Matters Political

Our Impoverished Discourse, Our Impoverished Thought

This will, I expect, be the first of many posts on, or related to, this topic; so here I’m not really going to do more than sketch out some ideas.I’m not a big believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least not as I think it’s commonly understood — not in its reductive, absolutist formulation — but on the other hand it seems plain that the way we talk about things and the way we think about things are closely connected, and the one can influence the other. (more…)

Four Decades of Mourning

Forty years ago last Friday, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, capping off five awful years of murdered political and civil rights leaders.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live through those years — but I don’t need to imagine the long years of cynicism and hopelessness that followed, because I’ve lived three-quarters of them.  To have the promise of real, positive change so violently cut down so many times must have felt as though some malign force beyond mortal ken were deliberately crushing all hope for a better future.  It’s no wonder conspiracy theories sprung up; but the explanation I find both more plausible and more terrifying than some notion of a shadowy cabal manipulating the levers of power is this: that American society up to and in the 1960s was (and, to a greater extent than many of us would like to think, still is) so hidebound, so racist, so terrified of change, and that certain strains of conservative thought, capitalist/anti-communist ideology, violent nativism, heroic mythology and valorization of vigilantism, and anti-intellectual populism are so deeply woven into American culture, that in the face of attempts to bring about radical change in the social system — even in ways that in the short run will hurt only those who enjoy unearned privileges at others’ expense, and in the long run work to everyone’s benefit — individuals willing to commit acts of violence, murder and terrorism in the name of preserving an oppressive status quo will arise organically, and communities will be willing to tolerate or turn a blind eye to them.

(It’s true that this is not really a good explanation for RFK’s assassination, as Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian who was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel in the Six-Day War, or mentally disturbed, or both.  He had lived in the US since the age of 12, so he very likely absorbed something of these cultural traits, but a twelve-year-old, though impressionable, is also already pretty strongly enculturated.  But even if the motivations of the assassin himself do not fit the pattern of the previous five years, the assassination, and its cultural repercussions, fit all too well.)

The title of this post, then, is meant to suggest not that we have been in mourning specifically for RFK for forty years — but for the radical hope of the ’60s, to which the final deathblow seemed to have been delivered on June 5th, 1968. (more…)

Something Other Than Beer

Darcy Burner is running for Dave Reichert’s congressional seat.  That seat is in Washington State, so it’s a bit out of my normal purview, but Burner has been one of the leading figures in promoting the Responsible Plan — I learned about her via Orcinus a while back.  She put up a very good post at OpenLeft last week, on the genuine threat to American democracy posed by mercenary armies like Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, etc., which are paid (and paid very well) by our government, ostensibly, to perform supporting duties for American troops.  In actual fact, these “contractors” are carrying out combat operations, and are frequently committing crimes — up to and including rape, murder, and torture — both against Iraqis and against other Americans, including their own coworkers.  On our dime, and in our names.  And because they’re not military personnel, and the US demanded, and the Iraqis had little choice but to accept, that “contractors” not be considered under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, they operate in a legal vacuum.  They can’t be held to account for crimes they commit.

I’ve called the offices of my Representative and Senators, and asked them to cosponsor (respectively) H.R. 4102 and S. 2398, the House and Senate versions of the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which would prevent further funding of mercenary armies.  I respectfully ask that the readers I optimistically imagine I might have read the OpenLeft post and the bills, and call or write your Congresspeople, and ask that they consider signing on as cosponsors.

A Troubling Development, Part IV

There was an article in the Watertown TAB & Press on Friday about the proposed Watertown Grove development.  Apparently, there was a Planning Board meeting last Wednesday, the 13th, at which the vote on the project was put off to March 12th.  The TAB describes the project as “condos” a couple of times, and says it was originally to contain 180 units, while at the neighborhood meeting I attended, the Hanover representatives were at pains to stress that these would be apartments, not condos, though a few years after opening they might sell it to another company, which might convert them to condos; and the plans I saw called for 182 units.

According to the TAB that’s down to 174 now, which is a bit of an improvement, but it seems to me the difference in traffic impact between that and 182 units is going to be minimal; the building is still four stories tall, so it seems to me that this small reduction in size also does little to answer concerns about it blocking the light and the view.

