The Political Song and Dance
Tonight in New York City I saw something I never once saw at Cornell University. Here, three thousand people rose up in unison, unprompted, to sing Cornell's alma mater. We did it because the CD that was playing in the background featured some Cornell group or other, and they came to singing the alma mater, and apparently the natural thing to do was to stand and sing along. It was something to behold.
But of course, we were not hanging around the Beacon Theatre to listen to mediocre piped-in music. We were, in fact, hanging around waiting for Walt LaFeber to come out and give his last public lecture. I had the insight that, with a full house and people being turned away at the door, we Americans yearn for something of the academic in our daily lives. We are not getting it. Smart professionals may know everything about stock pricing, or podiatry, or the layout of New York's pipelines, but we have very little opportunity for lifelong general education. It is a real lack in our society today.
Dr. LaFeber spoke about the spread of democracy in the early years of this country, about Woodrow Wilson's ideal of making the world safe for democracy, and about the later revival of Wilsonian rhetoric in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. He spoke well and comfortably, telling us about how Thomas "Inalienable Rights" Jefferson refused to grant the vote to New Orleans after making the Louisiana Purchase, because he feared that the region (full of foreigners and criminals from the states) didn't have the right culture and institutions to allow democracy to work yet. Jefferson instituted martial law in New Orleans instead, and said that when enough Americans moved there, it could become a territory and then a full state. This is exactly what happened.
Dr. LaFeber told us about how Wilson and his crowd of idealistic liberals set out to give self-determination to the world. It worked, for a bit, in Hungary--but then the Hungarians voted in a communist, and Wilson realized he had little choice but to go in and persuade the people (using food as a bribe) to vote in someone more amenable to our point of view. It never worked at all in Mexico, Wilson's first international relations test, leading instead to a powder keg and a narrowly averted war over California and the southwest after we sent troops into Mexico City to influence the vote (worried, you see, that the duly elected government was planning on nationalizing Mexico's oil). Exporting democracy and self-determination didn't work in Eastern Europe, after the Russian Revolution. It emphatically didn't work in China, where we let Japan invade (for very practical reasons having to do with the League of Nations); indeed, after this last debacle, many of the young Americans who had accompanied Wilson on his European tour to make the world safe for democracy resigned. Wilsonianism faded.
It came back 50 years later, though, according to Dr. LaFeber. There weren't many things Nixon and Carter agreed on, but exporting democracy was one of 'em. Wilson became everybody's favorite President, and a new rhetoric of republicanism took root in American civil discourse.
And that is where LaFeber's story leaves off. He never once mentioned Bush, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Afghanistan, or 9/11. He didn't talk about the price of gasoline or offer moral judgments. But this is, nonetheless, the story he was telling us: the founding fathers didn't think democracy was easily exportable, Wilson proved the fact, and from the 60's onwards we've been diligently ignoring the lessons of history.
It is convenient to be an historian. Dr. LaFeber can stand up there and tell us that we don't know how, or when, or if, to give democracy to someone else (though we did once have a codified route to statehood and democratic self-governance in this country--a thing LaFeber failed to mention but which I think may be richly suggestive). He doesn't need to have an alternative to democracy-building, though, to offer his assessment (and to offer it in fine form). Dr. LaFeber is a student of American diplomatic history; I wonder what he suggests we do when our neighbor to the south descends into chaos, or when a trading partner half the world away stops exporting to us. Does he recommend the glorious isolation advocated by Washington? But that leads to questions of moral culpability for non-intervention (consider the case of World War II), and may not be viable anyway (as in the trading-partner case, when we have a real need for the foreign goods). Does he recommend a return instead to the colonial model advocated in Wilson's time by Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Italy? But, while democracy may not be practicable, surely subjugation is more problematic still. Perhaps we should be explicit about installing a friendly government--but that, too, has its dark side.
This is not to say that I don't take Dr. LaFeber's point; I personally tend to privilege stable governments over democratic ones (though all else being equal I like democracy especially, both for its deference to
vox populi and for its inherent stability when compared with, say, monarchy, where the whim of a single individual is enough to dramatically change things). I only want to point out the difficulties of practicing politics, and the relative ease of studying it.
Nonetheless, Dr. LaFeber is right that we rewrite history all the time--and that it's all the easier to do so when we smudge over the details, and that historians have an important role to play in trying to resurrect those details once again so that the lessons of the past are not lost to the future. After all, it's easy to call Wilson one's favorite president for theoretical reasons, and it's all the easier when never looking at the more detailed successes and failures of his administration. Or, to put it a different way, it might seem natural to stand up and sing songs from one's bright college days when one is 55, but it's worth remembering that we never would have sung them at 20 (when we were instead busy thinking about all the ways that college could be just a bit better).
