Category: Intemperance
Not a Mosque, and Not at Ground Zero
The current kerfuffle over the “Ground Zero Mosque” is just the latest example of how we (by which I mean reasonable people of goodwill who may reasonably disagree amongst ourselves) have let an extremist fringe define the terms of the discussion. We’ve allowed ignorance, bigotry, and cynicism to invent a bogeyman that doesn’t exist, and let them whip up the sort of fervor that fed the Know Nothing and Nauvoo mobs. When the adults speak up, as President Obama did at a Ramadan supper, they’re pilloried for failing to grasp the import of an imaginary situation.
The “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy should have been shut down before Sarah Palin’s first “refudiate” tweet on the facts alone:
- It’s not a mosque; it’s more like a YMCA. It will include a gym, swimming pool, classrooms, restaurant, and bookstore, in addition to a prayer room with space for 1-2,000 worshipers; its secular facilities will be accessible to everyone regardless of faith (or lack thereof). But “Ground Zero Y” just doesn’t have that rally-round-the-flag fearsomeness to it.
- It’s not at Ground Zero; it’s in the neighborhood, a couple blocks away, not sitting on top of the hole left by the 9/11 attack. But “Lower Manhattan Y” doesn’t sound nearly scary enough.
Other things to note: the “they” who attacked “us” are not the “they” who want to build the community center; indeed, the “they” who want to build the community center are the “us” of whom “we” speak. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam associated with the project, is the author of What's Right With Islam, of which Devika Mistry says,
[The book] draws a vision of a Muslim world that can embrace its own form of democracy and capitalism, aspiring for a new Cordoba, a time in history, where Jews, Christians, Muslims and all other traditions lived together in peace and prosperity.
Hardly fire-breathing radical Islam; more like the modern Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish attempts to find a balance between the sacred and the secular. American Muslim’s are not a “them”: they’re just like us, trying to find their way in a world where people who have fundamentally different beliefs about ultimate things must still live together peacefully and, one would hope, prosperously.
Cordoba House, the original name of the project, was a perfect description for its spirit. Newt Gingrich to the contrary (and quite thoroughly refuted by a real historian), medieval Cordoba under the caliph was a place of pluralism and exchange. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers and scientists made Cordoba a center of learning in a very dark Europe indeed. We live in dark times now, with ignorance and bigotry driving far too many people; we could use some of Cordoba’s light today.
The Conservative Case for Bicycling
The tinfoil-hat fantasies of Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes are only the most extreme example of conservative opposition to bicycle-positive public policy. Disparaging remarks from the likes of John Boehner and Patrick McHenry are depressingly common (though it should be noted that Ray LaHood, the most bicycle-friendly head of the Department of Transportation ever, was a Republican representative in a previous life).
I suspect that the Republican animosity toward bicycling is more cultural than it is economic. Bicycling culture in the United States has a generally liberal feel to it, perhaps because more bicyclists live in urban rather than rural or suburban areas, or because cycling instead of driving has a countercultural feel to it in our car-dominated society. Championing automobiles over bicycles, with their faintly European and therefore suspicious aura, is a way for politicians to signal their support for the “real” America.
This is a little curious, because a case can be made that bicycling actually fits many planks of the conservative agenda. My own politics are a little to the left of Leon Trotsky, so perhaps I’m not the best person to point this out, but maybe it takes an outsider to see the opportunities that conservatives are missing. So here are a few key conservative values–both cultural and economic–that line up well with cycling.
Self-Reliance
The bicycle ought to be an icon of rugged individualism. Few people tinker with their cars anymore–modern automobiles are black boxes which require highly specialized tools to maintain–but almost anyone can keep a bicycle running themselves. Bikes are relatively simple machines that can be maintained with a few wrenches and a screwdriver. And most bicycle commuters make their daily trips in all kinds of weather with no support system but their feet and their wits. Remember that rush of freedom you felt as a kid on your first two-wheeler? It’s like that every day for cyclists.
