The Future Began with a Car Crash

Filippo Marinetti and the Futurist Manifesto of 1909

Marinetti, about 1915.

"... and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust I hurled myself - vlan! - head over heels in a ditch. 

"Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savoured a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse! 

"As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart." 

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was the principal author of the 1909 Futurist manifesto, and in the scene above he saves the lives of two clearly ungrateful bicyclists by swerving his car into a ditch. (It's clear that he was driving too fast for conditions. In fact, that was the whole point of his drive - speed.) 

I'd been wanting to write a story about Marinetti for some time, but lacked a good source. And then one day my son was browsing in a used bookstore and came across a book by James Joll called Three Intellectuals in Politics. The intellectuals were Leon Blum, Walther Rathenau, and Filippo Marinetti. The book was originally published in 1960; Ben had the 1965 paperback in his hands, and soon it was in my hands. (It's been falling apart as I use it, but I just keep taping the covers back on, and I'm not yet into the next phase of paperback dissolution, which is when individual pages start to fall out of the "perfect binding"glue.) 

A quick scan of the bibliography in Marinetti's Wikipedia article indicates that quite a bit of work has been done on him since 1960, but I've decided to content myself with Joll, who, in addition to being a good historian, is a very engaging writer. 

Futurism was about speed - particularly cars and airplanes. It was also about love of violence and hatred of women. And it wanted to destroy whatever remained of the past. As the Futurist manifesto put it in point number 9, "We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman." (Joll, pp. 135, 182. The quotation at the beginning of this story is on pp. 181-182. Joll's book contains the full text of the manifesto on pp. 179-184. This is also available online. To see it, click here.) 

Marinetti seems particularly annoyed by museums and libraries: "Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries!! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!" (P. 183.) 

1910-1914 - Futurism

It's worth noting that none of these ideas was particularly new. The years before World War I were a period of extraordinary cultural ferment, with new ideas, both good and bad, coming forth at a very rapid clip. This was driven by very rapid change in the larger society, which in turn was driven by older movements that were reaching new peaks - particularly the industrial revolution that began in the eighteenth century and the scientific revolution that began in the sixteenth century.

Marinetti's contribution was to package a bunch of seemingly disparate ideas together and then mount an intensive, multi-country marketing campaign: "... during the years 1910 to 1914, he was travelling constantly, lecturing, reciting, organising demonstrations, shocking his hosts and provoking violent reactions everywhere." (P. 150.)

"By stopping at nothing, by using all the devices of publicity he could think of, by revelling in noise, fights and opposition, he forced the public to listen to his slogans, and a good many of them stuck in their minds." (P. 143.) Sounds like Jerry Rubin to me. Or maybe Abbie Hoffman. 

A Parisian journalist called Marinetti "the caffeine of Europe." Joll concurs: "... it is as a stimulant to others rather than for its own achievements that Futurism has its greatest importance in the artistic history of the twentieth century." It was people like the Cubists and the Dadaists who actually made the art. (Pp. 155-156.) 

1914-1920: Fascism

Marinetti's influence was strong in the literature and visual arts of several countries, but his greatest effect was in the politics of Italy.  As Benedetto Croce, one of the grandees of Italian letters, put it: "For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism, in the determination to go down into the streets, to impose their own opinions, to stop the mouths of those who disagree, not to fear riots or fights, in this eagerness to break with all traditions, in this exaltation of youth which was characteristic of Futurism. ..." (P. 143.) 

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought "the end of Futurism as a coherent movement," although it continued to influence the thinking of progressive artists. (P. 168.) Marinetti turned his mind to the challenge of getting Italy into the war (perhaps the worst move the Italian nation has made between its unification in 1861 and the present day - although there are certainly competitors). In this effort he had an ally in Benito Mussolini, a prominent socialist who was in the process of trying to meld his socialism with a fierce Italian nationalism, eventually resulting in a form of national socialism known as fascism. 

The two men soon found themselves appearing together at the same rallies. This happened for the first time on March 31, 1915, in Milan. Both men wound up being arrested in connection with a later rally in Rome, on April ll. They didn't stay in jail very long, and on May 23 Italy entered the war. (P. 168.) 

Marinetti promptly joined the army, serving in the alpini, a formation of elite mountain troops. He received an award for gallantry. He was also wounded, but recovered and returned to the front, finishing out the war in 1918.  (P. 169.) 

With the end of World War I, Marinetti returned to Milan and immediately started work on the dopoguerra, or after-the-war. The year 1919 was, in Joll's words, "the year of Marinetti's greatest political notoriety." (P. 170.) He immediately gravitated to Mussolini's fascist party. At the party's foundational meeting in Milan's Piazza San Sepulcro on March 23, 1919, Marinetti spoke immediately after Mussolini, and was also elected to the party's central committee. (P. 171.) 

In addition, Marinetti helped form a group of streetfighters called the arditi, building it around a core of combat veterans. (P. 171.) 

In Milan on April 15, a socialist demonstration countered by a fascist demonstration turned into a street brawl. Marinetti and his arditi played a key part in the fighting and capped their day by invading and trashing the office of Avanti, the socialist paper that Mussolini had edited before the war. (Pp. 171-172.)