Collapse
Easter Island has no trees.
This is striking because Easter Island was once a forested, tropical paradise. The island was home to native varieties of the giant palm, the tree daisy, the toromiro, and numerous kinds of shrubs, among other plant and tree species. All are now extinct.
Easter Island has no people. This is striking because the island does have buildings, quarries, trash heaps, tools, and monuments (the famous
moai, Easter-island's giant statues), which could only have been left by people. Indeed, high-end estimates suggest that, at its peak, Easter's population may have reached 30,000.
Jared Diamond, Pulitzer-prize winner and author of
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, suggests that the lack of trees, and the subsequent lack of people on Easter Island, is no coincidence. After all, he says, it wasn't like a natural disaster uprooted all the trees, leaving the population stranded without food, fuel, or the raw materials for boat-making and composting for their fields. No, what happened on Easter Island was this: the Easter Islanders cut down all the trees. Every single one of them.
That's it. In what turned out to be an act of societal suicide, this group of rational-actors, people who had managed roadways and agriculture, a strictly hierarchical society, and complex mining operations, cut down every single tree until they were living on a barren rock. Without the fruits of their trees and without the ability to build fishing boats out of wood, and with increasingly poor soil due to erosion and lack of organic compost, the Easter Islanders had nothing to eat. In desperation, they turned to cannibalism. Then they starved to death.
Jared Diamond doesn't think the Easter Islanders were particularly bad environmental managers. After all, he points out, lots of other Pacific Islanders chopped down trees and raised livestock and set up a complex agrarian society and burned forests to make room for fields. Many of those people are still around today, on Hawaii and elsewhere, practicing those same kinds of farming techniques. The difference is that, based on everything from average rainfall to (the lack of) soil-renewing fallout from the Central Asian dust cloud, Easter Island is one of the places most susceptible to deforestation in the world and certainly in the South Pacific. It wasn't that the Easter Islanders were unusually thickheaded or stupid, then, or that they were particularly unlucky in the lifestyle decisions that they made. Rather, according to Diamond, it was Easter Island which was unusual and particularly fragile environmentally. The Easter Islanders just had the misfortune of living there.
But let us consider the story of the Greenland Norse. Unlike the Easter Islanders, perhaps, these were people we could really understand: they raised sheep, goats, and cattle; they had churches and a grand cathedral with stained glass windows and an eighty-foot-tall bell tower (as well as bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, jewelry, and even a bishop from the mainland); they regularly tithed ten percent to the Roman Catholic Church; they grew hay in the summer and built state-of-the-art barns to keep their cattle warm in the winter; they had pets. They had well-developed civil procedures, too: two people wanting to marry had to read the banns out for three consecutive Sundays beforehand (lest there be objections), for example, and there was a required number of witnesses at marriage ceremonies. If someone treated you unfairly, stole your goods, or threw around their power just a bit too much, one could always take a civil suit to the Greenland Assembly.
In one way, though, the Greenland Norse are like the Easter Islanders, and that is that there aren't any of them left. They chopped down their forests for fuel, they dug up their turf to build well-insulated homes (often with six-foot thick turf walls, meaning that a typical home destroyed about ten acres of grassland), they grazed their sheep and cattle on the grass that was left, and, ultimately, they starved to death. In one particularly harsh winter, the Norse at Gardar ate every single one of their remaining cattle down to only the toe bones. They ate the calves (ensuring in the process that they would be unable to regrow the herd in the spring). In the end, they ate their dogs. When they had nothing left to eat, they died.
We might be tempted to chalk the disappearance of the Greenland Norse up to one very harsh winter and to leave it at that, much like the way we chalked up the disappearance of the Easter Islanders almost exclusively to environmental factors beyond their control. To be sure, the Norse could not have known that they would be entering the Little Ice Age any more than the Islanders, on arrival at Easter, could have known that it would take burned or chopped trees twice as long to regrow on their Island as it would on neighboring Islands. But Diamond is at great pains to prove that he is not an environmental determinist (as the subtitle of his book should serve to show us), and the situation of the Greenland Norse is far more complicated than that of the isolated Easter Islanders. After all, at the same time that they lived in Greenland, that island was home to many Inuit people--and the Inuit survived the harsh winters and still survive today. What was it, Jared Diamond wants to know, that caused the well-formed Norse society to collapse so quickly that valuable wooden objects remain strewn about on the floors of their ruined houses, while their Inuit neighbors continue to thrive centuries later?
