Jersey Shore

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Just try to get on this beach, buster

Seaside Heights: Everybody's welcome

Back in the 1990s, I wrote a weekly column called "Jersey" for the New York Times. In it, I roamed the state for material, and regularly settled on the vexing subject of the New Jersey seashore -- known to all as the Jersey Shore.

Unlike most reporters, from New York or elsewhere, I actually realized that the Jersey Shore started at Cape May to the south and ended 127 miles north at Sandy Hook --  and that the absolutely worst places to get a feel for it, whether in good times or stormy times -- were at those two easy-to-find, easy-to-reach-from-Manhattan towns on the northern stretches of the shore, Asbury Park and Long Branch.

[Obligatory mention of Bruce Springsteen whenever there's a mention of Asbury Park].

A couple of things about those two towns. One, until they became nicely gentrified by young professionals, especially affluent gays, in recent years, those towns were decrepit and largely overlooked by outsiders.

Two, most of the other Jersey Shore towns -- Cape May, Wildwood, Avalon, Stone Harbor, Ocean City, Atlantic City, Long Beach Island's communities, Seaside Heights, etc -- are on barrier islands. Asbury Park and Long branch are on the mainland. The issues most pressing shore issues -- erosion, reckless development, restricted public access to beaches that are expensively, constantly, painstakingly restored with federal and state tax money -- are centered on the barrier islands, and not on the mainland.

And vis a vis public use of the beaches, the actual issue is access. The issue is not the $3 or $5 a beach town might charge per day for using the beach. Some of the towns that charge fees enthusiastically welcome the public to come in and pay them. Others, the exclusive towns that keep the public out by prohibiting parking anywhere in town, officially have "beach fees" -- but they are basically a fiction because no one can actually get to the beach who doesn't live there at least seasonally.

Despite my efforts, the media never got this right, and they still don't, as seen in this well-meaning but basically pointless report on NPR about beach fees and public access.

On the Jersey Shore in summertime, wide-open towns like Cape May, Ocean City, Seaside Heights, Point Pleasant Beach and the like, all impose nominal beach fees to offset local expenses of hiring lifeguards and maintenance. In these funloving towns, which welcome the public, it's easy to find the place to actually pay the daily fee (usually at numerous booths at the boardwalks), and public accommodations, including parking, are readily available. No problemo, as they might say in Seaside Heights.

[Only a few major beach towns, namely Wildwood and Atlantic City, do not impose fees of any kind, incidentally. Access is totally open.]

But most of the rest of the Shore is exclusive, with beach access actually available only to well-heeled residents, who go to great efforts, abetted by their local police departments, to keep out the riff-raff, which is defined as the rest of us who might be looking for a day at the shore and not planning to spend it at the big boardwalk towns.

Just try to find public parking, let alone a place to actually pay a beach fee or buy a beach tag, in Avalon or Harvey Cedars or Deal or a dozen other Jersey Shore towns that make it clear that "Day Tripper" is a dirty word. Just try to walk on their damn beach! You will see what the word exclusive really means. And it just so happens that these towns -- which comprise the bulk of the Jersey Shore oceanfront real estate -- tend to be the ones with the greatest demands for taxpayer-funded beach replenishment and anti-erosion projects because, you see, these are the most ecologically vulnerable areas, where the most inadvisable beachfront development -- read, multi-million-dollar homes built on beaches that are extremely susceptible to erosion -- has occurred in the last four decades.

New Jersey Gov. Chris ("Thar She Blows") Christie now lobbies for many billions in federal aid to restore the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy, the devastation of which he called "unthinkable." Yet it wasn't "unthinkable," it was absolutely predictable and inevitable -- but no one is really pressing Christie and his likes on just exactly what kind of restoration they have in mind.

Lemme guess. Does the term "status quo ante" sound about right? Is it your guess, as it is mine, that Christie's plan is to back the rebuilding of the Jersey Shore just as it was, with all of those splendid mansions on the seaside, revived and protected by taxpayers?

The NPR report correctly seeks out comment from people like Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group. It says:

"Before the storm, he says, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent years building up the beaches by pumping sand onto them. But that shouldn't be a solution to restoring the shore, he says.
'We need to design the beaches to be sustainable, to be open to the public, in a way that everybody can get to them, everywhere, and we need to design them so they're ecologically sensitive and they provide for habitat,' Dillingham says."

