Eric The Blue

Notes on the Pacific Northwest

My mom, when she was asked her opinion about this or that movie, would often say that it was "good" because there was "a lot of nice scenery."  I think that's what she said about Mary Poppins.  I know she did not like The Godfather.  The scene wherein Sonny comes to grief at the toll booth--not very nice scenery.  Nor could she give her imprimatur to the guys eating Chinese food right from the white boxes while plotting murder in the dimly lit room of a mansion purchased with ill-gotten gains.

So maybe the reason I've never been able to allow myself to be impressed by beautiful scenery is that it's connected in my mind with my mom's tastes in movies.  But I couldn't keep my guard up while driving along BC-99 from Vancouver to Whistler.  It's only around a hundred minutes.  For the first forty or so, you look out to the left and see way below an expanse of salt water and, to the right, snow-capped mountains.  Then for the last hour or so it's mountains on both sides.  There are screens on the sheer cliffs that the highway winds through, to keep rocks from falling onto the roadway (or the vehicles traveling along it).  I was wondering how they hung the screens, but probably a better question is how they built the road in the first place. 

Anyway . . . really beautiful country.  Possibly it's easy to impress a flatlander but my goodness!  Amanda's view is a little different, as the main reason for our trip was the Ironman Canada Triathlon, which she competed in last Sunday at Whistler.  She therefore had the opportunity, on an unusually warm (80°) day, to bike for 112 miles through those mountains after having finished the swim.  It pretty well demolished her sunny disposition.  She nevertheless ran-walked the marathon and finished the whole ordeal in 14 hours, 14 minutes.  There are photographers out on the course taking pictures of the competitors and, perusing the photos of herself a few days ago, she expressed relief that she seems never to have been caught walking.  ('ve kept it to myself till now but it's possible others feel as she does and that the photographers therefore don't regard walkers as worthy subjects.)  Lots are walking two or three miles from the finish line, but everyone runs in the finishing chute, which appeared to be around 500 meters long: it's fun to stand along there and watch them come in, their faces a peculiar mix of exhaustion and elation.

Vancouver is the most cosmopolitan-seeming city I've ever been in.  You hear I don't know how many different languages being spoken on the street--different Asian ones, lots of French, and, excepting the American southern drawl, every different variety of English.  The adult-oriented businesses are wholly integrated and may be next to a Macy's or a restaurant (of which there are a zillion, featuring every conceivable cuisine).  The downtown is filled with identical-looking residential high-rises.  I have no idea where the people who can afford to live in them work.  The streets are full at all hours with people who do not appear to be prosecuting the work-day routine or preparing to pull another 8-to-5 tomorrow.

One odd thing about Vancouver, a city of more than 600,000: it lacks a highway "bypass."  Granted, there could be no bypass on its watery side, but, supposing you want to drive from Whistler to Seattle, it seems you are obliged to drive right through downtown Vancouver.  There's our hotel again!  The drive thus seems longer than it looks on a map, especially if by "Seattle" you mean the suburb of Bremerton, which is west, across Puget Sound, from the city, so that to get there by car from the north requires you to drive past the east side of the city, then curve around southerly, westerly, and northerly to your destination.  We were at a Hampton Inn next to the Bremerton ferry station, and the ferry ride to downtown Seattle--round trip around eight dollars for adults and half that for kids--takes about an hour.  If you walk northerly along the waterfront from the landing dock, there is a carnival with the usual amusements.  It was my bad luck that the Mariners were on the road, so my family cruelly exploited my fear of heights by forcing me to ride on the ferris wheel that swings out over the water before, next day, going up the space needle.  The famous Pike Place Market is a cluster-f and less than ideal when you are trying to keep track of kids.

 

Roll call

Republicans are not as boring as decent smart guys like Tim Kaine, so I'm sure I would have watched more of their convention were I at home. From what I can tell, however, just noticing who speaks, and who didn't even attend, is redolent of rot. There are two living former presidents of the Republican party--Bush & Bush; neither spoke, neither even attended. John Kasich, the Republican governor of the host state, did not attend. The party's most recent presidential standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, did not attend. The second-place finisher in the nominating contest did speak and pointedly did not endorse the nominee. Who did speak for Trump? A former underwear model who more recently attained semi-stardom as an actor on a daytime soap. Along the same line, there was another actor, this one from a 1980s sitcom, who seems to have been recommended by a recent tweet in which he applied the c-word to Hillary Clinton. There was an avocado farmer and the guy from "Duck Dynasty." Rudy Giuliani, his veins popping out, and Ben Carson, rambling on about how Hillary is "Lucifer"--the show wasn't too crazy for them, nor for Chris Christie, who by now must have performed enough errands to be named attorney general. Just about everyone in the Trump family took a turn; unlike, say, Kasich, they presumably could not say No--or, apparently, overcome the temptation to crib the words of Michelle Obama, who according to the underwear model is married to a Muslim fifth column working to take down our country from of all places the Oval Office. "I feel it in my heart," he explained to an interviewer who asked for evidence. Oh, I am forgetting the woman whose son was killed at Benghazi; the idea there seems to have been that you can't say a grieving mother is nuts. Okay, but what's Fill-in-the-Blank's excuse? The Republican Speaker of the House took a turn at the lectern and described the divisions in the party as "signs of life," but I think the only good sign for the GOP is that quite a few of its current and former leaders had the good sense to stay away.