The Zoning Board of Appeals is having a public hearing on the plans for the site on the 27th of this month, so I’ll try to make it to that.  I’ve been continuing to find it difficult to find much information on the whole process, so I think I should probably look into subscriptions to the paper editions of the TAB and the Daily News Tribune.

Oliver Wendell Holmes is, presumably, turning over in his grave.

This morning on the BBC World Service’s NewsHour program, broadcast on WBUR, they played an interview with Justice Antonin Scalia, who among some other very dubious arguments, said by way of justifying the idea that treatment which is Constitutionally prohibited when applied to convicted criminals, is nonetheless not necessarily even bad when applied to people who have not yet been convicted of anything, but who are reluctant to give information, that you should be able to “smack a terrorist in the face” to get him to tell you “where he planted the bomb that’s about to blow up Los Angeles.”

Leaving quite aside the shocking bad faith of pretending that what the torture arguments in the US are about is a “smack in the face” rather than violent, painful, terrifying, techniques which (even when, as the arguments for waterboarding tend to claim, they don’t leave obvious physical damage, like bruising or broken bones) can have major long-term physical and especially psychological impact on their victims, and (to stick with waterboarding for a moment) which have been universally recognized as methods of torture for centuries, I’d like to point out something else, perhaps equally horrible, about Scalia’s argument.

The “bomb about to blow up LA, so you smack a guy in the face” scenario is lifted directly from the TV show 24 (the tendency of which to legitimate, if not glorify, torture is something I think Fox has to answer for, morally speaking). Scalia is attempting to make a convincing legal argument about what the US Constitution does or does not permit based on fiction. (Nor indeed is this the first time he’s fallen back on the 24 argument.) He might as well try to support rulings about police procedure based on what works on CSI, or claim that since it worked out so well in that book by Mr. Heinlein, and since “Islamofascists” are so similar, really, to hordes of giant space insects, we should consider whether military service ought not be a prerequisite to citizenship.

It’s really incredible — in the literal sense of “impossible to believe” — that anyone, let alone a Supreme Court Justice would have the gall, or the ignorance, to claim that fictional scenarios ginned up to bring in Nielsen ratings should be considered a reasonable basis for public policy and jurisprudence.  It’s even more incredible that so few people seem to be up in arms about this.  What the hell is wrong with us?

2007-08 Presidential Campaign

It might have seemed from my earlier post “The Problem of ‘Hillary'” that I was a supporter of Senator Clinton for the Democratic nomination. In fact, she was probably my least preferred of the broader field before candidates started dropping out, but I see no contradiction in disagreeing with her policy positions yet finding it repulsive that she’s the target of such egregious misogyny in the media.

I was a strong Edwards supporter until he announced his withdrawal from the race. Now that the Democratic field has narrowed to two, I’ve been struggling with the decision in front of me. There are good reasons to support Clinton, and good reasons as well to support Obama; conversely, there are good reasons to be wary of each of them, especially for a moderate liberal like me.

Many other blogs have been all over the problems with each candidate, so for the moment I’m not going to discuss them at length.  A week ago, in the Massachusetts primary, after a great deal of thought, I voted for Obama, but I’ll be happy to contribute to, vote for, and perhaps volunteer for either Obama or Clinton in the general election.  I think despite their respective failings, either one would be a good president, and each represents important progress toward dismantling some of the biases which are significant problems in our society.

I also think that either Clinton or Obama can win pretty handily in the general election, though they’ll have a tougher time against John McCain, who now seems the likely Republican nominee, either than I think Edwards would have, or than I think they would have against (for example) Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani.

A Troubling Development, Neighborhood Meeting Edition

The neighborhood meeting held by the Hanover Company to discuss their proposed new apartment building ended up being rescheduled for last night — something I wouldn’t have known if Mike at H2otown hadn’t put it on the calendar — and I was able to go and hear what they had to say.

For starters, I was very happy to see the turnout. The town councilor for this district, and one of the At-Large councilors, both came, as well as owners of local businesses, and a good number of residents. I’m not good at estimating groups of people, but if I had to guess I’d say there were 30-40 people there, if not somewhat more.

