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The Mayor of New York City

I was born in August of 1964

A Jewish-American prince, a Leo, a Brooklyn boy

It was less than a year after JFK was murdered

It was the year The Civil Rights Act finally passed

It was the year Beatlemania came to America

My mother claims she dressed me like John-John Kennedy

My mother loved the Kennedys , politically and personally

Even though she expresses anger, today, because JFK betrayed Jackie by sleeping with Marilyn Monroe

Though I lived only the first five years of my life in Brooklyn

It followed me round for the rest of my life

My grandparents lived and died there

My best friend still lives there

And my first love, my kindergarten playmate Teri, still haunts me to this day

The bond I had with Teri I expected to intensify

But over the years, just the opposite happened

Not merely because my family moved to New Rochelle, NY

And because I could not carry on a conversation with the poor girl

Throughout my adolescence

I do not know what to say to ANY of the girls

Even though I was falling for them left and right

I was a shy, ignorant bore as a teenager, a bitter angry ignorant bore

Obsessed mainly with sports and romantic fantasies

And it didn’t help that my mother developed mental illness…

I blamed it on Jewish suburban living

Which wash, phony, hypercompetitive and snobbish

My mother in my eyes was a victim

And I came to view all women as potentially following in her footsteps

To this day, Leo the lion, tries to overprotect women

From both themselves and the world

And sometime it freaks them out

In any case, after three disastrous high school years

During which my only friends were

John Lennon, Pete Townshend and other musical rebels

And after being waitlisted and ultimately rejected by Cornell university, my first school choice

I had no idea what I was going to do next

I was tempted to follow in the footsteps of my favorite writer, Ernest Hemingway

And become a globetrotting journalist and novelist

But I lacked Hemingway’s nerve

So I followed my parents instructions and went back to school

I studied at Boston University (alumni: Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Stern, Bill O’Reilly; controversial university president:  John R. Silber)

Where I absorbed British literature and Marxist philosophy

And general bohemian though and living

My first roommate was  African American

And he convinced me to stop crying in my soup

And start changing myself and the world, if I didn’t like the way things were going

He was a writer, an artist, a singer, an engineering student turned English major

And he was rational and sensible to the core

My suburban Jewish suite mates ; liked to make racist jokes about him

When he wasn’t in the room

But he helped save my soul and  I owe him to this day.

My bohemian friends and I worked on an independent literary/political journal of opinion

And a discussion group to which we invited the university’s best professors

By the time I graduated, I had plans to be a journalist, an English professor , the Mayor of New York City

And eventually the first socialist President of the United States

But I failed miserably in my attempts to secure meaningful, substantial work

And I became paralyzed with fear and self-doubt

And then my own mental illness set in…

I turned to reading about Martin Luther King and returned to Judaism for mental and spiritual comfort

They helped me from turning violent, but it didn’t keep me out of trouble

Homelessness, a homeless shelter

And hospitalizations followed

Abut eventually this big mouth writer activist

Was called upon to organize the tenants in his mental health supportive housing building in Manhattan

Then I discovered Fountain House, a mental health clubhouse

And returned to work and something resembling normal life

But sometimes  I wonder

Can I be the first mentally ill Mayor of New York City?

Hey, it’s not like my competition is worthier of the job than I am!

Craig R, Bayer, 8/27/16

Tom Seaver

I’m currently reading a book by sportswriter Steve Travers entitled “Tom Seaver: 
The Last Icon”. Obviously I haven’t finished it: I’m only halfway through, but I 
still feel compelled to write a review of it. 

Tom Seaver is my sports idol, more important to me than my favorite Yankee, 
Graig Nettles, and even my Jewish homeboy, Sandy Koufax.

 
I have always been impressed by Seaver’s intelligence, articulateness, knowledge 
of pitching and baseball, in general, and of, course, his skills as a pitcher. 
To this day, I aspire to be like him in various aspects of my life, even though 
I’m not a ballplayer (in Little League I used to imitate his windup, but I 
didn’t have the arm strength to blow hitters away!) 

In any case, in this particular book, the reader learns that Tom Seaver, though 
he has led a charmed life (handsome, charming, good with the ladies in his 
youth, and married to his beautiful wife, Nancy, for God know how long) was 
hardly a shoo-in to be a Hall of Fame baseball player. Though Seaver has loved 
baseball since his youth, he did not impress himself or baseball scouts with his 
abilities, but his toughness, determination, work ethic, stint in the Marines 
and spurt of physical growth in his college years helped Seaver increase his 
strength and skills, which made him one of the most dominant and consistent 
pitchers to ever play the game. 

Seaver is also identified as a leader. His brilliance on the mound and his 
willingness to push his fellow teammates to become less lackadaisical and more 
perfectionist, helped turn the sad sack New York Mets from loveable losers into 
an “Amazin’” franchise.

 
In the book, Travers reveals how Seaver and his fellow Mets pitcher, Jerry 
Koosman used to try to outdo each other in order to raise the level of their 
individual play: who could secure the most strikeouts, give up the fewest runs 
or hits, etc.…This competitive intensity affected all the Mets players and 
combined with the Mets famous good luck, helped win the Mets the World Series in 
1969. 

The lesson of this book is that if you maintain your drive and determination, 
you have the potential to create great opportunities for yourself in sports and 
in life, and combined with good fortune, you may just achieve spectacular 
things.

 
I miss George Thomas “Tom Terrific” Seaver. He’s still an inspiration to me, 
even though I have had to develop idols in other facets of life like Karl Marx, 
Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon and Martin Luther King, Jr. 
In fact, I now aspire to be the Tom Seaver of political activism. 

Craig R. Bayer, 5/17/16 

Liberal Renaissance

 

I’ll always be a moral and political fighter, but the time has come to stop being an extreme personality. And so I reinvent myself as a liberal Jew and Democrat.

It was anger that led me to utilize Marxism to purify the world and it’s been Marxism that has been keeping me excessively angry for thirty two years.

Every time I detected moral imperfection in myself ,other people, capitalism, religion, nationalism, etc., I got all worked up and found myself in conflict with one or more, indeed, millions more people and it was just plain dangerous—to myself and others.

If I truly want to be a man of peace and progress, I need to let capitalism stand: it’s a tremendous burden to wake up each day and think one has to start an economic and social revolution and it makes me angry when I meet any form of resistance.

I know that there is plenty of anger in conventional politics, too, but traditional liberals and conservatives are angry at fewer people and things, thus they have more restraint and self-control.

As for Judaism, it seems to me that serious Jews understand the value in both conservatism and liberalism and also understand that progress does not happen overnight: it can be very slow and sometimes even seems impossible, depending on the situation.

Jews, for instance, believe that anti-Semitism is probably a permanent phenomenon, whereas Craig the Marxist believed that he could both reason and bully it out of people and do so in a short period of time. It’s time to be a Jewish realist and acknowledge that Jews are going to be scapegoats perhaps forever.

You have to continue fighting racism, bigotry, poverty, economic exploitation and violence, but you have to do so with patience and restraint. And you have to act democratically, whereas radicals at both ends of the political spectrum, tend to harbor a desire to hit people over the head.

I just hope that I can make a sincere transition to liberalism, because in past years, I tried, but failed. But I think that I am finally mentally and spiritually tired of fighting lonely battles. It’s time to be reborn!

Craig R. Bayer, 4/12/16