BAYONNE – If Nietzsche – unlike Kant – expressed a cyclical view of human history, with the present, reduced to its core forms, little more than a recurring animation of what went before, Bayonne would be akin to a continual WWII staging area, with local politics a substitute for D-Day. “It’s going to be a war,” a local source called out to InsiderNJ on Broadway this evening, hustling across the street and appearing not to care whether or not a car ran him down. He jumped the curb, surviving rush hour traffic with the fierce, committed expression of someone under a GI helmet who would run into heavy machinegun fire on a beach. “It’s on like Donkey King,” texted someone else, similarly wired for mayhem.

This was Bayonne at 5 p.m., Wednesday, a couple of hours removed from Council President Sharon Ashe Nadrowski kicking off her challenge to Mayor Jimmy Davis, the man who once special assignment partnered with her husband on the police force.

A firefighter in turnout gear slumped on a barstool with the steeple of a Catholic Church peeking through the window behind him, and the docks out of sight but mystically unavoidably a part of the mechanics of identity here, as central to Bayonne as the crammed-together Polish-Irish-Italian customs that also drive the peninsular town’s political culture.

Marshall McLuhan talked about the electronic universe creating the opportunity of a simultaneous human experience of all social strata. He posited, in effect, the annihilation of a place like Bayonne, a roughneck wharf burgh that has long thrived on parochial blue collar designations to remain afloat in the public – and especially local – consciousness – and protect itself.  McLuhan’s glimpse into the future, of course, occupies – if even only subconsciously – the deeper political challenge of Mayor Davis, a cop who came of age immersed in Bayonne mythology, who develops the town arguably to the detriment of what existed before, a kind of sacrilege at the most primitive Golden Bough level, and yet truly the heart of progress. His delicate balance mirrors that of Newark’s Ras Baraka, on the other side of the bay. Perhaps inevitably, Council President Ashe Nadrowski now finds herself pitted against Davis, tribal chieftains at each other’s throats within the larger pressures of Bayonne breathing beyond its most simple or simplistic self.

A barstool source insisted the town otherwise known as the Garden spot of the Kill Van Kull, has not yet developed itself out of the family rivalries that finally force Davis and Ashe Nadrowski into each other’s wheelhouse. Just ten-thousand people show up to vote in local elections in a town of 75,000. The high-rises have not yet rendered the classic Bayonne City Hall irrelevant- or at least politically off balance. But the change in this coming 2022 election is the fact that Nadrowski is a woman, the Bayonne-grounded source said. The Saccos and Stacks of the world dominate Hudson County. Have for years. Former Mayor Dawn Zimmer made a two-term statement in Hoboken. Mayor Dana Grilo of East Newark changed the game in her hometown. But otherwise the males guard their local thrones over here with a vengeance. Ashe Nadroswki drawing a crowd of 70 people off a rain-pelted Broadway signaled energy. “If a challenger to Brian Stack found four people to show up at a public event, he would have to consider that a good turnout,” the source said.

“This is going to be a war,” he added, deviously.

That word again.

“War.”

It echoed the voice of a woman in Davis’s headquarters in 2014, the same year he made the runoff in his challenge of Mayor Mark Smith. “War,” she screamed, the town cathartic Election Time watchword, apropos of the candidate taking the stage.

On Wednesday evening, the reporters from Hudson crammed into the storefront with Ashe Nadrowski’s backers, wearing the  expressions of those who might have seen a grenade go off and remove someone’s arm from a shoulder, alert again to another supposed bloodbath. If politics was the civilized substitute and alternative to war, in Bayonne politics was the metaphor for war, over and over again, a poor one maybe – but for now, apparently adequate.

As the crowd geared up for the challenger, a statement appeared from the mayor’s press person Phil Swibinski, bland, as if blandness would be the condition of the coming contest, itself an outrageous irony. “Mayor Davis is running for re-election on his record of moving Bayonne forward and delivering the progress that residents deserve, and he’s confident that the people will continue supporting him regardless of the opponent.”