Bill de Blasio had his helicopter land in Prospect Park last week -- ruining a fun park day for families and children. Photo: Twitter ; R. Umar Abbasi
New Yorkers enjoying Brooklyn’s Prospect Park late one Friday afternoon this month got a surprise: an NYPD helicopter landing in the middle of a field.
No, they weren’t responding to a terrorist attack or a scary clown. It was just our fearless mayor — hopping the chop because he was late for a Queens event.
De Blasio’s Operation On Time matters beyond being just another flub. It reminds us of lots of things wrong with Hizzoner, from failing to safeguard New Yorkers’ quality of life to fiscal profligacy.
First, there’s the obvious: Helicopter travel isn’t progressive. Unless you travel by coal-fired space shuttle, it’s hard to think of a way of getting around that’s worse for the air.
These aren’t global-warming emissions we’re talking about here, although there’s that. Helicopters spew regular old nitrous oxide and other toxins, the stuff that gives kids asthma. When you walk by the heliport on Manhattan’s West Side, you walk fast — because it smells bad and is deafeningly loud.
Sure, Mike Bloomberg and other mayors used helicopters. But one doesn’t recall them landing in a public park.
No mayor should be using the park as a heliport any more than he should race his SUV motorcade across Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow to cut travel time.
De Blasio’s private need — to avoid the embarrassment of yet another tardy appearance — outweighed the public right of Brooklyn’s kids to use their park without breathing in toxic fumes. Progressive for thee, but not for me.
It would be one thing if the mayor were a hawk on quality-of-life issues, and just being hypocritical here. But he isn’t interested in protecting New Yorkers from the helicopter traffic that continues to plague waterfront New Yorkers, nor is he interested in protecting them from construction noise.
And de Blasio is uninterested in traffic and transit. Well, yes: He can avoid it. Meanwhile, the subways are finally so full that they’re losing riders, as people choose bikes, or, if they’ve got money to spare, Uber, to avoid the rush.
Frustrated drivers block intersections, making both walking and driving worse than it’s been in a decade. It’s dangerous, too: 188 people have died in traffic so far this year, compared to 174 last year.
Plus, de Blasio still doesn’t know how to deal with the police. After the Prospect Park heliport incident, the mayor’s people blamed the NYPD, saying his security detail is in charge of getting him around in whatever way they see fit.
Nonsense. The mayor supervises the police, not the other way around.
De Blasio is also sending a bad message to cops. If the mayor can park his helicopter illegally in Prospect Park, why shouldn’t officers park their private cars in illegal spots all over the city, blocking sidewalks, bike lanes and crosswalks?
The incident also demonstrates the mayor’s fiscal irresponsibility. Helicopters and the police who pilot them and secure their landing spots are expensive. All four of the city’s “rags” — the term the mayor uses for newspapers that report the facts — have written recently that the city’s payroll is at record levels.
This would perhaps be OK if the mayor had worked to reform city workers’ health-care and pension packages, but nope. Progressive means that city workers can avoid the government-retiree safety nets — Social Security and Medicare — that everyone else relies upon.
Finally, the mayor is showing which of the “tale of two cities” he wants to live in. Once you’ve joined the helicopter class, it’s hard to go back to traveling like a commoner. The skies are full of indispensable men.
The mayor fancies himself an important man, and he is: The decisions he makes can save or cost lives.
But he’s not all that important, just as no public (or corporate) official is. If he’s late to give a speech in Queens — or even if he doesn’t show — it doesn’t matter. A waitress who is late for her shift causes more problems than does a mayor who fails to give yet one more workaday speech.
Public officials love to cocoon themselves to revel in how critical they are. Perhaps de Blasio should spend some time walking or taking the subway, to remind himself instead of how the other 99.99 percent lives.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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