Makers of Things

Woody Guthrie would surely have been pleased with this line from President Obama’s inaugural speech yesterday:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given.  It must be earned.  Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less.  It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.  Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

 

How true, though that common sense history has been largely ignored in the economic policies that have existed throughout most of my adult life, a reality articulated well by the union boss in season two of The Wire:

 

You know what the trouble is…? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.

 

Indeed. Remind me again how that’s worked out.

 

So let’s invest in making things in America, green things, and restore a measure of prosperity to the many, rather than the pick-pocketing few.

 

You and Whose Money

Exciting architecture!  But, who’s going to live in it?

 

Glass Houses

From the once esteemed Wall Street Journal, we learn that many homeowners are simply shocked to find that their newly minted, west facing, high rise apartments, with full walls of glass, actually require window shades.

 

The air conditioning could barely keep the temperature tolerable as sun baked the $1.5 million apartment on summer afternoons. And the sun bleached her pair of brightly colored European sectional sofas, which cost $20,000.

 

In June, Ms. Antani gave in, spending $12,000 on motorized shades that she keeps lowered during the day. “I love being able to see everything,” says Ms. Antani, a 23-year-old graduate student. But “the sun’s just in your eyes; you can’t focus. Everything is so bright.” [Emphasis mine].

 

She “gave in”? Spending .8% of the condo cost on an essential furnishing is a sacrifice? C’mon folks, better journalism please.

 

And setting aside the socio-economic implications of a 23 year old grad student affording a $1.5 million condo, glazing technology is simply much better than is being described here. It sounds like our heroine (and her prized “European sectional sofas”) might have bought into an over-priced and cheaply made building.

 

The problem, which the article barely acknowledges, is that glass residential towers are de rigueur in urban real estate these days, yet only a small fraction are built with the budgets and design integrity required to responsibly integrate all that glass. The annoyances expressed by miss sun-in-her-eyes and others in the article suggest cheaply made glass towers are surely energy hogs of the highest order.

 

Buildings account for roughly 40% of all energy use in the U.S.(residential buildings account for 54% of that). We need better policies at all levels of government to raise the quality of our built environment and reduce energy use by buildings, especially as it relates to irresponsible developers out to make a quick buck on a high-end fad. I’d like to see stories focusing on that rather than the banal hardships of un-savvy luxury condo buyers.

 

And by the way, the issue of dead birds is very real.

 

America’s Pastime

Who can possibly afford to go see a baseball game these days? Don’t even bother trying to answer that, because now, even those who can are complaining:

 

Fans are now calculating how expensive it will be for many of them to attend games at the new stadiums. Tickets for the best seats at the 85-year-old Yankee Stadium, which sold for $1,000 a seat this season, will jump at the new ballpark to $2,500; in other areas of the stadium, they will range from $135 to $500 for season tickets. Prices for single-game tickets, which ranged from $14 to $400 this season, will be released later.

 

The current business model for baseball is seriously out of whack, especially as casual fans are concerned (I among them). Players’ salaries are incomprehensibly high, requiring teams to generate enormous revenue. Shiny new stadiums (and all teams must have one to “compete”) are economically extravagant affairs, built often at great expense to taxpayers and not always with local communities’ interest in mind. And ticket prices are out of reach of most everyone but the very wealthy, while scalping has been legalized and encouraged. All of which has repositioned baseball as a market, rather than a game – hometown team as international commodity.

 

Baseball is a historically populist game. Any kid can play with just a stick and a ball. It’s simple and poetic, that’s its charm: “mom and apple pie”, and all that. I remember as a kid going with my grandpa to watch the pathetic Cleveland Indians (ugh, Indians, can we please change the name already?) at old, drafty, peeling, Cleveland Municipal Stadium. They were a terrible team, and the stadium was a nightmare, but being at the game was magical. A day at the ballpark for a 9 year old kid had the sanctity of an epic and rhythmic benediction.

 

Phillip Roth wrote this in a Times op-ed on opening day 1973:

 

…baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.

…

It seems to me that through baseball I was put in touch with a more humane and tender brand of patriotism, lyrical rather than martial or righteous in spirit, and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not so easily be sloganized, or contained in a high-sounding formula to which you had to pledge something vague but all-encompassing called your “allegiance.”

 

That’s baseball at its best – America at its best. But at a time when the President asks citizens to sacrifice for their country by shopping, I suppose it’s fitting that the patriotism described above has been replaced by a pseudo-patriotic-capitalist-fandom. Show allegiance to your team (to your country): Buy season tickets! Buy merchandise! Shopping is the new American pastime.

 

Later in the op-ed, Roth adds this:

 

…baseball – with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefullness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its “characters,” its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate – was the literature of my boyhood.

 

That’s a lyrical and poignant sentiment, written more than a quarter century ago. And it begs the question: does anyone even read literature anymore?