Cleveland Uber Alles

2006-03-23T12:01:00.000-05:00

A Note on the Long Pause If you're one of the few people who regularly check this site for my musings, thanks for looking in enough over the last month to see whether I've created any new content. During the break from writing here (caused by professional commitments, life's urgencies, whatever), I was glad to see that a post from this blog generated an article for a paid Cleveland journalist. I will do more in the coming months to provide our less than inventive writers with fodder, I promise. Seriously, though, thanks to everyone for their continued interest. Up next week (I hope): How our President snubbed our Mayor and how the City Club erected a Potemkin Village. Stay tuned.

2006-03-23T11:31:00.000-05:00

The Hipster Beard Meets its Demise, Courtesy of Greorge Clooney, The New York Times Some of us will be buying the new five blade razors. The conventional wisdom of the fashion-forward, idle-thinking, and trend-concerned suggests that once a sartorial or grooming style is noted and analyzed in the New York Times, it’s dead. Thus, should I overcome my aversion to daily shaving and my admiration of John Bonham, I will at last be forced to give up the facial scruff that I’ve hidden behind since the fall of 2001. I simply can’t cotton to the fact that, as the Times reports, the male editorial staff members of Spin (how 1991) and Vice (how 2003) are now “majority beard.” Maybe even my side burns must go—staying ahead of fashion takes radical measures. The Times, of course, is as off in its analysis of the facial hair fad as it was in the call that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. First there’s the speculation of fad's relevance to the zeitgeist of 2006 America:

“Whenever a countercultural trend becomes a mainstream one, there is a natural tendency to look for deeper meaning. Do beards that call to mind Charles Manson suggest dissatisfaction with "the system"? Are broody beards, like the dark and somber mood of the fall fashion collections, physical manifestations of a melancholia in the air? Are they a reflection of the stylistic impact on mainstream fashion of the subculture of gay men known as bears, who embrace natural body hair?”

Then there’s the dismissal, which no doubt keeps readers ready buy whatever’s advertised:

"But such theories seem to have less relevance—and beards less shock value — than they once did. "Style has separated itself from viewpoint," said Tim Harrington, the lead singer of the rock band Les Savy Fav, who is known for his full beard and balding head. "This is not like when beards were worn by hippies. Now you pick a style for aesthetic reasons as opposed to a viewpoint. I wonder if beards can have the oomph they once had when it feels like someone will ask you: 'Where did you get that beard? Is that beard from Dolce & Gabbana?' "

So is the bread fad apolitical? Message-Free? Hardly. But it’s not perhaps as countercultural as you might think, either. Anyone who hung out at the bars where the hip kids started sprouting this facial hair back in 2001 and 2002, knows that, in fact, the look is a response to the news media’s constant iconography of Islamic radicalism, with all its lusty fear-mongering. Forget about George Clooney with his Semitic-State-Department-Wonk Beard in Seriana. Think John Walker Lindh. Think the Taliban. And like any “counter-cultural fad” the beard fad does well to serve our corporate masters, who love images of themselves as radicals and extremists, who like to be seen, more and more as law givers, and, well, yes, as Jihadis. So, that kid at the Beachland Ballroom whose wearing his now out of style beard is simply saying this: I’m prepared to fight for the corporate bottom line with the same kind of will that the Mujahedeen bring to repelling the imperialist agressor. His beard, then, is America's declaration (not unlike the President’s) that we are succeeding in the Middle East, that we can coopt its symbols of manhood and claim even these for the careless pimping of pop records and deoderants. Discuss?

2006-02-21T08:14:00.000-05:00

College Radio Uber Alles: Help WJCU Rid Its Signal of West Side Static At 4AM, in a car, with the city rising or receding in the windshield, whosoever among us has not found, there amid the static of the left of the dial that Paul Westerberg sang about, the slow-witted voice of a 27 year-old grad student and vinyl snob sifting through a record collection, delicately holding each sleeve against the flats of his hands, so that the slight cardboard bend of it achingly sounds in the microphone? And whosoever among us, driving at that empty hour, has not heard, enjoyed, and secretly wished to further the sleep-deprived, faux transgressive babble of those suburban kids who, thanks to tuition dollars and a lure of free records, find themselves sequestered in the studio, working a set of phone lines that register only the calls of cranks and the voices of their friends? And whosoever among us has not listened to a droll in-joke from these kids without getting it, indeed, never getting it, but hoping for some coherence to rise out of their laughter and their sense of themselves as happy, safe in a tower, at, this, the 4AM hour? And whosoever among us has not wished that the grad student would stop studying his Critical Theory essays long enough to come on the air and read us back his playlist, so that that band he just played (was it one, two, four songs ago), you know, the one whose droning wash of sound is both new and old--that band, whoever they are--won’t remain in our memory, a trace out of Derrida or a fragment from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes? And whosoever among us (with all apologies to the beginning of Rick Moody’s Purple America, from which I’ve borrowed the whosoever conceit), hasn’t felt in hearing these constant pleas of youth—the death metal more death metal each year, the gangster rap more gangster, the indie rock more, well, about your girlfriend and how you love her and remember some peculiar detail from a Podunk childhood, and so on—whosoever hasn’t felt that our Cleveland is somehow a perfect backwoods for the longing of all 19-year-olds, a place with just enough money to put you in a junk car on your way to a job you don’t want, a place perched right at the edge of the territory where the big dreams happen, call it a wilderness dropped, maybe, a forrest of rust dropped beside some metaphoric Bronx Queens Expressway or PCH, just close enough to these arteries as an idea, at least, to translate all that arty otherness we try to make our own in college back into a quiet lonely moment in your car, on your way back to your parents house or your first apartment or somewhere else in the nation of the mundane. In short, whosoever among us, at one time or another, hasn’t loved college radio? For me, college radio is one of the best things about Cleveland. Until you live somewhere else, my fellow Clevelanders, you won’t realize how spoiled you are—to have not one, but three, or possibly four excellent college stations, each of the staffed with a seemingly endlessly renewed cast of volunteers who make each hour probably more idiosyncratic and personal than any other “modern” media experience. Consider: Columbus, home to 55,000+ college students, still lacks a proper college station, as the story of OSU’s internet and campus cable broadcasting station attests. Meanwhile, Chicago, which hosts five major universities, has only little, anemic-signaled WLUC, from Loyola, and this station fades in and out of reception exclusively to apartments and cars on the North Side of town, bouncing uselessly against Lake Michigan. Cleveland, however, has WRUW, WCSB, and WJCU, and, if WJCU’s signal didn’t fade as you went west and Baldwin Wallace’s station had a better signal itself, the city could claim four college stations. Indeed, if during its radio-thon, which takes place all this week, WJCU raises enough money to increase the power of its signal to three times the amount that it puts out now, the city will indeed have four college stations, at least on its West Side, where BW’s station clearly reaches car radios. (Update: as 54Cermak points out in the comments section, Chicago actually has three solid college station. It's a testimony to the short range of their signals, however, that this former Chicagoan never managed to tune them in over four years on the North Side of the city.) Though it makes no money for opining about anything, Cleveland Uber Alles donated to WJCU’s cause during this week’s Radio-thon, singling out for its support Joe Madigan’s smart, fun, peculiarly polished, and often Cleveland-centric Retro Radio show, which airs on Tuesday afternoons. Worth every penny of the money we don’t earn and worth every penny of yours, this show is a true resource for anyone interested in Cleveland rock history at its most arcane, getting beyond, say, knowing who Eric Carmen is or the fact that Alan Freed hosted the first Moondog Coronation Ball. Better yet, Madigan, the show’s host, is obviously well-steeped in the verbal mannerisms and tone that signify “on-air” personality for a time long lost. Best of all, Retro Radio, in all its simulated 60’s AM glory, is probably the least segregated show on college radio. Just this week, during a Cleveland-centered show for the Radio-thon, Madigan played an Ojays single from their little acknowledged Doo-Wop period and the Raspberries' "Tonight" nearly back to back. Much respect, too, to WJCU’s “Shot of RUM,” which airs on Wednesday afternoons. Great shows like this one and Retro Radio deserve the support of the community. Listen to them and give what you can.

