On very rare occasions an incident will happen that demands to be written about. In this case, I am led to believe that if this essay is not written promptly, an indescribable act will be committed on my front porch.
The incident in question took place on Friday morning before the start of the Labor Day weekend this year. It involves the grand and glorious city of Newark, New Jersey. According to census figures, the population of Newark is now listed at 279,000. Curiously, when I moved here in 1955, there were 400,000 people who claimed to reside in Newark. My observation has been that the crowds in Newark are as large as they used to be and there seem to be fewer parking places than ever. There is a new arena in Newark where the hockey club, the New Jersey Devils, plays. Taking one thing with another, it seems to me that Newark is still a surviving city, even in these hard times. If the population figures that I have quoted are true, they suggest that over the years Newark has lost at least 120,000 residents. Simply put, I don’t believe that such a loss is possible. I am suggesting that perhaps the missing residents have avoided the census taker and perhaps are working off the books, assuming that they have jobs at all.
Over the years, Newark has had a succession of very dubious mayors. The last one before the current one was a fellow named Sharpe James who has just now completed a federal prison sentence. He took foreclosed properties and arranged with his girlfriend to give her the properties at bargain basement rates, which she then resold to more affluent people who wanted to own a piece of Newark property. Sharpe James was also an influential state senator. The question is whether he is collecting a pension from the state as well as from the city of Newark for his services. In all likelihood, my guess is that, given the situation in New Jersey, he may well have both pensions. There has to be something questionable during Sharpe James’s time in office, because he owned a fancy European car as well as a yacht. Ne’er do wells have suggested that Mr. James’s yacht should race against Tony Hayward’s yacht of BP fame, for a grand prize of ten million dollars. But I guess at this point, that Sharpe James is trying to put his life back together, so the yacht-racing will have to wait for another day.
A few years back a fellow named Cory Booker came upon the scene. He lamented the fact that Newark had sunk so low and he decided to do something about that sorrowful state of affairs. He quit his job on Wall Street and came back and became a politician in Newark. For the record, I should state that I am favorably disposed toward Cory Booker because I believe that he is not only honest, but is doing the best he can to make Newark a livable community.
Mr. Booker appears to be a single man who, upon becoming the mayor, decided that he needed a place to live. He bought a home in Newark in a respectable neighborhood, certainly not an extravagant one. The home in Newark is not a McMansion, but it does have a small front porch.
Mr. Booker goes there to greet his visitors and this is the place where his morning newspapers are usually placed.
America has fallen upon hard times in recent years, which has resulted in the fact that the federal government has no means to bail out the state governments and finally the state governments have no means of assisting the cities in the states. This is not to say that the situation afflicting Newark is unique. I suggest that it is the norm for most of America’s cities.
When Mayor Booker took a look at Newark’s finances, he had no choice but to restrict expenditures, including those for workers who were on the city’s payroll. The cops, the firemen, the teachers, and the sanitation workers are feeling the sting of the budget and they have been and are now facing layoffs and firings. I am certain that Mayor Booker understands their anguish, but the state of the financial record leaves him no choice but to proceed with his downsizing of the payroll. He hopes that later on they may be recalled. But at this point, layoffs are the order of the day in the grand and glorious city of Newark.
Apparently Mayor Booker is an early riser so that he can get to the mayor’s office to begin his valiant effort to try to save Newark. In the darkness of the early morning of September 11th, Mr. Booker came to his front door to recover The New York Times and The Star-Ledger of New Jersey which are usually placed there by a newspaper carrier. At this stage, it is still warm in New Jersey so outside the front door is a screen door. When Mayor Booker tried to open the screen door, in the darkness he hit upon an impediment that prevented him from opening the screen door.
When the lights were turned on, it developed that the impediment was a deposit of human excrement on his front porch. An examination by the police department, or what is left of it, did not turn up evidence of a struggle of any kind. So it is assumed that without a struggle the person who wished to protest events in Newark must have made a direct deposit of human excrement without assistance. I assume that the cop that might be guarding the Booker residence was absent because he had been laid off. Similarly, when the Mayor called the Department of Public Works to cleanse his front porch, there was a long delay because those workers had also been laid off.
