Suburbs From KOP to Voorhees Embrace New ‘Main Streets’ —But Not Cherry Hill

Michaelle Bond’s article in the Inquirer about citified “main streets” coming to the suburbs has everything you’d expect: interviews with developers and city planners, somewhat silly-sounding quotes from random members of the public, and the hint of snark (all that astroturf!) usually found in the Inky's coverage of anything suburban.

Really, though, what’s happening in King of Prussia, Exton and elsewhere is better than what came before (in the recent past) and better than any contemporary alternatives if one accepts the inevitability of growth. The article’s observation that these complexes “cost open space” overlooks the notion that these high-density projects gobble far less land than traditional housing tracts and shopping centers.

It also reminds me, yet again, of how tremendously stupid Cherry Hill was to reject a similar (and at the time, ahead of the curve) proposal to redevelop the Garden State Park property on Rt. 70 along pedestrian and transit-friendly lines. Not only was the tract perfectly situated to give the sprawly township the semblance of a town center, it lies adjacent to a (woefully underused) passenger train station, on NJ Transit’s Atlantic City Line.

I was working for a newspaper in Haddonfield at the time development of the land was being debated (2005-06) and remember then-mayor Bernie Platt trumpeting the approved plan as “mixed-use,” a politician-speak mangling of that term if there ever was one. True mixed-use developments are dense and pedestrian friendly; the only thing “mixed use” about today’s Garden State Park is that one can drive to the grocery store, drive to the restaurant, or drive to the townhouse—or risk life and limb dodging SUVs while walking across a sea of asphalt.

Garden State Park: A sea of sprawl... and a train station.

Appropriation is Not Necessarily Exploitation

I wrote this in response to a friend's Facebook call for comments on a New York Times piece, "In Defense of Cultural Appropriation."

I think much of 20th century social progress was abetted, if not in some cases directly driven, by what many today dismissively call “cultural appropriation.”

This more or less began in the '20s with nascent integration in jazz, and really picked up steam after the war, as the nation gradually grew to understand African-American culture as more than just inferior or quaint.

Remember, as recently as the turn of the last century, W.E.B. Du Bois had to plead for cultural relevance and respect on the basis of “the American fairy tales and folklore [being] Indian and African.” How far we have come since then, with mainstreaming and universal acceptance of art forms rooted in black culture as quintessentially American.

Especially, and somewhat ironically, in the South—a cultural cauldron in ways going far beyond the violence and victories of Civil Rights. What we call R&B, Rock & Roll—even folk, country and gospel music—was the result of many decades (centuries, really) of cultural cross-pollination, often driven, now as ever, by talented young people more interested in inspiration than labels and boundaries.

It’s true Elvis was seen as a white guy who could sound black, and had his first hit with an Arthur Crudup blues song. It’s also true that Chuck Berry was considered a black guy who could sound white, and had his first hit with a reworking of a western swing fiddle tune first recorded by Bob Wills.

Throw into the mix influences criss-crossing the pond—most importantly the effect of American music on young Britons in the 50s and 60s, which subsequently awakened young white America to this nation’s full musical heritage—and the positive effect this had on the fortunes of a generation of black musicians—and the picture becomes even more complicated. (At the risk of sounding unfashionably uncynical, it's been a long time since pop music appropriation equaled exploitation, despite what Jesse Williams may believe.)

Art does not fit into the neat boundaries proposed by academicians, and never will.

The Arguments Against Abortion Are Truly Out of This World

Of all the arguments against abortion, the one I find most ridiculous is the “if my mom had an abortion, I wouldn’t be here” reasoning.

So what? If my mom had a headache the night I was conceived, I wouldn’t be here either.

My mom had a miscarriage in 1968. If she had carried the baby to term and had given birth in ’69, it’s certain I would not be here, because my parents would not have wanted another child so soon. So I owe my life to the early termination of a pregnancy.

But again, why does any of that matter? A million things could have happened to prevent my existing. It's futile to dwell on the what-haves, near-misses and might-have-beens. Once I emerged into the world, I became a person—not in some Platonic, image-of-God way, but by my importance to family, community and society. By joining the whirl (and whorl) of existence.

I also find offensive the idea that parents of special-needs children have some special right to comment on the morality of abortion. The dynamic is the same whether the child is born healthy or sick, conventionally formed or not; once in the world, the infant joins the community of man. There is no cosmic symbolism to the birth of a special-needs child; this child is loved for who they are, like any other child.

