Crown jellyfishes are the six families of true jellyfish that belong to the order Coronatae. They are distinguished from other jellyfish by the presence of a deep groove running around the umbrella, giving them the crown shape from which they take their name.
I don’t read much, or really any, political theory at this point in my life. It’s an important field but I have little background in it and the start-up cost of time and energy to read difficult texts is high. But political theorists can often add a great deal of context to the ideological framework of political movements. And so I was quite interested in reading Alex Gourevitch’s From Slavery to Cooperative Commonwealth, which is an exploration of how the Knights of Labor and other workers’ movements of the 19th century reframed ideas of republicanism in order to demand Independence from exploitative captialism.
Because of my lack of a background in political theory, I am writing this review in the context of how the book is useful for the U.S. historian. Framing his story with the biracial organizing of the Knights of Labor in Louisiana, which led to the Thibodaux Massacre, Gourevitch argues that the Knights created a rhetoric of freedom that could appeal to African-Americans because it was about not having masters of any kind. This brought together African-Americans’ lived experiences and memories of slavery with working people of all races who had new demands for emancipation from their employers. Ideally, the Knights hoped workers could create cooperative institutions that would allow them to be truly independent and avoid the tyranny of capital altogether.
This master-slave language was a significant transition in the history of republican thought. The two key points for Gourevitch is a) republicanism had largely been an elite language in the past and b) slavery was a real live thing in the United States and when it was gone, workers could then use that language to serve their own purposes. On the first, 19th century workers appropriated this elite language around independence and virtue to describe the world of labor relations. Slavery and elite republicanism had been tied together from the Greeks and Romans to the Founding Fathers in Virginia. Life in the United States challenged this in a number of ways, creating not only working class definitions of it, but most prominently, abolitionists who tried to disconnect the need for chattel slavery from American republican thought. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison completely rejected workers’ claims to be slaves, often in vociferous terms, because workers were not unfree like slaves and therefore the comparison were not apt. Economic dependence was not unfreedom.
But the defeat of slavery then solved the abolitionist objection to worker use of this language, or at least made that appropriation less of a threat to their political project. With one form of slavery undone, workers sought to use republicanism to undo what was becoming a new and increasingly powerful form of unfreedom: the employer-employee relationship of the Gilded Age. The issue of independence was at the core of labor’s critique of this new system. The changes in American work developing before the Civil War began to create widespread changes to workers’ independence and freedom. If they labored for 12 hours but only made enough money to buy goods that took 4 hours to produce, that was 8 hours a day being stolen from them by their employer. And even if contracts were enforced fairly, the conditions of control had become so bad after the Civil War that workers were still oppressed. They didn’t make enough money to withhold their labor from employers, so the system was already unequal. Then the contract ceded total control of the workplace to the employer. Ultimately, only cooperative workers organizations could allow workers to escape this system of capitalism and regain their independence. A cooperative republic would challenge the dominant system of production and give workers control over their lives again.
This book gets at another key issue in American history, which is how a Republican Party that ended slavery and sought rights for free blacks during Reconstruction could then turn around and not only crush workers movements, but talk about unions in apocalyptic terms. But these two things were not contradictory in the mindset of Republicans. Garrison himself could celebrate black freedom in terms of “independent laborers by voluntary contract.” But what did “voluntary” mean? For mainstream Republicans, it was the conditions an employee agreed to when he (most likely) agreed to take a job. This construction of freedom did not have any room for other forms of compulsion like the need to eat or put a roof over your head. Freedom did not have to extend any farther than compulsory labor at the point of a lash. The Supreme Court itself roundly rejected the idea of alternative forms of tyranny in the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 when white New Orleans butchers said a new law forcing them to work at a single private institution violated the 14th Amendment by violating their economic independence and placing them in servitude. From there through Lochner, Gourevitch takes readers through how the courts routinely found that freedom of contract was true freedom, ignoring the increasingly unequal realities of Gilded Age society that led to the rise of the Knights in the 1870s and 1880s as a response.
Gourevitch also helps us understand the Knights’ unfortunate position toward immigrants, especially the Chinese and eastern Europeans. Labor republicans held themselves and other workers to very high standards because they believed the cooperative republic would have to rest on the morality of its members. These standards could easily not be fulfilled. They would them blame workers for their own failings. Given the racial milieu of the late 19th century, blaming workers for their own problems could easily morph into racial characterization. However, Gourevitch doesn’t really get into how the Knights managed to include African-Americans into this system when the Chinese and eastern Europeans could not be. That’s a weakness of the book, but you can read Joseph Gerteis’ Class and the Color Line for an understanding of that. Unfortunately, that book is not cited in Gourevitch’s bibliography, even though it was published in 2007. Interestingly, the two books use the same image for their cover.
Gourevitch does not shy away from the modern implications of his study in the New Gilded Age, noting that “who is subject to whose will” is a key question today. (177) Like in the 19th century, employers are using unnecessary power against workers to hurt their lives, such as cracking down on bathroom breaks to use Gourevitch’s example. He suggests the positives of using labor republicanism rhetoric and moving toward cooperative enterprises today. Personally, I’m really skeptical that cooperative enterprises can succeed on any large scale. But as I have argued before, one of the similarities between the two Gilded Ages is that in both cases, working people were smacked in the face by a radically transforming capitalism that left them figuring out just what the heck happened to their lives searching for any alternative to that system. So any alternative should be on the table today.
Ultimately, Gourevitch wrote a book that goes a long way to explaining some of the trickier and most often misunderstood intellectual trends in American history.
By all means, celebrate. But, looking to future gay-rights cases, Justice Kennedy gave us more rhetoric than precedent.
Friday, the Supreme Court ended the decades-long legal debate on marriage equality, making same-sex marriage legal for the entire nation in Obergefell v Hodges. Across the country, supporters of gay rights were jubilant as they read to each other delicious paragraphs out of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. But I have a complaint: Justice Kennedy got the right result for the wrong reasons, and that will eventually cost us.
Not in other marriage cases — that’s over, just like everybody says. But Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric about the dignity of gay relationships wasn’t supported by a sound legal framework that we can use in, say, employment equality cases.
The DOMA hangover. As regular Sift readers know, I have mixed feelings about Justice Kennedy, particularly on the subject of gay rights. He tends to rule the way I want, and he’s often the swing vote that puts my position over the top. But being the swing vote, he usually ends up writing the majority opinion, and he writes it badly. That’s what happened when the Court threw out the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) two years ago, which I covered (along with Chief Justice Roberts’ hamstringing of the Voting Rights Act) in an article I demurely called “This Court Sucks“. And it happened again Friday.
