey Nets actually looked like a real basketball team. We attended a Nets-Celtics game on January 25, 2004, and watched the final game that Bryon Scott coached for the Nets before being fired. The Nets turned in a strong performance and came away with a decisive victory. My camera work was a bit shaky at times (I was still getting used to filming), but it is remarkable how steady a hand I had when filming the cheerleaders half time show. Sadly, the cheerleaders are the only thing worth watching at a Nets game these days...