New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Cities across the U.S. are pledging to plant trees and restore urban forests to combat climate change and cool off disadvantaged communities.
As the U.S. grapples with natural disasters and racial injustice, one coalition of U.S. cities, companies and nonprofits sees a way to make an impact on both fronts: trees.
Specifically, they committed to planting and restoring 855 million of them by 2030 as part of the Trillion Trees Initiative, a global push to encourage reforestation to capture carbon and slow the effects of global heating. Announced on Thursday, it’s the first nationwide pledge to the program, and additionally noteworthy because the U.S. group — which includes Microsoft Corp. and Mastercard Inc. — will focus on urban plantings as means of improving air quality in communities that have been disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change.
“We’re passionate about urban forestry and the goal of tree equity,” says Jad Daley, president and chief executive officer of American Forests, the longtime conservation group that’s helped organize the pledge. “It’s not just about more trees in cities. If you show me a map of tree cover in any city, you’re showing me a map of race and income levels. We see this as nothing less than a moral imperative” ...
For counterpoint ... and an actual review of the book ... there's Ben Sixsmith at Spectator, honing in on a particularly head-scratching part of Osterweil's case.
‘When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses.’
Well, I don’t see what gives to Osterweil the darn right to determine whose businesses deserve to survive but perhaps they provide good products, friendly service and a local alternative to the mega-corps which are swallowing up Western economies in the aftermath of a vicious COVID-19-lockdown combo.
In the past months of demonstrations for Black lives, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about looting. Whether it was New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying that stealing purses and sneakers from high-end stores in Manhattan was "inexcusable," or St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter saying looters were "destroy[ing] our community," police officers, government officials and pundits alike have bemoaned the property damage and demanded an end to the riots. And just this week, rioters have burned buildings and looted stores in Kenosha, Wis., following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, to which Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has said: "Peaceful protesting is a constitutionally protected form of free speech. Rioting is not."
Writer Vicky Osterweil's book, In Defense of Looting, came out on Tuesday. When she finished it, back in April, she wrote (rather presciently) that "a new energy of resistance is building across the country." Now, as protests and riots continue to grip cities, she argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of "law and order," and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.
I spoke with Osterweil about this summer's riots, the common narratives surrounding looting, and why "nonviolence" can be a misleading term. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity ...
In the early years of home ownership, we used to awaken on Saturday mornings to the clock radio emitting the dulcet tones of Charles P. Pierce as he commented about the week in sports on "Only A Game" at public radio. We'd stay in bed and listen to the show before making coffee. That's loyalty.
At some point the habit waned. It happens; I started following Charlie Pierce at Esquire, when he graduated (?) to writing about politics. The show kept going, and as this farewell essay notes, it was Bill Littlefield's retirement in 2018 that suggested the end was near.
For 27 years, “Only A Game,” the sole sports program on National Public Radio and WBUR, told the kind of compelling, satisfying stories that a listener never quite wanted to end.
Somewhere along the way, it became one of those stories itself.
So it is with a sense of distinct accomplishment, but one of some melancholy too, that the people behind the program prepare to sign off for the final time, the show a casualty of budget cuts at WBUR in the economic maelstrom of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Only A Game” is one more lovely story ending.
The final original hourlong program will air Saturday at 7 a.m. on WBUR and on more than 250 NPR stations nationwide.
The build-out of Origin Park is beginning in earnest. Last Thursday the plans were revealed.
The presentation by Guillermo (Gil) Penalosa, who began his career designing and developing parks in Bogotá, Colombia, is especially impressive. Watch the video and beware of the CAVE people.
Is it just me, or is a certain locale missing? We're included, but we're not inclusive.
Please don't tell me that our grand old Irritability City isn't playing ball on this laudable project.
A 600-acre park planned along the Ohio River in Southern Indiana has been named Origin Park.
A new park that would transform part of the Ohio Riverfront in Southern Indiana is slated to cost $130 million and feature a series of high-quality amenities for the Louisville region.
The River Heritage Conservancy on Thursday evening unveiled a detailed plan for Origin Park, a 600-acre project that is expected to be noticeably larger than Louisville's Cherokee Park once completed. The site is near the Falls of the Ohio, where the Ohio River, Silver Creek and the Ohio River Greenway intersect.
Whatever Democratic voters think — and most of them like Bernie Sanders and his platform — the dominant bulk of Democratic officials oppose them both with an organized vigor they seldom bring to combat with Republicans.
This strikes me as a detailed and balanced assessment. Long, but essential.
If you cared not for Bernie Sanders as a Democrat, you should read the essay anyway; there's plenty there for you. If you were a Sanders backer, as I was, it's very important to absorb this.
... First, (Bernie Sanders' campaigns) demonstrated that bold social-democratic ideas, well beyond the regulatory ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can win a mass base in today’s United States. An uncompromising demand for the federal government to provide essential social goods for all Americans — from health care and college tuition to childcare and family leave — stood at the heart of the Sanders project from beginning to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls and conducting two presidential campaigns almost entirely on the strength of this platform, Sanders built the most influential left-wing challenge in modern history.
Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich also supported single-payer health insurance, but their campaigns did not end with polls showing a newfound majority of Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone massive supermajorities among Democrats and voters under sixty-five. Yes, leftists from Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long declared that a bipartisan corporate class rules America, but they did not turn that insight into a political movement capable of winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan, or California.
Nor is the partial success of the Sanders campaigns merely a hollow “discourse victory.” It has presented concrete evidence for a proposition that mainstream political observers scoffed at five years ago, and that the American left itself had grandly announced rather than demonstrated: that “democratic socialism,” driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule and dedicated to universal public goods, can win the support of millions, not just thousands. Across the last half century, any activist with a bullhorn could proclaim this to be true, but Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved it.
Of course, as Bernie’s defeat makes clear, there is a vast gulf between winning exit polls and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns illuminated American social democracy’s unknown political resources, they also revealed, in a dramatic fashion, the determination of their opponents. This is the second practical lesson of Bernie’s five-year war: the unanimity and ferocity of elite Democratic resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but to the essence of his platform.
In my previous life as a thoughtful and periodically fashionable essayist, one forever attuned to local foibles and frivolity, there’d be so very much to write about, right about … now.
Alas, those days are gone.
For example, I might be considering the ham-fisted, forced resettlement of the kulaks – wait, wrong word; I meant “residents” of Riverview Tower as part of a yet-to-be-revealed master plan for the structure’s implosion, annexation, luxurious playpen refurbishment for the enrichment of our design and engineering caste, or all three, quite spectacularly.
But I can’t comment.
Conversely, taking cues from my old, discredited ways, I could be considering the ongoing, benumbed silence of the city's leading element, this glaring absence of our local Democratic Party’s ruling elite from virtually all major questions of the day during the past six months, from pandemic disarray through racial and social justice protests, not to omit the indie business segment’s increasing problems, rampant vehicular mayhem on city streets, and the Tree Board’s leading role in rampant deforestation.
Seeing as none of them have uttered a peep, I’ll happily follow suit. My lips? Think of them as seals.
It’s just water under the justice's I-64 bridge, and in spite of all that’s going down – and I mean WAAAAAY DOWN given the GOP death cult’s cocaine-fueled subterranean spiral – in this failed city, tucked inside a failed nation-state, located on a rapidly failing planet where Mother Nature is belching rather viciously in our general direction, traffic on the bridge in question stands to be disrupted for years to come, and of course if we’d bothered setting up the city to accommodate multi-modal transportation options, these disruptions might not be so damaging, but we haven’t, and they will be.
As yet our “leaders” are not unlike clams, and accordingly, you won’t hear a word from me.
After all, I’m retired. It's someone else's job to try locating a pulse. Many of you, at least the minority capable of rational thought, are wearing pandemic masks. I’ve chosen to double insulate, augmenting my contagion-containing fabric with a free-expression-free, anchor-logo chain mail muzzle, and it’s quite cozy.
There’s a void in the coverage area, but maybe the News and Tribune will fill this gap in truth-telling, because as we all know, laughter really is the best medicine, especially when reading Pastor May’s weekly old white guy theocracy sermon.
---
So much for the preamble. Last week’s writing therapy session was long even by the standards of this admittedly wordy weekly column.
It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t. At times, it can be downright debilitating. The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.
And yet it was short in the sense that undertaking to distill one’s formative youthful experiences into words, whether 3 or 3,300, is at best a challenge, and probably impossible. Those weeks and years of external stimuli, so very long ago, burrowed artfully into a still developing brain. A handful of episodes stand out in the memory, but detailed contact tracing is almost impossible.
Hence my fascination, five decades later, at what it meant to be propagandized with blatant racism as a youth during George Wallace’s presidential campaigns, although it must be noted that by the time of my father’s enthused espousal of the Alabama governor’s cause in 1968, I’d already been exposed to the contagion of racism for the entirety of my eight years of life.
It matters not one bit whether the exposure was overt, because that’s what structural racism is all about. It's pervasive. Here’s one definition of many, courtesy of the Urban Institute.
Throughout this country’s history, the hallmarks of American democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.
At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.
I can’t argue. Structural racism is irrefutable, and the inescapable corollary is this: “White people need to accept that they’re racist. All white people.” Here’s Kelli Maria Korducki with more at Medium:
Very few people would call themselves racist, and getting called out on racist behavior tends to elicit defensiveness. This reflex is so culturally ingrained that its scripts are practically punchlines: “I don’t see color.” “Some of my very best friends are Black” …
… In her bestselling 2018 book, White Fragility, the author and academic Robin DiAngelo argues that one of the functions of White privilege is to advance the myth that racism is an individual sin, as opposed to a collective indoctrination. “[T]he way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for White people to understand it,” she writes. “Given our racial insulation, coupled with misinformation, any suggestion that we are complicit in racism is a kind of unwelcome and insulting shock to the system.”
By framing racism as the scourge of an ignorant few, White people skirt the uncomfortable work of interrogating the perks of their own Whiteness and confronting the structures that uphold those perks. White privilege allows White people to believe that because they grew up poor, or have Black friends, or are descended from European immigrants who were once viewed as non-White, they themselves are exempt from White privilege — and, by extension, innocents in the perpetuation of racism.