The reason Obergefell came to the Court in the first place was that lower courts could not follow Kennedy’s mushy reasoning in the DOMA case. The Supreme Court is supposed to do more than just decide the current case, it’s supposed provide interpretive frameworks for lower courts to apply, so that future cases can be decided without involving the Supremes again. But when Judge Kean was throwing out Oklahoma’s ban on same-sex marriage, for example, he wrote that he had “gleaned” — not quoted, gleaned — two principles from Kennedy’s DOMA opinion. Other courts gleaned other principles and disagreed, so the highest court had to sort it out.
This time, Kennedy has made marriage equality the law of the land, but he’s done it with another piece of mushy reasoning that is a poor climax to the distinguished series of lower-court decisions supporting same-sex marriage, going all the way back to the 2003 Goodridge decision in Massachusetts. Instead of following the compelling logic laid out by one lower court after another, Kennedy’s opinion looks like exactly what critics of marriage equality say it is: a judge redefining marriage according to his own values. His ruling is full of beautiful tributes to the dignity of same-sex couples, but short on the kind of step-by-step legal thinking you can find in the lower-court rulings, which I summarized last month.
Due process isn’t enough. Every pro-marriage-equality judge I know of, other than Kennedy, has centered the argument on the 14th Amendment‘s guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws”. As I summarized:
In practice, that phrase has been interpreted to mean that if the government treats some people differently than others, it has to have a good reason. The more significant the discrimination, the weightier the reason needs to be.
That’s why laws that provide a marriage option to opposite-sex couples but deny it to same-sex couples are in trouble: because it’s increasingly hard to say what legitimate reason the government might have for that discrimination.
… So the claim that gays and lesbians want to “redefine marriage” has it exactly backwards. During the last century-and-a-half, marriage has already been redefined. And in marriage as it exists today — rather than during the Revolution or the Civil War — what’s our justification for refusing its advantages to same-sex couples?
Instead, Kennedy focuses on the 14th Amendment’s due-process clause, and finds a fundamental right to marry in the word liberty. His rhetoric is inspiring if you already agree with him, but if you don’t, his reasoning isn’t compelling. The dissents by Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito eviscerate his argument, and rightly so.
Kennedy’s biggest problem is that the Constitution doesn’t require governments, either federal or state, to recognize marriage at all. (If Oregon wanted to become “the free love state” and stop performing marriages entirely, that would be up to Oregonians.) Liberty traditionally means being left alone by the government, not that the government must help you in some way. So Roberts makes an argument that appears in some form in all the dissents:
Our cases have consistently refused to allow litigants to convert the shield provided by constitutional liberties into a sword to demand positive entitlements from the State.
The question Kennedy should have raised is: Once the State has defined the “positive entitlement” of marriage for some people, what’s its justification for denying those benefits to others? But that’s an equal-protection issue, not a liberty issue.
In short: the ruling came out the right way, but the people who still want to hold out against marriage equality feel vindicated in their view that the Court has usurped the power of the legislative branch by “redefining marriage”. It didn’t have to be like this. Why, oh why, couldn’t Justice Ginsburg have written this ruling?
Why it’s important. The lower courts nearly all used the equal-protection framework: Define a level of scrutiny appropriate to laws that discriminate against gays, and then examine the government’s reasons for discriminating under that level of scrutiny. One of the issues to decide, if you go that way, is whether gays and lesbians are a class that has traditionally faced discrimination, and so how much benefit of the doubt a legislature or electorate should get as to its motives.
Racial discrimination, for example, faces the highest level of scrutiny. As a matter of judicial precedent, laws that discriminate against traditionally disadvantaged racial groups are inherently suspect. Similarly, laws that discriminate against women are inherently suspect. It’s possible that some particular race- or gender-discriminating law can be justified, but a court will not give the government any benefit of the doubt.
The traditional discrimination against gays and lesbians certainly would justify giving laws against them some heightened level of scrutiny, but the Supreme Court has never done so. Kennedy doesn’t do so either.
Pro-marriage-equality judges who don’t invoke heightened scrutiny are forced to give the legislative branch the benefit of the doubt. And so they end up having to argue that same-sex marriage bans are completely irrational. That argument has been made, and was sitting there for Kennedy to endorse. He didn’t.
Going either way would have established a precedent for fighting other anti-gay discrimination: Either anti-gay discrimination would face heightened scrutiny in the future, or there would be a precedent for saying that certain kinds of anti-gay discrimination are irrational.
Instead, Justice Kennedy gave us just this result, justified by a lot of effusive rhetoric that has no further legal consequences.
The “threat to American democracy”. All four dissents lamented a judicial usurpation of powers properly belonging to the democratic branches — which is in fact a fair criticism of the argument Kennedy made. The place for flowery rhetoric is in the legislature or on the campaign trail. But it wouldn’t have been a fair criticism of the equal-protection argument Kennedy avoided.
Dahlia Lithwick raised the right question:
And all I could keep thinking was, “Where was all this five unelected judges chatter when you all handed down Citizens United? Or Shelby County? Why does this rhetoric about five elitist out-of-touch patrician fortune-cookie writers never stick when you’re in the five?”
The most-quoted Roberts line was:
Indeed, however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause.
If you’re a straight person very distant from the gay community, this might sound convincing. But if you imagine yourself in the place of a same-sex couple, it isn’t convincing at all. Would you rather have widespread social approval ten years from now, or the equal protection of the laws today? The answer is pretty obvious.
The comparison to interracial marriage is apt. XKCD draws the chart:
Our fellow citizens are being persuaded of the justice of marriage equality — not, for the most part, by referendum campaigns, but by living in society with same-sex couples. That process will continue apace.
In these the-sky-will-fall-if-we-allow-this situations, most people have to see something in action before they realize the panic-mongers are conning them. As I predicted back in 2003:
Personally, I expect the same-sex marriage issue to follow the same course as interracial marriage. After a few years of Chicken-Little panic, the vast majority of Americans will recognize that the sky has not fallen, and that the new rights of homosexuals have come at the expense of no one.
Today, no one cares how interracial couples got the right to marry. Most young people have trouble believing it was ever an issue. (Have you ever tried to explain to a teen-ager why his friend’s parents’ marriage would have been illegal 50 years ago? I have.) So it will be for same-sex marriage.
Every year, the American Library Association releases a list of the top banned books in the country. But how do you determine which book is the most banned? The statisticians at FiveThirtyEight attempted to figure out exactly which book earned the crowning achievement of most banned book ever. The trouble, they found, is that even the most banned book one year might have been less fervently banned than books in previous years. One thing they did learn, though, was that banned books sell pretty well:
It may not be rigorous or even particularly accurate, but the ALA’s yearly list has drawn attention to many books. Perhaps as a result of that spotlight, “And Tango Makes Three” has been a huge hit, at least as far as books go. It has been debated on “The View.” A decade after it was published, customers still buy dozens of copies a day on Amazon. It has been translated into 11 languages and even turned into a play.