2006-02-15T12:53:00.000-05:00

29.7 Miles to the Heartland Clevelanders who wonder what goes on "in the the Heartland" or "on Main St. USA" need only to put the city's three toothed skyline and its idle smokestacks in their rearview mirrors and head east on Route 2 for 38 minutes, until they reach Painesville. There, as they eye one of those typical small town Ohio street-scapes that says that life is all about waiting for the big occasions (the photography studio, the bridal shop, the Attorneys-at-Law, the mortician, and the LPAs), they can get a sense of Nation's "true point of view"--not, of course, the messy P.O.V. of the American hoi polloi, with its multi-lingualism and its under-paid aches, but the good, basically-white blandness of those who wear the company polo shirts, gas up their trucks, and keep America rolling. Or so runs the logic of the Baltimore Sun's White House Correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who checked in on our "True Umerikan" neighbors in Painesville to find out what normal Americans think about the President's decision to eavesdrop on their fellow citizens without a warrant. Davis, who perhaps bought the lie of Ohio' s license plates, chooses a 34-year-old insurance agent from Painesville named Edith Rodriguez, among other locals, to act as the American Vox Populi. As you might expect, our civil liberties are in poor hands:

"If that's going to help them not let 9/11 repeat itself, then I say, 100 percent, go for it, because that was awful," said Rodriguez.

And:

"I look beyond whether it's right or wrong," said the 34-year-old insurance agent. "If it's going to catch some terrorist, then, hey - go ahead."

Nevermind the nightmare of Rodiguez's own, Bush-like fractured grammar and the Groundhog Day the movie image it calls up of "9/11 repeat[ing] itself." Nevermind, too, for now, that she and virtually all of the people whom Hirschfeld Davis interviewed, expressed neither knowledge of, nor patience for, a discussion of ideas like "just probable cause." The real trouble is in the very narrative that this article constructs, which tells us: 1) that the legality of the NSA surveillance program is question only for experts, and the "real" question is whether or not Americans are safe from the terrorists; 2) that "real Americans" and the "real truth" about America lies in "swing states," like our Ohio, and swing counties, like Lake County, where a 51-49 split in the 2004 election is supposed to make it a perfect mirror for "A Nation Divided," when in fact, this division is more an illusion of the electoral map than of the number of voters who actually take the blue and red positions. The legality of NSA spying without a warrant is not, of course, a question only for experts, since, of course, what's at stake here, really, is the question of whether or not the president is obligated to obey the law as written and is therefore accountable to Congress, the Courts, and, of course, the American people. What's more, no matter what an insurance agent from Painesville will say, the security and the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Queda is not the issue in this case either, since the FISA courts allow for government agencies like the NSA to go ahead and eavesdrop, if necessary, and to seek a warrant for it retroactively. For more on all of this, and some evidence as to the potential for blogging to give us ringside seats in government, see Glenn Greenwald's excellent posts on this matter, including his live blogging from the hearings on the NSA scandal , which features this observation:

"Of course Gonzales begins his Opening Statement by quoting Osama bin Laden and Zawahri. We used to quote Madison, Jefferson and Lincoln to decide what the principles of our Government are going to be. Now we quote Al Qaeda. The Administration wants Al Qaeda and its speeches to dictate the type of Government we have. It is the centerpiece of everything they do and say."

And, of course, the 51-49 America that the Baltimore Sun's article portrays in Cleveland's backyard is a fiction, especially when the president's approval ratings are stuck around 40%. However, to get an idea of just how necessary this fiction must be to Beltway scribes like Hirschfeld Davis and the rest of the national press, one needs look no further than the election results in Baltimore Country, Maryland, where the Sun is headquarted. There, Kerry defeated Bush by a mere 52% to 47%. The numbers might not be tidy enough for the produce the kind of "real Umerikan" impression that the Sun's article tries to produce, but they certainly suggest that the paper didn't need to travel very far to get a "range of honest opinions" about whether or not its OK for the Chief Executive to claim the expansive powers that George W. Bush has claimed for himself by ignoring the FISA law's requirements. The effect of awful coverage of the issue like this is already beginning to rear its head, with none other than our own Senator Mike DeWine leading the charge to have Congress abdicate its responsibility to exercise oversight over the Executive Branch. As This WaPo article notes, DeWine is leading the effort to draft a law to make the President's wiretapping policy legal:

"Senate intelligence committee member Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said in an interview that he supports the NSA program and would oppose a congressional investigation. He said he is drafting legislation that would "specifically authorize this program" by excluding it from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to consider government requests for wiretap warrants in anti-terrorist investigations. "The administration would be required to brief regularly a small, bipartisan panel drawn from the House and Senate intelligence committees, DeWine said, and the surveillance program would require congressional reauthorization after five years to remain in place."

Sherrod Brown, DeWine's opponent, seems to be as little help as the other Democrats in Congress. In the Hirschfeld Davis article in the Baltimore Sun, he dismisses the NSA's wiretapping as unimportant to his likely constituents:

"People have quit listening to the president's scare tactics," Brown said as he mingled. "People don't come up to me and say, 'What about this spy thing?' They come up to me and say, 'How come the drug industry has so much influence in Washington? How come they're doing nothing about heating prices?' "

Let Brown know that he needs to do more to speak out for our civil liberties.

2006-01-28T11:25:00.000-05:00

He Said, She Said Journalism Short Changes the Debate on New Convention Center It's a common enough lament that national reporters who strive to be "fair and balanced" do a disservice to the truth when they serve as stenographers for both sides of an argument, juxtaposing what one side says against the other, without providing any context to either side's remarks. The problem, of course, is that these reporters don't bother to fact-check their sources or to provide their readers with, well, real reporting, which involves asking follow up questions and placing each side's answers into a bigger picture. Instead, the reporters merely provide a forum for both sides and allow misleading assertions to stand uninterrogated, until eventually these assertions, in all their falsehood, gain traction as accepted fact and appear in story after story the the background narrative on the problem being covered. With this kind of reporting, the side that repeats its untruth most often and with the most volume wins, and all of the context that the opposition would attempt to provide to debunk this untruth is merely, well, so much effete hair-splitting. For a primer on the perils of this kind of reporting on a local level, check out this Plain Dealer article on the dearth of bookings at the Cleveland Convention Center. While the article does allude to several reasons against building a new center to make up for this lack of bookings, including an oft cited Brookings Institute study that advises cities against such development, it also repeats without follow up or context some misleading claims from those in favor of the convention center:

"At least a dozen groups considered Cleveland for meetings in 2005-09 but cited the center as their main reason for going elsewhere. The potential business represented nearly 44,000 hotel room nights and an economic impact of $36 million, according to the visitors bureau. "Many more groups never consider Cleveland because they don't like the center, Brewer said." "A PricewaterhouseCoopers report completed last year for the Convention Facilities Authority predicts that the number of conventions and trade shows could decline by 50 percent by 2008 if the city doesn't build a more competitive center."

