twin city sidewalks: Washington DC

Showing posts with label Washington DC. Show all posts

2019-10-02

Twin City Doorways #53

[Baltimore, MD.]

[Washington, DC.]

[Baltimore, MD.]

2019-09-09

Twin City Lampposts #22

[Washington, DC.]

[Cincinnati, OH.]

[Baltimore, MD.]

2019-08-19

Twin City Lampposts #21

[Northfield.]

[South St. Anthony Park, St. Paul.]

[Milwaukee, WI.]

[Maplewood.]

[Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis.]

[Washington, DC.]

2017-09-13

On Appearing with Sen. Franken in Support of Net Neutrality

Two weeks ago, I got a random request from Senator Franken's office to join him during a press conference about "net neutrality." The Senator needed a "blogger", someone who would represent independent media and the importance of free speech and equal access to the internet. As a almost-always-marginal blogger, I was flattered!

Senator Franken has been a champion of "net neutrality" since he started campaigning, and I knew a bit about the issue. I looked into the state of things today -- tl;dr, the FCC is not good! -- and jotted some notes down of key points.

Here they are:

The importance of net neutrality: equal access for everyone no matter who they are or why they are trying to use the internet. Mention important Minnesota bloggers like Aaron Brown, Tony Webster, and Sally Jo Sorenson.
Share my story about the Philando situation and writing that interview -- talk about the time you shared information about a major national story from your kitchen, and how the blog journalism reached an audience.
Talk about the repression of journalism in Turkey, China, the troubling attacks on the media coming from the White House…how important streaming media in particular is these days for political speech. It is not a given that the internet will be "neutral" and available for anyone, no matter who they are or how much influence they have.
Mention that the US built on free speech, American revolution comes directly out of things like the 1765 stamp act, the British attempting to restrict and tax access to paper.
Net neutrality should not be a partisan issue, proud of Senator Franken for leading the way on this.

(Note: thankfully I didn't mention the US history stuff. I also didn't mention China and, in retrospect, I am glad I did not start an international incident with Turkey! That said, Erdogan is bad.)

This is to say that, unfortunately for me, I kind of "winged it." Honestly, I didn't really understand the stakes of the situation. There were TV cameras, and I had a US Senator standing beside me while I spoke. The two other speakers both delivered polished statements about the importance of open internet to libraries and entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, I blabbed on... I guess it could have been worse.

Having my mind and daily live enmeshed within the small worlds of local politics, it's easy to forget that there are people who actually have to go out and deal with a Trump White House and (somehow worse!) DC Republicans every day. After the presser, Senator Franken took questions on DACA and a judicial appointment. A week later, he came out in support of single-payer health care. These are hugely important issues, if losing battles at the moment. I wish I'd been better prepared.

[Given what's happened since, can we agree that Al Franken was ahead of his time?]

From a more personal perspective, I've been a big fan of Al Franken's work ever since I first picked up "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot." I used to love political satire (still do, sort of) but Franken's books are legitimately informative and well-written. "Lies and the Lying Liars" has a great chapter on the centrality of top bracket tax rates to US politics in the 20th century. Reading it was the first time I'd really understood the straight-forward greed that lies behind the US right wing. I even listened to Air America once in a while back when Katherine Lampher was co-hosting!

Later, when Franken ran for Senate against the odious Norm Coleman, trying to take back the seat of actual-hero Paul Wellstone, I was cautiously optimistic. I remember during the recount, Franken used to come work out at the University of Minnesota gym. A few times he played squash with my good friend Dudley, and I would see him in the changing room. (Spoiler: as you might imagine, he was a super competitive squash player.)

Luckily, he won, and since then, he's been an extremely hard-working and well-informed Senator. He debates like he plays squash, a dash of playfulness, and a lot of preparation and determination. Unlike me, he does not mess around!

Even though I wasn't that prepared, this time, I'm honored to be able to meet him and (hopefully) help Senator Franken score a few points in DC.

All this is to say that, I felt a bit embarrassed when I asked him to sign my VHS copy of "One More Saturday Night", his early film about being a rock musician in Saint Cloud. (Note: this is the best movie ever made about nightlife in Saint Cloud!) I wish I'd had him sign my Lies and the Lying Liars book instead...