He also co-authored the Fascist manifesto that was published on June 6, 1919, in Il Popolo d'Italia, Mussolini's new newspaper. Marinetti's effort was in sharp contrast to his Futurist manifesto, concentrating on actual political issues like getting an eight-hour work day and giving women the vote. My sense is that Marinetti did not have the upper hand here. 

The fascists looked forward to a triumph in the Italian elections at the end of 1919, but the voters had other ideas, and the election was a total flop for Mussolini and his followers. This led to some serious introspection and a search for a way forward. (P. 172.) 

One result: "After 1919 the Futurist phase of Fascism was over." (P. 175.) Manifestos and street brawls were all well and good, but they clearly weren't enough. Mussolini looked for people and an approach that would help him seize control of the Italian government.  The key result of this search was the discovery of Italo Balbo, who among other things organized the March on Rome in 1922, which resulted in the king of Italy offering the prime minister's chair to Benito Mussolini. (For a lot more on Italo Balbo, see What Happened in Ferrara?) 

Mussolini also sought to turn the fascists to the right, even making overtures to the Vatican. Marinetti, a fierce anticlerical, quit the fascist party. After Italy became a fascist state he rejoined the party and continued to be a member until his death, but he was never again to have a position of leadership or influence in either politics or art, so his later life need not concern us here. It's largely unremarkable, but in you're interested, Joll does a good and sensitive job covering the ground on pages 175-176.. I get the sense that Joll actually likes Marinetti. This is not a feeling that I share. 

Legacy of a Confusing Career

As I look at Marinetti's dual careers in art and politics, I find myself asking questions for which I do not have answers. I did poke around in his childhood, but I found nothing there that would predict either of his careers.

Filippo Marinetti came from a wealthy north Italian family. He was born and grew up in Egypt (hence the reference to his Sudanese nurse in the scene above where Marinetti is born again from a muddy ditch). His father worked for the local ruler in Egypt, facilitating trade with Italian companies. For his higher education Marinetti went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne; later he received his law degree from the University of Pavia. 

To say that Marinetti was comfortable in Paris would clearly be an understatement. Not surprisingly, since he was wealthy, he decided to write poetry in Paris instead of practicing law in Italy. 

Marinetti did write poetry, and he had a large circle of artistically minded friends. But there is nothing here to indicate that his true vocation would be as a trail-blazing propagandist and provocateur. 

We're still thinking about Marinetti today because he was the principal author and sole signatory of the Futurist manifesto. This was a document which, at the time, had significant influence across a number of art forms in a substantial number of countries. 

May I have the temerity to say that the Futurist manifesto is a piece of crap? The writing is confused and often verges on incoherence. As a political platform it strikes me as a disjointed bit of carpentry with a number of rotten planks.

I know that misogyny was popular at the time, as it seems to be in America today, but misogyny does have the bad habit of bumping up against reality. As Joll notes, "There were few fields of Futurist activity where precept and practice were further apart." For instance, Marinetti happily lent a friend the money he needed to get married, "and yet it was equally typical that, when the young couple arrived back in Milan, the speeches against marriage at the party held by the Futurists to celebrate their return were so violent that ... the bride, who was only sixteen, burst into tears." (P. 161.)

I think Marinetti's career suffers from the same defects that mar the Futurist manifesto. I have yet to find a through-line between his work in the art world from 1909 to 1914 and his later political work from 1914 to 1920. The only thing that unites these two wildly different worlds is Marinetti's talent as a propagandist and a provocateur, which he used effectively in both worlds.

I do think I've started to see some other threads. Here's one. Joll's treatment of Futurism's influence on architecture centers on Antonio Sant'Elia, who died during the Eighth Battle of the Assonzo in 1916, leaving very little in the way of completed buildings, but also a number of drawings and writings that have influence to this day. His thought that "the use of steel and concrete and the absence of decoration would make 'the Futurist house like a giant machine'" was echoed by Le Corbusier, whose famous quote is "The house is a machine for living in," or La maison est une machine à habiter. (I found this in the 1925 edition of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, on page ix, in a section on airplanes, or avions. It's also on page 83. Vers une architecture was first published in 1923; it contains material from his contributions to the new periodical L'Esprit Nouveau, which first appeared in October 1920. None of this means that Le Corbusier owes his epigram to Sant'Elia, but it does seem that Sant'Elia, who died in 1916, got there first.)

Sant'Elia also insisted that buildings should have no stairs, only elevators. I'm pretty sure the fire marshals would have been unhappy with that idea. (On Sant'Elia, see pp. 148-149, 169.) 

I think that Futurism had another important effect on architecture. It's an idea that was best expressed by an American army officer during the Vietnam war: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." 

In its Apollonian moments, the Futurist manifesto talks about machines and speed, which are cool. In its Dionysian moments, it talks about violence and destruction, which creates space for the new to flourish.

This second idea seems to have appealed to many in the architecture profession in the first half of the twentieth century. I've spent a fair amount of time looking for documentation on this, but I haven't really found it. So I freely admit that my thought is simply a conjecture. 

