Ouch

Joseph Tiraco

There's an interesting play at the Producer's Club, 358 West 44th Street, Manhattan. The Playwright, Roxanne Alese, a lifelong resident of Western Queens, directed her own work, Panacea, about a drug dealer and his hapless clientele. One scene takes place in a topless nightclub. A buxom dominex mistress, black leather clad except for naked white breasts, drags, in dog collar and chain, her groveling slave across the stage, whipping him into submission. While the audience leaned forward to view the concupiscent debauchery, I saw only the political connotation, the Republican Party stinging their voters.

Nowhere in New York State has there been a more loyal block of Republican voters then the homeowners of Western Queens. Of New York City's seven Republican Council members (compared to 44 Democrats) two, Stabile and Ognibene, in overlapping districts, make Western Queens a Republican stronghold. Talk about loyalty, when the time came to introduce the deadly cancer causing agent, Home Depot into some New York City neighborhood, the Giuliani administration chose the solidly Republican constituency of Stabile & Maltese to take the blows, Ozone Park.

Home Depot has the distinction of being America's least desirable neighbor, with their all night noise, traffic, high crime rate and box store indecorum; their coming is a sign of a neighborhood's going, property values fall, and those who can afford to move away, generally do so quickly, taking substantial losses.

The rich grow rich because they are nimble-witted, and will move out of harms way long before subjecting their families to degraded lifestyles, leaving the phlegmatic middle class to sort through the ashes.

Home Depot establishments in rural areas could be genuine community assets, but their concept of retailing has to be drastically revisited for the stores to peacefully coexist in New York City - not rustic Americana, but the most populous, most vigorous, most sophisticated society on earth. Home Depot, a world class, monolithic, extremely aggressive corporation, is recklessly expansionist; the only viable check to their power is government regulation or negotiated agreements - probably obtained through the courts. But here again, government is indispensable. It's ridiculous to assume private individuals would, or should, bear the burden to sort out the complexities of city zoning and planning and make new policy; city growth by farrago is a method for madness. This function is currently in the hands of the Republicans.

Home Depot's strategy to defer the day of reckoning is the best that money can buy: keep government friendly through political patronage, mask controversial activities from the public, overwhelm individual community challenges. In our lawsuit against Home Depot, they submitted almost 1,000 pages of legal documents generated by a small army of New York City's largest and most influential law firms, at today's cost of legal representation, $5,000 just to read the documents, never mind the cost to digest, and answer point by point. To fight this monoglut, we sent an underfunded sole practitioner.

To illustrate the strategy of their masking unpleasant business from the public eye, search the Internet (go to Altavista, or Yahoo or some other powerful search engine - type in "Home Depot") and try to find anything controversial about Home Depot. Let me know how you make out?

Governmentwise, the secrecy is legendary surrounding the E.D.C., the Republican controlled organ of government that's attempting to force these elephantine square pegs into round holes.

Once Home Depot became firmly established in the city using "as of right" status granted to them by the Republican administration, they followed their natural tendency for unrestrained expansion - causing commensurate havoc in communities stripped naked of legal recourse. Enter George Pataki brimming his war chest with campaign contributions.

When the mostly Democratic Party voters of Central Brooklyn were threatened with heavy traffic from a proposed shopping mall, the Republican governor came to their rescue refusing to sell state owned land needed to build the mall. Why inconvenience the Democrats of Brooklyn when the Republicans of Western Queens will dutifully fall on their swords and the governor can collect his money? So George instead sold a piece of state owned land to Home Depot at Forest Park, giving them the green light to build in the safe and secure Republican enclave of Ognibene & Maltese. (Or did he sell them a defacto operating franchise, a tacit agreement with the Democrats to allow the stores in Republican neighborhoods?) To add a kicker, when the soil was diagnosed as heavily contaminated by toxic waste, threatening the health and welfare of Glendale and Forest Hills residents, the governor winked and ordered a mere cursory cleanup to keep faith with his campaign contributors (or, his franchisees if you like conspiracies); homeowners within the sphere of Ognibenean Republicianism were to grovel, and accept the blows without a whimper, and we had expected greatness of the man.

For Sale signs are popping up like mushrooms in a wide circle around ground zero, as the affluent fly before the turmoil of Home Depot's arrival. My neighbor of 25 years, a die-hard Republican voter who cried when Nixon resigned, and now mad as hell over the Home Depot debacle, put his two family home up for sale, then discovered a glut of homes on the Forest Hills market. He was offered substantially less then its pre Home Depot value - a shocking loss of $200,000. There are several thousand homeowners here facing the same dilemma (including myself.) Without question, the Republican Party has severely injured this middle class neighborhood, its own bulwark in Queens County, shrouding the future with financial instability, gloom and doubt. Were this a natural disaster, Forest Hills and Glendale would be entitled to Federal Disaster Relief; only the wreckage is not an act of God, but the result of disastrous Republican policies.

Roxanne Alese glimpsed a society careening out of control. Some need a crutch to bear the vicissitudes of life, others, insecure and frightened of life, see salvation in a strong hand, and long to be dominated, humiliated, and flayed; to grovel at the feet of a master, and yield their hard earned money and possessions in servitude. While slavish obeisance to the voluptuous beauty Seven of Nine might occasion a frisson (resistance being futile) somehow, the specter of Guiliani and Pataki appearing very domineering in black leather string bikinis and stomping my body with Gestapo marching boots fails to ignite the same torrid passion, then again, there's an awful lot of Republican voters all atingle at the thought of George and Rudy administering a sharp spanking. Cheer up, or should I say, pants down, election time is right around the corner.

October 1, 1998