Volume 42

JUNE 2007

42. 7: THE IMPERIAL BOOMERANG 6.30.2007

2007, UrbisMedia

The late Cal Tech Physicist and Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, used to employ an image of the earth rotating and, as it revolved, there would be a line of people from north to south who were all brushing their teeth at the same time. On the opposite side of the earth, one supposes, people would be sipping their first cup of coffee.

I have a similar image; this one latitudinal, of the peoples of the Southern Hemisphere migrating toward the Northern Hemisphere, not in circadian time, but in social evolutionary time. The line is not so much the Equator, but one that meanders further North, between the Tropic of Cancer and 30 degrees N. There are exceptions even to this, of course (don't want to get the Aussies pissed off; or give Afghanistan too much credit).

Pretty much since the 16 th Century the Northern Hemisphere has outpaced the Southern in what we would call “development.” It has been the North, however, that has come up with most of the intellectual, social, and economic development in the past five centuries. Now hold your guns, I'm not suggesting here that the (mostly) Whities of the North are in some way superior to the more pigmented Southerners. In fact there are a number of ways I find them to be “inferior” (although I am not a folk romanticist). But almost all the great inventors, intellectuals, explorers, scientists, and even artists, came from above the line. I'm not going to get too much into hypothesizing why, as I am concerned for the present with what happened and a result, and how this bears upon the mass movements of populations.

But part of the “why” is that it has been the North that has been able, by virtue of its technological advantages, to dominate the South. It is the South that has contained the areas of colonization of the imperial states of the north. Owing to their advanced weaponry, social organization, and communication, almost all the nation states of the North and especially the Dutch, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Italians and French, have conquered and exploited the continents of Africa and South America and dozens of other countries in the Middle East, the Indian Sub-continent, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Southeastern Pacific.

Part of the problem of the South was that it had a lot of goodies that the Northerners coveted: precious metals like gold, copper and silver, precious stones like diamonds, sapphires and rubies, wheat (remember that Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome), spices, timber, and (how could I forget), crude oil. It was also a good place top pick a few slave to, you know, do the chores. The North has expended a lot of its “stuff” already, through its development, but also it wars and wastrel ways. So from the time that we northernews call te great age of “exploration” and the southerner call the great age of “exploitation” the northern hemisphere was having a fine imperial time of it getting places re-named The Belgian Congo, and Dutch New Guinea and French Indochina, New England, and that vast geography acquired by disease, arquebus and rape by those champion brutes of imperialism, the Spanish.

Now maybe I'm being a bit harsh with those well-intentioned buccaneers. So they ad to engage in a little pacification to clear away those indigenous leaders who weren't interested in having their land appropriated, their gold, silver and gems shipped off to replenish the royal treasuries of Europe, and their women raped and subjects hauled off as slaves. Africans had to dig for diamonds, Indians to serve the Raj as servants and soldiers, Chinese to cough up silver and suck down opium forced on them by those great drug pushers of the Orient, the British. They got to subordinate themselves to the new viceroys, conquistadors, and greedy traders.

Sure, they got to learn new languages, and things have worked out where that is an advantage, particularly if you like being up late at night in Bangalore giving tech support in English. They got brand new gods to replace those old ones that didn't rise from the dead and let you eat their flesh and drink their blood. And they did get some new beneficial medicines and medical practices, but the price was often some nice epidemics of small pox, syphilis, and assorted viruses that wiped out most of your society.

For a variety of reasons, but mostly due to the expense involved in maintaining these “colonies” many have been jettisoned since the great age of acquisition in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Sometimes, as in the case of the French in Vietnam and Algeria, they had to thrown out on their asses. But often, as with much of the erstwhile British Empire, the upkeep proved to be negative at the bottom line, and Britannia pretty much sailed away on the waves they also claimed to have once owned. And so ensued a new phase for many of these sates, now armed with “democracy” and Christianity, in which their ability for choosing their political leaders was, well . . . it must be said, as bad worse that America's ability the last six years. Too many to be mentioned went through and still are going through dictatorships, coups, insurrections and civil wars, often in artificial “nation states”: that were created for the convenience and edification of their erstwhile imperial overlords. Meanwhile the northerners cluck about the slaughter, wondering whether their former subjects have reverted to their barbaric ways. (“After all, those fuzzy wuzzies, kafirs, wogs and chinks were racially inferior, weren't they, Clive?”) Not that this process is at an end by any means. The good ole US of A, a former colony itself, and a rather obstreperous one at that, has decided that neo-imperialism in the 21 st century is a good thing for its Halliburtons, defense contractors, and Hummer drivers. We're not so much interested in the slaves these days (I'll be getting to that)—anyway we've been there, done that--as we are the oil. (“Christ simply does not want infidels to have that oil; it's as simple as that.”)

