Bayonne, New Jersey and the Washington Post.

We don't write a lot of political coverage on this site. Despite the pleasure we take in reading Atrios, DailyKos, and Talking Points Memo, we often keep such opinions to ourself. Even though we started this blog with a few successful attempts at media criticism, our interests turned toward lighter fare and still the most popular search terms for this site involve the graffiti artist Kaws, how to book a table at the UN Delegates Dining Room, a cake and recipe we dedicated to a friend who is a professional opera singer, another who commits obscene acts behind a veil of Liberian security forces, and the downfall of Room4Dessert. Indeed, writing a post during the 2006 elections comparing the favorable coverage the media gives candidates in exchange for access to what restaurateurs provide food critics and bloggers, is the closest we've come to anything political. If ever we were to write in that vein again, we assumed it would be comparing Will Goldfarb to Rudy Giuliani, how the more people get to know him, the less they like him.

But that changed last week first when taking our grandmother to vote in Bayonne on Super Tuesday and the next day being forwarded an article entitled Working Class Whites from Sunday's Washington Post, which we recommend reading via the link before reading on.

While we're not often there, Bayonne is our primary residence. For a long time we there took care of our grandmother, 87, who is deaf and suffers from macular degeneration. Our mother does that now, and we both communicate with her by having our lips read up-close, making effective gestures or writing in large print. The paper on which we write comes from piles of pages around the apartment which on one side read articles cut and pasted from The Times or New York magazine, in a 72 point font. Those, and closed captioned television serve as entertainment filling her day with the busyness of keeping house which she enjoys doing well and by rote.

When we worked in fashion, she loved watching fashion shows replay on Full Frontal Fashion, her face inches from the screen taking them in, this past season, coming by for Sunday dinners she'd allow us the pleasure of watching the Giants and Jets play without words so their loose-knit wins and abject defeats could fill the screen, and just checking in on her we often turned the TV to CNN or more recently MSNBC, giving us both a break from her days of Murder, She Wrote and Law & Order marathons. It was those evenings sitting before The Situation Room complementing the reams of articles our mother would bring home that fueled her fire for politics.

You'd never know this though, because even when we once lived around the corner from Big Apple Sports Bar, we never liked their pizza enough to become a regular. So we find it amazing that Keith Richburg, the Washington Post staff writer would come to a small town of 30 pizzerias (that's one per 2000 residents,) choose one where people are drinking midday, and interview five people for an article entitled:

Working Class Whites
By the numbers Bayonne should be a Clinton Bastion. But enthusiasts for any candidate are hard to find in this down-on-its-luck town.

First, two of the five people interviewed aren't identified as democrats, one, Rich Wisolmerski, is a pro-McCain independent and the other, Joe Walejko, the undecided NRA member and Harley rider, doesn't live in Bayonne, he's a resident of Jersey City.

Of the three other residents interviewed, there is Roxanne Zygmund, "daughter of this fading factory town" who "worked for 15 years at the Military Ocean Terminal here before it shut down in 1999. Shuttles to a federal job in Manhattan."

What's wrong with this? Since MOTB closed the land's been developed into a major luxury cruise port for Royal Caribbean. It replaced 2/3 of the job lost by the closure of MOTB and 110,000 passengers a year possibly pass through it. It opened in 2004. And who owns the land where the cruise port operates? The Bayonne Redevelopment Authority. But it's not like Keith Richburg would have had time to reach out to one of them before deadline.

Except one, "Brian Ahern, 40, who works for the local redevelopment authority," was sitting on the barstool beside him. Maybe if the writer asked him about more than about Clinton and Obama, he would have learned that Ms. Zygmund, above, "shuttles to a federal job in Manhattan" likely via the Hudon-Bergen LightRail of which Bayonne was the first city to be a part when it debuted in 2000, connecting the two counties and becoming a clean-energy commuter hub providing faster access to jobs at the developing Jersey City waterfront and to the PATH trains and ferries leading to Manhattan. The LightRail is so popular that it brings Staten Island residents to Bayonne as well each day by a new joint MTA-PATH bus line.

