The Face of Fascism

And Then They Dropped the Mask

Halloween decoration, Asbury Park, 2023.

I remember reading, years ago, an article with the title "Fascism with a Smile." This would have been back around 1980, when Reagan was elected president. The idea was that Americans did not respond well to the shout-and-pout style of a Hitler or a Mussolini. After all, one of the things Nixon had going against him was the fact that he was so obviously a darkly angry man. Let's call it, in retrospect, fascism with a scowl.

I remember having some reservations about this idea. After all Senator Joe McCarthy did seem to have a grumpy side, and for a while it looked like he was running the country.

However, Reagan did seem to be on to something with his geniality, and his widespread popularity clearly helped him get away with some pretty amazing stuff. And I think, at least partly because of Reagan and his smile, I was unprepared for the popularity of the Former Guy and his sneer, at least with a segment of the population.

And now I think we have come to the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy or, perhaps better, one of the history plays about the Wars of the Roses. But certainly not a comedy. It puts me in mind of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Mr. Gray does not age, but a picture of him does. Gray enjoys a long life of dissipation and the portrait becomes uglier and uglier. Then Gray dies, and all the ugliness moves from the portrait to his face.

Hmm. What if Dorian Gray is not just the Former Guy, but the entire Republican party? 

In the last few years we have seen the reveal, and it turns out that the scowl, the smile, and the sneer were all masks. If you want to know what was always behind the masks, go back to the top of this story. I have seen no truer portrait of the monster that we are up against. 

See also How the Ship Sinks, Angry and Ridiculous, Trial by Combat, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.

The Traffic at J'aime

Why Do We Think Cars Rule?

The view from J'aime.

The intersection of 17th and Pine brings together several of the many strands that make up Philadelphia. On the northwest corner there is a shop that repairs violins; just next to it is a shop that frames pictures. On the southwest corner is a residential building. On the northeast corner is a large parking lot. And on the southeast corner is a relatively new coffee shop that also serves amazing pastries. Its name is J'aime, and I enjoy sitting with a coffee at one of the outside tables and watching the world go by.

Past those four corners flow three threads of traffic: people ride in cars and trucks; they ride on bikes and scooters; and they walk. I was particularly struck by the number of people walking on Pine, which on this stretch is an overwhelmingly residential street - not a lot of stores to attract foot traffic.

When we moved here from Manhattan in 1979, my wife and I were astonished by the lack of foot traffic on the sidewalks in Center City. Well, no more. 

However, there's no doubt that motor vehicles dominate my visual field at ground level. They're big, of course - Americans do love their SUVs and their pickup trucks, and every year they seem to get bigger and taller. Beyond a suspected epidemic of elephantiasis, there are simply a lot of them. Even in the middle of the day, when the number of cars moving on the street can be very light, there are always the parked cars, and they generally fill not just the parking lot but also the parking lane. You simply can't get away from them. 

This surfeit of mechanical eye candy leaves me looking for some relief, and I do find myself gazing up toward the sky with some regularity, which is where the photo at the beginning of this story came from.

By contrast, bikes and walkers tend to underoccupy the visual space. They're relatively small; they're also quiet, and they don't smell of burned and unburned fuel. Bikes in particular have a habit of hiding in plain sight. Coming at you, they almost disappear, and viewed from the side they pull the same trick. (For more on the ways that bikes tend not to impose themselves on us, click here.) 

This imbalance of visual weight led me to question the sway cars hold over the street. Might it at least partially be bluster? I found myself wondering about the actual balance among the three threads at this little crossroads overseen by a small cafe.

Recently I studied the traffic on the South Street bridge, focusing on the eastbound rush during the afternoon, and came to the surprising conclusion that cars were probably in the minority. So I decided to count again.

Oops. Motor vehicles on Pine are in the majority during the afternoon rush. Would you care to guess their margin of victory? It was 6 percentage points. Cars and trucks were 53 percent of the traffic, and bikes, scooters, and pedestrians made up 47 percent. I bet you thought cars were winning by a bigger margin.

I'd been hoping for cars to be in the minority again, but there you have it.

The Count

I did my count on the afternoon of Thursday, November 9, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm. I counted 184 bicycles, 18 scooters (including 2 people on skateboards and 1 person on inline skates), and 194 pedestrians. For a total of 396. Cars and trucks totaled 443.

I was interested in traffic that was using Pine street. I excluded traffic that came into the intersection from 17th street and left on 17th street. Anything turning from Pine onto 17th or from 17th onto Pine got counted. 

At least that was the plan. I'm pretty sure I undercounted the pedestrians. Daylight saving time had ended the previous Sunday, November 5, but I failed to include a sunset at 4:49 pm in my rather impromptu plans. Pedestrians are small, and they don't have headlights. I don't think I'll be scheduling any more nighttime traffic counts.

Also, my view of the northern sidewalk was intermittent because of the intervening motor-vehicle traffic.

However, I didn't miss 47 pedestrians, so I do think motor vehicles are in the majority here. But I don't think they rule. Sane politicians pay attention to 47 percent minorities. 

Improvement Opportunities

And indeed the City has made a number of improvements here designed to make life safer for people who aren't riding around encased in two tons of metal. A few years ago the bike lane was moved from the right side of the street to the left, making it easier for a driver to see bikes in the lane. The Pine and Spruce lanes have also received a number of flex posts near intersections, and at strategic points the asphalt surface of the lane has been painted green.