Conservatives love cowboys, but there are precious few of them left. Might I suggest the bicycle courier as the rugged individualist’s new hero? Out there on the edge, living by wits and courage, the bike messenger is the ultimate romantic loner. (Ignore for a moment that there are a good many anarchists in this niche.) Trade in your Stetson for a bike helmet, and your saddle bags for a courier satchel, and maybe get Alan Jackson to write a few songs about the brave and lonely messenger, riding in the tracks of the Pony Express. American enough for you?
Energy Independence
The Republican Party platform has touted energy independence for four decades, but they’ve done precious little to really encourage us to give up foreign oil. As long as we remain an auto-centric society, we’ll never be free of the negative consequences of depending on despotic and unstable regimes for our energy.
My bicycle isn’t entirely free of petroleum products–rubber tires and tubes, petroleum lubricants, and some plastic parts go into keeping it running–but it is a darned sight closer to energy independence than any car. There’s no need to invest in alternative fuel technologies, no need to drill for risky and inaccessible domestic oil; the bicycle is a near-perfect technology now, and an obvious part of an energy independence plan.
End Subsidies
Conservatives hate subsidies. Subsidies distort the market, redistribute wealth, and open the door to all sorts of social engineering aspirations.
And one of the most heavily subsidized aspect of our daily lives is the automobile. Whether through bailouts and tax incentives to manufacturers and dealers, or the proportion of general funds as opposed to user fees (license and registration fees, gas taxes) that go into infrastructure, or the hidden subsidies on parking, we pay individually far less for our cars than we pay collectively. If the true cost of our reliance on the personal combustion engine were borne by individual drivers, there would likely be many more people on bicycles or public transportation.
Bicycle infrastructure, by comparison, is incredibly cheap. And because bicycles cause so much less wear and tear on roads, bike lanes are cheaper to maintain. (We Minnesotans know that Republicans hate maintaining infrastructure almost as much as they hate subsidizing it…)
There are still plenty of left-leaning reasons to ride a bike, too: environmental, social, and economic. But that doesn’t preclude conservative support for cycling. The fact that liberal and conservative policies can converge on cycling just means that, like motherhood and apple pie, bikes are a good thing that ought to belong to neither end of the political spectrum.
Ill Fares the Land
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land is the perfect companion, and foil, to Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion. Where Hedges’ essay is a Jeremiad against the specific ills of contemporary culture, Judt’s is a cerebral assessment of where we took the wrong turn and how we might start to move back onto a path that was started in the years after the Second World War. They are both incensed by the same thing–a political culture dominated by corporate interests and an uncritical belief in the efficacy and naturalness of “free” markets–but Judt’s cooler analysis suggests possibilities where Hedges’ leaves the reader in despair.
Judt tells the history of Anglo-American political economy from the Great Depression to the present, as the story of the rise and fall of Keynesianism and social democracy. In his version, social democracy–in which a regulated market is guided by broad political consensus to provide material comfort for the majority of citizens, while also subsidizing culture (he devotes quite a bit of space to entities like the BBC, PBS, and public-private initiatives to support the arts)–was done in by its success. Over-confident planning created a drab and fettered world for too many–the council flats and public housing of the working class, the conformist suburbs of the middle class–and in the rebellion against conformity, the baby of the public good was tossed out with the dreary bathwater. The ideology of individualism, with the radical economics of the Austrian and Chicago theorists, threw the whole social democratic project into question; and with the fall of Communism, of which social democrats were far too uncritical, it became almost impossible to make a convincing case for the government’s role in building a just society.
Though clearly rooted in the Left, Judt’s analysis owes quite a bit to a particular brand of English conservatism. Echoes of Burke, Oakeshott, and Carlyle run through the book; Judt’s case is that it is the contemporary free-marketeers, not the New Deal and welfare state up to the early 1960s, who should be considered truly radical. The most radical effect of the 1980s turn to free market ideology has been to define the terms of debate such that social democracy has become unthinkable: as he quotes Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to unregulated markets.
The last two years (really, the last twenty, during which the living standards of the working and middle classes have failed to keep pace with the rise in GDP, and the lot of the poor has actually declined) should suggest that there are alternatives. Judt’s social democratic solution is based not on a bold vision of the future, but on a chastened fear of further economic catastrophe. It’s a very cautious program, focused on preventing future calamity rather than building a Great Society: social democracy ought to be as chastened by its history of failure as the free market ideology.
