“Brand Cattle, Not Cities!”

Well, if you didn’t already know this, Syracuse is a cool place to live because. . . IT’S ALL HERE! The whiz-bang gang over at 40 Below has officially launched what it is calling its Syracuse branding campaign. Apparently, a cool catch phrase and lots of ‘net and alternative media marketing will cure what ails us. We will be happening. People will flock from near and far to experience Syracuse: the rust Belt tres hip.

I found out about this when NYCO sent me an e-mail asking if I was one of the select CNY bloggers asked to create content for the It’s All Here web site. Apparently, I am a bit too smug or a bit too obscure (as well as 6 years over 40) so I was not chosen to join the chorus.

I found it interesting that potential smiley-face bloggers were reminded to write in the first person (no fair re-writing Metropolitan Development Assn. press releases) and to be positive. I don’t believe in relentless negativity, if that’s what you’re craving head over to the 40Below forum over at Syracuse.com. It’s been taken over by the people who believe that 40Below is just a pre-packaged Junior Chamber of Commerce, staffed by the progeny of current establishment figures and run entirely out of the M.D.A. offices. They’re right, of course. However, there is never any hint that the forum is anything but a personal flame war, talk radio for the deaf.

So why does 40Below make me want to vomit? The same reason I had as a kid, it’s sickeningly sweet. I grew up in the burned out, cynical Seventies. David Letterman is the voice of my generation. The tail end of the baby boom got the leftovers of the Sixties. We didn’t help end the Vietnam War; we got the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst. We didn’t get the sexual revolution, we got no-fault divorce, herpes and AIDS. A cynic is an idealist burned once too often.

There has to be a middle ground, an honest attempt to promote what’s good about our little corner of the world without having to subscribe to the candy-colored, consumer- driven nightmare vision of hell (sentenced to a lifetime of damnation in the purgatory of a yuppie food court) that the brain-dead advertising wonks are spewing out over at 40Below.

As Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of community organizing liked to point out, a constructive alternative was the price one had to pay to protest the status quo. In that spirit, I would point out that I think one of the best suggestions for improving this area was by Jesse over at York Staters when he advocated the promotion of the backpacker/trekker tourism so common in Europe. Check out his post titled post titled: Hostels, Backpackers and Trains–A Future For Upstate Tourism?

Our Go Doggy

Sammy Driving

Originally uploaded by Phil At Sun.

Sammy calls shotgun!

You Look Marvelous

You Look Marvelous

Originally uploaded by Phil At Sun.

I was brushing my teeth this morning, looked at my tube of toothpaste and
the old Saturday Night Live skit with Billy Crystal popped into my head “it’s better to look good than to feel good, and darling. . .you look mahhvelous.”

I don’t have much brand loyalty with toothpaste, buying pretty much whatever is the least expensive. However, I’ve noticed that with increasing
regularity, the familiar American Dental Association seal of approval. is missing from my toothpaste.

The seal is a pretty amazing thing. A 125 year track record of guaranteeing the safety and effectiveness of dental products, even to the extent of verifying all advertising claims. This is also the cause of so many recent products being denied the seal. The big deal now is whitening. We’re not so much concerned about cavities as we are about our appearance (of course, if we had been paying closer attention to our brushing habits all along our teeth wouldn’t be so dingy.)

The fact is, almost all toothpaste that claims to whiten does not work! How do we know? The American Dental Association will not approve most toothpaste that claims it makes your teeth whiter. What other industry has a watchdog that thoroughly tests all products and vets all advertising? Why do we ignore this stuff? Vanity.

Remember, brush your teeth well, if only to get rid of all the tainted cow manure from that bagged spinach. Progress, no stoppin’ it!

It’s Not The Spinach

It’s the factory farm shit, stupid! Check out this NY Times op-ed piece entitled Leafy Green Sewage. Author Nina Planck takes a whole different view of the current problems with e-coli contaminated spinach.

The e-coli strain that causes sickness, disease and death is most prevalent in the manure produced by grain-fed cattle, those crammed into factory farm conditions. This e-coli strain is not found in cattle fed their natural diets: grass, hay etc.

We’d wipe out dangerous and life-threatening e-coli infections overnight if cattle were just fed correctly. What are the chances that the princes of cattle capitalism will agree to this?

