Marathon? Seriously?

If you've been following the news lately, you made have heard that the New York City marathon organizers are planning to go through with the marathon this Sunday even though 1) parts of the city have been underwater all week 2) thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers are still without heat or power and 3) any police, other public servants or volunteers that you might use for a marathon would be about a million times more useful in the Rockaways, on Staten Island or at any one of many many other hard hit locations.

At first I honestly thought this must be a joke or a miscommunication.  Maybe Mayor Bloomberg (who was actually doing really well with this until now) said something like "marathon?  are you fucking kidding me?  My city is underwater.  What kind of a stupid question is that?", but because people are stressed and probably weren't really paying attention, it somehow sounded like he said the marathon was actually still going to happen.  Apparently I was wrong.

Many of the people who read my blog already know me a little, but for those who don't, I grew up in Rockaway Park in Queens.  It was an amazing place to be a kid and really is a wonderful little town.  If you've never been there, you just wouldn't believe a place like it could exist within the borders of such a large and crowded city, but that's just one of the things that makes New York better than everywhere else.

I literally don't have a word for what Hurricane Sandy did to my home town.  Every picture and description I see is worse than the one before it.  It's worse than anything I could have imagined.  Now, the people there are tough and it's a great community and they'll rebuild, but in the mean time, it seems the city is going to have a marathon. 

Because it's really important, in this time of great tragedy, that a bunch of people run around the city for a few hours.  Who cares if people in the Rockaways and Staten Island and other parts of the city have no power and no heat?  Who cares if hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of people lost everything?  Fuck that shit!  That was like, five days ago.  I guess everybody just needs to get the fuck over it, right?

Listen, I understand that events bring money into the city, money that a recovering city needs, but that doesn't explain why they can't run a marathon on November 25th, or December 2nd.  Do it a month later and everybody still gets their money.  Too cold to run around outside that late in the year?  Really?  Do you remember last paragraph when I said people lost their houses?  If December 2nd is too cold for you to run, then you can run around the city by yourself sometime when the conditions suit you a little better. 

Now you can say I shouldn't be too hard on the actual runners.  They've trained for years and it isn't their decision.  I disagree.  Everybody makes a choice.  You can choose to not participate in this ridiculous farce.  You can choose to do something more productive with your time, like volunteer, or just donate to the Red Cross http://www.redcross.org/  See look, there's the link right there. 

I've seen some stories about people who are going to run the marathon and use it to raise money to donate to victims.  That's nice, but couldn't you just collect money for victims and not spend all day running around a decimated city?  Personally, I would much rather do that.  Running 26 miles is tiring and really hard.  When I was a kid my elementary school did a math-a-thon for St. Jude's hospital.  I suspect my grandma still would have given me a check for the sick kids even if I didn't bother actually doing the math.

And as for the mayor and the organizers of the marathon, I don't know enough different forms of the word fuck to properly address them.  The symbolism alone of the marathon starting by running away from devastated Staten Island should be enough to tell anyone with a brain what a bad idea it is to go through with it.  It's a good thing the rubble of my home town won't disrupt the marathon path, or they might have to run somewhere else.

You know, sometimes I get on here and rant about things that really bother me, but then I have to admit that there's no easy solution and it's not as simple as I'm making it sound.  Not this time.  Just do it later.  How hard is that?  Personally, I don't know why they can't just cancel it altogether and tell the people who would have spent money on the day of the marathon to just donate the money instead, but maybe that's asking too much.  I hope, at least, that this will convince everyone in New York that they can't ever vote for Bloomberg again.

Disappointment

Before I get into this, a quick Oscars note. I could stay on topic by manufacturing some disappointment over a few of the winners, but I really wasn't disappointed. The Hurt Locker was an awesome movie and I'm glad it won (if that other movie about blue people, which I refuse to see or mention by name, had beaten The Hurt Locker for best picture, I would have done 5 blogs complaining about it). Sure, I would have liked to have seen that girl from Precious win, just because she seems really nice and it might have made Oprah so happy she would have given us all cars, but I like Sandra Bullock so I can't even really complain about that. And yes, 500 Days of Summer was easily my favorite movie of the last year, and it didn't get nominated for anything, but that has more to do with there not being a comedy category than anything else. So I was really pretty fine with the Oscars. Oh well. Anyway, onto things that do disappoint me.

Everyone knows New York is the best city in the world. It's an undisputed fact. Being from somewhere else doesn't mean you're from somewhere that sucks, it just means you're from somewhere that's less awesome than it could be. Like a cheeseburger without bacon, or a gun without bullets, or a milkshake without bacon, really anything without bacon is a solid example here. I was in the middle of a thought, now I'm just thinking about things I could add bacon to, where was I? Oh yeah, my hometown is great. That's why I'm so disappointed in New York politics lately.

I submit that all these problems started with New York's Senators. No scandals there, but I wasn't impressed with either of them. I once heard someone (Jon Stewart maybe) refer to Chuck Schumer as a human strip mall. I'm still not sure exactly what that meant, but it sure sounds right. Senator Schumer used to visit the university I worked at in New York sometimes and give little speeches. I remember always being underwhelmed.

