TMV regulars know that I love New Jersey. This is because I have frittered away countless summer days on its lovely beaches when I could have been baiting its jack-booted Turnpike troopers or being an extra on “The Sopranos.”
It is in the spirit of comity and good humor that I present this Valentine to the Garden State on this the 223rd anniversary of the day it entered the Union:
New Jersey joined the fledgling United States of America early on, unanimously ratifying the Constitution a few days after Delaware and then Pennsylvania. That may well be the last time since that there has been unanimity about anything to do with the Garden State. Except for widespread agreement that it is one weird place.
Say “Iowa� and you think of cornfields. Say “Texas� and you think of the Alamo. Say “Florida� and you think of Disney World. But say “New Jersey� and you think of . . . Smelly oil refineries? Toll roads? The 1932 Lindberg kidnapping? Tony Soprano?
New Jersey, you see, has an identity crisis that borders on schizophrenia. Situated between New York City and Philadelphia, its residents exhibit traits of both cities and their cultures. But the rich Bruce Springsteen songbook notwithstanding, NJ has no culture of its own to speak of. Worse yet, with the exception of a modest homegrown public television network, its citizens must rely on TV broadcasts from other places where identity and culture run deep.
Oh, the horror!
Singer-songwriter John Gorka nicely sums up this peculiar mindset in the closing lines of “I’m From New Jersey,� which is properly sung with a mournful languidness that borders on narcolepsy:
I’m from New Jersey. It’s not like Texas.
There is no mystery, I can’t pretend.
I’m from New Jersey, it’s like Ohio,
But even more so. Imagine that.
I know which exit, and where I’m bound,
Tolls on the Parkway they will slow you down.
New Jersey people, they will surprise you,
Cause they’re not expected to do too much.
They will try harder, they may go further,
They never think that they are good enough.
I’m from New Jersey, I don’t expect too much.
If the world ended today I would adjust.
Can’t you just feel the pain?
New Jersey’s license plates were long adorned with “The Garden Stateâ€? slogan because of the state’s many small truck farms, which grew the most delicious tomatoes anywhere, including the succulently flavorful and disease-resistant Rutgers variety. If you wanted the best for that pasta sauce, salad or sandwich, you asked for “New Jersey tomatoes, please.â€?
You can still find the occasional basket of locally-grown tomatoes at a roadside vegetable stand, but most of the truck farms have been plowed under to make way for the state’s current bumper crop – sprawl.
Sprawl is the unplanned and uncontrolled spread of development from cities to practically everywhere else. Only developers and construction companies (and politicians on the take) want sprawl, but nobody seems to be able to stop it. So it’s not for nothing (pronounced nuttin by gen-u-wine residents) that New Jersey is the most intensely populated of the 50 states.
Speakin of nuttin, the state may lack an identity, but it has a vernacular all its own:
A shoobie is a tourist, any carbonated beverage is a coke, everything is measured by blocks, to hook up is to have sex, route is a term never heard (it’s always take “9,� not “Route 9�), a pie is a pizza, the beach is the shore, to travel there is to go down the shore, and a sub is a sandwich made with various meats, cheeses, vegetables and (alas) out-of-state tomatoes.
Back back to our story . . .
The aforementioned tomato was named for New Jersey’s premier public institution of higher education – Rutgers University.
That brings up another big image problem.
New Jersey is the only state without an eponymous university. The sports teams (and more rarely the academic prowess) of Pennsylvania State University, University of Washington, Kansas State, Ole Miss, and so on and so forth, are magnets for state pride, bragging rights, paraphernalia from baseball caps to t-shirts to beer mugs, as well as lots of sports betting, most of it illegal.
When was the last time you heard someone say, “I went to Rutgers!â€? (Okay, that did change a bit this fall with the university’s most excellent football season.)
It gets worse . . .
Michael Stickings’ musings the other day on same-sex marriage and stem cell research notwithstanding, even the most cursory Google search reveals that virtually everything written about New Jersey has to do with official corruption.
In fact, New Jersey is the second most corrupt state in the union after Louisiana (no surprise there), according to political scientist Larry Sabato, who co-authored an entire book about New Jersey’s love affair with the bribe.
This often falls under the heading of “Pay to Play,â€? shorthand for an undeniable fact of New Jersey life: If you want to do business with the government at any level, you have to grease politicians’ palms, usually in the form of . . . er, “campaign contributions.”
The reason that smash-and-grab politics is so widespread is simple. There is an enormous hole in the New Jersey power structure between the top — a governor with enormous clout — and the welter of county, township and municipal governments at the bottom with enormous clout. There simply is nothing in between, unless you include the Pine Barrens.
When former U.S. Senator Jon Corzine was sworn in as governor back in January, the keynote of his inaugural address was a pledge to enact sweeping ethics reform. If that sounded familiar to jaded New Jerseyans, it’s because his predecessors since time immemorial had said the same thing. The reaction to Corzine’s clarion call was widespread hilarity to the point of pants-wetting.
Corzine’s honeymoon as governor has been the shortest in memory.
Early on, he took a well-deserved drubbing for suggesting that one way to deal with spiking gasoline prices would be to allow motorists to pump their own gas. New Jersey, you see, is one of only two states without self-service gas stations. This fact notwithstanding, it also has pretty much the lowest gas prices in the region and sometime the entire country, so the guv’s suggestion that thousands of gas station workers be laid off to pare a penny or two from the price of Regular Unleaded went over about as well as a radiation scare at one of the state’s notoriously-unreliable nuclear power plants.
By the way, Corzine replaced Acting Gov. Richard Codey, who had become governor after the sudden resignation of James McGreevey in 2004 because of an extramarital affair with a male aide whom he had appointed to head of the state’s department of homeland security despite his not having a lick of experience. (McGreevey’s come-back attempt hit a bump on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in September when he acknowledged that his first sexual encounter with the aide occured while his wife was in the hospital recovering from the Caesarean delivery of their baby.)
The rot is not confined to politics.
Most people see New Jersey through a car windshield on the New Jersey Turnpike. That makes the State Police troopers who patrol that toll road goodwill ambassadors of a sort. What sort? The sort that will stop you because of your skin color.
Meanwhile, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), the state’s premier health-care institution, has become the first university to be overseen by a federal monitor because of a scheme through which state and federal governments were bilked out of millions in improper Medicaid payments. It also was revealed that the politically-wired university administration had let an astonishing $700 million in no-bid contracts and hired new employees based not on their qualifications but a secret code identifying their political patron — if they were connected enough to have one.
And worse yet . . .
In a rare fit of self-reflection, New Jersey changed its slogan from “The Garden State� to “Come See For Yourself.�
You don’t have to be a UMDNJ brain surgeon to know that it cost zillions of dollars to redo all those “Welcome to New Jersey” state line signs, official stationery and, of course, license plates at a time when there is a huge state budget deficit. But wait! It turns out that West Virginia used the very same slogan a while back, so as a New Jersey tourism official solemnly declared, “We are proceeding without the slogan.”
I’ve got an idea.
How about “The Kick Me State?