Worst of all is the notion that mothers who sacrifice their lives on behalf of an unborn child are nobler, more saintly, than the rest. There is a Catholic saint, Gianna Beretta Molla, who was canonized for her refusal to save her life by having surgery that would, as an unintended consequence, end the life of her first-term fetus. She eventually died after giving birth, leaving behind a husband and four children.

Here we have a sacrifice on behalf of an idea—that of the inviolability of a zygote implanted on the placenta—taking precedence over the prerogatives of the born. Her choice was truly not “of this world” because it put a theory of personhood above the actuality of personhood, and turned the suffering of the body into a signifier of a higher cause (what could be more Catholic than that!). The mother-to-be becomes mortal vessel for the divine spark. Perhaps this is best understood as the dehumanization of a woman as tradeoff for the humanization of the embryo.

Believing that people are formed in the word and by the world means believing that the world matters; it is not just a symbol or staging ground for some higher or future purpose. Each one of us is here because of a series of dynamics, adaptations and choices stretching back millions of years; not random, but beautiful. This includes the choice of whether and how our parents decided to get pregnant and have a baby.

Campus Free Speech and Snowflakes

In his much-discussed Times piece, “What Snowflakes Get Right About Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer cites the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard to bolster his claim that some speech should be banned on college campuses because it has a chilling effect on marginalized groups.

“Lyotard," he writes, "shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good."

Essentially this is an argument about legitimization. Giving Holocaust deniers an equal voice with Holocaust survivors elevates their position while diminishing those of the people bearing witness to personal and collective suffering.

I understand this argument but do not believe it follows that censoring viewpoints from a university campus is necessary to “ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people.”

Baer’s argument that students curious abut the views of Richard Spencer or Ann Coulter can simply can go to the Internet undermines the central logic of campus free speech—that airing ideas in a university setting brings perspective (and tools for refutation) that are not available to someone browsing Reddit.

I would argue that the high profile of figures like Spencer is a result of, rather than threat to, the gains of traditionally disenfranchised groups in recent decades. Unfortunately for bigots, the genie is out of the battle; no amount of rhetoric will prevent members of Hillel at Auburn from participating in debate as fully recognized members of the community.

Maybe We're All 'Snowflakes' Now...

Baer thinks giving the Ann Coulters of the world a platform necessarily forces some groups “to defend their human worth.” But Coulter herself, who like many on the Right suffer from a victimhood complex making them feel as if they are the ones being denied (ethnic or cultural) rights, speaks in these same terms.

So perhaps the paradigm shift effected by identity politics has changed the terms of discourse—even for racists—from notions of inherent superiority to those of ethnic nationalism and cultural integrity. This too is odious, but the politics-based debates of today do not foreclose the possibility of disenfranchised groups maintaining a voice in the same way that pseudo-scientific, mytho-folkloric and religion-based arguments of the past did.

From the Right: A Vision of 'Communitarian Conservatism'

Interesting things are happening on the Right, such as a movement to take what’s seen as the positive elements of Trumpism to formulate a new conservatism opposed to both the neoliberal consensus founded by Ronald Reagan and free-market fundamentalism.

Julius Krein, thirty-something founder and editor of American Affairs, promotes a kind of economic nationalism he calls communitarian conservatism. It’s built around the idea of “grounding the economy in society”—as in, the structures and relationships of a stable, functioning community (he's vague on this point, maybe by design)—rather than the ideology of think-tank intellectuals.

This includes more government intervention in some situations. Regulation is not always bad, he says, if balanced by strong democratic institutions and accountability. He’s highly critical of free trade. 

Paraphrasing Krein: the Right reflexively celebrates capitalism without thinking of how modern capitalism is different from Adam Smith or the founding fathers, or how “corporate cartels” are harmful to classical free-market principals. 

Krein even hints that socialized healthcare may be an inevitability: “The idea that the only health care is free market health care is basically impossible and doesn’t make any sense.”

But he’s no Bernie Sanders in a suit. The racism and xenophobia of Trumpism clearly does not bother him. He is generally dismissive of such concerns or even sympathetic where he sees the result as helping to define society and strengthen its boundaries.

This is where you start to get the unsettling feeling that this vision, an intellectual projection of values at the core of Jacksonian communalism, could slide into something like National Socialism.

Klein outlines his views in a podcast from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. It's worth a listen for anyone interested in trends across the political spectrum.

http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/news/item/politics-polls-35-future-conservatism-trump-era