Postings from November 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

BACK, BY POPULAR DEMAND: It's MORE CITY SLOGANS!! I got so many emails from readers that I decided to reopen the subject and share a few real-world slogans.

Michael Wells writes:

You realize that this topic will never die, don't you? [I guess not if I keep encouraging people.—vp]

About 20 years ago, Santa Barbara came up with the slogan, "Where the lover inside of you comes out to play." Not content with a slogan, the city commissioned a song called "Sweet Santa Barbara", released on a 45. The flip side had an instrumental version with a voice-over by Fess Parker. It sounded like what it was: a really long commercial. The intent was to encourage tourism, but I doubt if anyone outside of Santa Barbara ever heard it. Fortunately.

Dan Bigelow writes, "I've read a lot of suggestions for bad city slogans inspired by your DFW contest, but none, I think, approach the motto of my hometown of Cathlamet, WA—the creepily ambiguous 'Cathlamet: A Unique Welcome Awaits You.'"

Bert Wiener writes, "Driving to Yellowstone from Denver a couple of winters ago we stopped (all too briefly) in Riverton, Wyoming. The welcome sign outside town says 'Riverton—we've got all the civilization you need!'

Adam Bellow, who in a previous life was discerning enough to buy The Future and Its Enemies for The Free Press, writes, "For my money nothing beats the simple eloquence of the road sign I saw years ago outside Climax, Michigan: 'Climax 1 mile'."

Clayton Cramer writes:

Driving south from Boise to Reno, I passed a billboard that briefly made me wonder if I had driven into a National Lampoon alternative universe: "Winnemucca—City of Paved Streets.

Well, in northern Nevada, that is quite a distinction.

James Taranto writes that "the best city slogan is from Yuma, Ariz., dating to 1983: 'Experience Our Sense of Yuma.'"

Joseph Britt writes:

I have one more for you. Back in the mid-1980s the city of Hamilton, Ohio, an aging industrial city north of Cincinnati best known for its proximity to the old Fernald nuclear site, sought to have its name changed to Hamilton!—the idea being that the city's name should appear that way in government documents and on maps.

Hamilton! never made it past the billboard stage. I do not know how much of the expected excitement and buzz ever happened. I also do not know if the idea of changing the city's name to something really jazzy like Hamilton, Baby! was ever discussed. You know, nearly every slogan suggested for DFW would sound much more hip and sexy if the suffix ", Baby!" were added. It's just a thought.

Finally, Paul Sand sends evidence that city slogans inspire even our finest writers: "James Lileks has a typically funny comment on slogans, taking off on Waupaca County, Wisconsin" here (starting at "Bad Town Smells"). [Posted 11/12.]

REMEMBER RUMAILA: The anything-but-independent Iraqi parliament is rejecting the U.N. resolution telling the country to disarm or else. That almost certainly means that, contrary to the worries of some hawks, Saddam isn't going to take the out he's been offered. Is he nuts? Well, yes. And he's not exactly savvy about avoiding war with the United States and its allies.

Somewhere in my personal archives, I have a certain embarrassing C-SPAN tape that reminds me not to underestimate Saddam's zeal for confronting the U.S. and its allies. Back in 1991 as allied troops were massing, I appeared on Washington Journal and, when asked whether war was inevitable, I said it wasn't. In fact, I predicted that Saddam would back out of Kuwait, holding only the Rumaila oil field bordering Iraq. The world wouldn't go to war just to keep the oil field in Kuwaiti hands. Saddam would call our bluff, exit Kuwait, and gain a rich prize.

I was wrong, of course, because I assumed Saddam Hussein was a rational actor. Not a wise assumption. [Posted 11/11.]

TSA REPORT: As you've undoubtedly noticed, I've been traveling constantly of late, with more to come. And I have to say that, at least for now, the TSA inspectors in airports are a distinct improvement over their predecessors. They're more attentive, more polite, more communicative, and more sensible. If they pull you aside for a head-to-toe inspection (warning: high heels trip the alarm), they first gather your luggage so it doesn't sit around to attract thieves. This is undoubtedly the TSA's golden age, with lower standards to follow as the newness wears off, but I'll appreciate it while it lasts. [Posted 11/11.]

