I Don't Really Hate Saying "I Told You So..."
Something like 20 years ago, I wrote an article for the New York Times' Sunday Jersey section (remember when the NYT took NJ seriously as a place deserving some coverage other than the occasional restaurant review?) which suggested, in a rather modest way, that the town of Sea Bright, in lieu of what even then seemed to me constant rebuilding and clearly futile beach replenishment efforts, should simply be abandoned to the elements. Even perhaps turned into a park. This was, too, around the time when a husband-wife team on the Rutgers faculty had written a much talked-about book proposing their "Buffalo Commons" theory, basically meaning that most of the Dakotas should similarly be bulldozed over and given back to prairie critters. This book was taken quite seriously at the time, despite (because of?) its rather chilling dismissal of the rights of Amerinds to keep living, albeit today with modern conveniences and Indian-owned casinos, where they'd already resided for hundreds of years. The Rutgers couple also rather blithely said "screw you" to both cattle ranchers and wheat farmers.( I was especially personally upset that their land usage theories would have meant the demolishment of both the Corn Palace and Wall Drugs, as well as an end to the annual biker pilgrimage to Sturgis, SD.)
Anyway, my relatively modest suggestion re Sea Bright did not sit well with the Times' reliably liberal and prone to frothing readers. (About as well as did to me that the Times did not in fact pay people like me for such articles, I was told by the editor I dealt with there to shut up and simply be grateful the Times had deigned to run my essay in the first place.) As a tribute to the kindness of Times readers I was pilloried for even daring suggest such a notion. Only they did it through my then-wife, whom many knew how to contact, and they did it cruelly and very aggressively. In a fishwifely, near-threatening vein of "Tell your husband that..."
Well, what do I see lately in the Star-Ledger (that magical place of respect for the English language where the concept of martial law was recently spelled "marshal" with no pun apparently intended and, in a news story, the famous Latin phrase was spelled "per say") but at least four columns so far by its resident editorial thug Paul Mulshine dealing with pretty much the same topic. Covering the entire post-Sandy shore, more or less, but still pretty much with the same basic idea, that "the Shore" has to be, uh, "rebuilt."
Now, Mulshine epitomizes much of what I find offensive about the Ledger as it goes through its public death throes for good reason - he's arrogant, pugnacious and clearly contemptuous of the opinions of others even when they might be expected to agree with him. (I once wrote him congratulating him on a column he'd written, and he wrote back in an amazing "Yes, I am quite wonderful" tone"without ever thanking me for taking the time and effort to write.)
This past Sunday, Paul Mulshine was at it again. Maintaining that the Shore of course has to come back and quoting with approval the mayors of Brick Township and Seaside Heights as to why, perhaps even how, sea walls might in fact save those towns and many others. (Galveston in 1900 had a seawall too, as the song, a frequent component of Tom Rush's act, uncomfortably reminds; nonetheless something like 8000 people died there.) Yet not with any comparable discussion of what such projects might cost, let alone where the money might come from. 'Desert the shore?Withdrawal is not an option" was the title of Mulshine's column, and he brooks no opposition.
Really,however, the debate about what to do about NJ's beaches post-Sandy has to be more truly open than that. When I was a little kid, the Shore seemed a magical place to me. I even found the tiny, obviously fragile cottages of the Ocean Beach development near Lavallette charming. I suspected even then that they were all really made of balsa wood, but I nonetheless found them cutesy little dwellings, fit littoral-side summertime shelter for the likes of Beatrix Potter's characters as much as for vacationing factory workers from Garfield and Edison and their families.
As I got older, however, and began to understand that it's hard to ever completely separate the idea of intemperate greed from even rational discussions about the real estate industry, Sea Bright in particular, but also "simply" much of beachside Monmouth and Ocean counties, struck me as precariously situated, placed where no sane architect would have built. Where no totally rational and prudent buyer would buy, either. But then, the myth of the Jersey Shore remains a very seductive one indeed. (As opposed to, say, the actual, to a scare-the-horses level, grubbiness, raunch and tattoo festival that is the Seaside Heights boardwalk every summer.The Shore calls more for a Tom Wolfe at his most excoriating than "the Boss" lyrically waxing romantic.)
That feeling has only intensified with storm after storm hitting Sea Bright. Sandy was just the final straw. Hard as it may be to speak unemotionally about the shore, too. (Although it's maybe useful to note that even Bruce Springsteen lives well away from tides and waves, first in that berm-protected Tudor-style place in Rumson, for the last several years in Colts Neck.)
It is therefore time for Paul Mulshine in particular to grow up and shut up.The time for "Shorebirds Commons" may well have finally arrived. More's the pity, I know, honest.. But whatever is finally decided, there has to be actual debate.And the present, grumpily Mother Nature-defiant attitudes of neither Paul Mulshine nor Govenor Christie are much of a genuine help. One might even term both men obstructionist on this one, and to an absolutely foolish and self-defeating degree.
r
This past Sunday, Paul Mulshine was at it again. Maintaining that the Shore of course has to come back and quoting with approval the mayors of Brick Township and Seaside Heights as to why, perhaps even how, sea walls might in fact save those towns and many others. (Galveston in 1900 had a seawall too, as the song, a frequent component of Tom Rush's act, uncomfortably reminds; nonetheless something like 8000 people died there.) Yet not with any comparable discussion of what such projects might cost, let alone where the money might come from. 'Desert the shore?Withdrawal is not an option" was the title of Mulshine's column, and he brooks no opposition.
Really,however, the debate about what to do about NJ's beaches post-Sandy has to be more truly open than that. When I was a little kid, the Shore seemed a magical place to me. I even found the tiny, obviously fragile cottages of the Ocean Beach development near Lavallette charming. I suspected even then that they were all really made of balsa wood, but I nonetheless found them cutesy little dwellings, fit littoral-side summertime shelter for the likes of Beatrix Potter's characters as much as for vacationing factory workers from Garfield and Edison and their families.
As I got older, however, and began to understand that it's hard to ever completely separate the idea of intemperate greed from even rational discussions about the real estate industry, Sea Bright in particular, but also "simply" much of beachside Monmouth and Ocean counties, struck me as precariously situated, placed where no sane architect would have built. Where no totally rational and prudent buyer would buy, either. But then, the myth of the Jersey Shore remains a very seductive one indeed. (As opposed to, say, the actual, to a scare-the-horses level, grubbiness, raunch and tattoo festival that is the Seaside Heights boardwalk every summer.The Shore calls more for a Tom Wolfe at his most excoriating than "the Boss" lyrically waxing romantic.)
That feeling has only intensified with storm after storm hitting Sea Bright. Sandy was just the final straw. Hard as it may be to speak unemotionally about the shore, too. (Although it's maybe useful to note that even Bruce Springsteen lives well away from tides and waves, first in that berm-protected Tudor-style place in Rumson, for the last several years in Colts Neck.)
It is therefore time for Paul Mulshine in particular to grow up and shut up.The time for "Shorebirds Commons" may well have finally arrived. More's the pity, I know, honest.. But whatever is finally decided, there has to be actual debate.And the present, grumpily Mother Nature-defiant attitudes of neither Paul Mulshine nor Govenor Christie are much of a genuine help. One might even term both men obstructionist on this one, and to an absolutely foolish and self-defeating degree.
r
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