Anyway, thanks Senator Franken for championing the cause of marginal bloggers. Sorry I made you sign your dumb movie! Good luck in DC. God knows you will need it.

You expect to see @SenFranken sign copies of his book, but blogger @BillLindeke showed up with a copy of "One More Saturday Night" pic.twitter.com/u7aOqF0QnE
— John Croman (@JohnCroman) September 2, 2017

2012-07-26

Run For Your Life! It's the #WARONCARS

[WARNING: If running for your life, always look both ways before crossing the street.]

["Franklyn Cater": NPR reporter or Thomas Pynchon character?]

Not too long ago, in our nation’s capital, Washington DC, Franklyn Cater was having a bad day. As a reporter for noteworthy semi-quasi-public national news network National Public Radio, he had to come up with ideas for news on an exhaustingly regular basis. But after years of living in Washington DC (our nation’s capital) and doing stories on LEED certified buildings, he was tired and out of ideas. He had a deadline to meet, and nothing to show for it.

“Darn it!” Franklyn Cater yelled at his 2012 Collie-of-the-month wall calendar before forcefully placing his almost clenched hand upon his antique milkbottle collectors mousepad. “Where am I supposed to get ideas?”

Franklyn Cater wheeled his chair away his desk and began to pace. Semi-furiously he walked back and forth in an ellipse until also amusingly-named NPR colleague Cory Flintoff told him to cut it out. With purpose, Franklyn Cater strode down the hallway and turned to face the window of the NPR headquarters in Washington DC (our nation’s capital). “Darn it all!” he repeated purposefully.

That’s when Franklyn Cater noticed something he’d never noticed before. As he gazed out out at the vast city around him, Washington DC (our nation’s capital), Franklyn Cater realized that everywhere he looked cars were stuck in traffic. So many cars! He squinted his light brown eyes to see more clearly the faces of the drivers. They looked angry, Franklyn Cater thought to himself. Yes, they looked sad. They looked angry and sad, thought Franklyn, in that way that depressed people look angry and sad, where that you can tell that the anger and sadness is not just an fleeting emotional peak but rather a consistent and erosive anger and sadness, a deep pathos made all the more poignant by its everyday attrition of joy so that the intensity of feeling is almost entirely offset by its continuity and one’s emotional register is amputated by timelessness such that one's sadness assumes a haunting aura that can only be similar to how you imagine a phantom limb feels.

“Oh my gosh,” Franklyn Cater muttered imperceptibly to himself. “People hate being stuck in traffic.” Nobody noticed Franklyn Cater dancing the world’s smallest jig. “I’ll do a story about how pissed off they are,” he thought. “I bet that’s a doozy!”

And so the #WARONCARS media frame was born.

As it turns out, the great thing about doing a story about how people hate being stuck in traffic is that, because the #WARONCARS is all around us everywhere, you don’t have to do any actual reporting. It’s not like you have to go out and interview people on the bumper-to-bumper beltway. Instead, you can just browse around on the internet.

[You don't learn how to do this until the second year of J-school.]

For example, in this case Franklyn Cater went to Bing (his favorite search engine) and typed “cars” and “traffic.” Voila, Franklyn's suspicions were confirmed! Angry sad people exist not only in Washington DC (our nation’s capital) but everywhere, in cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Toronto and Boston.

Franklyn Cater had his lede:

In cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Toronto and Boston, some people go so far as to claim there is a "war on cars."

Thank goodness for “some people.” It turns out the internet is full of bitter people ranting about traffic. I’m sure you’re wondering, who are the “some people” referred to in the article?

Meet Lon Anderson, regional media representative for the American Automobile Association, a historically popular institution that makes money by catering to car drivers' insecurities. Clearly, this is a well-informed expert. How do we know? Because he has been published by the media.

Lon Anderson, chief spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, wrote an op-ed in 2010 about what he called a "war on drivers" in Washington. He says he sees it in the more than 1.6 million parking tickets issued annually in the city, not to mention increasing automated enforcement, red light cameras and speed cameras.

Good point, Lon Anderson of the mid-Atlantic branch of the American Automobile Association. It’s not like we’d want people driving cars to do things like "drive the speed limit" or "pay for parking." The next thing you know, evil government fascists will force people to get “licenses.” (Not in my America! These colors don’t run.)

