Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Civility and the Windigo

Yesterday I was drawn into an online discussion with a Libertarian who accused “the left” of being riotously uncivil; of being incapable of argument and logic and dedicated only to name-calling and innuendo. I was so incensed I had to get in there and do a little name-calling of my own!  Yes indeed the left is louder and ruder and more blatantly blasphemous than I can ever recall in my lifetime, because we are mad as hell and we just can’t take it anymore. 

It is not a pretty thing. But I needed to point out that this now-common warcry from the right is really really really the pot calling the kettle black. If anyone else is old enough, cast your mind back to the first time you heard such rude meanness in the media (well, except maybe for the Vidal-Buckley bruhaha in 1968 – for which they were roundly punished, BTW). For me it was “conservative” talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, and my reaction to him and the fact of people actually listening to him was a sick stomach. I was appalled, my friends were appalled, my family was appalled. Limbaugh was the top radio host in Sacramento, CA by 1984. 

In 1986, the Fox Broadcasting Company opened its competing network of sensationalist reporting and the Fox News Channel followed in 1996, sporting King o’ Rudeness Bill O’Reilly and The O’Reilly Factor. 

In the meantime, Jerry Springer brought voice to the least common denominator in his daytime tabloid talk show where name-calling and on-stage fights were encouraged. My face is red with shame at the eagerness with which my species devoured (and still devours) this kind of vitriolic “entertainment.”  By the end of the century, the bounds of civility had been shattered. 

Maybe someone with a better memory than mine can come up with an entry from the left during this period. There was of course response from skewered politicians and commentary from comedians. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert started in 1996. Stewart and Colbert are no slackers, but they are not the mud-slingers of the right, and an argument could be made that they both instead have upheld a standard of civility in their satire, that this was one of their main goals. Certainly they engaged the right in argument (sometimes directly, as Jon and Bill on many occasions) and challenged them to respond, but that response was always more character assassination, beside the point and vitriolic. No one was spewing spittle from our side of the fence.

Air America radio network specialized in progressive talk radio from March 2004 to January 2010, famously led by Al Franken and Rachel Maddox. Commentary from the left got a little sharper, but it didn’t last. Probably because it wasn’t mean enough. 

The thing is, mean is not the default for most lefties. We are lefties because we want good things for everyone, because we like people and want them to succeed, because we are empathetic with our fellow men and women – we have to be driven to be mean. Not that some have not learned to compete to gain power, but the blue masses do not qualify. 

Now the election of pond scum like 45 and his own incredibly ugly and mean statements have finally driven us to that place. Truthfully, we are not very good at it. This is one fight we will never win because we just don’t understand how to be so underhanded, selfish, uncaring, and ruthless. To us, that is despicable behavior and the fact that we have fallen low enough to respond in kind, however incoherently, is an eye-opening commentary on the limits of patience. 

Are we mean enough yet to actually take back the polity? To restore civil discourse? To rebuild to a more inclusive society? 

And if we are that mean, will we even want to any more? 

Friday, August 17, 2018

The Art of Curation

It’s a lovely word, “curator.” Not everyone has worked with museums as I have, but I notice that the concept and use of the term has spread in the last few years to apply to almost any kind of presentation, any organization of diversity. 

“Curation” has always implied for me a studied and judicious ordering of elements into some recognizable group; some affinity of characteristics that organizes chaos into a shape. If it is done well, the affinity becomes commentary and points out a new thought or an important lesson, perhaps even creates an aha moment. It is an admirable and worthwhile undertaking.

It is time to curate my own life; to comb, sort, and recognize the worth of the eclectic mess that fills my drawers and closets, graces my walls, and clutters my hard disks. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker – I have done it all, and written about it as well. And as no good deed goes unpunished, I am currently averting my eyes from portfolios, binders, baskets, boxes, scrapbooks, photos, thumb drives, and all those shelves in the basement! Why oh why did I save it all?

And that indeed is the question. For what reason did I save this, and is that reason still viable

•I don’t have enough years left to do half the print projects I started and put away – do I have enough energy to do some of them? Are they still worth doing? 

•What will my kids want to have? Should it all be didacted it so as not to embarrass them? 

•My home videos, professional photos, print and computer resolution files on every media format – surely I could at least eliminate the doubles, triples, quadruples, and store everything on like devices. . .