What it is, we discover quickly, is that the Norse were too attached to Europe to be attached to Greenland in a reasonable (some would say "sane") way. They spent their summers hunting Walruses, valued on the mainland for their ivory, and traded these for luxury items and theological needs that reaffirmed their European culture; Diamond points out that they might otherwise have spent these summers trading for wood on Labrador, like the Inuit, thereby alleviating the environmental pressures on their part of Greenland. The Norse valued cattle, too, just like their ancestors in Norway, and rich chiefs spent great time and effort raising their cattle and growing hay to sustain the herds through the winter. For some reason, they had a taboo against eating fish: one researcher sifted through 35,000 bones from the garbage of a Norse farm and found only two fish bones (and other researchers have had similar results). The Christian Norse looked on the "pagan" Inuit with scorn and considered their own ways to be far superior.
And the Norse were right; many of their ways
were far superior. The Norse had iron tools, a more diverse potential food supply than the Inuit, and ready European trading partners. But the Norse came to Greenland with a strong sense of culture that kept them from adopting many of the more rational ways of the Inuit, too; the Norse never learned to hunt the ringed seal, plentiful in wintertime (when the hayless cattle were starving), they never learned to build igloos, preferring instead European-style wooden houses even in a land where ice was plentiful and wood was not, and they never hunted whales. In a land where one can pluck fish bare-handed from riverbeds, they chose never to eat fish. Summers that could have been spent preparing for the winter were indeed spent haying--but also looking for European luxury items and gathering necessary tithes, and trading their goods away for stained glass and silver chalices. Winters were spent using up their stores even as seals and fish were out in abundance. In the end, the Greenland Norse starved to death in a land of plenty.
This is a sad story, but also a baffling one as we look back on it from the perspective of hindsight. Why on earth wouldn't the Norse fish? Why would they spend so much time and effort hunting walruses, but never think about hunting the ringed seals that were so plentiful in winter? Why would they privilege beef, the least hardy of their animals and the least land-efficient as well, over their much hardier and efficient goats?
Diamond distinguishes between cultural and biological survival, and he is right to do so. The Norse didn't just want to continue to exist as
people; rather, they wanted to continue to exist as
Norse. Rich Norsemen keep cattle. They pay tithes. They keep wooden crucifixes in their houses and make sure they announce the banns for three consecutive Sundays before marrying, in a church, in front of the right number of witnesses. They are not pagans, and they don't hunt seals or live in iceboxes or do any of those backwards pagan things. These considerations are
important, Diamond rightly points out. The Greenland Norse were not trying to commit biological suicide, but were rather trying--desperately--for cultural continuation and for differentiation from the Inuit.
In this, to the end, they succeeded. In one harsh winter, the Greenland Norse all starved to death--but they never did eat fish, and they never did take down the roofbeams from their churches in order to carve out hunting boats. That would be un-Christian. It might be Inuit. It would, at any rate, be un-Norse.
After all, without one's values, without one's cultural inheritance, what is there left to die for?
What's happening to high school?
Okay, friends o' the blogosphere, I need a little input. Turns out I'm getting a whole bunch of hits on my
Picture of Dorian Grey post. Turns out a whole bunch of them are coming from domains with names like www.prepschooloruniversity.edu. Turns out I got an angry email from a teacher letting me know in no uncertain terms that his students are copying pieces of my post and turning it in as their own work. "You are the kind of person that makes cheating easy," he says. "Someone who cares about literature as much as you seem to should make an effort to chastise cheaters, not help them."
I take your point, Mr. Jackson. But I enjoy literature myself, and as much as I want to live in a world where high school students think about the things that they read, I also want to live in a world where
non-students think and talk about what they read. Moreover, I think through ideas by developing them as I write; I'm not one of those people who outlines an essay before writing it. (If I could do THAT, then why would I need to write the darned thing? For me, being forced to put my ideas down on paper (or computer screens, as the case may be) helps me to clarify my thoughts and, indeed, leads me to new thoughts. Once I've figured out what it is that I have to say about something (by writing out my thoughts on the topic), I can go back and add the stupid introductory bit that essentially says, "What I will show in this paper is X." I don't know what X
is until I've written it. That's why having a blog suits me so well: it allows me to think through interesting bits of my life.)