Here's my thought: A widely held belief in the architectural community that modern architecture should replace older forms of architecture contributed to a demolition mania that was particularly evident in the United States in the decades after World War II. This mania had, in my opinion, its greatest success with the destruction of Penn Station in New York City between 1963 and 1966 (it took a while) and its replacement by a new station that treats people like rats in a maze. 

The old building, designed by McKim, Mead & White, had subscribed to the Ecole des Beaux Arts approach that treated humans with respect and provided a meaningful progression through a series of related spaces. Apparently these ideas were seen as unnecessary relics of the past. 

Penn Station, main concourse, 1910.

I think it would be unfair to blame Charles Luckman, the architect who fitted Madison Square Garden on top of the truncated train station, for all or even most of this travesty. The Pennsylvania Railroad owned the station, and I think it's fair to say that the company had lost interest in railroading (admittedly a tough business at the time) and had taken to viewing itself as at least aspirationally a real-estate company that was happy to generate cash flow by cannibalizing its crown jewel assets. 

It's generally agreed that the destruction of Penn station triggered the birth of the historic preservation movement in the United States. The developers soon targeted Grand Central Terminal, but a curious thing happened. In 1975, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wrote a letter to New York's mayor, Abe Beame, asking him to protect Grand Central from the wrecking ball. Here's an excerpt: "Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?" 

As I was reading this letter, it occurred to me why the Futurists were so devoted to "contempt for woman." Futurism was about unbridled activity by young men. Women often act as a stabilizing force on such young men - mothers, Sudanese nurses, girlfriends, wives. And possibly, later, if they're lucky, an older version of the young man may find a daughter to be a source of stability and support. Sons can also fulfill this role, although they will do it differently. 

But the Futurists did not want to be stabilized, and Marcel Breuer really did want to knock down Grand Central. Jackie (and her many friends) stopped him. 

For a recent article on Marinetti in the Guardian, click here. 

See also Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets? Did Carpet Bombing Inspire Urban Renewal? What Happened in Ferrara? Night Lights in Coney Island.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Let's Take a Pass on the Unitary Executive

Nagant M1895 pistol, with a sample cartridge.

"In my experience, the most difficult part of discovering and gaining personal knowledge of genocide is accepting the truth about what happened. To know all the details while at the same time being able to continue to live a full life, without forgetting or hiding what one knows about the past." 

- Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (2008) p. 61. 

I confess I'd never given any thought to executioners' dry cleaning bills. And yet here is one of Stalin's executioners, Vasily Blokhin: "He had been one of the main killers during the Great Terror, when he had commanded an execution squad in Moscow. He had been entrusted with some of the executions of high-profile defendants of show trials, but had also shot thousands of workers and peasants who were killed entirely in secret. At Kalinin he wore a leather cap, apron, and long gloves to keep the blood and gore from himself and his uniform. Using German pistols, he shot, each night, about two hundred and fifty men, one after another." (Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010. p. 137.) 

Let's unpack this paragraph a little bit. Snyder is describing Blokhin in 1940, during something that later became known as the Katyn massacre. After the Germans and the Soviets invaded and conquered Poland in the fall of 1939, the Soviets placed about 15,000 officer prisoners and civilian internees in three camps at Ostashkov and Kozelsk in Russia, and Starobilsk in Ukraine. (See Snyder p. 125.) 

The people in those three camps thought, until the day they died, that they would be going home fairly soon. That's what the Soviets told them. But Joseph Stalin actually had other ideas. The prisoners were a significant part of the Polish elite. Certainly the regular army officers, but also the reserve officers, who in their civilian lives were school teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and so forth. And the civilian internees were in the camps precisely because they were considered politically dangerous. (See pp. 125, 135.) 

After some consideration, Stalin decided that these people would not be going home, where they would almost certainly form a significant part of the resistance to Soviet rule in Poland. And so they were sent, still thinking they were about to go home, to three sites of execution. One of these was in Kalinin (now Tver), where Vasily Blokhin worked. The most famous of the three sites was Katyn. 

Why did Katyn become so famous? Because the Germans discovered it. How did that happen? Because Hitler, who had worked with Stalin to carve up Poland, decided it was time for him to carve up the Soviet Union. German troops attacked in June 1941, pushing across the Soviet-occupied part of Poland on the way to Moscow. In the early going, things looked a lot like the blitzkrieg in France, just a year earlier. But German troops never did get to Moscow, or Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The offensive stalled, and the Russians eventually seized the initiative and found their way to Berlin. 

But that's another story. Back to Katyn. At some point in late 1942, or possibly very early in 1943, rumors began to reach the higher echelons of the German military command in the area, telling of a mass grave in the Katyn forest, located a little to the west of Smolensk. When the news finally got to Berlin, Joseph Goebbels recognized the value of the story, and he launched a propaganda blitz on April 13, charging the Soviets with mass murder. 

Nazi propaganda poster. Artist: Theo Matejko.

Goebbels may not have been expecting the Soviet response on April 15, which was effectively the old schoolyard riposte "No, you!" (I'll never forget the moment when Donald Trump, in a debate with Hillary Clinton, actually said, "No, you!" There are more adult ways to say the same thing.)