Why President Obama can say “nigger” and I can’t (except when I can)
Maybe the best treatment of racial slurs ever to appear in a movie was this scene from the 2006 film Clerks 2. Randall, a fast-food worker, can’t understand why porch monkey is racist: When his non-racist grandmother used to say it, he claims, she just meant “a lazy person” not “a lazy black person”. After a black customer (played by Wanda Sykes) freaks, Randall’s friend Dante finally convinces him that porch monkey really is a racial slur (and maybe Randall’s grandmother had more racial prejudice than he remembered). But then Randall decides he’s going to “take it back”; he’s going to keep saying porch monkey, but reclaim it by using it in a non-racist way. A frustrated Dante explains to Randall that he can’t reclaim porch monkey, “because you’re not black!”
“Well listen to you,” Randall responds. “Telling me I can’t do something because of the color of my skin? You’re the racist.”
Randall’s obtuseness and Dante’s exasperation are funny, but Randall’s view is not that different from a lot of white men: Why are the rules different for us? Black rappers say nigger all the time, but when we do it’s racist. Meredith Brooks can name a song “Bitch” and Christina Aguilera can up the ante to “Super Bitch“. But when a guy says “bitch”, it’s sexist. A female writer like Lisa Miller can title her New York Magazine article “Hillary Clinton Finally Has Permission to be a Bitch” and it’s supposed to be, like, liberating or something. But when Glenn Beck referred to Clinton — the same woman! — as a “stereotypical bitch“, that was objectionable.
What’s up with that? When blacks and women can say and do things that white men can’t, isn’t that a double standard? And as Randall says, aren’t the liberals who promote that double standard the real racists and sexists?
In a word, no. But in real life — particularly when an example springs up unexpectedly, like Randall’s porch monkey — explaining why can be frustrating. A whole branch of the media is devoted to promoting what I have elsewhere called privileged distress, the feeling among white men — and Christians and English-speakers and the rich and every other privileged class in America — that they are really the persecuted ones. Their supporting examples and arguments and ways of framing the situation come easily to mind, while the explanations of why that’s the wrong way to look at it require some thought.
So let’s do some of that thinking.
Banter or insult? When blacks say “Hey, nigger” or “What’s up, nigger?” to each other, that’s banter. But if a white man like me walks up to a black and says, “What’s up, nigger?”, it’s an insult — even if I’m smiling and friendly when I do it. Why? There’s actually a color-blind rule here that’s fairly simple: An insult can be friendly banter if it can be thrown right back at you.
The reason it can be banter when one black guy says nigger to another is that the other guy can respond, “Who you calling nigger, nigger?” That doesn’t work when the white guy says it.
It’s not a double standard, because the same rule applies to me in exactly the same way. At my 40th high school reunion last fall, we were constantly making fun of how old we’ve gotten. Picture me with a too-full beer stein, and a classmate saying “Hey, old man, you sure you can lift that? Don’t want to hurt yourself.” It’s banter, and everyone laughs, because we’re all the same age.
But now imagine that the handsome and athletic young guy tending bar says the same thing to me as he serves the drink: “Hey, old man. You sure you can lift that? Don’t want to hurt yourself.” Now those are fighting words. He’s thrown an insult at me that I can’t throw right back. Now I’ve got something to prove.
The same rule applies all over: Fat people can kid each other about their weight. Tyrion Lannister can tell dwarf jokes. It’s not a double standard.
There are no white male equivalents. Sometimes you’ll hear people banter, not by throwing the same insult back and forth, but by using insults that are more-or-less equivalent. Picture two white guys at a bar, taunting each other in a friendly way with dago and pollock.
Some white guys think they should be able to use nigger the same way. The other guy can throw honky or cracker back at us, so it’s all good. Here’s the problem: honky and cracker are in no way equivalent to nigger.
If you just look them up in a dictionary you might think they are equivalent: honky is a racial slur directed at whites, nigger at blacks. What’s the difference?
Usage.
Nigger has centuries of usage behind it, and the connotation of that usage is that blacks are a subhuman race. Nigger evokes a detailed stereotype — lazy, stupid, violent, lustful, dangerous — while honky just says you’re a white guy I don’t like. For centuries, niggers weren’t really people. There’s no equivalent word for whites, because whites have always been seen as people.
If that example of the importance of usage doesn’t ring true for you, look at a different example: cow and bull. If you had recently arrived from Mars, where you learned English out of a dictionary, you might think that cow and bull are equivalent insults for women and men: Each compares a human to a bovine of the same gender.
But those words have centuries of usage behind them, and so they connote very different different ideas. Calling a woman a cow implies that she’s fat, lazy, and stupid, probably good for nothing but whelping and suckling babies. Calling a man a bull, on the other hand, is a compliment. He’s powerful and headstrong. A running back can bull his way over the goal line, while someone who gets intimidated out of making a legitimate claim has been cowed.
Likewise, a Martian might think that prick and cunt are equivalent insults: They each identify a person with his or her genitalia. But a prick is a minor annoyance, while a cunt is a subhuman who is only good for sex. You might have an argument with a prick, but talking to a cunt is just stupid.
Limbaugh.
In short: No way, no how can white men banter with nigger. Neither the word itself nor any equivalent insult can be thrown back at us. Ditto for bitch or cow or cunt. A woman can shoot back with prick, asshole, bastard, or jerk, but it’s just not the same.
Taboos vs. stereotypes. White guys like Rush Limbaugh treat slurs as if they were taboos — words we’re not supposed to say just because we’re not supposed to say them, like shit or fuck. There’s no reason for it, it’s just a rule. Worse, it’s a rule that’s not applied fairly: Only white guys get called to account when they break it.
How Limbaugh pictures himself
Consequently, white guys make slurs the object of bad-boy humor. Limbaugh thinks he is being brave and daring when he calls Sandra Fluke a slut. And he thinks he’s being clever when he finds ways to come as close as possible to saying nigger without actually saying it. (It’s like those I-didn’t-really-say-a-bad-word jokes we told in grade school: “What did the fish say when he swam into a concrete wall?” “Dam!”)
That’s what white guys — and a few non-white guys who are trying too hard to fit in — mean when they brag that they’re “not PC”. It’s a James Dean pose: I’m a rebel. I can’t be bound by your arbitrary rules about what words I can or can’t say.
What’s wrong with that attitude is that society’s distaste for slurs is not a meaningless taboo. There are at least two good reasons for it:
The various disadvantaged communities are all debating whether or not it’s ever OK to use the slurs themselves. Some argue that when black rappers use nigger, they jam the stereotype rather than perpetuate it. Some women believe that saying bitch is liberating, because it shows the word doesn’t scare them. Others disagree, believing that any use of a slur promotes its stereotypes.