So now, a lot of these people who live below the line want to come north. They would like a little bit of the economic action, maybe in industries and economic activities that were partly funded by resources from their own countries and, in the case of the American Southwest, maybe even work on some of the land that was taken from their ancestors. These people want to immigrate, they want jobs, often the jobs that the descendants of the colonizers don't want to do anyway.

So that's where we are, in the third phase of imperialism (or in the case of Bushamerica, the first phase.) The chickens are coming home and want to roost: North Africans in France, West Indians and Pakistanis in England, Ethiopes in Italy, Turks in Germany, Indonesians in the Netherlands, Mexicans to the good ole Us of A. [1] And now we hear the hypocritical chorus of concern about the “adulteration of the culture,” the loss of jobs, the social costs of education and health care, the building of fences and walls. For the southerners it's payback time; for the northerners it's pushback time? But the imperial boomerang will be hard to stop. Humans have been migrating to where the opportunity was relatively better since they left Africa a million years ago. [2] If that's not reason enough there's always “it's a dirty job, and somebody's gotta do it.”

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[1] Yes, I realize that technically, according to my theme, the Mexicans should be emigrating to Spain.

[2] Unless you have been to the new Creationism Museum in Tennessee.

42. 6: GUYS (Sort of) STRIKE BACK (Culture Wars III) 6.27.2007

The guys on cable's The Man Show are slavering over slutty bimbettes bouncing their your-know-whats on a trampoline and smirking over their jokes about penises, drinking and toilet activities. Guy stuff, with the implicit approval of their silently accommodating bikini'd acolytes. Their fantasy world, the way it should be, life as something between an endless frat party and a gang bang in a sports bar. It is also probably the most blatant counter-offensive in America's on-going “battle if the sexes,” a cultural “carny”-show that has come to town on cable TV.

There are many theaters in what we now call the “Culture Wars” that putatively were declared in the 1960s (actually I think the first shots were fired in the mid-1950s in the form of Rick and Roll). One theater was opened up when that first bra was burned on some street on some American city in some year of that decade's tumult. Women dared to inform men that their boobs were no longer going to be trussed up in those devices that made their chests look like launch pads for Atlas missiles. It should suffice to say that not all women decided that their prime role in life was not to fulfill that fantasies or perpetually adolescent males. That first bra fired across the American gender divide (like the mixed metaphor?) had barely stopped smoldering when the silicone implant had arrived to Partonize one in four women, often eagerly financed by husbands and boyfriends.

Not all men have reacted to assertive “liberated” women by trying to get into the studio audience of The Man Show. Some of the guys have sometimes gone a bit wimpy; there was that Promise keepers thing, and the (not quite) million man march of Black men on Washington sort of simpering about how they have not been good husbands. And worth a mention are some self-emasculating programs like America's Funniest Home Videos, which has so many shots of guys being hit in the crotch with every sort of object imaginable that it should be renamed America's Most Brutal Vasectomies.

But enough about those eunuchs. One of the effects of what became the women's was stronger, more assertive women, which many guys took to be a new race of emasculating Amazons who not only wanted to climb to the top of the corporate ladder but wanted to be on top in (ahem) other places. Reeling from Affirmative Action for minorities on one side and women saying “what part of the word NO do you not understand” and how many sss's are there in sexual harassment, on the other, the American male was suddenly feeling like he was on the endangered species list. The American White Male had been the Bald Eagle, the breadwinner, the captain of industry, the master of the house, but now felt he had to go to the back of the line in the country he had built. [1] There ensued a lot of whining, a lot of sympathy from evangelistic preachers who could prophecy the ordaining of women ministers and female ordination of priests. The Bible made it pretty clear what position women should assume, especially after that snake and apple thing in the garden.

They stayed in their place for a long time. Then there was that bra, blazing like the flaming bush on Sinai. It was time for the guys to strike back. And since so many were forced into unemployment by those un-halted Amazons and their cowed politicians, they had little more to do than become couch potatoes in from of the television. Television was the best medium from which to launch a comeback for guys. Those Amazons—Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell—and that turncoat liberal Phil Donahue used it to appeal to their constituencies, but this is the age of niche programming and the men might bed able to climb back into he driver's seat by grabbing a few niches for themselves.