Seventy-five percent of the restoration costs for the Jersey shore, the report says, accurately, "is likely to come from federal taxpayers, with the state picking up a significant chunk too." And it adds, again accurately: "Yet much of the beach-restoration work will end up protecting private property. The relatively few beach areas now accessible to the public on the Jersey shore often charge fees of $8, $10 and even $12 a day for access. And some towns are considering hiking those fees to help pay for the renovations."

But that's where we slip off the rails. The issue, as presented by the NPR report, is that politicians in the New Jersey state legislature are hoping to pass a law saying that beach towns that have access fees in place can't accept taxpayer restoration money.

Who would be hurt by that? Why, the big boardwalk towns like Seaside Heights and Ocean City that charge beach fees and at the same time welcome the public, providing parking and rest rooms and other services, including lifeguards.

Who would not care in the least? Why, the "stay-the-hell-away" towns that have fees in place mainly  to maintain the fiction that beach access is available -- when, in fact, there is no practical way for outsiders to access or use  the beach, given parking restrictions and a total lack of public services. So why would they care if they can't charge beach fees to the public at large? In these towns, the beach is for the locals, there is no public parking anywhere in town -- but the bill for restoring that beach and fixing expensive homes that are recklessly built in vulnerable oceanfront locations, well, that bill is presented to taxpayers at large.

(Yes, the virtual gated communities do charge residents for beach passes to residents, but on a seasonal, not daily, basis. That is, residents pay for the whole summer. Officially banned from charging public "beach fees," these towns could just as easily designate these seasonal passes as  membership assessments, and hence make it official that what they're actually running is a kind of beachfront country club reserved for the swells.)  

So "access" is available in the big boardwalk towns, at a nominal fee (except for Wildwood and Atlantic City, where it's free) -- but virtually denied in most of these other towns, even though they maintain the fiction of access. Realistically there is no way for the public to use those beaches in the most exclusive shore towns with the most expensive real estate. On a summer day, you can't park there, and just try to even find a place to pay that beach fee.

So the NPR piece is well-intentioned, and so perhaps (just perhaps) is the move in the Jersey legislature to ban beach fees in towns that accept restoration money. But it misses the real point. A $5 daily beach fee in raucous, wonderful Seaside Heights, teeming with the general public during the summer, that isn't the issue. The smug archipelago of virtual gated communities, hogging taxpayer-maintained beaches that are effectively closed to the general public under all circumstances -- that's the issue on the Jersey Shore.


And you're not going to learn about the real issue, standing on a beach in Long Branch, where they actually let you stand on the beach. Try doing that in, say, the town of Deal.


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A New 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' Revival on Broadway, But the Question Is 'Why?'

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Scarlett Johansson

In New York for a holiday visit, my wife and I saw the new "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" last night on Broadway with Scarlett Johansson as Maggie. It was the second night of previews (opening is early January).

The 1955 play, said to have been Tennessee Williams' personal favorite, has always been a problem, in that it really has never been clear -- not to audiences, not to a succession of directors starting with Elia Kazan, not even to  to Mr. Williams himself -- exactly what it's about. Repressed homosexuality? Mendacity? A spurned wife? Familial greed? The last gasp of Mississippi Delta Planter Culture? All of the above, take your pick?

The latest revival, alas, has no new answers, though I do like that it uses the full play as written by Williams.  It's long (about three hours) in three acts. But as usual, Act One doesn't speak coherently to Act Two, and Act Three thunders out in a King Lear tempest.

I know previews are supposed to be a time when kinks in a production are worked out, but hey, the tickets for the good seats run into the $200 range (plus fees when you book online). That's a lot for a preview! We'll see what the play looks like when it opens in a month (though I don't have much faith in today's Broadway critics), but my hunch is that this production is pretty well set in its current form right now.

Here's a preview review, in triplets:

Scarlett Johansson good. Big Daddy too. Brick's a cipher. Gooper simply baffling. Direction is chaotic. No-neck monsters: Way too cute. Skipper's ghost creepy. Actors seem lost. Play needs work. Probably not fixable.

Sad to say!

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The Vile Tells the Despicable: You're Crazy

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The merely vile Rupert Murdoch, who seems to have actually come down on the right side of the out-of-control-guns issue, appears to have given marching orders to the New York Post newspaper whose extreme right-wing views he shapes: The despicable NRA boss Wayne LaPierre is a "gun nut" whose so-called "press conference" the other day was nothing more than a "bizarre rant."