DiAngelo proposes that we instead think of racism as a worldview that’s inevitably formed, and reinforced, by a racist society whose institutions deem Whiteness as a neutral standard. Instead of imagining themselves on either side of a bad/good binary of racist or not racist, she suggests that all White people reimagine themselves as occupying a movable position on a continuum of racism.
It probably isn’t possible to totally escape that continuum, she says; racism is so deeply embedded in society that it informs every facet of our experience and perspective. But by moving away from the binary framework, DiAngelo writes, White people can free themselves from the question of whether or not they are racist and instead ask themselves whether they are actively challenging racism as they go about their lives.
I’m quoting others today only because my own words haven’t yet come to me fully formed. Listening and learning is like being back in school, or stumbling through a new language. I’ll get there eventually. Until I do, I'll turn to those who are better than me at making the case.
---
Did you know that 110 years ago, the youthful Marx Brothers had a vaudeville routine called “Fun in Hi Skule”?
As an observer notes, it might have been called “Fun with Ethnic Stereotypes,” with the brothers and other actors portraying Germans, Italians, Jews, and the Irish. Jokes also were directed at gays.
At least no one wore blackface.
My most recent high school reunion was the 40th, which took place in 2018. I’ve attended at least a portion of most previous get-togethers, but two years ago I didn’t. My interest waned in the run-up, and that’s unusual for me as someone with an interest in history and a strong desire to record it.
I plead extenuating circumstances as they pertain to the lesser of two reasons for being a no-show, and that’s because I was uncharacteristically busy.
Pints&union was in the run-up to launching, and there were things that needed to be done. The pub’s prospective opening made me nervous, even if I wasn’t the owner. You'll recall that I'd been entirely out of the food and drink game for three years, and getting back into the swing of things at my advanced age took effort, albeit more mental than physical.
Another factor was lingering annoyance with my 35-year reunion in 2013, when I hosted a segment of the gathering at Bank Street Brewhouse. It transpired that an actual friend, with whom I’d spent much quality time during school daze (both high school and university), arrived at BSB loaded, whether literally or figuratively, and went out of his way to embarrass himself and me in front of my staff members, one of whom proposed to clean my friend's clock.
I was tempted to give him permission.
To be sure, everyone has bad nights. What's more, his ingratitude shouldn’t have mattered. In point of fact, he always was something of an asshole, which goes a long way toward explaining our friendship, given that I was (and remain) an asshole.
However, by 2016, it had become abundantly clear that my friend was in fact a born-again Trumpian bile spewer, filled to the brim with MAGA, outspoken and abrasive on the typically anti-social media platform of Facebook.
That ghost of George Wallace, yet again flatulent.
And this became a problem for me in 2018 as the class reunion approached. Facebook made crystal clear which of my former classmates were in sync with my values in socio-political terms, and which had spent the intervening decades gulping the toxic Kool-Aid.
The accounting kept coming back to me. I was not looking back in anger. It wasn’t about malice. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I found myself in disagreement with many of them (not all, of course), I tried to bear in mind that it was just a disagreement. This helped.
However, it was harder to escape the sadness.
Granted, the high school experience is ridiculously romanticized and vastly overrated. It was more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying several coats of rose-colored revisionism to celebrate those often maddening, frustrating years.
And yet, in spite of it, I look back on people and phases with satisfaction and even affection, hence the morose melancholy gripping me in 2018. In the end I didn't attend the reunion, precisely because I'd prefer to remember these folks the way they were, not grapple internally with what they had become.
It's as simple as that.
In high school most of the kids were apolitical, ignorant, and many times politically incorrect. On the whole, we shared the same goals, trying to make sense of adolescence and impending adulthood, figuring out what would come next, out there in the real world – as I understand it now, a world filled with racism, intolerance, greed and naked ambition.
I'd rather remember them the way they – we – were.
After yesterday's epic journey to Dupont Circle, as capped by a sweaty evening lawn-mowing session prior to a droning fascist's photo-op in DC, which I neglected to view, Friday almost surely was going to be a letdown.
Consequently, I cooked a soup bowl cabbage roll recipe.
Dessert has been two bottles of Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest. Am I drunk yet? My assessment is that the past years' collaborations with breweries in Germany were better than this year's solo journey, presumably owing to COVID; it still tastes good, just not as expressive Teutonically as those before.
I continue to marvel at my difarm-near-me/">minished alcoholic beverage consumption during pandemic times. The key point to this reduction is solidarity in our household, which is to say that we have not been dining and drinking out. This means all my work at the pub is done before the doors open, and in turn, without the social aspect of drinking with others, I'm good for a beer, glass of wine or mixed drink, and seldom have a second one.
Well, before tonight.
Since mid-March, I've been intoxicated twice, maybe three times. Days pass, and I don't even consider drinking. You'd have to go back to high school to find a parallel. This strange dryness of being is amazing, and I'm not sure what to make of it.
If you're just tuning in, and wondering where the stridency of tone has gone, trust me -- it's still there, albeit muzzled. I'm presently trying to stay out of the reprisal zone enforced by my town's self-appointed community pillars.
Some Louisville restaurants say they're losing business to competitors across the river, as Indiana has less stringent restrictions on patrons.
Indiana is keeping bars and restaurants at 75% capacity for another month, but Kentucky establishments are still stuck at 50% and likely will be for a while.