Worried

Having watched Trump's acceptance speech from a hotel-room in Whistler, B.C., I'm a little nervous about returning home--seems I'm past due for being assaulted by a brown-skinned person.

Mall of America: the place for fun in your life

We live about five miles from the Mall of America, so every ten years or so I go.  Today was the day for the 2010s.  The occasion was a kid's birthday party at Build-A-Bear.  Some places (Target Field) I love and others (like everywhere retirees move to) have for me no appeal at all.  (Line from Seinfeld:  "My parents live in Florida now.  They hate it, but they're  retired, and there are laws.")  I'm conflicted about Mall of America, however.

If I liked The Mall (as we call it here, "Southdale" being  Southdale and "Ridgedale" being Ridgedale but "The Mall" being The Big One that you hear tourists talking about in the seat behind you while landing at our airport) I'd go more than once a decade.  The Cathedral of Consumerism aspect of it repels me, and I felt sort of nostalgic today for the era when birthday parties were at the birthday kid's house and cost mom and dad a Duncan Hines cake mix and some candles.  Also, if you are inclined to sneer--and I am--The Mall allows you to practice.  Every ten minutes or so you see something not less eye-opening than, say, a morbidly obese  woman of indeterminate age sipping a vat-sized soft drink while blocking the escalator's passing lane: she is wearing slippers [sic], sweatpants, and a tent of a t-shirt that, you realize when you spot her again later, bears a message advancing the cause of the National Rifle Association.  If I never left south Minneapolis, I'd doubt the polls showing Trump at 40% and rising.

On the other hand.  What a critic said of The Canterbury Tales--"Here is God's plenty"--could be said of MOA.  If you don't like it, you must not like life.  All the people, to all appearances from every conceivable demographic group, out on a Sunday afternoon to have a little fun.  Who can be against that?  So what if I'd rather read a book or watch the Twins.  Someone correctly observed that the Puritans opposed bear baiting not because it was cruel to animals but because people enjoyed it.  They'd hate MOA, too.  Therefore it gets a mark in the credit column.

 

From the Norton Anthology of Tweets

Sitting here watching the Twins.  Commercial for Cialis every six outs.  I know I'm old, thoughts encumbered by a teenager, because I find myself thinking, "Actually, it would be a pretty good thing if 'when the time is right' everyone took a minute to swallow a sugar tablet and maybe have a clear thought."

One of my funny friends says he's thankful for decreased sexual desire but wishes he could sleep through the night without having to piss. 

Dick Bremer is just now singing the praises of technology because he posed a question on-air and within minutes had the answer coming across his Twitter feed.  (Yes, Bert Blyleven did give up a homer to Ken Griffey Jr.)  It's always encouraging to hear a guy about my age not sounding like a curmudgeon and a Luddite.  I was earlier today scrolling through someone's Twitter feed when I came to this little gem:

The world changes.
The earth spins.
We grieve our losses.
We eke out wins.
Gnight.

 

Too many guns

From what I can tell, the most plausible and charitable interpretation of what happened on Larpenteur Avenue in Falcon Heights the other night involves a misunderstanding between the cop and the fellow he ended up killing.  The key elements of the misunderstanding, in this view of things, would be

    (1) that the driver had told the officer he had a weapon; and

    (2) that the driver subsequently reached for his hip pocket (which is where almost all men carry their wallet). 

It seems possible the cop understood (1) as a threat.  Even if he regarded it just as a statement of fact, it could have made him jumpy, so that he overreacted to (2).  No matter the details, it seems that if something like this accounts for the tragedy, then the precipitating factor was the presence of firearms.  The fellow in the car had a gun, probably for personal protection, but he'd be alive today if he had foregone the protection.

We are constantly told that the remedy for gun violence is more guns.  But more guns just makes everyone more jumpy and inevitably catastrophes occur.   Despite the efforts of the NRA, these questions are a topic of social science research, and the results keep trickling in.  As was likely the case on Larpenteur Avenue, guns cause gun violence.  Fewer guns, fewer homicides. The notion that "good guys" with guns are combating crime is the self-serving daydream of "good guys" who for whatever reason have become infatuated with guns. 

Republican cartography

In my last post, about how Democrats being in the minority in the Congress should not be attributed to any "choice" made by voters, I didn't give Republicans enough credit for their supersized influence in national affairs.  Yes, it's true that Democrats, by flocking together in urban centers, make it easy for Republicans to pack them all into a relatively few congressional districts in order to give themselves an advantage in the rest.  But Republicans have made the very most of this friendly fact.  The case of Pennsylvania is representative.

