Stupid rich tricks

Hereabouts, the town issues two sorts of auto permits to those who ask for them and fork over the requisite amount of cash. There is the beach stickah, and there is the dump stickah. One might think the former would be the one with cachet, but the opposite is true. All residents can do with a beach stickah is park at the beach for the few weeks a year when beach conditions are above freezing. A dump stickah allows residents that privilege, as well as access to the transfer station (known to the ancien regime as the incinerator, which it once was), to the recycling centre, to the leaf and brush dump, and to the swap shed, where thrifty Yankees can exchange their trash for someone else's trash. (Think yard sale without money.)

Fastidious newcomers have usually started with a beach stickah, before they overcome their aversion to decorating the family Mercedes with a dump stickah.
The condescending sighs of natives are one motivation. Another is their first autumn, when they find out the town is very stingy with leaf pickup and even stingier with open burning permits. At that moment, newcomers begin to understand the cachet of the dump stickah, which entitles them to a place in the autumn scrum at the leaf pile. The town of late has helped them along by calling the dump stickah a "town facilities permit." (The beach stickah is still just a beach stickah.)

Perhaps this was a bad idea. Traditionally, drivers just stuck the new stickah on top of last year's. When one acquired as many layers as an archaeological site, the whole wad would peel off quite easily. Recently, though, newcomers have begun carefully arraying dump stickahs next to each other, much as people out on the islands line up each year's oversand beach permits.

This has two disadvantages. First, it's the scarlet letter of residency status. The desired effect is to impress people with how many years one has lived here. This is a losing proposition when the family of the guy who plows your driveway may have been here 300 years. Second, most local behaviours have a hard core of common sense behind them. The town seems to have gotten its stickahs from the same place since about the invention of the Model T. The glue is peculiarly stubborn. One stickah at a time won't come off: five or ten piled on top of each other yield to one persistent tug. Thus newcomers will have to endure their humiliation as long as they own their car, and may have hundreds taken off the trade-in value by unsentimental dealers.

Thus do the one percent bite themselves on the ankle.

I'd rather have tourists

Let us all be joyful. My little town has been invaded by Hollywood, courtesy no doubt of the Massachusetts Film Office. All of this began about a fortnight ago, and is likely to continue well into the summer.

In theory, all this is supposed to be great for business. The film crew's purchases are supposed to boost local businesses. Umm, well, they travel as independently as a Bedouin tribe. They even have their own catering, presumably so that cast and crew aren't tainted by East Coast eating.* Their presence in this place or that is indicated by yellow plastic signs reading "GU 2," with directional arrows and subtexts like "crew parking" or "extras." This doesn't penetrate very deeply into the local mind. The town is a notoriously easy place to get lost in, so anything from a 20-person cookout to a wedding for 500 on The Neck sprouts directional signs. If the signs don't involve us, we filter them out.

A mysterious lighted sign sprouted today, warning that one of our main drags will be shut down from 10 a.m to 1a.m., Friday into early Saturday. It's possible the town is actually fixing something, or that aliens are landing, but smart money is on another film disruption.**

About ten days back, most of my neighbourhood lost its cool when they were shooting on the beach at the end of my street. Almost everyone went wafting down the street to get a whiff of celebrity culture. My spouse and I cemented our reputations as resident curmudgeons by having better things to do. I've seen enough film, stage and video productions to know there's a dreary sameness to all these things, and I wouldn't cross the room to meet a star.

Word is the town is getting paid, directly, a handsome piece of change to put up with this nonsense. It's said that people and businesses who have been directly affected have walked away with large cheques. They haven't pressed any money into my hands yet at any rate.

* OK, I was hasty. Tonight (Thursday 6/7) I went to the first-rate New York deli down the street for our weekly fix and found them pushing out an order of 150 sandwiches for the cast and crew. If they keep that up, I'm converted.