I appreciate any author who bases an argument in the historical record.
As it pertains to issues like poverty and homelessness, we find that a "higher purpose" in this context truly represents bipartisanship in Southern Indiana.
By this I mean that while certain members of both major political parties have involved themselves in the issues, it remains that in the main, not one of the higher ups will touch them.
On July 4th, 1861, shortly after Fort Sumter had been shelled by Confederates, President Abraham Lincoln addressed Congress. In his speech to Congress, Lincoln declared that the conflict facing the fractured nation was "a People's contest," stating "On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men...”
Elevating the condition of men, as Lincoln put it, was an issue that transcended the Civil War, but by declaring the war a People's contest, Lincoln was able to frame the war in a way that would pit the foundational principles of the Constitution and of mankind's contract with government against those who sought to destroy them.
Today, there is no armed conflict that threatens to disband our Union and pit family against family, instead there is a deep political divide that threatens to irreparably fracture our civic institutions, especially at the local level. Through the partisan battles and name-calling conflicts, our community has lost sight of our higher purpose ...
Today was a momentous occasion for the Confidentials.
Diana had a dental appointment in Louisville, and I drove her through the war-torn city and back. It was the first time in more than five months that either of us had gone to Kentucky.
Apart from typically dangerous drivers prompting evasive action, we managed to avoid the dreaded terrorists.
Dupont Circle is just a stone's throw from Lexington Road, and so we made a $60 stop at Lotsa Pasta on the way home: muffaletta sandwiches, Teli Hungarian-style salami, goat emmentaler cheese, herring in dill, German dark chocolate biscuits, ciabatta, and a major haul of Mackay's three fruit marmalade.
Gracious. It might well be the closest we get to Europe this year, although I suppose strictly speaking the sandwiches are a New Orleans kind of thing.
“It’s not so much about the measurement being wrong, it’s that the whole underlying thesis is wrong”
-- University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick
Travel Demand Modeling (TDM) for the Ohio River Bridges Project? It was just another example of pseudoscience.
A Twitter denizen named Nolan Gray, who describes himself as a "once and future city planner" offered a valuable link, introducing it with this:
Most city planning and civil engineering heuristics and models—trip generation, floor area ratios, street widths, farm-near-me/">minimum parking requirements, among dozens of others—are legally-mandated bits of pseudoscience.
And our own ORBP? It's one of the single most shining, flagrant examples of the perpetual con game.
Although there are many reasons the Ohio River Bridges Project was a total urban planning debacle, one that has not gotten much attention is the role travel demand models played in putting lipstick on the $2.5 billion pig. One potential reason for that is because those who work in the field have come to expect nothing less.
For the last 70 years, American transportation planners have been using the same model to decide what to build. There’s just one problem: it’s often wrong.
In November 2011, the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project published a 595-page document that was supposed to finally end a decades-long battle over a highway. The project was a controversial one, to say the least.
At a time when many cities around the country were re-evaluating whether urban highways had a place in their downtowns, Louisville was doubling down. It not only wanted to keep the infamous “Spaghetti junction” where Interstates 64, 65, and 71 meet in a tangled interchange, but it wanted to build more on top of it. In addition, the political alliance behind the project aimed to expand the I-64 crossing to double the lane capacity, as well as build a whole new bridge just down the river—doubling the number of lanes that crossed the river from six to 12—all for a tidy $2.5 billion.
But in order to get approval to use federal funds for this expensive proposition, the project backers had to provide evidence that Louisville actually needed this expansion. Using a legally-mandated industry practice called Travel Demand Modeling (TDM), the project backers hired an engineering firm to predict what traffic will look like 20 years in the future, in this case, by 2030. They concluded that the number of cross-river trips would increase by 29 percent. The implication was obvious: if they did nothing, traffic would get worse. As a result, the project got federal approval and moved ahead.
Two subsequent studies, however, also funded by the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project, came to a very different conclusion.
Two years later, engineering firm CDM Smith looked at what traffic conditions actually had been while the project was seeking approval. It found that from 2010 to 2013, cross-river traffic had actually fallen by .9 percent.
The other study, this one for potential bond-holders, was far more puzzling. It concluded that by 2030, the combined cross-river traffic would be just 132,000 trips, some 15 percent lower than the SDEIS had predicted. Even worse, according to this new study, the combined 12 lanes of river crossings would carry some 4,000 fewer daily trips than just the I-65 bridge did in 2007 alone, completely underfarm-near-me/">mining the argument that Louisville needed these new bridges.
Aaron Renn, an urban policy researcher and frequent critic of the Ohio River Bridges project, extensively documented these shenanigans. “No matter how crazy this project is,” he wrote back in 2013 when that bond-holder study came out, “it always manages to find ways to show that it’s even more wacky than I thought.”
The project is now finished, and everyone in Louisville can see for themselves which prediction was the better one. In 2018, a post-construction traffic study showed that cross-river trips decreased by 2 percent from 2013 to 2018. As a result, the project has been called by Vox, among others, a “boondoggle” of epic proportions.
The Louisville highway project is hardly the first time travel demand models have missed the mark. Despite them being a legally required portion of any transportation infrastructure project that gets federal dollars, it is one of urban planning’s worst kept secrets that these models are error-prone at best and fundamentally flawed at worst.
