May 2009 Archives

SOMETIMES I FEEL like a frog that has been placed on a stove in a saucepan filled with cool water and doesn't hop out as the heat gradually rises. America/the world/civilization has been going to hell in a handbasket since long before I was born. The decline and fall of America/the world/civilization seemed to be all anyone talked about when I was growing up during the wonder years -- that's when we wondered who would drop the Big One first, the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. That we would all die in a fireball leaving our shadow on the sidewalk was pretty much a given. That we would go to hell for all eternity afterwards was also a given, although Philadelphia Catholic school children also knew that we had a get-out-of-jail-free card (a Perfect Act of Contrition) if we could only have the wits to say it in the five seconds between the flash and incineration.

Culturally America/the world/civilization has been to hell and back so many times I lost count a long time ago. Elvis, bikinis, the Beatles, mini skirts, hippies, interracial anything, same sex everything, disco, yuppies, androgeny, gangsta rap, greed, more greed and, currently, crying over spilt greed. All of these were pointed to as signs of doom about to be delivered (meanwhile in North Korea a diminutive militaristic madman named Kim Jong Il is playing chicken with nuclear weapons like a teenage drag racer on Delaware Avenue.)

I have lived through dozens of culture changing evil influences, influences that would have turned the nuns who taught me into pillars of salt. It's easy to draw the line between right and wrong, but what about the line between wrong and this-is-so-wrong-it-says-something-about-society wrong? Remember the teenage girl from Florida who didn't wear panties on yearbook photo day resulting in a photo that showed more than she wanted? Look at the American Apparel ad in the back page of the current Philadelphia Weekly and tell me that doesn't cross some kind of line. The model meets the reader's eye, her legs are spread provocatively. Her legs are bare except for colorful scrunchies on her ankles and a trim black wedge between her legs. OMG! As a male looking at that ad, I can tell you that the word "SCRUNCHIES!" will never have the same meaning. And I guess that was the point.

PERHAPS YOU'VE HEARD  -- of course you have! Do you not live in America? -- about the humiliating incident involving people that you'd never heard of before broadcast on national TV. An unidentified junior at Sickles High School in Citrus Park, Florida, went on CNN with her mother, Jeannette, to demand that a yearbook photograph revealing that the girl is wearing no panties should be removed from the yearbook and replaced with another and, furthermore, all yearbooks distributed already should be confiscated so that all evidence of the the exisitence of the offending photograph can be destroyed. The CNN report showed a fuzzed over image of the photograph (above) thus ensuring that millions of strangers will witness her 15 minutes of Sharon Stone/Britney Spears infamy rather than merely hunderds of snickering high school kids.

What was she thinking? The mother that is. The cat, if you will, is out of the bag. Everyone of the 2,500 kids at Sickles High School has undoubtedly seen the photo since it's been the talk of the campus ever since the yearbooks were distributed last week. And the mother seeks to repress the embarrassing photograph already exposed by a limited print media source like a high school yearbook by going on a worldwide cable TV network that flashed her daughter's secret abound the globe. Very shrewed, Mom. The only more effective way to protect your daughter's reputation would have been to appeal directly to Jerry Springer. The girl, who said didn't wear underwear the day of the yearbook photo because she didn't want panty lines to show, sat next to her mom on a sofa during the CNN interview. She wore a pair of shorts and sat with one leg tucked underneath her bottom causing the other leg to open in an unladylike manner in front of the camera. After all this humiliation, she still doesn't get it.

When I was in high school the most titillating language on TV was when Barbara Billingsly turned to Hugh Beaumont and said disapprovingly, "Ward, you were awfully hard on the Beaver last night." In a world where teenagers are sexting nude photos of themselves on their cell phones or posting them on Facebook, it seems almost quaint to have the high school yearbook as the source of must-see risque photos, even as subtle as this one, which according to a spokeswoman for Sickles High School, looks like "a shadow." (Never again will I hear the phrase "the shadow of your smile" quite the same way.) Bottom line, the girl brought all this embarrassment on herself by not keeping her stupid legs closed in a posed photograph when only she could feel the breeze.

