NY's Second Avenue subway, Bushworld's war on working people, and thoughts on the American Dream

Okay, it wasn't quite "T'row da bums out" Tuesday. But some of da bums did get t'rown out, including that pathetic shell of a human being Randy Kelly, who's now--by a margin just short of tarring-and-feathering level--the soon-to-be-ex-mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota. (You'll recall that Kelly is the nominal Democrat who endorsed the devil Chimpy Bush in 2004.)

All in all, by comparison with the recent run of election nights, it was upbeat. It confirms what we've been suspecting for a while now: that if the Democrats could get their shit together and offer a believable vision for getting the country back on track and making it work again, then 2006 could be exactly the catastrophe for Republicans that I suspect is already causing some of their strategists nightmares.

What I want to raise here is just a side note to the election, especially to those of you outside New York. It happens that one thing we accomplished in our state was passing a bond issue (never an easy feat these days) for mass transit. And it may lead finally to construction, and even completion, of at least a stretch of a scaled-down version of a long-fabled Second Avenue subway. You don't need to worry about the particulars, except to know that (a) this subway line is really, really needed, as it has been for going on half a century now, and (b) it has, shall we say, a history.

And entwined in that history is a thread of family history.

You know how family members, parents in particular, have those little mantras they seem unable to hold in, and how you cringe every time you realize one of them is about to tumble forth? Well, the Second Avenue subway was one of my late stepfather's hobby horses. As far back as the mid-'60s, any discussion of the subways, or of New York City transportation, or for that matter of government of any kind, at any level, would bring forth his caustic recollection of the unbuilt subway line, which by that early date had been not only planned but, for a brief shining moment, fully funded!

Then stuff happened. Meanwhile projected costs skyrocketed, and the result was that the line didn't get built. And the next time anyone looked, the money that was to have paid for it was gone. (The project was revived in the '70s--with, naturally, vastly higher budget numbers. And much money was actually spent. By the time work was halted, all we had to show for all that money was a bunch of useless, and in fact now-dangerous, holes in the ground.)

For my stepfather this was the telling detail: Back in the day, at one moment the money was there, and then it wasn't. To him this served as an all-purpose Parable of the Futility and Total Corruption of Government. It presented the essential truth, that politicians don't do a damned thing, unless you count stealing.

Each time I heard the parable, my youthful idealism rebelled. Of course, I knew, government could be a force for good! Lo, these many decades down the line, I guess I still sort of believe this. I just don't expect to live to see it. The world has turned upside down to the point where the most vocal bad-mouthers of government have turned out to be the biggest politician-crooks and crook-enablers.

Now you have to understand that my stepfather, despite his cynicism about politicians, was far from bitter or unhopeful. He didn't have much luck in his life, unless you count the quirk of timing that made him eligible to be drafted for both World War II and Korea. Then he watched his first wife die of cancer, and later lost a daughter to Hodgkin's. He toiled for more than 20 years at a job that was yanked out from under him when business faltered and management responded by looting the company. The problem of finding himself unemployed in his 50s was solved when a heart condition (and this was a man who not only never smoked but obsessively trimmed every scrap of fat off the meat he ate) made it impossible for him to work. During his not wildly successful recovery from eventual quintuple-bypass surgery the first signs of Alzheimer's appeared.

And yet most of that way he continued to believe in what I can only call the purest form of the American Dream: If you work hard, you will be rewarded. Not with fancy riches, but with . . . well, you'll be rewarded with the fruit of your labors.

Instead, he usually got screwed.

Whatever happened to the American Dream? Not long ago, I recall, there was some couple in Texas that got caught in some horrific crime like murder as a way of cashing in on their dreams. The details, as you can see, are fuzzy, but I do remember their indignant justification: All they wanted was their share of the American Dream.