I think this: Those issues are for those communities to figure out. In the unlikely event that they ask my advice, I might give it. But until then, my opinion as a white guy doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.
Words as words. Now, somebody is bound to point out that in my discussion of why white guys shouldn’t use nigger, bitch, and cunt, I’ve used nigger, bitch, and cunt. Isn’t that liberal hypocrisy? Aren’t I just waving my liberal privilege in Rush’s face, saying “I can say it but you can’t!”?
I plead not guilty. There is a difference between using a word and referring to a word. I haven’t been talking about “the niggers”, I’ve been referring to the word nigger.
Why is that OK? Once again, these are not taboos. There’s no dark magic in the letters that is unleashed whenever they are put together. The power is in the use, not in the pronunciation.
That distinction is too complex for children, so we teach them not to use the words by presenting them as taboo. And this creates problems for children, as when the tattle-tale blurts out: “Teacher, Billy said shit.”
Likewise in the mass media, where children might be listening and might regard the speaker as an authoritative example — “But Mommy, the man on the radio said it.” — we insist on circumlocutions like the N-word. But when adults talk to other adults as adults, we need to be able to name the words we’re referring to. Otherwise you wind up in situations like the stoning scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Obama on WTF. So now we come to President Obama’s interview on the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron“, where he said:
Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public.
And that caused a freak-out. Fox News’ Todd Starnes was one among many:
It was disappointing to say the least to hear such a vulgarity come out of the mouth of the leader of the free world.
But there you have it folks – this is man who was supposed to usher in the post-racial America. This is the man who was supposed to unite, not divide.
What President Obama said is indefensible. It soils the dignity of the Oval Office.
That’s a reaction to breaking a taboo: It would be appropriate if Obama had said fuck or shit. We don’t want our president saying crap like that.
But look at it in light of my previous analysis: We have a black man referring to the N-word in a forum not intended for children. It’s fine.
Fox’ David Webb raises this question:
Could you imagine if a Ted Cruz or somebody on the Republican side used it, in the same context, what the reaction would be.
You mean referring to it, in a discussion of racism intended for adults? I’d be fine with it.
Glee. What I’m not fine with is what Ted Nugent did: Use Obama’s example as an argument in favor of slurs and offensive symbols in general.
What sort of politically correct zombie could actually believe that the elimination of a word or a flag would reduce the evil of racism?
What sort of goofball could possibly believe that certain words are OK for one group of people but forbidden by others?
That, by the way, is the definition of racism.
I’m sure Ted and Randall could have a long talk about that, but no, it isn’t.
There’s something gleeful in Nugent’s usage of nigger, and that right there is the final test I’d recommend to any white person who’s thinking about saying it: You might think you’re referring to the word in the analytic way I have endorsed. But while analysis may at times be satisfying or even fascinating, it is almost never gleeful.
So if the word tastes delicious in your mouth, if saying it feels like a forbidden pleasure, something else is going on. Maybe you should reconsider.
The “Original Rhinestone Cowboy,” Loy Bowlin, in his Beautiful Holy Jewel Home, McComb, Mississippi (1990) (photo by Harrod Blank, courtesy John Michael Kohler Arts Center Artist Archives)
In the late 1970s, Loy Bowlin in McComb, Mississippi, styled himself as the “Original Rhinestone Cowboy.” From his slate-blue 1967 Cadillac to his dentures, he adorned everything in his life with rhinestones and spangles, including the entire inside of his house, which he anointed the Beautiful Holy Jewel Home.
“He covered the walls with patterns of cut-out paper, paint, glitter, and collaged photographs and magazine illustrations,” Karen Patterson, associate curator of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, told Hyperallergic. “The result was a kaleidoscopic and dazzling home interior.”
Loy Bowlin, “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” (installation detail, living room) (1985–1990), John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection (photo from 2006, courtesy John Michael Kohler Arts Center Artist Archives)
When Bowlin died in 1995, that sparkling home was sold and set to be demolished, until its purchase by Houston artist and collector Katy Emde. The house was completely taken apart and later acquired by the Kohler Foundation, and after four years of preservation gifted to the Kohler Arts Center along with many of Bowlin’s ostentatious hats, suits, and furniture. Next year, the art institution is devoting its main gallery to conserving the Beautiful Holy Jewel Home, where the public can witness the meticulous work on their permanent collection’s sole comprehensively relocated art environment.
Since it was established in 1967 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the Kohler Arts Center has made vernacular art environments central to their programming, and in 2017 the entire art center will host an exhibition on the work of creators like Mary Nohl whose eclectic cottage they recently helped preserve in situ in Fox Point, Wisconsin, Emery Blagdon of Nebraska whose “healing machines” once installed in a barn were acquired in 2004, and Nek Chand, the Indian artist who died this month, known for sculpting the sprawling Rock Garden of Chandigarh in India.
“We now care for 30 large bodies of interrelated objects from dismantled art environments which is the largest collection of art environment components held in any museum,” Patterson said. “Each case is treated differently and often starts with looking at preservation records, listening to oral histories and interviews, digging through archives, if there are any, and as much research as possible. As an exhibitions team, we acknowledge that the loss of the original context has happened and respectfully walk the line between recreating and evoking, of museum displays and evolving narratives.”
Loy Bowlin’s suits in ‘Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds’ (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)
Loy Bowlin, “Untitled” (1985–1990), paper, paint, glitter, sequins, foil, glue, mixed media, 30.625 x 30.25 x 1.25 in. (courtesy John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection)
Loy Bowlin in 1977 and views of his home in ‘Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds’ (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)
As for Loy Bowlin, the Rhinestone Cowboy who was inspired by the Glen Campbell song for his flashy style and persona, that same care will be devoted to his glitzy legacy. He was initially inspired to transform his life into one of glamor and light in a time of depression when those lyrics caught him: “But I’m gonna be where the lights are shinin’ on me / Like a rhinestone cowboy.”
“Here, Bowlin saw, was a way out of his sorrows,” Leslie Umberger wrote in the 2007 catalogue for the Kohler’s Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds exhibition. “He soon began thinking about how to adopt the rhinestone cowboy persona — starting with his own personal appearance — and do all he could to ensure that, wherever he went, the lights would shine on him.”
Part of his living room was exhibited in 2000, but this will illuminate all his self-taught sewing and collaging with the repeated patterns of his Mississippi palace, where the rhinestones were as meticulously patterned as a DIY Persian mosque. As Patterson said: “The arts center’s mission is to encourage and support innovative explorations in the arts, and that has translated into 50 years of saying, ‘this is worth looking at'”
Rhinestone Cowboy Conservation Lab is at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan, Wisconsin) December 6, 2015 to December 31, 2016.
Internet of Things appliance can print images and text on the surface of a coffee drink:
Add a Ripple of delight to every cup. Milk froth is your canvas. Coffee extract is your medium.