OK, here are just a few questions that Sarah Hollander, the Plain Dealer reporter, might have asked, but (apparently) didn't: 1) How reliable is the visitors bureau's tracking of "reasons for rejecting the center?" Do they have a formal method of measuring this in place or is their account of the "at least a dozen groups" who opted out of hosting their conventions in Cleveland purely anecdotal? And if these groups cite the condition of the center as their main reason for not choosing Cleveland as their convention site, then what is it about the center that doesn't meet their needs? Is it simply a lack of electrical outlets? a lack of net access? etc.--i.e. are these "defects" ones that must be overcome with a new center or ones that might be dealt with rather cheaply, through renovation? 2) What exactly does the loss of $36 million in convention revenues over four years (2005-09) represent to the local economy? $9 million a year sounds like a reasonably large amount of money in terms of how the article puts it, but when one considers that the city's new red light cameras are bringing in a minimum of $230,000 per month (or at this rate roughly $2.76 million per year) directly into the the city coffers, it doesn't seem to be that much of a revenue loss, and certainly not enough, perhaps, to justify going to the tax payers to provide Forest City with another lucrative Cleveland project. 3) Who commissioned the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report? And how much of the drop off in convention business that it cites is the result of factors that have nothing to do with the quality of Cleveland's facilities, including big gains for other markets like Vegas and Orlando (which are taking away business from the likes of Great Lakes city Chicago) and a decline overall in businesses' desire to participate in such get-togethers? Had the reporter asked these questions (and hopefully she and other reporters will in the future), maybe our decision makers, like Mayor Frank Jackson, who supports a new center, would have the information they need to see that a new convention center will be yet another band-aid applied to the wrong area of our wounded economy.

2006-01-20T07:40:00.000-05:00

Oh, Cleveland, My Cleveland From today's headlines, our city in one of several of its nutshells: Top U.S. broadband town: Cleveland Greater Cleveland 5th worst for fine-particle air pollution Which article do you suppose mentions the city's blue-collar "pedigree?" The one about broadband, of course.

2006-01-19T11:26:00.000-05:00

But Will It Sell in Beachwood? Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly links to an article by Garance Franke-Ruta in the American Prospect, which details the recent efforts of a company called Environics to use demographic/consumer research to find a better way to sell progressive politics to America. One important finding of the research that the company conducted in 2005 seems to confirm a lot of the conventional wisdom as to why John Kerry lost the 2004 election: talk about values and "character" connect more with voters than does talk about what Democrats like to call "Kitchen Table Issues." As Franke-Ruta reports:

"The new data have convinced even the most skeptical that an approach that worked in the industrial age is not as suited to the new, globalized information-era economy, where isolated voters look first at character as they assess candidates. Last August, for example, the Democracy Corps political polling firm released a memo that sharply diverged from the firmÂs usual reports on such generic Democratic concerns as jobs, prescription drug benefits, and heath insurance. In focus groups held among rural voters in Wisconsin and Arkansas, as well as disaffected Bush voters in Kentucky and Colorado, pollsters Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg found that concerns about a stagnant economy, job security, health-care costs, and the war in Iraq were consistently trumped by questions of values. "[A]s powerful as the concern over [economic] issues is, the introduction of cultural themes -- specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit, and the role of religion in public life -- quickly renders them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level," Agne and Greenberg wrote. "Particularly among non-college educated voters, cultural issues not only superseded other concerns, they served as a proxy for many voters on those other issues."

Note, of course, that focus here is not on what politicians do, but on what they talk about and how. The lesson here is one on display at shopping malls, and in things like the woeful U.S. personal savings rate, which is currently in negative territory: people don't actually understand economics in terms of dollars and cents, but rather in terms of consuming habits. Or in concrete terms: it's enough to say you own a BMW to convince a typical American you are a successful, and even (gasp) a moral person. The petty (well, not so petty) details of your owning the car (e.g. whether you had to borrow money for it, at what terms, whether the payments affect other quality of life issues for you, such as your ability to save for child's college education, etc.) just doesn't matter and real dollars and cents thinking just doesn't get done (or hardly gets done with any savvy) at the average Americans' kitchen table, and Democrats, who do this kind of thinking and talk about it in their speeches, simply don't connect with their audiences, who prefer talk about economics in clear terms, like BMWs in the driveway. The advice the researchers give is for Dems to stop cedeing the field to Republicans when it comes to talking about "values"--as in, well, Americans may not understand why the repeal of the estate tax causes budgetary troubles and ultimately will cost them in their own pocketbooks, but they will understand "Sid and Steve want a marriage license." While forcing the Demorcrats to "talk values" and cultivate "character" may be winning politics, it does have an awful underbelly: many of us want to vote Democratic precisely because the party is (well, more) grounded in reality, and because of our sense that politicians in the Democratic party don't buy bullshit, like "you are what you buy," or at least put bullshit thinking like this on the backburner, prefering think instead about things like Housing and Urban Development. Moreover, on almost all the "values issues" we are on the opposite side of Johnny of what Jenny and Johny McMansion believe, as sit they in traffic, locked in their SUV (to play up an unfortunate suburban stereotype). My own hope--which is a misbegotten one, given that the suburbs won't stop expanding and wielding greater political influence (as the Greater Cleveland areas history over the last 20 years itself attests)--is that the Democrats would be able to launch a culture war of their own: to get people to reject the me-first, fear-based value system that is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the nation, as this quote (also in the Franke-Ruta article) from Environics founder Michael Adams points out:

"While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority," Adams writes, "the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition."

I would argue, as Thomas Frank does in The Conquest of Cool and elsewhere, that this is the binge and purge of modern American Capitalism and one side feeds the other: get wild at the strip mall dance club and pray at the mall-like Mega-Church later, I suppose. And it seems to me, too, that there has to be a way to work against this culture, and one that's not so monolithic and intellectually foolish as efforts launched by the likes of Bill Bennet. Meanwhile, let the marketer's direct the Democrats: asking, "But will it sell in Beachwood?" about things like privacy and fairness and beware of the results you get.

2006-01-17T18:47:00.000-05:00

It's the Wonderful, Self-Correcting Blogosphere, By George See below for the earlier post which mentioned Democrat Congressman Sherrod Brown's guest-blogging at the TPM Cafe, and perhaps too casually linked to a post and comments at Brewed Fresh Daily . I want to note here that I no way meant to suggest that George from BFD had "defamed" Brown for not appearing at Meet The Bloggers (see George's link to the definition of vilify in this post); rather I was referring to language like this, from the comments section at Brewed Fresh Daily:

"If a candidate [i.e. Brown] canÂt handle a few bloggers, hedozen'tnÂt deserve to run."
And from George himself:

"In my opinion, Sherrod has a temper. If he were to do MTB, and someone, like Russo, were to push him on his record, heÂd lose his temper. His campaign is carefully trying to control that. Sherrod is trying to stand on his voting record and politrhetorictoric, not engaging in Q&A with voters. His campaign is focused on pandering opinion to likely fundraisers around the country, not on answering Âbase issuesÂ that directly effect residents of Ohio. "So, no. I donÂt think heÂs got what it takes to spend an hour in the hotseat. And for people like HeightsMom who think this is being blown way out of proportionÂI disagree. The way Sherrod is handling situations like this reveal his character. This isnÂt about Tim RussoÂitÂs about how Sherrod Brown handles himself in any situation. HeÂs doing everything he can to control the outcome thru manipulation. Is that what we want in a Senator?" And: "Feh. I grow tired of people talking about BrownÂs legislative accomplishments. He has none. Sure he fought on the side of righteousness - and lost every single battle. He sat out of the 2002 Gov race where he could have taken on Bob Taft, he sat out of the 2004 Senate race where he could have taken on Voinovich. Then he proposed to sit out this one until he saw someone else prepared to take on the mantle. It stinks of careerism and opportunity, and yes, ego. "That doesnt strike me as a guy who will truly lay it on the line for the people he purports to represent. "His campaign from the gitgo has been inept - to the point of firing two senior staff members before it has even started - and the only people who have engaged him are a few bloggers. How on earth is he going to handle himself when the real campaign begins and they spend millions of dollars against him?

