NJ’s Pathetically Correct Attorney General

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Grewal just issued a report on biased incidents in the state of New Jersey.

More than half the reported cases came from colleges and universities, a scary concept since colleges these days have become incubators of misinformation where students are expected to find racism under ever rock.

One university even required white students to write an essay on why they should be ashamed to be white.

Pathetically correct in schools are constantly trying to rewrite history to reflect their somewhat twisted vision of reality, such as the Elizabeth activist who want to remove the name of Ronald Reagan because he once said something questionable.

We already know activists hated Lincoln during his own lifetime because he preserved law over mob rule when it came to outlawing slavery.

In San Francisco, fanatic radicals want to destroy a mural of George Washington because it also depicted Native Americans (a term many Indians hate) and slaves.

All of this comes at a time when Toni Morrison died, a good writer, but someone who fed into this anti-white crusade, a black woman who preferred propaganda like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to real literature such as Huck Finn (both books written by white people.) Of course, being a white male who once served briefly in the Confederate Army, Mark Twain has been called a racist, too – clearly showing how little of his work critics have actually read (he openly condemned slavery in several of his travelogues but since these radicals are better at banning books than reading them, they would not know this. You would expect Morrison, an author, to be better, but she was not.

We can’t expect better from Grewal because we all know that attorney generals on a state or federal level are required to be political stooges – and so like Holder – Grewal does not disappoint us. But the fact that he is feeding into this anti-white racist frenzy is actually dangerous – giving creditability to this illusion that there are white supremacists under every stone just as there were communists in the 1950s.  This gives license to monstrous terrorist groups like Antifa or productions by NBC depicting violence against those media and schools claim as evil – in these cases, anyone who ever even thought about voting for Trump.

 No doubt racism exists and incidents happened. But how many are provoked by overzealous zealots and something criminals like Antifa?

The most visible of this hatred came out after the 2016 election as fanatic liberals became shrill when they could not lie or cheat to get their candidate elected.

The establishment of a Joint Bias Task Force will only exasperate this anti-white prejudice es, adding more questionable allegations by already questionably reliable people, who imagine racism under every bed and homophobia in every closet

Grewal and his side kick, Oliver, should show convictions, not accusations, and detail the circumstance behind each of these reports. Otherwise, all they are doing is feeding this hate.

Popcorn people call Trump a racist.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Democrat think tanks are spewing out a lot of crap these days.

This is not unusual for think tanks for the right or the left. What makes this dangerous is the fact that there is a built-in audience of true believers – I call them the pathetically correct (PC), who eat it up – the way movie-goers eat up popcorn.

To be in the in-crowd these days, you have to proscribe to a certain PC ideology, largely made up in these think tanks, and spread through media.

I call them big and little lies.

The Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election was a big lie – which taxpayers spent tens of millions to disprove.

Small lies are much more effective because no Mueller investigation is ever going to uncover them as lies, and popcorn-eating liberals gobble them up as fact.

One such lie is the idea that Trump is a racist. Another is that he supports white supremacists’ groups. Others paint him as misogynistic. While still others paint him as homophobic.

There is very little to collaborate any of these small lies except for a more than willing and dishonest liberal-controlled media that spreads them and distorts coverage to support these lies.

Day in and day out we hear how Trump’s rhetoric leads to gun violence by white supremacists, while media plays down those cases in which the culprit is actually a supporter of people like Warren and misguided and dangerous causes like Antifa (anyone who wears a mask is a criminal, white or black.)

If there is a terrorist connection, liberal media plays it down, but harps on any case that involves right wing killers, crediting Trump as the cause.

This comes even when the Trump Administration issues statements to the contrary. Braindead PC people still believe his rhetoric led to the violence, when they cannot actually support this with anything he said, just as they can’t support the claims that he is a racist.

This is fantasy that borders on psychosis, a liberal public unable to get over the shock that other people elsewhere in the country could win an election despite the massive voter fraud Democrats appeared to have used in 2016 to have the outcome come out differently.

We have transcended the concept of a fair media, and have evolved into a movement in which mainstream media has become an organ for spreading misinformation, pretending it is all the news fit to print, creating myths that popcorn people accept as fact because it fits in with their existing prejudices.

The truth appears to be exactly opposite of what these popcorn people believe, and when you have a sitting US congresswoman calling for the assassination of a sitting president and Hollywood spewing out movies that call for hunting down of Trump supporters, you have to wonder just who is actually inciting violence, and why mainstream media isn’t calling them to task.

But the answer is clear. Media has taken a side and is too busy screaming fire inside a crowded theater to actually report facts.

Living in the past

08-05-19

I live too much in the past, nostalgic for a time I found pain when I lived it, now far more innocent than time we pass through these days.

some joker on the intern posed an impossible choice between going back to 45 with $10 million or going back to my youth knowing all I know now.