Recently, I asked Renn how important those initial, rosy traffic forecasts of double-digit growth were to the boondoggle actually getting built.
“I think it was very important,” Renn said. “Because I don’t believe they could have gotten approval to build the project if they had not had traffic forecasts that said traffic across the river is going to increase substantially. If there isn’t going to be an increase in traffic, how do you justify building two bridges? ...”
Jumping to the conclusion, as a rather painful reminder of every meeting I ever attended where the carefully structured "models" were cloaked with unimpeachable "science," having the effect of reducing rock-headed elected officials to tears of joy at the thought of their own self-deception.
Perhaps the most useful thing the model does is obscure that debate behind a veil of scientific certainty. Behind hard, solid numbers. “From the standpoint of a citizen, these numbers essentially come out of a black box,” he said. “You don’t have any idea how they generated these numbers, so you can’t begin to critique them.”
In other words, the model shuts people up. It may not be honest, but in the world of transportation politics, there’s nothing more valuable than that.
One Balkan joke best captures the mindset of people who feel they’ve been left waiting far too long: when it comes to EU membership, the difference between pessimists and optimists is that optimists believe Turkey will join during the Albanian EU presidency, while pessimists believe Albania will join during the Turkish EU presidency. Meaning: never.
In the main, the Balkans are the part of Europe ruled by the Ottoman Empire (today's Turkey) for the longest time, as recently as 100-odd years ago in some locales.
The term Balkans is a geographical designation for the southeastern peninsula of the European continent. Europe has many regions, of course, and has two other southern peninsulas--the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and the Italian peninsula. But no other region of Europe contains as many different peoples (in the technical sense, "nations") as the Balkans.
There are numerous reasons for the persistence of instability in the Balkans. Scholar have spent entire careers researching this, and there isn't any one magical answer. What is clear is that whenever lots of young people move elsewhere, and the ones who don't opt for smaller families, there is plenty for demographers to chew on.
The demography of south-eastern Europe threatens its hopes of prosperity
Measuring demography in the Balkans is difficult: apart from those for births and deaths, data are hard to come by ... yet the data that are available paint a clear picture.
The population of every Balkan country is shrinking because of emigration and low fertility. In the past, populations grew back after waves of emigration, since many women had six children. Now few have more than one. Serbia may have more pensioners than working-age people by next year.
In the short run governments do not mind emigration because it lowers unemployment and increases remittances from abroad. But in the long run, says Vladimir Nikitovic, a Serbian demographer, it is “catastrophic”. About 50,000 people leave Serbia every year. Of those who return, around 10,000 are pensioners who have spent their working lives in the West. Their children will not follow them back.
The lost link between a city's forgotten history and its cultural potential.
It’s been widely observed that there’s an increasing sameness to cities today, a sort of neoliberal urban monoculture that’s swept the globe. Visit any city in the world and see the same boutique hotels, swank restaurants, outposts of global luxury brands, and so on.
Sameness ... even in smaller cities like ours.
It's what happens, utterly predictably, when the same old engineering and design firms with no connections to the cities, and no knowledge of their history and uniqueness, are hired to deploy their same old suburban template of design elements, generally a ludicrous collection of shopping mall motifs that somehow dazzle the barely-educated dullards who adfarm-near-me/">minister local political patronage programs.
For those cities who don’t understand their identity or have failed to believe in its value, it’s probably not too late. In some cases industrial knowledge may have been lost. But the local culture is surely still there in some form, even if it may need to be updated for today’s realities. Today’s younger urban dwellers, who see these cities in a very different light than their parents and grandparents did, are ideally suited to this task. They missed the collapse of the urban-crisis era. In many cases their cities are now showing nascent signs of rebirth, setting the stage for the rediscovery of these places as cities on a potentially upward trajectory again. The generation who left Egypt was unable to enter the promised land. Sometimes it takes a new generation to look anew and see the possibilities of a place. They perhaps will be the ones to rediscover the identity of a place, to look again at its history, culture, its traditions and rituals, to embrace the uniqueness of their city as their own.
I don't care if you got yourself a wrap
all I want is your pretty green cash
Bought me a suit, bought me a car
Want me to look like a Hollywood star
Money, (Money!) I want money (Money!)
Baby, ain't no "why", baby (Money!)
I need money!
First I look at the purse!
First I look at the purse!
First I look at the purse!
First I look at the purse!
Slate Run Road work continues as the New Albany Redevelopment Commission has taken some steps to rectify problems discovered with soil conditions.
NEW ALBANY — They were informed earlier this month that addressing issues with the Slate Run Road improvement project would cost more money, and on Tuesday, members of the New Albany Redevelopment Commission found out the cost.
A change order for $676,140 was unanimously OK’d by the commission after a brief discussion on why the cost for the project is increasing. The costs include some expenses beyond the steps that will have to be taken to adjust for the soil conditions that have led to delays in finishing the road project.
Redevelopment Director Josh Staten told the commission during the virtual meeting that the change order for the project contractor, Temple & Temple, includes additional drainage work and mediation of soil conditions that city officials said were discovered after paving work had already began ...
... Staten said Tuesday he isn’t sure when the project will be completed, but believes construction can be finished “pretty soon” with the additional steps that have been taken.