I made a mistake to link to the post at BFD without directly referencing these quotes, and I compounded my mistake, I suppose, via my use of the word "vilify" itself. Not to go all "Dictionary on Dictionary" with George, whose site is a valuable "central station" for NEO Bloggers, but definition number 1. for vilify over at Merriam-Webster's online site seems to suit the language I've quoted above. It's worth pointing out that I can't find a single instance of Brown publicly criticizing NEO bloggers, as George's post today seems to contend. On his own blog, Brown even has a friendly post up about Russo, and when Brown's staffer called to cancel his Meet the Bloggers appearance, the staffer was exceedingly polite went out of his way to point out that Brown in fact wanted to meet other bloggers, just not Tim Russo. It seems to me that a lot of the anti-Brown talk is just misplaced loyalty for Russo, who, by all accounts, seems to deserve a good word. But I can't see why Russo's spat with Brown is reason for the rest of NEO's liberals to dismiss Brown as a candidate for Sentate. I'll close, with this point, which is echoed in comments section of the post that George put up in response to mine: Time and energy would be better spent taking on Mike Dewine. Or as Roldo writes at BFD:

Ohio Sen. DeWine must be as happy as can be reading bloggers on the crucial U. S. Senate race. IsnÂt it time to check out the real enemy?

2006-01-16T17:16:00.000-05:00

In Honor of MLK Read this post from Nathan Newman at the TPM Cafe, which points out, rightly so, that Dr. King also dreamt about a society in which labor is organized:

"In the dumbing down of celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national icon, the relatively radical demands for economic justice that he was making in his later years tend to disappear. . . . Most memory of Martin luther King Jr. emphasizes only individual equality but his legacy, including his death, was also dedicated to the collective organization and empowerment of workers. "

Meanwhile, Sherrod Brown, who's been vilified for skipping out on a Meet The Bloggers Q and A, seems to be doing quite well at the TPM Cafe himself. Here he is posting (so what if it is with a staffer's help?) on how labor and progressives' efforts at an economic justice agenda are all too often smeared with accusations of "class warfare":

"The fact is that the Republicans in the last decade have been committing class warfare themselves.
"Every day on the House floor, Republicans stand up for corporate give-aways and tax breaks for the rich while at the same time they cut programs for working families like student loans, food stamps, veterans benefits, home heating programs for the elderly, Medicaid and Medicare.
"All of this is making the rich richer while it squeezes the middle class and hurts the poor."

While I have no real opinion on the whole Brown/Russo cock-preening feud (which seems to be, well, pretty Russo-driven), and even less of an idea of who originally provoked whom, I do think that Brown deserves some support for his pro-labor stance, and I wonder if Hackett, who is our state's Wesley Clark (and that's a good thing) won't be more of a triangulator, thanks to his Cincinnati home base.

Finally, instead of writing posts for Cleveland Uber Alles, I have been busy trying to hold my own in the comments section of the Becker-Posner Blog. For those of you who don't know, Becker is the famous University of Chicago economist and Posner is the Honorable Richard Posner, a federal judge and law professor at University of Chicago. Trying to disagree with them is great fun. Right now, I'm delighted at how the conversation I've been adding to is filled with delarations about how unions are inherently less efficient that "at-will" employment arrangements; yet when I ask these presumably well studied economics folks to cite research that demonstrates this, they don't seem to be able to. Could it be that the assumption that an organized workforce is less efficient than an "open shop" is just that, an assumption? Feel free to post your academic or non-academic two cents worth here at Cleveland Uber Alles.

2006-01-12T02:44:00.000-05:00

Light Posting Cleveland Uber Alles aims to be one of those long-on-words sites, but sometimes, well, if brevity isn't the soul of wit, then it's just plain necessary. So here, in two sentences a piece, are all three of the blog posts I've been wanting to put down over the last few days. First, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott takes a break from intelligently snarking his way through the endless NYC-media cocktail party to link to this must read dispatch about rust belt economics and the squeeze job that Pittsburgh's suburbs are running on the poor in city's core. Take heed, Clevelanders, before you even think of congratulating our city for not being Pittsburgh or Detroit. Second, every time I click over to Bill Callahan's Cleveland Diary, I pause to say a word of thanks for the simple fact that Mr. Callahan is here to read the papers for us. If I had the time, I'd love to pile on to Bill's good catch of the story about Cleveland lawyer and union-buster Peter Kirsanow receiving a Bush Administration "recess appointment" to the National Labor Relations Board, but instead I'll only note that this move is Rovian politics at its sharpest and bitter best, in line with appointing a timber industry representative to oversee the Healthy Forests Initiative--which is to say, appointing a union buster the the NLRB is simply in keeping with the overall Bush Administration policy of turning every government agency against itself, so we'll just want to get rid of the whole thing I guess and drown it in Grover Norquist's bathtub, and don't expect there to be a new friend for Cleveland workers in Washington any time soon. Was that two sentences? Finally, I want to hit two points from Christine from Really Bad Cleveland Accent's post on my own Cheap Airfare, The Engine of Culture : 1) Could it be that all those weekend flights to Cleveland you mention are booked by displaced Clevelanders like yourself, hoping for a cheap visit to the old folks back home and not, as it were, people looking to come to the heartland from the over-priced coasts?; 2) Thanks for this well-rendered paragraph about Madeline Bruml, whose Cleveland Brain Gain project sparked the post, for it does give Bruml credit she deserves (though I can't help but wonder if her interest in bringing suburban kids downtown isn't simply symptomatic of a zeitgeist that points to the whitening of the inner-city and the browning of the outer ring, rather than the more integrated, less economically polarized future I'd like to dream about):

The thing I want to point out to those who might consider Bruml a "childish" proponent of Cleveland's economic future is that she gets what's happening with suburban sprawl. It's evident from her Cool Cleveland interview that she gets that her friends - yes, probably from well-to-do suburban families - are dreaming their futures out in Solon or Avon Lake "starter castles", taking their Baby Gap-clad future children to Champps for some freedom fries, leaning slightly left in their voting habits but resolutely avoiding the city because it's crammed with scary poor people. But she sees that that shouldn't necessarily be the American Dream for her generation, and is cheerfully willing and able to kick them in a direction that this New Urbanist is pretty pleased about.

2006-01-06T13:27:00.000-05:00

Low-Grade Update on Creation of an Interactive Map of the City Via a Google page dedicated to helping web developers install Google Maps on their sites, I attempted to import a map into the Cleveland Uber Alles blog template. No luck. Anyone out there have some recommendations for help and/or making the whole idea I discussed here happen?

2006-01-06T10:49:00.000-05:00

Clicking and Driving Around Cleveland So, in keeping with the new message that "the public approves of Big Brother", Cleveland has gone live with its red light and speeding cameras. While I am anxiously awaiting reports that these cameras have been sabotaged by kids in the neighborhoods they've invaded, I say hats off to Ward 13's Joe Cimperman for opposing the cameras so staunchly and articulately. The link to this Crane's profile is courtesy of the (nose-holding gesture) conservative Right Angle Blog, which I've clicked my way to a number of times over the past months. Here you'll find some free-marketeer ditto-heading in the comments, but hardly a peep of pro-war wing-nuttery. I guess this is the one benefit of keeping it local. I would like to believe that this blog--and the whole Republican party really--is kept up by the sort of moderate, money-motivated Republican who reads (and understands) George Will's logically constructed (albeit overly pro-ownership class) arguments, and looks to some romanticized image of the WASPY elite for his image of "the city on the hill." But either there are fewer of these Republicans around these days, or, if they are around, they're not admitting that they're Republicans. Anyway, perhaps the link to the article about Cimperman is evidence of Right Angle's moderate position. Cimperman himself seems to have developed quite a mastery of Clintonian "centrism" and triangulation. Here here he is, in the Crane's article, moderating (yet holding) his stance on Wal-Mart:

"ThatÂs an interesting debate and IÂm happy you brought it up. When the whole issue came up a few months ago about Steelyard Commons, the debate really wasnÂt about Wal-Mart. Do I have feelings about the company? Of course I do. Do I also realize that there are things about the company that its opponents donÂt like to talk about? Yeah, there are two sides to every story. Where the issue became something that I felt very passionately about, is that the city of Cleveland for the last 10 years has been funding, aiding and subsidizing grocery stores, because we realize that grocery stores are a critical component of keeping people in their neighborhoods and in the city of Cleveland. My concern with the development wasnÂt so much with the company itself, but when they add a grocery store to their unit, because when that happens you often see local grocers struggle. But this is a free-market society. This is capitalism and people make choices. I still think people will choose DaveÂs and the West Side Market instead of going to a superstore for their grocery items. But I donÂt think itÂs wrong to have that kind of debate."

