A friendly warning July 3, 2012

 

 

I met Tom today during my stroll through Liberty State Park.

He’s an operative for the county (some say) political machine, and when he saw me, he pulled me aside, telling me we had to talk.

He said he’d heard rumors about the company I worked for and wanted to know if they were true.

We get this a lot, partly because we are the only regular media in a lot of small towns, especially up county which largely falls in a waste land between the local daily and the big cheese daily in Bergen County.

Tom said rumors claimed we’ve been taken over by a political cabala from one of the northern County towns.

I told him the male owner of our newspaper was too inept to get taken over by a political organization.

“My boss has the political instincts of a pet rock,” I told Tom.

While our company frequently took sides in elections, it almost always depended on which side had the bigger bank roll. For the most part, the male owner almost always picked the losing side.

He was the kind of man who tended to trust the worst kind of scallywag, the unreliable, untrustworthy sort who hooked his nose and led him down a garden path away from any kind of political credibility. Yet somehow, our owner still believed he had his fingers on the political pulse.

If there is a self-promoting, totally corrupt political operative chances are our owner considered him close friend, whose word he took on faith for everything.

But as for a political cabala from a small town, even our owner might not fall for anything like that.

“Anyone with a big enough check book can have anything they want from our company,” I told Tom.

But Tom was serious. Unlike the owner of my company, his political instincts were finely tuned, and when he said he believes something true, it generally was.

The cabala, he meant, came from one of the upper county towns that had recently elected a maverick mayor in one of the biggest political upsets in recent history.

This dirty dozen had come from far and wide to latch onto a virgin mayor they saw the goose who could lay them some golden eggs. Tom had mobster names for them such as “Joey D.” They had very little in common with each other except for their greed and they belief they could bleed the administration for contracts over the next four years – only realizing too late what a boob the mayor was.

Although a political maverick, the good mayor had almost nothing to do with his own victory. He was the end result of a much larger county-wide political war that pitted the county machine against the might of four very powerful political figures: U.S. Senator, a state senator, a congressman (a former popular mayor in that same town) and a neighboring mayor along the waterfront.

Within months of being sworn in, the maverick mayor had managed to offend all of these allies and to get himself arrested on campaign charges to boot, leaving those power brokers quietly looking to somehow replace him. But this only entrenched the cabala of snakes, who hoped to hold on long enough to squeeze out of him and the town enough to justify their having come there in the first place.

I told Tom such plots were beyond my pay grade, but added my doubts about the validity of such an attempt to take over our company since – as big a buffoon as our owner was, he would not see any profit in, since most of the cash still resided in the county political organization to which he had sold his sold long ago.

“I’m not talking about your owner, at least not yet” Tom said. “I’m talking about the girl you’ve got working up there. She’s romantically involved with one of that crew.”

This talk made my extremely uncomfortable and I told Tom I didn’t know anything about that either.

Always a political opportunist, Tom said he intended to broker his information with the Maverick mayor’s former political allies.

“I’m sure they’ll find the information valuable,” Tom said. “I just wanted to warn you, so you don’t get caught in the cross fire.”

I thanked him. But secretly I suspected I already was.


  2012 menu


email to Al Sullivan

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taking control Aug. 2, 2012

Image
The poem she posted today echoes in tone if not in content that of her quicksand poem. While as short at the previous poem, this poem about compassion is much more structured, using parallel phrasing to give it power and impact. Yet despite its brevity, it is incredibly complex, and creates a number of possible alternative interpretations, depending partly on for whom the poem is written. My ego (my narcissistic self as she referred to me in an earlier poem) would like to think the poem is directed at me, and so like the poem about quicksand, offers a certain measure of condolence or compassion for a clearly defeated man. But the poem may well also be directed at herself, about the idea of compassion or perhaps pain. While the overtly it claims to be about compassion, in fact, the poem goes beyond both pain and compassion and may well allude of a philosophy of survival. As with the quick sand poem, this poem seems to be offering advice, although less fatalistic. The most
Read more

Reflections of Coelho March 2, 2013

Image
    At some point in all of this mixed up, jumbled up world of hers, she posted a saying by Paulo Coelho, which said, “If you’re brave to say ‘Good Bye’ life will reward you with a new ‘Hello’.” Coelho de, born in August, 1947is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. Coelho wrote the best-selling novel, 'The Alchemist,' which sold 35 million copies and is the most translated book in the world by a living author. He has been frequently described as an author that “thrives on contradictions and extremes,” which may well be why she is attracted to him, and why she recently got into the role of Mata Hari in her real life, perhaps influenced by Coelho’s fictional take on the well-known temptress and spy. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Coelho attended Jesuit schools and was raised by devout Catholic parents. He was obsessed at an early age with the idea of becoming a writer, something his parents frowned on, and his i
Read more

Forgiveness is not possible July 13, 2012

Image
   By far this is the most painful of all the poems she has directed at me to date, partly because it is dismissive, and in some ways inaccurate, and uses some of my own statements taken out of context against me. I need to resist trying to defend myself here and attempt to focus completely on the statements she is attempting to make, dealing later in other pages of this journal in an attempt to set the record straight. Right from the opening lines, she dismisses the need for forgiveness, largely because she said it would imply the possibility of a “next step” or somehow getting back to a previous stage before all the hostility transpired, when it is clear that is not possible. While the poem does not explicitly say so, there is no going back, too many bad feelings, too many unforgivable things said. She describes the “ugly mornings” and the “sweat-streaked days of locking and unlocking” her door. The implication here is fear of violence, something she alluded to in an earl
Read more