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IT'S THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN
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This week I’m returning to some familiar themes that have been cropping up
regularly in the course of the weekly running battle between me and the English
language in these pages. First is the good news: the school scandal here on
Long Island continues to boil over with one revelation of skullduggery
succeeding another, with the promise of more and yet more to come and keep coming.
When you look for graft out here you are tapping into a rich vein. It’s the
gift that keeps on giving.
The latest news is that Mr. Tassone, former Roslyn superintendent of
education, now under arrest, spent the district’s money on $50,000 trips to London for
a couple of “conferences”, and stole a total amount of $1 million in his
nine years lighting the lamp of knowledge in the district. Other details of the
hijinks of the educators and their enablers on the school board are coming out
day by day and will be detailed here in a future column. Right now it’s
enough to say that a good time was had by all, and how. One principal, for
instance. billed the district for six trips to Vegas, four to New Orleans and two to
San Francisco in four years. He said they were all for “professional
advancement”. He didn’t say what profession.
Another recurrent theme of mine has been the story of the 3,351 counties of
the United States; are they of any use? A few weeks ago I offered thumbnail
descriptions of four of the most famous ones, and I’m doing two more today,
reserving my remaining space for an inquiry into the question of our States. Do
they all make sense? One thing leads to another, you see.
Deaf Smith County in west Texas is named after a frontiersman from New York
with defective hearing who was admired by the early settlers, though not as
much by the Indians. He died in 1837, but forty years later the county was
incorporated and named after him. It then had thirty-eight inhabitants. This
figure has since mushroomed to all of 18,000, making it a classic example of a
place with more government than it needs. It has a County Executive, a County
Judge, County Commissioners, County Clerks, a big County Courthouse, a District
Attorney, everything a New York county has except population.
In reviewing the history of this sagebrush sanctuary I was unable to find any
spectacular happenings to write about. No range wars, no Indian massacres,
no colorful outlaws, no gold rushes, no stolen elections, just a steady
application of the seat of the pants to the back of the horse to make those longhorns
hit the trail. Which I will also do and hope for better things in…
Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At last, a real county. With 600,000
inhabitants, no less. None of this business of 38 nonentities declaring themselves a
county and starting a mini-government in which they all had jobs. Bucks had
more than that in 1682 when it got started. Since then it has flourished. It
has a county government with all the offices of Deaf Smith County, but which
actually have work to do. It is completely lacking in sagebrush, cactus,
tumbleweed and rattlesnakes, but manages to get along anyway. It used to have a lot
of New York celebrities living there, which is how I happened to learn about
it as a boy, but I don’t see much about that anymore. Most of them were
writers and their favorite subject was the way in which the natives were able to
persuade them that with a coat of paint and a good sweepout an abandoned barn
would make an ideal place to create a masterpiece deserving of the Pulitzer
Prize. They could have it for a song too. They’re still at it.
And now for the States. From the time this country started the rule seems to
have been that we couldn’t have too many of them. They were admitted in a
free-and-easy way, even though some of them were on welfare from the beginning
and haven’t become self-supporting yet. Arkansas is an example. The thinking
seems to have been that if we didn’t make them States and bring them into the
family, someone else would try to grab them and use them against us in some
way. Hogwash. Calling a part of the country a Territory instead of a State
didn’t make it any more or less vulnerable to foreign occupation than it had
ever been.
Even so the mania for statehood persisted. The last beneficiaries of the
craze were Alaska and Hawaii. I remember the campaign to admit them. The New
York newspapers made a crusade of it. Without these two bulwarks, they
insisted, the country would be almost defenseless against invasion from, well,
anywhere. They hinted that maybe racism was a factor behind the delays in admission.
There were a lot of Eskimos in Alaska after all, and a lot of Orientals in
Hawaii.
What they never mentioned was the fact that there were also a lot of Senators
in Washington, 96 to be exact, and only two of them came from New York. One
forty-eighth of the whole, in other words, but with four more Senators added,
soon to be one-fiftieth of the whole. Since the main business of the Senate
was to allocate government funds for use around the country, this meant that
the state that then had the highest population, New York with over fifteen
million people, 10% of the American whole, would be more under-represented than
ever and would be under-funded accordingly. With 2% of the Senators you will
find it hard to get more than five or six percent of the money, even if your
federal taxes provide fifteen or twenty percent of the total being redistributed.
Redistribution is the chief function of government, of course, just as it is
of families and every other organization in existence. Some parts of the
structure will be stronger than the rest and must support the rest, or the
structure collapses. This is a fact of life, but so is it a fact that a good thing
can be carried too far. That is what is happening today. The Urban Areas
Security Initiative is the prime example. This is the government distributing
money to the states for defense against terrorism. In 2003 New York City got
$187.3 million of this money. This year the city will get $96.2 million. Also
the number of cities eligible to receive money has been expanded from seven to
fifty. This is the direct result of the pressure applied by the 98 Senators
who don’t come from New York, including the four from Hawaii and Alaska.
Mayor Bloomberg has gone ballistic denouncing this outrage and reminding the
world that the Twin Towers attack happened in New York and the next attempt
will come here also. The terrorists work that way; they want headlines even
more than they want destruction. They can bomb Kansas or Texas to smithereens
and they won’t get the coverage they’ll get in New York.
Not having space here, I can’t elaborate much on my unsurprising solution.
Four states in the North Midwest have a population of 2,800,000 among them.
This is 16,000,000 fewer people than New York. They have approximately
one-seventh of New York’s population, but have four times as many votes in the
Senate. I know what the Constitution says, I know people love their states, I know
most of these senators are Republicans, but I still say what’s right is
right. Consolidating these four states into one wouldn’t solve everything, but as
they say about the dead lawyers, it’d be a good start. (Sorry, lawyers).
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