The Littleman Cometh

The South Coast was graced yet again by a Democratic Presidential candidate this past weekend when all five feet of Dennis Kucinich made an appearance (amongst many in the area) at Arlington West on Sunday. Kucinich, the self-glossed peace candidate, spoke to an estimated crowd of 250 people at the shrine by the wharf. Reports said it was a much more personal visit than that of Barack Obama earlier this month, where around 5000 people turned out to cheer on the guy with no real platform. More personal? That's an understatement. You would think that if he knew that B. Hussein Obama drew maybe 20 times as many people that it might discourage him from spending another dime on his campaign, but alas he drives on. He even followed up his Santa Barbara visit with an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Congratulations to the former mayor of the Mistake by the Lake errrrrrrr Cleveland. You know you've really made it when you appear on a television program right after Jay talks to former pro wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. In case you were interested, Jay has Jennifer Love Hewitt on his program tonight, so set those tivos.

I have several problems with Dennis Kucinich. First and foremost, it's his slogan, "Strength through Peace." This is the only Democrat in the race who voted against the resolution granting the President the power to wage the war on terror. This passage appears on his website:

The Cold War belief that peace comes through strength is as obsolete as the Edsel. In an interconnected world of trading partners afloat with nuclear weapons, war is unthinkable. The Europeans have turned away from the catastrophic wars of the last century which took over 100 million lives to embrace a new understanding of diplomacy and dialogue as well as a new understanding of patriotism. So must the United States. The world depends on it.

Forget for a moment that in the last 1000 years no peace has emerged from any major conflict where one of the warring factions has pledged weakness errrrrr peace. It was in fact our very own weaknesses, in intelligence, operational safety, and lack of resolve, that led to the events of 9/11. It is weakness that our present enemies seize on. And for Kucinich to point to the Europeans as a model for foreign policy is an egregious moral error. Was it not the French and the Russians that were involved in the UN Oil for Food scandal? Didn't the Spaniards cow to the terrorists by electing a socialist administration very shortly after their trains were bombed by the terrorists? Aren't European countries being overrun with Muslim immigrants whose birthrates quadruple those of native Euros in some nations? Kucinich has pledged to engage with all nations, whether they disagree with US policy or not. So he's willing to lend an ear to the Iranian Hitler Mahmoud Ahmedenijad. I'm sure that the Kucinich policy of laying down would have furthered the progress with North Korea in trying to get them to abandon their nuclear programs. And Dennis Kucinich screaming "Peace! Peace! Peace!" is going to get the Sudanese to stop killing each other. Right. Strength through Peace only works if you're living in H.G. Wells' far flung future from The Time Machine, where the people ignored history. And even that was a relative peace, for weren't those monsters living just a few hundred feet below them, underground, ready to strike at any time? We are fighting a war right now that Dennis Kucinich would not fight if he were president. His campaign slogan is an affront to our men and women serving overseas right now. I believe he gives aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war with his foreign policy platform. The fact that he voted against the Patriot Act shows how ignorant he is of the threat we face today. Doesn't he know how many terrorist plots have been thwarted by that piece of legislation? This is the wrong guy at the wrong time, and he's got to know this. Only 200 people showed up to hear him speak in public on a Sunday. You don't have to be a soothsayer to see that his future does not contain the American Presidency.

To go along with his defeatist platform he's got all the bells and whistles of a liberal campaign: Universal Health Care for All, the End of World Poverty, Global Warming Legislation, Manned Flights to the Sun, you name it and it's on there. The one piece of credit that I will give the little guy: he's no Barack Obama. He's not all hot air. If you go to his website, it's pretty chock full of his platforms and how he would accomplish what he proposes. And for a little guy, he's got a pretty big set of balls to have voted how he has over the past six years. Unfortunately for him, the other horses in the race are bigger and stronger, like the black cocaine user and the pantsuit wearing lesbian. There's not a Napoleon Complex in the world that could overcome those two, and the sooner the little guy realizes that the quicker he can get back to bashing Bush and meandering down the path of less relevance.

Thanks for coming Dennis!

Never Forget

It has been six years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and for the first time the anniversary falls on a Tuesday. This morning the murdered were honored in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Shanksville, PA. As the years pass the cry gets more and more quiet, as they say that time heals all wounds. I sincerely hope that is only true in this instance only when we have defeated our enemies, and even then I hope the cry remains, however blunted. If folks are still traveling to Hawaii to visit the site of the submerged Arizona, then shall they be visiting Ground Zero sixty years hence. A Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, thankfully only comes around once in a generation, but these happenings should be remembered forever. With that in mind on this six year anniversary, I am going to lay out for the readers my own personal connection to the World Trade Center and 9/11.