I might also point out that my one or two eminently stealable posts aren't even drops in the bucket when it comes to the lucrative and enormous industry of internet plagiarizing.
Still, I do feel bad, and I do suspect that not all teachers are nearly as proactive, or as computer-literate, as the annoyed Mr. Jackson. So here's the dilemma, blogophiles. Do I take down my posts on books? Do I refrain from writing them in the first place? Do I keep them up just because I happen to like posting them? Does it really matter anyhow? And if you're here looking for one of those posts in the first place, it might even be interesting to consider why that's okay, and under what academic circumstances stealing my ideas could be justified. Is there anything to the whatever-it-takes-to-get-ahead mentality that could make me feel better about aiding and abetting those who stand by it?
I'd love it if visitors to this blog would take a second to offer their thoughts on this post in particular.
the first line says it all
religious practice... making the world safe for the sanely religious... eating together as elemental, Communion as not... this Christianity as an empty religion... the problem of mystery: its unbelievability and its desirability... I like hymns
RLC asks me why I "did the whole Lent thing." (I gave up sweets, desserts, mochas from Starbucks, that sort of thing.) He wonders why I'd go to church on Easter, much less Good Friday. He points out, correctly, that I don't really seem to believe in God and that I don't have a pre-existing religious community here in New York to which I might be bound by ties of friendship, kinship, or local tradition (as I might be bound to certain congregations in Florida and Connecticut, for example). Moreover, he wonders if the broader ties of tradition that do exist provide any real good to me or the world generally; he points out that the Lord's prayer may be a valuable but not unique memory exercise if there is no Lord in the first place, while Communion without belief is an empty gesture characterized by cardboard-like wafers and poor-quality wine. Other, more do-gooder aspects of the church are in no way inherently religious, he maintains: you don't need any kind of religious faith to work at a soup kitchen.
RLC's reading of my religiosity is quite accurate. Ask me if there's a God and my answer is something like "I don't know, but I sincerely doubt it, and at any rate the question has little practical influence on my life." This is not to say, of course, that I am not concerned about doing good in the world. It's not even to say that I don't care about going to church every now and again or about knowing the Bible as an important cultural reference. Simply, it's to say that the reasons that I think we ought to care about acting morally and about maintaining many of our religious traditions don't have that much to do with the carrot and stick of a heavenly or hellish afterlife, or even of God's pleasure and displeasure.
But then, back to RC's question, why do the whole Lent thing? Or the whole religious thing more generally?
My responses are really of two very different types: a personal, "but I like it" response, and a broader, making-the-world-safe-for-the-sanely-religious response. I also sometimes think about the preservation of human story and history, though I don't think that this itself could ever be enough to successfully urge me into personal religious practice.
Let's take these things in order. In the first place, and about Lent specifically, I think the institution of the Lenten fast is a good one. There is, of course, the fact that we often choose to give up something which is bad for us (or which we think of as bad for us): candy, alcohol, cigarettes, soap operas. That constitutes a very real and practical good. More important to me, though, is the exercise of will that is inherent in the choice to do without (or to actively do) something (like exercising, talking to your kid more often, something like that). For me, an awful lot of the appeal of Lent is the ability to say: "Sure, I love Breyer's ice cream, and I eat it often because I have the luxury of sufficient income, sufficient metabolism, and sufficient exercise to make that not unreasonable. But just because I have ice cream every few days doesn't mean I
must have ice cream every few days." A time-delineated personal sacrifice gives us a ready-made mechanism for reminding ourselves to want to do that which we do do. I want to eat ice cream because I enjoy it, not because I'm in the habit of it, or because I don't feel like cooking supper, or because I can't help myself. The fact that I can give it up for a month and a half makes that more obvious. (For the record, unlike some, I don't give up for Lent that which I mean to give up permanently. I want to reinforce in myself the idea that I do what I choose, not the idea that I can wait until Lent to stop doing things I shouldn't be doing in the first place. Moreover, I don't mean to give up things I enjoy forever; rather, I mean to question whether I actually enjoy them, or whether I am doing them out of habit or instinct or addiction or something. Let me tell you, I enjoy Breyer's ice cream. Ergo, I am now pleased to be eating it again.)
More broadly but still in the "but I like it" category: I like hymns, I love evensong services and I think some liturgical music is absolutely fantastic, and I am strongly moved by many religious spaces. I go to church, on the rare occasions when I do, for deeply-held aesthetic reasons. I do not think that this is a bad thing.
