Michael Bouldin, August 2014
Originally published on New York's new progressive blog, WriteNowNY.
When I was seventeen, my West German high school sent a group of students to Moscow. The year was 1987. To us kids, everything we saw was imbued with the aura of permanence, the inevitable division of our world, the only one we knew, bifurcated between East and West at the cruel knife edge of the Berlin Wall. An exotic world we knew only from screens, Hollywood’s or the nightly news, dangerous in its attraction to those of weak character, for us, a voyage somewhere from curiosity to apprehension. Monuments towering to an empty heaven, workers, state heroes here in ideal, their hard muscles and harder smiles carved in steel, unseeing eyes fixed on a future gleaming far off in the void, expectant gazes fixed on an ether a world away from the grime below.
Sure, the shops were empty, while a few crumpled dollar bills in the right hands would buy you a superb bottle of Russian vodka, clearer than any water, lethal beyond imagining and yet familiar. Our parents had these things, if we kids were lucky; the men and women toiling in the fields did not, but maybe the marble and steel heroes of labor had better connections. What mom and dad didn’t have were seat tickets to the fabled Bolshoi, its stage a palace in the soft shadows of the Kremlin parapets, the hall empty but for us and a scattering of the noble proletariat, the Soviet promise made real in an hour of peerless art. Fortress walls outside, ancient crimson battlements, gold flaming in the sunset. Above red stars brighter than the moon, a promise of the coming world revolution, where once the eagles of the czars were mounted, double-headed as they were in Constantinople a thousand years before.
Moscow is sprawling, in a plain stretching unbroken from the Atlantic to the Urals, Russia vast to defy comprehension. All we knew of it was of missiles and tanks in their tens of thousands, soldiers in their millions, worker drones in their hundreds of millions, animated presumably by devotion to beliefs alien to us, perhaps (we hoped) treated by them with an irony eluding the state, omnipresent yet unseen, imbued in limitless arbitrary power. The Red Menace seemed quite real, proud scarlet banners waving from towers beyond count. The people in their blood-red shadows didn’t know any other life, how could they, or desire a different world unless in whispers, small rebellions of no account to the suffocating power of what was. Were they happy? In some ways, surely, always the human heart seeks happiness; but we had the escape of Sheremetyevo to look forward to, they did not.
Two years later, the glittering mirage collapsed under its own weight, without warning.
The State of New York is not the Soviet Union. Albany is more by-word than capital, a casual slur, has little to inspire fear, awe, scarcely even contempt; only the piled granite mess of a capitol (a French chateau in idea, though sadly that nation hasn’t yet built the logical conclusion, guillotines to end the lives of monsters built in stone), surrounded by an accidental village already falling to ruin, a place built to make escape attractive. The Empire State is governed from a place the Caesars would have considered inadequate to stable their horses.
Would we had horses in that fake chateau. Caligula once named his favorite horse to the Senate of Rome, perhaps he was on to something. Horses don’t sire dynasties or lift their nepotistic spawn onto public payrolls.
We have elections, of course; but after decades without change, why would anyone bother other than for the comfort of the ritual? It’s not as if we haven’t tried change. We voted for Eliot Spitzer, got instead the saddest of hooker scandals – sex scandals without sex have a particular melancholy – then worse yet, David Paterson (two words: State Senate), a man so farcically awful that a certain Pedro Espada, venality made flesh, generous flesh, managed to appear not immediately a malignant, flabby cyborg (that took, generally, one look and half a second of astonishment). Espada played the broken system like a fine violin, a virtuoso of our decadence. Cynicism and resignation are to be expected, logical conclusions of the decay we use to distill the mortar for the small monuments of small power in our governmental stripmall. Nor have we yet mentioned that other malignancy, the Assembly.