** Suspicions confirmed. The alien landing would have been more interesting...unless they have a chase scene ;-)

Memorial Day, 2011

First, today's fall from grace award goes to the anonymous hackers who attacked various PBS Web sites because Front Line had dared to broadcast a show on Wikileaks that fell short of adulation. This is precisely why my contempt for Julian Assange and his minions remains strong. Freedom of information means nothing if its self-appointed defenders pick and choose what information shall be free.

The local Memorial Day show followed much the same script as in past years. This town has a three-stop parade. The first stop is the harbour, where the town remembers those whose gave their lives at sea, navy, merchant marine and privateer: there are long memories here, and it wouldn't do to leave the privateers out of our thoughts. The main event, which I take in, is at the Memorial Park downtown. This is the one dominated by a sombre Civil War obelisk, which bears more names than all the other memorials combined.

This the beginning of the Civil War sesquicentennial. If we manage to get through the next four years without starting another one, perhaps we can use the time to recognise the seed of what the war started, and to settle some things that were far from settled at the centennial.

Against this background, I was disappointed in our keynote speaker, a young Marine reserve officer raised in Marblehead. There is a lot of material to draw from here. We did not especially need a political sermon strongly tinged with Tea Party rant. Although that the town has a decidedly Republican cast, I detected an uptick in shuffling and shifting in the crowd. Not the place, old man.

Forty years ago one would not have predicted that veterans' organisations would have been inherited by veterans of my generation. Then, I would have predicted that those organisations would wither and die rather than treat Vietnam veterans on equal terms. I have never forgotten or forgiven that. I will show up at such events but that is as far as I'll take it. But here we are, old men and women, and the older men and women of World War Two and Korea are dying at a prodigious rate. We are the old ones: may the fates grant us one insight denied to veterans of "the greatest generation." What Holmes called "the incommunicable experience of war" unites us all. We are related to the deeps of time, far past Thucydides, before Marathon. May we be fair-minded and generous to those who are behind the guns today.

Solly

Twenty fricken days! I'm dreadful! I'd say I'm in a funk, but any time I do, I remember a college friend who would inquire, to that statement, why so and so was in a funk, not an MG.

I suppose I've been in the one and not the other. Which is too bad, because there have endless opportunities for literary levity in the world at large.

There has been this other thing, peculiar to my little town, the yachting capital of the world/the nation/New England/Essex County. Our universe has been shrinking, but there are still enough fools who believe it to make a Marblehead harbour mooring rather more valuable than our real estate.

I have such a mooring. The odd thing is that the holder of such a mooring no longer actually owns anything. He/she simply has rights to use a buoy, rights to pay a permit fee, and the privilege of paying a licenced maintenance firm a hefty amount of money a year. (Once upon a time if you had a permit, you actually owned the buoy, the chain and anchor, but no more.)

A few years back, we sold our boat but, in the usual local fashion, kept our rights in the mooring. We did this basically to give a lift to our small fleet of small sailboats. While in theory we also got the right to use the boat, our interests were moving away from sailing. We used it very little. In addition, our co-owner was a thorough mariner, both born and bred. He did much better than we ever did.

Suddenly, this spring, he got a new job in the Midwest and sold out the boat. If you ever feel friendless and unwanted, for an antidote try having one of these 5x8 bits of paper with no boat on the mooring. You will have many, many friends in a very short time. If you give up the mooring, you will make one anonymous person very happy, and earn yourself many unfriends. If you keep the mooring, only one of your friends will be truly happy.

If this isn't complicated enough, add a Left Coast child who has suddenly rediscovered her interest in sailing. This would be innocent enough if she were to remain living in the desert. However, there's a high likelihood that her next career move is to the Bay area, thence back to this coast. So, as all this unfolds, daughter says "Don't give up the mooring."

No pressure.

We caved.

Our new arrangement is with the person we thought needed a chance at a mooring most. Just to show how diverse we are, he's a Republican. Nowadays, doing this sort of thing is far from simple. Papers: many many papers. Hoops: many many hoops. It is unclear as yet whether we've acquired unfriends from all this, because they haven't called. At any rate, the deal is done. At last.