My then fiancé and I moved to Santa Barbara in the middle of August, 2001, from West Orange, NJ. She was a schoolteacher in northwest Jersey and I worked as an administrator in the Athletic Department of Pace University in downtown Manhattan. We both loved our jobs, but I had been living in NJ for 11 years and she had been there nine. Realizing we were not getting any younger, and that with age comes the reluctance to uproot, we decided to drop everything, pack up the cars, and migrate west to our little paradise here in Santa Barbara. We started driving the 3000 plus miles on August 13 and arrived here August 21, precisely two weeks prior to the attacks.

A little context helps here: I had commuted through the WTC every day for three years by the time I quit my job at the University. Getting that job at Pace University was the legitimizing moment of my career. Having moved from New Hampshire to New Jersey after graduating high school, getting work in the city was my number one goal, and I had achieved it. I walked amongst the Wall Street elite and the corner booksellers on Nassau and Park Row. I drank 19 thousand beers at the Blarney Stone on Fulton. I ate lunch in the park in front of City Hall and wandered amongst the 300 year old tombstones at the Trinity Church. I was certainly part of the culture of the melting pot that is New York City, and I loved it. I even loved the commute, via Path train from Harrison, New Jersey (where many of the scenes of the opening credits of the Sopranos were filmed). Along the way you could watch the skyline from across the river as you approached the city, a skyline dominated by the twin towers. Walk beneath them and you were in awe. So many times I said to myself on that commute, “you made it, man.” I was proud of those buildings, proud of my city. As a Yankee fan, I can tell you there is nothing like standing in the shadows of the towers, in the Canyon of Heroes, as the triumphant Yankees march up Broadway to City Hall in the years they win the World Series. Another image comes to mind, from Tim Levitch’s film “The Cruise,” where he says if you stand in the middle of the courtyard between the towers, look up, and spin around until you get a little dizzy, then lie down on the ground looking up, the towers will twist and intertwine themselves in your vision. It’s very trippy, and it works; I’ve tried it.

Fast forward: when we got here to SB we were put up by a friend for a couple of months until we secured our own housing. So it was that I was awoken that fateful morning by a roommate in time to see the second plane impact. Unemployed, I was glued to the news channels interminably. Unable to get any phone calls through to the area for weeks was devastating. The cell towers were on top of the trade center, so wireless was definitely out. They had no power in the neighborhood for weeks, so I couldn’t get through to anybody at Pace for awhile. I had 25 work-study employees and the entire men’s basketball team and coaching staff housed down there, and I couldn’t find out for weeks if anyone had survived the collapses. I didn’t know if Dave Butler the Irish bartender at the Blarney Stone, or Bernard the giant black guy that was my friend and partner-in-beer, had made it. The bar was two blocks from 5 WTC. There’s video of the collapse clouds blasting down Fulton St. right in front of the place. My stomach clenches every time I see that clip. I didn’t know if Frenchy the bookseller, with his simple “Any book a dollar” sign on cardboard, had set up his table on the corner of Broadway and Park Row yet. The Italian guy behind the counter at Ray Bari’s on Nassau, who served me my daily slice: did he step outside to take a look just before it all came down? The Korean kids that ran the video game shop right next door to Ray’s: how many of those kids who I had mashed buttons with on the house Soul Calibur machine were outside in the street when all the air got sucked out of the sky? During all this time of confusion I was tormented with nightmares of where I would have been at the time of the attacks. If I had not been on one of the Path trains on it’s way to the basement of the WTC at the very moments of the first impact, I would certainly have been standing right underneath the towers as they came crashing down. So my bullet missed me by two weeks precisely. Others were not so lucky.

I’ve spent hours upon hours of scouring the lists of the dead online over the course of the last six years. There are some very comprehensive databases out there with pictures of the victims. Click, load the next profile, don’t know him; click, load the next profile, don’t know her; click, load the next profile, it’s Jemal DeSantis. Jemal was just one of the guys I recognized as killed in the attacks. He and three full basketball teams of Cantor Fitzgerald employees perished. We ran a corporate basketball league out of our gym, and I would officiate the games. The bulk of the people I knew that died on 9/11 would come from this group.

When it was all said and done, I locked down 36 names. There could be more but I haven’t pored over those sites for years. I lost no Pace employees, and nobody from our basketball team was killed or injured. My friend Jeff Ruggiero worked up high in the Trade Center, but he decided to stay home from work that day to take care of his wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time. Small miracles like that buoy me when I feel down about 9/11.

Whenever I go back to the tri-state I go to Ground Zero. I shed a few tears at the site, thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t there that day, and head over to Ray Bari’s for a slice. From there I proceed to Frenchy’s table and pick up a paperback for the train ride back, for which he never charges me that dollar. He knows he’s going to get it from me when I buy him a beer or three at the Blarney Stone after the lunch hour rush has subsided. If it’s before noon, Bernard is almost definitely going to be in there to quaff a pre-lunch beer with his old buddy.

