"Snow-n'out-Ma!"

And man, is it ever! I just got back from my morning dog walk, and the snow accumulating on the sidewalks was up to Ilsa’s chest. The deep going required us to move to the street, where we walked in the tire tracks of a few cabs and a police cruiser. Ilsa bounded about like she had just been sprung from the joint; she loves the white stuff, and there’s plenty around to woo.

Only a few intrepid souls had ventured outside to share our excite- ment over this wind-whipped deluge of tiny flakes. It appears most of Hell’s Kitchen has opted to stay indoors and wait this one out. Wimps!

Snow transforms the bleakest cityscape into something spotless and serene. The many disparate thoughts of the city’s residents merge into communal awestruck wonder over the power that’s creating such pristine, and temporary, beauty. When it’s snowing out, everyone lives in the moment. Forget about that board meeting next week. Deal with that “C” on your child’s report card later. The unpaid bills can wait one more day. Just look at what’s going on outside. Nature, not known for her subtlety, again compels us to ponder the Big Questions: Do you believe in God? If so, have you made room for Him in your life?

Leave it to snow to rekindle memories you hadn’t thought about since, well, the last good snowfall. The crunching under your boots recalls afternoons of adrenalin-fueled sleigh riding, pulling your sled home with numbed hands and, once inside, seeing spots before your eyes from all of that blinding whiteness. On snow days you never wanted to grow up. School was closed and you could make yourself twenty bucks in a day shoveling driveways with a friend; that was more than what a newspaper route delivered in a week. With that much money you could buy a chocolate egg cream at the Goodie Shoppe, a model, paint and glue at Tervo's Hobby Shop and the latest Sgt. Rock comic book at Stanley's, and still be set for life.

Today’s New York Post says we should expect 20 inches and 50-mph winds before all is said and done for this blizzard later in the afternoon. That’s 5.5 inches short of the 24-hour record amount that fell in Central Park on December 26, 1947, but still an impressive showing. Then the cold air will be charged with the scrape of snow shovels and the whir of snow-removal machinery as layered-up New Yorkers work to make the walkways and roads safely negotiable. In another day the vast, white blanket will be marred with the soot of industry. Day-to-day living will have re-commanded our focus. Innocence will again have taken a back seat to experience. And, for most of us, the big questions, if remembered at all, will no longer seem so big.

Rolling Stone just says no

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character—on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.

That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before—ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today and forever.
—George W. Bush, 2005 Inaugural Address

There’s nothing postmodern about those words. How so many people came to believe that we could dissect, disassemble and ultimately repudiate the wisdom of the ages is beyond me. But there you have it—in the words of so many academics, artists, celebs and others allied with the current zeitgeist, who eschew what they interpret as retro, outdated beliefs of our president.

And here you have it as well. Today CNN reports Rolling Stone magazine has rejected an ad from Zondervan, the nation’s largest publisher of the Bible. The ad was to have run next month, in conjunction with the release of a Bible that is translated into words young people can more easily understand, according to a spokesman for Zondervan. But Rolling Stone isn’t having any of it, even though it took the cash for the ad last July. (One assumes the return check is in the mail.)

A representative for the publisher of Rolling Stone explained, “We are not in the business of publishing advertising for religious messages."

Instead, Rolling Stone is, and always has been, in the business of publishing advertising for multimillionaire rock icons. Last December, the magazine ran a glowing review of the new U2 album, “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.”

The review reads, in part:

“Nobody wants a skinny Santa, and for damn sure nobody wants a hipster Bono. We want him over the top, playing with unforgettable fire. We want him to sing in Latin or feed the world or play Jesus to the lepers in his head…Nobody else is even remotely qualified.”

Apparently not even Jesus Christ himself.

Note to my readers: I have been incredibly busy of late. I’m planning to move to lower Manhattan in March, and I’ve been working away on a business plan that I hope will get me some working capital for my new business. Dispatches will be sporadic over the next few weeks. Hang in there. When the move is completed, I will return with twice-weekly musings on whatever the heck happens to be in my head.

You ain't seen nothin' Mets

There will be no politics or locking antlers with misguided liberals this evening. Not with Ilsa my dog biting into a glazed pig’s ear.

“CRRRRRRAAAAAAAAACK!” (chomp-chomp-chomp…)

Outside the rain is coming down as steady as the sweep of the second hand on a Rolex watch. It’s January, and in New York it feels like a soggy, bone-chilling March. This winter has been one schizophrenic lion. Considering all the noise the weather has been making in the news, it could be worse.

