Libraries by Candida Hoffer

Hoffer photographs libraries as though she were photographing the inside of a great museum. Her photographs of libraries all the way from USA to Europe amount to beautiful artwork, evoking majesty and history. In a way, old libraries are museums; they were designed to resemble the insides of stately homes, so that whoever paid for them could show how rich and powerful they were. Whether they were built by kings and queens, or by the Medicis, or the Carnegies and Rockefellers, they always have the best when it comes to architecture and décor.

The juxtaposition is clear when it comes to the times. The libraries will either be wood-paneled and luxurious, or the kind of modernist carpeting that would make George Jetson proud. Few of the photos have any people in them, which allows the photographer to concentrate on the interiors. However, I the people who frequent the libraries tell you a lot about their true purpose. Take for example the library on Second Avenue and St. Marks Place in NYC; it’s full of homeless people who sit there all day, and those that aren’t homeless spend all day with their laptops. NYC’s public libraries are a notorious refuge for the homeless, so I wonder if it’s the same with public libraries in London, Paris, and Milan? Do Europeans bring their laptops into the library the way Americans do?

Unfortunately, young people don’t spend as much time in libraries as they used to. Whereas up until perhaps 2004, young people did their research at the library, now they use the internet. They no longer head for the library to do that social studies project, and as a result they don’t discover all those other books they have. It’s a shame that such a great resource is going to waste.

The New Urban Question

Andy Merrifield uses Paris as an example of early gentrification, particularly the way Bruno Haussmann bulldozed a lot of poor areas to rebuild the city. He quotes Eric Hazan’s book about Paris, with his lamentations over the changes, and championing of the banlieus as the next great thing in the city. If only Hazan had 30 year foresight and seen what the banlieus would become in this decade, I wonder if he would’ve moved to the USA?

The New Urban Question raises the rich versus poor argument frequently. If a city wants to expand, it has an easier time annexing poor towns. If the mayor wants to build a new stadium, he’ll probably demolish a slum. But this is where the author gets it all wrong (or simply ignores) in his argument; the “poor” areas are usually full of derelict fire-hazard buildings that the landlords want to get rid of anyway. If only somebody wanted the old row houses in Camden and Philadelphia, because those houses have been empty for years. The banlieus, which he lovingly discusses in tribute to Hazan, are a mess that nobody wants. The original inhabitants abandoned them as quickly as they could, and those that remain have nowhere to go, or simply lack the initiative.

The next book that the author discusses is Steven Graham’s City Under Siege, and its views on the militarization of police. Never mind what we saw recently in Ferguson, Missouri; that was just cops in military gear. Graham shows how London, Toronto, and other cities go crazy when they host the G7, G8, and G20 conferences, with barricades, cops in riot gear, security cameras everywhere, and general paranoia. But is it fair to call that an “urban” issue? Why not leave the city out of this and blame the G20? Do they have to hold their conference in a great city like New York, Paris, Milan, Seattle, or London? Why not hold the conference somewhere in Alabama? There’s plenty of room down there, and if they select the right town, no left-wing people to complain! Then there’s the Olympics, which spread demolition everywhere they go. Instead of Paris, London, or Athens, why not Philadelphia? There’s no shortage of derelict buildings to tear down to build a stadium, and you can build the Olympic Village to house them in neighboring Camden.

Just kidding folks, we know that’ll never happen. Philly, Camden, St. Louis, Mississippi, and Alabama aren’t chic, glitzy, or stylish, so they’ll never be an issue in a book like this. The only cities that will be part of the “urban question” are the stylish ones, where there’s a demand for housing and greater competition for space.

The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Undermined the Middle Class

Oscar Wilde and D.H. Lawrence turned up their noses at the bourgoise, while praising poets, according to the author. It won’t take a lot of convincing to tell me these men were full of themselves, because bourgoise money is what paid for their education and financed the production of Wilde’s plays. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis satirized the middle class, but it was middle class money that paid for their education. The author uses the heroine of Lewis’ novel Main Street as an example of dissatisfaction with small town life. But would she prefer living in a subdivision? Remember the town of Maycomb, Alabama, from To Kill a Mockingbird? That small town may seem dull, but there was plenty of social life for everyone, and the kids could walk to and from school.

