Growing up in suburban Westchester in the 1970s, I remember driving above the South Bronx on those long arterial stretches and looking down and out on the devastation. But it was not till I read Marshall that I understood its source or at least one of its sources: the wrecking ball of a mad urban genius, who set out to reconstruct an entire city as if it were nothing more than a system of highways, an expressway to get people and goods from one end to the other.
Robert Moses is the man who made all this possible. When I heard Allen Gisnberg ask [in Howl] at the end of the 1950s, “Who was that sphinx of cement and aluminum,” I felt sure at once that, even if the poet didn’t know it, Moses was his man. Like Ginsberg’s “Moloch, who entered my soul early,” Robert Moses and his public works had come into my life just before my Bar Mitzvah, and helped bring my childhood to an end.
From a eulogy for Marshall Berman, “the Socrates of Manhattan.” The embedded videos are a very powerful introduction to the toxic totalitarianism of Robert Moses, and the importance of resisting his spiritual children, the Developers who continue to destroy community with auto-centric sprawl.
Shalom, Marshall. Would it be too ironic if Amazon offered All That Is Solid Melts into Air on Kindle?
“May the record reflect, your honor, that Daniel Brewington is not a nice man.”
“The Court will take judicial notice of that, Counsel. So noted.”
I just made that up. Here’s what the record does reflect:
- In a contested divorce, Brewington rejected an expert’s custody evaluation and “subjected [the expert] to a torrent of abusive letters demanding that [the expert] release his entire file to him, withdraw the evaluation, and withdraw from the case. These letters are discussed in more detail below. Brewington accused [the expert] of “dishonest, malicious, and criminal behavior ….”
- Blogged that [the expert] was “using [custody] evaluations as a means to gain some kind of perverted sexual stimulation.”
- After the judge found him too unhinged to get visitation until he had a psychiatric evaluation, he proved the judge correct, right on cue, by attacking the expert, the judge and the special judge in pleadings and public lobbying against them.
- Identified the special judge’s wife’s name and residential address.
- Blogged at least nine times about the special Judge, describing him as “corrupt,” accusing him of “unethical/illegal behavior,” and repeatedly referring to the judge as a child abuser.
- etc.
He was indicted on six counts of intimidation, obstruction of justice, perjury and unlawful disclosure of grand jury proceedings. He was convicted by an anonymous jury on every count except the last one. The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed in part and reversed in part.
Well, it seems that some of his trash talk pretty clearly was constitutionally protected free speech, but the jury instructions and verdict made it impossible to tell whether he was convicted for the protected speech or for, for instance, true criminal threats.
The issues brought out big gun amici curiae in the Indiana Supreme Court, including Eugene Volokh of UCLA, who perceives a threat to robust free speech and journalism.
The briefs are not collected online, so far as I can tell, but you can find some of them, and sundry comments as well, here. It was argued in the Indiana Supreme Court Thursday, and video of the argument is here.
If I had to bet, I’d bet the this is one of those eggs that can’t be unscrambled, and the state, which scrambled it, loses.
Or, in words more familiar to lawyers, pigs get fat while hogs get slaughtered, and the prosecutor went whole hog on this one, inviting reversible error in his zeal to punish someone who, as “judicially noted” above, is not a nice man.
I recall the moment fairly distinctly, though it’s now somewhere in the range of 34 years ago.
It was the law school cafeteria (such as that was; as I recall it, it was a few vending machines, maybe, some microwaves and a lot of tables and chairs). I’d referred to myself as a creationist because, well, I thought all this stuff was created rather than having existed eternally. That’s standard issue Christianity. “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed, 325 AD)
It probably wasn’t the first time I’d used that label. And if that was what “creationist” meant, I’d use it still.
But what made the day memorable was that I learned that “creationist” was a term of art, denoting a belief that God did put all this stuff together in 6 days of 24 hours each, somewhere in the range of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
I don’t recall when I ever believed that, though I flirted with it, by pondering “did the first tree have rings?” and “did Adam have a belly button?” and maybe a few other conundrums, the gist of which was whether God could have created a ringless tree or a belly-buttonless Adam without violating their tree-ness and humanness, respectively.
So. Lesson learned. I don’t call myself a creationist any more. But since then I’ve flirted with Intelligent Design, which would have gotten me labeled a “creationist” by many of the sorts of people who taught me that day that it was a term of art that didn’t describe I.D.
That kinda honks me off. If they can use “creationist” as a slur much broader than its term of art meaning, who do I bother avoiding it?