Judt’s clear, level-headed arguments, with a solid foundation in the conservative (rightly understood) ethical sense undergirding civil society, ought to win adherents looking for a way out of the corporatist dead end. I worry, though, that it is a bit too level-headed, and too lacking in vision. He’s right that the collapse of Communism makes bold visions look suspiciously totalitarian; note how the decidedly center-right Obama administration is tarred as “socialist” for even suggesting a minimal public role in health care, finance, and energy policy. Real Communists (there must be a dozen or so left someplace, perhaps in Cuba; clearly there are none in China anymore) must be scratching their heads at the rhetoric of the Right. Level-headed arguments may convince the academic class, but they don’t mobilize voters.
Some marriage of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s temperance is needed. There was a moment in the 2008 Presidential campaign–perhaps in Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, when he described the failures of the Bush administration and declared that “[w]e are a better country than this”–when it seemed as if a vision of a different future was forming. Alas, that moment seems to have passed; and despite Rahm Emanuel’s exhortations, a good many crises have been wasted without resurrecting a vision. The technocratic solution that Judt offers would certainly be preferable to what has passed for policy in the wake of the latest (but surely not the last) financial meltdown, but without some vigor, and maybe just a touch of brimstone, it is likely to remain a highly reasonable road not taken.
Starbucks, WiFi, and Me
Earlier this week, I was sitting in the downtown St. Paul Dunn Brothers coffee shop when Jeff Horwich from America Public Media’s Marketplace approached me for a man-on-the-street (or person-in-the-cafe) interview about Starbuck’s new free wi-fi service. Part of the interview aired as a segment of the show that evening, and while I’m glad I didn’t come off sounding like a stuttering idiot (the editors at APM earned their salaries!), I don’t think I managed to say anything terribly profound. In the bit of the interview that aired, I came off mostly as a Starbucks hater without much to say about wireless internet access.
I’ve done a little bit of thinking since, and have come up with what I hope are some more valuable, if not at all original, thoughts.
To get the Starbucks thing out of the way: it’s not that I hate Starbucks, it’s just that I prefer not to spend my money there if I can avoid it. When I’m looking for what a cafe has to offer–not just coffee and wifi, but a little bit of sonic buzz, a chance to watch interesting people, maybe look at a little art on the walls or pick up a free periodical or two–I find that the independents in my neighborhood (the Blue Moon, the Riverview, Fireroast) and the local Dunn Brothers chain are more likely to deliver. Starbucks is not only ubiquitous, it’s perfectly stanardized: the same decor, the same products, the same atmosphere, whether you’re in downtown St. Paul, suburban Chicago, or Outer Mongolia (surely there’s a Starbucks in Mongolia by now). It’s simply not a place to sit and take in the atmosphere; it’s purely a to-go vendor for me.
On the wifi front, I think we’re asking entirely the wrong questions. As wireless connectivity becomes increasingly common, and in many peoples’ lives is shifting from fun and convenient to wholly necessary, it seems strange to me that we continue to rely on businesses like coffee shops and restaurants to provide it. As internet technology expands, making it easier for us not only to communicate with the world but get real work done, the piecemeal, ad hoc nature of our wireless connectivity can only be a brake on our progress.
Starbucks, Dunn Brothers, and the Blue Moon are not in the business of providing internet services; they’re in the coffee and pastry trade. That we’ve let our connectivity services fall to businesses that offer wifi (sometimes good, sometimes spotty; sometimes free, sometimes with strings attached; rarely, if ever, secure) as a sideline convenience is a sign of a failure of imagination and foresight. It’s a bit like the early days of the telephone, when you had to go to the post office or the corner store to place a call, and when service was unreliable and access uncertain. We are applying a late-nineteenth-century model to an early twenty-first-century technology.
I’m not suggesting that a large public project–something along the lines of rural electrification–is the only way to go for wireless internet. But if this is a technology that has positive social and economic potential, and could prove to be as transformative as the telephone, radio, and electricity were over the last hundred years, do we really want to leave it in the hands of the nation’s baristas? (Not to disparage my favorite baristas, who are hard-working, talented, and have great taste in music.)