Surely a city enforcing its laws concerning the movement of the automobile requires some kind of superlative suggesting extreme violence. If only there were an appropriate metaphor, you know, something properly connoting the stakes of the issue, something that captures the way that “government officials” (socialists) in their “police cars” (state-sponsored death weapons) hand out “tickets” (new taxes) to people when they don’t put money in “parking meters” (big brother invasive surveillance technology).

[Burning draft card or parking ticket to protest Vietnam or #WARONCARS.]

How about "war" as a proper metaphor? I'd go so far as to suggest that war is precisely the correct metaphor because, you know, having to pay for parking your car is just like having shrapnel rip through your leg when a bomb explodes. Because having to wait to make a right turn because a bicyclist is in front of you is just like that movie about the land mine in Kosovo where the guy is stuck on the land mine and can't move forever or else he'll die. It makes perfect sense because getting a speeding ticket for blowing through a red light is exactly like 623,000 people dying in the Battle of the Somme.

[A lot of people don't know that Picasso's Guernica is an elaborate surrealist metaphor depicting people stuck in traffic.]

Why? Because Lon Anderson, spokesperson for the Mid-Atlantic region of the American Automobile Association, says so. And if you don’t believe Lon Anderson, just continue reading. Expert witnesses abound, for example:

Political consultant and Washington resident Chuck Thies, who has written about what he calls the "war on automobiles" for the Huffington Post, says, ultimately, that war is over resources.

For a moment, ignore the fact that everyone who lives in Washington DC (our nation’s capital) is a “political consultant”, and almost anyone can get published on the Huffington Post (which is an internet blog). You can be sure that "Washington resident Chuck Theis" is a legitimate source who knows a lot about war and is properly using language when metaphorically comparing white stripes on the asphalt to the most extreme form of violence in the history of human civilization because he is knows how to “face the reality.”

Why? Because the war on cars involves “resources,” and resources, as we all know, are "limited." Not only are they limited, but they are “essential to the economy.” Check out this illustrative example:

Some cyclists, and other nonmotorists, may have a negative attitude toward cars. But Thies, a cyclist who for years didn't own a car, says critics need to face the reality: We can't get rid of cars. They're essential to the economy, he says.

"[Cars are] the predominant form of transportation in America. In fact, it's something that we can't live without," Thies says. "When you get a refrigerator delivered ... they don't bring it on a bicycle. ... They bring it in an automobile. It's easy to vilify the automobile, but it's not productive."

Another good point, though Theis does slightly undermine his argument about not being able to “live without” a car by inclusion of the biographical detail that he lived without a car “for years.” (Maybe he was in a coma? You don’t need a car when you’re in a coma.)

[Apparently, they don't have a #waroncars in China.]

Theis continues with an impeachable economic argument about refrigerator delivery. (Take that Milton Friedman!) Here's a joke I just heard in the elevator:

Q: Why do all Americans own cars?

A: Refrigerator delivery.

Haha LOL Get it? How could we possibly have a society filled with cooled foodstuffs without cars? How would we deliver fridges to each other?

Oh wait, hold on… I just heard the doorbell ring.

[long pause]

OK, I’m back. I had to get that. It was my refrigerator deliveryman. He comes through the neighborhood every other Thursday delivering refrigerators with his “automobile.” Thank god we live in a completely car-dependent society!

And as it turns out, the #WARONCARS isn’t just about the intractable problem of appliance distribution. Cast your eyes on this terrifying anecdote:

In Boston, a local columnist for The Boston Globe accused the mayor of waging war with a proposal to turn parking spaces into tiny parks called "parklets." Some even accuse the U.S. federal government of waging a war with money that helps cities make these kinds of changes.

Clearly for “some”, the #WARONCARS is getting more sophisticated. Not only are cities dropping parks on unsuspecting urban neighborhoods, but they’ve developed new park technology called “parklets.” In the war on cars, parklets are the analogy for the “bomblets” used by the military, by which I mean cluster bomb munitions that carpet large areas with small explosives that either explode right away and kill you or (even worse) don’t explode and bury themselves in the earth so that decades later farmers in Laos are still getting blown up when they try to plant their crops. I’d say that the only difference between a “parklet” and a “bomblet” is that the bomblet is designed to fly through the air and explode to kill human beings, while a parklet is architectural space intended to invoke pleasant and peaceful feelings.