And they do the same thing with “evolution.” No politician in his right mind should ever answer “yes” or “no” when asked if he “believes in evolution.” That question is a trap (set only for candidates thought suspiciously religious) that always should get a counter-question in response: “In which of several senses are you using ‘evolution’?”
And the folks I formerly hung out with on the Right do it with “American Exceptionalism,” too.
Peggy Noonan on Friday gave it a very beguiling spin:
America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world, it attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional. It is a nation formed not by brute, grunting tribes come together over the fire to consolidate their power and expand their land base, but by people who came from many places. They coalesced around not blood lines but ideals, and they defined, delineated and won their political rights in accordance with groundbreaking Western and Enlightenment thought. That was something new in history, and quite exceptional. We fought a war to win our freedom, won it against the early odds, understood we owed much to God, and moved forward as a people attempting to be worthy of what he’d given us.
We had been obliged (sic), and had obligations. If you don’t understand this about America you don’t understand anything.
I don’t know why the idea of American exceptionalism seems to grate so on Mr. Putin. Perhaps he simply misunderstands what is meant by it and takes it to be a reference to American superiority, which it is not …
Deny that and you’re unAmerican or deeply “misunderstanding” America. But hold your horses their, Peggy. I think American exceptionalism usually refers precisely to America’s putative superiority, and even if Putin’s New York Times column committed the fallacy of composition, as your buddy Taranto smirks, I think he had the better of the argument as a matter of fact.
And even if, as a matter of practicality, Putin committed a PR gaffe and lost about half the Americans who might otherwise have agreed with him more fully, he didn’t lose all of us.
Rod Dreher thinks American exceptionalism was one of Putin’s stronger points, too, and quotes Paul Pillar of The National Interest approvingly:
The part of Putin’s piece that Americans perhaps found more irritating than any other was his final comment about American exceptionalism. Americans get especially upset about this sort of comment because it sounds to them like an affront to the very nature of America and not just particular American policies. Probably an extra annoyance was Putin’s final line invoking religion, especially coming from someone who used to work on behalf of godless communism.
But what Putin actually said here involved one of his most valid and valuable points. He said that encouraging exceptionalist thinking is dangerous because countries differ from each other on all sorts of dimensions, and there is no basis for saying that any one country’s differences sets it apart in a way that does not apply to any other countries. He was not impugning the motivation of exceptionalist thinking in the United States or anywhere else—he specifically said “whatever the motivation”—but instead was pointing out undesirable consequences of such thinking.
This closing part of Putin’s article was a direct response to the closing portion of President Obama’s speech on Syria on Tuesday. Even the final God-invoking line was a reflection of the Obama speech. Given that a “God bless” closing has become obligatory in speeches by U.S. presidents, why can’t a Russian president invoke divinity at the end of his public statements, too?
What the U.S. president said about exceptionalism in that final part of his speech was shaky enough that it shouldn’t need a Putin to expose the weakness of it. Mr. Obama said that when “we can stop children from being gassed to death”—never mind for the moment that a U.S. military attack would not be stopping any such thing—“we should act.” He said, “That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.” Really? …
I have no reason to think that Putin’s invocation of God was one iota less sincere than Obama’s.
This isn’t the first time Pillar has visited American exceptionalism, either. It’s pretty toxic in its effects, and Noonan – with whom I rarely so strongly disagree – is credulous if she thinks her benign version is the “street” version.
I’m not going to affirm American exceptionalism, even in Noonan’s sense, because I’ll be understood as affirming something much narrower, more provincial, and more threatening to world peace.
Since I’ve already probably ticked off Evangelical Civil Religionionistas, let me pile it on deeper.
Friday was a very hard day.
Not only did I let curiosity get the best of me, so that I clicked through to a picture of Syrian Islamist rebels executing someone, but I listened to Contemporary Christian Music on K-Love, 106.7, for 6 or 7 minutes. Both made me ask “why did I do that?”
There’s enough horror in the world that I can’t avoid seeing without looking at a photograph of a knife at the throat just before the slicing.
And there are enough forces encouraging me to focus entirely on myself without listening to “Christian” music full of “I,” “me,” “You’n’me, Lord,” and sundry other snippets of sentimental solipsism.
I heard a story about a family of Orthodox converts with young children. After a few years in the Orthodox Church, they found themselves back in an Evangelical Church one Sunday – visiting family, wondering if their memories were accurate or something. In the car afterward, one of the children said “that Church made me feel further away from God.”
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings ….
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 