More Rent Reg

Rent regulation is crucial in this city (“Rent Spike Denied,” April 26), and was instituted to prevent profiteering by landlords in a market short on available apartments. That it protects the majority whose median income is $37,000/year is important—but it would be better if more tenants, not fewer, had those protections.

James Harmon knew three apartments in the building he inherited were subject to rent regulation even then. He nonetheless bought out his brother’s share. Rent regulation—like the fire, health and zoning regulations from which he benefits—were part of the scene from the get-go.

—Sue Susman

Use Your Horse Sense

My country horses (“Horses Can’t Cope,” April 26) have never been in an air-conditioned or heated building; they don’t have sprinklers in the field, nor do they have fan-waving slave boys to feed them bonbons while they lounge in their hay beds and fret over the next week’s weather forecast. They are coping just fine living pretty much as horses have for a long, long time—only without the fear of being dinner to a saber-toothed tiger.

Horses grow a thicker coat in winter and shed it in spring; come summer, they sweat. They accept weather without questions or self-pity. So stop projecting. When horses are not visible near Central Park, it does not mean that they are now riding around in air-conditioned taxicabs.

—Sarah Bellepeppa

Don’t Cut Tobacco Program

The proposed $5 million cut to the New York Tobacco Control Program by Gov. Cuomo and the state Senate yields troubling news for those who have hoped to prevent tobacco addiction in our nation. Smoking tobacco continues to kill 1,200 people—daily. For every smoker killed by his or her addiction, the tobacco industry is creating two new smokers under the age of 26, a trend that should alarm everyone.

Big Tobacco knows how to peddle its products to unsuspecting youth. More than a million dollars an hour is spent to market tobacco products in this country. Nearly 1.5 million kids will try their first cigarette this year, with 75 percent of these children continuing to smoke into adulthood even if they intend to quit within the next few years.

Unfortunately, despite public support for funding to the New York Tobacco Control Program, our legislators in Albany have routinely reduced funding. In the past four years, New York has cut funding for tobacco prevention programs by 52 percent, from $85.5 million to $41.4 million, and now Gov. Cuomo and the state Senate want to cut more. New York currently spends less than 2 cents of every dollar in tobacco tax and settlement revenue to fight tobacco use.

I encourage all New Yorkers to visit www.yourethecure.org to learn more about ways to stop the continued cuts to the NY Tobacco Control Program.

—Dr. Susanna Horvath

Chair, American Heart Association’s New York City Advocacy Committee

It’s hard on my nerves and gives me nightmares. But like a rubbernecker who gawks at a highway accident, I am unable to look away.

I am addicted to Fox News; hooked on O’Reilly, Beck and the Obama-bashing Fox and Friends morning show. But my drug of choice is Sean Hannity.

A promo for Hannity’s book, Conservative Victory, summarizes his politics: “Hannity surveys all the major Obama players… He exposes their resulting campaign to dismantle the American free-market system and forfeit our national sovereignty.” His nightly show is a parade of Rush Limbaugh wannabes peddling books and Republican presidential aspirants, pandering to Tea Party types.

What differentiates Hannity from his snarling Fox counterparts is that his rants have a good-natured delivery. His congenial demeanor makes me want to punch his nose and say, “Wipe that smile off your face.”

Most of what I hear on Hannity’s show is lies and misrepresentations; double-talk and hyperbole. While watching him, I feel like kicking in my flat-screen, yet I am too enthralled to even change the channel.

You might wonder why a hardcore Democrat like myself is drawn to such toxic talk. I have come up with several theories: as a columnist I want to keep up with the latest journalistic trends; being a liberal, I want to know my enemy; I have a subconscious crush on Sarah Palin. But none of these reasons ring true.

I asked my psychologist-friend, Amy, what she thought.

“The anger you feel enlivens you,” she said. “That’s why some people like to feel pain—it makes them feel alive. Fox does that for you.”

While it is disquieting to think that my television viewing habits are akin to sadomasochism, Amy has a point. Even as it drives me nuts, Fox produces a surge of emotion that gives me a high.

Some of my politically minded friends watch MSNBC, Fox’s left-leaning competitor. But Keith Olberman, Ed Schultz and the network’s other Democratic cheerleaders do nothing to raise my blood pressure. Listening to opinions I mostly agree with is like watching a 3-D movie without the glasses: flat and boring.