“This is about finishing the road and getting the best finished project we can get for that neighborhood,” he said.
City Engineer Larry Summers was asked if the additional remediation has helped since being approved earlier this month.
The contractor has continued to make progress over the past two weeks, and that paving should commence this week on the northern end of the project near Charlestown Road, he said.
“We have done what we can to make sure that we provide a good product for the citizens in the end,” Summers said.
Commission member Adam Dickey said about half of the change order costs appeared to be tied to drainage improvements that were added to the project.
“I think it’s important that we move forward with this and get this wrapped up,” he said.
With everything terrible happening in the world right now, is it indulgent to travel?
That’s a hot question raised by a viral article this week about the rise of travel shaming during the pandemic. After months of staying cooped up, should you feel bad about taking a trip?
Below are my thoughts about travel shaming—warning, my takes are more nuanced than hot this week ...
Since the contested election in Belarus, I've been riveted, as perpetually fascinated by these European locales. In watching coverage of the protests, as well as a few older documentaries, it finally occurred to me that Minsk (where I passed through during USSR times but didn't stop) retains so very much of that old Soviet feel that it's uncanny.
In short, always be suspicious of perfectly clean urban areas. They're more Disney-fied than real, and usually for all the wrong reasons (and I'm no fan of Uncle Walt, mind you).
Whether hostile or complimentary, all accounts of Belarus will mention the extreme Sovietness of its capital, the equally extreme cleanliness and lack of commercial pollution and/or vibrancy. This leads to some interesting errors. Historian Andrew Wilson, in his otherwise convincing critique of the Lukashenko regime, The Last European Dictatorship, describes its dominant style erroneously as Brutalist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Minsk is arguably the greatest neoclassical European city of the 20th century, with most buildings in the city centre resplendent with colonnades, baroque archways and romantic skylines of spires, obelisks and heroic sculptures, all on an axial plan integrated with landscaped parklands around the river Svisloch. This is the direct result of one of the least known episodes of the Second World War — the intensity of resistance in Soviet Belarus to the Third Reich. It deserves to be as well known as that of Poland or Yugoslavia, but isn’t, largely because it isn’t useful to anybody much, save perhaps Lukashenko’s unpleasant government.
Alexander Adams on Soviet Brutalism and where to read about it
Brutalism has seen a surge in interest among young people keen on bold uncompromising Modernist design. Whole books of moody photographic studies of concrete buildings are snapped up by fans of urban life and retro design. A crop of new books explores the Brutalism of socialist states.
While Constructivism and avant-gardism in fine art came to prominence during the October Revolution, it was suppressed in favour of Socialist Realism by the mid-1930s. In architecture more adventurous forms and materials persisted, although in the minority. Under Stalin there was a degree of stylistic conformity and austerity, yet adventurous architecture was not seen as “bourgeois formalism” as it was in art. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, historicism receded and a greater variety of art, design and architecture (including Modernist architecture) became possible.
While supposedly for the masses, many of the showpiece constructions were moribund from the start: inverted ziggurat hotels that were barely occupied and shopping centres with few consumer goods to offer. Much of this architecture was completed less than a decade before the economic and political collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
In postcards, gargantuan apartment buildings — veritable terrestrial ocean liners — tower over public spaces, making farm-near-me/">miniatures of two-tone buses and Trabants. Third-Worldism (also called the Non-Aligned Movement) was a political position of the mid-century decades that apparently offered advantages of alliance to states that pledged to remain equidistant between socialism and democratic capitalism. In practice, most post-colonial states in Africa, South America and South Asia following Third-Worldism did turn to the two superpowers, which provided strategic assistance in return for favourable trading status or military co-operation, thus forming indirect and unstated alliances rather than outright ones.
These are the books described in the article. I can't afford to buy them all, but I wish it were possible. Come to think of it, I just might, anyway.
Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia – Lidija Butković Mićin, Nataša Bodrožić, Saša Šimpraga East German Modern – Hans Engels Imagine Moscow – Deyan Sudjic, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Richard Anderson Soviet Metro Stations – Christopher Herwig Architecture in Global Socialism – Łukasz Stanek
In an article this long, it's hard to find a pull that summarizes the gist, but I've chosen a single sentence. It's a long read, and worth the extra minutes.
Almost from the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been obvious to me that some combination of stress, uncertainty, fear and anger (choose one of them, or all) in reaction to the public health emergency has acted as a truth serum.
What you were before, you remain -- but more so, enhanced, and in many cases, more obnoxious than ever before. If you were incapable of rational thought in February ... well, you know. Logic probably hasn't taken root since then.
I'm not backing away from this assessment.
However, it is equally obvious to me that it might be helpful to consider all this a bit more charitably, seeing as there's the genuine possibility of otherwise functional folks just plain freaking out amid these conditions. After all, the mental health professionals have been talking about it since the pandemic began.
Because, speaking personally, it appears that my lifelong phobia about using the telephone has gotten worse during COVID-19. It's embarrassing, but yes, I have a phone phobia, and it has been with me for a very long time.
Phone anxiety is a common fear among those with social anxiety disorder (SAD). Many people may not like talking on the phone, or may even have a "phone fear." But when your hesitance to make and receive calls causes you to experience symptoms such as severe anxiety, shortness of breath, or a racing heart, you may actually have phone phobia.
