it's understandable that pittsburgh was excited and optimistic about the prospect of hosting the g20.
if the world thinks of our fair city at all, it's generally in terms of air pollution and industry long gone, or of sports: the stanley cup champion pittsburgh penguins, the six-time super bowl champion pittsburgh steelers and, of course, the magnificent PNC park. nice distinctions and all, but not really saying much for the actual city itself and its inhabitants. meanwhile, the economy is in hell -- the handbasket burned long ago, and now it's just us. a little political distinction and glamour couldn't hurt, right? especially given that we're somewhat ahead of the curve on the whole recession thing, and frankly, we've been waiting for someone to acknowledge that fact.
right. except that we aren't DC. when we move here or choose to stay, pittsburghers are not willingly signing our lives away to be on city lockdown, overrun by police and tourists with agendas, unable to get to work or school or wherever. i'm a little bit of a spectacle junkie, and even i was overwhelmed, frustrated, disturbed and eventually infuriated by the events of what was basically a long weekend.
the issues, as i see them, in no particular order:
1. by the time it got here, it was played out.
the upshot of springing a major political event on a city like pittsburgh? it was all anyone (and i do mean anyone) talked about for a good two weeks before hand. too much. overkill.
2. traffic.
you know that line from grease where sandy tries a cigarette for the first time and rizzo says, "you shoudn't inhale unless you're used to it"? unless you've already been driving here for 2+ full years, you and everyone you encounter is screwed when you get behind the wheel.
also, see #1 -- most of that two weeks of chatter was about how awful the traffic was going to be. yes, we know. just awful. everyone's life will be ruined. so tragic. handle it.
also, i know people were moving around a little, what with fancy dinner at phipps and all, but literally everywhere i turned on thursday was blocked by police cars. i drove in three separate complete circles between my house and my coffee fix, and i am a pro at east end driving. no good.
3. the lingering post-steel era identity crisis. yes, the city wanted the publicity, and yes, pittsburgh and pittsburghers wanted to be hospitable, and we felt guilty about that because it's supposedly a blue collar town and we don't need 'em cloggin' up dahntahn n'at. but we're also good, solid, respectable, PROUD folk, and we wanted to show that we're just as good and capable and welcoming as any other city. after all, as has repeatedly been mentioned, when reporters heard the g20 would be held here, they laughed -- to which pittsburgh said, "bring it on! we'll show you!" ...following which it privately muttered, "ugh, this is going to be SUCH a burden."
grateful or ungrateful? pittsburgh welcomes the world, or pittsburgh really wishes you'd all please just go home now? working-class, blue collar pride, or up-and-coming, successful city pride? we're pretty torn about all of it.
4. police state.
if you've wondered to yourself, "what exactly does 'g20' mean?" i'll tell you. it means cops. cops cops cops cops cops. more cops than you've ever seen in your life. in riot gear. looking either extremely dangerous or extremely bored. everywhere. on horseback, with dogs, on balconies, around corners, in shops. constant sirens.
by the way, a lot of these cops were from out of town. normally i'd say, well, okay, what's the difference?
a scenario: it's 2 am. you're on foot. you need to walk four blocks straight ahead, but the way is shut, so to speak, by two police cars. you ask the officers for a suggested alternate route. their suggestion involves walking through polish hill and the hill district. you are tired, and do not have a death wish. what do you do? (yes, this happened, though not to me.)
5. "i'm mad as hell and i'm not going to take this anymore"-itis.
what makes a protester?
there are things i'm not thrilled about (or, inversely, things i'm passionate about). i've participated in demonstrations and rallies and marches and whatnot. i've even traveled to other cities for them on occasion. here's a cool fact, though: each of those demonstrations or rallies or marches had a stated purpose.
there were some legitimate, well-planned, well-executed, coherent demonstrations during g20fest. to the best of my knowledge, those did not result in broken windows, lit dumpsters, stolen property, et cetera.
there were also some extremely poorly planned, poorly executed, totally incoherent protests and... let's call them "situations" that arose. it's an economic summit, not a catch-all soapbox opportunity. if you don't have an aim, you're going to miss. man, did some people miss.
6. the complex guilt factor.
cops are (mostly) blue collar, which we respect. but they're also cops, and they're EVERYWHERE, which is, you know, off-putting.
protesters represent the everyman, which we're all about, but the whole destruction of property thing -- not kosher.
where do you turn when your relatively quiet, happy little east end neighborhood morphs into a freakish police state and an aimlessly destructive mob target overnight? where is the third option?
right, there isn't one. everyone i've heard talk about this, including myself, sounds either like a raging conservative hick or a raging liberal anarchist. and most of us switch back and forth depending on the piece of the puzzle being discussed at that moment. it's more than a little bit sickening.
