Smashing Pumpkins

(Image from www.snoopy.com)

You may wonder where in the world my blog was last week. Well I was visiting the fascinating city of Arlington, Texas where my Great Aunt was celebrating her 90th birthday. Arlington's fame comes from it being home to the original Six Flags theme park, the Texas Rangers' Ameriquest Field, and the future stadium for "God's Team" the Dallas Cowboys. It's also the largest city in the U.S.--360,000--without a public transportation system.

Congressman Joe Barton, whose district includes Arlington, you may remember is the Energy and Commerce Committee Chair that played the role of organ grinder monkey leashed to his oil company owners at the "hockey stick" hearing in July. He's also responsible for 2005's Gasoline for America's Security Act that doled out money by the billions to his patrons in the petrobiz.

All these subsidies make the claim by Marketplace commentator David Frum that the free market will efficiently supply our energy needs similar to claiming the Great Pumpkin will deliver toys to all the good boys and girls waiting in the pumpkin patch--you might as well try trick or treating in Bel Air.

Joe Barton--whose middle name is Linus!--is clearly a blockhead with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and M.S. in Industrial Administration who seems to think spreading toxic waste is like giving out candy on Halloween. Still those who attribute car dependency to corporate conspiracy live in the same comic book universe as those who believe the CIA was behind 9/11. In several hilarious columns Alexander Cockburn takes on these loonies who pester him with details "proving" that the government planned the whole pyrotechnic slaughter.

What's dangerous about conspiracy theories is not that they are always wrong--after all, Hoover and his cronies at the FBI did conspire to undermine civil rights by infiltrating groups like the Black Panthers with agents that provoked violence and disillusion in the movement. The problem is that focusing on the Machiavellian power of a few hides the complicity of the majority in maintaining the status quo. If it was simply a matter of exposing the manipulations of corrupt "Princes", then politics would not require the difficult work of organizing diverse coalitions through democratic dialogue.

The sad fact is that the lack of public transit in Arlington has little to do with the power of Chevron or GM, whose plant in Arlington assembles Chevy Tahoes and Cadillac Escalades. Instead the mostly white middle class residents three times rejected proposals to bring buses to their streets because they did not want their neighborhoods full of poor people. It's just like when you were seven and thought goblins were responsible for egging your house and smashing your pumpkins that late October night. Later you found out it was the high school kid down the block named Billy.

Master and Commander

The manufacture of automobile tires is a complex process. Natural rubber is still frequently used, harvested mostly in Southeast Asia, but synthetic rubber is also common, constructed from a variety of petrochemicals such as polybutadiene and isobutylene. Actually, tires often combine multiple chemicals to find the right balance of elasticity and strength. In addition to the rubbers, their curing process requires a complex mix of carbon, silica, sulphur, and other chemicals that only a team of research scientists could perfect.

So where do these chemicals come from? Increasingly they come from China, where, for example Eliokem now produces Wingstay L phenolic antioxidant in Ningbo, China. Meanwhile Bridgestone has built four tire plants directly in China--Tianjin, Wuxi, Huizhou and Shenyang--might as well be close to the source.

This is all quite interesting because according to Germany's Der Spiegel, China is now "the world's toxic waste dump." On November 13 of last year a petro-chemical plant exploded in the city of Jilin, killing five and forcing water to be cut off to the 4.6 million people living in the city of Harbin. Der Spiegel writes, "According to official statistics, 350 Chinese die each day in industrial accidents, but the unofficial figure is likely to be much higher."

More recently, the Los Angeles Times did a story on Huashui, China where thousands of villagers battled police in April of last year while protesting the devastation of their farm land by local chemical factories. Many protesters remain in jail, but the factories were removed--at least for the time being.

This all came to mind the other day when a woman yapping on her cell phone nearly rolled me over in her Lincoln Navigator while I tried to cross Ventura Blvd--and yes I did have the green. On the Navigator website one sees the 50,000$ monstrosity in the middle of a desert completely paved with cement blocks, with cirrus cloud streaked sky above and mountains in the distance. Perhaps this endless driveway is what the commander of this boat dreams of inside tinted glass, surrounded by "premium leather and American walnut burl wood" trim, listening to soft rock on the "Soundmark® THX™ Certified Audio/Navigation System", comforted by a "Dual-zone Electronic Automatic Temperature Control (EATC)", consuming gas at 13 mpg.

Just like that other Navigator, whose venture of mass murder and pillage was honored with a federal holiday last week, dreamed that nothing but empty sea separated him from the wealth of East Asia. His calculations were a little off, but over 500 years later, progress has finally reached there anyway. The economic miracle now flows through China, like the dead fish flowing down the Songhua river. (image from bbc.co.uk)

Outhousestanding

Currently advertisements throughout L.A. proclaim "Metro has been named Outstanding Transportation System by the APTA. It's nothing less than L.A. deserves."

