What needs to happen, once the dust settles, is a complete shake-up of who does what in the face of an environmental catastrophe. I propose that we beef up the National Guard (and possibly the Coast Guard, once we sack those in charge there too) so that when an environmental crisis threatens the American people, the American people can take care of it themselves. Costs would be covered by exactions from private companies who are actually doing the dangerous work (kind of like how we all pay taxes to fund the police because vigilante justice has proven to be a bad idea). Anyway all these companies would pay into a fund, the fund would support the training of the military on whatever needed to be done, so that they can react swiftly and appropriately if and when the time comes. In addition, this would make following existing regulations, or even making stricter regulations much more palatable for these companies, as now that there are actually consequences that are potentially costly and beyond their control, taking all the requisite safety precautions may seem like a good idea. Think of it as a doomsday weapon in environmental management. “Sure, you can drill if you really want to, but if you screw it up, there’s this big government-mandated deus ex machina over here that will come in and clean house with absolutely no regard for your earnings, your property, or the wishes of your company. But don’t worry, it won’t charge you a dime for its services. Have a nice day!”

Take the BP spill. What if those tasked with shutting it down only had to answer one question?

President Obama: “Is the well shut down?”

No follow-up questions of how much it cost the shareholders, can we start with a cheaper solution first, can we salvage any equipment, can we salvage the well, none of that. The government would just go in, assess the situation, and swat the gawddamn fly with the gawddamn howitzer.

I hear a lot of people in interviews, on C-SPAN, around the water-cooler, on the street, everywhere, all talking about how they’re against any government action because they “believe in the free market.”  I keep resisting the urge to directly ask them, “So do you believe in Santa Clause too?”  Now, I’m not an economist, but the conditions of a free market system, as described in economics textbooks are tantamount to “enlightened capitalism” in my mind.  Namely, in the textbook, everyone has a lot more information and understanding than they do in real life.  Basically, in the free market, everyone is invested in the system.  Where we start running into problems (in real life) is when we try to apply those same free market principles to consumers (not necessarily “invested in the system” so to speak).  Where in free market theory does the Wow Factor fit in, or keeping up with the Jones’, or the reality distortion field, or taking out a variable rate mortgage because some guy in a three-piece told you you could (but didn’t stop to tell you if you should), or any other senseless reason that money seems to fly out of people’s pockets.  These are the reasons why the free market will never be more than a sound-byte for people who think they understand the economy.  I’m not saying I understand the economy either, but I’ve learned that the smartest thing you can do is to understand that there is a lot you don’t know.  For instance, I don’t know what the hell is going on three blocks away from me (I work right next to Wall St.), I do know that the guy in line at the movies who’s spouting off to the bimbo he’s trying to impress that he knows what really should be done is full of shit.  So, to sum up, as Clinton reminded us that the same skills that get you elected also get you laid, this economic disaster will remind us, the same deregulation that got us rich put us in the poorhouse as well.  Free market indeed…

And the other thing I want to put my two cents in about: the “government bail out.”  If that’s too hard to swallow, try this on: the “citizen bail out.”  Remember, folks, our elected officials may have chosen to spend this money they way it’s being spent, but remember where the money is coming from.  Sure, government is pointing the spotlight, but the outlet, the transmission lines, the whole damn power plant, it’s all made of citizens.

So government, business, on behalf of the ones who ultimately bail you out every time either of you screw up: You’re welcome.

Said the guy with 15 dollar coins jangling around in his pocket after buying a five dollar book of stamps…

Personally, with his only son currently enrolled at Trinity University, this is the best time for Rove to spend time with his family. If only my father had decided to work long hours driving an irrepairable schism through the uniting the country instead of coaching me in little league (my peers called me Striker! [but with love]), bringing home pizza on Fridays, riding sweeper when we took family bicycle outings (yeah, it’s the whole family), driving half the neighborhood to school in the morning (we were too close for a bus), and making me finish my vegetables when I was five (“Eat half.” “Okay, now eat half of that.” “Okay, now eat half of that.”), maybe I would have turned out a better man than I am today…

Yeah, Rove, time to be a stay-at-home Dad. You’ll get to spend all of three weeks embracing the joys of parenting before Turd Blossom Jr. is off to college.

But seriously, why does every single disgraced politician, get-while-the-gettin’s-good politician, discraced corporate executive, and powerless public figure use that same excuse: “I’m leaving to spend more time with my family.” What a load of crap. It’s about as hackneyed as a rock band splitting due to “creative differences,” or a professional entertainer taking time off to “face personal demons.”

How about something a little more believable, like “I saw which way the wind was blowing and decided to leave now before the whole she-bang imploded on itself.”

