Category Archives: Random Blogging

Portland

We’ve been in Portland, Oregon, for two and a half days now. If I were twenty years younger, I would seriously consider moving here.

We wanted to visit Portland because we are urban policy nerds, and knew that Portland was something of a city planner’s dream. It is. Here, in no particular order, are some of our observations:

Billboards are obviously strictly controlled; we counted exactly five between the airport and downtown, making that 45 minute taxi ride far more scenic.

Streets are a bit narrower than in most cities, and blocks are a good deal shorter–even shorter than the “short” blocks in NYC. Most are tree-lined, and in the downtown area there are flower baskets hanging from hooks on the street lights. Although there’s a grid, it isn’t rigid; there are also streets angling off in various directions. All of that makes walking around really pleasant. Plus, the urban core is amazingly compact.

Bikes are everywhere, and there are dedicated bike lanes.

Perhaps the walking and biking account for another observation: people on the streets in Portland are mostly thin.

There are tons of parks–big and small and interactive (kids splashing in park pools is encouraged). The streets are active–unlike in Indianapolis, parking garages all have first-floor retail, so there aren’t long “dead” areas. And most of the retail seems to be local–although there are some national chains, local shops, bars and restaurants (of which there are so many you wonder if anyone here cooks) outnumber them by a significant margin. (I’ve seen few Starbucks, for example, although there are regional and local coffee shops everywhere.) Hundreds of food trucks offer all sorts of creative cuisines (Mauritania has a cuisine? Who knew?)

I wasn’t able to find out how many people live in downtown Portland, but there are many, many apartment buildings, and a good deal of the retail downtown caters to residential needs. (There’s a huge kitchenware store and three supermarkets–including a Whole Foods. So I guess someone must cook….) And there are regular, rotating Farmer’s Markets; we saw one, and it, too, was huge.

Speaking of huge, Powell’s books. An entire city block. 300,000 titles in stock, new and used. We got there a few minutes before 9:00 a.m., when it opened, and there was already a line.

And everywhere you look, you see public transportation. There are buses and trolleys in traffic lanes dedicated to them–no cars allowed. Light rail. A tram to carry folks up the big hill (with bike parking at its base). Nirvana…

We spent yesterday morning riding the trolley system. The cars were immaculate, the system was easy to understand, and $5 bought a 24-hour pass, good for the bus, the trolley and the light rail. The system is obviously well-used, and by a broad cross-section of riders.

I’ve also been absolutely blown away by how NICE people here are. My husband and I stopped to look at a building, and a man asked if he could help us find something. In a shoe store, the clerk whipped out a map and suggested places we should see–and gave me her card in case I had questions. The motorman on the first trolley we rode not only offered complete directions, but let us know when we were approaching the stop at which we needed to transfer. Servers in restaurants have been equally helpful. Drivers yield to pedestrians–and each other– everywhere, and no one honks his horn!

Portland is pretty similar in size to Indianapolis, and every urban amenity I’ve described is something Indianapolis (and other cities) could do, if we had the political will. But fairness requires acknowledging assets we couldn’t duplicate, like the absence of mosquitos. A climate in which you can evidently grow ANYTHING. No humidity. Mild winters that don’t take as much of a toll on roads, buildings and infrastructure. Mountains, rivers and hills.

I’m sure if I actually lived here, I’d find things to complain about. But from our admittedly limited perspective, this is a city to envy.

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In Case You Were Wondering….

Regular readers of this blog may wonder why there was no post at the usual time this morning.

It’s a long story.

My husband and I are taking a trip to Portland, Oregon. (Nerds that we are, we’ve heard great things about its public transportation and other urban amenities.) Yesterday, I prepared for our trip by packing and gathering up the relevant travel information about flights, hotels, etc. Our daughter-in-law was to pick us up at 6:30 a.m. for an 8:30 flight. We planned to breakfast at the airport.

At 5:30, still in my PJs, I logged on to my computer, and was horrified to see a message from the airline confirming that our flight was on time—at 6:30. Boarding at 6:05. Evidently, our original arrangements had been changed and I’d been working from an older itinerary. I looked at the boarding pass I’d printed off—yep. Boarding at 6:05.

We actually made it.

No showers. Teeth not brushed. Hair (mine, at least) standing on end (making me look sort of like the witch so many people think I am anyway…) Impressively, my husband moved faster than he’s moved in a very long time.

I drove (within the speed limit, in case a traffic cop is reading this) to the airport, grateful that we live downtown, and valet parked—damn the expense. (It was only when we were on the plane that we remembered that we are returning by train…We’ll need to figure out how to retrieve my car…).

I was ahead of my husband on the airport escalator when I heard him fall. “Go on to the gate” he yelled, prone, but I couldn’t—I had his boarding pass. Concerned airport personnel picked him up, relatively undamaged, and we continued our race to the gate. At least we were pre-check!

But of course, it was early, and pre-check was closed.

The clock was ticking.

We waited in the security line. Then I set off the alarm and had to go back through the metal detector. Twice.

The clock was ticking.

As we ran down the hall to our concourse, we were met by another airport official. “Are you the Kennedys?” (How he knew that, I don’t know. I guess because we were ticketed and missing…) “You’ll make it.” He promised. “Doors close in five minutes.”

And we did. Unwashed, sweaty, disheveled, hearts pounding, wondering what we forgot in our frenzied rush, and how the hell we’re going to get my car back, but we made it!

As my husband says, another story to share at Thanksgiving….

Tomorrow, this blog will return to its regularly scheduled preoccupations. I hope.

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Be Very Afraid…

What does what we fear say about us?

