Amnesty

For once I'm not even going to try to be clever and I'm just gonna come out and say something. Of all the vile political trends that have come around in my lifetime, the anti-immigrant hysteria is my least favorite. I like it even less than the warmongering neocon thing. While I agree that for security reasons we should control our borders and be aware of who comes in and out, that's not at all the same thing as saying we should try to reduce immigration. The reason there is so much illegal immigration to this country is that legal immigration is restricted by an anachronistic quota system that basically does not give most people who want to immigrate a legal way to do so. The solution to illegal immigration is not to reduce the number of immigrants, but to increase the number of visas to meet demand for them. Just about everybody here is descended from immigrants of one kind or another, and the day we cut off the flow is the day we cut off the nation's lifeblood and it shrivels and dies.

But to even propose limited reforms to make the system slightly less bad, it's necessary to propose draconian police state measures. Otherwise the nativists will go off the deep end fearing that somebody, somewhere has gotten a job that was rightfully theirs. I find this ironic, because really it's restrictions on immigration that interfere with the smooth operation of the labor market, making the entire country poorer. But for some people that's fine, as long as it also keeps the country more white.

Of course, saying that in a public forum is asking for trouble in a day and age where accusing someone of racism is seen as a greater evil somehow than racism itself. But it's increasingly obvious that the right wing "tea party" opposition is motivated primarily by race and identity politics, and I call 'em like I see 'em.

"We work for Fox"

No Kidding, Dave?


You know these media guys do better when their audience is pissed off, right? So what do they care if you "win?"

In my opinion, the President erred on the side of trying to make a deal. Why the Republicans repeatedly slapped his hand away is beyond me. They could have negotiated something they could take credit for. Now they're stuck with what they got.

Poetry

Can there be an urban poetry? In Chicago? I wonder. The naked fact is that Chicago has little aesthetically to inspire poetry. It is ugly. Most of its buildings are facades like a movies set, with plainspoken bare brick behind, crumbling. These sides were not meant to be seen but often stand, exposed by the death of a neighbor. New structures are smaller, meaner, with less time for beauty and artifice. With these, all sides are bare and plain. Weeds poke up through the melting gray snow, and trash. On the streets, cars stand in lines by the bare tree stem medians while drivers howl. Monoxide swirls lazily making everyone a little stupider. The neighborhood has always been ugly, with tall preposterous victorian flats rising next to white wooden shacks. Tall next to short, and varying distances from the street, the houses are like the teeth of an unsuccessful boxer or longtime minor league hockey goalie. Everywhere parking, cars, exhaust, cement. It's not grey here it's babyshit brown, polluted, dying. A woman with a broken nose? Chicago is like loving a leper.

V for Vacuous

Having come back home to my Tivo at last, I have been able to catch up on the new "V." Obviously I record everything because I have a two year old who believes TV sets are for watching videos and who doesn't realize anything is broadcast live except for baseball games. So prime time at my house starts at about 10 pm if it starts at all. So I finally watched the end of ABC's boring-assed remake, and when it was done I switched to 1984's "V: The Final Battle" which I have out from Netflix at the moment.

And I have to say, the '80s version was better, and that says something good about the world for a change. I mean, in the 80s, America becomes an alien-occupied fascist state like Vichy France, while our new alien overlords steal all of our water resources and shrink-wrap non-cooperative humans as a food source. They also engage in some truly scary mind control "conversions" where they perform a procedure on anti-alien humans which brainwashes them and turns them into collaborators. This reflected the world of the 1980s where we all felt threatened by immanent nuclear annhilation and totalitarianism. When I was a kid, I seriously doubted that I would ever grow up, believing the Cold War would turn hot and destroy the world at any moment.