The Berlin wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet empire began to crumble. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, agreed that the Germans had been right all along about Katyn. In 1991 the Soviet empire disintegrated. 

It appears that the other two sites remained official secrets until this time. I'm a little shaky on exactly when they became public items. I did find an interesting article online reporting that rumors about the Mednoye site began to circulate in 1988. As a note of explanation, Blokhin killed his 7,000 in the basement of the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin - a very impressive building that now houses a university. And Kalinin is now Tver. If you're starting to feel confused, you are not alone. Stay with me.

The people Blokhin killed were transported a short distance away from Kalinin, where the bodies were dumped into a mass grave that had been previously excavated. The burial site was in a forested area near the village of Mednoye, but its exact location was not known to the outside world. 

A group of volunteers from the Memorial organization confirmed the location of the burial site - one of the volunteers says they located the site after a KGB officer gave him the coordinates: “It definitely wasn’t legal, but we couldn’t wait.” says Sergei Glushkov. “We just climbed over the metal fence and started digging.” 

About the other site, in Kharkiv, I was stumped for a while. But I eventually found a 2021 story in the Euromaidan Press. The Polish prisoners from Starobilsk were transported to Kharkiv, where they were executed in the basement of the local NKVD headquarters. The bodies were then moved to a wooded area near the village of Pyatikhatky, not far from Karkhiv. They were buried in pits that had been dug in advance. The graves seem to have been discovered in 1969 by a group of teenagers, but the KGB moved quickly put a stop to visits by civilians, eventually erecting a fence. In 2000 the Ukrainian government created a memorial at the site, and in 2009 it declassified documents related to the murders. 

The term Katyn massacre has come to refer to all three sites. 

The slaughter at Kalinin was Vasily Blokhin's masterpiece - he actually holds the Guinness World Record for "Most prolific official executioner." He personally shot 7,000 prisoners over 28 nights, averaging 250 per night.

In addition to his leather apron, hat, and very long gloves, Blotkhin showed up with a briefcase full of Walther P2 semiautomatic pistols. This was a small handgun that had been around for a while and was apparently quite popular with German police officers. 

Blokhin chose the Walther P2 because, as his Wikipedia profile puts it, "he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended." The TT-30, or Tokarev, had been in service with the Russian army since 1931. 

The Walther P2 was a very early model from this company, which is perhaps most famous today for the Walther PPK, carried by James Bond. I haven't been able to find a usable picture of a Walther P2, so here's a picture of Sean Connery with a PPK strutting its stuff. 

(I was going to say that this picture puts me in mind of the photographs of Civil War soldiers, patiently confronting a long-exposure camera while displaying their weapons, which were frequently Navy Colt revolvers. But that would be a digression.)

Another option was the Nagant M1895 revolver, which the Imperial Russian army adopted in 1895.  The design was obsolete in 1895, but the Russians kept it in service until well after World War II. The main problem (but not the only problem) with the Nagant was reloading. The Nagant was a revolver, meaning it had a cylinder that contained cartridges; the cylinder rotated each time the pistol was fired, placing a fresh cartridge under the firing pin. Spent cartridges had to be ejected one at a time through a gate in the revolver's frame. 

This is the same system used in the famous Colt .45 Peacemaker, adopted by the U.S. army in 1873.  In 1892, three years before the Nagant came on scene, the U.S. army replaced the Peacemaker with the Colt M1892, which had a cylinder that could swing out to the side, greatly increasing the ease of reloading and greatly reducing the time involved. In 1911 the U.S. army joined the twentieth century when it moved to a semi-automatic pistol, the Colt M1911. The M1911 was loaded, basically, by placing a full magazine in the handle of the pistol. When the magazine was empty, the shooter pressed a button on the side of the frame; the empty magazine dropped out of the handle, and the shooter replaced it with a full magazine. 

In the Soviet Union, the Nagant remained in active service until well after World War II. I'm amazed that such an obsolete pistol lasted so long. Maybe it says something about the inner workings of the Soviet Union. But I'm not here to speculate. Blokhin was in a position to name his weapons, and he chose the Walther P2. As we shall see, executioners below his pay grade often found themselves using the Nagant revolver. 

The executions at Kalinin were the high point of Blokhin's career, but as Professor Snyder notes above, this highlight was only one part of a long and very bloody career. It began in 1926 when Joseph Stalin appointed him chief executioner of the NKVD. The NKVD had a lot of executioners, and he was the boss of all of them. The fact that he actually shot large numbers of people himself strikes me as odd, but again there may be an insight into the Soviet mentality here that I'm not grasping. 