Some cities are tentatively rolling out public-private partnerships for large area wireless service; Minneapolis is one, and I appreciate the near-ubiquity of its service. And some public institutions, most notably the libraries, also provide wireless service: this seems to be something that fits well within their mission, and I would love to see it expanded, perhaps with remote library wifi stations along the lines of the bookmobiles of old. With network devices becoming increasingly cheap, small, and easy to use, expanding the network seems like an obvious strategy to bridging the digital divide.
So yes, I think it’s lovely that Starbucks is trying to lure people in with free wifi (clearly their stale pastries and preposterously-named drinks weren’t doing it), but that’s possible only because we’ve dropped the ball on building on the technology in a meaningful way. We need to have ideas about our shared technological future that are a little more “venti” than the decidedly “short” approach we’ve had so far in this century.
(I’ve been reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, so I’m sure that I’m influenced by his social democratic critique of the last three decades of privatization. But there are worse influences to be under.)
Secession, then and now
I was surprised to discover last month that I live in a Congressional district that contains a sizable minority that “supports nullification of unconstitutional federal laws and secession as options to enforce state sovereignty.” This is a question that I thought had been determined a thousand miles and a hundred fifty years from contemporary Minneapolis.
What makes this particular eruption of secessionist opinion especially ironic is that it comes from Minnesota Republicans. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was Minnesota Republicans who raised the first volunteers to preserve the union and settle the secessionist question. After the Civil War, Republicans shaped the political character of Minnesota; it was the Republican Party of the late nineteenth century that laid the foundation for the moderate, pragmatic, and civil politics that has allowed the Minnesota tradition of good government to flourish. Indeed, until very recently, the Minnesota Republican Party has been far closer to the progressive tradition of Theodore Roosevelt than the rightward course the party has been on elsewhere. It would seem that the party has finally caught up to the retrograde tendencies that turned the GOP away from its origins in the 1960s.
This isn’t the only secessionist noise that has been made over the last couple years, of course. The same sort of empty threats have been coming out of areas like Texas, South Carolina, and Virginia, places where secession actually happened (and where one would think, except for the pernicious Lost Cause myth, hard experience would suggest it’s not such a great idea). This secessionist theater is largely an empty gesture, but it’s interesting to contrast it with the actual secessionism that led to the Civil War and unpack what lies behind the resurgence of the rhetoric.
My recent reading in Civil War history has highlighted that, whatever the later objections of Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders may have been, secession was about slavery. It was only after the war that it became wrapped in the highfalutin language of “state sovereignty.” Prior to Lincoln’s election, the South held significant power in the United States; the majority of Presidents were from the states that would secede. And the South was hardly shy about enforcing federal power over “state sovereignty”: the Fugitive Slave Act, for example, was passed to nullify the laws of many Northern states that gave freedman status to escaped slaves on free soil. Lincoln threatened the expansion (though not, until 1863, the existence) of slavery, and it was this threat to the slave economy that prompted secession.
There doesn’t seem to be nearly so compelling an economic origin to the current secessionist rhetoric; Lincoln threatened to curtail and unravel the base of Southern wealth, but Obama has barely threatened even to dent the base of corporate power. I’m enough of a materialist to believe that compelling economic interests need to be lined up behind something drastic like secession for it to come to pass: the Hartford Convention had some good points, but not enough real economic benefit to outweigh the costs of secession. There’s also not enough sectionalism (and certainly not here in Minnesota, where the impulse is decidedly a minority opinion) to make secession very practical; we are a much more interdependent and integrated nation now than we were in 1860, and it’s unlikely that anyplace of any size would be able to mount enough support to really pull of a secession.
So, what could be behind the “state sovereignty” bluster that has compelled people who should know better to hop on the “nullification and secession” band wagon?
At the risk of making the political psychological, it seems to me that the voices raising the secessionism roar belong to people who would rather not have to talk to anyone who disagrees with them. Secession represents in this case a retreat from debate and compromise, an unwillingness to accept that the other side has valid points, and a desire for a utopian political purity of the sort that has never existed in the United States. By defining oneself as no longer beholden to the national unit, one no longer has to do the hard work of building support across factions to get things done; one need only get agreement from people who already agree. It is, in the end, a rejection of the entire concept of civil society, where people with different interests and ideas are engaged in a common enterprise.