STEEL PRICES: With an assist from the Bush administration's cravenly protectionist policies, the steel industry is foisting hefty price increases on U.S. automakers. That should be good for the economy. [Posted 11/11.]

WORD UP: One of my sentences makes the big time: illustrating the use of trammel in Dictionary.com's Word of the Day. Thanks to Xavier Lewis for letting me know.

In another example of minor fame, I'm happy to say that I recently received a Katie Award from the Press Club of Dallas for my D Magazine column on our silly local trolley. (Publications from the seven-state southwestern region are eligible for Katies.) I received a cool, Oscar-like statue of a woman wearing nothing but a strategically placed quill pen; reliable sources tell me that, like Barbie, Katie has had a boob-reduction job in recent years, giving her a more politically correct figure. The Press Club also gave a lifetime achievement award to Walter Cronkite, who waxed nostalgic for the days of Big Three monopoly power.

Unfortunately, I've just discovered that D Magazine has redesigned its website and is now charging for access to my old columns. So I'm afraid I can't provide a trolley link at the moment. Eventually I'll be able to post the columns on this site. [Posted 11/11.]

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: I'll be at a conference from Thursday until Sunday afternoon and don't expect to post while I'm gone. [Posted 11/6.]

SUPPORT THIS SITE FOR FREE: Buy holiday gifts via any Amazon link on this site, and I'll receive a percentage of the price (usually 5 percent, but the more you buy, the higher the percentage). As a non-parent with nieces and nephews to buy for, I highly recommend toy shopping at Amazon, since the reviews let you know what works and what doesn't. [Posted 11/6.]

INEQUALITY & CONSUMPTION: My latest NYT column, on a fascinating study that contrasts the trend in the income distribution (widening since the late '70s) with trends in consumption (pretty much the same), is here. It's conventional wisdom that employment and income bounce around more than they used to, for both voluntary and involuntary reasons, but you almost never see anyone connect increasing income instability with increasing inequality in current income. Fabrizio Perri of NYU's Stern School and Dirk Krueger of Stanford look at the connection in the paper I discuss in the column—and they have a few good things to say for improved access to credit. [Posted 11/6.]

HERE IT IS: Here's what my new book will look like:

Stay tuned...

GEORGIA RESULTS: Reader Chris Huttman, who identifies himself as a "real live Georgian," writes with more info on the Georgia gubernatorial race:

We are all shocked at Barnes's loss. It's really too bad across the political spectrum, I would think. Barnes made a lot of tough decisions and therefor made a lot of enemies, but he was a respected fiscal conservative (Stephen Moore loved him) and the smartest governor we ever had. In fact, he might have been too smart for his own good.

The real stories on how he lost are these:

1. Flag change — Rural Georgia is still not ready for the 21st century when it comes to iconography.
2. Teacher anger — Barnes removed teacher tenure in his education reform. Though most reasonable people don't think teachers or anyone should have tenure that protects their jobs no matter what they do, it angered the teachers' unions very much.
3. Rain! — The rain was biblical yesterday.
4. New machines — Georgia has beautiful new electronic voting machines that went off without a single problem. Republicans probably got a 2% overall advantage yesterday with people voting just to see what the new machines were all about. Most of these unobservant voters probably align with George Bush and not Roy Barnes or their local Democrat, if they don't know them.
5. Cynthia McKinney — a lot of lingering anger in the black community about Cynthia's loss. Maybe 20,000 Democrat voters stayed home from the polls because of this, and when combined with the things above, Democrats can't win with all of these problems.
6. Shitty candidates. Bad field in a number of crucial regions really dragged down the ticket.

The real story is, how did Barnes and Cleland lose so badly when the other Democrats (including black candidates) cleaned clock on the statewide ballot.

For those who don't follow these things closely, Georgia changed its flag to downplay the Confederate image. Metropolis magazine, which covers design, ran an interesting, entertaining article contrasting the legislative compromises that gave Georgia its incredibly ugly (and hard to manufacture) new flag with Mississippi's unsuccessful attempt to sell an attractive coherent new design in a general election. (A sidebar features some graphic designers' alternatives to the Georgia hodgepodge. Ever wondered how Ray Charles might look on a flag?)