And, by Jove, they've done it! The pop-up ad on my computer announced that next week would begin a new series I shouldn't miss, Ice Road Truckers. This is a series about 18-wheeler truck drivers who drive their loaded rigs across frozen lakes somewhere up North, braving temperatures to forty below and risking crashing through the ice to certain death. Wow, we might even get to see somebody die. That was the same tension and danger in the series that just ended, called Deadliest Catch. Now, if you want to see guys really putting it on the line, you ought to see them battling crabs, big freakin' crabs that they catch in giant cages, in raging seas off the coast of Alaska. Week after week of cages of crabs, with us waiting for some guy to get smushed by a cage (and maybe eaten by crabs) to show it's a manly thing.

Over on another channel manhood is being put to the test not against crabs, but bulls, huge freakin' bulls who don't seem to like drawling dorks riding on their backs, especially when it appears that something has been applied to their genitals. Bull Riding is said to be swiftly gaining in viewing popularity, but if you think this is about anything other that waiting for some one-ton bull to toss some guy named Travis fourteen feet in the air, catch him in the groin on his horns on the way down and then stomp his ass with his hooves, then you'll believe anything that falls out of the back ends of those bulls. Taking the pain and coming back for more is the manly thing.

The point is that these shows are about how guys are willing to regain their manhood by, paradoxically putting their male reproductive equipment in great jeopardy. Ironically, the encomium “that guy has balls” can be applied even after he no longer does.

Suddenly guy shows are all over Cable. There's the immensely popular Ultimate Fighting Championships, where martial artists paint in blood in a cage that isn't filled with crabs (hmmm, there's an idea there). About the only thing that isn't allowed is striking to the reproductive equipment. It's more real than that fake wrestling stuff on the other channel. Suddenly guys are everywhere: building “choppers” and muscle cars, and always trash-talking in the ways that guys love to show that they don't belong on Queer Ey. There are Cops and The Military Channel , and gun and hunting shows.

There's a lot of stuff for guys to watch. So you have to wonder why so many of these shows are sponsored by Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.

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[1] OK, so white males had to drag in some black slaves, and yellow Asians, and brown Latinos to do some of the crap work of building America, and then they show their gratitude by coming uop with Affirmative Action.

42. 5: THE EIGHT-HUNDRED POUND PANDA 6.22.2007

There was a time when the Giant Panda slept rather quietly behind a giant screen. It always seem to prefer things that way, languishing in the desultory way of giant pandas. But we Westerners kept poking the giant panda with a stick, so to speak. First the Polos looking for the riches of Cathay, then the seekers of souls for Christ, sniggling heir way in with promises of better eternities, then the British with their gunboats and opium, ready to addict the vast new marketplace like some schoolyard pusher (“the first hit is free, kid”). All the time the giant panda seemed not to have a reciprocal interest in the worlds of these poking and prodding outlanders. It was always trying to close the screen and carry on as before. Then came the Americans, who can't seem to leave well enough alone, particularly where there is a buck to be made. This time the Giant Panda had hibernated for a quarter century behind a screen constructed my Marx and Mao. Six years later a little panda was talking like Donald Trump. “To become rich is glorious,” he announced, unleashing hordes of fresh new capitalist-roaders on the globalizing economy. With dramatic suddenness that only the world's most populous and chimerical nation can generate the world became like a room with am eight-hundred pound Giant Panda smack in the middle of it—sucking up the air, munching on the nachos and barbequed chicken wings, and slurping down most of the “cold ones.” And the rest of the world, the world that might have been more careful what it wished for, was picking up the tab.

That's China for you.

The Giant Panda used to be—and much of it still remains—a place of much poverty. It is 80 percent rural, made up of rice farmers living on a buck a day and up to their empty pockets in last night's pee and poop; other farmers growing wheat, soybean and sorghum on land that pendulates between drought and inundation; and city people scraping out life in their respective danwei, in industries that specialized in inefficiency, outmoded technology and corruption. All of this was, and still is, superintended by the repressive, authoritarian, backward thinking political leadership of a bunch guys with prostates like cue balls.

This was China—place with a billion and a third people. To poke it with a stick, let it loose with western economic values and a pent up taste and desire for consumer products, was something the West might have thought more carefully about. Now it is probably too late. Even at only a fraction of its population following the little Deng Xiaopanda's exhortation the giant panda is a global force to be reckoned with.

If the world's gyros seem to be acquiring a bit of a wobble these days two forces might be considered. One is the huge migrations of China's people from the countryside to the burgeoning industrial cities. How much that might throw China's, then Asia's, and then the World's economic fortunes into a spin is yet to be determined. Already the world's largest economy is nervous about the fact that China has already bought up a massive chuck of the debt America has floated to finance its adventure in the Middle East. China already makes something like eight-percent of the products sold by the world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, the only stores that can be seen from space. Entire businesses have been nearly wiped out by the low labor costs that a nation of several hundred million farmers with train tickets can produce. Remember the old “Yellow Peril” of the 1950s? Well, China produces so much of the world's clothing you can change that to “Yellow Apparel.” Check the label; it's Made in China.