There’s nothing especially new about this sort of impulse, nor is it exclusive to the right. Indeed, political puritanism used to be a hallmark of the left, where splinter groups of Trotskyites, Maoists, and Bakhunists could argue forever over their relative ideological purity (which is perhaps why they never got around to fomenting actual revolution). But it’s surprising, and disappointing, to hear it coming from Lincoln’s party from people one would have thought were serious about civil society.
Grown ups and government
A recent exchange with a couple of YouTube trolls, and a pithy (if slightly snarky) quotation surfaced on Eleanor Arnason’s blog, has me wondering why the grown ups have been so silent about the nuttier anti-government statements coming out of the Tea Party fringe these days.
First, the quote (attributed to John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey):
Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.
I discovered the orcs first, and I’m very glad of it.
The YouTube exchange came via a 1942 tourism film about Minnesota. (It’s a lovely film, by the way.) A troll by the name of “clvanhove” commented that “this is before many people relied on the government to take care of them. Sad state of this country…. wish I was living back then. People actually knew responsibility and took care of things? themselves.” Despite my policy of not feeding trolls, I answered with a little history lesson about Minnesota’s tradition of good government, which enabled many of the things the film presents (clean lakes, good infrastructure, state parks), and noted that “[i]n a democracy, we ARE the government.”
Another troll responded that “Minnesota is great? due to individual efforts of men eking out a tough fought existence in [sic] less hospitable land” and that “[t]he difference between you and I, is that my beliefs do not ask anything of anybody with the exception that they not deprive me of freedom. Yours demands it. There is nothing more selfish than people who seek? government force to rob their neighbors.”
Goodness! I won’t respond in the comments thread on the film; it’s way off topic, and I feel bad about feeding the first troll. But I do wish that some grown ups would weigh in a little more forcefully about the wave of silly warmed-over Ayn Randianism that has been bubbling up into the mainstream these days.
The fringe Right’s anti-government screeds are a radical departure from almost four centuries of Enlightenment thinking about government and society. By positing an “us” vs. “them” dichotomy, with “them” being The Government, they abandon the democratic experiment and the principles of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” And while there are a few on the Right who, I think, use this sentiment in a wholly rhetorical and deeply cynical way, I worry that there are far too many people who actually take this philosophy seriously.
The mainstream of political philosophy since Hobbes and Locke has been largely about how to strike a balance between liberty and the common good. The responsible libertarian side of the argument makes the case that increased liberty can do more for the common good than direct government intervention; the responsible socialist side of the argument makes the case that liberty for some distorts the liberty for all, and that true liberty is best achieved through policies that tend toward equality; and the responsible middle, where the United States has tended since the Progressive Era, tinkers around with the equation with a focus on pragmatic outcomes.
But none of the responsible participants in the debate have ever denied that there’s such a thing as the common good. They quibble about the definitions of both “common” and “good,” but never deny that both the collective and the private have a significant role to play in establishing a just society.
People of good will can disagree about a lot of things, so long as they do agree on a few foundational positions. Though I’m pretty far to the Left in the American political spectrum, I can find points of agreement with many on the Right. Indeed, the Right used to generate some useful ideas about how to use market forces for the common good (the current health care reforms, for example, have their origins in the Nixon administration, not in Das Kapital; the earned-income tax credit is a Republican idea proposed by Milton Friendman, and cap-and-trade is about as libertarian an approach to environmental concerns as I can think of). And some Leftist ideas–the five-day work week, OSHA, the EPA, Medicare, Social Security–have been thoroughly integrated into America’s capitalist economy.
But declaring that “[t]here is nothing more selfish than people who seek? government force to rob their neighbors” simply shuts down any rational debate. I can see the attraction in Randianism–it’s a very clean, clockwork view of the world, with room for a lot of dramatic heroics–but it falls apart pretty quickly into selfishness and fear. It represents a wholesale retreat from society, a desire to create a hermetic bubble around the heroic individual who owes nothing to the community out of which they arose. It is, in the end, a prescription for “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” against which Hobbes posited the first inklings of liberalism.