Transform any image or text into a “Ripple” in seconds with the Ripple Maker. Create inspiring art atop the milk froth layer of coffee beverages, both hot and cold.
Lalbagh Fort in Dhaka (photo by Shahnoor Habib Munmun, via Wikipedia)
The English-language newspaper Dhaka Tribune reported on Friday that part of a 400-year-old wall protecting the historic Lalbagh Qilla, a fort which dates back to the very founding of Dhaka by the Mughal Dynasty in the early 17th century, has been demolished — and that the Bangladeshi government’s Archaeological Department signed off on the action. This is but one of many construction projects within and around the fort’s grounds that threaten to disarm the historical significance of a structure that has served as a cultural touchstone for the millions who, over the centuries, have called Bengal, and later Bangladesh, home. The Tribune reports:
Part of the massive ancient wall … has been demolished because the archaeological authority wants to build a car park at the cost of Tk 30 lakh [~$39,000].
The action has drawn protests from a number of quarters, especially since the government often neglects historical restoration work on a plea of a lack of funds.
Moreover, and weirdly, after being alerted to the fact that the proposed parking lot would adversely affect the design and feel of the historic site, and that the move is in violation of the Antiquities Act of 1968, meant to protect culturally significant sites in Bangladesh, Altaf Hossain, the director general of the Archaeological Department, said:
This will not adversely affect the main design of the fort.
He later added: “But still, I will look into it. If I find something wrong, I will take action.”
On Sunday, the High Court of Bangladesh intervened and blocked the demolition of the wall, as well as construction of the parking lot, and demanded an explanation for the government’s moves. Responding to the Tribune‘s queries after the court issued the halt, Hossain said:
The construction work was halted two days back. But as the High Court has already ordered to stop the work, now we will renovate the wall.
Asked about the government’s next moves, he said:
There is a ground named Shaheed Ali Eidgah Field … we are thinking to relocate the parking place there. As the field is owned by the city corporation, we will seek their approval.
Basically, the very institution tasked with protecting Bangladesh’s cultural heritage was caught on the job knocking it down, and though there has been some important institutional pushback, it’s hard to tell if activists will be able to arrest the government’s seemingly ongoing plan to remake the fort into something else.
The Lalbagh Fort, or Qilla (literally the “Red Garden Fort,” owing to its red bricks made from the rich alluvial soil native to Bengal), was built by the Mughal Governor of Bengal and later Mughal Emperor Azam Shah. He was the grandson of Emperor Shah Jahan, the man who built a grand tomb to enshrine his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal: the Taj Mahal. The architectural history of the Taj lives on in Bengal, which, as one of the richest states in India, was a bespoke jewel in the crown of the Mughal Empire from the 16th to 19th century, and specifically in Dhaka in the form of the Lalbagh Fort.
Another view of the Lalbagh Fort (photo by Shahnoor Habib Munmun, via Wikipedia) (click to enlarge)
Construction on the fort began in 1678 in the same architectural tradition as the Taj, if not with the same opulence and emotional verve. However, it never enjoyed the regard of its Indian cousin: before it was completed, a princess of the Mughal line died within the fort, and the structure was abandoned; after she was buried there, the Mughal court left it to ruin, convinced it was cursed. The fort became prominent only as a shrine to the princess and the Mughal line, a lost heritage. It became a shrine to loss, to memory.
Four hundred years out, the fort stands as a symbol of the founding of Dhaka, then the capital of Mughal Bengal, now the capital city of Bangladesh. It stands as a symbol of a culture contested and maybe even as a benchmark for progress that was later ruined under the East India Company and, after that, the British Raj. Azam Shah’s successor, the Mughal Governor Shaista Khan, nurtured Dhaka as a city and a trading port, and in a surprising turn in 1686, banned the East India Company from Bengal. Successive Bengali rebellions reemployed the story of Shaista Khan’s defense of Bengal against foreign economic and military might, and ultimately the fort became a symbol of Old Dhaka, a hushed place that predates all the insufferable, nasty in-fighting that has roiled politics and society in Bangladesh.
These days the fort is open to the public, often used as a site for the genteel set to relax amid flower shows and the like. And the government is tearing at the walls of an important part of Bangladeshi heritage for what? A car park that only VIPs will be allowed to use. This isn’t an act of iconoclasm, like the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas (now come back to ghostly life) or ISIS’s brutal erasure of Syria and Iraq’s pre-Islamic culture. It is a government effacing its own past for the sake of the convenience of its bloated, rapacious political class. The High Court’s intervention will halt the government’s moves for only a while. Director General Hossain has been given two weeks to respond to the court’s demand for an explanation, but when the government sends the protectors of its cultural history to knock down parts of that history, you have to wonder: who watches the watchmen?
We’ve seen this story before: Sohel Rana, the owner of the Rana Plaza building that collapsed in 2013, killing 1,100 factory workers, was a close associate of the current prime minister and enjoyed an inherited position within the ruling Awami League Party. After the collapse, under public pressure, Rana became a pariah, but before that he enjoyed great privileges that bordered on illegality. In the fort’s case, there’s no proof that there are any quid pro quos, but it is telling that, without any public consultation whatsoever, the government began rolling over the people’s grounds, paving over not-quite-paradise, to put up a parking lot.
The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.
— David Graeber, The Democracy Project (2013)
Both the country and the Sift had an amazing week. What was amazing for the country is outlined below. As for the Sift, it had the most page views of any week ever — more than 150K — led by a surge of interest in last August’s post “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“. (Being extensively quoted at FireDogLake may have had something to do with that.) That article got more than 120K views this week, rocketing past “The Distress of the Privileged” to become the most popular post in Weekly Sift history. (Between them, those two posts account for slightly over half of the traffic since the Sift moved to WordPress in 2011.)
This week’s featured posts are “Two Cheers for Justice Kennedy” and “Slurs: Who Can Say Them, When, and Why“.
Thursday, the Court refused to gut ObamaCare, and Friday it legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. I broke off one piece of my Court analysis into its own article: “Two Cheers for Justice Kennedy“. Gay-rights advocates loved the rhetoric in Kennedy’s majority opinion, but his reasoning was mushy and convoluted. He provided justification for the criticism that he was redefining marriage according to his own values, and he didn’t establish a more general gay-rights precedent that was there for the taking in some of the lower-court rulings.
Roberts and polygamy. I was a little surprised that Chief Justice Roberts went for the polygamy cheap shot.
One immediate question invited by the majority’s position is whether States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of two people. Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one.
If you’ve lived anywhere that allows same-sex marriage, you’ve seen that it’s barely a leap at all. All the legal structure remains exactly the same, you just allow more people to access it. Polygamy OTOH opens up all kinds of complications, like: How does family health insurance work if you can add as many people to your family as you want? They may not be insuperable difficulties, but there’s some thinking to be done.
