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02/29/2008
On being a good union man instead of a rammy-headed bastard
Mass transit hysteria,
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I usually don't do local issues. I find them infuriating, hard to grasp, contemptible and inaccessible. But, like anyone in this town who's ever carelessly tossed their garbage out of a car window, I have an opinion on Pittsburgh's vagina envy.
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I'm talking about the "Small Dig," you dig? The "Big Dig" that swallowed Boston is now infamous in it's cost overruns, crap design and its shoddy shittiness. So what does Pittsburgh do? It emulates Boston but on a much smaller scale in terms of necessity and about the same scale in cluelessness.
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I'm a union guy, and the union guy way is to welcome work regardless of the consequences, so if city council wants to built an anti-gravity mass transportation system, which some members actually did want to build, or gambling casinos, which it is doing despite very active underworld involvement, I'm supposed to jump up and down and shout whippee.
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I remember a nuclear issue in my early years as an union electrician apprentice. Next door to our very classy union meeting room, at the time being held in a rather large ballroom of the Pittsburgh Hilton, there was a conference discussing atomic power, pros and cons.
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It was possibly one of those public meetings that the powers that be hold in order to accuse the opposition of not attending when the shit hits the fan, or in this case when the radioactive particle hits the blood cell.
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Anyway, our beady eyed, ruddy complected, alcohol breathed Business Agent was in high dudgeon over this adjacent meeting. I suppose he though that they were going to put the brakes on the entire nuclear industry then and there and he was driving the car. Or, the IBEW was driving the car, or labor was about to hit a stop sign and because he never stopped at a stop sign in his whole friggin life he resented it or maybe he was just drunk.
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He adjourned the meeting, to be resumed next door where we would actively assert our right to be disruptive and abusive union goons. I went home instead.
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I had become friendly with one of the International's (IBEW's) big shot's sons. We were on jobs together several times over the years and he was later to become my apprentice and confided to me that; the International had dispatched speakers to that next door meeting to speak on behalf of the nuclear industry and because WE disrupted it, they never got a chance to speak. Ha, Ha on that rammy headed bastard, the International was pissed.
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While, I too, welcome work in our depressed, ex-prosperous, ex-forge of the universe town, my son is a budding product of union nepotism, I would rather spend those billions on something that we need, not something that Steeler Chairman, Dan Rooney and his army of rammy headed, drunken fans think is a cool idea. You see, the tunnel runs from downtown, under the river, to the Steeler's front gate.
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In one hundred years, or so, when they finally, if ever, extend that tunnel and the miniature railroad that it's to house, to the North Hills of Pittsburgh and rather that take their George Jetson flying cars to work, the good people of the North Hills opt for mass transit, I may regret I wrote this but I doubt it. Gene
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