Now to the other gyro. Elsewhere in the world glaciers are melting, and everybody but George Bush seems to have figured out that it has something to do with greenhouse gasses. With so much productive capacity and little in the way of emission controls, the Giant Panda has become a major contributor to the cookng up of the planet. Most of China's major cities are already badly polluted. Beijing is already a three-pack-a-day city for any non-smokers waking around. In cities like Yinchuan in Northwestern China the blame goes to sulfur dioxide from coal, which is burned for everything from making electricity to cooking dinner. China produces twice as much of the stuff as America does, and even though projects like the Three Gorges Dam are intended to reduce the blue haze of coal-burning braziers, by some estimates, China may one day generate five times more than what is very visible today.

But that's only one half of its double environmental whammy. Production is followed by consumption, and China's consumption has been waiting a long time. As cars replace those billion bicycles not only are America's SUVs in for some major competition for fossil fuels, but also a lot more exhaust pipes are going to be emptying in to the carboniferous stew. Shanghai, it's fascinating old city now crisscrossed with elevated freeways, its shopping streets re-fashioned into trendy pedestrian malls is already having traffic jams and giving land over to parking. The Three Gorges Dam may substitute electricity for the coal-induced haze, but the car exhaust will take its place.

This progress is not only exacting a price upon the Chinese. Hong Kong's and other South Asian cities are getting the spillover and NASA satellites show the dirty air as far away as Hawaii. China's environment is a mounting problem for policy-makers in Beijing. The Giant Panda cranks out as much sulphur emission as Tokyo and LA combined but with far less vehicles. Of the world's twenty most polluted cities China can claim sixteen. Water is polluted in nearly three-quarters of the country. Air pollution may account for the premature death of some 400,000 Chinese each year. Crop productivity is steadily decreasing in quantity and quality because of polluted land and water. Solid waste is expected to more than double over the next decade; China will then be well out in front of the US in that category.

What will the Giant Panda do to rectify the problems of an economy that grows at seven percent per year and may double its GDP between now and 2010? There are internal protests, but they seem to have limited effect and more people would probably like to get in on the economic action. Other nations have become so tied into the Giant Panda's productivity that, if production costs begin to escalate from internalized clean-up charges, the demon in the closet of capitalism, profits, becomes threatened. And the Giant Panda doesn't want to sign on to environmental measures and accords that might spoil the ride, arguing that the US and Europe had their days of expansion and pollution, so now its his turn. Anyway, you know the old joke: Where does an 800-Pound Giant Panda sit? . . . Anyplace it damn well pleases.

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42. 4: WHACK-A-MOLENOMICS (101.9) 6.15.2007

Would you fill up your SUV gas tank with 2% Low Fat Milk at $2.99.9 (there's always a .9 on fuel prices)? Remember, currently gasoline is now averaging $3.29.9 per gallon in the good ole U of A. So filling up on some moo juice would be quite bargain wouldn't it? [1]

Too bad my car doesn't run on milk, you just might be saying to yourself. Right? Well, in a way it does. It's just that you need to grasp a few principles of what I call “Whack-a-Molenomics” to understand why. But to understand that you need to understand Whack-a-Mole, the kids' game on which it is based (economists are really just kids at heart [2] ).

Whack-a-Mole is a game where moles pop their heads out of holes in the ground. You have a mallet and, yup, you whack a mole on the head to drive him down. But when you do another mole pops up from another hole. Whack him and you might get some others popping up. That's really all you need to know. It's like that in economics, too. You whack one thing and something gets affected some place else; like push down the price of one thing and it goes up for another, for example.

Milk, moles, mallets! This guy's getting irrationally exuberant, you're thinking. Hold on there, dude; this is economics, it's all about making simple things complicated. So let me bring in something else. Like when I used to ask my urban affairs students how the Russian Wheat Deal helped the San Diego economy, since San Diego doesn't grow wheat. (Yeah, they thought I was nuts, too.) This was back in the Nixon days when there was a Secretary of Agriculture in the good ole US of A by the name of Earl Butz (you don't wanna skip this footnote [3] ). Butz negotiated something called The Russian Wheat Deal. Basically, the idea was a Cold War notion that it was better to feed Russians with ICBM's than to have them starving. [4] So a lot of wheat was shipped out to them. [5] Since wheat is something we eat, too, there was now less of it and the price went up (simple supply and demand stuff here.) There are grains we can substitute for wheat and they came into greater demand, so their price went up. Some of these grains are used to feed cattle, so the cost of beef went up. When the cost of beef went up people began to look for protein substitutes, one of which was tuna, and tuna, at that time, was still something that San Diego produced. So, there were more jobs for tuna fisherman and money came into the San Diego economy. [6] This was sort of Whack-a-Russkie Economics.