2006-01-03T11:47:00.001-05:00

Savvy with Symbolism. . . Now what about city management? Props to our new mayor for choosing East Tech High School as the site for his inauguration.

No building in the entire city might better embody the non-glamorous and real struggle that is essential for the survival and success of our city. Here's hoping that the comparisons made here between Frank Jackson and G.W. Bush are dead wrong and this smart use of "backdrop" for a political message isn't just aping the sort of stage management that makes the Presidential Administration so odious. Here's hoping that Jackson can translate simple eloquent gestures like these into action for the city itself.

Though it was more ballyhooed for its proposal of dismissing the school board than anything else, Jackson's position paper on education suggests that he does have some good ideas for moving the city's school's forward. In this paper, Jackson is conciliatory regarding vouchers, proposing a tax break for parents who choose to send their children to private schools, but otherwise making it clear that the school system should not be "outsourced" to the private sector. This is good.

Not so good: Jackson also seems determined to pay lip service to all the largely conservative-driven talk about "Outcomes Based Education," which is really, for those of us who care about education, a way of saying that he's concerned about test scores and, like so many other educators, has bought into the lie of the Texas Miracle.

Hopefully, however, the fact that CPS graduate Jackson personalizes the struggle to improve the district will keep him from getting too caught up in all this talk about bench marks to get down to the really good ideas his plan offers, like getting the schools to save money by pooling their buying power with other districts in the region, getting parents back into the school buildings by offering them classes there, and expanding students' apprenticeship and work opportunities. Importantly, Jackson proposes partnering schools, like John Hay High, with institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve, creating regional magnet schools that draw in tuition revenues from the surrounding area by providing top notch instruction. This is an idea that is long over due, and one wonders if the only thing preventing it is the fact that CWRU doesn't have a very active department of Education. Regardless, Cleveland needs a high school like Bronx Science or the Chicago Lab School--in this regard working to be "like New York" or "like Chicago" would be truly beneficial for the city and its residents. It's now a truism that real growth in downtown can't be sustained in a meaningful way without fixing the schools, and though introducing elite schools into the system might risk creating a two tiered school district, it would have the practical effect of addressing residents concerns that their are literally no good school to send their children to.

2006-01-01T03:25:00.000-05:00

The Business People We're Supposed to Subsidize This story shows us one of them. Note how the pay-to-play government that DiLiberto ran in Eastlake, OH, mirrors the one waiting to have its lid blown off in Washington DC. Note, too, that the "jobs" that were supposed to be created--the jobs that are always supposed to be created, no matter to whom the graft goes--failed to survive.

2005-12-31T12:35:00.000-05:00

CleveWiki Via Brewed Fresh Daily I see that a woman named Julie Kent has just founded an wiki site dedicated to becoming the definitive guide to Cleveland. A local blogger, Stuart Spivak has some interesting posts up about the project. For the time being, I'll merely note that efforts to create a CleveWiki are in league with the collaborative, virtual map of the city that I proposed for this little blog only a couple of days ago, though the things I imagine tracking and writing about are not the sort of things that might make their way into CleveWiki's various content areas (I'm more interested in oddments, like that giant "Read My Lips" Rooster sculpture on Chester Ave). The entire wiki phenomena is a fascinating one: the ability to have an endlessly revised and user-edited text hints at all those promises that the last decade's technocrati made about the democratizing power of the web, but it also points to the peril of that any technology of this sort has of becoming just one more way by which people will be "gamed by the system." Free information and diversity of content and voices often gets put to poor use. Funny how now, when Americans have unprecedented access to a free flow of news and information, when the internet gives them a portal into a heretofore unheard of diversity of opinion, they are all the more likely to be uninformed and downright wrong about reality. So the question is: what will CleveWiki ultimately look like? Here's hoping that our city's brightest and shrewdest made thoughtful contributions to it, and that a healthy number of folks will be doing their part to make sure its not just an annex to, say, the AOL City Guide.

2005-12-27T12:37:00.000-05:00

Cheap Airfare, the Engine of Culture Childish boosters of our city, whose notion of promoting life here involves little more than touting the "low cost of living" and urging frightened suburbanites to dine downtown, probably aren't much concerned with how our local culture--with all its quirks, imperfections, backwardness, and originality--has been gradually disappearing since, say, the groundbreaking of Gateway in 1994. But forgive Madeline Bruml, the Hawken High School student and child of the well-to-do who founded Brain Gain Cleveland. She's young, and knows not what she does, and her program at least contains the very good idea of giving local high school students and opportunity to shadow people doing business downtown. Cleveland Uber Alles suspects that Bruml's project will look wonderful on her application to, say, Harvard, or some other elite, out of town school. Now if only she had thoughtful adults around her who might help her pro-Cleveland marketing message reflect more than emptyness about our region's economic future, like this from Adam Paulisick a Manager in Channel Sales at Amco :

“To be rich or not to be rich? That is the question. It is not the question of whether or not you can obtain success in other cities but the speed at which you want to get there. After attending college in Cleveland and actively networking throughout college, I hit a harsh reality. Did I want to work until I am 35 and be middle management or did I want to focus my energy on becoming successful now? If you are willing to be confident, respectful, and listen to the guidance you have in this city, you have nowhere to go but up."

Oh, our city's "respectful" intellectual cheapskates, who'd sell you Cleveland on the basis of its low rent (which, in fact, isn't all that low) and the fact that "it's easy to be a big fish in a little pond." These are the same people, I am certain, who blather on and on about how this restaurant or that bar is "like New York" or "like Chicago"--their logic running something like this: "See, we have all the same glamour and finery, really, as the big city markets, and better yet, we pay only $7 for a Cosmopolitan, instead of $10 or $12, so there's money left over for splitting an appetizer now or a Pannini sandwich later, and this, plus a chance to drive my car home drunk later tonight, is really living," as if the only reasons anybody would choose to make a life somewhere were the ready availability of fattening foods and cheap, poorly mixed cocktails. (Ah, Cleveland, forever an Eastern European city at heart, forever marching on its stomach and searching for that existentially soothing buzz!) No matter that the people next to you at your Cleveland bar are likely to be lost if they tried to make conversation without prompting from the two giant TV's overhead, especially since only 11.4% of city residents over 25 have achieved a bachelor's degree or higher; nevermind that almost no one among the pool of people you'll meet while you're out there enjoying the city on the cheap is at the top of their profession--just keep slugging down those drinks and believe in Cleveland. And the Cleveland you'll be believing in will look a hell of a lot like everywhere else, as each and every mid-market city strives--a la, Target, which offers fine design at a low price--to be more "like New York" and more "like Chicago." That's what you'll enjoy: metropolish lite, the big city made easy, or a simulacrum of it anyway. Gateway, by the way, is hardly the cause of the sleek urban sameness that is blotting out regional character throughout the Midwest, though the sports complex's arrival, way back when, along with Michael Simon's Caxton Cafe, the first real money behind gentrification in the Warehouse District, etc. was concurrent with this latest explosion of our city's longing to be like somewhere else (it goes back much further, of course, to around 1910, when Cleveland actually did compete with Chicago and New York). And as for the cause of all this "other city envy": my money is on the arrival of low cost air carriers, which allowed foolish Clevelanders (including most of our local restaurant and bar owners) to visit other cities on the cheap and use the restaurants and bars they saw there as fodder for their own half-rate designs. Consider this, non-scientific, anecdotal information: A Google search of Cleveland "Like New York" yields 52,000 webpages; the current two week advance purchase airfare for a trip to the the Big Apple is just $171 via Expedia A Google search of Cleveland "Like Chicago" yields 28,200 webpages; the current two week advance purchase airfare for a trip there is just $131 via Expedia A Google search of Cleveland "Like Los Angeles" yields 16,700 pages; airfare here bought two weeks in advance via Expeida is higher, at $319. But of course there are a lot of other reasons why Cleveland is not "like Los Angles." Still, as it gets easier to go from place to place, more and more of America gets the same. And all those new makers of "local culture," like Great Lakes Brewery, which appeared around this same time, are mere attempts to grasp at what has already gone, and what's now fading. Note how the Euclid Tavern closed. Note how seldom anyone talks up going out to an odd, truly local place like the House of Swing. To me, you can't believe in Cleveland without remembering places like these.

