Josh Hawley's Romance with Religion

A Grand Inquisitor Wannabe?

Wooden church, St. Mary's, Ga. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936.

I named my last car Pelagia. It was an inside joke. Pelagius was a fellow who lived a long time ago and didn't believe in original sin. This got him into some trouble with the thought police. 

I don't think about Pelagius every day, but it seems that Senator Josh Hawley may. I gather he doesn't like him (see this story in the Times). Apparently Hawley thinks that Americans derive their well-known tendency to think for themselves from Pelagius. It's true that, in addition to his ideas about original sin, Pelagius believed that free will involved making up your own mind. Hawley doesn't like that at all. 

Theologically, it strikes me that Hawley would have been quite at home in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts. There the leaders told you what to think, and if you didn't like it you could go and found Rhode Island. 

(This is actually a more gentle treatment of heretics than was traditional. In 1600, the Italian heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome.) 

I had thought, or at least hoped, that we had gotten away from some of the more extreme manifestations of religious fanaticism. Over the years I've made a sort of hobby out of poking around in the underside of church history, with an emphasis on the Crusades and the Inquisition. I've even written about it a bit. 

I won't hide my basic conclusion from you. Religious fanaticism is not, in my opinion, a good thing.

I could talk about the taking of Ma'arra on December 11, 1098, during the First Crusade. The Crusaders, who became pretty good at committing atrocities during the course of the Crusade, actually cooked and ate some of their defeated enemy. This is called cannibalism in polite society, or perhaps not mentioned at all. (See Abortion and the Bible.)

So many stories. One more. There was a village called Montaillou in the south of France, up in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was crawling with heretics. The Inquisition had been trying to get them into the straight and narrow for many years. It didn't work. The villagers liked their heresy. (They believed in the independent existence of evil. This is known as the Manichean heresy.)

One day in 1308 the Inquisition, obviously fed up, had the adult and adolescent villagers rounded up and marched off to an infamous church prison in Carcassonne. 

Left behind were the children. They were alone, except for the animals.

I have a picture in my mind. A few small children, standing on a hill, a light breeze fluttering their hair on a cool, sunny day. They're watching their parents, far below them, walking away to jail.

If you can do this to children, you can do anything. (For more, see Where Have All the Grownups Gone?)

If I were Senator Hawley, I would rethink my commitment to religious fanaticism. It seems awfully hard to square with his oath to the Constitution. In the end, I think it's an either-or proposition. 

You're playing with dynamite, Josh. Stop.

Pelagius.

I found this picture of Pelagius through Wikimedia Commons. It's from a book called the Nuremberg Chronicle. This is a pretty special book. It was printed in 1493, which makes it an incunabulum - a book printed before 1500. There aren't a whole lot of them. Since Pelagius died more than 1,000 years before the book was published, I doubt that he actually looked much like this picture; in particular I think his clothes probably look a lot like what people in Nuremberg were wearing in 1493. 

See also Submerged Narratives, The Problem with Dystopia, Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil.

A Home Invasion

Civilization Is Fragile 

House interior, Morgantown, W.Va. Walker Evans/FSA, 1935.

It's a Friday evening. You're sitting at the kitchen table, writing a list of things that need doing over the weekend. Your spouse and children are at the movies. It's a quiet time.

And then it's not. There's a loud bang at the door. You're startled, but decide you should investigate. As you're standing up, a large man in dark clothes appears in the kitchen door. Things are happening very quickly. 

The large man punches you in the face, breaking your glasses. Then he hits you again and knocks you to the ground.

You're on your back. Your head hurts and you can't see very well. Your heart is thumping and you're having trouble breathing. You think you may throw up.

The large man is pointing a large pistol at your face, directly between your eyes. He speaks.

"Where's the money!" It's not a question. It's a demand.

Several days later, you're standing in your living room, holding a cup of coffee. There's no place to sit. The invaders used knives to rip open the sofa and the two easy chairs. They also cut up several paintings that had been done by an older relative who is not in a position to paint replacements. There is graffiti spray-painted on the walls.