I am also turned off by the network’s partisanship. While Fox’s emotionally charged rhetoric sucks me in, the same tone in liberal clothing makes me wince.

As a graduate-degree-educated, New Yorker-reading, PBS-watching (when I’m not watching Fox) NPR-listening liberal, I want the side of the political divide I identify with to be defined by rational, intelligent discourse. So when I hear my fellow travelers hyperventilating about the right (Keith Olberman on Sen. Scott Brown: a “homophobic, racist, reactionary… tea-bagging supporter of violence against women…”), it makes me embarrassed to wear my “YES WE CAN” T-shirt.

Despite my complaints about MSNBC, watching the network causes me no stress. Not so with Fox. I recently had a nightmare in which President Obama was overthrown in a coup. The plotters replaced him with George W. Bush, who was wearing a Caesar-like crown. The dream was so realistic that when I woke up I nervously turned on MSNBC to see if Morning Joe had been replaced by Joe the Plumber.

To preserve my mental health, I have taken a break from Hannity and his cohorts. To ease my withdrawal, I have been listening to sports-talk radio. Although the Yankee-haters (Richard from Queens: “Yankee fans are such hypocrites. They’re up in arms when Jeter gets plunked by Beckett, but said nothing when Clemens hit Piazza”) give me nightmares, it is less disturbing to have bad dreams about the Red Sox and bats, than red states
and pitchforks.

Ben Krull is a lawyer and essayist who lives on the Upper East Side.

Alcoholics Anonymous members are warned to keep out of harm’s way—bars, drinking situations and friends—but what can members of Tiger’s group do in a society that has become so inordinately, unabashedly, ubiquitously and yes, iniquitously sexualized? And why are clergy so silent?

Author and feminist Francine du Plessix Gray’s 1978 commencement address at Barnard College warned graduates that “the massive eroticizing of society meant the slow death of friendship.” My then year-old column worried even more about the resulting death of familyship already weakened by the preoccupation with friends and “the couple.”

Infinitely more should be said about that, and by high-profile individuals like Tiger Woods. No matter the reason he “came out,” incredible good could come out of this most destructive obsession, from which Sigmund Freud may well have suffered. Erik Erikson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning psychoanalyst, stressed the need for social relationships, not sexual ones. His grandson, Christopher, a West Side Spirit editor, spoke of visiting his grandfather in a nursing home, where Erik was unfortunately unable to write about these end-of-life conditions, or his grandson’s rock band music, which was not much about familial and other platonic affections.

Music once was about those affections. Read The Rise of Selfishness in America (a turn-off title), by music historian and social critic James Lincoln Collier. Collier also wrote books for children, but all age groups should read this one, ideally aloud and together while playing Louis Armstrong’s “A Wonderful World.” Most wonderfully, this recording was used in a “welcome, new baby” musical greeting card, which I once sent to a new daddy, former Council Member Andrew Eristoff, and a few years later to a new mama, Council Member Jessica Lappin. It could be a wonderful world with more music and lyrics like that—and with a return to a feminist world, where women like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug marched against pornography and gratuitous entertainment violence, which was once also assailed by First and Second Ladies Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore. Some women scrawled “Off Our Backs!” on “woman as sex object” Calvin Klein bus shelter ads. “Woman as sex object has got to go!” was a familiar chant. Well, most unfortunately it went in the wrong direction, evidenced even in the skating costumes at the Olympics.

Let’s hear more about Sexaholics Anonymous, which can be reached toll-free at 866-424-8777 or via email at
salco@sa.org. Compulsive Solutions
(other addictions included) is at 925-932-0201. Locally, Alcoholics Anonymous at 212-647-1680, where many in today’s news should go—like some high-profile people charged with domestic violence, and two of New York’s Bravest, who were busted in a Bay Ridge bar brawl.

If the mayor attended some open AA meetings, he’d not delay hiking the alcohol tax that the Health Department says would help reduce the alarming incidence of under-age drinking and deaths related to alcohol, car accidents and cirrhosis. Of course, it’s not only youth, car accidents or cirrhosis, which too many in power just don’t get. And, I dare to say it, we should tax high-speed private bikers in this high density city that has great, but financially strapped, public transit. Public transit is by far the safest way to go. Traffic tragedies cause great human suffering and are enormously costly to government coffers. Shouldn’t all the above be included in universal health care? It can be done if enough of us try. 

dewingbetter@aol.com