Overview
Those who do not have SAD may be afraid to use the phone. They may be more comfortable in direct social interactions, perhaps due to the fact that face-to-face settings allow them to be able to read non-verbal cues, like facial expressions.
However, those with SAD obviously suffer from the opposite. If you are dealing with this condition, a phone fear may reflect issues you are dealing with regarding interaction with others in general.
Symptoms
If you feel extreme anxiety before or after interacting over the phone, you may indeed have a phobia. Some emotional symptoms of phone anxiety may include:
Avoid making calls or having others call you
Delay in making or answering phone calls
Obsess about what was said after calls
Stress about embarrassing yourself
Worry about bothering the other person
Worry about what you will say
Physical symptoms of phone anxiety may include:
Increased heart rate
Nausea
Shaking
Trouble concentrating
The fear of making and receiving phone calls can be disruptive to both your personal and professional lives. It is important to take phone anxiety seriously. Although answering the phone and making calls may seem like a simple task that everyone should be able to do, if you suffer from phone phobia, the anxiety can be terrifying and real.
Yep.
Five of the six emotional symptoms and three of four physical symptoms apply to me, not every time I'm compelled to use the phone, but primarily when I must call a stranger or someone I don't know altogether well. I can answer the phone just fine. I can call a restaurant and ask for business hours. But I can't just dial up someone with whom I'm not already acquainted.
It's crippling.
That's why the digital era has been so good for me. Texts, messaging and e-mail have enabled me to avoid the phone, or at the very least, to make contact before calling. This helps considerably. I prefer writing, anyway, because I trust my ability to get it right with the written word.
Like an illiterate person who concocts dozens of work-arounds to cope with being unable to read, I've devised all sorts of ways to avoid a "cold" phone call.
Usually one of these works. Last week the exception to the rule arrived in the form of a person who doesn't use other modern forms of communication. Maybe he has a phobia about THEM. I had to call him, and I failed to call. Still haven't. Can't bring myself to do it.
This great revelation was confided to my wife the social worker, who merely shrugged and replied with deadly accuracy, "do you think"? She believes my phone phobia is a legacy of the speech impediment (and accompanying self-loathing) that I brought with me to grade school, where I had to leave class regularly for speech therapy.
The therapy was effective, although it took a lot longer to learn how to deal with debilitating shyness, and finally, thanks mostly to bartending, I was able to contain it and find my voice when I'm around people in a social setting.
However, the phone obstacle remained. Trust me, I've spent hundreds of hours more staring at a phone than speaking into one.
What's next? Dunno. I suppose the rote, expected answer is that I'll gladly seek expert advice and put in the hard work necessary to conquer this issue.
Except that in general, it's not much of an impediment at all. I can go months successfully avoiding the issue. If all of you would just use e-mail, we'd be good.
Got it?
Just have your people call my people. Otherwise, you might not hear from me at all.
It's a book review of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War, by Michael Gorra, and it reinforces the maddening complexity of all things Southern.
A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.
... How should we now regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation’s racial tragedy in ways that at once illuminate and disturb—that reflect both startling human truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stifling air of Mississippi’s closed and segregated society? In our current moment of racial reckoning, Faulkner is certainly ripe for rigorous scrutiny.
Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st by revisiting his fiction through the lens of the Civil War, “the central quarrel of our nation’s history.” Rarely an overt subject, one “not dramatized so much as invoked,” the Civil War is both “everywhere” and “nowhere” in Faulkner’s work. He cannot escape the war, its aftermath, or its meaning, and neither, Gorra insists, can we. As the formerly enslaved Ringo remarks in The Unvanquished (1938) during Reconstruction-era conflict over voting rights, “This war aint over. Hit just started good.” This is why for us, as for Jason and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), was and again are “the saddest words.” As Gorra explains, “What was is never over.”
In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic. But he also writes, he confesses, as an “act of citizenship.” His book represents his own meditation on the meaning of the “forever war” of race, not just in American history and literature, but in our fraught time. What we think today about the Civil War, he believes, “serves above all to tell us what we think about ourselves, about the nature of our polity and the shape of our history.”
The core of Gorra’s book is a Civil War narrative, which he has created by untangling the war’s appearances throughout Faulkner’s fiction and rearranging them “into something like linearity.” From the layers and circularities and recurrences and reversals of Faulkner’s 19 novels and more than 100 short stories, Gorra has constructed a chronological telling of Yoknapatawpha’s war, of the incidents and characters who appear in the writer’s extended chronicle of his invented “postage stamp” world. Faulkner took liberties with the historical order of events; what he sought to depict was the “psychological truth of the Confederate home front” and the war’s aftermath. This is work, Gorra argues, that actual documents of the period would be hard-pressed to do. And that psychological truth certainly could not have been derived from study of the racist historiography of Faulkner’s era, which he insisted he never even read. Instead, this understanding is the product of what Toni Morrison once called Faulkner’s “refusal-to-look-away approach” to the burden of his region’s cruel past.