I should add, too, that we're fools to reduce our talk of cultural life to talk of bars and restaurants. I might just as well say that you can't believe in Cleveland by talking about whose playing at the Scene pavilion and not talking about who's learning to play music at CIM.

And so on.

2005-12-26T14:14:00.000-05:00

Proposed Topics/Projects for Cleveland Uber Alles in 2006 Here are a few ideas I am thinking about pursing via this blog as the new year approaches: 1) An index of anecdotal economic indicators, to be compiled in conjunction with the this site's small readership. Anecdotal economic indicators, I suppose, would consist of things of potential economic import that are observed and commented on, rather than quantified. An example of this would be a report that "a number of for sale signs have appeared in front of houses in the E. 40's, between Superior and Payne. But obvious ones like these are only the beginning. Consider: in my daily travels throughout our Metro area, I notice a significant number of couples that are made up of young women and older men, with girls, really, of, say, 21-25, pairing themselves with men well over 30, or even in their late 40's, 50's, and so on. Obviously, I haven't quantified the number of these couples I've observed, but, anecdotally speaking, I seem to be seeing a lot of them. Well, one way to explain the prevalence of couples like these is through the lens of Psychology: since women mature faster than men, they are more likely to require a more mature partner. Another way to explain these, too, is through an examination of my own biases as an observer (I myself am in my 30's and I am often at places frequented by those in my demographic; therefore, I'm more likely to see more of these pairings than, say, a first year student living in a dorm at John Carroll or whoever). Yet another explanation for prevalence of these couples may be economic: since our region is currently "stingy" with opportunities for younger men to make a good living, and since these young men, furthermore, are being cut out of educational opportunities and other advancement tracks in greater and greater numbers, they are less and less able to compete with older men for interest of women within their own age group. Simply put, "Sara Recent College Grad is more likely to go out with Billy Over-30 Corporate Job than Bobby 21-year-old, since Bobby 21-year-old didn't go to college with her, as of yet still lives at home with his mom, and can't get a job of his own that pays more than eight dollars per hour. So, what I'd like to do, is collect observations like these, and have them argued over, contradicted and corroborated. Ultimately, Cleveland Uber Alles would be home of "anecdotal economic indicators for Cleveland," and the site could feature a sort of index that casually measures all sorts of things about our city's economic prospects--not only the number of young women with older men, but also the number of homeless on Euclid Ave., the size of crowds at hotel bars where visiting business travels ought to go, and so on, and so on. The idea, of course, would be to use these casually observations as a springboard to encourage real economic thinkers in area to do real research. Meanwhile, we can get a good conversation going about how the casual things we see in our everyday lives inform us about our economic prospects and hopes of improving life in Cleveland. 2) A collaborative, virtual map of Cleveland, collecting not only these "anecdotal indicators," but also stories of life here to raise our awareness of both problems on the street and those odd miracles, too, that make life here interesting, like tags from SYM or that shrine at the side of Chester Ave., with its now rain-soaked and salt stained teddy bear, marking where someone either crashed their car or got shot. This "interactive" Google Maps-driven collection of NY Times reader stories regarding the NYC transit strike approximates the kind of map I am hoping to see here on site. Comments on these ideas are welcome and encouraged.

2005-11-28T13:52:00.000-05:00

Holiday Down Time Cleveland Uber Alles will resume regular, at least weekly posting, after the holidays. Until then, here's hoping all who arrive here by accident or by choice have the human thing of joy.

2005-11-21T13:34:00.000-05:00

Yes, Renita, There is a Santa Clause This morning's 90.3 at 9 on WCPN featured some particularly flaccid gasbagging about the fact that a small circulation, corporate real estate trade publication, Site Selection Magazine, rated our great state #4 in "Business Climate"--a phrase, in this case, that should be read in terms of the definition of corporatism as practiced by Mussolini. The show's host, the usually thoughtful and well-prepared Renita Jablonski, did what she could to put Site Selection's article into context, asking the magazine's rather poorly prepared representative about how the rankings were compiled and asking her panelists and callers what this apparent kudo might say about the economic prospects of Northeast Ohio; soon, however, the conversation devolved into a recitiation of the usual shibboleths regarding economic developmetn in Cleveland and the region's struggle to maintain, if not national status, then simply middle class jobs, here in the post-industrial era: brain drain and the various fetters of unions, taxes, and regulations--all of those things that keep our poor, poor businesspeople shackled, prohibiting them from leading us onward into prosperity. Somewhere after the first half-hour, the very intellectual poverty of our region ought to have became glaringly apparent to concerned listeners, who really are rooting for some kind of resurgence in Cleveladn. Here was one of the city's best radio journalists and a professor from its best university and both of them were incapable of either critiquing the very wisdom of the idea of business climate as Site Selection Magazine would define it (i.e. as a kind of bootlicking sychopantism) or asking a single question as to why Northeast Ohio or any other geographic region would accept, as a criteria for evaluating its quality as a place, measures of how obsequious it is to those who do business there. To his credit, the Case proffessor was overtly enough of a "pro-business conservative" to have the nerve to ask if Northeast Ohio in fact was a drag on the state's overall business climate ranking (i.e. to ask if our city's sound Democratic majority and its roots in organized labor didn't in fact stop the rest of the state from being a proper corporate playground, like Texas, say, where the Bushies have already deregulated and privatized everything to the detriment of the people), but Jablonski, whose job it should have been to ask some tougher questions, simply let this brand of freemarketeering foolishness run its course uninterrogated--as it always does in all our media. The fact is, if you listen carefully to any conversation about the economic wellbeing of our area, the problem is always framed in terms of what we the people owe businesses, of what we, like school girls putting on rouge, need to do to be worthy of their worldly ways. We need to invest in education; we need to cut out red tape; to provide a flexible labor market; to give companies property tax abatements; and so on. Never once does anyone say how these companies ought to be responsible to our region and to us--how they ought to protect our natural resources, pay their fair share of the costs of maintaining our infrastructure, and contribute a portion of their revenues to paying for public services. This, of course, is because we need to promote a pro-business image, and our media, even our publicly funded and publicly supported media, like WCPN, is determined to keep giving business a podium to promote its interests over own, free of charge. If only you'd have jingled some bells and said Ho, ho, ho, Renita.

