Dog days: Barks and bites

The dog days of summer are upon us and it's been a bitch for New Yorkers. School is around the corner and parents are around the bend. Cameras to enforce congestion pricing are being erected like wind turbines in the sea, but instead of slaughtering whales it will kill the budgets of maligned suburbanites and urban dwellers alike.  

Physicists have calculated that people wiggling their pink in a lake will create a ripple that can be measured on the opposite shore. Can the outrage of citizens achieve such an effect?

Although it's been a slow season for local politics, there are sufficient stories to remind us of the folly of faith in the democratic process and the dominance of arbitrary authority.

The getaway driver in the 1986 murder of rookie Police Officer Eddie Byrne is being paroled by the state. That assassination still strikes a raw nerve. Have our local officials voiced their indignation? Some say that law enforcement and civilian lives are equal, and that "Preppie Killer" Robert Chambers and Manson follower Leslie Van Houten have also been released.   

There is no more eye-popping, jaw-dropping and brain-numbing ordeal than the sticky business of defining when criminals' debt to society has been paid. Those who sit in judgment must be detached from the passions that would rule them if their own loved ones had been victims. In Virginia, for instance, the position was recently taken that a teacher who has endured four surgeries after being shot in the chest by a student should be entitled to nothing more than workers compensation because it was job-related.

Well, at least us vulnerable survivors can take comfort in the allegation that we each have an immortal soul, unlike the fourteenth maggot that feasted on Julius Caesar's viscera or the aphid that landed on my shoulder when I was on a party boat in the Great South Bay ten years ago.  

Last week the controversy over encryption of police communications peaked. 

The public has the right to know almost everything, but not right away. Police Blotters are not adequate literature to engage our interest and protect our civil liberty, but the temporary maintenance of secrecy of certain law-enforcement operations does not constitute a Police State.  Yet upgrading police scanners so that bad actors (not the Hollywood type) can't audit and be guided by them, is a wholesome abridgement of our freedom to which we should readily subscribe.

Other first-responders will have access to the new system, but not the press, well-intentioned social service volunteers, curiosity seekers and self-appointed citizen watchdogs. This has fired up accountability fetishists and sufferers of transparency-philia.  

The City Council condemned the NYPD's failure to notify the public.

Oversight of the police is a touchy issue. It's been so even before the inception of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which was heatedly debated. It's been suggested that a delayed feed to a city website may be an acceptable compromise. Also, the NYPD's transmissions are covered under the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

Our City Council is a mixed bag of wisdom and inanity. A bill has been introduced to legalize jaywalking. Its advocates apparently feel that the danger is outweighed by the need to stop the historical targeting of minorities for enforcement. Their rationale is sound but its application here is self-demeaning. The last time they witnessed anyone getting a ticket for jaywalking was during the McCarthy hearings.

Crosswalks and intersections are race-neutral. Like arithmetic, the City Council would be better advised to address the challenge of anti-Semitism at CUNY, if they can muster the sponsors.

With the approach of the new school semester comes the annual charade of the bureaucracy's cleaning house. In the last couple of weeks, the DOE has lost its chief technology officer, its chief strategy officer and its communications chief. Their shoes will be easy to fill. Their salaries totaled around three-quarters of a million dollars plus perks. One of them presided over a massive data breach involving 45,000 students, school employees and service providers whose highly personal information, including Social Security numbers, were hacked.  

When it comes to micromanaging educators, the DOE are champions of anal-retentiveness. For public consumption, they're all about sound bites and sound stages. The bureaucracy is about performance art. The classroom is about the art of performance. 

What innovations and fads will the coming school year bring?  

What new titles, vendors and leadership? Palms may be greased, backs scratched, many hands washed which in turn will wash many others, fixes will be in, and educational gasses passed.  

What reforms will be instituted and will kids profit as adults make a profit? Will special effects, like those of which the cinema and embalming industries are capable, be used in the exploitation of false tests as measures of true education? Who will make a splash by diving into an empty pool?

Let's hope that our policymakers won't be beguiled by privatizers who boast they can put public education through a wood chipper and make it emerge with a smile on its face like a lottery winner.

When Labor Day comes, perhaps there will be reason to celebrate the end of the Manhattan Supreme Court's restraining order that has held in abeyance the law that would substantially boost pay for around 60,000 workers of the four major app-based delivery companies including Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub and Relay. Corporate resistance to the workers' merited hike exemplifies what City Comptroller Brad Lander calls the "gig business model.”  

There was recently, in one of the free daily papers, an op-ed from the owner of several take-out food establishments, who as an immigrant some years ago achieved the American Dream by becoming an entrepreneur and eventually opening up multiple restaurants. He is panicking that his Dream will lose its luster and he will be forced to padlock his businesses if the nightmare of delivery workers' pay raise takes effect. 

His operations don't sound marginal to me. Poor soul. I trust he submits impeccable tax records.

A new local law forbids restaurants from dispensing ketchup packets unless the customer explicitly requests them. Starting next year, they will be fined for non-compliance. No worries. By then the Earth may have handed in its retirement papers.

I'm in favor of the City's goal of saving the planet, so long as it doesn't hinge on sacrificing its residents. Its mission is driven by the Michelin philosophy, named after the car tire mascot, because of its inflated sense of "manifest destiny.” Biting the hands that feed them with votes is the politicians' seminal act of affirmation. They expect our gratitude for the disparagement they provoke. Their showcases should be converted to secret hiding places. They wear designer Emperors’ New Clothes. They and their optics need to be redressed.

No doubt our City Parents will furnish us with plenty more unsolicited gall between now and Labor Day.