Blokhin particularly flourished during Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938. At this point, I need to stop and take a deep breath. I've been researching and writing about mass murder for several months now. I just noticed that it's starting to look normal to me. There is in fact nothing normal about the Great Terror, just as there was nothing normal about the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933, which killed 3.9 million. Or Reinhard Heydrich and his Einsatzgruppen, or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, or, on a smaller scale, the complete destruction of the little village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. All of these things are, in my opinion, insane. But they were carried out by seemingly rational people, who wrote long bureaucratic memoranda, and many of whom lived at least superficially normal lives. And I see this horror standing in the doorway, just outside the living room that is the United States. So I will write a little more, to try to warn people about just how bad it could get here. And then I think I will take a break and write about more pleasant things, even things that might help make the future better - that's more fun than trying to stave off the worst. 

Okay. Joseph Stalin woke up one day and decided he wanted to kill 681,692 people, and he set the wheels in motion. We should look first at his favorite whipping boys, the kulaks. These were farmers who were more prosperous than the average peasant. They also tended to be leaders in their communities - the kinds of people who might actually be skeptical of orders coming down from on high, and also influence their fellow villagers to think independently of the party line. In other words they were a threat to Stalin's complete control of his country. Stalin killed 378,326 kulaks during the Great Terror. (Pp. 78-79, 83, 107.) 

Timothy Snyder describes a typical execution: "Killings were always carried out at night, and in seclusion. They took placed in soundproofed rooms below ground, in large buildings such as garages where noise could cover gunshots, or far from human settlement in forests. The executioners were always NKVD officers, generally using a Nagan [sic] pistol. While two men held a prisoner by his arms, the executioner would fire a single shot from behind into the base of the skull, and then often a 'control shot' into the temple." (P. 83.) 

National minorities, particularly the Poles, received the same treatment. Professor Snyder again: "In 1937 and 1938, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were shot on essentially ethnic grounds. ... In fact, the Soviet Union in the late 1930s was a land of unequalled national persecutions." Again, the reasoning was that they were not reliable supporters of the regime. (P. 89.) 

The Soviets worked very successfully to keep these killings secret, just as they had largely succeeded in keeping the full extent of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 from the public. On the other hand, they assiduously publicized a series of show trials, which began in August 1936 and initially focused on people who had been Stalin's political opponents. The trials went on from there, most notably decapitating the Soviet armed forces (the trial of the generals and certain other trials were secret) and were supplemented by purges of lower-ranking people who did not receive the formality of a trial. In all, about 50,000 people were executed. (Pp. 73-75.) 

I'm going to let Timothy Snyder summarize, starting with the obliviousness of the outside world: "Insofar as the Great Terror was noticed at all, it was seen only as a matter of show trials and party and army purges. But these events, noticed by specialists and journalists at the time, were not the essence of the Great Terror. The kulak operations and the national operations were the essence of the Great Terror. Of the 681,692 executions carried out for political crimes in 1937 and 1938, the kulak and national orders accounted for 625,483." (P. 107.) 

Valery Blokhin.

In 1953, Joseph Stalin had a stroke; he died a few days later, on March 5. Subsequent leaders tried to walk quietly away from this legacy, but I think the lesson is stark. As Lord Acton put it, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

Stephen Miller visits Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.

See also Somotomo, A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, The Real Parallels Are With Weimar, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump? and Unleashing the Oligarchs, What Caused the French Revolution? and Jim Crow Was a Failed State, Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924), What Happened in Ferrara?

How the Dam Breaks

Or Maybe It's More Like a Pie Crust

"For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, 'The emperor is naked!' - when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game - everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably."

- Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1979, 2018), p. 44. (If you decide to read this book, I strongly suggest you read Timothy Snyder's introduction first. Havel originally wrote for a Czech audience; Snyder explains things.) 

In my opinion, our problem in the United States is not simply Trump, or a fascist party called the Republicans. It is the half-hidden oligarchy that has ruled us in the past (see Mark Hanna), and has reasserted itself with increasing success since the days of Barry Goldwater, who came from a family of dry-goods merchants and was partial to cowboy hats. 

Havel describes a world where the ruling class has obtained complete control. That is not currently the situation in the United States, but people are very definitely busy erecting the crust. I think the Epstein scandal is a particularly useful weapon against them, because I think it will wind up implicating not only Trump but also many members of the oligarchy. Both Republicans and Democrats. And I will be utterly amazed if there is no film.

__________

From page 62: "... the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being." 

And from pages 60-61: "... those who are not politicians are also not so bound by traditional political thinking and political habits and therefore, paradoxically, they are more aware of genuine political reality and more sensitive to what can and should be done under the circumstances." 

And from page 140: "There can and must be structures that are open, dynamic and small; beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work." 

__________

As regular readers may recall, I have been struggling recently to maintain my commitment to non-violence, which has its roots in the 1960s. Havel writes favorably of an approach that "can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence." (P. 99.) 

Perhaps we could call this engaging with the enemy in a language he understands.

__________

On pages 112-117 of The Power of the Powerless, Havel discusses how a resistance movement starts to develop parallel structures that allow people to perform their chosen activities when they have been excluded from official structures. His example is the famous samizdat literature of the Soviet Union and the eastern Europe of the Cold War. Another example would be the underground literature of France during World War II, including the newspaper Combat (with editor Albert Camus) and the famous 1942 novella Le silence de la mer, from the underground publisher Les editions de minuit. 