I’m not interested in “robbing” anyone, nor, I suspect, are most proponents of government (however limited or expansive their notions of government may be). Instead, I’m interested in finding the balance between liberty and equality that makes our society as good as it can be. If that means extending liberty in some areas, so be it; if it means restricting it in others, then that’s a valid prescription as well. And because this is an experiment, and we hold the levers of power through the vote, there’s room for debate and compromise and principled disagreement.
And I’m not interested in “depriving” anyone of freedom. Can government be tyrannical and heavy-handed? It certainly can; history is filled with examples. The United States, thankfully, has never been one of those examples, and so long as we have the vote and share a vision of a common purpose, it never will be. But tyranny can arise not only from the government: unchecked mobs, rapacious classes, and extreme atomization are paths to tyranny as well.
I don’t feel “deprived of freedom” when I use municipal roads to get around town, or state parks to enjoy the resources that Minnesotans have agreed to protect; I feel that my freedom has actually been enhanced by these and many other collective efforts. And I don’t feel “robbed” when I pay my taxes (well, except maybe when I pay sales tax in Hennepin County for a baseball stadium I never got to vote on, but that’s another issue…); I feel that I’m paying my fair share to enjoy a society that’s a little more fair, equal, and just than it would be without government.
I suspect that Elrond, Bilbo, and Gandalf would agree.
Home Delivery
My last Sunday Star Tribune newspaper landed on my doorstep early yesterday morning; by the time I’d ventured out to collect it, I’d already read the New York Times headlines, the Washington Post book pages, and my favorite funnies (including Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County, blessedly rebroadcast in this digital age). I’ve let my newspaper subscription lapse because most weeks I find myself hauling unread paper to the recycling bin, and tend to use the newspaper more as a firebuilding tool on camping trips than as a news source.
It will be a little odd not to have the newspaper around, because I’ve been an avid newspaper reader for about thirty years. I first started reading a newspaper regularly in 5th grade; we were living in West Germany, and had the Stars & Stripes (the military’s paper–surprisingly good and independent) delivered, along with a week-old Lewiston Sun-Journal, my father’s hometown paper. Once I was out on my own in college, subscribing to the local newspaper was one of the things that fell into the category of getting the electricity and telephone turned on when setting up a home. In addition to my subscription, I also made a habit on the weekends of venturing out for a regional or national paper, usually the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune.
Not take the newspaper? Unthinkable!
Two big changes have converged, though, to make taking the paper less important to me. The first is parenthood: I don’t have the time to sit down with a cup of coffee and the newspaper now that I’m also making breakfasts, distributing laundry, encouraging kids to get their coats and shoes, and making sure everyone gets out the door to school, swimming lessons, or Cub Scouts. The daily paper subscription was the first casualty to the compression of time; I’ve finally admitted that the weekend paper was a casualty, too, a long time ago.
The other big change is the Internet, which has made global news sources abundantly and ubiquitously available. Using Google Reader and Feedly (technical details here), I can assemble my own newspaper with headlines from not only the Star Tribune but also the New York Times, Manchester Guardian, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Lebanon Star. I can beef up my comics page with classics like Bloom County, new favorites like Cul de Sac, and web-only strips like xkcd, and leave Family Circus and Garfield out. I don’t read the sports pages, so I don’t need a sports section: I’ve got a section in my paper for bicycle commuting, though, and a great science page. My books pages draw from not only the New York Times, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor review pages, but from a wide range of book bloggers, writers, and poets. And since all of this content is stored “in the cloud,” I can read the funnies on my netbook while I’m making my coffee in the kitchen, read the headlines upstairs while checking my e-mail and bank balances, and even peruse the latest in books and poetry during the five-minute inter-pomodoro breaks at work. In the evening I catch up on the news from around the world and the neighborhood, read a little science and sociology, and exercise my righteous indignation on my opinion pages, which draw widely from a range that includes Andrew Sullivan and the Socialist Worker. I probably consume more news now, albeit in smaller chunks, than when I used to head back to my grad school apartment with an armload of papers and the Village Voice.