This follows a Twitter note from Murdoch in which he asked, "Will politicians find the courage to ban automatic weapons?" Fox News, it does not need to be said, has also been put on notice, though Murdoch writing about "courage" is to me akin to Hitler writing about courtesy.

Anyway, LaPierre, the Vietnam draft dodger who has unaccountably been permitted to shape himself as a kind of warrior in the 40-plus yeas he has been with the NRA, has gotten a sucker punch from his presumable pals on the ideological fringe where the heavily subsidized New York Post and its in-house co-conspirators Fox News and the (also subsidized these days) Wall Street Journal editorial page usually set a media agenda for right-wing reactionary ranks.

That can't be good for Wayne. Meanwhile, the tabloid New York Daily News, still techically a newspaper, calls LaPierre the "craziest man on earth."

Now I want to see some reflection, in the general round-heeled media, on why 150 reporters showed up, dutifully as summoned, to LaPuerre's "press conference" the other day, an event marked by the rule that reporters couldn't ask questions of the NRA boss.

That's not a press conference, folks, that's a speech.

Here's a link to a story about the New York Post.

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Travel Mess. Hey, It's Late December!

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Map, via Flightview.com (as of 6.26 p.m. EST), shows lots of yellow lights at major airports. That's not good! Red dots are worse. Look for more red dots as this winter storm spreads northeast.

The TV weatherpeople all have their hair on fire, but hey, it's late December! It's winter and it snows. News reports breathlessly talk about the "killer storm," and keep track of the "death toll" (12) -- but you know what? People die during bad weather all the time. (They even die during good weather). Ask any hospital emergency room doctor or EMS technician. So the "death toll" in any routine storm is usually meaningless, except as a way to dramatize bad weather and give it some kind of a narrative.

It's just crappy weather. 

But one factor that's actually new: Airlines have shrunk domestic capacity to the point where there is absolutely no slack in the system. A cancelled flight often means a day's delay for a connection, in that case.

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Wing and a Prayer in Iran

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Here's one of the things you get when you mix civil society with obsessive and fanatical religiosity:

From today's Times: "Under a directive announced Wednesday by Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, all aircraft will be prohibited from flying across the country during the Adhan, or call to prayer, when many devout Muslims pause to face toward Mecca and pray."

That's a five-times-a-day ritual. Link.

"Buh-bye!"

Also, "serious attention" will be given by the religious police in enforcing more strict Islamic dress codes for women at airports.

"Allahu akbar!"

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New York At Christmastime

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Carnegie Hall, where people know how to dress for the theater

Some people say that New York City is rude, and in fact it's a standing joke in some parts of the country and world:  "So I'm in New York and I ask a local, 'Excuse me, what time is it -- or should I just go f--- myself?'"

I  never understood that, not at all. It's not at all the New York I've ever known, and I've known New York since I was a child.

I worked in New York for a long time, lived in the city, lived in the immediate area for over a quarter century, and as far as I am concerned, New York stands out among the world's great cities for courtesy and good civic will. London? Now, you want a rude city, just consider London. Los Angeles: Rude! Chicago? Rude, and with lousy pizza to boot!

You want a friendly American city, you get that in New York. Only San Francisco, in my estimation, comes even close.

Anyway, my wife and I are fortunate enough to be able to live in the Sonoran desert and still manage to visit New York for a week or so, a couple of times a year, to get what we refer to as our New York fix. This past week was one of those occasions.

Manhattan at Christmastime is an especially congenial place. We met our daughter and young granddaughter, who live in Albany, at the tree outside Rockefeller Center last Friday, a scene thronged with tourists and even locals, any one of whom is delighted to accept your camera and snap a family photo for you. And no, having your camera stolen is not an issue as it would be in, say, one of the world's truly awful cities, like Sao Paulo or Rio or Kiev.

Our daughter and granddaughter went to the Radio City Christmas show, the child's first. Yes, the tickets are expensive, but at least a mother and her daughter get a grand show, high holiday splendor, production values at a level not seen on a stage literally anywhere else, except at grand opera uptown at the Met. On the subject of taking a kid to a holiday show, I sometimes think of Woody Allen's line in "Hannah and Her Sisters," in which he was asked to contemplate reincarnation and Nietzche's theory of eternal recurrence: "Great, that means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again."

Nobody would say that about the Radio City and the Rockettes.