These bike lanes were originally installed on the right side of the street, removing one of the two lanes  that had been devoted to motor-vehicle traffic, and thereby removing the abrupt lane changes from one car lane to another that can be so heart-stoppingly dangerous on streets with two lanes of motor-vehicle traffic. (The lanes were originally installed as a pilot in 2009 and updated to their current look in 2019, after the 2017 death of cyclist Emily Fredricks.)

There are still a bunch of ways to make things better on this street. More flex posts and better enforcement of the bike lane would be excellent.

And the sidewalks. Philly's sidewalks are legendary for their poor condition, and I can testify from personal experience that the irregularities in the pavement are frequently very hard to see at night. It's true that maintaining sidewalks is the responsibility of the property owner, but since that is not working well, it seems appropriate for the government see what it can do to help make things better. (For an interesting set of ideas from parking guru Donald Shoup, click here. Philadelphia has already settled a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act that focused on sidewalk curb ramps.)

But, as I've been saying for years, I think the main improvement opportunity lies in the parking lane. The problem is convincing motorists, and their elected leaders, that they should share the lane. 

The arrival of streeteries - dining shelters located in the parking lane - was the first large-scale demonstration that there were alternative uses for the parking lane. But transportation planners have known since the beginning of cars that free parking is an astonishingly inefficient use of scarce curbside space. 

In many of the more crowded parts of Philadelphia, it is possible for residents to purchase residential parking permits for $35 a year. This is the functional equivalent of free.

Economists like to talk about opportunity costs. At the corner by J'aime, if a resident is not parked in a spot, someone else can park there and pay the meter. Or the City could make some loading zones. There are a few in this neighborhood, but not nearly enough. Which of these uses are more valuable, and to whom? I think those are interesting questions.

For many years, the pressure on the City was to expand curbside parking. And the City accommodated motorists. Back then, the conventional wisdom was that everybody either owns a car or wants one, and I think the City just assumed the expansions would be universally popular. 

Some of the things the City did actually violate state law. There are many examples of parking zones extending to the crosswalk, when the state requires a substantial setback to preserve sight lines. Now there is a move to "daylight" these intersections, so that everybody has a few more precious seconds to react to a dangerous situation that may be developing. 

Beyond all that, I find it frustrating that motorists expect to park for free. They pay the dealer for the car and the insurance company for insurance. They pay for registration, inspections, and a driver's license. They pay for oil and gas and maintenance. They pay tolls on bridges, tunnels, and fast roads. These are considered costs of ownership. But parking should be free.

So we're capitalists down to the last drop of window-washing fluid, but then all of a sudden the government owes us a free parking spot. The chalk makes a funny sound when I try to write that on the blackboard.

See also Barnacles at the Curb, What We Lost, Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story,  Quo Vadis, Philadelphia?

Echoes of the Spanish Civil War

They're All Over the Ukraine Story

Salaria Kea. From the Tamiment-Wagner Collections, NYU.

Early in my historical reading I developed a special interest in the Spanish Civil War. It was such an obvious rehearsal for what was to come (perhaps you've heard of World War II). And as in a rehearsal, the performance was still seeking its final shape.

Later on, say in 1945, everybody seemed to agree, at least in public, that fascism was a very bad thing. And yet the surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, when they came home from their war in Spain, were generally viewed with distrust and often had difficulty getting jobs. Then, when the conventional wisdom on fascism coalesced in their favor, they were called "premature anti-fascists."

In other words, we still don't like you, even though you were right. And we're still in charge.

I do love those little moments when the controlling narrative goes a bit sideways, and some of the seams appear hastily stitched.

I also thought the war produced some amazing books: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Andre Malraux and his monumental L'espoir, Ernest Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls. 

I know I'm not supposed to like Hemingway, but reading him taught me a lot about how to write. I concede I didn't learn much useful about how to live (I've never been terribly interested in fishing). An English teacher did manage to coerce a sixteen-year-old boy into writing a paper on Hemingway's women. I did manage to come to the conclusion that his women weren't real.

Recently this brilliant insight came in handy while I was reading Sarah Watling's description of Hemingway's relationship with Martha Gelhorn, in Watling's new book on the Spanish Civil War, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future (2023). It struck me that Hemingway actually expected real women to be like the women in his books.

Watling's book focuses on foreign women who come to Spain to help the Republic survive an insurrection led by a dissident general who had backing from many of the country's traditional elites, and who also received crucial support from Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, while the western democracies sat on the sidelines.

Her focus on women is a very happy angle of approach. Malraux's L'espoir (the word means hope in English) is basic to understanding the people who supported the Republic. But this hope was not an exclusive possession of the men, and Watling has some great stories to tell.

Some of the participants are or used to be famous - Gelhorn for instance. And then there's Salaria Kea, an African-American nurse who left a steady job at Harlem Hospital to serve in a medical unit that was attached, more or less, to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Later, when asked why she went, Kea said, "And why shouldn't I go and help the world?" (Watling, p. 197.)

My personal favorite is the story of the two photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and their intense romantic and artistic collaboration. There is a sad ending along with a great many unforgettable photographs.

But the main thing Watling's book does for today's reader is point to the perils of getting it wrong in Ukraine.

The lesson here is simple: If we drop the ball in Ukraine we will very quickly find ourselves on the front lines of a much wider - and possibly nuclear - war. Do the right thing.

See also What Happened in Ferrara?