The Long October: They Haven't Learned

One big sign that the Far Right Republicans in Congress are willing to put the country through the nightmare they pulled at the beginning of this month?

The Senate Republicans just pulled a symbolic vote that "repudiated" the actual vote they made a few weeks ago to end the Shutdown and avoid a default.

This particular vote went nowhere.  It was an open attempt by the Senate Republicans to position themselves for any primary challenges they'll face next year and/or 2016.  They want to be able to say with a straight face in a slew of ads starting right about now that "oh, we were always against a functioning federal government, we just don't want you noticing the vote we passed before this one to keep government functioning!"

Insert headdesking here.

The thing is, the deal that got passed to end the Shutdown was just another temporary reprieve.  The agreement will only last until February, perhaps March of 2014.  Which is right about the time a good number of primaries for the Congressional midterms can happen.  At least a sizable number of challenger campaigns will be in full gear by that point.  Meaning there will be even greater incentive for the sitting incumbents to suck up even more to the extremist base voters that are key to every primary.

And the best - the ONLY - way to show off their Far Right credentials is to pull another Shutdown and threaten the government with default.  Again.

But there's a problem.  While the base voters are key to the primary stage of an election, the moderate and independent voters are key to the general election, the election that really matters.  And if the Republicans have either A) voted in a challenger whose credentials are further to the Right than ever before or B) voted for an incumbent who won by swinging further to the Right than ever before, they're suddenly stuck with  candidates and platforms that will not appeal to moderate and independents, who will go stampeding off to the other choice (the Democrats in those races).

What's happening in Virginia right now is a decent example.  The Democratic candidate McAullife is beating the Republican candidate Cuccinelli by an almost double-digit percentage lead (caveat: polls are not always accurate.  But when a slew of them show similar numbered results, there's a trend worth noting).  Granted, the numbers are pretty skewed compared of the regular 52-48 close-call race, but the shocking thing are the unfavorable numbers against Republicans:

Among minorities, it's a given the unfavorable numbers are that high: the shocking number are among independents, who are now firmly opposed to the Republican ideology (you used to see the numbers more even, with independents giving either party a meh approval).  I've rarely seen independent voters be anywhere close to 60 percent unfavorable against one party.

And try to remember that McAullife, who is more businessman than politician, isn't someone the majority of his own party actually likes: at the start of all this the general response among Virginia Democrats was "Oh God was THIS the best we could do?"  And this is a guy whose questionable business practices echo the same miscues as his primary backer Bill Clinton, which is saying something.  And STILL McAullife is about to win the governorship by a double-digit percentage lead, mostly because a majority of voters aren't voting for him they are voting against Cuccinelli and the GOP (the down-ticket candidates in Virginia are suffering too).

We'd still need to see the final results for the Virginia election next week, and we'd still have to recognize that Virginia is NOT a common bell-weather indicator for 2014 midterms (mostly because Virginia - a major employment zone for the feds - was hard hit by the GOP-led Shutdown this month, which pissed off Virginia voters to no end).  But it's still important to note: Virginia's population is large enough and diverse enough to provide comparisons to other bell-weather states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado, maybe even states like Texas where the dissatisfaction among women voters are likely going to make things look very bad for the Republican label.  The results are going to matter because there are a lot of other states that can reflect the same response against the Republicans.

Hell, this is a key element in the New York City Mayoral race where a liberal Democrat (De Blasio) is running about a 40-point advantage over a Republican challenger (Lhota) where De Blasio's accusations that Lhota is a Tea Partier is working to full effect... even though Lhota as a New Englander Republican is actually pretty moderate.  The polling has 4 out of 10 New York Republicans opposed to the Republican Party.  That level of abandonment against their own party is unheard of in today's GOP: This is how toxic the Republicans are right now to themselves.  Just how toxic do you think they'll be to the independent voters?

And they don't care about that.  The Far Right GOP are going to keep doing this until they gain control of the federal government AND until they wreck it, break it down to a small enough size to drown in Grover Norquist's bathtub.

This Long October won't end until November 2014, when I hope to God enough people vote the Republicans out of power for good.  Until then... keep working.  Get the vote out.

God Help Us.  And stop voting for Republicans.

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Presidential Character: Week Thirty-Seven, One Of Us

Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us—and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all?- Joseph Conrad, final chapter of Lord Jim

I read Lord Jim for college studies - a class on Conrad - and while I liked Conrad's short stories I ended up not liking the novel.  Partly because I saw a little too much of myself in the named character and recoiled.

