“Honest to Goodness! The Bars Weren’t Open This Morning.”
I voted for myself for U.S. Congress today. I walked into the polling place intending to vote for Michael McMahon, our first term Democratic Congressman. Bay Ridge, y’see, is lumped in with Staten Island for representation. This is the first election that I’ve ever been in a swing district. Boy, the number of phone calls and mailers a voter receives sure can get annoying if the election matters. I now sympathize with the citizens of New Hampshire, slightly.
Now, obviously, there’s a lot at stake if the Republicans retake the House. So, every time I received a campaign call or a survey I’d commit to voting for McMahon – but I’d be sure to tell that campaign worker that I’m pissed that he voted against the Employee Free Choice Act. I figured I would have my cake and eat it too: register my protest but hold my nose and vote for the disappointing Democrat.
But here’s the rub: voting against EFCA cost Rep. McMahon the Working Families ballot line. Y’see, in New York, we have fusion balloting. A candidate can appear on more than one ballot line, but all votes count cumulatively so that a candidate can cobble together coalition support. Most third party ballot lines in New York exist to put pressure on either the Democrats or the Republicans by adding to – or subtracting from – a candidate’s total vote. The Conservative party, for instance, usually endorses the Republican candidate unless that candidate is too namby pamby for this proto-Tea Party group. If the Republican candidate doesn’t headstomp single mothers with enough gusto, the Conservative party may choose to run its own candidate and cost the GOP nominee enough votes to throw the race to the Democrats and teach the Republicans to run a more conservative candidate next time.
Working Families employs a similar tactic, except they almost never run their own candidate. Instead, if the Democratic nominee offends, the WFP merely removes its endorsement. The candidate runs on the Democratic line only, receives fewer votes and is thusly admonished for next time. Ah, but for whom should Working Families voters cast their ballots if there is no nominee? I am genuinely unsure of the answer to that question. I’m sure that most WFP leaders and staffers would prefer that the Democrats not lose a seat that cost cost the national party control of the staff. And yet they’ve essentially told their supports, “Don’t vote for this bum.” Further, I am sure that I’m not the only WFP voter who has never pulled the lever for a Democrat in his entire life (*yes, I know we don’t have levers anymore – more below on that). It is only the thin cover of WFP endorsement that has enabled me to vote for erstwhile Dems on the WFP line. But no name appeared on the WFP line today. Just Democrat McMahon and his Republican challenger. So, I did the only logical thing and wrote in my own name. I hope this isn’t a close race, because it seems like these new voting machines in NY actually count write-ins, and I’d hate to be the margin of difference. Again.
(In case you’re wondering, I voted for WFP in all the other races except for Governor, where I voted for Hawkins and Mattera on the Green line. Cuomo does not need my vote to claim a mandate when he starts beating up on the teachers union tomorrow. I also gave good old Norman Thomas a write-in vote for the fourth judge seat that WFP did not make an endorsement for.)
So, yes, we finally have new voting machines in New York. The pull lever machines that sent JFK to the White House have finally been retired. Our new ballot is kind of a Scantron fill-in-the-bubble sheet that one hand-feeds into a scanner that is no more sophisticated than that all-in-one scanner/printer/fax machine you set up for your parents. It sucks the ballot up, the screen chirps “Thanks for voting!” and you hope your vote is counted. A friend of mine was not reassured by the on-screen confirmation, and longs for the old lever machines.
But the old lever machines used to eat huge numbers of ballots. There were races where as many as ten per cent of the ballots cast were “spoiled” and not counted. Pulling that giant switch when you were done would sometimes cause the machine to crumple and rip the ballot(s) inside. I remember that in 2000, the Socialist Party’s presidential ticket received only two write-in votes in the entire city of New York. Both the candidate and his campaign manager lived in New York, so you gotta imagine that a few votes got lost along the way. My election district did report a vote for McReynolds, so I think my vote was counted. But my poor intern on the campaign, Maddie VanHaaften-Schick, was assigned a defective voting machine at her precinct. The write-in button wouldn’t click and reveal the tiny slip of white paper on which to write in a name. She waited. She fought with the machine. She caused a long line-up behind her of voters waiting to do their civic duty. Finally, the manager of the polling location came over to see what the problem was. Maddie explained that she had ben working on this campaign for five months and wanted to cast her write-in vote for David McReynolds. This useless bureaucrat told her, “Oh, honey, we don’t count those votes!” Not content with merely saying this outrageous thing, he commenced to prove it by spinning the machine around and opening it up to show the weird jumble of paper rolls that were in the guts of the machine. “We don’t even look at these,” he said of the write-in roll – a continuous spool of blank paper with occasional scribbles that corresponded to no set ballot position. Thus defeated, Maddie voted for Nader, who was on the ballot.
