…to Laura Ingraham interview Christopher Hitchens is like watching Rosie O’Donnell play tennis with Pete Sampras.

I’m almost willing to write this Strib editorial off to post-election let-down; perhaps the editoral writers are still hung-over from the election they and their paper worked so hard to engineer.

But the piece – which sniffs and phumphers about ad space being sold on the outside of trains – frankly, makes absolutely no sense.

Trusting the stranger is a basic precept of the successful city. An urban place cannot thrive if public sidewalks, parks and transit are overtaken by the fear of unpredictable or threatening behavior. Happily, those tensions can be eased by good architecture. Unobstructed windows are especially important because they provide transparency between, say, a sidewalk and street-level business. As the urbanist prophet Jane Jacobs observed, the more eyes looking in and out, the greater the confidence in the urban experience.

That’s why it’s so ironic that the Twin Cities’ latest and most celebrated venture into the urban experience — light-rail transit — so eagerly violates Jacobs’ dictum.

For starters, Jacobs’ “dictum” has been pretty well debunked – not by free-market conservatives, mind you, but by the people who’ve actually spent the last fifty years trying to make it work. “Eyes on the Street” doesn’t prevent crime, and a city is built on distrusting people enough so that the honest people stay honest. (Read the linked article; it doesn’t debunk “new urbanism”, merely guts out the very myth that the Strib is peddling in this editorial).

Metro Transit has shrouded most of its light-rail cars in advertising. Whole trains — windows and all — have become gliding billboards for supermarkets, sports teams, discount stores, you name it. Commuters on platforms can’t see into the cars; riders inside can see out, sort of, but only into what appears to be a murky, depressing city.

Thus, the transit agency trades the confidence and pleasure of customers for the revenue that advertising brings. It’s willing even to obscure its own brand identity in a desperate dash for cash. These “wraps” account for one-third of Metro Transit’s $2.7 million annual ad sales (but far less than 1 percent of its total budget).

One wonders what the Strib is thinking:

1. A city that is “murky, depressing” through a thin layer of translucent paint will spring to vibrant life through a clear window?
2. “Brand identity?” The train is a government venture! Branding only matters if there is competition! There is only one train! Oh, sure – the train is competing against cars. But does the Strib board think that the very Metro Transit “brand” that Twin Cities’ commuters shun by a 95-5 margin is going to actually draw people in? That the dismal off-white cattle pens on rails are going to be any more inviting, in and of themselves, than the dismal off-white cattle pens on wheels?

Back to the Strib:

We do not disparage advertising.

But it’d be perhaps useful to note that the Strib competes for the same ad dollar that the trains are eating up.

Perhaps some of that money should go to teaching the Strib some elementary logic. Or maybe just how to control one’s hysteria:

…transit is a public product, and allowing whole trains to be tarted up with images of toothpaste and laundry soap demeans the public’s pride in its investment.

It’s a train! An ugly steel trolley shuttling back and forth on ugly steel tracks over ugly cement overpasses! The only “pride in investment” in having a train in the first place is the efficiency it (supposedly) brings to the city’s life. Trains can be aesthetic – but that’s not the point of the public’s investment.

Imagine the outcry if Lake Harriet were “sponsored” by a hamburger chain on condition that lighted golden arches were placed at the lake’s center.

I sat, stunned, the first time or two I read this.

The Strib editorial board can’t tell the difference – conceptual as well as literal – between a natural wonder in the middle of our city, and a train?

Or if the 2006 election had been “brought to you by” a TV newscast, which placed ads on every ballot. At some point a line is crossed. Metro Transit has crossed it.

The Strib also notes that the MTC has begun rolling back the amount of window surface to be covered. so why write the editorial in the first place?

It’s unfortunate that Metro Transit hasn’t been provided the money to build and operate a fully modern system.

No, Strib editors. It is, in fact, too bad that metro taxpayers have been saddled with a “transit” system that is structurally unable to pay its own way – a billion-dollar “train to nowhere from nowhere”, linking the airport and the Mall to a downtown full of people who don’t, as a general rule, take the train to the airport or the Mall! A train whose main function is to take the (few) commuters in South Minneapolis who neither drive to jobs in the ‘burbs nor downtown, to the relatively few jobs remaining downtown, or to take revelers on the now-ritual Friday/Saturday night trolley pub crawls.

A train could have been built to haul people from the inner city, where people actually are, out to Burnsville and Bloomington and Eden Prairie, places to which people actually need affordable transit, that had a better (though still dismal) chance of paying for itself. But a work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy trolleythat hauls working people about isn’t quite as posh a monument to the wisdom of its creators as a gleaming train connecting the crown jewels of a city – its downtown(s), airport, and “destination”.

Or to put it in the business terms that the Strib’s editors so poorly understand, “get a sound business case before you worry about branding”.

(Oh, and Strib? Weren’t you guys just raving about what a “success” the Hiawatha line has been?)

It’s too bad that it feels the need to become so thoroughly “wrapped up” in the pursuit of extra cash. It’s regrettable that it has violated the see-through principles of safe, responsible urbanism [hah!]. Advertising truly has its place on public transit — just not every place.

The Strib’s version of “new urbanism” is unsafe, irresponsible, and obsolete; their concern for the “branding” of a train that should never have been built (or at least built where it is) qualifies as “turd-polishing”.

Scott Johnson responds to a note from a journalist friend, which I’ll excerpt here:

Your often trenchant critiques of the Strib’s editorial/opinion pages would be heard so much farther if you granted the strengths of the rest of the paper, thereby allowing you to point out how boring, slanted, vicious, cheap and dishonest the editorials often or usually are, compared with the rest of the Strib.

