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Here I go again. I will begin by denying any rumors that my absence from print lately was due to a previous engagement with the Department of Correction or that I was committed for observation anywhere. My real trouble was the need of a TKR (Total Knee Replacement) to keep me mobile enough to move around a pool table or occupy a position at the local bar. These objectives have been attained and on top of that I can walk here and there without help. The best news, though, is that I’m not going to write any more about it here.
The world didn’t stop moving just because I wasn’t around to comment on it. There was action on the newsfronts I’d been covering. One of my favorites was the Roslyn school district where $11,000,000 had been scammed from the funds by the Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Tassone, and his pals. In September he copped a plea to grand larceny and agreed to pay back $2,000,000. This got him a reduced jail term of four to twelve years . The courtroom crowd booed this, but he later said he thought he got a raw deal. It was too much of a sentence, he said, for plain old theft with no force used and nobody hurt. He left a clear implication that this was a public service that should have been rewarded, and even honored by the court instead of being dismissed without comment.
Still to come in Roslyn are the proceedings against Pamela Gluckin, former assistant finance director, who got enough to buy four houses and four race cars, along with several members of her family and Stephen Signorelli, Tassone’s roommate, who got $800,000 for auxiliary services like testing and surveying students’ attitudes and preparing brochures and such, for none of which things are there bookkeeping entries to support them. Ghoulish people are hoping there’ll be no more plea bargaining, but instead a series of lively trials revealing what everyone wants to know -- how’d they get away with it?
Other things happened too. The Supreme Court decided a case in New London in favor of the city, which wanted to use eminent domain to condemn some private property in order to buy it and resell it to a private developer who would create a shopping center that would do more for the city than the present occupancy did. Court critics jumped all over this, claiming the Constitution didn’t permit such a proceeding unless the property was to be used for public purposes, not private ones. Now the Court was putting all property in the country at the mercy of governments which could seize it at their price and turn it over to people who happened to have friends in City Hall.
The point has weight, but so has the abuse of property rights which takes place under present conditions. Liberty’s a great thing and it includes the right to do whatever the hell you want with your own property. Yeah, sure, but how many of us enjoy having a neighbor who litters his with discarded refrigerators, cars up on blocks, discarded tires, etc., etc? Damn few. When it happens the protests roll in. Apparently there’s a limit to what you can do with your property after all.
This was brought home to me a few years ago in Atlantic City, which my wife and I were visiting with some English friends. We were admiring the Taj Mahal of the Prophet Trump and the Resorts International of Merv Griffin when our guests asked us about the dirty little shacks tucked in between the showplaces. What were they doing there spoiling the whole scene? We had to explain that this was the work of speculators who cornered good locations wanted by builders and then shook down the builders for a ridiculous price. They hadn’t succeeded with Trump or Griffin (and they didn’t with John D. Rockefeller Jr. when he was building Rockefeller Center) but it was still a good racket and eventually Mr. T. and Mr. G. would make a deal. In the meantime the hot-dog shacks would make enough to pay their taxes -- buildings like that were even known as “taxpayers” -- and the public could put up with the eyesores whether they liked them or not.
Where our guests came from this didn’t happen. European countries simply taxed out of existence landlords who didn’t improve their property when all their neighbors were doing so, so overseas, shakedowns can’t be done. The result is big-scale development, with all buildings fitting into an overall plan and blending together, whether the district is commercial or residential. In America builders can’t assemble big real estate parcels without running into the blackmailers and paying their extortions if they want to continue. Many of them quit at that point and discontinue building. The result is a hodgepodge of different styles from a scatteration of small-scale projects, having no compatability with each other. It’s all very ugly. I like freedom as well as anyone, but freedom’s not an absolute value; it can be abused, and I think hot-dog stands spoiling one’s view of an American Monte Carlo is such an abuse. Monte Carlo doesn’t allow it.
What else went on while I was on the sidelines? There was the World Series with three unbeatable pitchers getting schlumped back-to-back. There was my introduction to physical therapy at the hands of trainers who all learned their trade at Guantanamo Bay where they extracted confessions from all their subjects whether guilty or innocent. I learned to ride a stationary bike -- much better than the regular type, which always gave me trouble. I also now know about leg lifts, about ice packs with an electric current running through my knee at the same time, about holding a weight on the knee for ten minutes with no hope of parole, and in general the whole curriculum followed at Abu Ghraib.
I also learned that a new Supreme Court Justice had been selected but rejected, so now another one has been selected but has not yet been appointed. No other country in the world thinks picking a judge is such a big deal, but here we go on like we were deciding the succession to the imperial throne So much is being made of it that I predict we’ll eventually get to the point where we’ll be taking the candidate’s DNA and comparing it to that of Justices of the past to see if he or she has got the Right Stuff. All I can say is that we should hope that no one will establish a link to Justice William O. Douglas, who very definitely had the Wrong Stuff, in dense quantities. It was kind of a concentrated dose of cobra venom laced with alcohol and blended together to create a witch‘s brew of murky vapors poisoning the groundwater for miles around. Mix it all together and you would have an atomic cocktail calculated to end life on this planet. Did someone say cocktail? It does seem to be time for one and I owe it to my convalescence to make it a good one, thereby ending today‘s proceedings. Till our next...
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