Not a few years after, I was at my first job after getting my Masters in Library Science working part-time at the reference desk at the Clearwater branch of St. Pete (Junior) College.  One day, we received news that Richard Nixon, former President, had passed away.

I immediately thought of Lord Jim while I gathered up some books for an impromptu display in one of the library's corners.  Particularly that quote, which I used as an epitaph of sorts on the signage taped over the book display.

It wasn't that I thought of Nixon as a hero, but more of a failed attempt at becoming one (which Lord Jim proved to be).  No, not even that really.  Nixon as someone self-deluded, talented but troubled perhaps?  Nixon as Nietzschian wannabe, self-made man who self-destructs?  Nixon as used car salesman?  Nixon as American?

There was/is a biography of Nixon exactly titled One Of Us, although I didn't know of that until after I made the book display.  But it becomes a common theme about Nixon: that in most respects he was a common American at heart and origin, rising from a humbling background that any other average American could claim.  Driven by the same ambitions to achieve success that any other young white man of the day would seek, albeit in politics rather than business or medicine or other path to notice and fame.  Not a glamorous figure like a movie star or singer or scion of a wealthy family, someone who has success just by being who they were, but self-made through hard work and personal strife.

But where Nixon could be one of us, he was the part of us that we tend to not talk about.  We don't talk about the shady deals we make to keep our businesses going, or the lies we tell ourselves when we ignore a social need to fulfill a personal want.  There's that concept, that meme derived from the rivalry (and friendship) that existed between the glamorous John Kennedy and the hard-driven Richard Nixon: that Kennedy is the America we pretend or hope to be - habitually rich, handsome, confident, life handed to him by eager friends - while Nixon is the America we really are - glum, stubborn, outwardly successful but inwardly doubting and defeated, struggling against forces outside of his control...

I shouldn't ramble like this.  One of the things I've got to do in this review of Nixon's character is focus on the facts and present the evidence.  Which means I've got to start referring to the work James David Barber already did on the guy.  And this is important to remember: Nixon is the first one Barber publicly profiled for his Presidential Character studies, which he notes in the introductory paragraphs to Nixon's chapter (p.123).  And it's also important to note that Barber not only predicted Nixon's success, but also Nixon's self-destruction...

Barber as always looked first to the childhood and drew evidence from Nixon's upbringing and childhood adventures.  From the stern distant father, the loving but burdened mother, the childhood tragedies of ill siblings and Nixon's own near-fatal accidents, this was what he found:

...Out of his childhood Nixon brought a persistent bent toward life as painful, difficult, and - perhaps as significant - uncertain.  He learned to work very hard... between the traumatic events there were long stretches in which Richard felt the tension around him and learned to deal with it - especially, when, with Frank (father) at him, the knots might suddenly tighten.  Speak softly, diplomatically, carefully, and ambiguously; let sleeping dogs lie; work hard and be prepared.  Those were the lessons Nixon's childhood brought home to him... (p.128-9)

Nixon the student was hard-working and intelligent, respected but aloof.  His social skills seemed to revolve around the debate societies than anything else.  He graduated second in his class at college and third in his class at law school.  Nixon attributed it not to skill or being smarter than his more "gifted colleagues" but to his "competitive drive," to his need for maintaining his scholarships, and to the parental expectations of getting a good education (the few times Nixon notes any love from his contentious father was when he came home with good report cards). (p.135-6)

After school, there was looking for work - a trip to New York's law firms proved fruitless, leaving Nixon to take a job back in hometown Whittier - and then looking for income, looking for a wife (courting Pat for 2 years, even staying in "the friend zone" as we'd call it now trying to prove he was a nice guy while she dated other guys), settling into family life.  And into this came the Second World War.

Nixon spent the first year working as a government employee for the tire-rationing office where he became disillusioned by the bureaucracy and "empire-building" by political appointees.  He switched over to the Navy, becoming a junior lieutenant as a supply officer, not a glamorous job (or a harsh one that combat entailed) but a necessary one and one that fit his overall Quaker, pacifist beliefs.

Barber didn't make a major note of it, but a key moment in Nixon's life was gaining an interest in poker.  With little else to do at a naval station out in the Pacific Ocean but drink or play cards, Nixon went for cards (which still went against Quaker tradition against gambling).  Above all, Nixon became a pretty good poker player by all accounts, and he fondly recalled years later a particular hand that was a one-in-a-million draw that helped him win a pretty-sized pot.