The phone rings. It's the police. They have captured the three home invaders.

"So," the officer asks, "do you want us to prosecute them, or do you want us to let them go?"

Domination

Home invasions are about money, but they are also about domination. In this country, they are almost always a private affair, but, in Italy, Benito Mussolini used them as a tool of politics. I wrote about this in 2019:

"Not that we should underestimate the seductive, iconoclastic power of the fascists. Mussolini had at his disposal hit squads, or squadri, composed largely of petty criminals and wannabe thugs. The squadristi would use the manganello, a kind of billy club, to beat people they didn't like. They would also make them drink castor oil. Another favorite tactic was the home invasion, where the homeowner's furniture and other belongings would be thrown into the street. The squadri also ransacked newspaper offices. (See Caroline Moorehead, A Bold and Dangerous Family, 2017, pp. 77- 78, 129-130, 140-141, 147. For a recent article in Slate, click here.)

"Numerous judges and police officers simply loved the squadristi, and would go to great lengths to keep them out of jail, even before the March on Rome. (Moorehead, pp. 78, 82.)"

(To see the full story, click here.)

Justice

The sack of the Capitol - the People's House - was a home invasion. And now various people are saying that it wasn't that big a deal, and we should move on - no, that was a Bush-era phrase. Now it's "unify."

I say we need justice to be done first - and not just to the people who were on the ground at the Capitol, but to all those who abetted and incited, including the president.

Then we can talk about moving on and unifying. But we will never forget.

See also A Moment in Time, Reform in Head and Members.

Barnacles at the Curb

Don't Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters

Careening an old whaler near New Bedford, 1882.

 

Back in the days when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron, the ships had a problem. The problem was barnacles. These pesky little creatures just loved to latch onto the nice wet wood on the bottom of a ship's hull, where they would soon cover the entire area below the waterline with their extended family. With a good crop of barnacles, a sailing ship would become noticeably slower, and its response to the helm more sluggish. The solution was called careening - typically, grounding a ship at high tide and tipping it so the bottom of the hull could be cleaned at low tide. Pirates used to do this on the sands of secluded beaches in the Caribbean, with sunny weather and appropriate palm trees, but you can do it anywhere you can safely tip a boat over on its side. We still use the word careening. When you go a bit too quickly around a corner, and your car goes tippy, you're careening.

The barnacles came to my mind while I was reading the performance audit report that the Philadelphia Controller's Office released at the end of last year on the Philadelphia Parking Authority. I think the report is good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.

Managing Money, Managing People

There's something called LODO - Lights On, Doors Open. LODO seeks to answer a question: Does an organization have the basic infrastructure in place that will allow it do its job - whether that job is selling groceries or managing parking. In my opinion, the auditor's report does a pretty good job looking at these basic issues.

Not surprisingly, the auditors suggested after their review that the PPA has too many workers and pays its senior managers too much money. To arrive at these conclusions, the auditors compared the PPA to a group of peer organizations in other cities, and so the criticisms we have all heard for years now have a basis in data.

The PPA was not happy, claiming essentially that it was a unique organization in an extremely unusual environment. You hear that a lot in Philadelphia, along with the excuse that the city is too poor to do the right thing.

Benchmarking is a standard practice, and frankly the PPA should be doing this itself, rather relying upon outsiders to provide the service.

Next on the list of the usual suspects is the thought that the PPA is a patronage mill. Again, the auditors came up with some interesting, and I think suggestive, data. They selected a random sample of 107 employees working in the on-street parking and support units, and they "compared employee residency data with publicly available records for ward leaders and city committee persons." They found that 25 of the 107 (23%) either held one of those offices or lived with someone who did. This number, of course, only provides a lower bound to the discussion. All that the auditors may have identified is nepotism, which is the hard core of patronage. The more subtle tentacles of patronage can be long and twisty, and cover a much wider area. (Page 14 of the auditors' report. To see the report, click here. For the back-and-forth on salaries and staffing, see pp. 7-12 of the auditors' report and  pp. 4-5 and 8-12 of the PPA's response to the auditors' report, which are also pp. 30-31 and 34-38 of the full report. Then go to pp. 48-50 of the full report for the auditors' response to the PPA response.) 

On the patronage issue, the PPA spluttered a bit, and then blurted out this: "On its face the Audit Report finds that the vast majority (77%) of the PPA's employees have no political connections. This finding undermines the 'patronage' stereotype often errantly restated about the PPA." (Page 5 of the PPA's response to the auditors' report; page 31 of the full report.) 

I think this response is hilarious.

The auditors were careful to note that the employees studied came from both of the major political parties. I suspect that such a bipartisan theme might be found elsewhere in the PPA.  It might be interesting, for instance, to look into where the PPA purchases its vehicles, and what replacement cycles the various types of vehicles are on.

There's a lot more, but I think I'll end this section by looking at something I've taken to calling the school funding corkscrew. Does anyone want to argue that the funding structure by which the PPA gives money to the Philadelphia School District is not screwy? There are much more straightforward ways to fund our schools. And I know we face obstacles in Harrisburg, but shouldn't we at least state that tying the school subsidy to the number of parking tickets is ridiculous? Reform has to start somewhere. The PPA has enough other distractions to keep it from focusing on what should be its job, which is managing parking. It doesn't need the school funding corkscrew.

Managing Parking

So how is the PPA doing with its basic job of managing parking? My answer is, Not very well. 

As the PPA notes in its response to the auditors' report, its mission statement includes the following language: "A focus on improved access, greater mobility, and increased vehicular and pedestrian safety are the guiding principles of our program." (Pp. 1-2 of the PPA's response; pp. 27-28 of the full report.) Remember that word "access." A big part of access is being able to park your car when you get to your destination.

The auditors don't seem very interested in these issues, as the PPA duly notes, but the audit report does give us a gift. If you have trouble reading this table, click on it. It should get larger.

Back in 2015, I came up with the idea that we should have a set of vital signs to measure the health of our parking system. This would be similar to the vital signs that get taken every time you go to your doctor's office - you know, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, that sort of thing. 

I think the most important vital sign for a parking system is its occupancy rate, which should ideally be about 85 percent. I stumbled onto my second-most important vital sign while I was doing some research on the (then) new parking system in San Francisco, and it turned out that its ratio of meter revenue to ticket revenue was four to one - four dollars of meter revenue for every dollar of ticket revenue.

I wondered what the ratio was in Philadelphia. Finding out involved filing a Right-to-Know request, and when the data for the answer came back it turned out that we had a reverse ratio - we had twice as much ticket revenue as meter revenue. (For the article I wrote, click here.) 

The table above, from page 8 of the auditor's report, displays the necessary numbers for six cities. Only two have reverse ratios - Philadelphia and Detroit. Portland, Oregon, has five dollars of meter revenue for every dollar of ticket revenue. (Meter revenue figures are not available for Boston.) 

Why does Philadelphia have so much more ticket revenue than meter revenue? The answer is simple. Parking on the street is very inexpensive in Philadelphia, and so the legal spots at the curb are almost always taken. 

So when a plumber shows up to fix a clogged sewer line, and he looks for a spot to park, he is almost always looking at a block that has an occupancy rate of 100 percent. If the occupancy rate was 85 percent, he would find an open space and park in it. At 100 percent he parks in the crosswalk at the corner.

And that's when a young parent and a child in a stroller step out into the street and get hit by a car careening around the corner. So the plumber doesn't get access, and the pedestrians don't get safety. Feel free to refer to the extract from PPA's mission statement, above.

Oh - I almost forgot. Why is there so much more money in parking fines than in meter revenue? Because the meter rates are artificially low, and the clogging at the curb forces people to park illegally, which drives up the revenue from fines. The PPA profits greatly by dangerously overloading our curbs.

The PPA could provide 85 percent occupancy in metered areas by adopting dynamic pricing, the system that was pioneered in San Francisco back in 2008. Dynamic, or variable, pricing is at its heart very simple: At places and times where demand is high, prices go up. At places and times where demand is low, prices go down. (For more on dynamic pricing and the San Francisco demonstration project, click here.) 

This system works. And it's not even new any more. 

There's an interesting twist in residential areas where the PPA offers residential parking permits to the people who live in the area. At $35 a year, the parking permit is essentially free. Once again, the curbs are jammed. (For more on parking permits, click here and here.)

There is a solution. Its name is uniform price auction. Explaining it is a bit complicated, although I think it would actually be fairly straightforward in operation. For a discussion of uniform price auctions, click here. 

When it comes to adopting new technology, I think it's fair to say that the PPA is a slow, fumbling adopter. 

The auditors were quite interested in license-plate recognition technology. There's an interesting tit-for-tat between the auditors and the PPA on pages 12-14, 38-39 (pp. 12-13 of the PPA reply), and 51-52 (in the auditors' response to the PPA response). 

The basic question has to do with the fact that the PPA has issued hand-held license-plate readers to its staff of ambulatory enforcement officers. The auditors suggest that it would be more efficient (and more in keeping with best practice) to mount license-plate readers on vehicles, which could cover large amounts of territory in not a lot of time, thereby allowing the PPA to lay off a substantial number of enforcement officers, an indeterminate number of whom are members of a political machine. 

The PPA responded that LPRs can only be programmed to recognize one type of regulation, which meant that LPRs could not be used on complicated blocks where, in addition to parking spaces, there were such things as loading zones, handicapped zones, fire hydrants, and crosswalks.

The auditors demurred: "Additionally, our parking management consultant has indicated that LPR systems can be programmed to recognize different regulations within a city block. Crosswalks, loading zones, fire hydrants, and drivers who decide to double park are not unique to Philadelphia. The PPA should consider researching how other cities manage these constraints while using mobile LPR systems." 

This is a very polite suggestion that the PPA should do some benchmarking of its own.

If the reader is thinking that the decision to use hand-held license-plate readers rather than vehicle-mounted readers may have been influenced by the prospect of laying off a large number of employees who have connections, you would not be alone. Remember: Distractions can damage the mission.

There are two glancing mentions of the PPA's mobile parking app, meterUP, on pages 13 and 39 (p. 13 of the PPA response). I won't go into the history here, but the PPA did not exactly cover itself with glory when it set this program up. (Click here for more.) 

For several years I have been serving on the municipal parking committee for Asbury Park, a small city at the Jersey shore. In July 2017, 8 percent of parking revenue was coming through Asbury's mobile app. In 2019 a second app was added to the first, and, in December 2020, 67 percent of all metered parking revenue was coming through the two apps. 

That's a pretty steep adoption curve, but, in the world of electronics, adoption curves can be nearly vertical. I wonder what the PPA's experience with meterUP has been.

Managing Streets 

So let's back up now and ask a bigger question: What are our streets for? Or, perhaps better, what should our streets be for? For the last century there has been an unexamined assumption that our streets are for motor vehicles - moving, and also parked. In recent years, people have started to push back against this dominant belief. 

And in the last year, with the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a shift. People no longer automatically accept the hegemony of the car. In Philadelphia the best example of this shift is the proliferation of restaurants located in the open air - on the street and not just on the sidewalk. (For more, click here and here.) 

In Paris, there has been great progress in the last year to establish a complete, safe, network of bicycle lanes. No such rapid progress on bike lanes has occurred in Philadelphia, although we do continue to inch along at our usual snail's pace. 

My own thinking about the use of streets has evolved slowly. When I started writing about these issues on my blog in 2012, I was initially concerned about making recreational bicycling safer on Martin Luther King Drive, in Fairmount Park. And then I turned to the problem of the incredibly tight parking conditions in Center City and South Philly. 

Only in time did I come to see the rapidly developing use of bicycles for many purposes other than recreation, such as commuting to work or dropping the kids off at school or going to the grocery store. And only in time did I come to see parked cars as barnacles - in the way, and slowing down the progress we needed to make, first in reimagining our streets and then in redesigning them. 

I really enjoyed playing around with Professor Shoup's ideas about parking, and trying to see how they could be applied in Philadelphia. I still do. But now I see clearly that the basic problem is not that our parking system is badly designed and poorly executed, but that we simply have way too much parking on our streets.

I think it's clear that long-term on-street storage of cars on the street has to go away. These cars belong off the street. In my opinion, PPA should be leading this shift by building or encouraging the development of large regional garages in residential neighborhoods. 

One good location for such a garage would be the site of the old Moyamensing Prison in the heart of South Philly. (For more, click here and here.) 

Managing our streets is a complicated task that is, at present, poorly organized and lacks any unified, coherent vision. A great many public agencies and private organizations have a say in our streets, and just figuring out who owns or controls a particular patch of street can be a patience. Jim Saksa had a good story on this in PlanPhilly in 2015. (To see the story, click here.) 

So there are challenges. How surprising. I will leave you with one thought, a little piece of light that came to me only slowly, and in pieces, but is now whole.

We need to scrape off the barnacles. I think the barnacles are the key to liberating our streets.

Picture credit: F.S. Cozzens, in Harper's Weekly, December 1882. Per Wikimedia Commons.

See also Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, It's the Road Design, Stupid, The Supreme Court and Parking. 

Fitting the Solution to the Problem

Brooklyn's Fulton Street Shows Bureaucrats Being Flexible 

Say hello to Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G. This mural portrait is at Fulton and St. James in Brooklyn. Notorious B.I.G.'s childhood home is on St. James, between Fulton and Gates, and in 2019 New York City added his name to the block, so now it's both St. James Place and Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace Way. (He was also called Biggie Smalls, but that sobriquet didn't make it onto the street sign.)

Notorious B.I.G. was a famous and, I'm told, very talented rapper. I don't know enough to talk intelligently about him or his music, so I'm going to move directly to the actual topic of this story, which is a little miracle that is taking place in his home neighborhood.

Bus Lanes

Let's have a look at Fulton Street. Fulton is a major east-west street that extends from downtown Brooklyn to the border with Queens. (The street continues in Queens, but it has a different name.) We're concerned here with the western part of Fulton, which has three distinct segments. Have a look at the drawing below.

This drawing comes from a 2017 Powerpoint by New York City's Department of Transportation (NYCDOT). If you'd like to see the full document, click here.

So here was the state of play in 2017. The Fulton Mall, west of Flatbush, has been around for decades. It prioritizes pedestrians - the area is a nexus for transit with, by my count, not less than 13 subway lines and seven bus routes passing through or near the mall. Buses are allowed in the mall, which is technically a transitway, and delivery trucks and emergency vehicles also have access. (For an article on the Fulton Mall, click here.)

There are two segments east of Flatbush. The first - the central one of the three - has curbside bus lanes. The easternmost (labeled "Study Area" in the drawing) has no special provision for buses, beyond bus stops. 

In 2017 NYCDOT, facing serious congestion issues in the Study Area, proposed extending the curbside bus lanes from the central zone through the Study Area, but limiting operation of the lanes to morning and evening hours, allowing the space to revert to parking and loading at other times.

There was precedent for this proposal. the central segment was actually two zones. The western zone, starting at Flatbush, had curbside bus lanes all the time. The eastern zone, however, limited the zones to  the hours between 7 am and 7 pm on weekdays.

So the proposal for the Study Area can be seen as simply a further step on a glide path from the Fulton Mall, which is mainly about pedestrians and buses, through the central segment, which starts off with 24/7 bus lanes for the western piece, and then glides down to provide overnight and weekend parking in the eastern piece, and then glides to a Study Area bus lane design focused on rush hour.

The community's reception of this modest proposal was not entirely positive. The Fulton Area Business Alliance (FAB FULTON) negotiated with the City and agreed to a new plan with westbound bus lane hours in the morning only and eastbound lane hours in the evening only.

Numerous local businesses then decided to go rogue, and even enlisted a City Council member to plead their case. This effort failed, and the FAB plan was implemented. 

I don't have a good sense of what has gone on during the pandemic, but before the arrival of the coronavirus I had the feeling that NYCDOT had gotten what it wanted.

Signage and Enforcement 

One of the problems with the new bus lanes is that they're complicated. Have a look at this pole full of signs.

The space here is variously given over to loading, parking - don't forget street sweeping - and, oh, yes, no standing, when it is a bus lane. This is called burying the lead, so the sign makers came up with yet another sign, which I suppose we can call a headline.

Having these signs means you can point to them while you're writing a ticket, if that's your line of work. Of course, enforcement officers can't be everywhere, so, in August 2020, NYCDOT and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that camera enforcement was coming to Fulton Street; this was part of a broad expansion of an existing camera enforcement program, adding streets in three boroughs.

Cross Road Blues

(Robert Johnson originally recorded his Cross Road Blues in 1936. For more information about the song, click here.) 

Fulton Street has a mind of its own and basically pays no attention to the underlying street grid. This diagonal approach to life creates some interesting intersections.

And the quirkiness leads to problems - a flat turn means drivers can - and do - go faster. The geometry of the intersection can also lead to very long crosswalks.

NYCDOT, in its 2017 study, came up with several fixes. Bumpouts can shorten pedestrian crossing distances and increase visibility for all road users. These bumpouts can be made of concrete, or they can be made of paint. Paint is quicker and cheaper. It helps if you throw in some flex posts and a few planters. That way you won't have people parking their cars in the bumpouts.

I think we should give the streets engineers some credit here for their flexibility. Departments of Transportation have historically been rather ponderous organizations, doing large, expensive projects slowly (think bridges and Interstate highways). The idea of a small project executed quickly and cheaply is a big shift - a cultural shift. And here they're doing it. 

The work on Fulton also involves a fair amount of more standard construction, and my impression is it's well designed and well executed.

Here's another example of new thinking. There is the very human tendency to cut corners. NYCDOT has taken to placing sturdy flex posts in the street's median strip, near intersections. Here's an installation on Fulton near Classon. In the background you can see the Crispus Attucks playground. (The adjacent basketball courts are named after Biggie.) 

These posts get beat up quite a bit, but that means they're working. You just need to maintain them.

Putnam Triangle

Diagonals make triangles; the City and FAB, which is a Business Improvement District, have been working to upgrade the triangles along this stretch of Fulton. 

My favorite is the Putnam Triangle, which has benefited greatly from a dramatic renovation. 

Before this recent work was done, Putnam Avenue ran into Fulton right next to the spot where Cambridge Place ran into Fulton, creating a very gnarly three-way quasi-intersection. 

Eliminating this block of Putnam got rid of a substantial number of traffic conflicts. It also basically doubled the available pedestrian space and turned a traffic island into a handsome, easily accessible pedestrian plaza.

FAB has extensive coverage of the Putnam Triangle on its website.

One of the Things We Lost

Below is a shot of a little cafe at the same intersection as the Crispus Attucks playground. It's from the Before times, and I couldn't remember the cafe's name. My daughter reminded me: Always and Forever. A trifle ironic in view of subsequent events.

This is a rare quiet moment. Usually this place was bustling; the owners and staff just loved little kids, and families would pour over from Crispus Attucks to refuel with cookies and hot chocolate, and pastries and very good coffee for the grownups.

At this moment, I think my grandson and various grownups may have gone back to the playground for Round Two, to be followed by home, lunch, and a nap. I would occasionally stay behind, lingering over my coffee, and being very happy.

Always and Forever is now sadly gone from the neighborhood - lost to the virus.

(My daughter also, in an attempt to update my musical education, sent me this link to a music video by the Notorious B.I.G. I enjoyed it very much and recommend it to you.)

See also Getting From Here to There, Unblocking the Bus Lane on Chestnut.

Winter Shelters in Rittenhouse

Outdoor Dining Dons a Winter Cloak

The restaurants of Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square are getting ready for winter. The big question seems to be: Tents or carpentry? Both are popular. Above is a view of 18th Street, looking south from Sansom.

And below we have a shot of Moravian from the before days. It's worth remembering: Not too long ago, this was the summit of our ambition for outdoor dining.

The design pioneered by Parc is basically a frame of two-by-fours clad in plywood and plastic. Here's the original Parc winter shelter, on Locust just across 18th from the park.

To give you a better idea of how these structures are put together, here's a shot of the Tria winter shelter, up on Sansom, with the framing almost complete.

And here's Tria almost ready for customers.

Parc's first winter shelter, the one on Locust, soon gained a sibling around the corner, on 18th. You'll notice that it takes up the parking lane and one of the two traffic lanes, confining motor vehicles to a single lane. This single lane for moving cars is getting to be a bit of a theme in the neighborhood. 

On Locust, as neighboring restaurants have joined Parc in the street, drivers find themselves in a single-lane cattle chute, surrounded by winter shelters on both sides. A replay of the layout I showed you at the top of the story.

Meanwhile, over on the 1500 block of Sansom, the dining structures occupy the whole cartway. Don't worry, though - you can still get into and out of the architecturally undistinguished garage on the corner of 15th. 

(No picture of the garage - my camera said that such a photograph was beneath its dignity.)

See also Philly Plein Air.

Greed Is Not Good. It Is a Mortal Sin.

Our Elites Need to Support Democracy

 Miner at Freeze Fork, W. Va., Ben Shahn/FSA, Oct. 1935.

"It is hard to imagine an economy and society that can continue functioning indefinitely with such extreme divergence between social groups." 

- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) p. 297.

The central precondition for Trump's rise to power was the gutting of the white working class. We can lay this sin at the feet of the nation's wealthy elites - financial, industrial, agrarian, you name it. And let's not forget Mark Zuckerberg, or Charles Koch. Or the quiet and unobtrusive coupon clippers whose families have been wealthy for generations. I expect that none of them think of themselves as bad people, but this has not prevented many of them from happily participating in the project to pauperize working people (the destruction of unions played a big part here) while further enriching themselves. Tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, joined with ever smaller slices of America's income for the workers, have been a part of this project since before the time of Ronald Reagan. 

The rage and frustration of the white working class has been a useful tool for Republican politicians, who for decades practiced a bait-and-switch in every election cycle, promising to address workers' grievances, and then after the election reverting to a policy of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of banks and other businesses, and seeking to destroy government programs for poor and middle-income Americans. 

In 2016 the Brahmins of the Republican party received a rude shock when their preferred candidates were shouldered aside by Donald Trump, who rapidly became the People's darling. The Brahmins found themselves sidelined by a man who saw no point in maintaining even the superficial niceties of democracy, and they were surprised and shocked. Shame on them. The pot boiled over, and the people who thought they were the cooks didn't see it coming.

A strong supporting role in the project to destroy democracy has been played by the Protestant evangelicals and the Roman Catholic church, or at least the elites who see themselves as being in charge of those organizations. These people were willing to surrender all their precepts about how we should live in this world, in exchange for a ban on abortion. (Will they change? No. For a story, click here.)

Overturning Roe v. Wade is just a first step for these people. Shortly after they deal with abortion, look for them to move forward with a ban on contraception. Will they then push for a de facto ban on women working outside the home? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure daycare will become harder to find and more expensive.