There is another reason why I go to church and, moreover, why I like to
present myself as a person who sometimes does so. It's the reason RLC knows I was celebrating Lent in the first place. That is, I want this country to be a place in which normal, sane, doubt-filled, non-ideological people might self-identify as Christian, with all the history and rhetoric that entails--and, conversely, I want it to be a world in which people who self-identify as Christian might aptly be described as normal, sane, non-ideological, and even doubt-filled. I fear that the Evangelical movement has cornered the market on the church in America. Certainly Evangelicals have every right to be a PART of American Christianity, but any religious movement ought to be tempered by questions from within, because without those voices one can't help but be ideological (simply because religion is founded on a premise of absolute morality and truth). I don't like the politics of God that characterize "Christianity" in America today. At the same time, though, I fear that much of the political left has become decidedly anti-religious as a backlash to the megachurch movement (instead of as a considered position). It seems like the more education one has, the more likely one is to forget the very real good things that are linked to religious practice--from touchy-feely good feelings to very real incentives to help others or to not steal even when no one is watching. Moreover, by coopting the term "Christian," Evangelical Christians may have successfully built their movement, but it also makes it too easy for atheists to paint all Christians with a single brush--which usually comes out as something like "they're all crazy" or even "they're all bad for America." Not true--so I don't like the anti-God politics, either. Making it clear that I am Christian (by upbringing and familial background, at least--certainly I'm not Muslim or Jewish or Bah'ai or Hindu or anything else), that I occasionally go to church (I'm a stereotypical Christmas-and-Easter type), that I'm celebrating Lent, and that I know the Bible stories--but also making it clear through my actions that this is a cultural and religious identification and not a political one--places me firmly in the middle ground. I want this shrinking middle ground to continue to exist, to mediate between the crazies on both sides of the religious divide. I think that those of us who think that Christianity can be real, good, yet neither all-consuming in life nor absolutely determinative of our morality, have an obligation to live a life that points to that fact. It would be great if we as a nation could care deeply about morality and character without automatically being assumed to care deeply about, say, the Bush presidency. There is a space for such sentiment within religion (any religion), and it would be nice if some Christians would choose to occupy it on occasion.
All that said, it's hard not to feel that traditional Protestant Christianity is an empty faith in America today. There's not much spiritual sustenance in a sparsely populated church, and this is all the more true when religion is made devoid of mystery as seems to be
de rigeur these days. Frankly, I'd rather have the arcana and doubt its worth than have the religion say nothing but believe it.
Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the sacrament of Communion. For Protestants, even those who believe doubtlessly, the sacrament is nothing more than a symbol. A priest stands up there, says some stuff in English, you go up, eat a wafer and drink some wine, and then you reflect on being a part of the spiritual body of the church. It's a ritual with important significance theologically, but very little significance
experientially. Compare this with the Jewish tradition of praying over the bread and wine, washing before eating, and breaking the silence with the food (an obvious comparison at Easter, to me, because of the fact that the last supper was a Passover meal). The contrast is startling. There is something elemental about eating together, and that thing is absent from the "bread" and wine of Communion. Moreover, the linguistic shift (into Hebrew for the prayers) unites Jews everywhere and makes you a part of a larger religious body in a very obvious way, while the subsequent shared meal means that those who pray together over the bread later talk to each other and enjoy each other's company--meaning that, in other words, they actually DO form a community. Taking your wafer and getting the hell off the kneeling pad so somebody else can get on is not actually very communal, and can't hold a candle to a real meal when it comes to the practical interpenetration of religious tradition and real life.
you see the weirdest things...
Yesterday night, I was riding the subway home from GreenDrinks (a place to meet environmentally conscious Manhattanites who like to hit on girls who work for hedge funds, perhaps because, to the uninitiated, "hedge" sounds more like a green leafy thing in your front yard than like a bold statement along the lines of "I work for the man") when what did I see but a man wearing bright purple alligator-skin (snakeskin?) shoes. This, I tell you, was a bit odd.
It was not as odd as the man carrying a 47-pound tin of lard, however. (The can looked roughly like the one pictured, though it was newer and the label was differently colored.) I was shocked! Who knew they even
made such things anymore? Or ever?
And why, I had to ask myself, 47 pounds? That's an awful lot to carry around. Moreover, and this is what really got me, it's not a nice round number. Hell, 47? It's prime, at least, I grant you that. But why not 45 or 50?