Above all, Nixon learned to bluff.  To present himself holding a hand that was better than it was, and force others to concede.  Merged with his debating skills, this made for a dangerous political opponent when the time came and Nixon was asked to run for a Congressional seat in 1946.

At this point Barber establishes Nixon's core traits of rhetorical confrontation - an aggressive campaign style that would become the trademarks of what we would consider "mudslinging" today - and an obsessive need for direct decision-making that left nearly everyone but himself in the dark.  Barber defines it as a kind of "crisis" behavior:

...all of these feelings come together in Nixon's "classic crisis." There he relives each time the agony of self-definition, as he decides whether or not a crisis is "his"; the confirmation of suffering, as he wearily drives himself to get ready; the freedom of aggression, as he takes clear action; and the closure of control, as he reasserts self-restriction in the aftermath. There, in a short space of time, Nixon acts out the drama of his life - over and over again... (p.142)

...Nixon won the Presidency in 1968. The main worry of his critics was that he would be too flexible, too unprincipled, not that he would freeze up in a pattern of rigidification. Nixon himself said he intended to anticipate and avoid crises... but his intentional contradicted his character. He needed crisis to feel alive. He would hold and concentrate power in himself... The old Nixon showed through in his fight to get his Supreme Court nominees approved by the Senate - and in his fury when, for the first time in forty years, the President failed in that effort...

...This character could lead the President on to disaster, following in the path of his heroes Wilson and Hoover and his predecessor Johnson. So far his crises had been bounded dramas, each apparently curtained with the end of the last act.  The danger was that crisis would be transformed into tragedy - that Nixon would go from a dramatic experiment to a moral commitment, a commitment to follow his private star, to fly off in the face of overwhelming odds. That type of reaction is to be expected when and if Nixon is confronted with a severe threat to his power and sense of virtue... (p.142-3)

Barber wrote that second tidbit just before the Watergate break-in happened.  But we'll get to that in a minute.
 
Barber makes the comparisons here towards previous Presidents like Wilson and Hoover and also Lyndon B. Johnson, all of whom we'd already seen Barber classify as Active-Negative characters.  Nixon's confrontational habits - the aggressive campaigning - echoed the habits of Wilson's refusal to compromise or treat with political opposition.  The obsession with problem resolution echoed Johnson's obsession with deal-making, albeit with Nixon's zeal for bluffing than for horse-trading.  The Uncompromising nature of Hoover - the "I Must" duality that drove Nixon to work hard yet limit himself to his narrow options - that made it all a Zero-Sum game for Nixon when dealing with Congress or the nation or his enemies at large.

What is so confounding about all that is that Nixon's own administration showed points where he could have easily stepped away from such self-inflicted Active-Negative impositions.  His domestic agenda for the most part leaned towards a liberalism - defined by his Quaker faith - that most Republicans today would consider socialism.  He pursued a foreign policy agenda that outside of the Vietnam War (and Southeast Asia) practiced a kind of pragmatic relationship with allies and enemies alike that allowed for a strident anti-Communist as himself to open relations with Red China, driving a wedge in Sino-Soviet relations that brought the USSR to the negotiation table on their own (even the Vulcans created a meme out of it: "Only Nixon Could Go To China.").

And yet... and yet that self-destructive tendency was there.  Pushing Vietnam by escalating the bombing rather than taking a peace deal in 1969 just so he could claim in 1972 he ended the conflict as "Peace With Honor."  Secretly bombing Cambodia as part of that war effort and against what was viewed as a Domino Effect with Communism threatening to consume all of Southeast Asia (the secret bombing actually escalated that).  Two gigantic flaws - even a war crime considering Cambodia - that marred an otherwise awe-inspiring foreign policy era.

Regarding things back home, Nixon's desire for control as a means of ensuring success in his conflicts led to his administration abusing the bureaucracy of the executive office in a way not seen since the Spoils system under Andrew Jackson (another A-N).  Nixon's controlling nature led to a form of inter-office rivalry between his key handlers (which led to inter-office spying and interference not only in the West Wing but across the Departments) and a steady diet of lying to his own people.  That all created a trickle-down of sorts, where a pattern of acceptable behavior ("ratfucking") allowed Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign (CRP, actually CReEP) to sabotage the Democratic primaries and drive them to wiretap the Democratic National headquarters situated in the business offices of the Watergate Complex.  