I’m guessing that, in effect, such an approach would be winsome, winning over many more of the Strib staffers who probably think similarly about the editorials, and would plunge the dart of your retort deeper into the hearts of the editorial editors.

I agree, actually. And I’ve actually done a bit of this, at least in terms of MPR (which is the second-most-important establishment news source in the Twin Cities.

And as far as “winning over Strib staffers” – well, I do hear from enough of them to know that this is a valid goal. There are a few people inside the Strib who know what’s going on, but also need to learn a living and don’t really want to go back to writing obituaries in Sheboygan.
So how about the Strib?

(more…)

I’m told that there’s a certain sect of Zuni tribesmen in the American southwest whose shamen pray every morning for the sun to rise. Since the sun rises every morning, they say, it must be working.

In a more-or-less unrelated matter, did you know Bill Press had a radio talk show?

Me either. But according to Brian Maloney, Press believes he – and Al Franken, and Fast Eddie Schultz – are the real impetus behind the electoral turnaround for the Dems: and for pretty much the same reasons as the Zuni shamen believe it:

But it also wouldn’t have happened – without progressive talk radio.

Think about it.

Two years, there was no progressive talk – It was all right-wing – and we lost our ass.

This year, there is progressive talk – and we won big time.

So shows like this really can make a difference. Not just me, of course. But Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, Alex Bennett and all the rest.

And you, the listeners.

By speaking truth to power, every day – we helped get American back on track.

Be proud of what we accomplished in 2006.

And now – On to 2008!

Brian Maloney notes the absurdity of the claim:

Sure, Bill – your tiny ratings and small number of affiliates made all the difference in the world! It couldn’t have been that the Republican Party blew it, right?

Liberal talk radio is straining to justify its existence, granted – but given liberal talk’s anemic ratings (only in rare markets does the entire libtalk genre get out of the one-point cellar), to claim that libtalk had any impact at all is comical.

Ward Sutton – of whom it can be charitably said “he’s better than Ken Avidor” – on this year’s campaign:

Two gay jokes and a portrayal of Christians as idiots (And please don’t bother saying “noooo – that’s what Republicans are thinking”). Has anyone noticed that there’s been vastly more gay-bashing “Humor” from Democrats than credible Republicans lately? How must that play at “Stonewall DFL” meetings? “We’re doing it for your own good?”
The Dems may “win” this election (although anything less than a forty-seat pickup in the House and ten in the Senate is a defeat, really, given the way this election should have gone for them), but I think this shows why they’re going to lose the nation, sooner or later.

The Strib wants you to quit saying things that hurt their feelings:

The phrase? “Cut and run.”

Anyone advocating immediate or even sometime-soon withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is apt to be accused of wanting to “cut and run,” meaning they advocate a dishonorable, cowardly retreat.

OK. Let’s be ruthlessly clear and accurate, here:

Leaving Iraq now would allow Iraq to fall even deeper into a civil war that the central government is, so far, unable to handle. We are the only power in the world that can do anything useful about this.

“Cutting and jogging” – moving our troops to Kuwait, or Okinawa, or (as the hapless, terminally-dim Amy Klobuchar posits) Afghanistan – would have the effect of taking Omaha Beach, and then withdrawing to England while we let the French sort the rest of their liberation out.

Counterinsurgency warfare is a slow, ugly grind – but it can be won, or at least resolved favorably. It takes skill. More than that, as every successful counterinsurgency in history shows us, it takes patience.

But calling for an end to a fruitless, bloody conflict to which this nation has devoted itself for 3½ years, and which shows no signs of ever ending on terms favorable to the United States, is in no way cowardly. It’s a reasonable, even brave, perspective.

“Truth is lies, Winston”.

It might be reasonable, under some circumstances – if you assume that taking a hill from the enemy and then giving it back, to be taken back again, is “reasonable”.

“Brave?” No. It is the very sort of armchair-generalship and parlor leadership that the left sniggers about when they yap about “fighting keyboardists” and “chickenhawks”. The troops – and the Iraqis that come out to vote, volunteer for the Iraqi Army and Police, and live their daily lives amid the horrors concocted by the “insurgents” – are brave. The Strib editorial board and other advocates of cutting and running are merely stating an opinion. In our nation, this is not “brave”, it’s merely par for the course, thank God.

That honorable point of view actually fits well with the original meaning of cut and run, lost now on most who use the term. In nautical battles among sailing ships, when enemy vessels were bearing down on a navy caught at anchor, the ropes to the anchors would be cut and the ships would run with the wind, thus surviving to engage the enemy on more equal terms. An admiral who cut and ran was more likely to be praised for saving his fleet than criticized for cowardice.

Since the Strib wants to invoke picayune, irrelevant bits and pieces of trivia, let’s go further. In 1973 the US – at the behest of leftists like (or, in some cases, including) the people who run the Strib’s editorial board, “cut and ran” (by whatever definition) from Vietnam. Oh, we did it with a promise – we withdrew “over the horizon” to Okinawa and our bases in the US (had Amy Klobuchar been in office, one wonders if she might have suggested we pull back to Honduras or Cuba), with a guarantee to Saigon that we wouldn’t leave them in the lurch.

And then, with full control of Congress after Watergate, they cut off both the funding and any other hope for rescue to the South Vietnamese. The killing fields, the boat exodus, and seven figures’ worth of carnage ensued.

While that example isn’t as picayune and meaningless as the Strib’s nautical excursion, it’s the best I could come up with – and it happens to be front and center on the conservatives’ conscience right now.

A case can be made for not considering withdrawing from Iraq until the conflict somehow is redeemed. But that case should be made with real arguments, not with sleazy accusations that those who advocate a different course want to “cut and run.”

We’ve given you the former, Strib Editors. And you’re going to continue to get both.