7. the obama voter's sellout dilemma.
pittsburgh votes democrat. fact. obama's got the steelers jersey and pens jersey to prove it. we love the man. obviously, politicians are politicians and there's nothing to be done about it, but as politicians go, he's a damn decent man. so when he invites the world to our doorstep to show us off, we blush a little and invite them all in.
the problem is, tony norman is right (again). we looked this thing right in the face and instead of really seeing it for what it was, we checked our reflection in its aviator sunglasses and considered what we'd look like in the media (remember, the camera adds ten pounds).
i have a sense that pittsburgh will experience positive effects from the g20 being here, though i couldn't say what those will be, and we may or may not recognize them when we see them. and at very least we can say that it didn't bring the city to the ground.
it was andy warhol, a pittsburgh native, who said in 1968 that, "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." as a city, we're going on a bit more than fifteen at this point, but the subtext rings true: it's all in flashes, and the value of the minutes themselves is questionable, or perhaps irrelevant. around here, the g20 was a big deal; elsewhere in the US, not so much. the spotlight matters to the one in it, not to the audience. while warhol is often quoted either cynically or to with an implication of glamour, i like to think that what matters about the fifteen minutes is not the time itself, but the reflection and self-evaluation that happens afterward.
there are a number of reasons that i'm not out there demonstrating. it's kind of new to me -- seeing some major forms of demonstration going on right around me and not having anything to do with it other than as an observer. (it actually reminds me a little bit of walking to class in athens, though most activists there had their act together.) the main reason is that, well, a lot of what i heard and read about prior to the start of the g-20 was extremely vague -- not in direction, but in purpose. i thought the idea of a "catch-all" protest seemed irresponsible, counterproductive for everyone, and disorganized, and decided to stay out of it.
this is not me bragging: i was right. this is what's supposedly going on right now.
this is the angry drunk bureaucrat's open letter to g-20 protesters.
protesters, i hear you. we hear you. but you're going about this all wrong, and this is the result.
you're not in new york and you're not in DC. you're in the steel city, and people here not only don't like it when their neighborhoods and livelihoods are attacked by a bunch of out-of-towners in ski masks, they downright hate you for it. pittsburgh may not be massively patriotic in the national sense, but it's practically foaming at the mouth with hometown pride, and here you are attacking everything we've got and care about. i and many others will support you in assembling and demonstrating and making noise and blocking traffic, but starting fires and hurling "human waste" and rocks is over the line.
if you need help planning some sort of demonstration in the future, perhaps rely a little more heavily on city residents for guidance. we may be able to provide some insight into the workings of our fair city, and save you from either self-destructing or being expelled from the region by fired-up yinzers.
for example: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM PAMELA'S, YOU RAGING JACKASS. try to pull that crap in the daylight and you'll only have your bandanna to save you. from the patrons, not the police.
in other news, last night i watched cops in riot gear spill out of a PAT bus like it was a clown car. right in front of me. out on forbes by the library and schenley plaza. the lit-up sign on the front of the bus said "SPECIAL" and "PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD!" the next time anyone makes an argument for cutting public transportation funding... well, there you go.
whew... that last post was pretty rough. remind me never to go that long without writing for an audience again. starting up is terrible.
something of substance:this.is sickening. infuriating. incredibly sad. and on all levels, wrong.
basically, if the PA state legislature doesn't approve a new sales tax, philly's library system will have to shut down, effective oct. 2.
i'm no expert on, well, anything, but it seems to me that killadelphia -- like any city -- could probably benefit from continued use of its libraries. not to mention that reading through the list of programs and resources that may be abandoned is downright depressing.
while the carnegie library of pittsburgh differs from philly's system in a number of ways, it's facing the same challenges. as someone who spends several hours a week at various branches and knows a few employees, i am certain that right now, the resources and programs provided by the carnegie library are vital to the pittsburgh community. i could go through the whole persuasive argument, but it's a library, for God's sake; it provides all sorts of media, and internet access, and a place to go, and community programming, for FREE, and if you really need to hear the whole argument in order to think it's a worthwhile cause, honestly, you should get your head examined. something like the statement i just made can be conveyed to any of a plethora of public officials via communication methods suggested here.
even if you've never set foot in a library (and if that's the case, i do hope you'll give it a try -- they are lovely and, as i believe i just mentioned, FREE), this should be important to you. the entire mission of CLP is "to engage our community in literacy and learning." i know we're all still a little sore around the upper shoulders/neck region from the stresses of the whole "is it a speech about education or is it subversive propaganda?" ordeal, but collective exhaustion over a topic doesn't make the subject matter any less important. literacy and learning go in the "hooray, good things!" category, and shorting them out goes in the "boo, destructive and awful things!" category.
in other words, write a letter. please. even a postcard will do.
hey there. it's been a few months. the summer, you know. on with it...