But what really amazed me was that Roberts learned nothing from Justice Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence, the case that threw out laws criminalizing sodomy in 2003. Scalia made a reduction-to-absurdity argument, claiming that the Court’s reasoning would lead to same-sex marriage; since that would clearly be absurd, the Lawrence ruling must be absurd also. But instead, his dissent has been quoted again and again in subsequent years, making Scalia the inadvertent prophet of marriage equality.I don’t expect to see legal polygamy anytime soon. But if it does happen, Roberts will be its inadvertent prophet.
Obamacare. For the second time — the first was three years ago — the Supreme Court refused to kill ObamaCare, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the opinion once again. This time he had Justice Kennedy with him, adding to the four liberals (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) to make a 6-3 decision. The far-right faction of the Court (Thomas, Alito, Scalia) united around a dissent written by Scalia in his trademark everyone-who-disagrees-with-me-is-an-idiot style (maybe best rendered as an emo song).
[BTW: I’ll take some credit for being right about the outcome. When I examined this case last summer, I wrote: “I don’t think they’ll overturn the subsidies. The Roberts Court practices conservative activism, but prefers to do it by stealth. … I can imagine Thomas, Alito, and Scalia going that way, but Roberts and Kennedy will be reluctant.”]
Like the previous legal attack on ObamaCare, this one was basically absurd. (In the 2012 case, a new legal theory was invented precisely for the purpose of killing ObamaCare, and got four justices to endorse it. Salon‘s Andrew Koppelman wrote: “The constitutional limits that the bill supposedly disregarded could not have been anticipated because they did not exist while the bill was being written.” In fact, it got five justices: Roberts endorsed the theory, but re-interpreted the Affordable Care Act to avoid applying it.)
This challenge was more of a legal “gotcha” attack, claiming that the way one sentence was worded, the law didn’t mean what everyone involved in the legislative process thought it meant and intended it to mean. As I explained last summer, the sentence establishing the subsidies to help people pay for health insurance refers to “exchanges established by the State”, while 33 states let the federal government set up a healthcare exchange for them. So the plaintiffs in King v Burwell argued that the subsidies weren’t valid in those states. As Roberts observed in his opinion, this would likely have started a “death spiral” of health insurance in the federal-exchange states: Without the subsidies, the individual mandate wouldn’t apply to a large number of people, who then would wait until they got sick to get insurance. Insurance companies would raise their rates to compensate, pushing even more people out of the market, and so on.
According to former Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, who was lobbied heavily by the administration but ultimately voted against the ACA, the interpretation pushed by the plaintiffs was “never part of our conversations at any point”. She attributed the disputed sentence to “inadvertent language”.
Back when we had white presidents, Congress handled this kind of thing without getting the courts involved. It’s not at all unusual to discover after a law is passed that some part of it isn’t worded quite right. But these drafting errors are just fixed by new legislation, which usually passes without noticeable opposition. (No one has come up with an example of a major pre-Obama law that got skewered because of inadvertent language.) Similarly, it’s typical for a complicated piece of legislation to need minor fixes to its procedures, and Congress used to simply recognize that the fixes made the law better, rather than seeing this as a chance to refight the original battle and scuttle everything.
But in Obama Era, Republicans in Congress practice an unprecedented scorched-earth opposition, and have abandoned all previous standards of fair play. So there is no chance of getting amending legislation passed. (This is also why Obama has had to do so much through executive order. No matter how sensible a procedural change is, Congress will not pass it. Obamacare delenda est!) So the law Congress originally passed is the one the Court has to work with. Like Obama, the Court had to decide whether to take on a larger role to compensate for Congressional dysfunction.
Fortunately, Roberts and Kennedy did the sensible thing. Looking at the option of canceling the subsidies in 33 states and throwing their insurance markets into chaos, Roberts wrote: “It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner.”
And it is. No one who voted for the law has come forward saying s/he thought it meant what the plaintiffs claimed. And when the state legislatures were deciding whether or not to create healthcare exchanges, nobody argued that they were risking their citizens’ subsidies.
Roberts’ interpretation has an added bonus: One way the case could have come out (the way one of the appeals courts ruled) is that the sentence in question is “ambiguous”, and so the Court would defer to the IRS’ interpretation. But that would allow the next president to order the IRS to interpret the law differently. By finding on his own authority that the sentence means what the Obama administration has been saying, Roberts avoided that scenario.
So maybe now we can just let the law operate as intended. It seems to be doing pretty well.
When I wrote “Please Take Down Your Confederate Flag” last week, I had no idea how suddenly the ground would shift. I expected South Carolina’s Republican majority to rally around that flag, leading to further protests like flag-burnings.
Well, within hours after I expressed that expectation, not only did Governor Haley ask the legislature to remove the flag from the capitol grounds, but a groundswell began to remove Confederate symbols across the South. Alabama Governor Bentley removed Confederate flags from a memorial on his state capitol’s grounds. Tennessee started talking about removing the bust of KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest from its capitol. Mitch McConnell called for moving the statue of Jefferson Davis in Kentucky’s capitol to a museum. Several governors said they’d eliminate the option of putting a Confederate flag emblem on state license plates. Statues people had been walking past obliviously for decades suddenly became issues in places like St. Louis and Kansas City.
On Facebook and various other forums, I’ve been amazed how quickly Confederate defenders jump to charges of “banning” Confederate symbols, which I don’t think anybody is asking for, and which would violate the Constitution anyway. What we’re asking is that governments stop endorsing the Confederacy, and that individuals and private institutions that endorse the Confederacy face criticism. It’s your First Amendment right to fly any flag or put up any statue you want, but it’s my First Amendment right to point out that you’re promoting and celebrating racism.
The encouraging thing is how quickly the country seems to have lost patience with the mythology of the Confederacy’s noble Lost Cause. President Obama summed it up in his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought — the cause of slavery — was wrong — (applause) — the imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. (Applause.) It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.
The Confederacy fought to keep millions of African-Americans in slavery. There was no nobility to that cause. It was immoral and does not deserve to be remembered kindly or proudly. For decades, American leaders have tip-toed around those truths for fear of offending white Southerners — that’s the real political correctness in this issue. Maybe that’s over.
As for what to replace those Confederate monuments with: There’s a real shortage of monuments to the hundreds of thousands of slaves who escaped their masters and joined the army of the United States. No doubt every Confederate State has such a black hero. You can impugn the motives of many of the Northerners who fought, but these Southern blacks were the real freedom fighters of the Civil War.
Let’s not overestimate the importance of these symbolic moves. But they seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. As David Graeber has said (see quote above), political common sense can change very suddenly. It gives me hope for issues that seem hopelessly jammed today, like serious action on climate change.
