Goal.
I was at the H Mart buying creatures of the deep for a Fathers Day meal when I was startled by the sudden roar of cheers and a polite, but enthusiastic, burst of applause. The Japanese and Korean checkers and baggers were gathered around a teevee that had a terrible reception of Telemundo. Korea had just scored against France to tie the match. Oh, that’s right. The rest of the world is intensely focused on the World Cup these days. The native lawnguylanders scowled at all the fuss and went back to their shopping routines.
I’m jealous of all the fuss and wish I could really get into soccer – er, futbol – the way hundreds of millions do. Aside from the occasional rioting and hooliganism, it does seem a wonderful bit of global togetherness. Back at the university – itself, a model United Nations – the student activities center has been a ghost town while all the international students hunker down in the basement to catch broadcasts from across the pond. Meanwhile, I was out in the cold at the happy hour in one of the labs as my friend, the Ukrainian scientist who’s an unapologetic union supporter, chatted with the skittish Chilean tech who’s got Visa worries about…some team or match or other. They really were in their own world when having that conversation, so I wandered down a little further to try to chat with the Argentinean scientist who refuses to talk to me. A friendly, casual, non-union ice breaker chat is just what the PhD ordered. A grad student mentioned Argentina’s team and she beamed with pride, “Aren’t they wonderful?” If only I caught a match, or had a clue.
At least America is apparently losing. The last thing we need, really, is to win at the sport that the entire world is bonkers about, but that we could give two shits about if we even bother to call it by its proper name.
Jim Hurd, 1955-2006
It is a special peculiarity of our time that it is possible write an obituary for a friend that you have never met. I think I first heard about Jim Hurd, the Hoosier Socialist, from Jen Ray bitching about him (Hell, she bitched about everyone, so why not him?) ten years ago. Jim was a gadfly on the Socialists Unmoderated mailing list and a member of the Socialist Party. Jim quit the party over some stupid sectarian pronouncement of our National Committee and joined the CP, and he advanced – along with the internets – from listserves to blogs. He was an occasional commentator on this blarg (his most recent comment a quip in response to my “Being “Wrong” in the Socialist Party” piece that referenced Mark 6:4), and a gadfly blogger in his own right.
It’s a punch in the stomach to read that Jim Hurd died a week and a half ago after a long struggle with depression and alcoholism. With our tiny band of reds spread far and wide, it’s not unusual to meet a comrade through the internets. Eventually, you’ll meet at a conference or a rally. I never met Jim, though, even though he repeatedly reached out to me through e-mail and this website. And for that, I am truly sorry.
There will be a memorial for Jim at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bloomington, IN on Saturday, June 10th.
Worst. Park Name. Ever.
The charming statue of an befuddled capitalist foot soldier, who had gone missing like so many other men in ties with attache cases after 9/11, has returned to the former Liberty Plaza around the corner from Ground Zero. The park is now named after one John E. Zuccotti.
Who the fuck is John E. Zuccotti, you ask? Is he a fireman who died that day, or perhaps a waiter at Windows on the World or a stockbroker at Cantor Fitzgerald? The classic comedic duo George Pataki and Dan Doctoroff revealed all in a high-larry-us send-up of award ceremonies at yesterday’s unveiling:
“In the category of New Name for a Refurbished, 26-Year-Old Park,” Mr. Doctoroff began, “the winner is – ”
” – the winner is,” Mr. Pataki continued, “the chairman of Brookfield Properties, the chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York, the former first deputy mayor of the City of New York, former chairman of the City Planning Commission, and one of New York’s finest citizens: John Zuccotti. This is Zuccotti Park, from this day forward.”
Oh. That John E. Zuccotti. It’s funny that while every other street, park or airport is being renamed “Liberty” or after some fallen hero, this park – so near the site of that five-year-old tragedy – is having “Liberty” stripped from its name in order to salute a real estate tycoon. Well, it is an accurate statement of our values in this post-9/11 age.
Of course, this was easier to do because Liberty Plaza was not a public park, but was instead “privately owned public space” – a concession granted to the public by real estate developers in exchange for the ability to exceed zoning and add even more lucrative floors to a skyscraper. This public space – open air plazas, gardens and parks and enclosed arcades – is meant to provide space for anyone to sit, relax, meet, eat or take shelter from the elements in a congested city.
However, while those extra half million square feet of rentable office space will provide real estate developers with revenue for generations, the public space that was granted in exchange is constantly under threat of privatization. The arcade in Sony building has had much of its space claimed as a dining area for one of the restaurants that leases from the landlord (so if you want to sit there now you must buy an overpriced martini). Citibank has tried to decorate the public area of the Citigroup Center with an “art” installation of red umbrellas – its corporate logo. And now Liberty Plaza has been renamed for the Chairman of the corporation that owns it.
I’ve got a new name for it: Corporate Pinhead Park.
Overpopulation, or Overconsumption?
Ward Sutton, who was much funnier when he was drawing cartoons that lampooned rock-n-roll culture, makes an extremely dubious point about overpopulation and the “culture of life” in this week’s “Sutton Impact.”
In it, Sutton mourns the loss of greenspace and farmland in his hometown to “exurban” housing developments, blames overpopulation and then mocks the right-wingers who want to ban contraception. While the effort to ban contraception is ridiculously puritanical and begs for mockery and outrage, I find it extremely hard to blame American urban sprawl on “overpopulation.” The great big land mass under the stars and stripes is a whopping 5.9 million square miles, while our population is – as Sutton points out – soon to be 300 million. That means that, on average, we have to squeeze about 83 people to each square mile.
India, on the other hand, with its billion citizens, has to find enough living space for about 328 people per square mile. Taiwan gets comfy with about 636 people per square mile, the Gaza Strip makes room for about 3,823 in its relatively few square miles, and even prosperous countries like Britain and Germany accommodate 243 and 230 subjects and citizens to the square mile, respectively. The United States, in fact, ranks just 144th out of nearly 200 countries in terms of population density.
So, is the problem that there are too many people in the world, or that there are too many Americans in the world, demanding strip malls, office parks, sport utility vehicles and McMansions? Do we need fewer Americans, or do we Americans (who, with 5% of the Earth’s population, consume 20% of its resources) need to consume less?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of sex and contraception as the next single male hornball, but cries of “overpopulation!” often sound to me like cries of “There’s too many damn brown people!” And countries like India and China, while poorer than the U.S., somehow find a way to accommodate their masses without uprooting every forest in sight to build more goddamn Best Buys and 7-11s.
Perhaps I’d be less antagonistic to Sutton’s cheerleading for contraception if it was accompanied by a call for massive new immigration into this country. After all, there are places in this world where there is legitimate overpopulation (India, Palestine and China being good examples), and here we are in the U.S. of A. wasting perfectly good greenspace on giant styrofoam houses and honking huge parking lots. Brown people of the world, help fill our wide open spaces!