Doing My Duty

I spent most of today in the new Courthouse building, I was summoned for jury duty. I knew it was coming, as my medical problems of the past year forced me into two postponements. Unlike many folks, I was actually looking forward to serving.

My father was a lawyer and I briefly (for one sad semester) toyed with the idea of law school myself. Being on a jury is as close to the law as I’ll ever get now (heaven forbid I get arrested.) I made it into the section where the lawyers question you about your background and your general temperment–voir dire.

The case in point was a burglary/robbery committed by a brother of his own sister, in the house they used to share and it seemed obvious that the defense was going to bring up the brother’s drug/alcohol abuse.

The questions thus clustered into three main categories: 1) can you get over the fact that this is something that other families deal with themselves? 2) can you get over the fact that there will be only one witness–the victim/sister? 3) can you get over the fact that alcohol and drugs can rob you of the intent necessary for a conviction in any crime?

Most folks seemed to answer all the questions in the affirmative. I wonder if the straighahead nature of the questions intimidated some jurors. After all, the questions were phrased as if positive responses were the mainstream position. Many people don’t want to publicly point out that their opinions aren’t like everyone else’s. This may explain why the Assistant DA mentioned that lawyers are often surprised by jurors who say one thing and vote another way.

Anyway, I wasn’t selected. I think the defense kicked me off because I mentioned that my work has me collaborating with the Syracuse Police Department to improve the safety of our neighborhoods. I did, however, get a good laugh from the collected audience when I was asked by the DA if I had ever received a traffic ticket. When I answered yes, she asked me if the experience had soured my opinion of the police or the legal system. I responded ” No, I was guilty. I paid the fine.”

Updated to include:

I really agree with City Court Judge Langston McKinney’s attempt last year to force the County’s Commissioner of Jurors Sid Oglesby to create all city-resident jury pools for city defendants. Of the 500+ potential jurors in todays pool there were probably less than 20 African-Americans or other people of color. The two African-Americans in my pool for the trial of an African-American accused of burglary and robbery were both dismissed (one at his own request.) The overwhelmingly white, suburban and significantly older jury pool surely isn’t a jury of one’s peers if you’re a young, black, African-American male.

Sammy, Molly & Archie

Bed Time

Originally uploaded by Phil At Sun.

My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down

“Every day you see a new commercial on TV where some song from your past has been sold to a car company or a restaurant chain, as if it’s to be automatically assumed that it’s just a commodity. . . ” In the quote above NYCO touches on a subject that has been a particular concern of mine for quite some time: the commercial use of rock ‘n’ roll songs.

Some people don’t seem to mind much (my wife loves to tease me by calling out “California Raisins!” everytime “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” comes on the radio.) Thomas Frank wrote an excellent book “Conquest of Cool” that studies the whole phenomenon of counterculture as consumer culture. So I shouldn’t freak out so much, right?

But I do. Rock music means a lot to me. Some tunes rekindle memories of happy times in my life. Some music just makes me want to get up and say YEAH! Some music makes me reflective and introspective (think Pink Floyd on headphones after midnight.) Some songs tap into other genres and cultures, educating me about folks quite different from myself. Oh, and did I mention the tunes that make me want to get up and say YEAH!

So, while I can follow the intellectual argument that rock ‘n’ roll is the new soundtrack of acquisition, it doesn’t make it any less painful to hear The Ramones shilling for Pepsi. (The Carbona glue folks really missed their chance!) Hope I die before I get old and become Pete Townshend, who argues that the Who songs are his and he can sell them if he so chooses.

Rock purists can sit back and guard their memories, compose mental lists of products to boycott and take comfort in folks like Bruce Springsteen (who refused hundreds of offers a day during the 1980’s to license Born In The USA) and Neil Young:

“Ain’t singin’ for pepsi/Ain’t singin’ for coke
I don’t sing for nobody/Makes me look like a joke
This note’s for you.”

0 for 3

My favored candidates in Democratic primaries have always done very poorly, no exception this time around.

Suozzi: never caught on, unable to smoke Spitzer out into the open and force him to answer anything specific.

Tasini: has the issue, but no name recognition, no money. Hillary still hasn’t answered for her Iraq posturing.

Green: he said it all in his concession speech: “I’m no politician.” While he may continue teaching and advocating, this original Nader Raider should reconsider electoral politics.