   In the 1920’s, the New Republic’s Waldo Frank (NY born) voiced his disgust with the “human waste” that rode the subway home. But what had he done to contribute to progress? When Lewis turned up his nose at small town life, would he have preferred to live in one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays? Would he have preferred an apartment above the Last Chance Saloon, in a strip populated by hookers, crooked cops, gamblers, and drunks?

   I agree with the author’s criticism of society’s critics. Everyone chooses to live where they feel the need. Some like the city, some prefer a house, some don’t mind the long drive to work. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis were within their rights to satirize the middle class, but they never worked to make positive changes. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for Ivy League graduates to become teachers in rough, failing schools. Who’s opinion counts more?

    I don’t, however, agree with his use of Leopold & Lobe as an example of elitism run amok. Both men got life in prison, and although they were spared the death penalty, they didn’t get special treatment just because their families were wealthy. Clarence Darrow’s argument that they killed to satisfy intellectual desire didn’t influence the judge, who was probably against the death penalty anyway. A better argument for the author would be the Jack Henry Abbott case, now that was an example of intellectual stupidity gone wild. Norman Mailer fought to free a convicted murderer, over the psychiatrist’s objection, and a month later he committed another murder. Call it “radical chic” if you like, but Mailer was so awed by Abbott’s writing talent that he overlooked the man’s violent nature. At least the author rails against Amiri Baraka and other black intellectual hucksters who’ve killed any chance of progress.

    Keep in mind, in the early 60’s, Baraka was named “LeRoi Jones” and was living in Manhattan’s west Village, married to a white woman and a staple in the beatnik scene. With the death of Malcolm X, he suddenly became a great black radical.

First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar

The students of Dunbar High School in Washington DC put on a dance show to celebrate Obama’s election. Most of the audience found it vulgar, clumsy, and low class. Their school has a history of problems, like many inner city schools. But 60 years ago, it graduate the best black students in DC.

This book tells me that much of what drove progress in the DC black community of the time was elitism. If you were a good student who was able to attend high school, then you had to act the part. Always be properly dressed, well-behaved, and speak in perfect English. It was an “academics first” education, and if you couldn’t conform, off you went to vocational school, where you’d be trained for a respectable career. Either way, whether you were trained in classics or cabinetry, you were prepping for a career. Nowadays the vocational schools are gone and the academics are weak. In the old days, girls were more likely than boys to graduate high school because they felt no need to be macho and get a “tough guy” job. There weren’t a lot of jobs for women; they couldn’t be cops, prison guards, security guards, or army sergeants, just teachers, nurses, or secretaries. So you’d better go to school, or end up scrubbing floors.

Washington DC isn’t all about Senators and Congressmen. There are regular people living there, who’ve never visited the Capitol Building. To long-time DC natives, their city is just another southern town with southern character. Unlike Savannah and Charlestown, however, the character hasn’t been especially good; crime, drug use, dangerous schools and a crack-smoking mayor haven’t helped. There are a lot of hardworking people there, who often get pushed aside by the decay. In his autobiography Step By Step, Bert Bowman (longtime Senate employee) tells the story of DC, and it doesn’t seem as bad as I expected. Prior to the 1950’s, most of it was safe. You had streets full nice row houses where the black doctors lived in their own private homes, apartment houses where teachers lived, well-kept boarding houses where the men lived, working for the government and sending money home, strict rules of behavior enforced by the landladies. Somewhere, I bet you had the derelict houses, where winos and hookers lived. But somewhere along the way, the dereliction spread. Just like with Dunbar High School, the professionals moved away, and the “other” people creeped in to fill the space.

Dunbar High School is an example of what happened all over the USA. People moved out of inner-city neighborhoods and into the suburbs. The inner city schools declined and collapsed, and the technical schools were phased out, victims of the “college or bust” idea. This was once a big disagreement between DuBois and Washington, whether to promote technical or academic education. I guess DuBois won out. But what are we left with?

