The lead item in the metro briefing column in today's New York Times is an Associated Press dispatch that reports, "The annual Heisman Trophy award ceremony could disappear unless money is found to help its sponsor and dozens of other nonprofit groups hurt by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Senator Charles E. Schumer said yesterday. He urged the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to approve a $225 million plan to help the nonprofits. The money would come from a $2 billion block grant allocated by Congress. The Downtown Athletic Club, which is three blocks from ground zero, sponsors the award ceremony, but closed on Sept. 11 and has since suffered losses averaging $500,000 a month, $1.5 million in December alone, the senator said. It faces permanent closing."
It might have been useful for the Times to have noted here that the Downtown Athletic Club's financial woes far predate the September 11 attack. The Times itself reported on October 4, 1998, that "the club's financial affairs are in utter disarray. (It is in bankruptcy and owes the city more than $3 million in back taxes.)" The Times said in 1998 that "The decline of the Downtown Athletic Club has been mirrored at private clubs across New York City, many of which have been forced to close in recent years by changing fashions, economics and their own inefficiency."
The Downtown Athletic Club exists for the use of those who can afford a membership that costs $1,800 a year, the Times reported back in 1998. The idea that the hardworking taxpayers of this country ought to spring for a bailout of the place under the rubric of September 11 disaster relief is just galling. The club's Web site boasts that members include "captains of industry, people in politics, national sports figures." That 1998 Times article reports that the place has a 70-foot-long bar, and that Ivan Boesky used to keep a locker there. Given all the other competing claims on federal tax dollars -- including the claims of the individuals who pay the taxes -- why should any of those dollars go to assure that captains of industry don't have to exercise at a public health club or drink at a bar with the masses?
Even the club's own president, Jim Corcoran, doesn't buy the AP-Times-Schumer claim that "the award ceremony could disappear." Newsday reports today Mr. Corcoran "insisted, however, that even if the club has to close permanently, the venerable trophy would still be awarded each year in New York. 'I think the people deserve it and I think that's what we would do,' Corcoran said."
The Times, which only days ago devoted an inordinate amount of space to Senator Schumer's living conditions in Washington, seems unwilling to subject the senator's policy proposals to anything approaching a similar level of scrutiny.
Fundamental Goal: A front-page quote in today's New York Times from Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy specialist at the Brookings Institution, declares, "Throughout the nuclear age, the fundamental goal has been to prevent the use of nuclear weapons." The Times lets that slide without even a nod at the possibility that there might have been a more fundamental goal, like defending America, freedom and democracy from Fascism and Communism.