Upstate embarrassment

I know some people who are really proud of their hometowns. They come from places with good schools, winning pro sports teams, fun shopping districts. Places that get written up in the New York Times with headlines like “An Ocean View” or “Organic Heaven”.

I envy them.

I'm from Coxsackie, New York.




Yes, that’s right. Coxsackie. (Which, for the record, is pronouned “cook-SOCK-eeeeee”. But I know that you-all will continue to prounce it that other way, which is fine, because it deserves it.)

Coxsackie is a sort of typical small town—pretty white, pretty blue-collar, pretty farms with pretty cows. In certain ways, it's quite nice, emblematic of a way of life that’s near-extinct in our dangerous, modern times… in a people-don’t-lock-their-doors, everyone-knows-your-name kind of way.

In other ways…. well, check this.

You rarely see anything even remotely related to Coxsackie in the mainstream press, but sometimes you’ll see little tidbits about upstate life in general that feature the surrounding counties, and such. So I was very excited when today, in the New York Times “Most Emailed” list, I saw this headline:

In Tiny Courts of N.Y., Abuses of Law and Power

Scandalous! And, having grown up in (and surrounded by) little towns with teeny-tiny courts just like that, I was really interested to see exactly what was being said. So, within a couple of minutes, I’m keenly following all the details about abuses of power by local judges who are too inexperienced/ignorant/mean to care about upholding the law. Anecdotally speaking, a lot of this stuff is pretty horrifying. But I’m glad to see that they’ve taken time to get to the root of the problem:

“For the nearly 75 percent of justices who are not lawyers, the only initial training is six days of state-administered classes, followed by a true-or-false test so rudimentary that the official who runs it said only one candidate since 1999 had failed. A sample question for the justices: “Town and village justices must maintain dignity, order and decorum in their courtrooms” — true or false?”

Well, that explains a lot! Obviously, there need to be some higher standards than an idiotic true-false test to determine who holds a position in small town courts. But seriously, someone actually failed this thing? What kind of complete asshole would be that clueless? Where would you have to go, to find somebody that asinine?

“In the Catskills, Stanley Yusko routinely jailed people awaiting trial for longer than the law allows — in one case for 64 days because he thought the defendant had information about vandalism at the justice’s own home, said state officials, who removed him as Coxsackie village justice in 1995. Mr. Yusko was not even supposed to be a justice; he had actually failed the true-or-false test.”

Oh.... right. I've got hometown pride. The kind that makes you want to rip your hair out.