By contrast, today's "V" features sleepers cells of aliens disguised as humans who may engage in terrorist acts or distribute some poisoned flu shots. Aliens come with a fleet of high tech spaceships floating over our major cities, and that's all they've got? Big deal. The problem here is that we live in much less scary times. Sure, 9/11 was frightening and tragic, but it certainly wasn't the end of civilization as we know it. If that's all the terrorsts have, then they are no the existential threat they have been made out to be in some quarters. It's terrible when terrorists blow stuff up and kill a tiny fraction of a percent of the population, but it's not really a menace to your way of life. Spain, Israel, Turkey etc. have all dealt with stuff being blown up by terrorists without being destroyed by it, and there's no reason the US couldn't do the same. All this is just to say that the military threats posed by todays world are simply not as great, and as a result, a TV show updated to be "relevant" today's world is simply not as scary as one influenced by the Cold War and World War II before it.

Thinking about this, it really struck me that all this talk about "unprecedented threats" and color coded terrorist alerts are just completely overblown. If there is an existential threat to our way of life, it comes from climate change and our dependance on world-destroying fossil fuels, not from terror cells with silly facial hair. All Al Queda can do is murder a few thousand people. Sad, but you'd take it over nuclear annhilation or fascism any day of the week. They're certainly not a threat of a magnitude that should provoke us to restricting civil liberties, spying on our own citizens, or resorting to torture or imprisonment without trial. If those extreme steps were not necessary when faced with the Soviet Union, why on earth does anyone theink they are necessary now?

Apparently they're giving them out like Halloween candy now

You could call it a WTF moment. I mean, I like Barack Obama and all, really I do. But a Nobel Peace Prize? For what? He hasn't done anything yet. His goals are right on, and if he managed a peaceful resolution to the Iran nuclear confrontation, finds a way to get out of Afghanistan without it collapsing back into full scale civil war, negotiates an arms reduction treaty with Russia, passes climate change legislation and negotiates a global climate treaty, and facilitates a lasting peace agreement in the Middle East creating a Palestinian state, then yeah, sure I suppose he'd deserve to be a Nobel laureate. But he hasn't done any of that stuff yet, and do you really believe all of those things will actually get done? Because I didn't think the prize was just for good intentions.

Hell, in some ways Bush had fairly good intentions too, his means were just awful and anti-human. The President of the United States has a lot of power to make things better, so a lot should be expected before you give one a Nobel. I mean, aren't we still at war? Aren't we still holding a bunch of "detainees" we basically kidnapped and now have no idea what to do with, at Guantanamo and CIA facilites around the planet? Or did that change in the past week while I've been too preoccupied with the baseball playoffs and my own health issues and vacation plans to pay any attention to the news?

The President himself, from my inbox:

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.

That is why I've said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.

I'm glad he realizes he doesn't deserve it, but I wish he had declined it, saying, "I am puzzled by this decision" or something like that. It's not that I don't like Obama or support most of his goals, I just think giving the award out like this devalues the award more than honors the recipient.

I understand that you have to give out the Oscar every year even when there were no good movies, and maybe nobody has done that much for peace in the last year. It's certainly possible, you certainly hear a lot more about people blowing stuff up than working for peace. But obviously, if stuff is on fire, the media will be there. But I don't think that changes my point, if you give the award out without it being earned, then you end up devaluing the award.

It's Official. We Suck.

Where's Mine?

Wow, wasn't expecting that. After all that buildup and the Olympics issue dominating local political discussion for months, we don't even make the final round. Not even sure what to say about this as I started the day really expecting to win. I'm not sure why, a week ago I would have told you, "it's Rio, silly," but this week I've been feeling certain it was going to happen.

Sorta like this time last year when I thought the Cubs were going to take the pennant for sure.

Here in Chicago, there will be ramifications, a loss of confidence in the city's future, and questions about whether our Mayor for Life will actually run again in 2011 (I'm guessing yes, after a period of introspection). And that was a lot of money that won't get spent here, I was hopeful that an Olympics would lead to increased federal spending on infrastructure here. Probably that was a pipe dream anyway.