My brother-in-law, hearing all this, suggested that getting moorings in Marblehead is like getting season's tickets to the New York Giants. I think the Giants tickets would be easier.

Hoist by his own Johnson

Mr. Wayne Johnson's bid to save his house from his self-destructive urges was "indefinitely postponed" by a 2-1 margin last night. Those unfamiliar with the art of open town meeting politics, as practised in the Massachusetts towns still delusional enough to have open town meetings may not understand this reference, or the back story.

The town's Finance Committee vets the list of action items, called the warrant, before meeting. They publish their recommendations which are approve (we can afford it), don't approve (we don't think we can), no recommendation (it doesn't cost anything so we're not competent) or indefinite postponement. The latter is generally recognised as a sort of local politics limbo. It is possible, though not likely, for an indefinitely postponed item to resurface in its present form. Such measures usually undergo serious tweaking before they show up on the warrant again.

The present zoning ordinances, which set a variety of lot sizes but which do frown on narrow-fronted (or "pork-chop") lots, were set by town meeting a couple of decades ago, years before Johnson decided to ignore the law and build what he pleased where he pleased. Although most town meeting articles pass by simple majority, zoning articles must pass by a two-thirds vote. In a town in which it is close to impossible to get a two-thirds vote favouring anything, this ensures that zoning ordinances command as close to universal assent as the town is ever likely to go.

The question, then, was settled law to just about everyone but Wayne Johnson, who makes his laws up as he goes along. It is before the meeting now only because our hero discovered that the Commonwealth's courts were unimpressed by his poor little rich kid pouting act. Faced with the imminent threat of demolishing his house, Johnson did what every red-blooded American millionaire does. He hired more lawyers and discovered a loophole that allowed Town Meeting to stay the courts' decision by retroactively changing the zoning.

It took two nights of nail-biting suspense for Johnson to reach his turn. Alas, his personal article came during a meeting preoccupied with

a) Accessibility for the Old Town House, one of the nation's oldest public buildings (1727)
b) Changes to the Town Dump
c) Capital expenses for a large elementary school.

All we would have needed was any article concerning dogs and the meeting would be sitting until mid-June. Any one of these topics generates hot air in inverse ratio to its level of importance and/or controversy. We have in addition a relatively weak-kneed moderator. His late predecessor knew town meeting procedure inside out, and showed no hesitation about shutting off anyone or anything to keep things moving. With all this, it took two nights and around six hours to do less than three hours' worth of business. When the end came, poor Wayne was sent packing, despite his crying towel.

Indefinite postponement does Johnson little good, for this warrant article was a last, desperate throw. The questions remaining are whether courts and town can at last show the backbone they have failed so far to display, and who's going to pay to take the place down?* The emerging buzz seems to expect that Johnson, who has laid out every sob story he has, will hunker down and wait to have the house torn down around his ears: which might happen.

Negligent as town officials and courts have been in enforcement, we should not lose sight of the central fact in all this: Johnson's pre-adolescent hubris. He knew the lot was non-conforming, but he bought it and built on it anyway. Although he could have built a more modest, better-sited house, and avoided most of the pitfalls awaiting those who build on pork-chop lots, he did not. He built a McMansion so sited that it was deliberately in yo' face to neighbours and town officials alike. Sixteen years of "no" from neighbours, town offices, town boards and the courts was not, and perhaps still is not, enough to convince him that they meant it. He was voted down not only for his hubris, but because wiser heads understood it was not all about him. Johnson expected to do as he damn well pleased, then change the law to ratify what he had done after the fact. Marblehead should be pleased that he pursued this pleasant line of reasoning in a relatively benign field like zoning and not in, say, homicide.

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*The irony in all this is that Johnson could have moved his house on the lot, or altered it. The courts made it clear that they found demolition a distasteful solution. So far had Johnson lost his reason that he never seems to have considered either option, and they may now be closed to him.