Just recently the New York Times' Style section reported on the booming and unprecedented popularity of Cinderella, the only kink being that the heroine is now thought of exclusively as a rich and glamorous princess, a sort of Paris Hilton prototype. It seems that the little girls who worship Cinderella, and dream of being her, are bored and resentful when they're subjected to that inconvenient earlier part of her story, when she is for some incomprehensible reason downtrodden and smeared with, you know, cinders.

But I digress from my digression. At the end of my stepfather's run with his longtime company, he and his coworkers were faced with the all-too-familiar option of cutting their losses and giving up, or else continuing to work for little or no pay, in the hope that eventually . . . ohmygosh, at this late date it seems just too sad and pathetic to spell out what they hoped. In those situations it seems inevitable that workers are seduced by the argument that without their financial concessions, the company has no hope of regaining its financial footing. In this case, even their union was pressing the argument. Yes, they had a union. In fairness, what else could the union advise? Unions, after all, are supposed to protect workers, and watching them be transformed magically into ex-workers hardly seems to qualify.

Of course, once everything squeezable had been squeezed out of the dying company's carcass, the workers wound up where they would have been in the first place: out in the cold. All they had to show for their loyalty and all that unpaid extra effort was an extra round of exploitation and humiliation.

By the way, this is not to say that the union did nothing for its members. To this day my mother, who's 86 now, receives a monthly pension payment of $29.16. We were joking about this recently, and she mentioned that she used to think of this as covering the phone bill. I hated to point out that $29.16 no longer covers her local and long-distance phone bills.

In dark moments, I wonder what a useless blob of protoplasm like George W. Bush--or any of those damned Bushes--makes of someone like my stepfather, who never asked for or expected anything more than what he earned through a lifetime of hard work. I figure if they have a shred of honesty, they must look at a poor working stiff and think, "Sucker!" Probably they find it hopelessly hilarious to think of someone--say, an elderly, ailing widow--to whom a paltry sum like $29.16 a month is real money.

I confess that I was caught somewhat by surprise by the extremity and viciousness of the contempt for working people apparently felt by the people who bought the White House for Chimpy Bush (and then still had to steal it, twice). In the end I don't suppose this matters, since there was no reason to be surprised by the scale, nakedness, and sheer gall of their greed. Clearly they always expected, as part of the return on their considerable investment in this administration, not just government acquiescence but active support for an all-out war on working people. The only remaining surprise is that so many working Americans cheered as they cast votes, many of them twice, for a shell of a man who was put into office by people intent on screwing them, and I don't mean in the fun way.

Now it appears that at least part of the Second Avenue subway will actually be built. I can't tell you how odd this makes me feel. What would my stepfather say? Apart from reminding us how, way back when, the money was all there, and then it wasn't.

To be sure, even with money from this bond issue, all that's budgeted for now is a stretch that will serve the fairly prosperous folks on the Upper East Side. Yes, I know what you're saying: How prosperous can they be if they take the subway? Well, not everyone has a car and driver, and even for those who can afford taxis, they often aren't an especially efficient way of getting around a city where, especially in rush hour, traffic tends to be gridlocked. Trust me, a heap of heavy earners pack their way onto the hideously overcrowded Lexington Avenue lines, still the only uptown-downtown subway service available in Manhattan east of Sixth Avenue.

If there's any hope that the Second Avenue subway will someday actually go somewhere, it lies in the incredible transformation over the last couple of decades of what will be the line's downtown end. You wouldn't believe the current prices of apartments in the once-ragtag Lower East Side and the dowdier, even dangerous reaches of Alphabet City--rechristened the "East Village" by canny real estate operators. The people paying those prices are probably going to get their subway.

As a matter of fact, our newly reelected mayor is a big subway guy. Mike Bloomberg didn't become a gazillionaire by taking cabs. Is there any question that the passage of that transit bond issue is attributable at least in part to a certain "can do" spirit fostered by our citizen-mayor?

I wonder what my stepfather would have made of all this.

I'm fairly sure there are some lessons buried here. I just don't know what they are. Once the ironies pile up above a certain level, they can leave a person a tad numb.