Instead of retyping manuscripts and perhaps making carbon copies at the same time, or quietly using commercial printing presses at night, we have today the internet, which allows Jen Rubin to leave the Washington Post and take her column to Substack, where she can write whatever she wants, whenever she wants, and reach a large audience. 

Stephen Miller could try to crush Substack, but then Peter Thiel would have to admit that he is a totalitarian and not a libertarian. (Miller and Russell Vought, by the way, are already there. As president, JD Vance will do whatever Peter tells him to do.)

__________

Here's the last paragraph of Havel's little book:

"For the real question is whether the 'brighter future' is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?" (P. 146.) 

See also Wounded Souls, A Teacher's Dilemma, A Report on Travel Restrictions, Deja Vu All Over Again, A World in Ruins, Is Stephen Miller the Next Reinhard Heydrich?

Fourth Street Surges Forward

Queen Village Reinvents Its Heart

My brother's mother-in-law grew up in South Philly, and she told me that, back in the day, all the mothers and their daughters loved to go to Fourth street and shop for fabric, and then sew themselves stylish new frocks. It was a happy memory for her.

In the 1990s, local merchants started using the term Fabric Row for the stretch of Fourth between Bainbridge and Catharine, and pretty quickly the City made it an official second name. There are still a good number of fabric and related shops on Fabric Row, but the strip has definitely diversified, creating a commercial center that can provide for many of the daily shopping needs of the surrounding neighborhood, which is called Queen Village. 

(There is a Queen street in the center of Queen Village, which is apparently named after a queen of Sweden whose actual name was Christina. Christiana, Delaware, home of the Christiana Mall, is also named after her, as is the local Christina river. The Swedes were among the very first Europeans who attempted to put down roots in this area, before being overrun by the Dutch, who were in turn overrun by the English.) 

And now the Queen Village Neighbors Association has decided to take back the street itself and give it to the people. If you look at old photographs of similar streets you can see what Fabric Row would have looked like before cars - jammed with people walking in every direction and abruptly shifting course when something in a store window caught the eye. 

There's another piece of this picture that you might not expect: The curbs were lined with pushcarts, from which vendors sold a wide variety of items. The curb was a very lively liminal space on Fourth street. Then the cars needed the curb for parking, and the curb became a dead liminal space. Or, as The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia puts it, "With the increase of automobiles and demand for parking spaces, in 1955 a city ordinance brought an end to an era by banning pushcarts from Philadelphia streets."

So it's back to the future on Fourth. With variations, of course. I'm not expecting pushcarts to return - but the merchants who took control of the street in front of their shops did put me in mind of the pushcarts that used to occupy exactly the same space.

And the current approach to open streets on Fourth is one day on two weekends in October. And it's just an experiment for now. 

I do think kids will be the key to success here. Kids don't need elaborate props - QVNA gave them chalk and bubble-blowing kits, blocks and bean bag. I think chalk was the favorite, and not just with the kids.

The shops that were open and put their goods out front definitely drew in passers-by. It's so much easier to linger for a moment at a table set up in a space that nobody owns than it is to walk into a store, however welcoming it may be. Walking through that door takes you from the public space into a private space. I understand that retailers want to put you in a controlled environment, but with selling points both inside and outside, they can have the benefit of both environments.

There was a very good band - three instrumentalists and a vocalist. The music permeated the space without dominating it, and I think contributed significantly to the ambient happy energy.

I visited on Saturday, October 11, and wound up spending several hours there, just wandering around and absorbing the atmosphere (and eating a very good bagel at The Bagel Place). A QVNA person asked me to fill out a questionnaire. One of the questions was how long it had been since I last visited, and I was stumped. I finally decided it was before Covid.

Too long. My bad. Queen Village is a really nice neighborhood, and I like what's happening on its main street quite a lot.

I just love all the children.

See also April Open Streets, Open Streets Mummers, Big Mews and Little Walkways.

Food as a Weapon

The Ukrainians Call It Holodomor

In 1932 and 1933, Joseph Stalin killed 3.9 million Ukrainians. He did it on purpose. He did it because he didn't like them. He didn't like them because they weren't obeying him. And yes, there are strong parallels to the relationship between Ukraine and Russia today. 

Anne Applebaum has described what it's like to die in a famine:

"The starvation of a human body, once it begins, always follows the same course. In the first phase, the body consumes its stores of glucose. Feelings of extreme hunger set in, along with constant thoughts of food. In the second phase, which can last for several weeks, the body begins to consume its own fats, and the organism weakens drastically. In the third phase, the body devours its own proteins, cannibalizing tissues and muscles. Eventually, the skin becomes thin, the eyes become distended, the legs and belly swollen as extreme imbalances lead the body to retain water. Small amounts of effort lead to exhaustion. Along the way, different kinds of diseases can hasten death: scurvy, kwashiorkor, marasmus, pneumonia, typhus, diphtheria, and a wide a wide range of infections and skin diseases caused, directly or indirectly, by lack of food. ... 