This is much like mom saying in the 1950s her uncle had the finest outhouse in rural Tennessee when everyone she knew in her Illinois town had flush toilets by then. "Metro" may be outstanding, but it is still merely a string of wood planks with a whole cut into it with a stinking mess of feces and urine in a pit below.

Saying a public transportation system is "Outstanding" in the U.S. is like saying that eight year old boy I saw doing some traditional Polish dance last Sunday in Verdugo Park was "Outstanding." Sure, the serious look on his face while he awkwardly bumped into his dancing partner was very cute. But since they are merely a group of eight year old kids who practiced for an hour six Saturday's in a row--except for Suzie who was sick one day and Kevin who was crying uncontrollably that one morning because daddy put cinnamon and sugar on his toast, and even though he wanted it on, HE wanted to put it on himself--one is impressed they even remember to twirl when they are supposed to twirl. But it's really nothing like going to see the professionals of Podhale.

The public transportation systems of European cities are flush toilets next to the piss poor service we have in the U.S. New York is somewhat of an exception--there are plenty of places where the subway smells like piss, but at least you can get from the Bronx to Coney Island in under an hour. By contrast, when I went to see those kids perform at the Unity Festival, it took me over two hours to get from Encino to Glendale, approximately the same distance.

And last Friday, in mid afternoon, at the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, I waited 15 minutes before squeezing onto an overloaded "Rapid" bus, which then took twenty minutes to arrive at USC, a distance of exactly 2.5 miles. Metro celebrates the Rapid Bus as a prime reason they received the APTA award, but for actual bus riders, the "Rapid" is a sad joke. As I have discussed, it is often just as slow as the regular bus because it has to manage the same traffic jams as every other vehicle that crawls up and down Vermont or Wilshire or Ventura. And as I have also mentioned before, the solution would be cheap and fast: bus-only lanes on these thoroughfares.

Instead our Mayor and the propogandists behind this ad campaign--who don't actually ride the bus but love looking at statistics saying the Rapid is 25% faster than the regular bus--sure and this is 25% slower than that fourteen year old girl on her one speed beach cruiser--are calling for billions to be spent on extending the rail network. Let's say in twenty years our Mayor's dream is realized, and two rail lines to Santa Monica are completed, it would still take me 20 bleeping minutes to go 2.5 miles south on Vermont!

Mayors love to fantasize about future monuments to their reign, in the meantime people who live in the present get stuck in a barn with manure a half-foot deep. That's why the Bus Riders Union needs people who know a crap hole when they see it to show up October 17 and demand a halt to all rail projects until a true rapid bus system is built. And while we are at it we should demand future board meetings be held outside with a port-o-potty standing behind each of the board of directors seats. Its nothing less than L.A. deserves.

Teenage Troubles

In high school I was a skinny awkward misfit who sat at the lunch table with the other oddballs with no social life. Perhaps this is why I am uneasy with the rush of high school kids who pack the bus around 2:30 in the afternoon. Suddenly I'm transported back 25 years and kids are slugging me in the stomach until I pass out and wake up staring at the nurses office ceiling, becoming the school's source of laughter for the next month. Harris and Klebold were hardly the first to fantasize about wasting those who ostracized them. Fortunately, punk rock was more my style than semi-automatic weapons.

Riding the Ventura Rapid line back from Target we stop at Winnetka Ave with over fifty Taft High students squirming to get on. At the back door waiting to get off are a teenage girl wearing Sony closed headphones in black jeans and t-shirt and a younger boy talking into his cell phone. The back door does not open, but they just stand their as the Taft students push their way onto the bus. I suppose they recognize the busdriver is busy managing the crowd and has forgotten to open the back door to let them out. After a minute or so, the two of them start looking anxiously towards the front of the bus. Finally, the boy says somewhat weakly "back door," but the door doesn't open.

All the students are now on and the driver shuts the front door. The bus is packed with chattering high schoolers, many with their cell phones in one ear, seamlessly integrating conversations through real and wireless space. The bus begins to pull away. "Back door!" The boy has apparently lost his patience. The bus stops for a moment, but only until the light turns green, when it starts off again. The girl begins knocking on the door's window. Once again, the bus stops--but the driver's just waiting for a car to pass so he can merge into the center lane. We fly on. The boy waves his hands hopelessly, "what the...?" The girl just stares silently outside the door and the rest of the bus seems oblivious. The next stop is Reseda--a long two and a half miles.

Ah, the humiliations of youth. But it will all be over soon. In a few years she'll have her Associate's in Phlebotomy and earn 30,000 a year drawing blood in a Valley lab. And he'll pull down 12 an hour re-shelving dog-eared books and magazines deposited by dawdlers at the Hollywood Border's--or at least the one in Glendale.