•Is there value in framing the best of the portfolios full of art originals? Where would I put them as my walls are all full up already? Should I just order them chronologically? Does anyone give a rat’s ass?

•Big tins of inherited family photos that I have begun sorting, scanning, and matching to ancestor information could go dark here in the middle of such a curation storm. 

•What about the diaries? There is poetry in them thar pages if I want to mine it to use. Or maybe I should just burn them whole before they are left to the eyes of others. . .

•Six feet of shelf space for the products of a lifetime in publications. OMG. 

I don’t feel so studied and judicious any more; organizing principles elude me as I begin to topple, and for now, I think the best thing to do would be to go home and take a nap.

Friday, August 3, 2018

Scalawags 2040

Minneapolis's new 2040 Plan is getting a lot of reaction. The Scalawag Overlord Brigade (SOB) that installed the new bicycle lanes on 26th and 28th avenues in the dark of the night (su-prise, commuters!) kept it all close to the vest until just weeks before several public meetings were announced and a public commentary period of three months declared. I hang with some real knee-jerkers, so I was hoping to be able to react to this plan with an open mind if not open arms. But now that I have done a little research, goddamn it, throw the scalawags out!

It actually didn't take much. Nearly 300 collected email comments (and many more from other venues) are available to read at https://minneapolis2040.com/received-public-comments/  and they are about 95% negative - loudly in some cases and convincingly in others. And don't think people didn't notice the sneakiness (well, a "lack of transparency" to be more politically correct). 

The goals of the city growth plan wouldn't melt in your mouth: dealing with climate change, which requires a radical reduction in car use (hence no parking requirements for new developments, heh, heh, heh); and racial equality, which means that all those historically redlined neighborhoods should have new four-plexus built wherever a developer wants to put them in order to end the "affordable housing crisis" (and I have a bridge in New York I would like to sell you. . .).

You can get the full monte on the problems with this plan as countered by Minneapolis's long-range planning director, Heather Worthington, from Minnpost's 7/24/18 article at https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2018/07/fight-over-minneapolis-controversial-comprehensive-plan-proposal-explained. Check out the butter. 

The plan must address education, jobs, skills training, small business support, yadayada somewhere, but you can't miss how it waxes fantastic about rezoning and building "affordable housing" in every neighborhood, differentially and apparently depending only on the whim of the developer.  It is outrageous - 4-unit buildings zoned in so that lower-income people and smaller houses get pushed out as the taxes go up and developers scarf up properties to build. Now I am all for making housing affordable - maybe by getting people JOBS so they have enough money? But then, we would not NEED new units, n'est pas? 

And another thing. I want to know what the city means when it says "affordable." To find out, I first called the Community Planning and Economic Development office (CPED) (and I recommend all of you do the same, since the simple request for a definition confused them so much!). The receptionist, flustered at my question, demurred about who might be best for me, then sent me to Nancy, who also did not know anything but sent me to the Mayor's Office, where I encountered the brightly smiling voice of Jacob Frey, MAYOR OF MINNEAPOLIS:), telling me to leave a message and he would get back to me. Right. Back to the CPED, I chose a random Development Coordinator who answered his own phone and tried to help me by reading to me the same description that I had found in the site's policy:

a) For residential rental projects, at least 20% of the units shall be affordable to and occupied by households earning 60% or less of AMI (Area Median Income). 
b) For residential ownership projects, at least 10% of the units shall be affordable to and occupied by households earning 80% or less of the AMI.
c) The affordable units (both rental and owner occupied) shall be reasonably distributed throughout the project and comparable in size, number of bedrooms, quality and finish to the market rate units in the project as determined by CPED staff. 

which tells me WHO can rent or buy, but not HOW MUCH THEY WILL PAY.  My young friend at PRG tells me that HUD publishes the Section 8 income guidelines on their website for the metro area and it’s broken down by household size and defines landlord limits for those parameters, but no one with the city can (or will) tell me if these guidelines are followed if no federal funds are involved. Anyone want to bet?

Finally, I sent a very specific email to SOB President Lisa Bender's office three days ago (August 1) asking for a definition, but so far no response. I sent the email because both phone numbers for my councilperson wanted me to "leave a message please I will call you back," and in the case of D'Ana Pennington, Council Aide to Ward 10, because she is "out of town from July 9-13 and will call back when she returns." Would that be in 2019? Has it really been over two weeks since she checked her messages? Maybe something happened to her. . .