Well, I’d believe that, but I don’t think Rove would. Sad thing is, I think Rove actually belives his own spin. I think that he’s been shilling his particular brand of crap for so long that he’s absolutely convinced of his justification for all of it. My take on the whole thing goes something like this: Rove is at his desk, he stands up and walks to the window, surveying the deeply divided nation he has worked so hard to split apart, he walks back to his desk and leafs through the latest casualty reports from the war in Iraq that he not only pitched, but sold, then sighs contentedly and says to himself: “Well, I’ve done all I can here…”

Seriously, what the crap?

Cyclists who take the Brooklyn Bridge during a time of massive subway failure are idiots.  Cyclists who hurl obscenities at the throngs of pedestrians that can’t seem to get out of their way should be dragged off their bikes and beaten to death with their own helmets.

Reason #1: The Brooklyn Bridge is a crisis icon.  It’s the worn out teddy bear with one eye and missing stuffing for Brooklynites everywhere.  When bad stuff happens in New York it usually means we have to walk home; and the gothic towers, the steel framework, the overwhelming history that sweeps over us when we even look at it are exactly the friend we need when times are tough.  Standing inside one of those massive natural cement towers is akin to standing in that snow fort you spent hours building when you were a kid.  You’re invincible.  And it’s a feeling that a lot of Brooklynites have.  We love our bridge, and when the subways fail us, it’s the first place we turn.

All of us.

Seriously, nearly everyone walking over to Manhattan from the general downtown Brooklyn area this morning was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge.  Never mind the Manhattan Bridge, with its entrance only a mere block North of Brooklyn Bridge Blvd.  Never mind the fact that the Manhattan Bridge deposits you about half a mile further uptown in Manhattan (helpful if you work anywhere that’s not the Financial District).

So when everyone and their mother needs to use a bridge, and they all pick their safety blanket (naturally), there are going to be way too many people for the pedestrian lane.  Which brings me to…

Reason #2: The pedestrian lane of the Brooklyn Bridge is crappy for cyclists anyway.  I bike over this thing every day, trust me, I know.  The lane is anywhere from 15 to 20 feet wide and combines a pedestrian walkway with a bike lane, separated by a foot-wide white strip of paint running down the middle.  What’s crappy, you say?  Well, on paper it sounds fine.  But the designers forgot one key factor.

Pedestrians are idiots.

That might sound elitist, but it’s grounded in fact.  Pedestrians don’t have that much to pay attention to, it’s difficult to mess up walking, so they often meander around, not really paying attention to where they are going or where they are in reference to that big white line in the middle of the lane.  Cyclists, on the other hand, are forced to pay more attention to their surroundings, simply because they are balancing on a collection of simple machines traveling anywhere between 10 and 30 miles an hour.  I can’t afford to meander, I have enough problems just not getting myself killed.  But getting back to the point I was making: Pedestrians are complete idiots on the Brooklyn Bridge, particularly when it comes to respecting the bike lane.  On a typical ride I’ll have to deal with at least two of the following, usually three:

• Someone who is walking in the bike lane.
  
• Someone who darts out into the bike lane to pose for a picture.
• People milling about under the arches of the towers, always a crowd standing where I can’t see them until I’m almost on top of them.
• Self-important joggers that don’t want do deal with running through crowds of people.
  
• Some asshole who is walking his bike up the grade, yet still in the bike lane.
  

Sure, it sounds like I’m whining, but most encounters with said idiots usually involve me swerving, locking up the back tire, or narrowly avoiding terrible injury of all parties involved in some other fashion.  On a normal day I am that asshole hurling obscenities at witless walkers, and I completely support any cyclist who does the same.  On a normal day.

The fact that I work at the extreme South end of Manhattan (the reservoir tip, if you will) is the only reason I put up with the annoyance of using this bridge every day (even though I love everything else about it).  So why the bridge would be used by any cyclists to get to get to Manhattan on a day of a city-wide subway shutdown is beyond me.  Multiply the typical amount of people walking over the damn thing by ten and tell me they’ll all stay on the pedestrian side.  Right…

Reason #3:  Speaking of dedicated bike lanes, did you know that the Manhattan Bridge has one?  Yup, completely separate from the pedestrian walkway, it’s on the North side and it’s wonderful.  I took it this morning and I can count the number of people on there with me on one hand.  Literally, there were three other cyclists on there with me, all of whom were going the same way I was going.  The same thing happened during the Transit Strike.  Cops were forcing cyclists to dismount because of the crowds on the Brooklyn Bridge, but the Manhattan Bridge was a ghost town…

There are other reasons why the Manhattan Bridge is better: shallower grade, steadier climb, concrete riding surface (think about bad weather), but I think I’ve proved my point without getting into the boring stuff.