Here's a bit of Christopher Hawthorne's conclusion:

A great irony of this story is that each state was presented with the proposed new flag design that the other seemingly deserved. Georgia—which has long been thought of as the continually rebuilding center of the New South, with gleaming skyscrapers and tens of thousands of immigrants from the north who care little for dusty Civil War tales—got a flag packed with meaningful historical symbols. Mississippi's more conservative and nostalgic populace, meanwhile, was confronted with a design as bright, shiny, and devoid of history as the streets of downtown Atlanta.

The reasons for this are not mysterious. In Georgia, the flag became the design equivalent of a piece of legislation; it carries a number of marks bearing witness to its trip through the halls and backrooms of the state capitol. By contrast, the designers of Mississippi's new flag took pains to avoid any such signs of modification. And yet because the one part of the flag they removed, the Confederate cross, was the only element anyone had ever paid any attention to, they wound up with a design that struck Mississippi voters as offensively contemporary.

But there is a key lesson buried in Moss and Alexander's experiences designing new flags, despite the almost inevitable failure of the Mississippi referendum. Moss knows as much about the history of flag design in the Southern United States as anyone. He diligently applied that knowledge to the new Mississippi flag, and the result was aesthetically unimpeachable.

But as Moss himself would admit, he was little interested in thinking about the differences between design and politics—between a vexillological symbol and a cultural one. The journalist Jack Hitt has written about what he calls the "semiotics" of the Confederate flag: the way its symbols operate on several levels simultaneously and long ago surpassed what they once symbolized in political importance. The truth is that in the year 2001 it doesn't matter much that the Georgia flag is hard to read hanging from a pole, or that soldiers on a smoke-filled battlefield might confuse it with the flag of North Dakota or Louisiana, which also feature a gold seal on a blue background. In Georgia, the battleground that mattered was the state capitol. In Mississippi, it was the polling place. And on the ballot, Moss's design—in all its perfectly crisp full-color glory—was all too legible to the "ordinary folks" of Mississippi.

Cecil Alexander brought a much different attitude to his design task: a sense of the long view, certainly, and a kind of wry and useful flexibility. He is justifiably proud of his work on the new Georgia flag, despite the fact that it's routinely pilloried by Confederate loyalists and vexillological purists.

After I accompanied Alexander to the flag-raising ceremony in downtown Atlanta, the two of us sat talking for a while in his car in front of my hotel. I asked him, given his training at Harvard in the 1940s, if he considered himself a Modernist. Without hesitation, he said yes. I suggested that his design for the Georgia flag, with its postmodern "assemblage" of elements, hardly looked like the work of someone who'd studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Alexander laughed. "Well, I learned from them that form should follow function," he said. "And the function of this flag was to represent the state in a nondivisive way and to get approved by the state legislature. From that point of view I think it's done its job."

Unfortunately, the Georgia flag may have similarly failed at the ballot box, indirectly in this case. Along with opposition to video poker, trying to get rid of the Confederate flag helped cost Republicans the governorship of South Carolina four years ago. It may have come back to bite Barnes. But, then again, the Democratic party is the party of the teachers' unions, even in the South. [Posted 11/6.]

ADVANTAGE, BLOGS: I seem to have been the only observer who wasn't surprised by the upset in the gubernatorial race in Georgia. That's because I heeded Chuck Watson's tip on Shoutin' Across the Pacific. Among Chuck's leading indicators:

There is a great deal of bitterness in the educational community over his educational "reforms". Barnes reportedly said to a audience of secondary school teachers that "every teacher in Georgia should be fired. They are all incompetent.". In the last few days there has been a huge grass roots effort (however, I suspect NEA/GEA involvement) among teachers to stick it to King Roy. My wife (a high school science teacher, but not an NEA member) has received numerous emails urging her to vote for Purdue, the Republican. For a Democrat actually having the NEA hacked off at them, and possibly even working against them, is pretty unusual.

One of the big stories of yesterday's election was the GOP's recovery from its 1998 Southern debacle, when its anti-gambling moralizing turned off the good ol' boy swing vote. I'm particularly happy to see Mark Sanford, one of my favorite pols when he was in the House, become governor of South Carolina. I'd be even happier to see him replace Fritz Hollings in the Senate. [Postd 11/6.]