2005-11-17T13:43:00.000-05:00

Open Source Projects for Cleveland Artists The Open Source Movement has already generated a decent amount of attention in tech circles, via the Windows/Linux conflict. Meanwhile, former Clevelander Trent Reznor polished his cred among musicians (most of whom traditionally disdain copyright law, until it affects their own bottom line) by releasing an Open Source GarageBand version of a track from his latest album. The basic idea is this: technology (and art) can innovate and progress more rapidly in an environment of free sharing of ideas and lack of legal constraints. Linux is more stable because its had a large team of people actively helping debug its code; Reznor's music will become more sophisticated (and more "fan interactive") if anyone interested can remix his songs or turn them into songs of their own. While it is hardly such a high tech or sophisticated undertaking, Cleveland Uber Alles would like to contribute to the free distribution of ideas for creative types and cranks here in our fair city. So: Attention Cleveland Institute of Art students! Attention suburban kids ready to bankrupt their parents via the cost of of educational travel and art supplies! Attention Tremont hipsters who long for something to do when they're not dreaming up stickers for their next band or hanging around drunk, looking all arty-like! You know who you are. Occasionally, Cleveland Uber Alles will be your unreliable source for real ideas that work, for the gauzy, post-sturcturalist thinking stuff that belongs in the language of an Ohio Arts Council grant proposal or in a senior thesis. Link to it on your MySpace page and check back often, because you never know when you'll see a project that you might execute yourself as you do your part to make our city creative capital of the rustbelt. Grab your cameras and consider this one: The Rise and Fall of Rust Belt Retail Recently, the prefabricated arty interior of a Starbucks was erected in a long vacant University Circle retail space? Was their anyone to document the "This I believe" cups being pulled from their plastic sleeves? Anyone to capture the workers putting in the Ikea styled lamps and the mermaid sign? Of course not. While the real (and therefore secret) history of our city's occupation by outside powers went on, its artists were, well, drawing cubes and what-not in classrooms. A good photographer or a painter could capture the very process of building these places, thereby demystifing them, and revealing them as the constructs that they are--i.e. as the marketing ideas that add at least a dollar to a cup of coffee. Apparently, too, Starbucks has so saturated other markets that it is finally bothering to put one in next to our major research university (where surely the kids need their caffeine); so no doubt we can expect there to be other NEO locations to photograph. And think of the irony you can generate, capturing how the locals react to the big national brands' arrival here in the provinces! Meanwhile, as if to play counter point to the development at U-Circle, up the hill, the Medic Drug on Coventry closed. Was anyone there to document the "Everything Must Go" sale? Did anyone chronicle for posterity the flush faces of our suburban girls piling skin products and shampoos into their arms, like fat little christ-children? Sadly, no. But businesses go bust here in NEO every day, and a skills visual artist might capture this, too, and therefore make this economy of ours a little more concrete to us. Think of how less baffling the idle smokestacks of the flats might be if someone had bothered to capture, for all time, the very process of that old way of life ending. Then again, maybe the stores should sit silent, empty, our sad little post-modern versions of the Sphinx.

2005-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Abe Lincoln, Plagiarist Nathan Newman's essential Labor Blog carries the most reliable account of how Ohio Senatorial candidate Sherrod Brown made a criticism of Mike DeWine's ready support for the nomination of Judge Alito to the the Supreme Court and how ultimately Brown came to suffer unfair accusations of plagiarism at the hands of the Plain Dealer, which was only too happy to regurgitate for its readers the DeWine campaign's talking points. Other blogs, including Brewed Fresh Daily and the scurrilous, in this case, Right Angle Blog have picked up on this story as well. But before Cleveland Uber Alles piles on with its own examination of how these accusations further sully the integrity of our sole city daily, please take a moment to consider these words from the final line of Gettysburg Address:

". . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

The speaker, of course, was the legendarily honest sixteenth president of the United States, and the speech itself was given at the cite of one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles, on November 19, 1863. The source of the language, however, was none other than Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary who arrived in America under the sponsorship of Congress in 1852 and whose struggle to usurp Hapsburg rule over Hungry became a cause celebre for patriotic Americans everywhere. Speaking to the Ohio State Legislature on February 6, 1852, Kossuth said:

"The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people and all by the people. Nothing about the people without the people. That is Democracy, and that is the ruling tendency of the spirit of our age."

Obviously, Lincoln either failed to acknowledge the source of this idea and the language he used to convey it, or he simply stole the idea and the language. It's worth noting, too, that he of the beard and hat also stole a line from the Bible's Matthew when he said "A house divided cannot stand." Well, where is history's outrage? Is Lincoln spared because he had the good sense to change a couple of words from the original? I doubt it. Sticklers of the sort the PD seem to be in the Sherrod Brown affair (caring not that the language Brown used was posted on a site that pre-authorized reuse, and not that Brown himself had readily acknowledged that the facts he cited about Judge Alito's career came from Newman's Blog), would no doubt hold Lincoln accountable, just as a college teacher might, since failing to acknowledge the source of a paraphrase, as Lincoln did with the Kossuth quote, is also considered plagiarism in academic circles. The "house divided" quote is easier to defend: it's the Bible and therefore in the public domain. But wasn't Newman's post, which Brown supposedly "pinched," also in the public doman? It doesn't matter to the PD, which editorializes thusly:

". . . blogger Newman is incensed that The Plain Dealer even cares where the language came from. "But we do -- and voters should, too. Here's why: We need to know who is speaking. Is it a responsible, elected public official, or an Internet dilettante? Or is theirs a seamless relationship that makes a vote for Brown a vote for nathannewman.org or the Daily Kos? In their minds, does it make a difference? "In ours, it does. "Brown, a bright, energetic liberal who has gone almost 15 years with this page's endorsements and without a serious challenge, has let his campaign skills get out of shape. This transgression shows a staff that's already intellectually gassed -- and the race has yet to begin. What will happen once the gun sounds?"

Ach! I don't even know where to start. First, Newman, a published author who holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a JD from Yale, is hardly an internet dilettante, and were the Plain Dealer's editorial writers not so "intellectually gassed" themselves they'd do a little research and properly inform their readers of the credentials of their source. The PD doesn't want readers to know that Newman is a legal scholar of a rather fine caliber, since that would call into question their claim that Newman's dismissal of the plagiarism charge is light and insubstantial. Moreover, by reading Newman--who has a true lawyer's gift for putting complex positions into clear succinct language --Brown and his staffers are showing that in fact they are indeed sharp enough and studied enough to run a well-armed campaign against DeWine, who will, as this whole plagiarism affair reveals, play the all too usual role of ad hominem attacking Republican. What's sad, as Newman himself has said, is that the PD's readers aren't getting anything about the substance of what his post revealed about Alito's judicial record--rather what they get instead is the PD pinching a story of talking points that were no doubt supplied by the DeWine campaign itself. To plagiarize the old saying: it's the pot calling the kettle--well, no it's not, since in this case neither Brown nor Newman come off as dark and obfuscatory but the PD does.

