Repeal & replace

The Star-Spangled Banner:

Too martial.

And "This Land Is Your Land" and "America the Beautiful" are more uplifting and far easier to sing.

 

Register, train, license, insure

The trouble with the decline of civilization is that it makes everybody so uncivilized.

Blue Dogs, what are they good for? (huh) Absolutely nothing (say it again)

These are the Democrats who joined the Republicans to save the legislative foundation for the Iraq, Afghan, Syrian and other wars of the Bush, Obama and Trump regimes:
Carper (DE)
Casey (PA)
Cortez Masto (NV)
Donnelly (IN)
Hassan (NH)
Manchin (WV)
McCaskill (MO)
Reed (RI)
Schatz (HI)
Shaheen (NH)
Stabenow (MN)
Warner (VA)
Whitehouse (RI)

Bye, Bye Miss American Spy

I'd like to take the opportunity offered by the apparent determination of the Trump treasury department not to elevate the heroic abolitionist Harriet Tubman to our currency (I don't suppose it would make any difference to our military-loving president were he to be informed that Tubman provided invaluable intelligence to the United States Army fighting the rebellion -- if John le Carré were to write her story he might call it "Slave, Nurse, Scout, Spy") to renew my appeal on behalf of Helen Keller who -- struck totally deaf and blind by childhood illness at 19 months, before she'd learned to speak -- overcame the adversity of being unable hear or see to become one of the 20th century's leading humanitarians, an international champion for the disabled, a feminist, a Socialist, a co-founder of the ACLU, a teacher and lecturer, a journalist, and the first deaf-blind person to earn a BA.

On the twenty dollar specie, though, not the ten. Thanks to Broadway, Alexander Hamilton now has a lobby. It is Andrew Jackson, the populist president and, alas, slave holder and genocidist, who needs to go.

Here's the original post: Helen Keller on the $10 by John Gabree (Impractical Proposals).

It is not that the estimable Harriet Tubman doesn't deserve to be honored for her courageous activism, it's just that being, you know, black, she may not be a favorite of this administration.

Urban progress and reaction

“You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.” ― P.D. James, The Children of Men

Nimbyism is a reactionary impulse that ignores the history of urbanism and strikes at the city's reason for being. Nimbys seek to impose a romantic fantasy of an orderly and edenic past on an urban history that in fact is a tangled tale of struggle, ambition, imagination, innovation and criminality. Indeed, it is the chaotic nature of the city

that gives it its magnetic pull, that makes it such fertile ground for creativity.

To bind a city to imaginary specifications is to strangle its spirit, to rob it of its dreams, to steal its soul. Were you to abandon a city, eventually nature would return it to the jungle or desert, the forest or prairie hidden beneath its tar and concrete; but nowhere has an urbanized locale merely devolved to an earlier stage of development. It has to be murdered, deliberately killed by greed, selfishness and myopia.

A flourishing city is an antidote to mediocrity, monotony, intolerance, rigidity, stasis, just as it is the engine of invention, adaptability, resourcefulness, enterprise, growth. We forget that the modern city developed originally as a refuge from the impliability and oppressiveness of feudalism, that within its communal

walls, and fueled by commerce, artists, rebels, scholars, free thinkers and tradesmen of every stripe were free to prosper.

It is from the concentration of talents and energies, born of the city's wealth, that the qualities of life we value most, that we count among the benefits of civilization, are afforded; cut off the city's ability to change and grow, and you condemn it, and ultimately urban culture, to death.

The city springs from hope, from the desire for a different and better future; thus, though it can be done badly or to excess, development is, at its heart, progressive.