DISADVANTAGE, BLOGS: Well, well, well, you can't trust Kausfiles after all. Mickey was onto the NYT's lede-burying poll story, but he was as wrong as wrong could be on the Texas Senate rate. So much for those optimistic Dems. If Tony Sanchez's $60 million bought the Democrats anything (and the final tally remains to be seen), it may be Henry Bonilla's House seat. Amid a lot of straight ticket voting, Democratic challenger Henry Cuellar may have knocked off the Republican vet. But, then again, maybe not. They're still counting votes.

Speaking of Mickey, have you noticed how welfare/welfare reform has completely disappeared from popular political discussions. The topic is now a subject for specialist wonks, much like trade used to be. [Posted 11/6.]

ELECTION DAY: I spent Election Day in New York and then on an airplane back to Dallas, so I didn't vote. It just wasn't worth finding an early voting place to pick between candidates I didn't like. If I lived in the fifth congressional district, home of a Libertarian candidate who actually has a sense of humor (and, like me, writes for D Magazine), I might have bothered.

In New York, I visited a couple of editors at the Times, where reporters were scrambling madly to figure out how to put out stories without knowing the election results. Except in landslides, the daily newspaper just isn't a good way to cover election returns. And the press's Eastern Time Zone bias (not just at the NYT, which can plausibly claim to be local) means that every state west of Texas is treated like a foreign country, even on TV. [Posted 11/6.]

DEMOCRATIC SOUL SEARCHING: Here's a hint for Dems looking for a winning message: Nobody thinks a new prescription drug entitlement constitutes a governing philosophy. It may excite a few ideologues (mostly on the anti- side) and interest groups, but it's the sort of issue that makes normal people's eyes glaze over. Just say "Medicare Part B" and watch the reaction. "Free prescription drugs" can't define a party. [Posted 11/6.]

POLITICAL GAY BAITING I: Given their oft-stated concerns for good journalism, I'm surprised to see both Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds pointing to this blog posting allegedly demonstrating that Paul Wellstone was hostile to gays. The Brothers Judd posting links to Sam Smith's Progressive Review, which cites a single, unidentified source:

one Minnesota gay activist who voted for him said after his death, "I would have voted for Wellstone. But, sorry for my disrespect, I personally hated the man. He was grossly, openly homophobic. He was a loud advocate of the Defense of Marriage Act, and gave quotes like "what Sheila and I have is a holy thing, a covenant between each other and with god. I don't believe same sex relationships have that sanctity."

I'm not doubting that someone said that to Sam Smith. But who was the source? Would other people confirm this view of Wellstone? Is it widely held or just one angry person's opinion? I'm no Wellstone fan, but I do care about basic accuracy and fairness, not only to dead senators but to living readers. And if Wellstone was anti-gay (which is itself different from anti-gay marriage), what, if anything, does that tell us about his old-style leftism? [Posted 11/1.]

POLITICAL GAY BAITING II: Given his interest in the South Carolina shi-tzu-baiting incident, I told Mickey Kaus about this a couple of days ago. But since he hasn't posted anything on it, I will.

First some background, for those who just came in. In a recent debate, folksy Democratic Senate candidate Alex Sanders criticized Republican Lindsey Graham's endorsement by Rudolph Guiliani, saying, "He's an ultra-liberal. His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don't think so." (Here's the original report.) Barney Frank has since condemned the statement, an act that should give his fellow Dem a boost among South Carolina's good ol' boy swing voters.

This isn't the first time Democrats have used gay-baiting to attack Lindsey Graham's Strom-succeeding ambitions. Back in March 2001, The State newspaper reported:

U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham accused state Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian of slander Wednesday because Harpootlian said the congressman was "a little too light in the loafers" to succeed Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Harpootlian, who made the comment last week in a news release issued by the state party, said he had no idea the phrase "light in the loafers" often refers to someone who is gay.

Graham fired back Wednesday. "I don't believe that for a moment. Nobody does. It was intended to slander me," the congressman said when asked about Harpootlian's comment. The phrase frequently is used as a pejorative reference to homosexuality and is included in "English Idioms, Sayings and Slang" published by Wayne Magnuson.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing just might work in my former home state. [Posted 11/1.]