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And it was ever thus, the iron two-party duopoly on the Hudson every bit as permanent as its predecessor on the Moskva. Animated by no principles immediately obvious, other than graft, dynastic ambitions and small plunder without remorse; it is astonishing for how little these men can be bought. Old men, almost always men, stumbling through arcane cant, almost a priestly caste mumbling incantations in painted locked chambers only a short drive from the most magnetic metropolis on the planet. Odd, isn’t it, that the City, drawing into its orbit the Londons and Hong Kongs of the world as of right, shows precious little interest in ruling the state that bears its name. Manhattan would shatter the smallness of this government by the mere taking of a breath.
My guess would be this: our stripmall acropolis is as fragile as the dying Kremlin. Let’s test that idea.
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There is no system without a flaw. The Constitution guarantees every state in the union a republican form of government. Hollowed out beyond meaning though they may appear, those words still carry the force of constitutional law. And not all elections are the same; as energetic as New Yorkers may be – take a walk through Manhattan at rush hour, and you’ll see the boundless ferocity of us – it is true enough that our general elections are exercises in torpor, empty schools filled with ancient machines, disdainful of those that show up beyond hope to take part in the acclamation we risibly think is democracy in all its egalitarian splendor.
Party primaries are different animals, and quite possibly, the levers of change; the flaw in the system. And so it is this year, in 2014, when a governor frozen between the contempt and resignation of his people faces a new, young and fresh face, a woman with the unlikely name of Zephyr Teachout.
I choose to ignore in this writing the odds, the polls, the conventional wisdom, because what is that? Convention is habit, wisdom a rhetorical nod to the familiar made expected by repetition. If convention always held, I probably wouldn’t have woken up next to a man this morning, or every morning for the last thirteen years, while Malcolm Smith would have been laughed out of every used car dealership between London and Toronto.
And why exactly is Andrew Cuomo, the name aside, governor of this state? Charm? I assure you it ain’t that. Talent? He glowers with some accomplishment, sure, and there’s that classic of infamy ‘Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo’. Gay marriage? Newsflash, darling: we’re not that easily bought, and fuck you if you think equality was your achievement. Too many people gave all for it, we stand in the shadow of a mountain of corpses, being in the right place at the right time does not heroes make.
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I’m a cynic, guilty as charged, my fanboy days are behind me. But I believe that this woman, Zephyr to her friends, is the hammer to shatter New York’s malaise.
Politicians write books, hyped-up hagiographies to their own magnificence, insight, inevitability – two copies, not one, of ‘Living History’, Hillary Clinton’s last effort, sit on my shelves, lonely, dusty, unread – Ms Teachout writes scholarly articles on the Constitution.
The Cornell Law Review is not, to be charitable beyond need, known for sparkling prose; The Anti-Corruption Principle [.pdf] by Zephyr Teachout however is a page-turner. Seriously: read it. I’m not a lawyer, perish the thought; I sell ideas, products, people, in a field – advertising – removed from prostitution only somewhat by less scanty clothing, more tattoos than are acceptable on Wall Street, less honesty but better cocaine.
I devoured her piece in one sitting, all sixty-six riveting pages. She can write, well at that, which is for me (and I’d guess many or most Democrats), a matter of undisguised delight. Just to throw a name out there, that Sarah Palin person – a television personality, in case it slipped your mind, eminently useful as amnesia can be – probably doesn’t know how to spell Montesquieu, and just a guess, doesn’t see why spelling French food – do they have anything else? Not in Real Murka they don’t – is worth the bother.
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We have a different animal before us. Law professor ain’t a bad start, considering our legislature is basically a holding pen for Rikers. Zephyr was raised on a farm, might that help understand and govern a state covered in forests and fields?
How about digitally not just savvy but brilliant in a state without universal broadband. Not your problem, Manhattanites? Think again.
Buffalo and Rochester aren’t just withering because heavy industry has decamped to Chinese factories (or sometimes prison camps), but because they are not connected to the fiber-optic cables that make London and Manhattan twin titans with a puddle between them.