I've done a bit of research on this question (no kidding), and it seems that historically lard was sold in 50 pound tins. Indeed, lard is
presently sold in 50 pound tins as well (just check out the "quantity discount items" at that link!). This makes sense to me. If you're going to sell large quantities of lard, at least have the human decency to do it in some sort of increment divisible by 5. Whoever it is that makes the 47-pound tin-o'-lard is out of step with all the cool kids and their round 50 pounds of lard.
In completely unrelated news, while researching lard I stumbled across
a 1904 Supreme Court case that found, among other things, that a licensed margarine dealer could not buy the particularly gruesome concoction of, and in perhaps the strangest ever reference to a Supreme Court decision I quote, "oleo oil, 20 pounds; natural lard, 30 pounds; creamery butter, 50 pounds; milk and cream, 30 pounds; common salt, 7 pounds" while paying a mere 1/4 cent-per-pound tax. Rather, he was required to pay the full Congressionally-mandated tax of 10-cents-per-pound. Reactions: 1. That smarmy oleomargarine dealer! He should have known better. (This actually WAS the government's winning position.) 2. Congress passed a federal tax on margarine, and, moreover, taxed it at two separate rates depending upon its color??? How nitpicky can you get? 3. And in his defence the margarine dealer argued that taxes deprive him of his property without due process of law? Over 10 cents per pound? Perhaps he'd have done better to argue about property taxes, hrmmm? 4. Also, there are margarine dealers looking to turn a quick buck by buying cheap and selling at full markup?
The things I learn in this city.
nobody ever reads the small print anyway
As those of us who occasionally go away for the weekend can tell you, LaGuardia airport is not connected to the subway system. One can, of course, take a cab there, but that's expensive. A friend asks me, "Why on earth isn't LaGuardia hooked up to public transport???"
News Flash! New York City has a public bus system! For those of you who would rather not spend $45 on a cab from Manhattan to the airport, might I recommend the M-60? This fine bus has all the latest features, including a wheelchair lift, fabric-covered seating, a system for requesting your stop, and even windows. It makes stops at all the coolest places, too, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metro North Station on 125th Street, and the Apollo Theater. And for all those of you who think New York public transportation isn't
real public transportation unless it includes a stint underground, this fine bus also stops mere feet from the entrance points to the 1, 2/3, A/C, B/D, 4/5/6, and N/W subway lines (to which you can transfer for free). Surely this fine offer is too good to be true.
But no! It can be yours for just four easy payments of $0.50! That's right, folks. For just two American dollars, you too can enjoy spectacular views from the Triborough Bridge. But wait, there's more! If you order now, you'll also be able to ride all the way to Morningside Heights, where the bus makes a stop at lovely Morningside Park. You can disembark here or continue south-westward until the end of the line at 105th street.
But that's not all! The M-60 runs not only on the west side of Manhattan, but also on the east side and in the middle too. At the other end of this fine bus's Manhattan route, then, you'll find yourself in East Harlem, where you can go shopping at the PathMark supermarket and get your hair braided on the street corner. As an added bonus, you're sure to derive great pleasure out of smirking at those who are paying the outrageous pump prices at the BP station across the street from the empanada stand just this side of the East River. Continue in this eastwardly direction, and you'll enjoy the rebellious thrill that comes with travelling a toll road
without paying any toll! You'll then have a brief view of Astoria before reaching, finally, the parking lots and terminals of New York's second-finest airport. View the Northwest/Delta terminal up close! Check out the AA baggage claim area! Board an airplane, if it suits your fancy and your budget.
But remember folks, this offer is being made for a limited time only and is not available in stores. But if you act before the 2008 fare hike, you too could take advantage of the M-60 bus route with easy subway connection and free bus-route-map add-on for just
four easy payments of $0.50, or a $2 lump sum. And we'll toss in a bus driver for free!* And unwitty ads on the side of the bus to boot!
But we don't take checks or money orders, so be sure to have your MetroCard or exact change ready at boarding. Call soon! Act fast! If you don't, you might just miss your plane.
*Bus driver only free for tourists. Though bus driver appears to be free to those who live or work in New York City, this is only an illusion and should not be confused with fact. Free bus driver offer contingent upon the City of New York taxation structure and continued negotiations between the MTA and the transit union. This offer can be changed or revoked at any time without notice, much like an MTA employee's health care plan. Bus driver not available for personal use and actually a human being, so it would be nice if you'd talk to him sometimes. Assaulting a bus driver is a felony and also just plain mean, so don't do it. And other small print which doesn't matter, since nobody ever reads the small print anyway.