Newspaper home delivery, like so many other things we take for granted (highways, shopping malls, parking lots), is a product of post-war suburbanization, and its historical moment is probably coming to a close. Before the middle class fled the cities for the suburbs, newspapers were bought at the corner store, or the newspaper stand, or from a newsboy. Home delivery was the newspapers’ solution to maintaining readership in the less dense suburbs; that it coincided with a bicycle-riding baby boom of pre-teen surplus labor gave rise to the paperboy, one of the icons of mid-century Middle America. Paperboys have long since been replaced by adults in cars or vans, covering much larger routes than would have been possible for a kid on a bike.
Home delivery will likely become a premium service in coming years; subscriptions are falling, and it no longer makes sense to subsidize delivery (the logistical infrastructure of distributing newspapers is enormous and complex, and unlikely to survive the falling fortunes of many local and regional papers). I’m at the tail end of the home delivery demographic; the “digital natives” coming of age now have had their online news sources set up much longer than I have, and won’t see physical home delivery of one newspaper as much of a service when they already have virtual home delivery of hundreds.
The fly in the ointment of this brave new world is, of course, the free rider problem. Good journalism is expensive; advertising is a less and less reliable source of revenue (indeed, I see almost no ads at all when I look at my news through Feedly); as an online “subscriber,” I’m not shouldering my financial share of the burden. And I do feel a little guilty about that.
Newspapers need (as the jingle at On the Media goes) a “present and future business model for monetizing the newspaper industry.” Advertising isn’t working; subscriptions are dropping off; and news room jobs are being slashed, which only threatens to make newspapers even less valuable to their readers.
I’m a member of my local public radio and public television services: I get a lot of value from the public broadcast programming, and I’m glad to pay my share. If other news sources that I use had a similar model, I’d be happy to contribute.
Of course, public broadcasting can’t rely entirely on the good will of its users; there are also public funds and foundation grants involved in paying for their services. Surely other news sources, if operated as non-profits, could attract similar foundation support. The challenge would be converting papers to non-profit (rather than money-losing) operations after a decade of debt and unrealistic profit expectations fueled by speculative investors.
If my Internet subscription included a news fee (much like telephone service has those various “access fee” additions), and that fee were distributed either directly to the sources to which I subscribe, or to a foundation that would distribute the money to news gathering services, I’d be perfectly happy. I’d even be happy to participate in something like Kachingle proposes, letting me split a monthly subscription fee amongst the services I find most valuable. Some months might see more of my money going to the Star Tribune, other months to Bookslut, depending on who provides me with the information I use and enjoy most.
But putting all of my media money into one (relatively leaky) bucket? That no longer makes sense.
Maryland sets a price on bicyclists: $313
A Maryland motorist, Kathy May Lee, who killed a bicyclist, has been fined $287.50, plus $25.50 in court fees. This is an amount that the average motorist could probably budget for; you wouldn’t want to kill a bicyclist every day, certainly, but for an annual, or even monthly, cost of operating your vehicle, it’s certainly reasonable. I’m sure it can’t be much more than a Hummer driver spends on fuel in a month.
The motorist had failed to clean her windshield (she “had cleared a portion of the left windshield of morning dew but left the fogged up right side to be cleared by the car’s heater”), and was fumbling for a cigarette lighter, when she struck the bicyclist from behind. In her defense, the prosecutor noted that “there were no indications that Lee was sending a text message or otherwise using a cell phone when the collision occurred”–apparently the fact that she wasn’t engaged in one of the current bugaboos of distracted driving is a mitigating circumstance.
Also “mitigating” the incident was the fact the bicyclist was not riding all the way over on the right side of the road. “[A] bicyclist is required to ride on a roadway’s shoulder if it’s usable or as close to the edge of the roadway as possible,” so apparently all bets are off if you try to use more of the lane than the strip by the curb.
There are many things that are obscene about this:
- The punishment hardly rises to the level of the offense; it’s not much more than a parking ticket. At the very least, this should have resulted in the revocation of the driver’s license; this certainly looks more like “vehicular manslaughter” than “distracted driving” to me.
- There are many good reasons that a cyclist would not be riding in the gutter: road conditions (I don’t know about Maryland, but in Minnesota the gutter is where dangerous debris piles up), lawful maneuvers (such as positioning for a left turn), or avoiding a hazard (parked cars’ doors can be as deadly as moving cars). Being in the middle of the road is a perfectly valid place for a bicycle.