My wife and also went twice to the theater during six days here. Once was to Broadway, to see "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof," starring Scarlett Johansson in a revival to which I won't hesitate to attach the word "unfortunate," even though we saw it on the second night of previews. (It opens in January, if it makes it that long).

I was thinking of the Broadway experience yesterday at Carnegie Hall, where we went for a splendid performance of "Messiah." Let me digress and say that several factors keep me from enthusiastically attending a Broadway show these days, among them a concern that any show, especially a straight play, that has a famous star in it, tends to attract an element in the audience that is, let us say, unfamiliar with the protocols of live theater. That is, when Al Pacino makes his entry in the (also unfortunate) revival of David Mamet's tiresome and overrated play "Glengarry Glen Ross," a disconcerting number of theatergoers behave in the way that tourists would behave if a movie star wandered into the little star-print plaza outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. They act like idiots! More generally, audiences these also tend to approach any straight theatrical drama as if it were a television situation comedy. That is, there are all of these automatic titters and chortles at lines and situations that a playwright never imagined would be considered amusing. (That was true at "Cat," incidentally. Not sure that Tennessee Williams thought he was writing a comedy. 

And so many people attending Broadway performances these days dress like they were going to the ballpark, and a ballpark for a losing team at that.  I swear, a big fat guy in row near us, in the expensive seats at the too-big-for-a-drama Richard Rogers Theater during "Cat,"  looked like he was dressed for an off day at the mall, complete with sweatshirt and that tall cup of soda that big fat people always seem to keep jammed in their mitts, as if hydration were a matter of life and death on a December evening in New York.

Anyway, it was with unmitigated delight that I saw how the big crowd was dressed at Carnegie Hall for the "Messiah" we saw on Sunday afternoon. They were dressed nicely, like it was Christmastime and they were in a nice place, with quality entertainment performed at an extremely high level of skill.

Call me a fussy old fart, but frankly, I ain't that old and I ain't that fussy, not really. But I do like to see minimal standards maintained, as they evidently are at Carnegie Hall. People dress like they're going somewhere nice!

Last year, to digress again, I remember reading one of those long-paid obits that  often are the only thing actually worth reading  in our local newspaper in Arizona, which I refer to only as "The Daily Stupid." It was written by a family member about a career Army colonel, a World War II veteran, who had just died. It went on and on, at wonderful detail, about this man's interesting life, but it was the final line of the obituary that delighted me. It said: "He was always on time, and he knew how to dress for dinner."

Anyway, Carnegie Hall, with the Masterwork Chorus and Orchestra "Messiah" performance, was the perfect cap on our latest New York visit.

And yes, the audience knew that it is traditional to stand for the rousing Hallelujah Chorus -- and then sit down quietly again, because, of course, it ain't over yet.

A perfect way, I thought, to say Merry Christmas, from New York.

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Crazy in America

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[UPDATED] 
Christmas Day brings more detailed news of still another horrific shooting massacre, this one caused by a lunatic in upstate New York who set a house fire on Monday in order to ambush responding firefighters. The gun he used for the killings was the same model of semi-automatic-like assault rifle, a Bushmaster .223 (a civilian version of the military M16), as the weapon  used by another lunatic to kill those little children and those teachers in Connecticut less than two weeks ago.

The New York Times story on the latest shooting (link) is far better than the Rochester paper's (and the Buffalo News only runs wire, sadly, and, pathetically, so on Wednesday does the hometown Rochester Deomocrat & Chronicle, a Gannett paper, natch).  The killer shot and murdered two firefighters, and injured two others as they responded to the fire. Today, authorities found the body of another victim, believed to be the killer's 67-year-old sister, in the rubble of the burned house in Webster, N.Y. 

The killer, this Spengler, had a long rap sheet. In 1981, the Times story says, "he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for bludgeoning his 92-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer. He was imprisoned until 1998."

(Wait a minute, you and I are asking: He hammered his granny to death and got off with manslaughter and a sentence of less than 20 years? Explanation, please!)

But I was taken with a statement from the understandably deeply grieving fire chief, Gerald L. Pickering (emphasis mine): “We know that people are slipping through the cracks, not getting the help they need. And I suspect that this gentleman slipped through the cracks. Maybe he should have been under more intense supervision, maybe he should not have been in the public, maybe he should have been institutionalized, having his problems dealt with.”