This is not some malevolent law of nature. It is a choice, a failure of governance. To the Albany kleptocracy, Upstate is a lingering embarrassment, perhaps, but above all one thing: dispensable, and distant enough to ignore. The GOP can’t garner enough votes there to govern the state, Democrats barely try, not with the vote cushions provided by the City and suburbs, the practical result is neglect. Avoidable neglect as the vast region slowly dies.
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Let’s assume that this digital savant who wants to be our governor also wants to arrest that slow death. Allow me a quote from our off-the-record interview: “Affordable broadband is a core infrastructure issue”. Go a step further and assume that there might even be a strategy to get it done, a game plan. Raised on a farm? Yeah, and a dad in the military. Take it from an Air Force brat, our kind nows how to execute orders.
Heard that before, anything like it? Probably not. Now ask yourself if a woman with a funny name taking on the most powerful man in the state – and driving him to what a looks a lot like panic – is the type to keep her promises. I’d go with yes. Think she’s not tough? Go ask the Yonkers firefighters that just endorsed her. Rather hard men, one would think.
The wealth of this state is not in its minerals, in oil trapped in shale, it resides in a peerless network of universities, in young men and women speaking every language known on this planet. That wealth is untapped. Our water is pristine, our forests, shores, mountains sheer marvels, what of them? New York is peerless, our government, a sad farce.
We need a governor that sees this New York, builds on its strengths, our strengths, nurtures and unlocks them not as a stepping stone to the White House, but for their own worth and the wealth locked in them. We’ve had a son seeking to best his father in the highest office, not all that long ago, help me here, how did that work out again?
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So let’s test the feeble clay our shackles are made of. Sure, it’s a disgrace to our polity that so few people vote in primaries; expectations this year, in a state of almost twenty million souls, is of seven hundred thousand voters in the Democratic primary. That number is the flaw in the system. If it fails, if that flaw breaks, we face a new day. The cracks are already there. There’s a reason Cuomo isn’t debating; he’ll get, another quote from a different friend, “his ass kicked”. Leonid Brezhnev didn’t debate either.
Cuomo’s politics (positing they exist) are cynical, divisive, empty of all but blank, ruthless ambition. Why the man is governor other than to rise higher – in your dreams, buddy – nobody knows. Frederick the Great called himself the first servant of the state, le premier domestique de l’État; New York is the first servant of its governor, and has a shelf life limited to its, our, usefulness. If you want to be a stepping stone, suit yourself; I refuse.
This piece however is not about him, it is about the woman seeking to take his place. I happen to believe she can do it, pull off a victory in this primary, and New York being New York, carry the general.
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It’s time to articulate the how and the why of a governor Teachout. A majority of seven hundred thousand Democrats can be persuaded; this state is built on hope, not the droit de seigneur.
Zephyr’s written extensively about corruption. That is a thing distinct from graft; sure, Malcolm Smith can be bought for laughable sums, many can be, but that’s strictly not corruption, or the problem. Every drug dealer has envelopes stuffed with bills, and yet the world turns. The cancer is when working for Vito Lopez, the not-Latino until recently the most powerful man in Brooklyn, requires a tight dress and, his words not mine, ‘showing your tits’. The misogyny reeks, fouler yet is the abuse of power, the degradation of public service; is this how we get the best talent into government or inspire the faith in its workings we require as part of the social compact, the set of rules that makes this society work?
We’re not going to get money out of politics; America is the land of the almighty dollar, that task would be Sisyphean in the best of circumstances, even were the Roberts Court not gnawing merrily away at constitutional bedrock. We can however flush out the sleaze. If New York is the first servant of its present governor, we can have one who is the first servant of New York. Someone who sets high standards of conduct and probity, not by decree but by example. That they still let us vote on, and five will get you ten with increasing regret. The legislative districts are already tailored with Milanese precision.
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Now just a final question: when is the last time you were proud of your government? Do you even remember what that feels like?
Let’s find out. The New York Democratic primary is in seventeen days. Vote.
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[Disclosure: the author is not paid by the campaign or, it sometimes seems, by anyone really. My site is here.]