On the face of it, the break-ins were minor, BS stuff that shouldn't even have been authorized by anyone in the first place.  Getting caught doing it looked bad.  But it brought about Nixon's downfall because like Barber predicted, Nixon's desire to confront each setback or quandary as a "crisis" led Nixon to over-react.

It's an unwritten rule of paradoxical human behavior: it's not the crime that kills you, it's the cover-up.  Where the original event itself - breaking in and setting up unwarranted wiretaps - would have been easily excused as "a third-rate burglary" that didn't involve Nixon himself, Nixon insisted on both paying "shush money" to the burglars and on obstructing any federal investigation into the break-in.  But by stepping on the then-autonomy of the FBI, he angered enough key officials in the Bureau - including one Mark Felt - that the investigations continued, and with each revelation to the public exposed another part of Nixon's power structure that exposed a nest of backstabbing and unethical behavior.

Nixon's desire for conflict and resolution made him jump into the path of the train.  A more self-controlled personality would not have been so obviously self-destructive.  It was as though Nixon was Lord Jim, fully accepting a fate that didn't have to be his, only because his idealized vision of himself insisted he stand there and take the bullet.  Only in Nixon's case, there wasn't any ideal: merely a form of crass cynicism railing against an unjust universe that never loved him.

Just try to remember these few facts: this was a very bitter man whose ambitions compromised his potential, who saw enemies to defeat rather than rivals to deal, who lied even to his closest allies and even himself to an extent never seen before, who knew deep down he could never be loved as a leader so aimed for the next best thing to be feared... and failed miserably, becoming hated in the end.

"He would have been a great man if somebody had loved him," Kissinger once quipped, and while it reflects ruefully on Pat Nixon (clearly she had to have loved Richard) and on Nixon's mother (whom Barber noted did show affection toward a favored child) Kissinger was probably thinking of Machiavelli's question about being loved or feared as a means of gaining respect.  Nixon was terrible at being feared: dangerous, yes, but easily mocked and just as easily despised by the people who took him at face value and hated what they saw.  If he had ever considered being loved as a means like his rival Kennedy, or his predecessor Eisenhower.  If Richard Nixon had learned the skill sets to be loved...

Nixon's legacy still haunts us to this day.  The nature of the Republican Party itself - the aggressive campaigning and emphasis on winning elections, the obsession with political control of the bureaucracy, this madness of "crisis government" where every political action causes a disproportionate reaction (a kind of party brinkmanship) - owes more to Nixon than any other Republican figure (not Ike, not Teddy, not even Hoover) today.  The modern GOP may publicly worship the likes of Ronald Reagan (who was loved), but they speak, deal, act like Nixon.

I leave you with one more thought: no other President proves as popular when it comes time to pulling bank heists and Halloween trick-or-treating:

Next Up: The Unappreciated One

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Personal: Tehya the Pretty Kitty

As I'd mentioned to my friends on Facebook, and through postings on other forums and on my writer's blog, last night I had to let go of a pretty kitty.

There's not more to say about that.  The apartment right now feels empty.

I've been digging through all my photos now.  I took so many and then left so many of them in boxes.  There's a bunch I took before I got digital cameras, old film photos that need to get scanned or something.

I had this at my office.  It was the best photo of Tehya and her adopted sister Page sitting together on a window sill (that was rare, Tehya I adopted first and she never got along with Page when I adopted her a year later).

Page has this pleasing "How May I Help You Kind Sir" expression on her face.  Tehya's arm is stretched out with her paw next to Page's.

Page passed away two years ago, before Thanksgiving.

I miss them.

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Sometimes This Just Needs To Be Said

An honest man, like the true religion, appeals to the understanding, or modestly confides in the internal evidence of his conscience. The imposter employs force instead of argument, imposes silence where he cannot convince, and propagates his character by the sword.
- Junius (Letter 41, 1770)

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Presidential Character: Week Thirty-Six, The Salesman Who Couldn't Convince Himself

There may never have been a better horse-trader in politics than Lyndon B. Johnson.

Politics itself, when done right, is all about deals.  Deals between parties, deals between pols, deals to get one pork barrel program in exchange for a key vote on a policy treaty.  Like it or not, there's a Quid Pro Quo nature to American governance, as long as the quids are as legal as the quos.  And as long as the deals happen, the government functions (SEE The Long October and the modern GOP obstructionism for how government collapses without compromises).