Faulkner enacts this refusal through his practice of looking again, of revisiting the same characters and stories, and through the prequels and sequels and outgrowths of those he has already told, digging deeply into the hidden and often shocking truths of the South he portrays. Gorra endeavors to unknot and clarify Faulkner’s oeuvre by reconstructing it himself, but his act of literary explication is also one of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks to come to terms both with America’s painful racial legacies and with William Faulkner ...
I seldom visit Next Door, but here and there it's an informative resource, as when a well-attended thread began under the title of "Drag Strip on Elm Street."
The last time I recall this topic being raised by elected and appointed officials was in late June, when city council discussed speeding and other examples of forever escalating driver mayhem in New Albany.
The council's discussion was followed by a revealing intervention by the Board of Public Works and Safety's appointed chairman Warren Nash, who hastened to remind elected public officials that there was no need to discuss problems that don't exist.
But don't take my word for it. After all, I don't attend meetings any longer, in an act of self-censorship explained in depth here: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.
NEW ALBANY — Last week, the New Albany City Council kicked around a few ideas for traffic calming, though the only decision reached was to convene a committee to further explore the issue.
On Tuesday, Warren Nash, president of the New Albany Board of Public Works and Safety, urged the committee and council to be cautious in its approach due to a major improvement project slated to begin next year on the Sherman Minton Bridge.
“I hope your committee will take into account the Sherman Minton Bridge construction during the next two years and not do anything too drastic during that time,” Nash said to Councilman Jason Applegate, chair of the traffic committee that was scheduled to meet Tuesday evening for the first time since the pandemic.
Applegate regularly attends the board of works meetings, which will resume being held in-person likely on July 7, and explained that the committee’s intent isn’t to propose massive projects or to attempt to overstep its bounds.
The board of works oversees city streets as part of its domain while the council is primarily in charge of funding and managing municipal budgets.
Applegate said the committee would like to see a process streamlined “that gets information in kind of a systematic way where maybe there’s a liaison between the council and the board of works on these types of issues.”
The board of works is a three-person body and its members are appointed by the mayor.
Nash referred to the council’s discussion Thursday about speeding and traffic calming. He said he heard several issues raised regarding streets that the board already has projects planned for or where upgrades are in process.
He mentioned some traffic-calming measures and upgrades for Grant Line Road, Mount Tabor Road, McDonald Lane and Slate Run Road, among others.
“We’ve done traffic calming and slowed traffic down on all of those streets, so I think we’ve done a considerable amount of slowing traffic down,” Nash said.
If I've misinterpreted Suddeath's quote, I'm open and eager to be corrected.
"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from." -- William Faulkner, from Light in August
1.
This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.
I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.
To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.
2.
These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.
In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”
We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.
It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.
By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.
Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.
Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.
Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.
He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.
3.
My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).
The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).
I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).
At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.
Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.
It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).
It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?
4.
George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.
Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.
The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.
And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).
A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.
Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.
“Out-segged.”
Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.
Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”
Duh. Of course he hadn’t.
Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”
This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?
Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.
As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.
Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?
Ding, ding … ding.
Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?
5.
I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.
My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.
By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.
But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.
Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?
These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.
"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."
Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.
To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.
He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?
How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.
I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.
Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?
Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.
If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?
Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.
6.
I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.
And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.
In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?
Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.
7.
My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.
I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.
Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.
Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.
My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.
It would seem that I didn’t.
Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.
Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.
52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.
What’s the answer? I don’t know.
8.
It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.
According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.
A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.
In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.
Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.
I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.
Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.
My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.
I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”
It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t.
As the postal crisis unfolded recently, I kept reminding Democrats that they, too, have contributed to this problem via their bizarre eagerness to accept the gutting of public services.
Oh no, they replied.
Oh yes. Sorry to bug you,but it's true. This can be fixed. First, Democrats must stop agreeing with Republicans on voodoo economics. They might begin by listening to their own left wing.
We should defend the Post Office, both from Trump and the ideology of austerity that treats the agency “like a business.”
We’re currently getting a vivid, painful reminder of why we need a public sector. The collapse of public services, in particular the provision of public health, has torpedoed the entire economy as a deadly pandemic ravages the country. The end of the road in our current devolution may be the assault on one of our oldest public institutions — the venerable and very popular U.S. Postal Service.
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From an economic standpoint, there is no reason a postal service must run a profit. As many commentators have pointed out, this constraint is applied selectively, out of ideological prejudices. Nobody requires the Department of Defense to turn a profit. (For this we should probably be grateful.)
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The point here is that the spurious notion that the U.S. Postal Service should be financially self-sufficient — which goes back decades — helped give rise to the ability of Trump’s crony in charge of the Post Office, the conflict-of-interest-ridden Louis DeJoy, to cut services in the name of accounting solvency. For his part, Trump has acknowledged openly that his refusal to provide necessary supplementary funds to ensure effective delivery of the mail is founded on his determination to frustrate the vote-by-mail system.
In the wake of the uproar over mail sabotage, public pressure has apparently forced DeJoy to defer some service cuts until after the election. To make sure this pledge is honored, we will have to keep a clear eye on the actual progress, on the ground, in preparing for the election. Fortunately, unionized postal workers will be essential allies in monitoring the integrity of Postal Service management. Pending the successful removal of the current administration, a forthright rejuvenation of the U.S. Postal Service can commence, in which we finally cast off the unfounded accounting imperatives that cripple its operations.
