Letters to the Editor
FDNY's Warped Chicken Little

To the Editor:

Sound the alarm indeed. Once again Deputy Chief Paul Mannix, the self-appointed gate-keeper of the status quo in the FDNY, has cackled (Jan. 25 letter) like a warped Chicken Little, and the citizenry should be shuddering in its boots. God, it is a wonder the City of New York is still standing.

Just imagine this: since the gate-keeper first appointed himself to the position, one or two blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and women have actually managed to come into the FDNY so that the demographics have fallen to a dangerous low of 91-percent white firefighters - people who look like him and practice his same trade of Hessianry. (I think I can take literary license in making up words if he can make up definitions out of the Mannix edition of the dictionary).

We are most certainly living in the final days of the FDNY. The training and discipline are harder and better. The equipment is evolving daily. The fires are going out. Lives are being saved without three tries to make it up the ladder. Everybody wants to come here for seminars and training. But, there still are those people - the ones who have managed to slip past his gate, and worse, the ones out there who want in!

When one speaks about motives, I always wonder about the motives of someone who proclaims to see what no one sees, has the "courage" to rail against something no one else has the "courage" to rail against, someone who sees conspiracies in assistance, and thinks that a level playing field is reverse racism. Then again, innuendo and aspersion are useful tools when the heart isn't quite strong enough to just say it straight.

Just as I could say his diatribe smells a shade reactionary, asinine, chauvinistic, illogical, self-serving and terroristic ... instead of just coming out and saying what it really smells like.

At least this time he didn't trot out "good ole Gus Beekman" like some faithful darkie. A man, by the way, the gate-keeper never worked with, served under, knew personally or - to my knowledge - he has ever referred to in these pages by the well-earned title of either Fire Commissioner August Beekman or Chief Augustus Beekman.

What's the motive behind that? Oh yeah, he was another one who slipped past the gate, so he didn't really earn those titles at all, did he? I supposed somebody gave him the answers, too.

DELBERT E. COWARD, Battalion Chief, FDNY