I'd skip the $10 million for the chance to see old friends and family again.

perhaps to meet even family I didn't get to know enough when I met them only in passing.

delving into their lives in retrospect I realize just how much I missed or have forgotten or never knew and only by going back will I truly know them.

Everybody's youth seems more innocent than it actually is. My grandparents, my great grandparents even my great great grandparents each saw their worlds change and become more complex. Each saw the passing of family the way I have to become as my grandmother became and I have become, a sole survivor, burdened with my memories and the memories who came before me, knowing but not well enough my ancestors. but I have only bits and pieces to represent the whole, snapshots in time with which to preserve them.

if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I would know what to look fir, how to fill in all these missing pieces of all those people I have come to cherish through time.

Elated to be fired?

August 4, 2019

The first feeling I feel when I get fired is not panic.

That comes later when I try and figure out how the hell I’m going to pay my rent or mortgage.

The first feeling isn’t even negative, although that comes later, too, the unworthiness that makes me unacceptable.

No, the first feeling is always elation, as if the chains have been removed from me and I am able to move about unencumbered by responsibilities that I been forced to endure just to get a paycheck.

After 32 years as a beat reporter – 27 at the Hudson Reporter, the rest elsewhere, and the week in and week out ritual of a meeting deadlines, the elation this time was even more significant than during other terminations, feeling the links of chain drop one by one as I used by 30 minutes to pack up 27 years of accumulated stuff from my desk, putting notebooks and file folders into recycling, things I thought I needed fore to save for unrealized future stories.

I didn’t even hear the ticking clock in my head I had when fired from other jobs, my whole 30 minutes done in deliberate slow-motion since what I needed to take was significantly less than what I would leave behind – and not all of that physical.

To be unbeholden to anyone, returning to that point in life when I lived more or less carefree, assuming life would someone take care of me – the hippie-hobo life Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road.” Someone on the street of Hoboken even called me a “Darma Bum” as if my new-found freedom emanated from me, a radiation glow I could not keep contained had I wanted to.

How long this glow lasts is up to me – perhaps even for the rest of my life.

My real work

March 24, 1997

The daily grind goes on.

Monday morning rising to face one more week of deadlines.

I always have too much to do and make more promises than I can keep – a story for this cause or that, each a brutal battle from notes to finished copy that I always cringe over.

I keep looking for a formula that will make life easier, knowing I’ll never find one.

All this, of course, comes in the middle of what I like to think of as my “serious work,” those passages of purple prose which will put me in a literature book someday, guarantee me a place among the greats (how many other fools have thoughts like this, like the man at the poetry reading Saturday who ranted on about those writers who influence him, name dropping so heavily he could have served a biography for a text on western literature.

A large part of literary success is self-promotion, such as what happened with Whitman when he wrote reviews of his own book and gave himself high praise.

I am poor at self-promotion, and wish talented amounted for me, and hard work, and some aspect of self-belief. All writers, artists, musicians must believe they are destined for something, or they fail.

But some of us deceive ourselves, relying too much upon the world somehow discovering us.

I did well enough at the open reading this weekend, and more or less discovered a fact that I already knew, that people won’t tolerate long pieces, regardless of the quality. They like beginnings and endings, and would avoid the middles if possible, especial if those middles seem to go on and one.

Even poetry as been pockmarked by the punchy, sliced up images of post-MTV, and in poetry as in my old adage (to whom I can not give credit): keep it short stupid.

The problem is I don’t operate well in the realm of the ultra-short, where every word need be a pearl, where every image as sharp as a diamond. My work plods along in an emotional accumulation, where poetry demands lightning strikes. But I do have a few short pieces, and I’ll see where that gets me. Perhaps I can seduce some sucker into giving me a feature, where I can do what the hell I want.