“Right, Ilsa?”

“CRRRRRRAAAAAAAAACK!” (chomp-chomp-chomp…)

With all that death, destruction and despair out there, both dog and her master are feeling pretty fortunate right now. If you haven’t dug into your pockets and shelled out a few bucks for the South Asian rescue and rehabilitation effort yet, click on “Tsunami relief” under my Previous Posts, select a participating organization and get going. Let’s shame US bashers everywhere with our generosity and good will.

Yes, I know, I said no politics this evening. So how about those Mets? Omar Minaya, the team’s new GM, goes out and gets Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran, and suddenly the Mets are beginning to look like the Yankees. At least on paper.

The last time I remember the New York media getting this excited about “that other baseball team” is when it signed big, bad Mo Vaughn. One arthritic left knee and one $15 million paycheck for a missed 2004 season later, and Mo can often be found, when he’s in town, getting lap dances at Scores, courtesy of the New York Metropolitans. Not that I begrudge Mo his lap dances. But big names are just that: big names. The proof is always in the pudding, and let’s just say the Mets have a history of making pretty lousy pudding. I’m confident Beltran will play as advertised this year; he’s only 27. But let’s see Pedro make it to Opening Day healthy, and then show us what he’s got left in that 33-year-old arm. So far, his stats show he’s been keeping pace with the great Sandy Koufax. But Koufax was out of baseball at 32, his dominion over National League hitters ended after a dozen seasons. Can Pedro still deliver at the front end of a pitching rotation, on a New York diamond and under an unforgiving spotlight? Capital questions.

Ilsa has finished her glazed pig’s ear and is sleeping contentedly in her bed. She has the right idea. There’s still 88 days, 23 hours and 45 minutes left until it’s “Play ball!” at Shea. And it’s been a long day.

Golden boys and girls

I was going to comment on another article that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times, but Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal beat me to the punch, and did a pretty good of it, too. So I'll share some of his insights, along with a few of my own, in today's post.

The object of Henninger’s and my affections is here. The Times solicits answers to the question, if you could nominate one era of New York’s history as its golden age, what would it be? Responding are “14 prominent New Yorkers with a keen sense of the city's past and present, from novelists like Cynthia Ozick to architects like Robert A. M. Stern to public figures like Vartan Gregorian.”

Henninger goes after several respondents who nominated the 1970s, all artists of various stripes who called the city home back then. They romanticize the good old days when they were broke and lived the boho life in an economically stressed town of mean streets and lawlessness. Good art, feeding off of the dark vibe of that decade, was indeed created locally. The music was raw and loud. I remember seeing The Ramones at CBGB’s in 1978 with my then brother-in-law. A glitzy, grimy hedonism ruled the night, and I have to say it was intensely compelling and seductive to a teenager from the suburbs, although personally I was ultimately relieved, as were my ears, when Joey, Dee Dee and company finished their set, and my brother-in-law and I returned to our car for the drive back to boring, orderly Long Island.

Performer John Leguizamo probably best expressed the consensus of his peers who nominated the 1970s as New York’s golden age. “New York was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund,” he opined.

Henninger distills his counterargument in these on-the-money paragraphs:

“Over eight years in the 1970s, New York lost more than a half-million private-sector jobs, according to E.J. McMahon and Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose essential travel guide to these years and their aftermath may be found in the current Winter issue of the Public Interest. During the 1970s the real New York nightmare wasn't lived in the SoHo funkytown, but in the funkless outer boroughs.

“Many of the city's most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can't cop a ‘life’ in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell's hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply ‘free-rides’ on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.”

Henninger also notes, “These comments raise the question of just what liberalism believes makes a city great or even golden, rather than just . . . interesting.”

There was another aspect of the Times article that particularly impressed me. I detected the betrayal of a pampered insularity from today’s metropolis in several responses, perhaps most notably in the statement by novelist and historian Caleb Carr, who replied, in part:

“It may seem odd, to those living in a city sterilized by the Giuliani years, that anyone would feel fascination with or nostalgia for a decade that was almost as filthy, violent and degenerate as its predecessors.