On the national stage, however, this is probably a good thing for the Obama administration, since the Chicago 2016 was basically a committee of Obama's friends and political backers. Any scandal or inefficiency or delay or nepotism would have been dragged around by the Right and the Press in an attempt to sully the President's reputation with it. Too much cronyism could have been turned into Obama's Whitewater scandal. Now Chicago 2016 as a story will die out in a few weeks. Not that I think the bid was more corrupt than any other - Madrid's bid was headed by former IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch Torelló, Marquess of Samaranch, a former Franco crony who's no stranger to scandal (remember how Salt Lake City bought the games in 2002?). The reason Madrid lasted so long was basically that Samaranch has more clout with the IOC than just about any other figure, and his personal appeal carried more weight than Obama and Lula da Silva put together. So why did Madrid fail to win if they were so connected? Probably their bid was not good enough on the merits.

And the same was true of our bid. Honestly, it lacked vision. Daniel Burnham, the author of the 1909 Plan of Chicago who is regarded as a founding father hereabouts, is famous for saying "make no little plans" (among other things). But this plan, it was little. Since Burnham's day, Chicago has been home to Big Architecture, and its build environment is marked (some might say blighted) by all of the architectural ideas that have come and gone since - Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Stanley Tigerman, Rem Koolhaas, and all of their pallid imitators. Beijing was almost a dare, with its Water Cube and Bird's Nest. But the Chicago 2016 bid, as it was, lacked vision, and lacked the memorable design that would impress our image on the world. Instead, we got a low budget bid with a disposable stadium and largely existing facilities and infrastructure. We weren't even proposing much in the way of enhancements to public transit. And I'm telling your, our transportation infrastructure can't even handle a Cubs game and a drizzle at the same time. The Olympics? Fageddaboudit.

So, it's probalby sour grapes, but I'm feeling like maybe it's better not to win rather than to be unfavorably compared to Beijing.

Today's earworm: Chicago by the Tossers has been stuck in my head all day. For a song I have only heard once, live, it sure is sticky.

Well that didn't work

Apparently today was world car free day. In practice, traffic was awful, the worst it's been since the traffic jams returned after Labor Day. So bad I abandoned my first route to work in favor of a second route that ended up being worse and resulted in my being late to work on a day I was sure I'd be early. The bitch of it is, Chicago's transportation infrastructure really is more or less adequate for the core task of getting people to work in the morning and home in the evening. That's why traffic really isn't that bad over the summer, when most rush hour drivers are actually on their way to work, and a large share of workbound commuters are using public transportation (my office, unfortunately for me, is not located in the central business district, but in another neighborhood, much like the one where I live except less affordable - and being neither downtown nor suburban, it features neither easy transit access from home nor parking). But every year once Labor Day weekend is over, the horrible traffic meltdown returns. The reason? Public school is back in session.

I haven't heard this discussed enough when people talk about planning, or at all really. But the largest cause of Chicago's horrible traffic jams is people driving their kids to school, not people driving to work. For one thing, if you work in the central business district you can probably find another way to work other than driving yourself alone in your personal automobile. The infrastructure, as I said above, is designed to help you achieve this. But faced with abysmal test scores and the resulting environment of selective enrollment and charter schools, few middle class parents are actually allowing their kids to be (mis)educated at their local public school, which is typically right down the street from their houses. Instead, they have picked the public or private school they feel best fits their children's needs and yet will allow them to attend, regardless of where it's located, and then resigned themselves to driving them to school every day and then driving to work. Part of the reason is the relative rarity of yellow school buses in Chicago - but then, how do you design a bus route that transports kids from neigborhoods all over the city to your school? And the existing public transit system, while adequate for transporting workers from many neighborhoods to work, do not allow for crosstown transportation of school children in less than two hours if neither the child's home nor school are centrally located. Such a route would typically involve several bus transfers as well, potentially leaving school age children standing by a busy street in a crime ridden neighorhood for up to 20 minutes several times a day - not an ideal situation.

So our substandard education system is directly negatively impacting the environment and our quality of life in a way most of us don't seem to recognize or understand. There's probably some deeper insightful point to make here about modern society or something, but I'm tired and I just don't have it in me.