During my recent hiatus, I learned the perils of not watching television and Pennsylvania politics all in one fell swoop.
Heading for the Planet Ohio on Friday -- three days after the storm -- I didn't give a thought to the road conditions. Until, that is, I made it to Route 80. The entire roadway was covered in a packed three or four inches of ice and snow, making travel difficult. Some on the road thought nothing of maintaining the speed limit, but your cautious correspondent kept it down to a modest 25 or thirty mph. I was the slowest one on the road, other fellow travellers zooming past me at a good forty or fifty mph. After a half an hour of grumbling about the patent incompetence of PennDot, I suddenly noticed a state police cruiser, lights ablaze (they do love their flashing lights, don't they?) in my rear view mirror. With no where to pull over, and scant other traffic around me, I simply stopped where I was.
A man, who looked all of 17 swaggered towards me, "Look, I KNOW I wasn't speeding", I told him. "What do you think you are doing?" was his reply. Now, I knew he was trying to say something else, but apparently all of his verbal skills were sufficiently underdeveloped that he was unable to actually say what he meant. But, I wasn't going to play that game, so I answered him -- "Umm, driving?." He wasn't amused. He told me that Route 80 was closed and was incredulous when I told him I wasn't aware of that -- "It's all over the news", says he. When I told him that that morning's New York Times didn't mention a word about it, he told me it was on TV all night. Informed that I didn't watch TV, he asked "Didn't you notice there wasn't any other traffic?". Now, that was a particularly brilliant come back, since we could both see about a dozen vehicles on the road ahead of me and on the other side of the median. Exhausted by his cleverness, I told him where I was headed and asked how far the roadway was closed. He told me all the way to Ohio and ordered me off at the next exit -- warning that the was going to radio West and "If they see you on the road again . . . ." (he never finished the sentence -- those low verbal skills I guessed).
Getting off at the next exit, I was astounded to see that the state highway which ran adjacent to Route 80 was cleared of ice and snow -- including the shoulders. I motored along that route at, or above, the speed limit, for about thirty miles. At that point, Route 80 was clear and filled with traffic. Reentering the highway, I realized that the asshole who stopped me either knew he was lying to me or didn't care. Either way, I decided that he was emblematic of the general incompetence of Pennsylvania governance. He had no thought of the public as customer, as employer, and likely spent more time admiring his swagger in front of a full-length mirror than he did in things like, oh, say, reading, which might help him with those verbal skills.
So off to Ohio I went, and returned. Yesterday I got to visit Scran'en and Wilkesberry, the home office of graft, and it showed. The local papers had the most recent incompetent Wilkesberry Mayor
praising the road crews. A week after the storm and Main Street was still not cleared, the main side streets were single lanes, cars were still under mounds of snow, and the Mayor thought his road crews had done a praiseworthy job. When one
Wilkesberry councilman stated the obvious -- "We could have done better", the idiot Mayor told him to shut up.
In NEPA, jobs and contracts are blatantly awarded to those in the know, to campaign contributors, to the juiced and connected. This is true at every level of government, including the Courts, the DA's office, City and County, as well as in journalism, public schools, and the business world up there. As a result, you get a single snowfall
closing local schools for a week, City roads impassable a week later, and elected, appointed, and hired officials wondering what everyone is complaining about. As a result, you get a bunch of buffoons working for a bunch of morons running their courts, their cities, their schools, their businesses into mediocrity, or worse.
And they wonder why the Northeast is steadily losing population, why most of downtown Wilkesberry has been empty since forever.
(Photo Credit: Wilkes-Barre Times Leader/Van Orden)
UPDATE 2/22/07: Wadditelya? From today's Wilkes-Barre Times Leader:
HAZLETON ��� Although city officials have heard a multitude of complaints about the way snow was plowed and removed after last week���s storm, the only member of the public to speak at Wednesday���s city council meeting questioned who was removing snow in the city.
Local government watchdog Dee Deakos asked Mayor Lou Barletta if a relative of his works for the Triple K trucking company ��� a private contractor the city hired to remove snow after the storm. (More)