I take no issue with a deeply distraught fire chief, but I do with the tenor of the times and with journalism, this reflexive assumption that somebody like this murdering psychotic needs "help." Let's examine that for a minute. A fellow who bludgeoned his grandmother to death, who is known locally as a dangerous lunatic, who proclaims that he wants to kill as many people as he can, who sets a fire in order to ambush firefighters, four of whom he shoots and two of whom he killed (plus the victinm found today in the rubble, so far publicly unidentified) -- this man does not need our "help." Rather, it's we who need help. Society needs help in the form of protection from a murdering maniac like this.

Chief Pickering is exactly correct when he says that "maybe he should have been institutionalized." That is, locked up -- not for his own good, to hell with him, but for the good of society.

To the extent that the mental health industry actually cares about treating the severely mentally ill (and the evidence is, the industry cares not very much at all for that mostly futile, largely unrewarding chore), the touchiest clinical subject at hand is the idea of institutionalizing the severely mentally ill who pose real and present danger to society. There is, for one thing, no money to be made in that. And, of course, there is the horrific history of the grim state-run mental hospitals (most of which were basically patronage mills for the benefit of state politicians).

On the other hand, until the insane asylums were emptied out in the 1960s and 1970s, there was, in fact, a place for society to keep people like Spengler (and the maniac who shot those children, and the other maniac who shot my congresswoman Gabby Giffords and all those others in Tucson, ad infinitum) away from the rest of us.

The subject of some form of reinstitutionalization is enormously complex and fraught with social danger, especially in a health-care system in which mental health services are a profit center, as they have been since the 1980s. Who decides? But I would submit that in a case like Spengler, institutionalizing him was not even a close call. And  Lanza in Connecticut, or Loughner in Tucson, among others in our pantheon of mass murderers probably would have had no problem making the cut, either, in an intelligently and honestly run mental health system.

In a note left at the crime scene before he shot himself, this Spengler clearly self-diagnoses: homicidal maniac. "I still have to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down and so what I like doing best: Killing people," the note reads in part.

Incidentally, the promise inherent in deinstitutionalization was that after we closed the horrible industrialized public insane asylums, we would establish in their place effective, adequately funded community mental health centers, emphasis on "community," where a range of critical-care services would be available, and where clinical psychiatrists and other trained professionals would be able to closely monitor cases from a local perspective. In other words, a Spengler or a Lanza or a Loughner would be on the radar, at least.

[UPDATE: Wednesday's Times has an op-ed piece by a psychiatrist named Paul Steinberg who assumes the sanctioned industry position on whatever the hell schizophrenia actually is -- which officially sanctioned position is, that it is a diagnosable physical disease (hence treatable with reimbursement under insurance policies, at least for those who have enough insurance).  Steinberg mentions another homicidal mass murderer, the one who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 (emphasis mine): "At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well." The assumption being that this particular homicidal maniac might have gotten  well through intervention and therapy, rather than that society could have been protected through custody.]
 
After deinstutionalization and the concept of genuine community mental health clinical care went terribly wrong, nearly all mental health money flowed toward luring the worried well into treatment. As the psychiatry establishment, long a kind of orphan child in medicine, sold its soul to profiteers, it gained unaccustomed hospital-industry respect as financial rainmakers, if not as physicians. The promise of deinstitutionalization and community mental health. focused on the truly mentally ill, was cynically dashed. The desperate homeless roaming city streets were only the most visible, and in many ways benign, consequence. The Spenglers and Lanzas and Loughners and were the real payoff. (Abetted, of course, by the gun lobby that ensured that homicidal maniacs could be armed to the teeth with the latest in murderous assault weaponry).


The subject of critical mental-health care is on the table again, and I'm currently working on a revision and update of my 1994 book "Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy" (St. Martin's Press), under a new title, "Crazy in America," and a new publisher.

The book is focused on the greatest health-care financial fraud of them all, the pillaging of the mental-health-care system by rapacious for-profit psychiatric hospitals and affiliated therapists, including alcohol and addiction charlatans, in the 1990s. But the book also provided a primer on the sordid history of mental-health care in this country, where the money all started flowing toward the "worried well" who had insurance to bilk, and away from the truly crazy, who tend not to have much insurance coverage to bilk, tend to resist treatment, and in many cases are impossible to cure anyway.

"Bedlam" will be reissued, in a revised edition, as "Crazy in America," in the spring.

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