"Sooner or later, hunger made everyone listless, unable to move or think. People sat on benches in their farmyards, beside the roadside, in their houses - and didn't move. Bustling villages grew quiet, recalled Mykola Proskovchenko, who survived the famine in Odessa province. "It was a strange silence everywhere. Nobody cried, moaned, complained ... Indifference was everywhere: people were either swollen or completely exhausted ... Even a kind of envy was felt toward the dead." 

(Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 2017, pp. 241, 250-251. For the 3.9 million number in the first paragraph, see p. 280.) 

Joseph Stalin did this. He didn't have to. But he wanted to, and he had the power to make it happen.

This is why the Ukrainians will never give in to Vladimir Putin.

I'm not convinced that anyone in the White House is aware of this history, but they do seem to be blundering down the same path. Trump is already responsible for the excess mortality in the Covid epidemic, and the idea that he cares about anybody's death except his own is fanciful.

And now, with the suspension of SNAP funding, he's taking food away from people who will be immediately hungry. I doubt that we'll get to 3.9 million dead, but with this crowd you never know.

You say it can't happen here. Well, with the demolition of USAID, they have already done it in Africa. And, frankly, they've gotten away with it. How do you propose to stop them from bringing hunger home?

(The flag above is an authentic pirate flag that is about 200 years old. It is currently located in the Aland Maritime Museum in Finland.)

See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.

What Is a Fop?

Good Question.

Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington
in The Relapse (John Vanbrugh, 1696).

Years ago - say 1696 - a fop was an overdressed and empty-headed person. But today it seems to mean a person who lives in Philadelphia and hates loading zones.

Why do these people hate loading zones? I think they hate them because they're useful and very popular, and because they effectively block a return to an older design for our parking system where the fops had a very sweet deal. They, like the Bourbon royal family in the French ancien regime, were very special people.

But we're not here to discuss eighteenth century France. Let's focus on modern Philadelphia, and something called Friends of Pine & Spruce, or FOPS.

The Basic Problem: Too Many Cars

Since the 1980s, Philadelphia has used a zoned system of residential parking permits to regulate parking in the residential areas of Center City and other densely populated parts of the city. The problem with this system is that it fills all the regulated blocks with parked cars, effectively leaving no space for people who seek access during the day - delivery drivers, plumbers, electricians, or friends and relatives visiting from out of town or another neighborhood.

This is called denial of access. It leads directly to illegal parking in crosswalks and fire hydrants, and also double parking that frequently ties traffic into knots.

As a response to this issue, Philadelphia decided to install loading zones that operated during the day and reverted to regular parking spaces at night. The first of these loading zones went in on Pine and Spruce streets, west of Broad, in 2024. The next year, the system was expanded, and Pine and Spruce streets east of Broad were included. 

In June 2025 a new organization called Friends of Pine & Spruce sued the City, seeking to block installation of the loading zones, claiming, among other things, that the City administration had exceeded its authority because there was no ordinance authorizing the loading zones. In August the judge issued a temporary order in favor of the plaintiffs. Today, City Council passed legislation that authorized the loading zones. (Bill number 250718.) This might mean the end of the lawsuit, but there may be other claims in the complaint that the plaintiffs will wish to pursue. (I'm not a lawyer, but I've done my best here.)

A little while ago, I decided I would read the plaintiffs' complaint. I thought it might be useful to look for insights into their thinking about the underlying street design issues.

In previous articles on this blog I have gone into considerable detail about a number of these issues. If you're interested in learning more, I suggest you start with Loading Zones Are the Key (September 2024), which provides links to many of the earlier articles. 

I'll be quoting from the Amended Complaint, filed on August 19, listing paragraph numbers, and also commenting. 

Paragraph 33e. In its enabling legislation for the residential parking permit system in 1981, City Council found that the existing arrangements on the street were harming residents "by effectively denying them access to curbside parking ordinarily enjoyed by residents." Plaintiffs add, in paragraph 36, that the legislation "embodies a clear legislative directive to protect residential curbside access in the City’s most densely populated neighborhoods." Paragraph 35 quotes the enabling legislation as seeking to protect "residents of areas of the City who suffer adverse effects from vehicular congestion resulting from the existence of limited numbers of curbside parking spaces and large numbers of non-residents competing with residents for curbside parking spaces..." 

We have here, I think, a pretty clear statement that the City thought the problem was outsiders. And that may have been the case in the early 80s. Today, however, our basic problem is too many insiders - and too many insiders with cars. (See Parking Permits and Musical Chairs.) We can only be grateful the great majority of them have found - or made - places to park off the street.

Plaintiffs then turn to the famous Rina Cutler letter of August 12, 2009, which states in part: 

"We do not plan to change the current permit parking program for religious institutions, although we do want to better regulate such use to assure that the permit parking is only used as authorized. We recognize that taxis will continue to stop to pick-up and discharge residents as they do today, and that residents will stop to unload groceries, etc." 

(The letter is Exhibit B in the amended complaint. Rina Cutler was deputy mayor for transportation and utilities.) 

I think it's important to recognize that Cutler's letter was simply a statement of current intent. It is imbued with a tentative quality appropriate to people who are doing very new things. And it is not a contract, or an ordinance.