UNDERSTANDING THE BRT (Board of Revision of Taxes) in Philadelphia is like making sense of long division the way it's taught in the fifth grade, say, 93,745 divided by 743. No one in the room can figure out how it works and yet the teacher goes through the motions on the blackboard. Multiply the party loyalists times years of service, carry the drones, subtract college degrees in professional courses dealing with taxation and real estate appraisement, add inconsistancy and political connections, divide by common sense. The result is divination rather than mathmatical certainty. The best precision Philadelphia property owners and taxpayers can expect from the BRT in appraising the market value of real estate is, at best, a guesstimate. At worst, a travesty. In sum, the same old same old.

In the past week the Board of Revision of Taxes, a seven-member patronage plum where politically favored board members are paid $70,000 to $75,000 a year to attend a handful of meetings, has come under withering fire in a front-page investigative series in the Philadelphia Inquirer that resulted in Mayor Michael Nutter calling for the board members resignation.. The BRT board members answered with a unified, "nuh-uh." The mayor can suggest, cajole and encourage board members to resign, but he can't fire them. BRT board members are appointed by the Board of Judges of the Philadelphia Courts of Common Pleas (BJCCCP) another powerful yet obscure political oligarchy in city government. On the surface having important and well-compensated appointments made by sober minded black robes from the judiciary seems like an ideal way to assure quality selections to important governmental posts. In practice the Board of Judges deliberations can more closely resemble a nest of vipers where bald political considerations and double crosses are as common as courtesy.

Years ago the chairman of the Democratic City Committee lobbied individual members of the Board of Judges on behalf of the party's preferred candidate to fill a vacancy. The chairman of the Democratic party received verbal assurances from each of the eleven voting judges that he/she was committed to voting for the party's preferred candidate. In a secret ballot the judges voted eleven-to-zero for the other guy, meaning that every single one of them had lied to the chairman's face. Had a single judge cast a vote for the party's candidate, the chairman would never know which judge had told the truth. But faced with a unanimous lie by the men and women holding the scales of justice, he did the honorable thing and resigned as Democratic party chairman. And he was rewarded by appointment to the Board of Revision of Taxes.

BE PREPARED TO BE DAZZLED by names of important white men you've never heard of and distant dates from Pennsylvania's past. Take 1848. . .Please! Try to remember the year 1848 because that's the last time that Pennsylvania had a Democratic governor and two Democratic United States Senators. At a news conference last Tuesday Arlen Spector announced an unexpected Democratic Party Pennsylvania trifecta in a race no one saw running at post time. Specter's announcement to become a Democrat after serving 29 years as a Republican U.S. Senator from his adopted state of Pennsylvania was both stunning and nationally important, but beyond that, mindblowing in Washington. The new American congressional reality is this: as Specter turns so turns the United States Senate.

This is heady stuff. So heady that it's easy to forget the parochial considerations of Pennsylvania history. Arlen Specter, at 79, has stepped onto the national stage like no Philadelphian of that advanced age since, well, Benjamin Franklin, who was 81 years old when he joined 54 men meeting at Independence Hall in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Like Franklin, only in William Penn's Philadelphia could a Russian Jewish immigrant's kid with a sense of justice from the junkyards of Kansas have figured out how to fit right in and cause such problems. Specter's decision has created a once in a sesquicentennial-plus situation in Pennsylvania electoral politics. Eight score and one year ago was the last time Pennsylvania Democrats controlled the Governor's Office and both upper house seats in the U.S. Congress. The year was 1848. That was six years before what we call the Republican Party would even exist. But despite the early head start by the Democrats, Pennsylvanians have preferred Republicans more than two-to-one in those three statewide elective offices in the years since. Most of those Republican years, incidently, fell between the administrations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Since then it's been in-again-out-again-Finnigan for both party's candidates for governor and U.S. Senate. You're in, you're out; it's time for a change, Democrat or Republican every other election cycle. Our change in political mood has been as dependable as the seasons. All except for Arlen Specter who has served longer than any U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history. For a brief period of less than a month in January 1848, the governor, Francis Shunk (of South Philly Shunk Street fame!) and U.S. Sens.Daniel Sturgeon and Simon Cameron were all Democrats. Cameron famously served in President Lincoln's cabinet and later was elected twice to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. . . as a Republican.