In the first couple of days after the election, you could understand how I was left cold by complaints that some ballots might have gone uncounted in Palm Beach because voters couldn’t punch the right hole. Votes go uncounted all the time. The only way you can be sure your vote counted, it would appear is to write in your own name.
My Greatest Hits
Maybe it’s because I was recently badly quoted in the press that I’m revisiting some of my dark sarcastic hits from the past. I mean, I could claim that I was misquoted, but, no, I said it. I could quibble with context and editing, but anyone who deals with the press seriously knows the importance of staying on message. I could complain that I’m out of practice – and I may be – and that’s why I was too flip. But, flip used to be the point, back in my bad old Socialist Party days. Throwing out a little red meat is important if you’re the Socialist Party and nobody will pay attention to you otherwise. Things are different now. But I am, perhaps, too clever – and certainly too sarcastic – for my own good.
Case in point, about which I am currently cackling to myself: my too-brief stint as Editor-in-Chief of “The Socialist” magazine. I’ve written in the past about how I sparked a controversy in our tiny world with the cover of my second issue. But I was, nevertheless, given a third issue with which to prove myself and permanently secure the job. But I couldn’t help being slightly flip with the cover again:
This was – I thought – a reverent, teasing reference to Cesar Chavez, the great leader of the United Farm Workers whose spirit is reflected in the current student activist support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers boycotts of tomatoes.
Well, someone took offense. And someone else dogpiled on me. And I went to a dark place and quit. Here’s my final version of that last cover:
Pity it never got published.
A Requiem for Departed Comrades
Socialism truly is a dying religion. Tonight, I’m lighting some red candles for some wonderful comrades who have passed on this year. Yesterday, I learned that Ruth Greenberg-Edelstein passed away on November 24th. Ruth was a stalwart of the Socialist Party in upstate New York. On the National Committee, she was an effective advocate for feminist process and gender balance. A retired faculty member at both SUNY and Rutgers, she had, more or less, left active service on the National Committee by the time I got on there – although she had clearly left her stamp. I remember her as a friendly and vivacious backbencher who genuinely enjoyed the company of her comrades – especially the younger ones. Herself, she seemed much younger than she must have actually been, which is why her death comes as such a shock.
Her death follows so closely that of her husband J. David Edelstein, who passed away this July. His death was – forgive me – slightly less of a shock. Retired from Syracuse University for goodness knows how long, he was 90 years old and physically frail. Mentally – and ideologically – he was sharp as ever, and firm and determined in his convictions. Maddeningly so, from my perspective as a teenage socialist. How could such a good Marxist reject our Socialist Party Presidential campaigns in favor of the Greens? In retrospect, I came to see the logic of his argument, but at the time I got hot and bothered in our debates, and out of line, while he remained calm and civil. Fortunately, I was able to apologize while it still mattered. He remained a calm presence and a beacon of sorts. Looking through my inbox, I found a four-year-old email from Dave, gently admonishing me for an irreverent (and highly controversial!) cover from my two-issue stint as editor of “The Socialist” magazine while firmly standing in favor of my continued tenure as editor.
Finally, the most upsetting passing of the year was of Robert W. Tucker. Rob was my favorite old man in the party. A Quaker pacifist and expert on socialized medicine, he had become a lovable curmudgeon by the time I joined the party. For example, Rob had used his (slight) loss in hearing to make a mockery out of Robert’s Rules. I remember a young comrade from Boston rising to make a speech during a convention, and Rob (LOUDLY) whispering to his brother beside him “HE’S THE BEST ONE WE HAVE IN THAT STATE – GOD HELP US!!!” Kinda took the wind out of the sails of the young man’s speech.
In the true spirit of socialism, Rob would share his talent for LOUDLY whispering by acting as an amplifier for your private asides, as when the same young comrade from Boston took a shot at our YPSL National Secretary who was running for Vice Chair of the Party by questioning if the duties of both offices weren’t too overwhelming. “Well, I did them both at the same time,” I whispered to Rob. “YEAH, SHAUN DID THEM BOTH,” Rob shouted to the convention hall. No one ruled him out of order.