When it’s time to leave, it’s a round of hugs and back on the train for another ride back to Jersey. These days it’s a cathartic ride, and I don’t get to do it very often, but when I do it’s really easy for me to look back on the city as I’m hurtling across the river back toward the Garden State. A part of me will always reside there, 9/11 or not.

This American will never forget his generation’s Pearl Harbor.

All Temps Are Not Created Equally

Jack the Temp is leaving us, and I’m kind of sad about it. Some people would look down upon the temps that they are forced to endure in their workplace. They’re usually under-skilled, fleeting, socially deprived individuals that working folk won’t allow into their tight knit office cliques. In Vietnam, guys grunting through the second half of their tours wouldn’t even talk to the fellows freshly in country. They even had a name for them: FNG’s. They didn’t want to get to know them because there was a good chance the new guy wasn’t going to last very long out in the bush, so why bother? This is kind of the way I feel about temps.

Rambo probably wouldn't even talk to a temp.

The City of Santa Barbara has got to be one of the slowest operating bureaucracies around. It can take months to process a request for a list of viable candidates to fill even the most menial of clerical positions (such as mine). One of the lowest positions on the municipal ladder, yet one of the most imperative, is the Administrative Specialist. I am going to estimate that there are probably 50 AS professionals working for the city. They fill myriad roles for each of the 12 departments and are filtered through a hiring process that includes testing, list placement, and multiple interviews. My own effort at securing the position I hold took nearly five months. For this reason, the city utilizes several temporary employees to fill gaps when AS people move up or out of their roles. Jack the Temp is one of those guys. He’s been here for six months.

We all knew that Jack the Temp was only going to be here temporarily, yet I think none of us thought about what life would be like at work without Jack the Temp. On this his last day, I am forced to think of a future without my favorite prank pulling partner. Yes we liked to play jokes on our unsuspecting colleagues. Jack the Temp spearheaded the effort to steal all of the (flowers that are) pens from the other side of our lobby. The plan checkers could never figure out where the heck their pens were going. They painstakingly turned their ball point pens into flowers and potted them on the counter to try to keep the public from stealing or otherwise walking off with them. It works; that is until Jack the Temp came along. They were so confounded over there and it was hilarious when we’d hear them asking each other “where the heck did all the pens go?”

Jack also figured out how by using just a couple of keystrokes he could turn a person’s desktop display upside down. I forget what keystrokes he used, but I had never heard of it and when he turned my screen upside down I couldn’t figure out how to turn it right side up again. A great trick!

Jack always laughed at me when I would reply to an open chat window on an unsuspecting co-workers workstation with something like “My butt hurts” or “That burrito is giving me the worst farts!” Not a lot of people would laugh with me on those, but Jack did.

While he never got to go to the meetings that our division is forced to endure, I think people really thought of Jack the Temp as their colleague, and not just a temp. In fact I know that a certain fraction of our division was jealous that he didn’t have to go to the meetings. I know I was. But that is another matter. This post is about Jack the Temp. Don’t get me off topic.

Some of the things that I’ve learned about Jack the Temp since we’ve worked together:

• He likes to practice his left handed penmanship, even though he is right handed.
• He eats very healthy foods and even runs an Ethiopian catering service. I tease him about it by pretending to order “fried housefly” and then he calls me an asshole. He’s right, of course.
• Jack usually wears all black. He’s into the whole fashion thing, and he wears some pretty hip stuff, but I never figured out why fashionistas always wear the least expressive color. It’s okay, it’s his thing not mine.
• Jack likes to sing out “I like pizza, YAY!” but I’ve never seen him eat a slice.
• He’s prone to studying the names of world capitals when he’s not busy, and in fact will be visiting some during his European Oddyssey beginning next week. I think he’s hitting something like ten countries in three months, which is impressive.
• Jack has an affinity for the homeless lady that hangs out around our building. She’s a total regular in this neighborhood, and she showers in the sink of our ladies room. He likes her so much we started calling her “Jack’s Girlfriend” and that lasted for a little while until one time someone referred to her as “Jack’s Girlfriend” and he refuted that statement saying that in fact she was his long lost Mother. Now she’s known as “Jack’s Mother” and he spins intricately detailed falsehoods about what they did for dinner last night or how she reacted during his acting up period during his upbringing. Jack is hilarious when he is ad-libbing. Larry David would be proud of him.
  

So I wanted to memorialize my co-worker Jack the Temp, who is leaving us today, by saying that he is the tip-top of the list of the temporary toilers, and I will miss him. Au revoir, Auf wiedersehen, and Adios my friend.