But you get the idea now, right? We have a lot of talk these days about “bio-fuels” substituting for our addiction to foreign oil, which necessitates our going to the Middle East, whacking the locals, and having Haliburton take over their oil fields. [7] The problem with getting our cars to run on (cheaper) milk is that we could well end up paying for our driving habits with more expensive milk for our more costly Wheaties for breakfast and higher-priced Big Macs for lunch. In economics moles are always popping up when we mess with the system.

We're trying to find ways to whack both the oil dependence mole and the greenhouse gas mole. It will be good if we can find some stuff to shove in our SUVs that doesn't have the problem of substitutability attached to it. Like us, automobiles are at the top of the food chain, they use processed stuff, be it crude oil to gasoline, or corn or soybeans to bio-fuels. Therefore there are processing costs as well. At least letting cattle turn this stuff into burgers is less costly.

I also have the feeling that the Whack-a-Mole effect applies to more than economics. Even if we solve the problem of finding a fuel source that does not have the problem of substitutability costs associated with it, and we are all driving happily around in our Toyota Tofus and Pontiac Trans Fatty Ams, there is still going to be heat produced. The ecological system can be just as complicated and vexing as the economic system. Everything has an effect, and everything has its price. Newton and Einstein taught us that about energy; in the physical world there are substitutability effects in the biosphere as well. Damn moles are everywhere!

So that's Whack-a-Molenomics, the concept that is going to win me the next Noble Prize in Economics. But this economic concept won't be so difficult for you to understand. The next time you pull your SUV up to a cow at your local dairy and fill up you will find out when you drive off to your local McDonalds that, in the world of Whack-a-molenomics, there really is “no free lunch.”

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[1] Particularly for you idiots who bought Hummers.

[2] Except for Alan Greenspan, who is an irrationally exuberant ditherhead. Oh, and Arthur Laffer, Ronnie Reagan's favorite economist, who showed Ronnie the elegant principles of “Piddle-Down Economics.” That's where you give tax breaks to the rich so they have so much goddamn money that some might just fall out of their pockets and piddle down to the poor.

[3] Butz was, like so many Republicans, a butt-head. In 1976 he was forced to resign after it was widely publicized that he had made a racist remark. Butz's statement had been: “I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

[4] Russians seem to be incapable of growing anything, or maybe that was just on the collective farms.

[5] I forget what they gave us. Those nesting Matryoshka dolls, I think.

[6] This advantage—that San Diego was the closest American city to the tuna that swam by S. America in the Humboldt Current. But that's another story. We partially substituted for it with Sea World.

[7] Well, we're not quite there yet, but we're trying to surge toward that noble goal. This is called Whack-a-Politics; you whack the nation that didn't attack you, and hope oil will squirt out instead of insurgents. (It doesn't work.)

42. 3: NO DOO-DOO IN YOUR SOCK DRAWER; THOUGHTS ON URBAN PLANNING 6.11.2007

I used to half-seriously tell my urban planning grad students that, if they were the type of people who kept there socks neatly in their sock drawer and their underwear neatly in their underwear drawer, they probably would make good planners. Planning, I added, again in over-simplification, is ultimately about the old adage “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” Probably in the very first Neoloithic villages there was some guy named Urk who said, “Hey, why don't we put the place where we make doo-doo down wind from the place where we eat.” Then somebody said, “Good idea, let's make Urk our city planner.” Simple as that. Well maybe not quite that simple; there probably was some developer named Buk who owned some property upwind of the doo-doo place. The goodness of an idea doesn't guarantee its implementation.

But in truth, I only half-subscribed to the principle of “a place for everything and everything in its place.” The aesthetic side of my urbanism wouldn't me full-hearted advocacy. I recall, after writing a book on new towns—comprehensively-planned communities—and then visiting a few of them when I first came to California, that my first impression is that they were well-planned (everything in its proper place), but my second was that I wouldn't want to live in any of them. It was my first direct encounter with the realization that all that makes cities interesting cannot be either imagined by planners, or brought into being by the methods and tools available to them. I began to imagine that sometimes it is interesting, as it were, to find a pair of boxer shorts in your sock drawer. A little surprise—in a city at least—is a good thing.

