A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

marxist-cohenism

Do you have a secret fantasy? Do you want to rule the world? Have you ever fantasized, for instance, about being mayor of Ithaca?

Experience the power, standing on the roof of the Seneca St. Parking garage, looking down over the Commons, Fall Creek, the Northside, the Southside, the dark side, and shouting into the winds of April" This is all mine!"

"Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." --Milton.

Ezra's thought about being Mayor. This actually represents a step up from fantasizing about being one of the faces on the Smith Bros. Cough Drops box. Those guys are so cool.

Ezra occasionally stares at his own reflection in the mirror and whispers, "Mr. Mayor." He knows he can do a better job than Alan Cohen. Could he one day be the first avowed anarchist ever to become mayor of Ithaca, New York? But wait -isn't that a contradiction in terms? Anarchists don't run for political office, do they?

Yeah, but the thought of all that power is just so intoxicating. Like a drug.

Ithaca once had a Marxist mayor, did you know that?. Ben Nichols. A really great guy. Unfortunately, he was one of those hothouse, academic marxists incubated up there in the heady Andean mountain reaches of Cornell. A theoretical socialist. He never had that fire in the mind, the revolutionary zeal of a Lenin or Trotsky. No, Ben never tried to storm the winter palace. He was barely capable of producing a tempest in a tea pot, let alone a revolution.

Poor Ben. To others, it must have seemed that Ben was as radical as putting catsup on toast. During Ben's administration, people talked a lot. Committees abounded There were sub-committees and sub-sub committees. Finally, Common Council had to sign a sub-committee non-proliferation treaty with the mayor.

People in Ithaca loved it. A lot of ex- hippies who form the Ithaca power base must have had Marxist pretensions at some point in their lives. Like Ezra's hero, Steve W. from Jersey, who is a big apparatchnik at EcoVillage. Steve studied Marxist labor theory at the New School of Social Research in NYC. He now works for the State of New Jersey.

It looked good in the press releases, however. Ithaca, NY, one of a handful of cities in the US to have a Socialist mayor. People still get mileage out of it.

The sad thing about this episode in Ithaca's history is that nothing whatsoever came out of the city's fling with marxist-leninism. No dictatorship of the proletariat. No collectivization of the bottle and can pickers. No transfer of the means of production to the masses. The same people continued eating at Simeon's, others continued eating at the soup kitchen. Ezra wasn't living in the area at the time but, from the point of view of a distant observer, he occasionally reflected that Ithaca had all the revolutionary praxis of a Marx Brothers movie. Not the Marx they had in mind.

Ben's analyze this and analyze that, committee and subcommittee approach to governing Ithaca prepared the ground for the phenomenon known as Cohenism. People were fed up with nothing getting done. They were disgusted with traffic gridlock at West Hill. Every morning hundreds of cars were tied up in a bottleneck down by the Inlet as people tried to get to work. Waiting for 30 minutes at the base of the hill. People were also tired of having Cornell sit up there on the mountain like some giant toadish demi-god, contributing only a few scheckels to the upkeep of the city and county. They started doing in-depth studies of how many times City fire trucks were called up there to answer false alarms resulting from student pranks. Ben couldn't very well challenge Cornell because he was either on the faculty payroll or bringing home a pension.

Folks were looking for a change. They were scanning the horizon for a strong leader riding a white horse. Or was that wearing a white apron? (Alan Cohen owned Simeon's. He looks sort of like a maitre-de, doesn't he?) Ithacans wanted a leader who would get things moving again.

They didn't bank on ushering into power the Machiavelli of the Finger Lakes.

Alan Cohen, to his credit, is a mover and shaker. The library moved, didn't it? Big box retailers moved in, didn't they? The lake moved, didn't it? Up to Cornell to heat the gym. Even Cornell is beginning to move its tentacles downtown. Once Al dispatches the city's cadre of attorneys to perform a little eminent domain presto-digito on Race Office Supply so constuction can begin on Cornell's combo hotel/office complex. Talk about storm troopers. Lawyers are the SS of corporate America!

There's more than a hint of suspicion about Cohen's tactics. City residents wake up one morning and find that a developer is bulldozing a site across from Buttermilk Falls for a new retail complex. Hardly enough time to muster the anti-development human shields.

The Common Council has become a rubber-stamp squad instead of a debating society. Does Alan convene the Council under cloak of night down in some kind of underground bistro bunker under Simeon's. A Lubayanko prison of sorts, filled with wine coolers and torture devices? The inexorably boring tv version of CC meetings is actually just window dressing. The real business of government is performed over cappuccino and thumb screws. Dissent is not allowed in Alan Cohen's central committee.

Ezra happens to know that there is a Stalin waiting in the wings to follow Cohen's Lenin. He wears a tie-died tee-shirt, ratty pair of jeans and sneakers, sports a beard and long hair. You'd think at first glance that he was an amiable hippie business owner but he's really not. He is a ruthless despot who kicks kids off downtown art installations, longs to ban dogs from city limits like St. Patrick drove snakes out of Ireland. At this moment he's gathering his forces, slowly accumulating power and influence, planning his sinister takeover of the whole apparatus of government. Ezra hears that he's started to design a series of gulags out by Stewart Park. To house dissidents like Ezra.

Watch out, Ithaca. There's a shadow moving across the Commons. An avuncular gray eminence, patiently waiting his turn. Uncle Joe revisited and, you know, the strange thing is that this guy is also named Joe.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:16 AM