Internal Exile On The Upper Left Side

We were hardly surprised when the State Department announced last week that the news ticker that twinkled across the outside of the US diplomatic mission on Havana's Malecon drive had been dismantled. It was an obvious attempt to appease the communist dictatorship there. The 5-foot-tall ticker had streamed news bulletins, political statements, and messages pointing out that Cuba's misery was caused by its Stalinist overlords. President Bush had enraged the tyrants when he put it up 3 years ago. As soon as the Democrats swept in, the time had come to pander and kowtow to the Marxists who machinegun people trying to escape the island prison.

Here on the Upper Left Side, we have our own Malecon Drive, also known as Broadway. Folks in these parts are as happy with the Cuban regime as with our own newly minted socialist government.

How often have we heard of the wonders of Cuban education, housing, and health care from returning teachers spending a few weeks of their a sabbatical there! Raising questions about the legitimacy of the dictatorship is considered politically incorrect and a sign of dangerously reactionary tendencies. The last time someone touted the wonders of Castrocare, upon returning from his summer camp, we posed a hypothetical scenario: Suppose that while you were blissfully exploring the Castro brothers' tropical paradise, a desperate fugitive - an artist, a writer, a scientist, an educator - threw himself at your feet and pleaded for assistance to escape persecution. Would you help?

There was an awkward pause with words to the effect that it was more complicated than it appeared and that the state there pays for everything and so the prospective escapee would owe the beneficent bureaucrats a great deal of money, etc.

Anyway, Malecon Drive North runs past Fairway, the popular green grocer and purveyor of coffee, cheese, and organic produce. We were waiting on line there one evening, leaning on a top-heavy shopping cart, trying to guess the professions of our neighbors: That one's a politically committed artist, that one's an environmental activist, that one's a bitter bluestocking, that one's an inept, mixed-up psychiatrist, that one's a radical professor, that one's an unapologetic anarchist, etc.

We were happily taking it all in when an amiable gentleman chatted us up about the prospects of the Obama presidency. We told him that McCain and Palin had our vote. Now the gentleman was a vintage intellectual, a man of manners and breeding, but he seemed most surprised and said that in his year and a half of residency on the Upper West Side, this was the first time that he'd encountered a living, breathing, walking, talking Republican.

It's common knowledge that the West Side is renowned for its political engagement, liberalism, and enthusiasm for diversity of every kind. We're supposed to have more sensitive, concerned, proud, supportive, caring, committed, unconventional, inclusive, open, funny but irreverent, environmentally conscious, residents than anywhere else. The gentleman's observations said otherwise.

Fortunately, those few hardy souls of a conservative bent have learned to live with this distressing situation. We're in the kind of internal exile experienced by captives of the Soviet Union before the fall of the Iron Curtain. We smile and nod agreeably to our radicalized fellow West Siders, but, inside, we roll our eyes and dream of God, family, and country, of the nation founded by the Pilgrims, forged by the greatest generation in the American Revolution, and strengthened through the trials and tribulations of civil and world war.

We've learned not to react to the provocations and hypocrisy of limousine liberals, penthouse communists, race hustlers, man-haters, antireligious bigots, and America bashers.

How well we recall two women walking their dogs on Broadway, a block north of Fairway. McCain and Palin were ahead by 6 points and pulling away. It was before the Wall Street crash handed the White House, the nation's banks and the automotive industry, for starters, to the least qualified candidate in history. One woman shouted: "McCain needs to be put in a hospital!" The other replied: "He ought to have a stroke!" to which the first woman - ever the sensitive West Sider - added: "Well, at least a minor stroke." Yes, when the Democrats swept in, they were singing "Kumbaya" on the street where I live, but don't be deceived.

Up on Central Park West, not long ago, I listened to someone deriding Sarah Palin: "She's so stupid, she can't even remember the last book she read!"

Denunciations of Mrs. Palin in these parts amount to a religious test. The mere mention of the former governor is sure to provoke hostility. Yet liberals are supposed to be inclusive, open-minded, and tolerant. Where will it end? Let's hazard a guess.

An amateur astronomer in Australia just discovered a new scar on Jupiter the size of the Earth. Scientists think that it was hit by an object from 50 to a 100 miles across, the first since the Shoemaker-Levy comet was captured on camera giving the largest planet in our solar system a black eye, 15 years ago. This latest collision prompted another round of questions about the dangers of earth-crossing bolides - meteors, comets, and asteroids that could cause an extinction-level event.

Scientists think that Jupiter's massive gravitational pull may protect the Earth from the majority of collisions by acting as a vacuum cleaner, however, there may be instances when instead of Hoovering up a comet, it could redirect it and in a roundhouse punch, send it screaming into our atmosphere. There's an analogy here.

The time will come when there'll be a cataclysmic backlash against the brainwashed promoters of Obamamania, and they know it. Part of the reason that liberals are so touchy about any criticism of the president is because they realize that his shield is tissue thin. One of my favorite books is by a geologist, Prof. Walter Alvarez, whose father, Luis W. Alvarez, was himself a physicist and Nobel laureate. Dr. Alvarez's book, "T-Rex and the Crater of Doom" is about an asteroid the size of Manhattan that plowed into Chicxulub on the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, 65 million years. The Cretaceous period stopped in Cancun. The ascent of humankind began. The dinosaurs evolved and the saurian scoundrels scampered off into the sunset as pigeons. May Jupiter protect us from those right wing extremists! Kumbaya.