The Hanover representatives also, to their credit, had prepared a thorough presentation, and, I think, tried in earnest to make their case for why this development would be good for the area, and to answer our questions.

However, I’m not sold, and unless I badly misread the tone, I don’t think anyone else there was sold that night, either. They expect their building to add roughly ten percent to the volume of traffic on the neighborhood streets, which are already having traffic and parking problems. It will be four stories high —roughly twice the height of most of the buildings in the area. It will also be a single, huge building taking up effectively the entire 3.5 acre plot of land. There won’t be a driveway in front, only a ramp into the underground parking, which despite their assurances to the contrary I, along with a number of others at the meeting, am convinced will result in cars (and especially taxis) pulled over on the street out front with their hazard lights blinking, all the time.

People who live along Coolidge Hill Road are, rightly I think, quite concerned that having a four-story building just across the street from their two-story houses will mean suddenly they get much less sunlight than they used to; I have been planning to put in a garden in my backyard, and my neighbor across the backyard fence already has a well-established and quite impressive one — a sudden drop in sunlight could be a problem for these, not to mention the potential effect on our heating bills. I’m also worried about the long-term environmental impact of the project — they emphasized that their units will include Energy Star appliances, but I don’t recall the last time I went to a Sears and saw an appliance that didn’t have an Energy Star label on it. It seems to me that there’s little reason we shouldn’t expect them to provide the town with detailed estimates for long-term impact, and to incorporate measures to, as far as reasonable, balance or mitigate that impact.

Another person at the meeting mentioned a concern about the transiency of the residents, since they’ll be apartment dwellers, but I think while the worry is at base reasonable, it’s misdirected: I’m an apartment dweller, not a homeowner, because I can’t afford to buy a house here yet, but I’m trying to be involved in my community, I went to this meeting, etc.; what concerns me is that this building will have gorgeous, luxury apartments, a private underground garage, interior courtyards, presumably exercise facilities of some sort, and a “clubhouse” with double-height ceilings, and probably some kind of bar/lounge area and large-screen TV room, and its residents are going to be paying (what seems to me) a fortune in rent. I have trouble imagining that those kinds of people are likely to be the sort who’ll care about the neighborhood as such, and go to meetings like last night’s, even if they live in the building a long time, and so aren’t really “transient.” I was discussing this concern with a friend from out of town, and she wondered what might (feasibly) be done to encourage new residents in this building to become more locally engaged, and I don’t know the answer to that.

All that said, I realize I sound pretty negative about this project.  As I’ve mentioned before, I do think it’s a nice looking building, and I liked what they showed us of the overall landscaping of the project.  I’m sure it would be a nice place to live, but of course I won’t ever live there.  Realistically, of course I recognize that something is going to go in on the old Aggregate site, and it’s doing no good for us sitting empty; and whatever goes in there will worsen the traffic situation.  The long-term solution to traffic problems is out of any individual developer’s hands, because it needs a shift in local government’s priorities in favor of clean, safe, reliable, convenient and cheap public transportation, and a shift in the culture away from cars and toward buses, subways, bikes and walking.  All of that, naturally, is a long way off.  And I appreciate that Hanover is doing the right thing and coming before the neighborhood with this as a first step.  I just hope that, as the process continues, we in the community continue to have input, and can, potentially, extract some further concessions — at least a circular driveway in front, to prevent stopped cars on the street, for example — from them.

A Troubling Development, update

Well, due to the snowstorm, I didn’t make it to the “neighborhood meeting” about this proposed apartment building. However, for those who might be interested, I will note that Google Maps now has Street View in the Boston area, including on Grove Street here in Watertown. This here is the site where they’re planning to build their apartment building; if the photo doesn’t pop up, click the “Street View” button up top and drag the view around to look at the brick building, and you’ll have about the same angle as the artist’s rendition the Hanover Company is using to promote this plan. (In their portfolio, either use the thumbnails or the “select by property” link at the bottom to find “Watertown Grove”.)

I think it’s pretty clear that the building they want to build just doesn’t fit in the space they want to build it in.