I mentioned Obama’s Charleston eulogy above. If you haven’t seen the whole thing [transcript, video] you should.
It’s really hard to imagine how Obama could have picked up all that Christian theology at his madrassa in Indonesia. But seriously, I think people who assume authentic Christianity belongs to conservatives will be stunned.
I’ll be interested to see if we hear more of this change: Where presidents have been ending their speeches with “God bless America”, Obama ended this one with: “May God continue to shed His grace on the United States of America.” It is a more humble usage, less amenable to American exceptionalism.
Ted Cruz is calling for Texas clerks to express their “religious freedom” by not processing marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Hmmm. Would he support a clerk expressing his religious freedom by refusing to process gun-owner licenses?
Now that they’re not allowed to discriminate against gays, at least two Alabama counties have stopped issuing marriage licenses entirely. Good luck with that. I’m sure this principled civil disobedience will bring gay rights advocates to their knees. Personally, I am quivering at the thought that opposite-sex Alabama couples who can’t get married will blame me rather than their local officials.
I have already expressed my sympathy with the Bernie Sanders campaign. But if you are tempted to forward some of those anti-Hillary social media messages, you might want to explore where they come from. You might be carrying water for some right-wing group that is trying to turn Democrats against each other.
Who knew elephants could boogie? Actually, elephant intelligence is remarkable, and ought to be studied further. For example, elephants are one of the few species that can recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Unfortunately, elephant labs tend to be rather expensive, so for the foreseeable future we’ll understand white rats a whole lot better.
Here’s a question somebody ought to know the answer to: If elephants have a sense of rhythm, does that mean they’ll get in step with each other on long migrations?
Donald Featherstone, “Bookmingo” (2010) (photo by Charles Sternaimolo, courtesy Fitchburg Public Library)
He’s most recognized for helping to dot the yards of US suburbs with shocking pink plastic flamingos — the exemplar of kitsch that rose from its resin roots to become the “ambassador of the American lawn” and even a “signpost for the transgression of social and cultural convention.” But Donald Featherstone, who died last week from Lewy body dementia at 79, was also a trained painter and sculptor who left behind much more than his fuchsia specimens, upon which he had bestowed the playful trinomial nomenclature “Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus.”
Featherstone, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, began making art as a child and recalled drawing the neighborhood bread truck when he was four. He became more interested in the arts in middle school when he started sketching and working with watercolors, and, during high school, took fine arts classes on nights and weekends, studying photography, oil painting, architecture, and design. He eventually attended a three-year program at the Worcester Art Museum‘s art school, but rather than pursuing a career as an artist upon graduating, he joined the plastic manufacturer Union Products (acquired by Cado Company in 2009).
Penguin pair designed by Donald Featherstone (courtesy Union Products division of Cado Company, Fitchburg, Massachusetts)
“I did it to keep from starving,” Featherstone said in a 1997 interview. “It was the 1950s, and everyone said plastics were going to be big so I went into plastics.” According to Bangor Daily News, he “likely would have taught in an arts school or focused on watercolors” if he had not chosen a career in yard ornamentation. That decision, however, forever transformed landscapes across the nation: over the course of his 43 years with Union Products, Featherstone designed more than 600 garden tchotchkes, many of which are still available for purchase.
Among his creations are more feathered friends (perhaps a personal salute to his name), from pheasants and roosters to pelicans and graceful swans that double as planters, showing his consideration of function in addition form. Also available: a pair of comically wide-eyed penguins gazing skyward, making for fun winter decorations or cheesy punchlines in the tropics. Featherstone’s first assignment was actually to sculpt a duck; he purchased a living one as a model, named it “Charlie,” and kept it in his sink. He couldn’t repeat the process for his next assignment — the (in)famous flamingo — so he drew inspiration instead from vivid photographs that accompanied National Geographic‘s October 1957 cover story. That bird became his masterpiece and even carries his signature on its rump, but Featherstone’s ostrich was apparently his favorite fowl.
A lamb planter (courtesy Union Products division of Cado Company, Fitchburg, Massachusetts)
Aside from the birds, Featherstone also fashioned elephants into darling watering cans; introduced dinosaurs, pilgrims, and witches into the canon of lawn decor; and got into the spirit of Christmas with elves and smiley Santas.
When he retired from Union Products in 2000, four years after rising to the position of company president, he returned to painting but shared the works only with his wife, Nancy. In a gem of an interview with the Guardian in which she discussed the couple’s quirky habit of wearing matching outfits, she noted that her husband had an “excellent eye for color.” The one painting Featherstone did share with the public was a submission to a contest held by his local library; it was a winning work and, titled “Bookmingo,” featured none other than his distinctive flamingo beak-deep in a lawn art tome.
Some may still find Featherstone’s plastic sculptures tacky, but their enduring presence speaks to a desire to accessorize and embellish our personal spaces; to transform and color the generic with individual tastes. As Featherstone told the Chicago Tribune: “An empty lawn is like an empty coffee table; you have to do something with it.”
Three-piece swan planter set designed by Donald Featherstone (courtesy Union Products division of Cado Company, Fitchburg, Massachusetts)
A pair of the original Donald Featherstone pink flamingos (courtesy Union Products division of Cado Company, Fitchburg, Massachusetts)
An elephant-shaped watering can (courtesy Union Products division of Cado Company, Fitchburg, Massachusetts)
Donald Featherstone also designed Christmas ornaments, including Santa Claus (courtesy Union Products division of Cado Company, Fitchburg, Massachusetts)
Donald and Nancy Featherstone in their matching outfits (courtesy Plastics News)
The packaging for the pink flamingo in 2011 (courtesy Plastic News)
Even worse is Alito’s conclusion that death by torture does not violate the Eight Amendment unless defendants can identify a safer method, which Sotomayor correctly describes as “indefensible”. Even assuming for the sake of argument that the US constitution permits the death penalty in the abstract, it does not guarantee that states will be able to perform executions in every circumstance. If medical personnel and drug companies – making free choices – decline to participate in the machinery of death, this does not mean that the Eight Amendment ceases to apply. As Sotomayor explained:
“But a method of execution that is “barbarous,” or “involve[s] torture or a lingering death,” does not become less so just because it is the only method currently available to a State. If all available means of conducting an execution constitute cruel and unusual punishment, then conducting the execution will constitute cruel and usual punishment. Nothing compels a State to perform an execution. It does not get a constitutional free pass simply because it desires to deliver the ultimate penalty; its ends do not justify any and all means.”
Her argument is unanswerable. Boiling people in oil or killing the on the rack would not suddenly stop being cruel and unusual punishment if they were the only methods available. It is true that the condemned prisoners in the cases considered by the court committed genuinely heinous crimes – one broke an infant’s back with his bare hands; another raped an killed an 11-month-old girl, as Alito was sure to mention in his opinion. Fortunately, even if Oklahoma could not execute these prisoners a remedy exists that is good enough for most American states and every other liberal democracy in the world: imprisonment.
