NY Times op-ed - November 15, 2004
Feed the Billionaire, Starve the Students
By BOB HERBERT
The juxtaposition of the two articles, one in the news section and the other in sports, was instructive.
We learned from a page-one story in last Thursday's Times that pupils at Public School 63 in the South Bronx have to take their gym classes in the school's lobby. They don't have a gymnasium. Their teacher, Rose Gelrod, has marked a jogging path on the lobby's floor. These makeshift classes, as reporter Susan Saulny informed us, "are regularly interrupted by foot traffic to bathrooms and deliveries to the cafeteria."
Welcome to the wonderful world of neglect, which is the daily life of New York City schoolchildren.
Ah, but on the front page of the Sports section of that same paper comes a different story. It was a profile of the pampered billionaire owner of the New York Jets, Robert Wood Johnson IV, who is known as Woody to his close friends and those many public officials who stumble all over themselves trying to kiss his ring.
The very people who are crying poverty as they deny gyms and playgrounds to the city's schoolchildren - starting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, and the governor, George Pataki - are pulling out every stop in an effort to round up and hand over hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to their friend Woody so he can have the grandest, most luxurious, most expensive sports stadium the country has ever seen.
The stadium would sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the country, prime Manhattan riverfront property, which would also be handed over for Woody's use. Oh, it's good to be a billionaire. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/opinion/15herbert.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=>
Billionaires Run Amok on TV? Satirist Terry Southern's Wacky Idea for Tube a Reality
By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, November 12, 2004
Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big round of applause for the mad genius who prophesied television's latest craze!!! Put your hands together for Mister Terry Southernnnnn!!!!!
Terry? Where are you, Terry Southern? Don't be shy, Terry baby, come on out and take a bow!
Oops. Sorry, folks, but Terry Southern is not here with us today. Terry couldn't make it because he's . . . um . . . deceased.
Southern, the legendary novelist, journalist and screenwriter, died back in 1995, way too soon for him to savor the exquisite pleasure -- or perhaps the hideous pain -- of seeing one of his most outrageous comic ideas come to life as the latest craze in reality TV, which is, of course, sadistic billionaires tormenting money-grubbing weasels.
As fans of what Southern used to call the "quality lit game" will no doubt recall, Southern was into sadistic billionaires tormenting money-grubbing weasels back when prime-time TV billionaires Donald Trump and Richard Branson were still schoolboys.
Back in the '50s and '60s, Southern was famous, the author of "Candy," a comic porn novel, as well as the screenplays of such classic movies as "Easy Rider," "The Loved One" and, best of all, the brilliantly demented Cold War comedy "Dr. Strangelove." Southern had a dark, sardonic wit and he traveled in the hippest of circles, hanging out with the Rolling Stones, Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce. He was so cool the Beatles put his face on the cover of their "Sgt. Pepper" album.
In 1960, Southern published a novel called "The Magic Christian," the comic tale of Guy Grand, a billionaire who amuses himself by staging elaborate pranks that cause people to reveal how much they're willing to degrade themselves for money.
In the book's most famous scene, Grand buys a building in downtown Chicago, demolishes it and builds a gigantic vat perched atop a huge gas heater. He fills the vat with 300 cubic feet of manure, urine and blood purchased from the Chicago stockyards. When this hellish cocktail is nice and hot, he stirs 10,000 $100 bills into it and puts up a sign that reads "FREE $ HERE."
And then. . . . well, people will do just about anything for money, won't they? ...
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44133-2004Nov11?language=printer>
Carl