It was a bit of a kick in the guts to see see Rob quoted in Maurice Isserman’s biography of Michael Harrington, which I’ve been working my way through since before I learned of Rob’s passing. In it, Rob tells of Harrington’s tendency to date skinny minnie model-types who would sit – wearing their brand new leopard-skin pillbox hats – in the back of whatever hall Mike had dragged them to while he carried on with speeches and parliamentary maneuvers. Isserman does not publish the ribald conclusion of this anecdote that Rob loved to share, which involves (an unofficial) debate about the protein content of semen and Harrington admonishing all participants, “Oh, no, don’t tell her that!”
Nor does Isserman (or anyone as far as I can tell), share accounts of the younger Shachtmanites’ propensity for group-sex at conventions, in which, Rob, as a Quaker, was too prudish to participate but not too prudish to inquire what it was like. “It’s a wonderful feeling of comradeship,” he was told.
Rob was full of stories like these, and I loved hearing them. I don’t think I had seen Rob since the 2005 convention in Newark. By 2007, I had quit the party. Looking through my records, my last contact with Rob was at the time of my resignation from the party’s National Committee to which he responded with a fairly stern disapproval. Four days after I resigned from the party Rob noted his 50th year as a member, asking – a broad list; I was merely the audience – if he would finally be shown the secret handshake.
A few weeks ago, after being assigned to Philadelphia (Rob’s hometown) by my union in August, I wrote to Rob’s AOL email account to see if he was up to meeting for dinner. His wife – well, widow, now – Cornelia wrote back to inform me that Rob passed away in February after a long illness beginning the previous November. I cannot begin to tell you how shitty I feel that it took me so long to learn of Rob’s passing. I’m mad at a lot of people about not being informed at the time of his passing, but none more than myself.
Robert W. Tucker deserves a fuller obituary than this, and hopefully one day I’ll feel up to writing it. But for now, i just feel awful. But grateful to have written this much and to have known him while I could.
Alas Poor Busky. I Knew Him, Facebook.
It’s been previously noted the unnatural oddness that is leaving behind a virtual representation of oneself on the myface. As this shit gets more mainstream, the awkwardness gets more familiar and yet more surreal. In the Times, Adam Cohen writes of a friend’s Facebook profile becoming a sort of living shrine to a dead-too-soon friend. At least it served that function to those who friended him up while he was still alive, and until his surviving family chooses to pull the plug on the profile. But what of those who die unloved, unmourned, unfriended?
I recently threw in the towel and joined Facebook, the creepy, creepy improvement on Friendster and MySpace. Immediately, the computer intelligence starts recommending friends I should connect with. How does this bloody thing know the names of girls that I went on one or two dates with three or four years ago? And why does this blasted thing want me to be friends with Don Busky? Busky died late last year, and in life we were something closer to enemies than friends.
He was always an odd fellow, more noted for his reclusiveness than his actual politics or personality. As an ambitious young turk, I quickly butted heads with the guy in an attempt to recruit eager new recruits to charter a more active Philadelphia local of the Socialist Party and overthrow an innocent savant who was more interested in publishing silly little zines with a socialist bent. Shortly after I showed up for work in the party’s national office, as a teenage socialist in 1996, my buddy Clement Joseph started cracking jokes about the disembodied brain in a jar that was Donald F. Busky. My only interactions with the comrade were a fairly acrimonious e-mail exchange over his failure to properly represent the party (or, indeed, turn up to a single meeting) in the “Unity 2000” rally planning. His last message to me (and every party member for whom he could find an email address) was addressed, simply, “Cde. Richman owes some apologies.” I met him a few months later at a YPSL convention near Rittenhouse Square in 2001. We spoke not a word, but it was the first time I had been in his physical presence. The brain in a jar was a large man, shy and soft-spoken. He was a devoted Mac user, a labor buff and adjunct professor. We might have been friends if we hadn’t started as enemies. It was a sad loss, but C’est la vie. I soon left the party, and didn’t hear about Busky again until Gabe Ross passed on the unfortunate news about his death last December.
The next time I saw Cde. Busky’s name was on an open public records access request for the list of adjunct faculty at a community college down in southern New Jersey, where I’m helping the part-timers form a union. Prof. Donald F. Busky gets to be a voter in their union election, except that he couldn’t possibly vote “Union Yes” (as he surely would have) because he is No Longer Employed. Still, it was a kick in the guts to see his name on that OPRA list, just as it is a kick in the guts to see him recommended as a friend on Facebook whenever I log in, and to see his name and home address on a mailing label for a mailing we worked on last Friday for the union campaign.
I don’t think his elderly mother (if she’s still alive), or any other surviving relative knows enough to get Cde. Busky’s Facebook profile retired. Therefore, he will continue to haunt me. Perhaps I’ll learn to be a better comrade to those who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil.