Quagmire

Portland Is Donald Trump's Vietnam

Asbury Park, a sunset in July.

If Donald Trump leaves Portland, he loses. If he stays in Portland, he loses.

George Washington's great strategic insight in the Revolutionary War was that, as long as he maintained a force in being (the Continental Army), the British could not win.

We got to look at this little paradigm of insurgency warfare from the other side, during the Vietnam War. It was not pretty.

In Portland the resistance does not carry guns. They don't need them. Their job is not to beat the goons but to win the American people. Which they are doing.

Their job is made easier because they are the American people - the kids, of course, as well as older activists, and Portland's mayor, and the moms in yellow t-shirts, and the vets in their baseball caps and t-shirts. 

And then one night the goddess Athena paid a visit. She showed up, took off her clothes, ran through a yoga routine, stared down the goons, and left.

I have a word of advice for the goons. I've read Homer's Iliad. Do not annoy the goddess Athena.

As for the goons in Portland, they are an apparently small group of ambiguously uniformed myrmidons who seem to think that graffiti should be a capital offense. I have questions about their training, discipline, and leadership.

Trump has had trouble pulling together his version of Mussolini's squadristi. His search for an army began in Charlottesville in 2017. The Unite the Right rally brought together a wide variety of right-wing groups, including right-wing militias. Firearms were present in abundance. Then antifa showed up, and they also had guns. I think this perplexed the right-wingers. I'm sure they were willing enough to shoot people, but perhaps it had never occurred them that their opponents might shoot back.

This year, in Lafayette Square, we had an army raised by Bill Barr, mainly from the Department of Justice. The thugs from the Bureau of Prisons seem to have been the worst. Elements of the National Guard got dragged into the mud, and then did their best to extricate themselves.

The actual military took a pass, and even the defense secretary, Mark Esper, slithered away from his boss. After some hesitation.

Barr also backed out of his role of generalissimo, and in strode Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security. So now, in Portland, it appears the goons are largely from DHS subsidiaries like the border patrol. 

But perhaps not entirely. There are rumors that some of these swamp creatures are actually mercenaries. One of the firms that DHS hires rent-a-thugs from is a descendant of Blackwater. Ah, Blackwater. Will we ever forget their exploits in Iraq?

My sense is that Trump is close to running out of armies to do his bidding.

And he has definitely lost control of the narrative. He was always a clown, but now he is a buffoon and a laughing-stock.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer have apparently backed away from Trump. Is there time for the Republicans to dump Trump, go with Pence, and try to save the Senate? At this point, I think the answer is no.

See also The Problem with Dystopia.

Liberate Cookman Avenue!

Asbury Park Says Be All You Can Be

Cookman Avenue, the old Woolworth's building on the right.

This is what happens when you make an outdoor dining room. The people like it. The merchants like it. And the motorists have to choose among half a dozen alternate routes, all of which will get you to the same place at the same time.

With the arrival of the liberated zone, a certain number of parking spaces have gone away. However, as a number of observers have noted, without restaurants on Cookman Avenue, how much demand for parking would there be?

Asbury Park (born in 1871) is a small city laid out more or less on a grid. Cookman Avenue lies on the south side of the city and runs essentially from the train station in the west to the beach in the east. The three blocks just east of the train station have always been Asbury Park's commercial core. In the old days these three blocks and the immediate area sported Steinbach's department store, Woolworth's, the phone company, the Asbury Park Press, Eidelsberg's shoe store, and a truly spectacular bank building at the intersection of Cookman, Mattison, and Emory. (I mentioned that the layout was more or less a grid - in this case three streets do mash together at some truly odd angles.)

Nowadays the main business of Cookman Avenue is restaurants. There are also quite a few shops selling antiques, clothes, books, you name it. And they've all taken to the new outdoor dining room like fish to water. 

Here's the Asbury Book Cooperative.

Paranormal Books & Curiosities is next door.

You'll see there's a customer not wearing a face mask. He also arrived by riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. I can't say that everything is perfect on Cookman Avenue. But I will tell you this: It's alive.

Here's a display of locally meaningful merchandise from a knick-knack shop. These non-food merchants are definitely bringing something to the street.

Tillie, the smiling face, is Asbury's mascot.

Still, the liberated zone is basically about plein air dining.

The old Steinbach's in background.

Outside the liberated zone, the stream of motor vehicles continues to flow. But - there are islands in the stream. Here's Cardinal Provisions on Bangs Avenue.

And here's Pascal & Sabine on Emory.

Aside from helping these restaurants keep their heads above water, the islands have a perceptible calming effect on traffic. Even the most hardened motorist will have trouble believing he's on an Interstate while he's passing one of these emplacements.

Further afield, there have been other changes. At several locations throughout Asbury Park, neighborhood streets have been turned into Slow Streets, where through traffic is discouraged and recreation is encouraged for people young and old. These streets join other recent innovations, including lower speed limits and a strong and expanding network of bicycle lanes, to send motorists a message that is permeating the whole city: Go slow and expect to share the road.

For more on Asbury Park's ReOPEN program, click here.

See also What Streets Can Learn From Boardwalks, Striping Webb Street,  When Will Philly Get Scooters?

A Moment in Time

And Some Deep Resonances

Vine Street Expressway, June 1.

I keep coming back to this picture. It's from June 1, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Protesters had walked onto the Vine Street Expressway, which runs east-west in a trench through the center of Philadelphia, and the police tried to do - what?

If they were trying to remove the protesters from the roadway (it's actually an Interstate, with the designation I-676), they were remarkably maladroit. After all, the protesters had no way out. They wound up on an embankment topped by a concrete retaining wall, which in turn was topped by a fence. The police had the protesters pinned, and they were using them for target practice.

The story behind the picture has been well covered. For an article and an editorial in the Inquirer, click here and here. For a video story in the Times, click here. For the City's response to the Times piece, click here. 

I lived through the sixties, so police riots are hardly a novelty for me - Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, Chicago in 1968. I was expecting those images to come back to me. But the resonances went deeper. At first they were fuzzy, but as I kept coming back to the photo, they became clearer and clearer. 

First was the wall. In 2013, I was in Terezin, in the Czech Republic. Also called Theresienstadt, it's a small fortified city built in the eighteenth century to help protect the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire from unwanted visitors. It's named after the Empress Maria Theresa.

Fast forward to World War II, and the Nazis are using Terezin as a concentration camp. You can use walls to keep people out, or you can use them to keep people in. 

Terezin was a prison but not an extermination camp. Still, lots of people did die here, mainly of diseases fostered by malnutrition and overcrowding. Towards the end of our tour we came to yet another blank wall. It looked like all the others, but it was here that difficult prisoners were shot to death. (For more, click here.)

And as I looked at the photo of the Vine Street Expressway for the umpteenth time, I finally knew why I found the embankment and the wall so creepy. It reminded me of the execution wall in Terezin.

The tear gas didn't help. Gas means Auschwitz, it means the Western Front during World War I. My God. How many of my buttons is this photograph going to push?

One more. I sometimes call I-676 a trench, but more often I think of it as a dry moat. When I look at Vine Street today, and think of its unbuilt southern twin that apparently would have bulldozed the house that I now live in, the desire to separate, to divide, is what jumps out at me. (The use of Interstates to separate people is well documented in Atlanta. For a story, click here.) 

Back when people were actually using moats and city walls - hey, let's throw in some turrets, and don't forget those massive gatehouses - back then, separation served a useful purpose. It helped city dwellers stay alive when the four horsemen of the apocalypse were stalking the land.

We don't do city walls anymore, but I think the impulse to exclude remains alive and well. Usually, though, it doesn't reveal itself quite so dramatically as it did on the Vine Street Expressway on June 1. 

One angle is obvious. Peaceful demonstrators were protesting police brutality, and the police responded with a demonstration of police brutality. 

There's a second angle that's less obvious. I-676 is an Interstate, and it is actually illegal for people to walk on its pavement. It's also illegal for horses and bicycles. Only motor vehicles are allowed into this inner sanctum of the car culture. Walking onto the Vine Street Expressway was a highly transgressive act.

I'm sure the police would say they were just trying to maintain the traffic flow; but there's a little something else going on here.

I wish we could get over the impulse to exclude. I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think we need to find a way to rein it in. 

Tearing down the walls and filling in the moats should have been a liberating moment in the history of cities. All of a sudden, the other great force behind cities - the desire of people to be with other people - had the field to itself.

Things haven't worked out that way, at least not so far. But perhaps the idea of an open, inclusive, and welcoming society has a better future than its past.

I hope so. 

Terezin, 2013.

See also Lidice and the Power of Nothing, Getting From Here to There, How Do We Put This Back Together?