September 14, 2015

Governor Andrew Cuomo

NYS State Capitol Building

Albany, NY 12224

Governor Cuomo,

The fact, both inconvenient and undeniable, is that far, far more horses’ asses are afoot today than then are horses’ heads. The number, save for a remake of “The Godfather”, should always be in balance. Look in the mirror. To quote a still dead White European male, it is empirically self-evident.

Hank Williams, Jr performs a marvelous song that features his drinking, his drug usage, and his frequent trips to the dark side. Naturally enough it is called “It’s a Family Tradition”.

I wrote to your father when he was Governor about his speech on abortion at the graduation at Notre Dame.

In it he said that while he was personally opposed to abortion he had no choice but to uphold it because it was the law.

My question, of course never answered, concerned Dred Scott and the law.

What would he have done if Scott, a runaway slave, was captured in New York? Imagine that the Governor had received the outstanding warrants and the request for rendition of the prisoner back to the state from where he had escaped.

A brief aside.

You can thank James Madison for the following sentence.

“Full faith and credit shall be given in each state

to the public acts, and judicial proceedings of

every other state.”

Article 4

Section 1

The Constitution of the United States

I asked your father if, however reluctantly and certainly accompanied by a highly dudgeoned-filled protest, he would have put him on the midnight train to Georgia.

I am still waiting for an answer. Perhaps his estate….Nah. Being a modern American Liberal, even a dead one, means that you never have to say you’re sorry. Ever. For anything.

Now comes your turn in the barrel.

I saw you on TV this morning preaching the benefits of a $15 an hour minimum wage. You said that you would “knock down” anyone for opposing it.

Perhaps not the best example of reasoned discourse or civility in the public arena

but it certainly explains the difference between Rhetoric and Sophistry. I am thankful for even small blessings.

For the record…

Have you ever worked for the minimum wage?

Have you ever been fired from a job you held at the minimum wage? 

Have you ever had a job mopping johns?

Have you ever painted a closet in summertime?

Have you ever dug a ditch?

Have you ever swung a 9 pound hammer for wages?

Ditto a post hole digger

Have you ever belonged to the Teamsters’ Union?

Have you ever walked a picket line other than protesting the heartbreak of psoriasis?

Are your blue collars from Brooks Brothers, Ralph Lauren, or WalMart?

Perhaps someone explained to you how, if you are unemployable at $7, $8, $9, $10 an hour or more you suddenly become more employable at $15 an hour. If you are in possession of such knowledge I beg you to share it with me, with us, with people who live in the real world. That’s the world where “stones are hard and water is wet”. It is a world with which modern American Liberals are not familiar. If they are part owners of unicorn farms on which they have an environmentally sensitive balloon juice co-op and an organic rainbow stew commissary that doubles as a soup kitchen for the children of overweight transgendered, re-gendered, or ungendered victims of predatory lenders who were victims of intense, organized bullying it may not be too late for them. 

When you gave your call to arms, “Happy Days will soon be here” speech you were wearing a gold sash. I couldn’t read what it said but it would be a chalk bet that it either mentioned the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire or Jimmy Hoffa. Maybe Cesar Chavez, almost forgotten uncle of the legendary Hugo Chavez, was on the back side.

Pop quiz.

What is the literal meaning of the word “utopia”?

Answer later.

The only time I wrote to you was in the summer of 1998. That was the year when Big Bill Clinton, in between assignations, told a group of reporters in the Rose Garden that it was very hot out. Further, the heat was caused by Global Warming. Of course, the Koch Brothers profited obscenely from this. The worst part of the treacherous GW was that it caused more heat which caused, you guessed it, more GW.

 It was like the rat, cat, and snake farm. Each section supported the other section. It was a machine that went of itself. As soon as we can develop a market for low fat snake tid-bits – Any chance you could put the word with Michele to get me on the good vendor list? Just asking. I’m from Hudson County, just across the river form where you grew up. If I tell you that I know the buttered side from the dry I won’t Have to say anything else, right? – we will have a perpetual Summer of Recovery. Honest.

I say with all honesty and sympathy that if tautologies did not exist we would have to invent them lest modern American Liberals sneeze the brains out because they dried up from lack of use. 

The craftier among you have Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc genetically infused into their sperm and their eggs lest the line perish. 

Logic is to a mAL what holy water, sunlight, and a silver crucifix is to Dracula.

Anyway, when you were HUD Secretary in the hot summer of 1998 you had a sly agent in Pompano Beach, FL. He discovered the heretofore undiscovered “right’ to air conditioning. He arranged for 200 12,500 BTU A/Cs to be “lent” to residents of Section 8 Housing there. I tried, unsuccessfully, to find out if he bought them off the floor at COSTCO or if you had a warehouse filled with them awaiting further shipping instructions. I tried, unsuccessfully, to see if any of them were ever returned.

And, God dang it, you never answered my letter.

I stopped writing to you because of an unconnected fact.

We both attended and were graduated from high schools run by the Marist Brothers; I from Marist High School in Bayonne, NJ  and you from Archbishop Malloy in Queens, NY. I was worried that there might have been some pedagogical cross-pollination that would have caused embarrassment to any or all of our joint teachers.

One of my proudest achievements as a business man was “creating” more jobs in the 1980s than all the companies making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I am responsible for a bit more than 400 net new jobs. The companies in the DJIA “created” none. In fact there was a net loss of jobs from them.

There is no better example of the “triumph of hope over experience” than the repeated failure of modern American nostrums about wages and unemployment rates, particularly among urban inner-city youth. [That’s a euphemism for African-American teenagers – hopefully non-feral.]  The deadly combination of increasing the entry level wage while enforcing the Davis Bacon law, the most bigoted anti-Black law passed on the national level in the 20^th century, is feloniously imbecilic.

Further, it doubly sins by promising that all it takes is when good people, good ideas, in a good government incubator come together and “speed the plow”, when they “force the spring”, and, yes we can, reach the horizon and pass over into the land of milk and honey where we will sleep ‘til noon, have free beer, and fart through silk.

All it will take is “designing a society so perfect that no one will have to be good”. 

Hey! We went to the moon, didn’t we?

Kevin Smith

PS – Utopia? “Nowhere”. Got it?