The recent death of Dave From Queens, David Weintraub, Esq., at 37, a man whose passion led him to trail Joe Lieberman in a Bush face mask, confront Sean Hannity by calling in repeatedly and accosting him during a book tour, and engage in conflict here, leads me to note what some probably consider obvious: trees grow in Brooklyn, but passion grows in Queens.
As one who spent the first three years of his life in Queens, I have paid attention to those who are from Queens: Republicans such as David Horowitz, both Governor John Sununu and his son, Senator John Sununu, and Justice John Scalia; Democrats such as Mario and Andrew Cuomo, and Geraldine Ferraro.
There are no shortage of ordinary political figures from Queens also--my good friend Cliff Wilson, the Democratic County Chair in Delaware County, Pennsylvania who backed Obama in the primary, for instance, was a Queens state legislator as a young man--but the passionate intensity of the most prominent is striking.
I have experienced this passion first hand in the case of the elder Sununu, when I debated him on the risks of nuclear energy in 1980, and when I took on David Horowitz's manic obsession with investigating the politics of Pennsylvania college teachers in 2005.
I supported the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984, and was prepared to support Mario Cuomo for President in 1988, when he decided not to run for President after all. Ferraro's passion made her somewhat notorious last year, when her remarks about Obama appeared to some to be racially insensitive or inflamatory.
It may be intense family ties that feed the passion. Horowitz followed his parents into the Communist Party, and then began a steady right wing drift, fueled in part, he writes, by the sense that the Communist Party had no personal interest in his parents despite their dedication to it. Ferraro had a strong sense of wrongdoing about the merciless media attack on her husband's investments and associations.
Nobody invoked the metaphor of family more than Governor Cuomo, who referred to The Family of New York, and spoke movingly of the struggles of his immigrant parents and their contemporaries.
In his incredible passion, Dave From Queens belongs with the exemplars of passion from Queens. He, too, had intense family ties, practicing law with a three person law firm including his father and his sister.
Passion leads to putting forth the effort that makes things happen. It leads to doing what reasonable people consider to be impossible. It also can have negative side effects.
It's good that the overwhelming sentiment on this site is recognize the positives in Dave From Queen's passion, and to put aside the rest. Dave died much too soon to achieve fully the greatness of which he was capable, but he lived long enough to show the goodness which motivated his finest attributes. Rest in peace, Dave.