Running for Your Life: The Jock Resistance -- A Modest Proposal

An essay describes a “resistance” force of high-ranking aides busily trying to constrain, steer, manipulate, coddle or simply ignore the directives of a president who seems at times to be quite unhinged and barely in control of his own White House.

Call it the Jock Resistance.

Emboldened by the Quiet Resistance anonymous appeal for order in the White House comes this plea from a senior official at the Ninth Street YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

The poignantly argued position by the anonymous senior official is just the smoking gun needed to alert the citizens of New York to the inordinate time and energy lost to the efficient governance of our fair city by the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who, the official advises us, spends more time working out at the Y than working on any crucial topic of municipal business.

The anonymous senior official of the Y points out that the mayor exchanges points of view with personal trainers and Park Slope co-op workers alike, all of whom are of like mind and correct opinions, while dodging calls for meetings with such important figures as the current head of the New York City Transit Authority, Andy Byford.

Subways now run as inefficiently as they have since the bad old days of the early ’80s. Maybe Byford should get himself to a treadmill.

What’s more, the mayor refuses to wholeheartedly endorse congestion pricing, or alter his own 12-mile treks from Gracie Mansion to the gym, while seeing himself as a policy leader in fighting climate change.

Surely, as the New York Times did with the White House mole, the newspaper will find it fit to print the anonymous appeal for order, as honestly portrayed by this senior official at the Park Slope Y.

The person in question is a liberal democrat bereft over the squandering of this opportunity for real change from the office of an avowed progressive to show the nation that a liberal path to political and social order is one that is characterized by compassion and brotherhood, bristling with promise that the 99 percent (Remember them?) need not always see their wee-lamb gains gobbled up by giant sheepholders, the kings and queens who will countenance no real threat to the consolidation of their insatiable appetites to acquire more and more wealth and influence, as if society is a simple parlor game of elites, conservatives and liberals.

In a just world, the Times will publish the anonymous letter from the Park Slope Y senior official about the mayor’s obsession with workouts while hope-and-change work goes undone.

Besides, Times, the decision to lead the “Quiet Resistance” has been boffo for paper sales – and advertising.

So bring it on. Citizens must learn of the “Jock Resistance.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait