I don’t want to beat this to death, but I am from New Jersey and I am just as emotionally traumatized by what happened there during Hurricane Sandy as any New Orleans native was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps for this reason, I am getting a little tired of all the remote psychoanalysis of Gov. Chris Christie by cynics who think that he is cuddling up to the president out of some kind of cold political calculation. If you are not from Jersey, maybe you just don’t know. The Jersey shore is as integral to the culture of the state as the automotive industry is to Michigan or Mardi Gras is to The Big Easy. When I saw the aerial footage of the damage to Seaside Heights and Atlantic City and other areas of the shore, I was devastated, just as the governor was devastated. I knew exactly what that footage meant in a way that most people don’t.
Look. I’m not a fan of Chris Christie. I think he was a corrupt U.S. attorney and I think he is a bully who has a destructive ideology and agenda. But he’s Jersey. He’s Jersey, one hundred percent. And he isn’t cozying up to the president because he has some secret agenda. He wants help for his state and he’s getting help, and he’s appropriately grateful. When he says that he doesn’t give a crap about the election, he’s saying that because after seeing the destruction at Long Beach Island and spots further south, he can’t focus on anything else. There are other concerns, like massive power outages in Newark and Jersey City, flooding in Hoboken and other areas near the Hackensack River, and wind damage in various areas. But it’s the Katrina-like destruction at the shore that is driving the governor’s behavior. A way of life is threatened.
Here’s what I am talking about:
Any questions?
I get it. Thank you for posting that. But for your comment, I would not have gotten it. Though I live in the far northwest corner of Washington state now, in an idyllic city that looks out on the sound and the San Juan Islands, I’m from New York. Long Island to be specific. And we didn’t have Bruce. And we didn’t have the Jersey Shore. But we had a kind of culture that will forever be a part of me (and I a part of it). Something deeper than words. Perhaps it could be captured in poetry. Or music. Perhaps by Springsteen. Certainly not by my fellow Long Islander, Billy Joel, but perhaps our Long Island version could be captured and transmitted by someone.
For me, this is the essence of the Jersey Shore experience and culture in sound and lyrics and poetry:
Not sure I get what you’re saying, but I love Springsteen. His talent is awesome.
I can’t expect you to get it. His voice echoes down Rte. 33 from the shore to the heart of the state. You hear it, or you don’t.
I totally get it. I grew up in New Jersey, but not “down the shore” (as we always called it). Nevertheless, some my fondest childhood, adolescent and young adult memories were formed there. Going to the beach was the ultimate summer treat as a kid. Growing older, driving there with friends or a girlfriend was maybe even better. Seaside Heights was, for me, and many others, the epicenter of all that. Seeing the rides from that pier, even though they are nothing special in comparison to Six Flags or whatever, twisted and broken and lying in the ocean just breaks my heart.
And Bruce, who himself grew up in Freehold (not really “down the shore”) but found his voice and his earliest (and, for my money, best) material in Asbury Park, was like the troubador of all that. His songs and his singing somehow encapsulated everything the shore meant, and means, to me, and millions like me.
Even now, when I would rather go Island Beach State Park, Barnegat Light or Cape May than Seaside, let alone Asbury, the honky tonk, the boardwalk, the carousel, the win a record spinner places, the way pizza or french fries tasted after spending hours body surfing, the rides (from the little tea cups as a baby to the thing that spun round and round and turned you upside down), the drive home on the Parkway with your girl sleeping on your shoulder, the whole damn thing, looms large in my, again, many, many like me, personal mythology.
I believe Christy feels it too, no matter how much of an asshole he has always been or how of an opportunist he is being now.
Bingo and exactly.
Why not this?
~mistermix
That works for me.
By the way, I think it works for Obama too.
Yep. I grew up in Jersey and go to Point Pleasant every summer. I am heartbroken at the devastation. I am not a fan of Christie, but his reaction/behavior regarding Sandy and Obama is genuine. There’s nothing political about it. BooMan s right – he’s totally New Jersey.
My dad wited in line today for 2 hours – twice – for gas in Berkeley Heights. There house was one of a few on their street without tree damage. They were very lucky. He has no idea when they will get electricity back.
A friend of mine is mourning the loss of Mantoloking. Her parents’ house is still standing, but the first floor completely flooded. Another dear friend is wilting to her if there’s anything left of her mother’s house in Bay Head. It was a block from the beach.
I am having a hard time imagining how everything will be cleaned up. It’s overwhelming.
That’s the way I see it also. Christie may or may not have national ambitions – I think his personality would be tiresome. But he is who he is and is not a fake. He cares for his community and takes his responsibility seriously.