This ecclesiastical lust for secular power will only grow, and we need only look at the history of the Roman Catholic church to discover that an increase in secular power almost always brings with it a concomitant decline in spiritual power. (For an example of clerical overreaching in fourteenth-century France, click here.)

Theocracy is not democracy.

The police in this country are, I'm afraid, in serious need of reform. The self-pitying warrior mentality that stands behind the flag with the thin blue line is a fascist construct. I'm the victim while I'm bashing in your head.  The infamous social media post by the national FOP, below, is only one exhibit among many. (For a story click here.)

Here's one more: a training program for the Kentucky State Police that repeatedly quotes Adolf Hitler with approval. 

It pains me to say these things about the police. I've gotten to know a number of honorable and dedicated cops over the years. But the policing system in this country is broken.

The judiciary are a mixed bag. I think we tend to concentrate on the ones who are happy lackeys to oligarchs, because they are so visible and so powerful, and perhaps because some of them display a certain acerbic flamboyance. But there are still honorable judges who are devoted to the Constitution and the law. We've seen a number of them at work in the litigation over the recent election.

The armed forces are actually a bright spot. People keep wondering why they are so reluctant to speak out, but their reluctance is a sign of their dedication to the Constitution and to our democracy. Unlike in many other countries, the military in the United States are supposed to stay out of politics. With luck, they will be able to maintain that absolutely vital tradition. A democracy in which the military plays an active part in politics is a democracy in peril.

I don't mean to let the politicians off the hook here. Now that the Republican Party has done everything but rename itself the Trump Party, some party officials may be genuinely shocked at what they see when all the shells in their little shell game get turned over at once. Others may be thrilled that they no longer need to dissemble about their deepest beliefs. Either way, they are unworthy of their offices.

And Steve Bannon deserves a paragraph of his own: Shortly after the election, he suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray should be beheaded. A romantic amateur to the end.

(For a recent death threat by a Trump lawyer against Christopher Krebs, former head of the federal cybersecurity agency, click here.)

Lay on top of all this our four-hundred-year history of the enslavement and oppression of black people, and then sprinkle on all the other seeds of destruction that we have sown, not least the oncoming climate disaster, and perhaps you can see why I think we're in a pretty pickle.

See also Unsustainable Income Equality, Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil, Mr. Piketty's Book, Submerged Narratives, Life on the Farm, How Do We Put This Back Together?

The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office

A Delusional President Ignores the Coronavirus

Don't worry about the coronavirus. Its feelings aren't hurt. It doesn't have feelings. And it's used to not being seen. It is, after all, invisible to the naked eye.

I'm a bit more concerned about the idea that the president is psychotic. I don't generally throw around inflammatory psychological terms, but my God - pretty soon we're going to have more dead people than the U.S. had in World War II (405,399).

I imagine the coronavirus in the Oval Office. I'm seeing its diminutive figure sitting comfortably in an armchair. Wearing dark glasses (really, a very stylish virus).

Doesn't look like an 800-pound gorilla. But then, as you know, appearances can be deceiving. (And by the way, there are no 800-pound gorillas. They generally top out around 400 pounds.)

The sod behind the Resolute desk can't see the virus in the armchair. He's busy with other things, important things. Delusional things. Things that aren't there.

In his mad pursuit of a horse that has already left the barn, he is assisted by an attorney whose behavior has been, at best, bizarre for quite some time. A man who quotes the movie "My Cousin Vinny" badly. My family will never forgive him.

Our mass death event is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. It needn't have happened. Any moderately competent public health response would have had the pandemic under control months ago. Alas, it was not to be. 

Never trust a president who has his head up his ass. Oops. Too vulgar. Avoid flaming narcissists in the Oval Office. But very few people know who Narcissus was, or that while admiring his reflection in the calm surface of a lake, he lost his balance, fell into the water, and drowned. (We don't have good documentary evidence for this story. But then it is a myth.)

How about, Look for a president who looks after others as well as himself. A little flat, but it'll have to do.

See also Little Karl, And So the Worm Turned.