In the 2010 election, Republicans gained control of the Pennsylvania state legislature, which gave them the power to redraw the state's congressional boundaries after the 2010 census.  Two years later, in the first federal election with the new districts, President Obama carried Pennsylvania by around 300,000 votes, and Democratic candidates for the U.S. House received, in the aggregate, about 100,000 more votes than their Republican opponents.  Nevertheless, Republicans won 13 of the state's 18 House seats.  In other words, Republican candidates, though receiving 100,000 fewer votes statewide, won 13 of the 18 elections for U.S. House.

The secret to their success lies in "packing" and "cracking" Democratic voters in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  It works something like this.  There are about 700,000 people to a congressional district.  Let's say that, in a certain metro area, there are 2.8 million people--four districts--and that two-thirds of them at least lean Democratic in their voting habits.  That sounds like a recipe for sending four Democratic representatives to the U.S. House.  But if you can draw the lines in such a way that two of the districts are around 85% Democratic, you might then be able to divide up the remaining Democrats in such a way as to create at least one safely Republican district out of an overwhelmingly Democratic metropolis.  And that's how, with fewer votes, you can win more congressional seats and thus wield more power.

The system is rigged, though not in the way that the Republican's presumptive nominee ever describes.  How else can you describe a system in which one party, having received 40-some percent of the votes statewide, wins more than 70 percent of the state's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives?  It sounds almost magical, but you can sense the hard work involved just by looking at the unnatural polygons of some of the district maps (shape on the left, placement in the state to the right):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's not easy sending that many Republicans to Washington on the strength of so few votes!  The districts have to be drawn very carefully.  The journalist David Daley has written a book about the Republican art of mapmaking.  The title is Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy.  Elizabeth Kolbert has a review, here.

Maps, restaurants, the partisan divide

There's a lot of dross in the political journalism that proliferates quadrennially but, for those who are interested, there are exceptions as well.  Ron Brownstein, of The Atlantic, is one.  His latest piece includes the following graf:

Democrats now rely on an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and socially liberal college-educated and single whites (especially women). Republicans thrive among older, non-college educated and religiously devout whites, especially outside of major cities. In 2012, President Obama carried less than one-fourth of America’s counties; he won fewer counties than any presidential winner since at least 1920. But because Obama so dominated the nation’s population centers, he triumphed by 5 million votes.

The above map, which depicts the outcome of the 2012 presidential election not by county but by congressional district, amplifies Brownstein's point.  Districts carried by Romney are different shades of red, depending upon his margin over Obama.  The Obama districts are shades of blue.  Looks like a Romney landslide, doesn't it?  Check out the key states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.  They're practically all red, and Obama carried each one.  This can happen because congressional districts all have a population of around 700,000.  Wyoming is a uniform hue, since the whole state is one congressional district.  Meanwhile, a big city is just a speck.  You can see, if barely, that those four states I called out are dark blue in and around Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

It's fun to speculate about the why of this very pronounced phenomenon.  There must be, to some degree, a kind of self-sifting that occurs.  Democrats do well with nurses and educators, while Republicans do well with business executives and military officers--because, I think, the traits that attract people to these different lines of work are cousins of the traits that go into forming political opinions that align with one side or the other.  Similarly, there is something about people who choose to live in a big city that  causes them to choose the Democrats, too.  Vice-versa for Republicans. 

Olive Garden is Republican; bistros with flaming waiters who while detailing the menu ask whether you eat red meat--that's not just my side of the restaurant divide, it's my side of the political one.

There's an aspect of this whole subject that I wish Democrats would talk about more.  The country as a whole is considerably more Democratic than the elected "representation" in Washington.  If you take a randomly selected American and a randomly selected member of the U.S. Congress, it's more likely that the citizen will prefer the Democrats and the member of Congress will be a Republican than the other way around.  There's two factors that go into this.  The first is the fact that the composition of the Senate is not based on population.  Each state, no matter its population, has two senators.  This means that big states with big cities and large populations, which tend to be the blue ones, are underrepresented in the Senate.  When the senators of the largest state (California) and of the smallest (Wyoming) have voted on some issue, the tally is usually 2-2.  But if you put the question, whatever it is, to the people of the two states, the outcome in all likelihood wouldn't be close at all. 

The other factor leading to outsized Republican "pull" has to do with the way we Democrats congregate in population centers, thereby giving a relatively few congressional districts a superfluity of Democratic voters.  There are a lot of ways to demonstrate this tendency but one of the best is to return again to the result of the last presidential election, congressional district by congressional district.  If all the districts won by Romney had a Republican representative, and all the ones carried by Obama had a Democratic one, then Republicans would have a 226 to 209 majority in the House of Representatives.  The Speaker of the House would be a Republican, the chairs of the committees would be Republicans, and the legislative agenda would be set by Republicans.  But the Democrat won the election by about 5 million votes.