And looking past the original 34th Street LightRail terminal, now one of four LightRail stops in Bayonne? It's a strip mall. True it's not much to look at. You might think that sort of progress is a joke, a luxury only working-class whites can appreciate. But it's home to two things Bayonne has never possessed in our lifetime. 1.) Houlihan's. Bayonne's first non-fast food chain restaurant. And 2.) a twelve-screen multiplex, the first movie theater in Bayonne since the closure of the Lyceum and DeWitt theaters in the 1970s which respectively are now a dry cleaner and a McDonald's.

And what's just past that? A 9/11 memorial donated by the Russian government and dedicated by Vladimir Putin. And what's just past that? The Bayonne Golf Club, one of the most difficult and expensive courses in the United States where both Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani both play. Just what town is home to all this again? As Keith Richburg describes it:

"Once a major oil refinery and storage center, and home to the military shipping terminal, which employed thousands of people, Bayonne has fallen on hard times. The refineries are long gone, the terminal shut down as part of a military restructuring, and several factories have closed their doors.

Now Broadway Street hosts mostly fast-food chains and discount stores: $5 Shoe Factory, S&J 99 Cent Store and Broadway Dollar, boasting "everything $1 or less."

And as we've mentioned in previous posts, Bayonne's been a more and more popular site for movie production in the past, with Oz and The Sopranos, A Beautiful Mind and most noticeably War of the Worlds being filmed there, the last in the neighborhood under the Bayonne Bridge, a waterfront neighborhood on the Kill Van Kull, which found its ballfields revitalized by donations from Stephen Spielberg's studio.

It's in that neighborhood where our father was born and raised, and in this town where he lived and died. He taught us as much to remember my roots even as he'd work hard enough to make it possible for me to get it out of there and as much time as we spent in Bayonne, we did in Bar Harbor, Maine. What those two towns have in common is one more thing this article failed to mention. Bayonne too, before its days as a factory town, was a resort community, a yachting center known for its beaches and hotels. And as we previously mentioned on this blog, Bayonne is getting its first hotel in nearly 100 years. It's a Holiday Inn, but hey, Park Slope just got one too.

We're proud to admit too, that we know so much about this town not because we've been Googling for the past half hour, but because when we attended school here, Vroom Learning Center, what was then a Gifted & Talented magnet school, well-funded with Macs and a boat back in the 80s, we'd walk past a mural every day on the 2nd floor chronicling the history of the town from its native beginnings to its nascent industrialization, and it gave us the sort of pride in community articles like this, in the national section of a Sunday Washington Post only work to diminish.

It was from that school that our grandmother would take us to and from, and it was only fair now in her condition we'd walk her to and from the polling station a few blocks from the apartment where our mother now lives with our grandmother, a few blocks from where our mother went to school as a little girl.

We voted first with no problem, no ID required, only the 86th person to vote at one of the gymnasium's three machines. Then we went home, woke our grandmother taking an afternoon nap, and succeeded where our mother failed. For us, she would vote. And she'd then be way more enthused to watch with us MSNBC or CNN for the next six hours til she went back to bed for the night. We walked her the three blocks and ran into old family friends of hers, old classmates of ours, and worked to sign her in. Of course she needed ID and had to prove her residency because she wasn't in their system, having only voted there for fifty years. And of course, just as we told her, no, she wouldn't have to put in her teeth because she wouldn't have to speak to anyone, we also told her there's no reason she needed her purse for the short walk. So we spelled things out with the largest hand gestures we could, sat her down, and returned fifteen minutes later with whatever we could find, she filled out a few forms, and finally we were allowed to go in the booth with her to vote. We held her finger to the name she wanted, held her finger to the Vote Now button and made our way back home. We knew if we had to take her back home again with us she'd never go back.

It was a great example of voter dienfranchisement as no reason was given why of so many names hers required proof of ID, but we kept her informed, we showed her she can still contribute outside her apartment, and that night she went to bed happy Hillary Clinton had won New Jersey. Her vote counted. And already she knows we're walking her back in November. With her teeth, her purse, and with an enthusiasm that like so many of Bayonne's better attributes, the Washington Post can't seem to find.

Comments

[metalchick666]

Great articles about Bayonne! I wanted to say that I was one of the students that had a hand in painting that mural on the wall at Vroom, I really loved that school.