2005-11-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

The Candidates We Deserve . . . Are the ones we get. Thus, Jane Campbell and Frank Jackson; thus, the current mayoral race reduced to a bloviating debate about which candidate is a "real Clevelander." Cleveland Uber Alles sympathizes with the six voters who would give a damn posting in the comment section over at Brewed Fresh Daily. Despite his apparently lopsided lead, Frank Jackson remains uninspiring, with a narrowness of vision that suits life in a village, rather than live in city. Jackson may be "true the code" of Ward 5 (see post below for relevant links and commentary), but throughout this campaign, he's proven himself unable to articulate or demonstrate any compelling reasons to believe that he'll actually do anything for the "real Clevelanders" he's supposed to personify. And it's Jackson's lack of public speaking skills that worries this blog. It's ridiculous to hold a Cleveland politician's rhetorical skills up against the standard of, say, a Harold Washington, but Jackson's gaffing speaking style and his apparent inability to go beyond his talking points recall our current president's troubled way with words in a way that's quite uncomfortable. One who can't speak well is all too easily the tool of others, and with rumors circulating that Jackson is Forrest City Enterprises' candidate, Cleveland Uber Alles worries that he will, like so many mayors before him, merely become an implement of the city's "Developers" (ach, how their title belongs in quotes, with how they've developed poverty and illiteracy here). Campbell, on the other hand, well, doesn't promise to do much for the "real Cleveland" either, and so voters are left only with a choice of who will get to decide which developers will get their share of the loot from the latest public money boondoggles. This won't change either, until Clevelanders do. Like the rest of the nation, they need to become more literate in the decisions that affect them; they need an activist base and strong, involved community organizations; and, yes, they need jobs and schools--all that stuff the candidates are supposed to promise. Hopefully, when the election's over, and in the quiet about it, since we won't even notice much difference no matter who wins, the city will be able to start talking about what needs to be done and how it can be accomplished.

2005-10-27T11:01:00.000-04:00

Campbell on Defensive is No Candidate for Cleveland Uber Alles Via Callahan's Cleveland Diary is this press release from "Campbell for Cleveland" in reaction to a poll that shows Frank Jackson ahead by 20%:

This evening Channel 3 will broadcast the results of theirrecent poll... The results they will broadcast are fallacious. Jackson 54 -Campbell 34 and here's why. The demographics which should be 50/50 east and west and 50/50black and white are: 61% east 54 % black 15% seniors 60 % under 49. The senior number is ridiculous. Seniors and over 50 year oldsare the largest voting blocks [sic]. Our internal poll completed last week showed the race dead even.

So, if one is to believe Campbell or her supporters' version of the demographic breakdown of the city she represents, then it's an even split, 50-50 between blacks and whites. Not only is this claim demonstrably false, with whites representing 41.5% of the city's population and minorities representing the other 58.5%, it also suggests that in pursuit of Campbell retaining the privilege of representing this majority minority city, she or her supporters are willing to engage in the worse kind of race baiting, as in, "You can't trust a poll that weights its sample with respondents from the east (i.e. blacks) and samples too many blacks. Don't you worry, Campbell supporters, White Cleveland (most of which is old, ready to die in its little crackerbox homes on the far West Side) will come out and save you from the black menace of a Jackson administration." This is ugly stuff--the sort of subtle racist spinning that usually gets Republicans elected--and Cleveland Uber Alles condemns it for it is. Now, if only some reasons to vote for Jackson would make themselves clear. An aside: why aren't any of our "young professionals" running for an upstart Green or Libertarian party, threatening to put up windmills on all of the Euclid corridor's vacant lots or something?

2005-10-24T08:45:00.000-04:00

On the Failures of Our Fourth Estate: If Jackson is "Still an Enigma," then It's only Because the PD Won't Bother to Give Us the Answer As it is the province of pages like this one to play "armchair" reporter, Cleveland Uber Alles will, perhaps frequently, perhaps occasionally, sully itself with the dull and all too often snarky business of criticizing the journalistic standards and practices of The Plain Dealer and our Alt-Weekly Mega-Conglomerates and Alt-Weekly Mega-Conglomerate wannabees. Today, let's look at a long, Just-Who-Is-The-Candidate?-type piece that ran in Sunday's PD. Now this wasn't the most horrendous sort of the genre--you know, like the NY Times article that wasted our time with a description of how John Kerry prefers his Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches--but it was a prime example of an article filled with moments when a reporter failed to provide necessary context and/or simply failed to ask necessary questions. Cleveland Uber Alles doubts that Frank Jackson, or any Cleveland politician for that matter, has the kind of lights-out charisma that shuts off a reporter's critical faculties, and it doubts, too, that a piece like this lacked the sufficient time between assignment and deadline to allow the reporter to get away with such, with all due respect to Atrios, a craptacular handling of her subject matter. But, well, whatever happened, happened. And anyone hoping for some real insight on whether Jackson derserves their vote is left with this sad, sad over simplification about him: he's pro-neighborhood, anti-downtown development; his adherence to some abstract (if not nonexistent) "loyalty code" from the streets is either a) what makes him an authentic representative of the people of Cleveland or b) likely to engage the most odious kinds of patronage (Hiring a friend as "a consultant" to allow her to avoid the city's public employee residency requirement; lobbying with friends at City Hall to get constituents off the hook for their building code violations. Oh, the questions that PD reporters Olivera Perkins and Mark Naymik should have asked: like how much "consulting" has former Plain Dealer editor Maxine Greer actually done for the city? What makes her so important to the city council, beyond her friendship with Jackson, that there was some justification in hiring her in a way that would allow for the residency requirement to be waived? Did Jackson himself (who appears to have been interviewed for the article) believe that there was any conflict between this hiring and his "neighborhoods first" philosophy? I guess we'll never know. And what about the people whom Jackson helped avoid building code violation citations? How many of them were his ward's long suffering home owners? How many were landlords and developers who should have been forced to pay, for their tenants own good? We'll never know--at least not in the Cleveland that the PD would give us. Consider this offending passage from the article:

For his first two years as council president, Jackson thought Campbell adhered to his code [i.e. "Don't lie. Deliver on promises."]
Ultimately, though, Jackson decided that Campbell was dishonest. He says today that she lied to him about a lot of issues, but the one that infuriates him is the law that requires contractors on big projects to hire residents. Early in his career he made a promise that residents would get work on projects the city pays for.
Campbell publicly supported the law, but when the federal government threatened to withdraw money for projects if the law was enforced, Campbell opted not to enforce it. Jackson said Campbell did not tell him of her decision. He saw her behavior as a betrayal. Of him. Of the city. Jackson said he could not abide a mayor he perceived as dishonorable. So he decided to risk all and try to take her job.

So what about the Federal Government's threat to withdraw funding for these projects? Was it due to the fact that the contracts were to be handed out, patronage style, to political supporters, as in so many cities? Due to the fact that the city couldn't conduct a successful competitive bidding process? No one can tell from the article, and so what readers are left with is an unsubstantiated charge against Mayor Campbell, and blurry picture at best as to whether Jackson's "code" would be good for the city or simply more business as usual. Right now, like the many Clevelanders who couldn't be bothered to come out and vote for the mayoral Primary, Cleveland Uber Alles isn't inspired by any of the candidates and wishes the city's press organs would do a much better job in providing some facts that would aid in the process of deciding.

2005-10-21T13:59:00.000-04:00

Lipstick, Pigs, Young Professionals Somehow, in the photo-ops, the truth always comes out. This one, which the payrolled optimists at the PD's online arm have entitled "Brain Gain: Believe in Cleveland," features pictures from an after-work cocktail/pep rally event. Mayor Jane Campbell and other luminaries, including an obligatory "young professional" of the kind the city wishes to keep (blonde haired, blue-eyed, the best of Cleveland youth), gave a series of empty speeches that were back-lit, a la our president in his own remarkably false photo-ops, by rather schlocky AV-club style lighting effect: a pink Believe in Cleveland! logo. Why pink? Who knows? Perhaps to cash in on the warm feeling of other successful public service campaigns like the one against breast cancer. Perhaps to remind us of cartoon pigs, so that we might better understand the situation that the ad campaign is trying to put lipstick on. As you look through the pictures, note that the PD couldn't even spare a pro photographer for the event, even though they themselves are spearheading the whole Believe in Cleveland! campaign. Note, too, that the crowd is overwhelmingly white (I counted around 9 minority faces, going through the pictures casually), and certainly does not reflect this city's ethnic make up. Indeed, one wonders how many of these "young professionals" were commuters from the suburbs. Considering the sheer number of bald pates in the photos, too, one might begin to wonder if the four or five young blondes might have been imported from Strongsville.