- Once again, the sacred bull has been given a pass. Motorists need to understand that they are operating a potential deadly device every time they get behind the wheel; particularly as our roads become increasingly crowded, motorists must be responsible: attentiveness should not be the sole reserve of cyclists and pedestrians. The onus should fall on the person who could most easily kill someone in a collision.
It’s nice that “distracted driving” has gained some attention lately, with a focus on texting and cell phone usage; but those are such incredibly obvious derelictions that there should be no debate about them. On my bicycle commute through St. Paul, I’ve seen any number of motorists fumbling for things in the cab, shaving or applying makeup, eating and drinking with both hands, even taking advantage of a stop light to do a little knitting. None of these behaviors should be acceptable: when you’re driving, you’re driving, and that’s your primary responsibility. Anything you do (or fail to do: winter in Minnesota brings out a lot of cars with a tiny porthole scraped in their icy windshields) that distracts you from that responsibility should not be tolerated.
on the launching of Christmas puddings
Oh what a tangled mess we’ve made of Christmas!
The annual kvetching about a war on Christmas has returned, as predictable as (if less pleasant than) the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Black Friday, the lighting of thousands of public Christmas trees, and the hegemony of the carol over the speakers in shopping malls. Much posturing about “putting Christ back in Christmas,” “the reason for the season,” and maligning of tepid “holiday” greetings is done by people who could be spending their time a little bit better (say, by working on health care reform, investigating the roots of the late financial crisis, or taking the long view on climate and environment challenges). There’s more than a little of the bully’s tone in the complaints, demanding that everyone celebrate Christmas the way these brave champions of tradition would have it done.
What’s ironic (and, really, a bit farcical) about it all is that we already had a war on Christmas, a century and a half before the Declaration of Independence, and the enemies of Christmas won, at least for twenty years or so. And the enemies of Christmas were even more stridently Christian than the holiday’s latter day supporters.
When they weren’t flogging Quakers and hanging witches, the Puritans of old New England were banning Christmas. A 17th century English Christmas was apparently a wild affair, with much drinking and carousing, more than a hint of Saturnalia, and a healthy dose of old pagan mid-winter festivities. And the Puritans would have none of it. In 1659, after several years of informally discouraging Christmas, they put the ban into a law that must surely warm the hearts of the Christmas-hating secular humanists hiding under Bill O’Reilly’s bed:
For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.
One is reminded of Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Luckily, Christmas–and all the strange and ancient traditions it has absorbed over the centuries–is tougher than the Puritans, either the cheerless kind who banned the holiday or the forced-cheer-of-my-kind who are mounting the barricades today. In Angela Carter’s “The Ghost Ships,” galleons full of Christmas Contraband sail into Boston Harbor and fire Christmas puddings at the Puritans; and no grim cheerlessness can stand up for long against Christmas puddings.
I’m certainly no fan of the “war on Christmas” defenders, but that hardly makes me an enemy of Christmas. Indeed, it’s the wonderful hodgepodge and mishmash of the holiday that makes it so glorious, and its generous syncretism is the secret of its success. I’ve got a Christmas tree (a pagan German tradition imported by way of Prince Albert) decorated as high as eight-year-olds can reach with all manner of baubles and gewgaws; my iPod this time of year frequently plays the Choir of Winchester Cathedral singing traditional carols, plus old favorites by Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole; I love eggnog and fruitcake, and my family’s traditional waffle breakfast on Christmas morning; and we eagerly await the visit of a chimney-climbing Turkish bishop dressed by a Dutch tailor who may or may not bring with him a nasty little elf named Schwarzer Peter (I keep him in reserve just in case the boys get out of line). We’re unlikely to go to church–Linus’ rendition of the Nativity to Charlie Brown is as close as we get to the manger most years–but then, we don’t go to church on Easter (named for a pagan fertility goddess), either. The holiday’s spirit–generosity, kindness, peace, and hope–are available to everyone, regardless of confession or creed. (No matter what Garrison Keillor might say.)
Indeed, if there is a war on Christmas, it’s being waged by the grim and joyless scolds who will demand that we celebrate the holiday their way. Luckily, I don’t expect them to win.