“Hey!” Somebody shouted.

I looked up, it was the white-haired man, and he was heying at me.

“Watch out for that car,” he said to me.

I turned around. There was a large Suburban idling behind me. It had come in via the other entrance (after me) and I was in the midst of crossing its path on my way to the storage rack.

“Don’t worry, I see it,” I replied, knowing that in a matter of seconds I would be headed in the opposite direction as it was, thus allowing it to continue on unobstructed.

“You should watch out for cars,” said the white-haired man. And here’s where the written word doesn’t convey the proper meaning at first, because what he said, and the tone in which he said it, suggested several other statements: Watch out for cars you irresponsible slacker. You should let cars go in front of you because all roads were made exclusively for them, kid. Cyclists should be seen, not heard, you stupid pedestrian.

“I am a car,” I responded, with a tone suggesting: I have as much a right to this road as any car, fuckface.

Somehow, I think my confrontation-prone demeanor combined with my tendency to instigate are going to lead to a few more problems with this guy in the coming months. I may end up parking on the street for a while, but if I can get HR involved and mention “discrimination” in any way, I’ve got a chance of winning this.

I’ve had a hair-trigger for crap like this all my life. I think its because I know that most people won’t react at all, and therefore nothing will ever happen to even address the problem, no matter what the problem happens to be. When I was in high school some stupid jock called me “gay” and I got him suspended for a week with a mandatory tolerance workshop just because I could. My motive wasn’t spite though, I did it because I knew that there was rampant homophobia among the student population and that the school was ignoring the problem. Walking down to the office and putting it on paper would force them to acknowledge the problem, and to act.

Not that holding up homophobia to some old guy who is irritated by bicycles is an apples to apples comparison. I’m not going to be joining any picket lines, or demanding sweeping policy changes. Hell, I just want to be taken seriously, that’s all.

As I write this, I can only imagine the van, sitting peacefully in the driveway (not leaking, by the way), patiently awaiting a set of much needed new tires. My father will get in the van Wednesday morning and the van will be so pleased, because at its ripe old age, being driven is a rare honor, bestowed upon it at odd, but glorious intervals. And the van will pull into a strange parking lot full of strange new cars, all from a far off land, all speaking a strange un-American language. But the van will react as it always has, with poise and respect, and it will attempt to strike up a conversation with these strange vehicles using the universal language of engine ticks, but they will just twitter amongst themselves and point their highbeams and laugh. But the van will just shrug it off, thinking, “Maybe this is where I’ll get some new tires!” And why not so? The van has served for many years, through many trials. Who cares about the twittering cars? Not the van. Because its job is the proudest of all, its job is to protect and transport the Kennedy family, speaking of that, where is the man in the yellow Gore-tex? And that’s when the van will see my father, driving by in a brand new Sandpaper-pearl 4Runner, driving out of its life forever. Only then will the van know sadness…

The way I see it, there are two options, over the next few days I need to float the cash to buy the van outright. I think I can do it if I can leverage some of my eggnog futures and funnel them through a dummy corporation I cooked up the last time I was in Hong Kong.

Or, I can go Brady Bunch-style and convince the Toyota dealership that the van is haunted, thereby making it ineligible as a trade-in.

As we speak, I’m cutting eye holes in an old sheet and digging out the silly-string. I think you know which option I’m leaning toward.

Well, tonight I was forced to upgrade that to a love-hate relationship… I was dropping off some pants and shirts to be dry-cleaned and I had a feeling that I’d forgotten to pick something up last week. This happens often, as I am a flaky idiot when it comes to remembering to pick up laundered items. I asked the lady at the counter if I had any outstanding tickets and she informed me that I had a suit that I never picked up… from last September. “Must be a mistake,” I said, “the only suit I had last September was my tuxedo, and I definitely… remember… Crap.”

The dogs were with me tonight, for when the lady went to retrieve the ticket from the rack my tux was still there… After eight months. Meaning the incompetence of the parade of morons that I’ve had to deal with for the past two years may have actually saved me from having to scramble for a tux for the wedding next week that I am the best man in.

[For those of you playing the Doylebrau.com Home Game, score yourself two quarts of eggnog if you guessed that the previous post (linked to above), about how much I hate the "parade of morons" working at Atlantis, and which is also full of my whining about needing to pick up a completely different item of clothing, did indeed come several weeks after I had completely forgotten about my tuxedo. This is why I have a categorization tag called Idiot.]