It’s Not Solely About Fixing Windows

A reader wrote into Sean Kirsts weblog to praise him for another in a series of posts and articles about litter. The comment that got me going was this:

“The ‘Broken Window syndrome’ is well-known; it’s the little things, like litter, graffiti, abandoned cars and crumbling front porches that create the impression that bigger indiscretions will go unnoticed.”

The Broken Window theory certainly is well-known. People throw it into conversations and writings all the time. The problem is that most take it as the gospel truth, like this writer, that the theory explains how places such as NYC turned their cities around and reduced crime. It is an appealing theory–stop the turnstile jumpers in the subway, the squeegee men in the street and the loiterers in the park then, voila! Watch drug crime and violence plummet.

Unfortunately, this is one of the classic logical fallacies: post hoc ergo propter hoc. In English it means “If after, then therefore, because.” The fallacy is to believe if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second.

Yes, New York City cracked down on so-called “quality of life” violations. And yes, drug crime and violence also declined. Are the two connected? Increasingly, academics studying this issue are quite skeptical of “broken windows” policing.

The big-time bestseller Freakonomics by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, point out many intertwined explanations for the reduction in drug crime and violence in NY City during the “broken windows” era–such as a reduction in number of young men of prime crime-committing age and more people in jail due to drug and gun laws.

In his book Illusion of Order, sub-titled The False Promise Of Broken Windows, University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt argues that Broken Windows has never been validated with research data and he himself lays out a case for its failure. His study of a 1990’s-era HUD program that relocated juvenile offenders from chaotic neighborhoods to stable neighborhoods showed that their rate of criminal activity remained the same in both neighborhoods.

And what have been the effects of Broken Windows on the ground? Ezekiel Edwards is a staff attorney for the Bronx Defenders, a nationally recognized organization of public defenders that has become a model of community-based advocacy for clients that are charged with crimes and for the communities they live in. He makes an eloquent case that its only practical effect has been harassment of poor and minority residents (as well as overloading an already burddened court system).

This whole debunking of Broken Windows also contributes to my belief that the continual discussion on litter control on Sean Kirst’s weblog is sort of beside the point. Crime wasn’t reduced solely by fixing broken windows. Litter will not be solved solely by sprucing up the interstate. What has worked locally in the fight to reduce litter? The bottle bill certainly took a large part of the waste stream off the streets. We should investigate in more large-scale methods to give people in this throw-away culture a reason to reduce, re-use and recycle. Couldn’t we investigate things such as the tax on fast food restaurants being tried in Oakland? Shouldn’t we invest more heavily in DPW crews, especially near known waste producers?

9/11 and Anniversaries

Sean Kirst wrote an eloquent post on his weblog contrasting the rememberance of tragedy in Lockerbie, Scotland about Pan Am 103 and in America over the WTC attacks. Sean believes that American culture seems to have absorbed the blows of the attacks and come out as shallow and materialistic as ever, despite all the “the world will never be the same” rhetoric.

Well, I’m not so sure that any culture doesn’t find a way to compartmentalize the painful events in its history and move forward. However, the speed with which the 9/11 attacks have become fodder for insincerity is relatively astounding. Perhaps an administration that callously trots out the specter of the WTC attacks and possible future terrorism whenever it needs a partisan bump in the polls may have something to do this?

Anyway, the 9/11/2001 anniversary always reminds me of two other September 11’s–dates that inspire me to remember history and commit myself to important ideals:

On 9/11/1973, Chilean military leader Augusto Pinochet led a coup that toppled the democratically-elected President Salvador Allende. The terror and executions of that day were sanctioned by the United States and assisted by agents of the C.I.A. The coup led to years of repression and disappearances of Chilean citizens struggling for democracy. However, their struggle was viewed as insignificant in the face of the larger geo-political contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This 9/11 reminds me to be ever vigilant of our country’s claims to being defenders of democracy and freedom. Ordinary leaders with grandiose dreams can have a devastating impact on our nation.

On 9/11/1999 I was married to my lovely wife after an extended courtship (seven years!). This 9/11 reminds me to love the family that you have and refuse to take your loved ones for granted. I think of all the families that were torn apart just two years later and resolve to never forget how lucky I am to have my family together.