By my own calculations, I have had a career of something on the order of 47 years. During that time, I ran across at least two or three AT&T vice presidents who angered me, and therefore for whom I had no great respect. Unfortunately, this was before the incident in Newark happened before Labor Day. If I had known about this form of protest, I may well have been tempted to use it as a means of registering my strong disapproval of their conduct. Ah, but the fact is that I did not know about this form of protest. When I first came to New York in 1955, the Vice President of Personnel was an obese man who disliked Catholics and who was prejudiced against me because I had come from a labor union. If that fat fellow would have found a similar deposit on his porch, it would have been nothing more than simple justice and a joy to my heart. One thing to be said about this essayist is that his memory is long, he remembers prejudices and he is rarely in a forgiving mood.
Well, that is the story about Cory Booker and the Labor Day incident. I have been led to believe that, unless I write this essay promptly and with great care, I may find a similar direct deposit on my front porch as I search for the newspapers. All I can say is that I hope the god of essay writers is pleased with my account of Mayor Booker’s Labor Day problems. And Mayor Booker has my utmost sympathy.
E. E. CARR
September 10, 2010
Essay 511
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Kevin’s commentary — Today’s commentary will be outsourced to my older brother, who is often wittier than I.
Here, first, is an email to Connor from Pop:
On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Judith Chicka wrote:
Professor Shepherd,
I am aware that you had distinguished careers in both the English and the Japanese languages. Therefore I wish to submit a question to you.
Over the Labor Day weekend, the Mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, had an unfortunate incident which I have memorialized in an essay that is not back from the Jewish transcriber but has been promised for Sunday, on the gentile Sabbath.
The Mayor of Newark tried to open his screen door on the front porch and found that it was impeded by a pile of human excrement. Or a big shit, to translate it to the vernacular. Newark is having the problem of balancing its budget and several layoffs were the result in the employment situation for the City of Newark employees.
An investigation cannot find any reason that the excrement occurred elsewhere and so I am forced to conclude that it was a matter of a direct deposit by one of the laid-off workers. What I would like from your fertile brain would be the past tense of shit. If we use “to sit” as an example, we find that the conjugation goes along these lines: He sits, and the past tense would be, he sat. Do you think that it would be appropriate, when I correct the essay, to contend that someone shat on the Mayors front porch? I think this is an elegant use of the English language, but before the essay is distributed, I would like your views on this monumental question for superb usage of the English language.
Do you have a thought on the use of “shat” for the past tense of “shit”? And could you translate this into the language of the Japanese?
Pop
Connor’s reply, which almost deserves a blog post of its own:
Hi Pop,
I feel qualified to address this question. Thank you for directing it to me.
First of all, a brief survey of current colloquial usage: members of my demographic cohort tend to use “shat” almost exclusively, favoring it over the inelegant and plosive “shitted.” The only other candidate would be to use “shit” as its own past tense, ala “quit,” but this is not popular, I think, because generally when one speaks of an event involving shitting, one prefers to encode as much information as possible, including the temporal. An extra question along the lines of “has the shit already been shit, or is this shit yet to be shit” can be the difference between identifying and fending off a would-be shitter and having one’s front porch all covered in shit.
In fact, I would venture to guess that Mayor Booker learned this lesson last weekend.
In order that the conversation be further enriched, I’d like to also point out the critical difference between “shit” and “the shit,” the latter used by young people to denote something of outstanding quality. Inclusion of the definite article delineates between “that album is utter shit” and “that album is, utterly, the shit,” which are diametrically opposing statements regarding the quality of the work.
I would suppose that Mr. Booker considers himself to be in a shit situation, whereas I feel that shitting on the mayor’s porch is basically the shit.
Love,
Connor