I have written often in these pages about Hong Kong, a city that I have lived in, visit often, and for reasons some of my friends can't quite understand, I find continually alluring and interesting. My reasons aren't even those the Hong Kong Tourist Authority might reckon (great shopping and lots of places to eat). It's the contrasts and contradictions in its urbanism that fascinate me. If you approach Hong Kong by sea from the East you will sail past vast forests of identical residential high-rise buildings that look like cluster of crystal. Hives is my first thought. My second, and related, thought it that there is no opportunity for the people who live in them to articulate their living space (except in very marginal ways internally) to express anything of themselves. Everything as been planned for them by the architects and engineers of the building. Everything is in its place. I wouldn't want to live there either.

Elsewhere in Hong Kong there are older neighborhoods where it is evident that people have some ability to give some shape to their physical environment. At the street level shops are built into spaces between buildings, a little crevice of space will be turned into a shoe repair, in lanes a few feet wide booths will be erected selling all sorts of foods and commodities, signs clamor for you attention over the streets and from any vantage, people build balconies on their flats (sometimes not very well) and hang their clothes to dry from them, they use roof-tops for all manner of activities—in short, they defy restriction and regimentation. These are the parts of Hong Kong that, and any city, invite and fascinate me. They are the areas where one can see “the hand” of humans as place -makers, not just space -occupiers. True, you can end up with some things that are problematic, incompatibilities and conflicts—planners even have a term for such things, called “non- conforming uses” (like a sock in your underwear drawer).

Therein is the issue joined. If you want to see conformity at its extremes you can go to Pyongyang and see people like automata, and the army marking like brain-dead drones, where every activity has a rule and a prison sentence to back it up. This is the image that Republicans like to call up if planners even suggest that there ought to be a zoning law that prohibits opening a gun shop next to a schoolyard. Somewhere between the genes of Kim Jong Il and George Bush is a reasonable place.

Planners need to be more like Einstein because it is the nature of urbanism that everything is in some relation to everything else. Put down one land use, let's say a temple because somebody thinks this is where some god or goddess resides, and the land—and its value—change. Somebody sets up a food stall for worshippers, another a shop that sells religious articles, a soothsayer sets up a booth, people who want to live near a holy place start to build residences, religious schools come into being, and so on. Gravity is another favorite word of planners. Civic authority becomes necessitated, to provide access and safety, and of course to tell the people where they can and cannot make doo-doo.That is the magic of urbanism, suddenly space becomes place, value is created seemingly from nothing because now the land has urban utility .

The concerns of safety and efficiency of cities are in constant dynamic tension with the concerns of democracy and individuation. And here enters a term that the planer cannot live without, but does not always find it easy to live with—the Pubic Interest. We certainly do not want chaos and anarchy, so we must consent to some rules and regulations that we must adhere to. But where is the line; where do we say this or that law is too confining, this or that regulation is too binding. Reasonable minds can differ, which is why cities need to be places of democracy.

In the urban context everyone has an interest. And these interests exist in a dynamic and functional relationship to one another. Cities are the product of specialization of labor, which means that the various components of all sorts of productive enterprises in the City are carried out by different workers. This economic interdependence requires public cooperation if the whole thing is going to hold together. Once the interests of one cohort gains too much power and acts in a manner that diminishes that of another segment of the process inefficiencies and dysfunctionalities begin to enter. So planners also need to be teachers of what I like to call a civic consciousness. They need to be more than designers, engineers, economists, architects, and environmentalists; they need to help people understand that planning our cities is more than about how we keep our underwear organized and where we put our places for making doo-doo. It's much more than about the product; it's about the process .

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42. 2: PUSH-CART MOGULS 6.6.2007

In one of the early scenes of Ragtime (1981) a piano player watches pictures on a silent screen and causally fits his music to first a one-reeler and then some newsreels. A few scenes later, in recreated busy streets of Manhattan's lower east side, Jewish immigrants are plying various trades from stands and push-carts. One of them, Tateh (Mandy Patinkin), makes his living cutting silhouette profiles for sitting customers. Later, he is seen peddling the flip-books he makes to shops, and in still later scene he reappears in a beach scene, this time directing a one-reel silent film with actors in costume.

The year was 1910, and the notion that a peddler might quickly rise to become a movie director is not only a plot convenience, but also an historical gesture to the early days of the cinema in America. Indeed, in the early years of the 20 th Century the conditions for the emergence and growth of the American cinematic experience might have been unique in the world. The cinema also took root in Western Europe at the same time, and quickly spread to Asia. [1] But in America, the City, the Cinema, and immigrants came together at this time in a unique and unprecedented way. Immigrants were involved in the creation of the American cinema as audience, were often the subject matter, and installed themselves in production and distribution. The portrayal of a Jewish immigrant peddler as an early American filmmaker is more fact than fiction. Film historian Steven Zipperstein has written that: “Hollywood was created by a remarkably homogeneous groups of Central and Eastern European Jewish men. . . . It was they who transformed primitive moving pictures, the product of very recent technical advances by Edison and others, into America's most popular entertainment form by the early 1920s. Nickelodeons were replaced by movie palaces (sufficiently opulent to satisfy the escapist needs of the working class and to capture the respectable middle class) short flicks expanded into features, their obscure players made into stars, and eventually, by the late 1920s, their visual pleasures enhanced immeasurably by sound.” [2]

