The International Writers Magazine: New York Elections
Update 6 Nov 2013: BLASIO wins by 73 to 24 percent

Bill's My Boy • Dean Borok Well, New York City mayoral election day is here, and it is the only election that I consider to be REALLY REAL. This is it, folks, the essence of world political culture reduced to a grease stain on the bottom of a cardboard pizza box.

Make no mistake; there are plenty of political geniuses who believe that the swing vote pivots on a rotating pizza. Republican candidate Joe Lhota bragged that he could discern the distinction between Neapolitan and Sicilian pizza. Now that’s what I call a spicy meatball!

Lhota has too many bad associations for me, the worst being that he is a former employee and close personal friend of James Dolan, president of the Knicks basketball team, who, I am convinced to the point of emotional certainty, sabotaged his own team to the level of a laughable clown show (remember Stephon Marbury, Isaiah Thomas and all the other loveable stooges? No, you don’t? Then read my story “A Knicks Christmas Carol”, where the whole team commits mass suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building) in order to drive down the price of Cablevision (which owns the Knicks) stock to a level where he and his father, Charles, could buy it back and take the corporation private.

Maybe I’m out of my mind, but that’s the mind of the typical New York City voter, for instance, so you pick your version of reality and go with your own instincts. Actually, my version of reality is probably more coherent than that of the average subway straphanger, though not necessarily more accurate.

Naturally, whatever’s going on in New York City is immensely preferable to the freakin barnyard Animal Farm of New Jersey politics across the river. Those guys must be receiving transmissions from outer space! They got a loudmouth fatman carnival sideshow act named Christopher Christie, who broadcasts a lethal combination of hot air and intestinal flatulence. This guy is no deep thinker but he never shuts up for a second, like a “Sopranos” episode. The greatest accomplishment of his governorship is his close working relationship with Obama, to squeeze every dime out of FEMA, for SuperStormSandy damages, so basically is bringing money into the state, which every New Jerseyan appreciates. As a Republican, he is supposed to hate Obama and he is supposed to be against FEMA on principle, but as a New Jerseyan he is not conflicted against kissing Obama’s posterior for more federal money - haha!

Aside from that, Christie’s idiotic cost-saving initiatives have caused real suffering. He instituted a program to save taxpayers money by renting out bed space in New Jersey’s maximum security prisons for a total unitary profit to New Jersey of ten dollars per day. To free up space he shifted maximum security inmates to the state’s county jails, where a gang of vicious killers murdered an innocent guy who was just being held for parking tickets (wrongly, it turned out). I don’t know the ins-and-outs of public policy, but a story like that is enough to put me off the guy for life, not to mention that he is a Republican, from New Jersey, a fat loudmouth slob, etc.

Anyway, my problems lie closer to home, in the shape of Bill De Blasio, who is going to get my vote on Tuesday 5th November. Democrats are always going to get my vote, considering how good they have always been to me personally. Remember, I’m from Chicago, where the school teachers tell you, “On election day, always remind your parents how good the mayor has been to them”. You can’t get more subtle than that! In Chicago, Republicans are rarer than zoo animals, but in New York as well there have been certain times in my life where the indulgence of some persons in authority have helped me to mitigate the consequences of my own idiotic stupidity (I don’t know how else to put it).

I need to amend Tip O’Neill’s dictum about how “All Politics Are Local”, to read “All politics are personal”. It is my visceral feelings that drive me to the left side of the spectrum, toward the Social Democratic humanism defined by Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, for instance. But even on the left side of things, where everything should be rosy ha-ha, I got enough personal animosities to make me feel uncomfortable among people with whom I am in 100% agreement.

The fact is, De Blasio is not my perfect candidate. I don’t have a perfect candidate. I wouldn’t even vote for myself because of my own past behavior (also present behavior). The first problem I have with De Blasio is that he reminds me of a kid I used to know named Tom, from Pennsylvania who married a black woman to get in contact with authenticity. She was very charming, but they were deadly dull as a couple, too much sincerity. Boy, they were really in earnest, I used to run out of their house to get away from the freakin aromatherapy and love.

Judging from the remarks from De Blasio’s wife, Christine McCray, she is going to represent a right-thinking, moralistic role in De Blasio’s ear and to the outside world as well, which I personally can do without. Why have I gone through much to stay in New York? To stay out of the grasp of the community! She already slammed Bloomberg for “paternalism”. I believe Obama has been very wise and clever at finding useful things to occupy Mrs. Michelle while keeping her on message but, knowing New York women as I do, I don’t have confidence in De Blasio’s capacity for controlling Mrs. Christine’s character-building ambitions.

I told you, this is personal. The worst slam I have against De Blasio is when I saw a news clip of him taking out the garbage from his home in Brooklyn. He was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. Compared with Obama and Putin, who are body-conscious to a remarkably high degree, for instance, this De Blasio hasn’t done one push-up in the last 30-40 years. What is he spending his time on? He’s not that smart, so it’s not reading and culture. He’s just a freakin dork from deepest Brooklyn who won the primary because his kids were so cute in the televised campaign ads, not to mention the weirdo nut jobs he was running against, and now he seems to be riding a tectonic change in voter attitudes. He looks good in a suit, but he should never again take out the garbage unless he wears sweat pants and a jacket, get the picture?

The Dems are slated to win big on Tuesday, except in New Jersey against Christie who, I need to restate it, has got all his credibility from his good relationship with Obama, and the Democratic roll sits fine with me. Bloomberg gave crooked landlords a free pass to remove rent stabilization from thousands of apartments, has opposed measures to allow sick days and minimum wage increases for low-end employees. He was way too much for the bosses. Moreover, I haven’t appreciated his ban on smoking at public beaches, where there is plenty of fresh air to blow away cigarette smoke, and his incitement of insane nut-jobs to pop up out of nowhere and hector you for smoking a freakin cigarette! More Republicanism, I don’t need!

De Blasio presents his own headaches. He’s obviously not as clever as Bloomberg. His body looks like Pee-Wee Herman on a bad day. I seriously have got problems about his wife’s possible opportunities to moralize a politically correct female point of view. He probably owes a lot of political favors to everybody who sucks the teat of New York’s $70billion annual budget.

But, as Dwight D. Eisenhower once deadpanned about Richard Nixon after Nixon had publicly groveled, begged and debased himself in every imaginable way on live national television to stay on the 1952 Republican presidential ticket, “Dick’s My Boy!”

© Dean Borok Nov 4th 2013
dean@200motels.net

It’s Flu Season and Obama Is Hacking
Dean Borok
If I were Obama I would lay awake at night worrying about NSA hacking of foreign governments.

nyc.pollsitelocator.com,

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