Escaping the Titanic unscathed

Wednesday, July 31, 2019 I’m unemployed again.This time I’m not completely to blame – although internal politics at my office played a significant part in their choice to chop my head off rather than someone else’s.Sometimes, the universe lines up in such a way that things become inevitable.I’ve carried a target on my back for the last several years, in particular with the change of ownership last year – but even more so when the person who despises me most became by boss and tried at least twice to convince the new owners I was expendable, and even incompetent.Over the last 32 years as a journalist, I always knew I was better respected by the people I covered than the people employed me.But in the most recent case, I’ve become a non-entity entirely because the new owners do not see people as people, but as pieces in a corporate machine, easily replaced, more importantly, easily pressed to do more than we are actually getting paid to do.The recent downsizing was number crunching, nothing personal on the higher levels. The corporation clearly saw my salary as an issue but left the choice for who got chopped on local bosses, and since my boss didn’t like me, I was an easy choice.This was true of some of the others that were giving notice when I was, old adversaries to the local bosses, who found this as a good opportunity to get rid of those they disliked anyway.This trust in local bosses is not new.Managers historically in our society trust other managers regardless of how incompetent or corrupt these managers are.Nobody takes workers seriously enough to actually listen to them, unless these workers make a lot of noise the way I do.Although I have held this job for the last 27 years, I have been fired before, a number of times, only in those instances, I deserved it, mostly for challenging authority.Ironically, each of these events seemed to occur around the same time in the decade, so that the current dismissal is a kind of anniversary of each of my previous events, in 1969, 1979, and 1989. Some jobs I resigned before they got the chance to fire me.Almost in every case, I caused my own demise by pointing out just how incompetent the people who oversaw me were or challenged the corporation mentality that made workers into machine parts and ignored our humanity.I remember how the vice president of Fotomat came to my booth to talk to me after I wrote a long letter to the corporation criticizing the way they did business, or how I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin donuts two weeks before my wedding because the owner was a complete ass and had abused one of the female workers – a similar situation got me fired from the cosmetic company in the late 1970s. I quit my summer job the Garfield Two Guys store before they could find an excuse to fire me. I had challenged them and could afford to, then realized that some of the other workers were looking up to me – and were risking their jobs because I became a kind of spokesperson for a righteous cause, working people. I understood then, that rebellion comes with responsibility, and while I was willing to pay the price, I could not afford to let others suffer.When I wrote a letter to Tony Pro in 1978 about how our union rep was selling out to management, I knew I risked my job. Tony Pro was on his way to jail but took time to fire the union rep (maybe more than that), but I lost my job anyway.I was a constant thorn in management’s side during each of my jobs, because people became invisible, and it was important for someone like me to remind these powerful people than workers are not machine parts, easily replaced, they have families, and their lives are shattered by corporate decisions.That may well be part of the reason I’m unemployed this time, too, since my current boss decided to use the corporate system to try to get me fired – unable to get the previous owners to do it – and I struck back, refusing to recognize my boss’ claims.But I knew in winning, I was losing, and that the whole confrontation with a corrupt local boss was unwinnable ultimately, and that eventually, I was doomed.So, when the corporate downsizing came, I did not resist – it was the least painful of potential events, and let me walk away with the same dignity I always have in such situations, knowing that the victory of the petty local boss will be temporary, and hollow. In the end, letting me and other rebels go also stole the heart and soul of the business, and left a pack of self-serving power-hungry wannabe bosses in place – each aching to be captain of a ship that has already sprung so many leaks that it can do nothing but sink.
It's easy to be a captain of a sinking ship. You need no compass to choose a direction. The only direction is down.Now I know how it feels to be one of the survivors in the life boats watching the Titanic sinking in the distance, saddened by the loss of life, and the tragic loss of a noble ship, but relieved that I have finally managed to escape relatively unscathed, and aware that for the first time in a long time, I do not need to look over my shoulder to see who is taking aim at the target on my back – having left the target on the deck of the ship, and the pack of wannabe captains shooting themselves in their feet as the water rises up around their necks.And while I may feel as if the row to shore is a long one, at least I know I will eventually reach shore, maybe even before my former bosses meet Davy Jones. 

The day the bad guys won

July 27, 2019 Power never lasts.And the tighter you grip it the more it slips like sand through your fingers and leaves your hands empty.This may take days or weeks or even decades, and so on days like this, when it seems like the bad guys won, I tell myself they haven't.And for those of us who seem to have been exiled from the kingdom, outcasts from what we thought was Arthur's perfect realm, we need  to realize, too, that inside those noble halls, those who remain hate each other as much as they ever hated us, and must live with each other, hating each other, more than they ever hated or feared us, sharks living among sharks, always fearful of teeth that might dig deep into them they way their teeth once dug deep into us.We all lived in one big fish bowl where they feed on guppies like us, but now that they have fed on the last of us, we feed on each other.This is poor satisfaction for those of us who spent decades building our power right, brick by brick, instead of body by body, making alliances rather than petty schemes. In the short view, good guys always seem like suckers, having done things the way were taught to do them, living by some moral code that avoided using and abusing others in our climb to the top.On days like this we need to tell ourselves that these mountain climbers really aren't getting to the top of a mountain, but to the top of a dung heap, their own petty egos painting it as something more, and that those same egos will eventually bring about their downfall from even that un-lofty height. We need to convince ourselves that we won even when it seems we didn't, by retaining a moral highground they for all their ambition lack, and that even in exile, we remain the ones who won, though at moments like this, we do not feel like we have.We need to remind ourselves that sharks will remain sharks even when the fish tank is empty of everything but sharks, and we must learn patience, learn to heal ourselves, wait and watch for that day when these sharks turn onto each other – knowing that it must come, knowing that sharks must continue to feed, and in the end, must consume each other.On days like this, we need to remember that all power hungry people carry inside them the seeds of their own destruction, weaknesses they cannot see in themselves, either because their egos won't allow them to, or they simply do not know themselves well enough to avoid their inevitable demise, and that on some future day, the final grains of sand will slip out from between their fingers, and when they open their hands, they have nothing.