The other Senate seat currently belongs to someone named Kirsten. That's really all I know about her, but I had a friend named Kirsten when I was a kid, so Senator Kirsten is plus one with me so far. But her predecessor, Hillary Clinton, was another disappointment for me. A carpetbagger from Arkansas and Washington who was clearly using the state as a stepping stone to a run for the White House. We elected her because we knew her name and it had a D next to it. I thought New Yorkers were smarter than that.

Now, you could look at both of those elections and say they weren't really so bad, and you'd probably be right. But I don't know, maybe if we had examined these two little mistakes more closely, we could have avoided the rest of this nonsense.

Eliot Spitzer wasn't really a disappointment (at least not for me) so much as he was an embarrassment. Governor Spitzer liked whores. I don't like whores, but some people do, and that's really between them and their wives. I mean, it's not like it's a crime. What? It is a crime? Oh yeah, that's right. OK, so maybe a slightly disappointing embarrassment.

Wait, the voice in my head wants to know how I can say I don't like whores if I've never tried one. That's an interesting point, voice in my head. But I have a somewhat related counterpoint. I've never tried hepatitis either, but I'm fairly certain I wouldn't like it. Hey, voice in my head! How come other people have a conscience that tries to get them to do good things but you're always doing things like trying to get me to try a hooker or betting me I can't drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels on St. Patrick's Day in college without blacking out (mission accomplished, by the way)? The voice doesn't have an answer, that's what I thought.

Spitzer's shameful resignation ushered in the David Paterson era, which has been like a Lollapalooza of unethical behavior. On the main stage, there was his immediate admission of cheating on his wife, followed by his admission to trying almost every drug ever invented. And just as the main stage show was winding down, we found out that he allegedly used state police to intimidate a woman who was making accusations against one of his staffers. Oh, and did I mention he's also legally blind? Blindness isn't funny, but you have to see the irony in a blind Governor so blatantly misusing officers of the justice system.

What actually got me going on this are the commercials I've been seeing about this stupid soda tax they've proposed in New York. I know, they already tax cigarettes and alcohol and 17 other things that people like even though they're bad for us. That doesn't mean I have to like it. How does the awesome, cool state become the no smoking in bars, soda tax state?

I should mention, at this point, that I won't make fun of that Massa guy from the 29th district. For one thing, New York's 29th district could easily be called northern Pennsylvania, it barely counts. Also, what I've heard so far about what he supposedly did doesn't really sound that bad. Most importantly, that dude has cancer, so I think I should leave him alone.

OK. So far, I can't really be disappointed in the voters. They haven't voted on the soda thing yet, and even if I could blame the Governors on them, I could just blame it on the voters from the weird upstate part of New York, and not the good part where the people are. Is there anything specific to the city that can be reasonably blamed on voter stupidity?

Well, how about Charlie Rangel? It would be easier to list all the House ethics rules he isn't accused of violating. And Congressman Rangel's been re-elected something like 52 times. Specific to the city? Check. Voter stupidity? Probably not. Even with the story out there for weeks, it's still a little hard to get your head around exactly what the Congressman did. I'm not sure you can blame voters for electing him when it was still a secret.

Oh, I got it! Bloomberg! Mayor Mike ignored his term limit and then bought an election, which the good people of New York were more than happy to let him do. Yeah, that's not good. Bloomberg's the first non-Democrat I've mentioned. It's not that I'm intentionally picking on the Democrats. New York Republicans are no picnic. Peter King is a New York Republican, he's also completely out of his mind.

You can say other states are just as bad, maybe even worse. We know South Carolina is a mess. Mark Sanford is still the Governor there (seriously, I swear I'm not joking). And there's Minnesota. They've got Michelle Bachmann, who's crazy enough all on her own, but they've also got Al Franken and they had Jesse Ventura. What's wrong with Al Franken? One day, maybe I'll make a big list of rules to live by, like Leroy Jethro Gibbs. When I do, one of the rules will definitely be, "if the best option you can find for Senator is a stand-up comedian, look harder".

But that's sort of my point. Disappointment is all about expectations. I know New York isn't any worse than many other states, but that's not good enough. New York is supposed to be the best, the Empire state, home of the greatest city in the world. Now, it seems, New York is no better than anywhere else. That's a disappointment.

I'm not doing this to bash New York. My home state needs an intervention. How about Governor Giuliani? Hear me out. I know Rudy's gone pretty crazy lately, but I think it was leaving New York that turned him crazy, and I know how he feels. When he was the Mayor, he was a little crazy, but he was our kind of crazy. Oh, but he had scandals too. That's the sad part, I could spend the next year doing nothing but searching for a truly clean politician and still never find one. So, I'm still going with Governor Giuliani. It's just my first idea, I'm open to better ones. Maybe we need someone who would come with expectations so low, he couldn't possibly disappoint us. Hmmm, Harry Reid should be available after November.