Since the letter was written, two people have been killed on this corridor, many more have been injured, and a very large number have been intimidated by the thuggish behavior of some Philadelphia drivers. I think it's fair to say that the Rina Cutler design for these streets has been shown to be dangerously defective, because it is based on the principle that all Philadelphia motorists will never behave like Visigoths. In my opinion, this design needs to be replaced with a better, safer, less intimidating design. This is the process that the Fops oppose. (For more on intimidation see Intermittently Terrifying.) 

All the churches and synagogues that were parking in these bike lanes have altered their behavior and are no longer parking in these bike lanes. All that remains in opposition to the reform of these streets is a small, loud, and wealthy group of egocentric people who are accustomed to getting their way. 

The fopsters, however, are in denial. Paragraph 54: "For nearly fifteen years, and counting, this arrangement has worked. Not a single death has occurred on Pine and Spruce from a bicyclist having to maneuver around a vehicle stopped in a bike lane on Pine and Spruce. This successful, unblemished track record continues to this day." This statement would be laughable were it not so painful to so many people. 

Let us move on to paragraph  107. "Specifically, the City desires to designate time-limited loading zones at the start and end of nearly every block along Pine and Spruce Streets, as well as mid-block in some locations—effectively converting approximately 25% of existing residential parking into commercial-style, all-purpose curbside access points." 

The only objection I have here is to the 25% number. As a quick reality check, I selected the 1700 block of Pine as a convenience sample and did a count. There are 23 parking spots on this block, including four spots in loading zones. My arithmetic indicates that the loading zones are taking 17% of the spots (and of course they revert to regular parking spaces in the evening and overnight). 

The blocks in this area are not uniform, and it would take a full survey to determine the exact percentage of spots, by block. However, the hyperfocus on access to individual blocks is essentially a distraction. Residents in this area are rarely able to park on the block where they live. Years ago, I was happy if I was able to park within three blocks of my house, and my observation is that the situation is considerably worse today. 

A better comparison would be the number of loading zones as a percentage of the total number of parking spots in the area. Ten years ago, Mike Axler and I counted the parking spaces, both on-street and off-street, in the area covered by the Center City Residents' Association. We found a total of 1,584 Zone 1 parking spots, for people with Zone 1 permits. The total number of curbside spots was 3,161. 

If we assume there are four loading zones on each block of Pine and Spruce, between Broad and 22nd (this is the location of the loading zones subject to litigation west of Broad) there are 64 loading zone spots. (Eight blocks on Pine, plus eight on Spruce, gets us to 16 blocks. 16 x 4 = 64.) 

For Zone 1 spots, this gives us 64 / 1,584, or  4.0%. 

For all curbside spots, this gives us 64 / 3,161 or 2.0%. 

I could throw in the massive amount of off-street parking, but perhaps we've done enough arithmetic. Mike and I did find that, on any given day, no more than 13% of households were parking in Zone 1 spots on the street in the CCRA area. Half the households did not own a car, and the rest were parking off-street - 87% of resident households are not parking on the street. Three-quarters of those who own cars park them off the street. (For more on the numbers game see Parking: Storage v. Access.) 

The Foppers are fighting to defend a dying system.

Finally, paragraph 177. "The City’s plan – while favoring elite, able bodied cyclists – places some of the most vulnerable in our society in a position where they are exposed, disproportionately, to unnecessary hardship as a result having [sic] their narrow, historic, highly residential street access cordoned off in concrete." 

This business of stereotyping bicyclists and then hiding behind grandma really needs to stop.

As for grandma, the old arrangement, without loading zones, only favored the people who abutted the bike lane. The people on the other side of the street were normally looking at a curb that was filled to overflowing with parked cars. The only access for grandma would normally have been illegal parking at fire hydrants or in crosswalks. The loading zones provide access for both sides of the street. If grandma has a wheelchair, she should get into it, and when she gets to the house, I'll leave it to a large, strong grandson to carry her up all those steps to the front door. Which the grandson already has to do today.

Finally, yes, there are "elite, able bodied bicyclists" on our streets. They are a minority. Go to the South Street bridge at rush hour in the morning or the evening, and watch the people cycling, scootering, and walking. They are ordinary people who are going to work or returning home. (See Civilizing the South Street Bridge.)

This is the future of our city, if only we will accept it. If we want people to come here, and live here, raise a family, and grow old here, we need to make our streets safe, useful, and pleasant for everybody. 

(The painting of Colley Cibber is by Giuseppe Grisoni. I found it in Wikimedia Commons.) 

See also The State of Play on Pine-Spruce, What Are We Doing to Our Truck Drivers? and Quo Vadis, Philadelphia?

Slam Dunk in Philly

A Very Big Happy Crowd

Also, there were a lot of young people at the No Kings rally in Philadelphia, October 18, 2025. We gathered at City Hall and strolled down Market street to Independence Mall, which we filled, both blocks. 

I'll leave the numbers game to others. I think we did our job. Here are a few photographs, starting at City Hall and finishing on the Mall.

See also Politics on a Very Hot Day; Bookends: Making Good Trouble; Somotomo; No King, No Clown! and Message for the Mad King.