Archive for politics
Luxury Boxes in Buffalo, NY – No, really …
From my old and much admired colleague, Buffalo State University Professor Mike Niman:
People like new things. I get it. That’s what shopping malls are all about. Within this culture, it’s to be expected that the conventional wisdom says we need to replace a 74,000 seat football stadium that cost $22 million to build in 1973, with a sparkly new one that will seat about 74,000 people and cost upwards of $800 million.
The major problem with Ralph Wilson Stadium [home of the Buffalo Bills], why it’s supposedly obsolete, why it needs to be torn down, thrown away and replaced, is that it doesn’t have sufficient luxury boxes. That’s right. Luxury boxes. It all makes sense if you look at current economic indicators that predict that by next year, the richest one percent of the global population will have half of the world’s wealth. And they need luxury boxes, both to keep themselves out of the snow, and away from the rest of the Bill’s fans—whose average income puts them only among the richest 10 percent of the global population. …
Not only do I not want to pay for this stadium with a rent-to-own lien against my future tax bills, but no matter who pays for it, or how they get the money, I don’t want it in downtown Buffalo. …
An NFL football stadium is too large for any of the three proposed downtown sites. Too many people will come, and they won’t come often enough to justify the type of infrastructure, such as a monorail to a new city of parking, or better yet, a working regional public transportation system, that would be needed to make this thing work.
First off, none of the three proposed sites are toxic brownfields located on depopulated wastelands. We have plenty of toxic brownfields and depopulated wastelands that can certainly use some TLC to jumpstart an area revival. Downtown Buffalo, however, is not that place. …
A football stadium and its supporting infrastructure, as proposed, would devour up to 95 acres—entire blocks—of historic Buffalo real estate, landing a massive out-of-scale concrete erection on what were once urban streets. One proposal would wipe out blocks of housing while cutting the Old First Ward off from downtown, boxing it to the east and north with massive parking fields. …
Against all odds, Buffalo has persevered and is now coming back. We have an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past where we wiped out historic buildings and districts to make parking lots and build massive tombstone-like structures that, once abandoned, just serve to memorialize our stupidity. Downtown is coming back to life as a dynamic urban environment that is alive 365 days per year. Let’s not impede this renaissance by making a massive urban planning blunder.
Mike Niman on capitalism and contagion
Professor Mike Niman’s new column ripples with that combination of pessimism and winsomeness that has long characterized his philosophical and prose styles. An brief excerpt:
Medical research is expensive and usually driven by private investment, which is drawn to profit, not service. Hence, while Malaria continued to devastate the third world, and Ebola lay in hiding like a time bomb, the medical industry mostly ignored both, putting money into more profitable pursuits such as developing erectile dysfunction drugs for octogenarians.
With corporate research money heading toward more profitable products, fighting diseases like Ebola is left to the public sector. Across Africa, where colonialism plundered resources and neo-liberalism saddled governments with structural debt, the public sector isn’t too robust, often unable to provide basic infrastructure for potable water or education. Developing an advanced medical research sector ain’t happening. This leaves the continent at the mercy of American and European philanthropy, which often seems drawn more to sexier or trending causes, like saving wildlife or hating the eminently hateable Joseph Kony.
First world apathy toward Ebola continued even as the current epidemic unfolded over the last six months, eventually spreading to seven counties, with Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea hit the hardest. A month ago, the World Health Organization’s Assistant Director, General Bruce Aylward, declared that the Ebola epidemic has become a health crisis “unparalleled in modern times.” That means, since the Black Death ravaged Europe and the holocaust of European diseases decimated native America.
Aylward asked for one billion dollars to combat the epidemic. To put this number in perspective, that’s $400 million less than Fracking magnate and uber sports fan Terry Pegula paid last week to buy the Buffalo Bills.
Bad Apologies
Dr. Nancy Snyderman, who works for NBC news, had an especially vivid one today. Ordered to remain in quarantine by the CDC after being exposed to Ebola, she was spotted out and about in the city of Newark with other members of her NBC crew.
After driving to a New Jersey restaurant and violating her 21-day Ebola quarantine, NBC’s chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman is now [back] under a mandatory quarantine.
While covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia earlier this month, a freelance photographer working with Snyderman and an NBC News crew was diagnosed with the virus. Ashoka Mukpo was brought back to the United States for treatment, and Snyderman and the rest of the team also returned to the U.S. and quarantined themselves.
But Snyderman was seen outside of the Peasant Grill restaurant last week, TMZ reports, sitting in the back seat of her Mercedes. …
[Snyderman was quoted as saying the following:] “As a health professional I know that we have no symptoms and pose no risk to the public, but I am deeply sorry for the concerns this episode caused. We are thrilled that Ashoka is getting better and our thoughts continue to be with the thousands affected by Ebola whose stories we all want to cover.”
She wants to reassure the world that *she* is – that is, *seems* – perfectly healthy (not realizing, or forgetting, that the problem with her violating quarantine was that she put the health of *others* at risk). The parting point – that the Ebola outbreak is a story “we all want to cover” – might have just been poor wording, but is nonetheless … vile … who *wants to cover* such a vicious epidemic?
Dear doctor, I am truly sorry that you effing offended *me*.
“Jussives” …
… are a form of indirect command, and have been used by writers to respond to recent acts of violence. I am a little bit embarrassed that I had not heard of this term before. Jonathan Mayhew is on the case.
God Bless Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple‘s only peer as an illustrator / artist / journalist is the great Joe Sacco. The tone of their work is very different, though. Whereas Sacco’s reporting is dispassionate and ironic, Crabapple’s is emotional and argumentative. Sacco’s art – black and white illustrations – is famously detailed, and everybody, including the artist, has ugly faces. Crabapple works in colour as well as in black and white; all of her portraits and her scenes are exuberant; even pictures that convey mourning or disapproval are done with a Dionysian, fluorescing density. She hasn’t given up on life, anywhere.
This is from her wonderful piece called “We Must Risk Delight After a Summer Full of Monsters,” published by the irreplaceable Vice.com:
Journalism often feels like vampirism. Before Ferguson or Gaza, I’d been reporting from Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Before that, Guantanamo. Sources told me about repression and violence. A journalist on the disaster beat told me to be a funnel for this pain. “Let it go through you. Get it down truthfully. Move on.”
I could not.
Writing about others’ trauma bears no relation to living it. Yet I was a ruin more and more. The word “burnout” is dead from overuse. Constant exposure to pain burns in.
Quinn Norton once advised me to write about what I loved. Rage came more easily. I’d make my lines bloody, my words damning. I didn’t know how to write about happiness. What did it mean, the night I danced on the street in New Orleans? A brass band howled. I’d woven flowers into my hair, but they dissolved beneath the Halloween rain. My friends and I danced for hours. …
Power seeks to enclose beauty—to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarized zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street.
The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us. Jack Gilbert [in “A Brief for the Defense”] is right. “We must risk delight” in the summer of monsters. Beauty is survival, not distraction. Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight.
The Salaita affair
Your author joins the debate over at Stupid Motivational Tricks. The Chicago Tribune provides background.
The Ghetto and the Dead
Gaza.
Last year I wrote,
My least favourite maxim of all time most certainly belongs to George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Its banal ubiquity has not increased its charm any. Remembering the past is usually a necessarily step to repeating it. Historical records of religious and clannish rivalries, confidence games and marital treacheries, and tragic hubris and the rest of it are no doubt worth remembering, but not for any contraceptive function.
I have no doubt Netanyahu remembers the Warsaw Ghetto … as a model and not a warning, alas.
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(I recommend Andrew Sullivan’s collection of viewpoints on this galling war.)
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Proportion and Civilization
Jordan is supporting 1.3 million Syrian refugees within its borders, and many in the United States want to take up arms against children fleeing to their nation, many of whom are escaping death and rape?
Believers
In terms of money, I think that Hobby Lobby’s “victory” in the Supreme Court today was Pyrrhic, and that the lawyers who advised the family who owns most of the shares *must* have advised them of this. The company will lose a number of highly trained employees as well as a large number of long-term customers. That is money going out the door.
The company might save a little money in insurance costs.
The family loses. It must have known. This family *believes* in the cause.
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Updates
1: I’ve tried out my theory on two friends of mine. One thinks Hobby Lobby’s sales will go through the roof. The other nodded politely.
2: Dan Savage is at work on a neologism. – 3 July
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