[One of these is an unexploded cluster bomb; the other one is a park.]

As Franklyn Cater, credentialed reporter for one of our nation’s most respected journalistic institutions points out, “cast about North America and in just about any city you'll find heated rhetoric about urban transportation.” Obviously “the government” is “waging a war with money,” and the only significant difference here is that instead of shooting cruise missiles that explode to kill people as might occur in a war, in this case, you’re giving away money. The story even contains a photograph of a bike lane in Washington DC (our nations capital), so that you know the #WARONCARS is really happening. If you zoom in, you can see lots of dead bodies and maimed babies in the background.

[The #WARONCARS is all around you. Wake up America!]

The only good thing about the #WARONCARS is that it will make journalists' lives easier, as they’ll never have to do any difficult “framing” of issues again. Never again will heads be scratched while attempting to identify which story will appear above the fold, because now there’s a #WARONCARS right here in the USA in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Seattle. Now Americans trapped in traffic jams during rush hour can tune into NPR and hear journalistic radio stories about themselves and how upset they are because they’re in a war involving terrifying 3,000 lb. rapidly moving metal machines that are constantly killing people.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe it's not an exaggeration to suggest that every city in America is occupied by terrifying 3,000 lb. rapidly moving metal machines that are constantly killing people. The more that I think about it, the more this starts to ring a bell.

Hold on. Let me do some quick research.

["Bing" is the sound your car makes when it hits a 12 year old on a bicycle.]

I just found out some rather astonishing facts! Compare the amount of people who are killed in the #WARONCARS with the number of soldiers who die in the non-metaphorical war in Afghanistan:

290: Total number of pedestrians killed by cars in New York City in 2008.
295: Total number of US and UK soldiers killed in the War in Afghanistan in 2008.

Or, check out this comparison between the most protracted war in US history and the death toll from the US automobile and freeway system:

58,902: Total number of US casualties in the War in Vietnam.*
684,654: Total number of motor vehicle deaths in the USA from 1963 - 1975.

Maybe the metaphorical use of the term “war” to describe the constant movement of motor vehicles isn’t so far off after all.

* 2,118 Afghani civilians died in the Afghanistan war in 2008 according to the NY Times, which is undoubtedly a lowball estimate.

** It is estimated that 2,000,000 Vietnamese people died in the Vietnam War. I'm not sure if that includes Cambodians or what...

2012-01-09

Classic Sidewalks of the Silver Screen #51

Sergeant Joe Carter almost forgets that he lives with Connie Milligan...

... in George Stevens' (1943) classic, The More The Merrier.

2010-11-16

Signs of the Times #26

Free Food
Comida Gratis

[Sidewalk. Lake St., Minneapolis.]

Please Don't Feed
The Pigeons

... or
They Will Land on Your Head.

[Fence. Adams Morgan, Washington DC.]

NEW PARKING METER HOURS
Parking meters will let
you park here for 4
hours ALL THE TIME!!!
Now Available at all
Meters on This Block.

[Parking station. Adams Morgan, Washington DC.]

Snack to Forget
[With Dinosaur]

[Sidewalk. Adams Morgan, Washington DC.]

We will be - Have
Moving - ED

Open Now
To to 3012 Lyndale Ave S

[Shop door. Lyndale Avenue, Minneapolis.]

Hey You!
Metal Only!
No Trash No Glass

[Trash bin. Warehouse District, Minneapolis.]

Dam Zamlen St Thomas Student 18
Abducted + Murdered 4-5-09 Ramsey Ct: "Accidental
Satanist Death Squads Covered Up (Federal) State + Local
In USA + World MT24L7-9: "There will be famine
Earthquakes in Many Places" These are the Early Stages
JN 4:04: "God is + Spirit Those who worship Him Must Worship in
Spirit + Truth." Believe in Jesus Christ

[Man. University of Minnesota East Bank Campus, Minneapolis.]

FOR SECURITY
REASONS
PRESIDENT
OBAMA'S VISIT
BIKE RACKS
WILL BE
REMOVED
NO
PARKING
AFTER 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, OCT. 22

[Sign. University of Minnesota Campus, Minneapolis.
Thanks Jake!]