The new bennies

There's a group organized on the Jersey Shore called Benny Go Home, Benny being the derogatory term for partying summer rental people in shore communities. The line is that the name comes from the initial letters of the cities they come from: Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark and New York -- but the term has been pinned more loosely on anyone who lives north of the Raritan River.

The Benny Go Home people eschew the geographic qualifications in favor of assessing potential Benny-tude by attitude. In other words, the real Bennies are those who disrespect the shore communities and their residents by treating the towns like their own personal playpen -- and shitting all over it.

Ken Pringle, the mayor of shore town Belmar, recently got into trouble for profiling the unfortunate Benny subspecies, the Staten Island Guido, in his Belmar Summer Rental News. During his long tenure, Mayor Pringle has moved to turn the town from a raucous 24 hour party to a more family-oriented destination, and a nice place for year-rounders to live. It's a worthy goal, but he should know better than to use his own press to malign the only place on the East Coast that's more misunderstood than New Jersey. His wife was PR flack for Jim McGreevey, so maybe that says something.

All that said, I've been noticing my own form of Benny -- those coming from Manhattan on the Sandy Hook ferry. For a while, they only came for the clothing optional Gunnison Beach, so I never ran into any of them unless that beach was overcrowded and they deigned to keep their pants on. But now that more people have heard about the beach and the nice boat ride, they seem to be all over. Unfortunately, my favorite beach in the park is the one closest to the ferry landing, so I get an earful. You can see the Brooklyn skyline and the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, which I've heard referred to as Manhattan and the George Washington Bridge, respectively.

Now, I don't have anything against people coming from the city to ride their bikes or hang out on the beach (well, as long as they're not sitting too close to me). I do take issue with those who act as if the place didn't exist before they first heard of it. An apt analogue is the Ugly American who goes to another country and marvels when they find their hosts have running water, electricity and pizza.

Last week, I was treated to the prattling of two couples with kids, including an eight-year-old boy who was allowed to run around naked. They seemed surprised that there was a nice beach in New Jersey. I overheard one of the women telling the other adults, "Oh, there used to be medical waste washing onshore all the time. Then they cleaned it up and built all of this a few years ago, and started running the ferry from New York, and people started coming here." Typical hipster New York thinking -- everything was shit before you discovered it. The medical waste issue was for a few months something like 15 years ago. Gateway National Recreation Area was opened in 1974, thank you, and Sandy Hook was a state park before that.

Maybe I'm not being tolerant, but it seems to me that if you're at someone else's house, you treat it with respect and don't impose your ignorance and superiority on it. It led me to wonder if Pringle's Staten Island Bennies and the Manhattan Bennies were really all that different. Which, of course, would probably mortify the Manhattanites. Who don't realize there are some nice beaches in Staten Island, too, and the ferry to get there is free.

Hmm....