I grew up in Keyport, NJ. It’s been almost forty years, but it hurts me to see the pictures of damage back there. The marina there is destroyed. I’m not sure about some of the other places, I worked as a busboy at the Ye Cottage Inn in high school, it’s right on the Bay, I don’t have high hopes for it. I’ve seen photos of devastation in Union Beach and Keansburg.
I don’t know what’s in Christie’s heart, but he’s been a lot nicer to listen to the last couple of days.
I get that this particular one hits home, but this is what Washington pundits do. They don’t want to talk about the policy or crisis of the minute, the relative merits of the different options, who will be affected, etc. They just want to know how this event will affect the political positioning for the next election.
Personally, my early reaction was that this meant Christie either figured he isn’t a viable Presidential candidate anyway or just didn’t include that in his calculus – so instead he just did what he thought was best for his state. I still think that. You don’t think his overt praise for Obama wouldn’t doom him come the primaries if he tried to run?
Doom him?
Probably not. But the point is that he honestly doesn’t give a shit.
To his credit.
Personally, my early reaction was that this meant Christie either figured he isn’t a viable Presidential candidate anyway or just didn’t include that in his calculus – so instead he just did what he thought was best for his state.
Remember, he has an election in ’14 to worry about before running for President, if he does. And who is the guy most touted to run possibly run against Christie in ’14? Cory Booker!! Christie’s response was certainly political. If he botched this, he’d certainly lose re-election to a cardboard box. And what better way to burnish your image in a “blue state” then what he’s doing now?
I might be wrong. Christie might be up for re-election next November. If that is indeed the correct date, getting the storm response right was even more urgent for Governor Coronary-in-waiting.
The scenes in NJ and NY are horrific. And so many still without power, clean water, etc. I read on Bloomberg about a 2011 study done for the MTA and they estimated damages at around $50 billion for something of this scale and that is just the MTA infrastructure. Money hasn’t much meaning when people are dying and losing their homes but it gives a scale for the enormity of the physical damage.
I don’t know much about New Jersey, but I hope it gives a chuckle to someone when I say the first thing that pops into my head is after all these years Joe Piscopo.
So Jeff Goldberg in the Atlantic is speculating that the REAL reason Christie is making BFF with Obama is that he’s hoping to win affection from Springsteen. And, as Clarence sang, “I kid you not”.
New Orleans native, Katrina survivor here BooMan and I feel you completely on this.
This song is what still gets me through the first few years after I evacuated to DFW and I still listen to it when I’m homesick for NOLA. A little backstory, my aunt lived in the same neighborhood as Fats Dominos. Google his home to see what it used to look like. Back in da day, I thought that was the gaudiest thing ever. But now after it was rebuilt, I look on that house as a symbol that NOLA and my old neighborhood could rebuild with the resources and help that was needed.
Anyway,
Fats Domino – Walking Through New Orleans.
http://youtu.be/SjX1vFk384s
All this to say that yes it does get better BooMan.
At the very least, thanks to lessons learned from Katrina, what happens now with Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath will be infinitely better.
It gets better!
Ditto iamh31. I used to live in Galveston, and Ike in 2008 essentially destroyed much of Galveston. It was just as heartbreaking as the scenes in Jersey this week.
My housemate when I lived there was back this year, and says it’s recovered almost completely. After Katrina, every president for a generation is going to remember that it’s politically toxic to fuck up a hurricane response. Even someone like Romney, last seen scrambling to make people forget his desire to inflict the same privatization scamming on FEMA he’d like to inflict on everything else.
I appreciate Christie’s genuine concern for the welfare of his state before and after Sandy. I can even put in the background my observation that politicians and especially Republicans need to personally be affected by suffering to be persuaded of the need for relief.
But let’s stop reacting emotionally for a minute, because that’s what I find really dangerous as the normal response. “I don’t care at all about the election.” ?! (He said this not in the context of politics, but in the context of how they would be conducted!) It’s worse if it’s true. We shouldn’t have needed 911 to teach us what’s wrong with this but even so, did we learn nothing from it?
A crisis happens. Some people need to focus on survival. Some need to focus on helping those individuals survive. Some need to make sure that the society as a whole doesn’t fall apart. Christie belongs to that last group. If he’s suffering from PTSD (and I don’t write that facetiously), he can refer the reporter to his Secretary of State.
His response is of a kind to his blowing up at people who ask him questions that he doesn’t like. Pure impulsiveness, emotionality. Not characteristics I want in a political leader.
People think that crises are a time to let go. It’s the opposite. When you’re bleeding out, is it OK or responsible for your doctor to freak out?