The founders of the great movie studios were Jews who had emigrated from the villages in Germany (Carl Laemmle), Hungary (Adolf Zukor and William Fox), Russia (Louis B. Mayer) and Poland (Benjamin Warner). The men who became the “moguls” of the movie industry had no special training or talent for that line of work. They were unlettered and some of them were barely literate. But they were skilled in trades that were suited to the needs of the early film enterprise; they were used to methods of merchandising that brought products to consumers. [3] Early film distribution, to beer halls and social clubs, and then to nickelodeons, was suited to men with experience as peddlers. Thus the storefront theaters that exhibited films in before 1920 were subsequently transformed into the movie theatres by these men who knew how to conduct business in the City, where getting the product to the consumer was, in the initial years of movies, key to its success. Realizing the promise of this enterprise they quickly moved into all aspects of production, forming talent agencies, hiring entertainment lawyers, and, of course, with their movement to the film production friendly climes of California, founding their own “industrial” city of Hollywood.

They were unlikely men to leave their imprint upon the American city. But they did, because the cinema not only changed the way in which Americans found their diversions and entertainment, it also introduced a new land use to the City. Cities had theaters since the golden age of Greece, but they were few in number and usually centralized. Large, opulent “movies palaces” would be built in the centers of American city, but the cinemas would also proliferate and become a fixture for many years in different neighborhoods until new methods of distribution came into being.

But these unlikely “founding fathers of film” did more than establish a new industry, they left their imprint on the industry's product as well, especially in the way it was used to portray life in their adopted country. Extremely conscious of anti-Semitism and concerned about accusations that their domination of the industry would undermine “American values,” they made great efforts to appear as “American” as possible. As a result, their films created a varnished, wholesome image of their adopted nation, a place that was far more tolerant in their movies than it was of them. Although they craved assimilation they associated mostly among themselves in a social world of their own making. Hollywood allowed them a certain respectability that would not have been possible in the Eastern establishment, and there no social barriers to admission in a business that was just becoming established and not regarded as the equal of other “professions.” Thus, in a strange way the cinematic vision of America, certainly in the formative years of the cinema, was created by entrepreneurs who were “outsiders” not only as immigrants, but also as men who continued to regard themselves as outside the mainstream of American social life.

To employ a term that has come into common usage, the conditions in American cities at the end of the 19 th Century were a “perfect storm,” a confluence of technology, a compression of diverse immigrant groups needing a new form of entertainment to give the]m some release from long, hard hors of labor, and a particular entrepreneurial group whose commercial ways were forged in the crucible of prejudice and discrimination in Europe. Because they were often not allowed to own property in the countries of the diaspora, Jewish merchants were required to peddle their wares in the streets from pushcarts as the only way in which they could get their products to customers. As they say, “when life serves you lemons, make lemonade.”

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[1] The Australian produced film Shadow Magic (2000), directed by Ann Hu, chronicles the earliest introduction of moving pictures into China in Beijking in 1902. when a newly-arrived Englishman who's brought projector, camera, and Lumière-brothers' shorts to open the Shadow Magic theater . .

[2] Zipperstein, Steven (1989) “The Lions of Judah in the Jungle of Hollywood,” The Los Angeles Times Book Revie, November 5, 1989 p. 12.

[3] European Jews might well have become skilled at “peddling” their wares from carts and stalls to consumers because in many countries they were either not allowed to own property, or otherwise found owning real estate a risky investment when expulsions or pogroms were threats.

42. 1: TRUE FAITHS AND THE RIGHT OF “NAH” 6.2.2007

The word could be translated as “the words of God,” or “the study of God.” Presumably this putative “body of knowledge” is like other –ologies. Except that there is a habeas corpus problem with this “body”—there isn't one. So theology is reduced to what the credulous believe (not know) to be the “words of God,” as “divinely inspired” and “spoken” through the authors of the scriptures. That means there is a whole lot of writing that people who call themselves “theologians” then proceed to have all sorts of fun with, making all manner of interpretations, stuffing stuff in between the lines, unearthing secret meanings and messages, predictions and prophecies, you name it. Theology is more artifice than science, hocus pocus that the Pope might decide to write a papal “bull” (ah, such an apt term) about, or some drawler who used to sell roofing and siding can get up with a sprayed pompador and blather bullshit about to the dim and frightened.