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
-- Brave New World
i reread the above (the book, not just the quote) over labor day weekend.
that quote is far and away my favorite bit. the book itself is one of those which, though i'm glad to have read it, is not necessarily on my top 10 list.
that being said, the quote's just the tops. even more than the phrasing, what i love about it is what it implies: that happiness can be -- and, in fact, is -- simple, subdued, private; and that a lack of happiness can be (and often is) glamorous, sensational, thrilling. of course, an extension of the former half of that implication is the basis for the whole hellish societal system huxley's writing about, and the latter half is what gets people like myself with a penchant for hemingway and the beats and such in all sorts of trouble.
(can anyone actually read my writing, by the way? i've just reread that last paragraph.) for the record, i'm not trying to say that happiness is boring, or that unhappiness is, by definition, exciting. i disagree with the designation of actual happiness as "squalid": i'm all for the quiet, peaceful, understated life, which i find "grand" in its own way. and i'm not about to start wishing for some part of my life to fall apart just to shake things up a bit (though a younger -- and, it could be argued, stupid -- me might have). what i will say is that it's come to my attention over the course of several years that, to paraphrase my dad's description of a similar phenomenon is his life, the things i bitch about the most are the things i love the most. this may be true of everyone, or maybe just libras, or maybe just only children, or maybe just me and my dad. point being, i believe there's room for that quote to be both true and false. it runs alongside the same river as "you always hurt the one you love" (or, avenue q-style, "the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them") -- our most profound sources of happiness are also the things that cause us the most frustration, and the things that complicate our lives are also the things that give us a measure of peace and stability.
which is the whole point of the book, i suppose, even if huxley didn't mean it to be: if human beings are capable of anything complex, it's rationalizing paradox. we can't be satisfied with just being "happy" any more than we can be satisfied with being miserable. we need challenges to our happiness to make us happy. it's like the rationalization your parents gave you for having to leave your best friend's house after a super-fun play date when you didn't want to leave: if you don't go now, you'll never be able to come back.
it's 2009 and we don't have flying cars or world peace, and C, X and Q are still included in the alphabet (see #16). but for most people our (my) age, the first action in the morning is checking something computer- or internet-related. when i wake up in the morning, before i'm capable of speech or fully opening my eyes, i can still type my laptop password (which is upwards of 10 characters) in about a second. and i'm not exactly a technology person.
i was shown a different version of this at a conference a few months ago. most of these things don't really surprise me -- a fact that decisively places me in a certain age group -- but it's kind of intense to see them all in sequence. (there's sound, but it's just background music.)
maybe this is bad (?) but i'm less interested in the question -- what does this all mean? you know -- than the facts themselves. i don't know that it all has to mean anything. i just want to know what's coming next. or what effects the reality of these facts have on people now: ones that now or soon will feel disconnected, and ones that are being born into this culture. because this isn't exactly a cultural shift. the culture shift already happened. i think the culture in which we exist now is one of continuing shift itself. so instead of saying we are at a moment of transition, i think we can now say we're a culture of transition itself. with so much connectedness and communication and increased speed and numbers of people, maybe "developed nations" don't have the time or space for stages anymore. that's the ultimate form of individualism, really: if everything is constantly changing and moving and transitioning, one person can only ever be at the same stage as him or herself. alone in a crowd, as it were. which also makes all the communication and connectedness both increasingly important and increasingly moot.
[i'm resisting the urge to make a pitch for summer camp here. suffice it to say that this kind of spiralling mental logic is one of the major reasons i enjoy closing my laptop for the summer and having no cell phone service.] i think this is also why "our" generation (whatever that is) has so very much difficulty with rebellion. a lot of us grew up in a sort of, i'm sorry to say this, fight club mentality: that whole bit about having no great war, no great depression, no scars. nothing in which to participate or against which to rebel. the early-mid 90s suffered from severe 60s envy, but by the time the shit hit the fan (lots of it, and a very big fan*), it was a new millenium and we had become too jaded to carpe that particular diem. at least most members of our parents' generation waited until their mid-30s to sell out. we barely made it through high school. * see: 9/11, war on terror, iraq, afghanistan, energy resource depletion, global warming, economic crisis, gay rights, the entire middle east, etc. and on that note, i'm leaving my computer and going outside to frolic in the sunshine.