Being a rural Okie, I’m about as far as you can get, mentally and culturally, from Jersey and from Christie. But being an Okie, I can relate 100% to that sense of shock and desolation that comes when forces totally beyond your control destroy everything you care about. Out here it tends to be tornadoes. It tends to happen in minutes not days and the damage is usually very local. But the sense of utter helplessness and the need for support is universal.
What I know about Christie is the corporate media narrative, which paints him as a fat, self-centered prick. But what I saw was genuine, heartfelt concern for his people and his state, and genuine, heartfelt gratitude for the rapid helpful response from a president who obviously shares his concern.
What I read into those press conferences is that Romney is toast. When those who’ve been identified as your “surrogates” and your “strongest supporters” pull a Clark Gable Gone With the Wind on you, you have officially become irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Romney says he feels their pain, and knows what it’s like to cleanup their mess because once in high school he was part of a group that had to clean up a football field the day after a game.
This week Romney has shrunk from a shrill liar to irrelevant.
I have been a poll watcher at the early voting locations every day since saturday, and then I’m so tired when I get home I watch a tv show and fall asleep. It’s hard work watching our county clerk making it really hard for people to vote, creating a series of hurdles that are nearly impossible to clear by election day.
As a result, I am completely out of touch with what’s been going on with the campaign. (Which is both a blessing and a curse.)
So I have no idea whether what you said about romney and a football field after game day is something he actually said or if it’s snark, because that’s how shallow and out of touch romney is.
God help us if he really said that. How did this disaster of a human being ever get this far?
It’s true.
Lawrence O’Donnell did such a great job of telling the story in his “Last Word” commentary segment last night.
Worth the watch. He ends with the football field anecdote. It’s 5 1/2 minutes. The football story is at about 4:15, but watch the whole thing.
Thank you for that! By the halfway mark I was feeling really embarrassed for Romney, and about 2/3 of the way through I found myself putting my hands over my face because it was so painful to watch someone humiliate himself like that.
Wow. Just wow.
There’s so much to choose from, I really can’t decide what is the worst part. Buying 5,000 dollars of fake donations so people can fake donate to get into his fake non-political political event? Some volunteer must have pressed play on some random video player that we didn’t have hooked up and ready to go?
I could go on, but I have to get ready to go to NJ so I can help by cleaning my lane.
From afar, the worst thing Gov. Christie has done is make a spectacle of himself. Turning down Federal money is certainly his right as Governor, and he has his constituency to answer to. I’ve seen clips of how he treats constituents and it’s appalling. But, having grown up 3 hours outside the “CITY” in upstate New York, that could be said of most of the inhabitants of that metropolitan area.
As a dairy country farm boy, I personally got quite fed up with the in-your-face attitude of the folks from the City and Jersey, but that’s life for you and I understood why they are like that. It’s a way of life jostling about in a crowd of millions, and humans respond instinctively in the long run to invasions of personal space. And the Shore is the only outlet for many of them to get some stress release.
My question is, do you really think he is sincere? I just sat through jury duty on a 2 week tobacco trial, I’m not sure I can take anything a former U.S. Attorney says without some degree of cynicism…
Yeah, I think he is sincere. Do you think only Democrats love New Orleans and what it stood for and its culture? Do you think only Democrats love going to the beach in Jersey or care about the people who live and make their living there?
These are barrier islands that have been completely battered and realigned. It’s the Ninth Ward writ large. Except, the Ninth Ward was an impoverished corner of the city not the crown jewel of the state.
Christie is a bully, Jersey bully, sure, but still a bully. As usual Jon Stewart sums it up.
“Christie, of course, is an outspoken Mitt Romney supporter, who has said before that President Obama is fumbling around in the dark, looking for the “light-switch of leadership.” During Sandy, though, Christie was not short of praise for the president’s leadership and partnership in responding to the storm.”
“Yeah, I guess he found that fucking light switch, huh?” Stewart said.
Did he climb down from Bullshit Mountain and is now trying to do his job? Yes. A real political leader? Never.
“Did he climb down from Bullshit Mountain and is now trying to do his job? Yes. A real political leader? Never.”
And time will only tell if he will ascend to its summit once again. I’m not holding my breath…his track record as a blowhard who will do what ideology dictates is not promising.
Didn’t Christie veto the will of the NJ people regarding gay rights? I can understand his right to veto the will of his government, he’s the boss, but where does he get off telling the population to get bent?
Nevertheless, he has now revealed a solid mensch at his core, and deserves genuine admiration for it.
So sorry for all the deep personal loss that prompted this, but good on Christie for shooting straight in response to the whirlwind. Few in his profession could have done it as well.
Like Red Green said, “We’re all in this together. I’m pullin’ for ya.”