Hog Meat and Hoecake

Researched in the 1800’s and published as a book in the 1970’s, Hog Meat and Hoecake is a study on food production in the Old South. From the information gathered, it seems like the food supply of the Old South was based on a backward subsistence farming culture imported from Scotland. While the Northeast states were originally known as the “bread and butter colonies,” Southern agriculture was weak when it came to food. It had none of the cash crop production that you had in New England. There was plenty of room in the South to raise lots of pigs and chicken, grow corn and potatoes to feed them, and good rivers for shipping the produce around the country, but it wasn’t happening. Lack of commercial food farming was one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War.

While the agribusiness sector may have been weak, the southerners definitely knew how to make their food last. They knew how to preserve their pork, eggs, beans, and butter for months at a time. Sausage was a big part of southern fare, as were pickled vegetables. I don’t know for sure how accurate this information is, because it’s contrary to a lot of what I’ve seen in other research. In most of the stories I hear about the South, there’s a large population that’s poor and hungry, even though they have plenty of space to grow their own food and raise animals for food. It doesn’t take much effort to breed rabbits for meat or chickens for eggs, and it’s not expensive to feed them. I suspect that the southern mentality doesn’t encourage entrepreneurship, so there’s not much incentive to take care of the problem yourself.

Live Wire by Skeeter Wesinger

Wesinger takes elements from every criminal organization and pits his own James Bond-cum-Rambo type of adventurers against them, with helicopter chases, shootouts, and good old fashion spy thriller intrigue. The author is a licensed pilot and avid traveler, so he has plenty of adventures to write about. Whether it’s fighting in the bush in Africa or passing a suitcase with half a million dollars in foreign currency, you’re in for a swashbuckling wild adventure.

Analyzing Intelligence: National Security Practitioners' Perspectives

I was watching a documentary on Israel’s famous Six Day War, and the big question is always how they came to be so well prepared. One of the pilots involved in the war said “above all, you have to have intelligence.” It might seem trivial compared to fighter aircraft and tanks, but for Israel, I bet 50% was intelligence. They knew the location of all the Egyptian airbases, when the planes would be on the ground, and where the defenses were. When it comes to intelligence, we can say “okay, we need to know where the enemy is and what kind of weapons they have.” But the question now is how you’re going to know. Are you watching them via satellite? Do you have a spy down there? Do you have a mole in their government? If so, how do you know you can trust them? This book covers all those things, especially with regard to the post-Cold War era.

    Analyzing Intelligence devotes a chapter to the relationship between the intelligence gatherer and the analyst. It cites examples such as Pearl Harbor, The Yom Kippur War, and the Iranian Revolution, as examples of a weak relationship. In those three cases, there were few ears willing to listen to the information gathered on the respective countries. Israel’s spies, who’d spent years accumulating information on her neighbors, didn’t know that Egypt had surface-to-air missiles and wire-guided anti-tank Sagers from the USSR. In Iran, the US embassy didn’t have employees who spoke Farsi, and they knew nothing about the country. They didn’t know that the Shah was old, the army officers were incompetent, and the starving populace was angry. Ayatollah Khomeini, then living in Paris, was anything but quiet about his intentions. Somehow, nobody noticed.

   It seems from this book that a problem with intelligence is the lack of cooperation between agencies. Pearl Harbor is used as an example of the US army and navy not sharing information, and others, like Iran in 1979, seem more an example of ignorance based on arrogance. Then there’s the failure to warn about India’s nuclear tests. But with Israel today, they seem to know everything everywhere. I suspect that when you have a tiny country, with a miniscule coastline and only one major airport, there’s less to be done. Keep in mind that today’s Arab leaders (like most third-world dictators) are rarely secretive, so it’s easy to listen in on their activities. But not so with North Korea. They’re super-secretive and impossible to penetrate. The people are all brainwashed. It remains to be seen what happens with them.