A couple of weeks ago, in the wake of the Congressional vote to modify the extent of government snooping authorized by the Patriot Act, Timothy Egan wrote a thought-provoking column for the New York Times in which he compared Americans fear of terrorism to the far more numerous, everyday threats we face:

Some time ago, a friend of mine was hit by a bus in New York, one of almost 5,000 pedestrians killed in traffic every year. I also lost a nephew to gun violence — one of more than 11,000 Americans slain by firearms in this country. And I fell out of a tree that I was trying to prune in my backyard. I was O.K. But the guy next to me in the trauma ward was paralyzed from his fall. He was taking down his Christmas lights.

The column went on to list the odds of other misfortunes: it turns out that being struck dead by lightning, choking on a chicken bone or drowning in the bathtub are all more likely than being killed by a terrorist. Ditto deaths from cancer, diabetes, even the flu.

People who text and drive will get you before that suicide bomber does.

Consider the various threats to life. The sun, for starters. The incidence of melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer, has doubled in the last 30 years. More than 9,000 Americans now die every year from this common cancer. I also lost a friend — 30 years old, father of two — to malignant melanoma.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death, just behind heart disease. Together, they kill more than a million people in this country, followed by respiratory diseases, accidents and strokes. Then comes Alzheimer’s, which kills 84,000 Americans a year. And yet, total federal research money on Alzheimer’s through the National Institutes of Health was $562 million last year.

To put that in perspective, we spent almost 20 times that amount — somewhere around $10 billion — on the National Security Agency, the electronic snoops who monitor everyday phone records. For the rough equivalent of funding a breakthrough in Alzheimer’s, the government has not prevented a single terrorist attack, according to a 2014 report on the telephone-gathering colossus at the N.S.A.

What is it about terrorism that so consumes our imaginations? I’d speculate that it is the random nature of terrorist attacks, but getting hit by a texting driver or coming down with a fatal disease is equally random.

Perhaps it’s tied to our persistent fear of the “other” and our tendency to fear the stranger?

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Ideology and the Informed Voter

Well, this is depressing.

We like to think that more informed voters are “better” voters–more likely to make reasoned decisions, more likely to base those decisions on evidence rather than emotion or prejudice.

We’d like to think that, but apparently we’d be wrong. Research increasingly confirms that more information does not necessarily translate into better judgment.

An informed voter is only as good as her information sources. And because we all get to choose which information sources to believe, voters with more information are not always more informed. Sometimes, they’re just more completely and profoundly misled.

Looking at the 1996 election, for instance, Achens and Bartels studied whether voters knew the budget deficit had dropped during President Clinton’s first term (it had, and sharply). What they found will shake anyone who believes more information leads to a smarter electorate: how much voters knew about politics mattered less than which party they supported. Republicans in the 80th percentile of political knowledge were less likely to answer the question correctly than Democrats in the 20th percentile of political knowledge.

It gets worse: Republicans in the 60th percentile of political knowledge were less likely to answer the question correctly than Republicans in the 10th percentile of political knowledge — which suggests that at least some of what we learn as we become more politically informed is how to mask our partisanship.

This is all part of what political scientists call “motivated reasoning”–the very human tendency to filter information through our personal worldviews.

Those of us who follow politics most closely do so because we care about issues of governance and have developed value structures and perspectives through which we analyze the information we acquire. The more invested we are in a particular approach to an issue, the more likely we are to apply our ideological “spin” to information about that issue.

It seems counter-intuitive, but it may be that voters who are less  invested in partisan politics and political philosophy–who don’t have a dog in the fight, as the saying goes– are actually more likely to cast votes based upon more or less dispassionate evaluations of the candidates and their campaigns.

If so, the more people who vote, the better.

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Proving Jon Stewart Right

Although the Daily Show has taken great delight in lampooning our political class, over the years, Jon Stewart’s most frequent targets have been the American media.

In fact, the Daily Show could be considered one longstanding reproach to an American media that focuses on celebrity and “infotainment” at the expense of what used to be called the “news of verification”–a media that repeatedly fails to provide the sort of investigative reporting on government, business and social institutions that we need in order to be informed citizens in an increasingly complex world.

To take just one example, America has recently experienced a series of highly problematic incidents in which police have killed unarmed citizens. Those incidents–several of which have been captured on the cell phones of witnesses–have led to protests and civil unrest.  Given their frequency, and the amount of discord generated, it would be reasonable to expect an investigative series separating fact from fiction and rumor: the number of people killed by police in a given period of time, the demographics of communities where such tragedies occur, perhaps even comparing the American experience to that of other Western democratic countries.

Instead of that reporting, we’ve gotten pundits and “commentators” accusing or defending police actions, based upon their particular ideological positions.

It has taken the Guardian–the excellent British newspaper that regularly offers more information about the U.S. than most American news outlets, to do the hard reporting. The Guardian has produced a database showing, month by month, the number of people killed by police, the manner of the death (gunshot, taser, etc.) and where that killing occurred.

No punditry. No spin. No hysterical accusations or indignant defenses. Just raw data. This is what happened, this is where and this is when. A basis for discussion.

People can draw very different conclusions from a given fact situation. But in the absence of those hard facts, we are left with conjecture and ideology and hyperbole. In order to have anything approaching reasoned debate about solutions to our common problems, we need to begin with verifiable facts–and we depend upon the media to provide those facts.

The First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press was a recognition of the importance of that media role. We didn’t protect the media from government interference so that reporters could parrot party lines or hype the newest “in” bar.

The Guardian is evidence that journalism is still possible. In this case, the data was clearly available–but to the best of my knowledge, no American outlet compiled it.

Perhaps American media should focus less on things like Kim Kardashian’s ass and more on that quaint thing called actual news.

I’m sure Jon Stewart wouldn’t mind.

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