No Cry Babies!

by Dennis Green

You may have noticed a new signature on my emails: “NO CRY BABIES!” And where did I come up with this, and why? Well, I’m sitting here in my Captain Nemo Chair, and on one of the several tables around my Command Station sits a small pack of wooden matches, a memento from one of our favorite hangs, Fog City Diner in S.F.

They’ve been there forever, and I’ve been going there since 1979, this café designed to look like a diner of old, resembling in fact an Airstream Trailer I lived in for a year while finishing up my undergraduate years at UCSB. Compact living. And one of our Chums, Lodewijk Borst, waits tables there and heads up the rock band Skirt Lifter.

Lodewijk recently married a lovely Brazilian lass, and their newborn daughter is a dream! They recently spent some time in Brazil with Mrs. Borst’s family, and Lodewijk’s emails gave me a sense of the land where the next Olympics will be held. But I digress…

The Fog City Diner motto is “No Cry Babies,” and it hangs on a sign outside the door, on another near the restrooms, and is sported on those match box covers. I’ve always liked its intent — if your baby starts bawling, please take the little darling outside — but also its wider implications.

I heard George Steinbrenner’s quote the other day, “Sure I’m a sore loser. Show me someone who loses and is happy about it and I’ll show you a loser!” And I get his drift about the winning Yankee ways, but it immediately reminded me of how sorely dumfounded are the losers of the recent Measure E school parcel tax initiative. They’re still crying.

One letter writer, who doesn’t live on the island, even threatens NOT to move here if we don’t pass the next school parcel tax. And I say, “Oh, please! Don’t throw us in that briar patch of your disaffections, Lady!” Our loss, no doubt.

And Trustee Mike McMahon, on one blog discussion thread, laces into me for perceiving him as a “schoolyard bully.” Then quotes my op-ed piece, where I describe him as “deliberate,” and says that doesn’t really sound like a bully now, does it? You can see that subtlety is not Mike’s art form.

But we’re also seeing letters from people who voted in favor of Measure E and will not again. Why? Because all during the campaign, we were told that if it failed, at least one high school, one middle school and four elementary schools would be closed immediately, not to reopen in the Fall. And now…well…maybe some of those will close in 2011, if the next parcel tax doesn’t pass. This dishonesty is apparent even to some of the partisans formerly blinded by the threat, “Give us the money or we’ll shoot this kid!”

Measure E was so unfair it seemed to reflect precisely the sort of corruption and mismanagement apparent at AUSD. And now one of our City Council members, Lena Tam, is being investigated for felonious conduct in leaking privileged memos and emails to the developer SunCal that persists in trying to develop Alameda Point in spite of being defeated, 85%/15% at the polls in February.

Tam is crying foul, and SunCal threatens to bankrupt Alameda with lawsuits if it doesn’t yet get its way. Tam will no doubt be their star witness. And how will the cry babies react? How will the newspapers and blogs that support SunCal cover this story? Will they side with Tam and SunCal against the City, the taxpayers and their own readers? Are they really THAT DUMB? Are they really such cry babies? Stay tuned.

©2010 Dennis Green