It’s worth comparing the careful, devastating dissents written by Sotomayor and Kagan — both of which rank with Ginsburg’s evisceration of Shelby County — today to Scalia’s witless ranting last week. The fact that Sotomayor was described as unqualified by pundits who take Alito’s (identical to Sotomayor’s) credentials for granted and consider Scalia some kind of supergenius is about as clear as a racist and sexist subtext can get.
It’s not a coincidence that today was the day Ginsburg and Breyer announced their disinclination to continue to tinker with the machinery of death. If this is what the death penalty will be, holding the death penalty per se unconstitutional will become the default liberal position.
Maybe your state is one of the more than two dozen around the U.S. with what is known as a three-foot passing law—a provision that requires drivers to give people on bikes at least that much clearance when passing them on the road. (Pennsylvania calls for a more generous four feet.) But are these laws enforceable? Or are they just an empty promise of safety?
One police officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, wanted to find a way to give the law in his jurisdiction some meaning. Officer Robert Simmons, who has been with the city’s department for 12 years and on full-time bike patrol for seven, came up with an idea for a device that can measure and record the distance between a bike and a car.
“I thought, I wish there was a data-driven way, like a radar gun,” says Simmons. “This is what I want to build; this is what we need to prove it in court.”
Simmons had been thinking a lot about how to prevent deaths like that of David Meek, a leader in Chattanooga’s biking community who was killed in 2009 when a truck driver drove close enough to hook Meek’s saddlebag, dragging him under the wheels. “That resonated in my head,” says Simmons. “I didn’t act on it—was just a thought in my head that we have to do something about this.”
Then Chattanooga got a new mayor, Andy Berke, and a new police chief, both of whom were receptive to suggestions about improving safety for people on bikes. In discussions with the chief, Simmons got the go-ahead to see if he could come up with a way to enforce Tennessee’s three-foot law.
Chattanooga calls the result BSMART (its technical name is the C3FT Device). Developed by Codaxus, an engineering firm in Austin, Texas, the handlebar-mounted device measures the distance of passing vehicles with ultrasonic waves. The bike-car gap is then shown on a large digital display, and when a car comes closer than 36 inches, BSMART beeps—alerting an officer to a violation. Paired with a GoPro camera, the device both detects and records a car’s proximity to a bike.
“It’s easy to use,” says Simmons. “It doesn’t distract me. I just ride along until it starts beeping.”
Simmons got the device, which was actually paid for by a local bike advocacy group called Friends of Outdoor Chattanooga, on May 17. He has only used it consistently for a couple of weeks so far, sometimes while in full uniform and sometimes in plainclothes, working with other officers in marked cars to conduct the pursuit. He he has already pulled over about 25 drivers. (No surprise to learn that drivers give him a wider berth when he’s in uniform.)
He hasn’t written any citations yet, preferring to give warnings to those drivers who get too close. A lot of them, says Simmons, don’t know about the law. “The device has allowed me to interact with those who commit the violation and do some education,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know and have trouble judging three feet themselves.”
Simmons says if he gets attitude from a driver, or if the person behind the wheel doesn’t seem receptive to the information, he’ll write a ticket. He’s already worked out an arrangement with a judge who says he’ll try to sentence offenders to a Bicycling 101 course. The class imparts the rules of the road that apply to bicycles and includes a group bike ride to show participants how it feels to travel the streets of Chattanooga on two wheels.
“Everybody deserves to be safe on the streets, whether they’re traveling by car, by foot, or by bicycle.”For Mayor Berke, improving conditions for people on bikes is part of a larger effort to diversify transportation options in his city and improve quality of life for everyone. “Everybody deserves to be safe on the streets, whether they’re traveling by car, by foot, or by bicycle,” says Berke. “We’re using innovative technology to build stronger neighborhoods. If you think about what makes a neighborhood great, it’s seeing that multimodal transportation occurring. People getting out of cars, talking to each other.”
Simmons says the city has already received inquiries from at least 10 other police departments about getting their own devices, as well as some bike advocacy groups. “It’s a device that’s really needed,” says Simmons. “Hopefully it’ll keep going and we’ll save some lives.”
“Oh hey, new guy, is this your first cycle? Haha, yeah, the first one’s always the worst!”
Yeah… definitely.
we live in a time where “you are shit” and “you ain’t shit” mean the exact same thing english is truly incredible
But saying “you are THE shit” is the exact opposite
“u dont need makeup to be pretty just be urself!!!”
ok but consider this
- i fucking love eyeliner
Project by Design I/O is a huge interactive installation for children for the New York Hall of Science, featuring an ecosystem of virtual animals to play with:
Connected Worlds is a large scale immersive, interactive ecosystem developed for the New York Hall of Science. The installation is composed of six interactive ecosystems spread out across the walls of the Great Hall, connected together by a 3000 sqft interactive floor and a 45ft high waterfall. Children can use physical logs to divert water flowing across the floor from the waterfall into the different environments, where they can then use their hands to plant seeds. As the different environments bloom, creatures appear based on the health of the environment and the type of plants growing in it. If multiple environments are healthy creatures will migrate between them causing interesting chain reactions of behaviors.
Connected Worlds is designed to encourage a systems thinking approach to sustainability where local actions in one environment may have global consequences. Children work with a fixed amount of water in the system and have to work together to manage and distribute the water across the different environments. Clouds return water from the environments to the waterfall which releases water to the floor when it rains.
Sophianotloren"How about AT THE Y?!" ~wink, wink~
SophianotlorenThe War On (some classes of people who use some kinds of) Drugs is working *exactly* as intended.
Cops standing in front of big drug seizures look great on the evening news. But it sells a lie that we’re winning, just like George Bush on an aircraft carrier declaring that a war was over that still rages on today.
It’s not only that we can’t win this war, it’s that we’re destroying ourselves fighting it. We are literally addicted to the War on Drugs. A half-century of failed policy, $1 trillion, and 45 million arrests has not reduced daily drug use—at all. The U.S. still leads the world in illegal drug consumption, drugs are cheaper, more available, and more potent than ever before.
Our justice system is a junkie, demanding its daily fix of arrests, seizures and convictions. It needs drugs. It’s as hooked as that guy sticking a needle into his arm even though he knows it’s killing him.
”
The twinkling lights dotting the ceiling of this dazzling cave system are the work of arachnocampa luminosa, a bioluminescent gnat larva (also called a glowworm) found throughout the island nation of New Zealand. It is believed that the light, emitted mostly from females, is how the insects find mates. These long-exposure photos by local photographer Joseph Michael capture small communities of worms amongst 30 million-year-old limestone formations on North Island. You can see more shots from the project titled Luminosity, here.
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