“But not only did the 1890's witness attempts at the kind of meaningful reform that eluded Mayor Giuliani - of the Police Department, labor laws, and living conditions for the poor - it also saw the blossoming of culture both high and vulgar: the dominance of the Metropolitan Opera and establishment of the city's great museums, along with the Bowery music halls, Broadway, and the proliferation of artists' communities throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. We should remember, too, that a New York scrubbed clean of prostitution, adult entertainment, drugs and other dark phenomena is a city that has lost its original dynamic, and therefore its meaning.”

I don’t know what planet Caleb Carr is living on, but in my neck of the woods I encounter made-up hookers, dressed in v-neck red and fur, talking on cell phones and getting ready to call it a night, almost every morning before dawn on my dog walks. “Escort services” advertise their wares late nights on public-access cable television; almost all of them have Web sites these days, too.

As for “drugs and other dark phenomena,” they’re still around—I recount my own near-mugging in my December 8 dispatch—but are nowhere near the high-rise, high-security domiciles of established liberal creatives pining for the nihilism of New York’s underbelly. Perhaps they’re just too busy and too ensconced in the trappings of their success to have noticed that the beast is alive and kicking, in the streets below and on TV and the Internet.

Isn't it Rich?

Literary Manhattan has become unhinged. It’s a postmodern wreck in the age of irony, bankrupt of sensitivity and devoid of reason.

Two articles in The New York Times Sunday edition underscore the above brilliantly, albeit unintentionally. I’ll discuss one article here, and the other in Saturday’s post.

In his column, Frank Rich, an esteemed member of the New York liberal elite, treats us to yet another lesson in absurdist logic.

Rich is in a lather about The Kennedy Center Honors, held last month in Washington, DC. He’s dismayed that none of the high-level politicians or art-world celebs attending the annual fete mentioned the Iraq war. This year the president and first lady, as well as John Kerry and other dignitaries, honored Warren Beatty, Sir Elton John, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Dame Joan Sutherland and John Williams for lifetime contributions to American culture.

Rich views their silence on Iraq, at least as demonstrated in the television special airing a couple of weeks after the event, as an oblivious dis to the soldiers. As if FDR never hosted state dinners on evenings when American servicemen were dying by the hundreds in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. As if we should use a “carefree variety show” (Rich’s own words) as an occasion to mourn our dead. And as if doing so wouldn’t play into the hands of the insurgents in their vicious efforts to derail Iraq’s march to free elections.

Rich writes, “The razzle-dazzle Hollywood martial music, the what-me-worry Washington establishment, the glow of money and red plush: everything about the tableau reeked of the disconnect between the war in Iraq and the comfort of all of us at home, starting with those in government who had conceived, planned, rubber-stamped and managed our excellent adventure in spreading democracy.” In case you missed it, Rich is likening “all of us” to the moronic title characters in the film, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” Like, man, we just don’t get it, do we?

But then he observes that “ordinary” folks are “feeling that disconnect more and more.” He cites an ABC News/Washington Post poll, released the same day The Kennedy Center Honors aired, which “found that 70 percent of Americans believed that any gains in Iraq had come at the cost of ‘unacceptable’ losses in casualties and that 56 percent believed the war wasn't ‘worth fighting’ — up 8 percent since the summer. In other words, most Americans believe that our troops are dying for no good reason, even as a similar majority (58 percent) believes, contradictorily enough, that we should keep them in Iraq.”

What Rich fails to point out is that, during times of increased violence and controversy in Iraq, such as occurred last month, some Americans waver in their support for the war. A CNN/Time poll, released May 22, 2004, right on the heels of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the videotaped beheading of American Nicholas Berg, found the following:

“More people than not believe that going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do, but that number has declined to 48 percent in this poll, compared to 53 percent in April. And 56 percent of those polled say the war is not worth U.S. lives and other costs.”

So in December 56 percent of polled Americans believed the war wasn’t worth fighting, and last May 56 percent felt the same way. If Rich is correct in his contention that last month’s 56 percent figure is “up 8 percent since the summer,” then at some point after the May poll that number decreased to 48 percent. How much would you like to bet the drop came at a time of relative quiet in Iraq?

Along with wavering poll numbers, it appears that during times of stepped-up suicide bombings and beheadings in Iraq, we should expect more “disconnected” blather from liberals like Frank Rich. Meanwhile, those dunderheads in Washington enjoy the greatest support for their “excellent adventure in spreading democracy” from the soldiers on the ground.