Johnson was a master at deal-making.  Stories abound about how he would work out a fellow congressman's position, figure out a proper arrangement to get his vote, and do the deal.  For the ones he couldn't convince, he'd find a way to get those elected officials out of town on "fact-finding missions" before he changed a vote's schedule to take advantage of the absence.  And for the ones he couldn't convince and yet needed to get a vote from, he would apply The Treatment, a form of psychological warfare under which friends and enemies alike would wilt:

...(It was) supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat. It was all these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless... (Robert Dallek, PBS.org link)

The most famous moment of Johnson's method was when he met Alabama Governor George Wallace, an at-the-time fervent segregationist whose state was Ground Zero of the Civil Rights movement in 1965.  The brutal assault on protesters at Selma had just happened and LBJ wanted to send in federal troops to secure the peace (from that Brian Sweany's Texas Monthly article):

...the President directed Wallace to a soft couch. Nearly a foot shorter than Johnson, he promptly sank into its cushions. The president pulled up a rocking chair and leaned in close. The Johnson Treatment had begun...

Over the next three hours, LBJ pressed Wallace on the issue of race. Careful not to let the governor play the martyr for states' rights, he cajoled and flattered him. When the president asked him why he wouldn't integrate the schools and let black residents register to vote, Wallace said that he didn't have the power. Johnson thundered in response, "George, don't you shit me as to who runs Alabama." In the end Johnson questioned Wallace's place in history: "George, you and I shouldn't be thinking about 1965; we should be thinking about 1985... Now, you got a lot of poor people down there in Alabama... a lot of people who need jobs, a lot of people who need a future. You could do a lot for them. Now, in 1985, George, what do you want left behind? Do you want a great big marble monument that says 'George Wallace: He Built'? Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine lying there along that harsh caliche soil that says 'George Wallace: He Hated'?"...

Shortly after the meeting, Wallace agreed to ask the president to send in federal troops. The governor, who just two years before had declared, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," would later say, "Hell, if I'd stayed in there much longer, he'd have had me coming out for civil rights." 

Within two days, Johnson would push for his signature 1965 Voting Rights Act that alongside the 1964 Civil Rights Act killed off Jim Crow Era in Southern (and national) politics.  Achievements not even the active civil rights Presidents like Truman, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, or Grant could claim.

Johnson was obsessed with the idea of being the best: achievement above all others gnawed at him.  He chafed as Vice President under Kennedy, and when Kennedy was assassinated Johnson used the moment - and borrowed the legacy - to take over the Presidency on his terms and pass historic legislation on civil rights and voting rights that JFK never could.

And yet... and yet.  For all his efforts, for all his successes, he didn't last very long as President, and left the office hated more than loved or feared.  All because of one thing:

Lyndon B. Johnson could never really sell the idea of Lyndon B. Johnson as President to the people... and never could sell it to himself.

Oh, he could still make deals from the White House same as he could from the Senate backrooms.  He could cajole and brow-beat the Beltway media to his whim.  But there was something lacking.  All that ambition to get things done and yet almost no ability to dial back that intensity, no ability to inspire like Kennedy or FDR, no humility or ability to take the body blows of losing fights the way Active-Positive Presidents could.

At heart, Johnson was an Active-Negative, compelled to do things because "I Must" (much like Hoover before him) drove his deal-makings rather than "I Can" that could have allowed for compromise and adaptability.  As Professor Barber notes in his book Presidential Character, Johnson was obsessed with it being about him and what he had to do:

Lyndon Johnson took his tragedy personally.  His initial commitment to the war was made in personal terms: "I am not going to lose Vietnam.  I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went"... Not only did he talk that way, but he invested his energies as intensely as his words.  He had always been a fantastically active politician, driving himself well beyond what those around him could do... (p.42-3)

Like A-Ns before him, Johnson's Driven character could not allow him to see the objections of his opponents, which he came to view quickly as enemies:

...He had an answer to that question (of why bad things kept happening to his tenure): his miseries came from "knee-jerk liberals," "crackpots," and "trouble-makers"... the prime villain... became Robert F. Kennedy, the rival he had always called "Sonny Boy"... Even at the height of his success... Johnson complained bitterly asking "What do they want?  What do they really want?  I am giving them boom times and more good legislation than anybody else did, and what do they do - attack and sneer!  Could FDR do better? Could anybody do better? What do they want?" (p.44-6)  