Not that there are not quite “intellectual” approaches to theology. I had four courses in it in college, each one involving a boring, thick green book by some booze-besotted Jesuit who, I wished many a time, had been sent off to missions in Melanesia to be dismembered and eaten. [1] That's about what I remember, given the amount of critical analysis that was encouraged on the subject. Theology isn't theology; it is what religion has always been, the words of men placed in the mouths of imagined deities. It is, in short, an intellectual joke, much ado about nothing. Since it was also a required course there was no getting my degree in Economics unless I passed my courses (which meant puking up the “correct” interpretations of the “words of God”) in Theology.

Having an –ology lends an air of knowledge and reason to religion, doesn't it. Gives it a legitimacy in the halls of academe up there with the other –ologies. Makes it sound like proofs of the existence of God and his words from on high have been scientifically and objectively arrived at. Mind you, Theology is not Comparative Religion [2] , which I find more legitimate and even useful; it is indoctrination in the guise of free inquiry. You need that if you are going to have a “one, true , faith.”

Arguing about which religion is the “one true faith,” is a lot like arguing about whether a cloud formation looks like a kangaroo or a set of genitals; perspective, conditioning, and preconceptions—not truth—have everything to do with it. But, unfortunately, unlike clouds, religions tend not to go away. There isn't any money in cloud shape interpreting, but there's a lot to be made in shaping people's minds by clouding their reason.

A person in the Bible group asserted to me that he “knew with certainty” that he was “going to heaven.” He had no doubt about it, he insisted, when I asked how he knew that; he “just knows it.” Well, of course, he can't possibly know that in any epistemological sense. What he really means is that he really believes it. But therein lies a problem of cloud interpretation. While I am not saying that I know he is not going to heaven—I don't know that either—I am just saying that I know that he cannot know. I only know that he believes.

Splitting hairs? Not quite. What too of gets split because of this distinction are throats and skulls, and personal relationships, even societies. This is because the mind sometimes has a mind of its own, and doubt is that little demon of the mind that is an equal opportunity pest. In the wee hours, or weak moments, when the guard of religious conditioning might be let down, even the true believer has to admit that doubts sneak through—little “what ifs,” like what if there is no God—only for a fleeting moment perhaps; but the mind knows that if the existence of God is a statement, then its negative is also implied If you won't even let yourself think that thought, it's still there. Damn those little doubt demons!

True believers don't like that. They're engaging in a constant process of self mind control, keeping those doubt demons at bay like someone filling sandbags against a flood, or nailing their closet door shut to keep boogeymen out of their bedroom. They like to say that this is just the work of the devil, Satan's way of trying to trick you with irreligious thoughts. Any non-believing thought is an evil thought. So, categorically, they are wrong; it's not the work of a logical mind, but the work of the devil.

This is where it gets nasty. That means that people who come along and say that there is no God, or just that their might not be God, are sewers of doubt and, if not the devil himself, in his employ or clutches. They are either evil of infected with evil, and you know what you have to do with evil—put them to the sword.

Now, back to the one true faith. My Bible group mate claims to know that he is certainly going to heaven because he is a believer in the one, true faith, in his case that's Christianity, or at least the version of it he believes. Sometimes, more vexing than the doubters are those who claim that their faith is the one, true faith. The epistemological doubter may wish only to have the right to make a claim that God and eternity cannot be known—without having their throat slit for saying so. It's not prosyletizing, they just want to be able to exercise the right of “nah.” [3]

But true believers are not content to have a philosophical distinction between belief and knowledge because that leads to the distinction between faith and reason, which leads to the distinction between church and state. Once those distinctions become established and codified the true believer loses the right to slit the throats of those who would say “nah” to their theology. The true believer wishes of course for no distinction between his church and (what de facto becomes) his State. If you don't think this has already happened then you need to read some history. If you don't think this is happening again, then you need to pull your head out of your drawers.

Just remember, when somebody says that cloud looks like Jesus arriving on Judgment Day, be careful in saying you think it looks like toad riding a grasshopper, be careful even just saying “nah.” He just might be the head of your local morality police.

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[1] One of my Theology instructors was the infamous (in my view) Daniel Berrigan, S.J. Berrigan became a darling of the Vietnam anti-war movement and author of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. But closer up he was a pompous little twerp, and he gave me a “C” on the very same book report (on Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain )—and I mean verbatim—that my roommate gave him the year before and got a “B+”. Berrigan thought, of course, that he got his theology directly from the Source.

[2] See Karen Armstrong's A History of God .

[3] “Nah” means, sorry, that just ain't good enough.