Greetings from transit-free NYC (where not trying to get to work at least made it easier for me to pick up a package at the post office)

As you may have heard, here in the Big Apple just now we're having some no-mass-transit days, the exact number to be determined. Our transit workers have gone on strike for the first time in 25 years, and only the third time ever.

We New Yorkers depend on our subways and buses to a degree that folks elsewhere may not appreciate. Personally, I opted out of Day One of the jamboree, except for such of the wall-to-wall TV coverage as I watched. I was already planning to use my next-to-last available sick day today. In my office, as in many others across this great land, December is "use it or lose it" season when it comes to "paid time off" days. And I don't mean to give up any PTO days if I can help it.

Why, I may even use that last sick day tomorrow. If the strike goes on, however, I will have to resort to my backup plan. This involves walking uptown about a mile, then crossing a bridge into the Bronx, squeezing into a presumably packed Metro-North commuter train, and then walking another 15 or 20 minutes from Grand Central Station to my office. Not to mention doing the whole thing in reverse to get home.

But then, at least I have a backup plan.

(Yes, I'm afraid I'm about to indulge in some shaggy-dog-style rambling. But if it's any consolation, eventually there will be some predictably leftish screeching about politics and those goddamn plutocrats and governmental and quasi-governmental cronies and hacks.)

I know from the experience of 9/11 that walking the distance isn't a realistic option. That day, after leaving my office at 32nd Street, I made it as far up Broadway as 103rd Street--en route to 189th--when I heard announcements emanating from the IRT subway station below which said that subway service, which had been totally shut down in the city, was about to resume on "my" line, the no. 1 Broadway local.

The final leg of the trip turned out to be not nearly as effortless as might have been imagined, but it sure beat more walking. And if you do the math, you'll notice that I hadn't even reached the halfway point!

Of course, if there had been no alternative, I would have had no choice but to trudge onward. At least then I would have been home, though. Doing the complete slog to get to work, and then doing it again to get home, and repeating it every day . . . sorry, but this really doesn't seem in the cards, especially at temperatures that rose today from the high 20s into the low 30s.

The 1980 transit strike, which featured then-Mayor Ed ("The Great Gasbag") Koch walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, was much more conveniently scheduled for April.

I hope it will come as small surprise that the Transit Workers' Union is being simply creamed in the media coverage, while the Metropolitan Transportation Authority gets a free pass.

(The MTA, you need to know, is a quasi-governmental authority that is basically controlled by the governor of New York State, in the present instance "Tall George" Pataki, who has stocked it generously with bottom-feeding political hacks and cronies. Now, I don't mean to be overly hard on "Tall George," but what can you do? I mean, the guy--yet another Yale product, please note--has been governor for what feels like a hundred years, and tallness still seems to be his only distinguishing quality. Unless you count boundless cynical opportunism. I'm inclined to count it, but that could be just me.)

So it doesn't seem to matter that for years now the MTA has screwed its workers at every opportunity, while the governor was willing to give away the store to other unions whose support he craved at reelection time, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg (you'll never guess which bridge he was photographed walking across this morning), who fancies himself a tough labor negotiator, has never asked for the kinds of concessions that were presented to the TWU as a fait accompli. Some cynical commentators have had the nerve to suggest that the TWU makes an easy target for gutless and self-serving pols because its membership is so overwhelmingly made up of people of color.

Meanwhile, the MTA has managed for the second year in a row to "spend down" a surplus that materialized unexpectedly in the midst of the humongous budget deficits that have given us two recent rounds of giant fare hikes, with another supposedly coming sooner rather than later. (It's hard to keep track of MTA budget numbers, since it appears that the agency keeps a different set of books for every purpose, and it appears further that the numbers made available for public perusal are, you know, sort of made up for this purpose.)

This time the MTA, God love 'em, managed to make a windfall of some $1 billion go bye-bye just in time for the labor negotiations! The coincidences just keep piling up!

Naturally the sore-headed transit workers have suggested that it's not so much of a coincidence. The MTA is never shy about making budgetary disasters an integral part of contract negotiations, expecting the workers to roll with the fiscal punches. Apparently, however, management's official position is that, by contrast, financial news of a positive cast is none of the damn workers' damn business.

Make no mistake, whatever pathetic contract the TWU eventually "squeezes" out, the workers are screwed. In addition to suffering the usual financial hardships of a strike (and there isn't even relief from their union, since the national isn't supporting the strike), the state law that forbids strikes by public workers calls for penalties of two days' pay for every day of work missed--and various other fines can be levied as well.

Even here in the heart of Blue State Country, only glimmerings of the workers' side reach public attention. Nevertheless, in this morning's Times, in a piece that delusionally portrays the transit workers as bullyingly flexing their mighty muscle, the writer does note that

the very conditions of their job also grind them down and generate resentment, said Marian Swerdlow, a sociologist and the author of "Underground Woman," a memoir of her four years as a subway conductor.

"The working conditions are more physically onerous, the treatment by managers more disrespectful, and the abuse from the public more hurtful, than any other group of public workers in the city experiences," Dr. Swerdlow said.

Of course when you dip into the saturation TV quasi-coverage, you see these poor souls demeaned by most everyone from know-little street reporters to know-not-much-more talking heads to the august likes of the aforementioned Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki as vile and greedy Snidely Whiplashes who have willfully and gleefully set out to steal Christmas from us honest, hard-working folk.

Amazingly, for once George W. Bush doesn't seem to come into the picture at all! Unless you count all the energy that he and the people who installed him in the White House have spent all these years demeaning people who work for a living, and you connect this to the climate in which it is so easy to vilify people who aren't asking for much more than to be treated with a modicum of respect.

(Once again, I'm inclined to count it. But once again, that could be just me.)