And when confronted with enemies, the A-N's response to is to be Uncompromising, even in the face of facts:

In the course of his crusade, Johnson slowly whittled his advisors down to those ready to back his course.  George Ball had opposed the war from the early days, but Johnson had managed to plug him so firmly into the role of official dissenter that his views were listened to and then easily dismissed.  One by one his aides resigned... (p.45)

This self-inflicted damage was nowhere more apparent than LBJ's harshest failure: managing the Vietnam War.  What had been a small sideshow in the Cold War in 1963 - where Kennedy was hedging his bets between commitment and withdrawal - Johnson turned into a hotspot as he saw it as another domino in the Communist Takeover of Asia.  Maneuvering legislation and military backing for South Vietnam to create a favorable situation, Johnson took the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse to deploy fully committed troops to defend the South against the North Viet Cong.

Johnson's main objective in committing to a war effort was to force the North Vietnamese to the negotiation table.  After all, deal-making was exactly LBJ's forte.  Problem was, the Viet Cong were not interested in any deals: the U.S. misread Vietnam as a Communist takeover when it was more a nationalistic effort to unify Vietnam into one.  The North Vietnamese quickly realized one thing: Johnson was not committed to open war, just holding patterns and bullying tactics.  And that they didn't have to beat the U.S. army on the battlelines: they had to beat Johnson.

Johnson's nature as a salesman betrayed him the longer the Vietnam effort strayed.  What was supposed to have been a quick mission turned into a quagmire.  Johnson obsessed over winning battles, which meant winning the body count statistics, which meant an overemphasis on numbers rather than qualitative results.  Above all, nothing was happening to get the other side to a negotiating table, and it drove Johnson to escalate.  Each troop draw-up exposed more of the lies his administration were claiming about "winning the war."  By 1968 he was losing home support, and the nation became more divided between pro-War and anti-War factions.

When the Tet Offensive - a massive blitz by the VC and their guerrilla forces throughout South Vietnam - occurred in late January 1968, it ruined Johnson's Presidency.  While in real terms the North Vietnamese lost far too much manpower to the attacks, it exposed Johnson as a liar about the "war ending any day now."  By March of 1968 Johnson pulled back on his war effort - and announced he would not seek a second term (the 25th Amendment did not apply to his brief tenure finishing JFK's) - as a show of faith to bring North Vietnam to the table at last.

That proved to be one of the nation's worst years: violent and tumultuous and unhappy.  It left a massive stain on LBJ's legacy, one that would have been remembered for its striking civil rights victories instead of the bloodshed at home and abroad.

And it left us with an Active-Negative more driven and self-destructive than LBJ ever was.

Next Up: I quoted from Lord Jim when this one died... and yes, after all he was one of us...

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Pictures Of a New York Weekend

I'll have to ask the Horde first if it's alright to repost some pictures here.  In the meantime I can post the ones for myself:

 Coming in via the subway from JFK.

  The Flatiron building, also known as the operational HQ of Damage Control!

 I'm a librarian.  A visit to the New York Public Library is freaking mandatory.

 Selfie.  Witty and the Lions.

 En route to The Cloisters.  That's the Hudson.  The picture does not do the scenery any justice.

 One of the gardens at The Cloisters. It's a museum of classical Catholic architecture and artwork.

  I got lost on the second day.  How lost?  I was supposed to go to Brooklyn to The Commodore for dinner.  I ended up in southern Manhattan.  At least I got to see the new Tower...

More pictures forthcoming once I get some okays.

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Just Flew Back From New Yawk City

...and boy are my arms tired.

Actually, it's my legs.  Damn but there's a ton of walking through Manhattan and Brooklyn.  To the people of New York City, two words: moving walkways permanently installed into the sidewalks.

"Look you moron," say 9 million New Yorkers, "that's seven words.  Damn tourists can't count..."

I'll answer that 1) I'm tired from all that walking and 2) I'm really tired from all that walking.

All I'm asking is a massive construction project across the whole city that will tie up everyone's ability to get around for the next 10-15 years before any usefulness becomes apparent., tied into open-air electronically-run equipment that's doomed to break down every three months for costly repairs.  In short, something that will keep the local unions busy and happy for decades.

I'll see about photos from the trip uploaded later today.  The Horde - wow, a lot of us showed up for this weekend, it was great seeing you all! - has already seen a few of them.

Also, sore throat.  Gotta go see a doctor this morning...

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