The Invaluable Inefficiency of Neighborhoods

[This is a shortened version of my recent Mittelpolitanism post, up on the Strong Towns website.]

The death of suburbia has been predicted many times, and yet suburban development endures. Will the current pandemic finally make the difference? Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn suggested it might a month ago, for two reasons.

First, in the wake of the economic wreckage of COVID-19, governments may just be too broke to handle the fiscal liabilities and infrastructure costs of suburbia—and when those costs are more immediately felt by residents, they'll leave. He pointed out that “the North American development pattern is built with an assumption of permanent affluence”—something that the economic consequences of the current pandemic may finally disabuse many people of.

Second, even if the suburban experiment doesn’t economically collapse, he suggested it may do so because the closures and restrictions necessary to keep people alive have made suburban limitations manifest as never before. "Those of us living in cities can hear the birds instead of car horns,” Chuck wrote. “The air seems cleaner. The city, more human." So we may see a critical mass of people pushing against cities sacrificing their urban neighborhoods for the sake of enabling suburban commuter ease.

Both of these speculations could be countered, of course. In the first case, will the economic devastation of COVID-19 really be sufficiently devastating, and does anyone actually want it to be? Even setting aside the unfortunately enduring appeal of having one's own (heavily subsidized and mortgaged) castle on a cul-de-sac, the suburbs are central to school district competition, socio-economic sorting, and what David Imbroscio has called the logic of "liberal expansionism," the linkage of suburban development with the push for ever-greater regional investment in a city, whether corporate or governmental. With all that in place, isn’t it likely that the means to keep suburban costs steady will somehow be found, absent a truly total economic collapse? (Note the Republican support in Congress for a second round of pandemic-related stimulus, this one focused, predictably, on infrastructure projects which historically have primarily served suburban commuters.)

As for the second case, will the mere experience of a healthier urban environment with fewer cars really lead people to decide against them? That's a change much longed for by anyone who worries about either the environmental health or the cultural strength of where they live—but when you place it against the delight of record low gasoline prices, and rates of infection which make urban density quite reasonably seem as something to fear, I'm not sure how much I would count on it.

During a Eutopia Workshop discussion organized by the good folks at Solidarity Hall, Chuck suggested that, whatever our speculations of a post-suburban future, the pandemic is going to force nearly every American city or town into one of two camps. Cities that take what he labeled "option 1" would be those who dare not contemplate real economic collapse, and thus will instead insist that residents be provided with every economic opportunity for continuing suburban and auto-centric ways of life, no matter what. As for "option 2," that would be the cities which do what is necessary to adapt to the reality of suburban costs in the face of the economic recession we are almost certainly facing—including doing the work to build up those civic strengths which will enable their residents to follow through on what the restrictions we have been operating under have hopefully allowed most of us to recognize.

What might those civic strengths be? In a word, they’re neighborhoods.

Note that “neighborhoods” are not necessarily “communities.” Community feeling and friendships can obviously exist among neighbors, but they don’t have to: what really matters to a neighborhood is proximity. Neighbors, because they live nearby each other, end up creating public spaces that can be mutually shared, and forming (both with and sometimes against one another) routines around and in the midst of those public spaces which bring richness to ordinary patterns of life. As Nancy Rosenblum wrote in her superb book, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America, neighbors exemplify “weak ties.” Neighbors regard each other as "decent folk" (or at least aspire to, and commiserate with other decent folk in the neighborhood about those bad neighbors who choose to not so aspire). They show reciprocity, speak out when necessary, but also abide by the rule "live and let live." Hence, the neighborhood is a place conceived in light of at least a degree of pluralism, mobility, and anonymity, with proximity being the essential bond: 

To moral philosophers committed to more demanding expressions of mutual respect or principled toleration, live and let live falls short. To disparage it is a mistake, however...."Weak ties" based on infrequent interactions are...[themselves a] critical resource....[O]rganizations where neighbors develop the capacity for collective action are key...a close cousin to the...rudimentary cooperation in countering people who flaunt reasonable expectations for "for what anyone would do, here" (pp. 113, 139-140).

Understanding the central role in distinguishing between different cities, and especially between different city approaches to dealing with the pandemic crisis, is crucial. In a small community of friends, of people committed to a shared (but more often than not also quite exclusive) faith or ethos or way of life, encouraging people in recognizing that which Chuck pointed out, and supporting one another economically in making the adaptations he suspects may be mostly unavoidable, would presumably go much more smoothly than it likely will in the pluralistic cities which 80% of Americans live in. The Strong Towns aim, as I understand it, is to nudge the urban environments we have to greater sustainability, and thus greater local empowerment, within which a whole host of particular communities can play their organic role. To the extent that we can build up the "weak ties" of our neighborhoods, build up their shared spaces and the trust they inculcate, build up the opportunities they provide for people to see the costs and opportunities of collective life directly, the more likely option 2 will become.

A central part of that building involves the "social infrastructure" that Elias Crim, the director of Solidarity Hall, wrote in his response to Chuck's presentation. He discussed the "traditional economy of cooperation," which has parallels in various distributist, socialist, and communalist institutional forms—none of which are particularly efficient, at least not from a market perspective. They allow for overlapping and conflicting responsibilities, tradition-bound forms of interaction and service, complicated collective decision-making practices, pricing mechanisms and welfare policies that reflect localized information, and more—all of which will make for economic forms which are more resilient when disasters occur, but in the meantime do not maximize efficient results.

What does this have to do with neighborhoods? In a sense, everything—because in many ways, the weak ties of neighborhood associational life and routines are the very definition of "inefficient." Marc Dunkelman, in his book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, makes this his central thesis: that the routine, repetitive, inefficient, and overlapping encounters and social constructs which emerge from ordinary proximity with other people form a desperately important “middle ring” of casual trust and mutual support. Quoting Jane Jacobs’s line about neighborhoods being "valuably inefficient," he draws upon the work of Sean Safford to consider two different Rust Best cities—Youngstown, Ohio, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the latter, “neighbors attended a variety of different colleges and worked in different mills. They were congregants at different churches and regulars at different bars.....[This] random intersection of individuals from different pockets of society spurred big new ideas—even when they appeared to waste resources. Regions focused too exclusively on efficiency may have been able to produce more with less, but...[faced] an insufficient capacity to adapt to new circumstances" (pp. 171-172, 176).

If the current pandemic demands anything, it is certainly the "capacity to adapt to new circumstances." So as economic suffering and new realizations open up the possibility for a truly post-suburban future, however minimally, with such possibilities confronting all sorts of contrary pressures along the way, a focus on "weak," neighborly ties is crucial, as whatever transition may be in the offing may well depend upon those distinctive civic resources. What should such a focus look like? Much like some of the principles which Strong Towns has laid out in their Local Leader's Toolkit. In particular, for the enriching proximity of neighborhoods to function, the people living there:

*Need to have some basic food and housing security, especially at this time of economic insecurity and pandemic fear; they’re start hoarding, or pillaging, or simply leave otherwise.

*Need open spaces and alternatives for getting around; without them, the assumption that all their interactions should be conducted over a distance via the automobile will seem, whatever else their experiences with stay-at-home orders might be telling them.

*Don’t need invasive regulations interfering with their commercial and residential adaptations; the “live and let live” aspect of effective neighboring is never more important than when families shelter relatives, students, or co-workers during a time of lockdown, or start new businesses from their garages to replace lost income.

*Need, most of all, the cash to address those immediate local needs—the potholes in the street, the lack of bike racks at the grocery store, the vouchers for the bus ride to the farmers market or cross-town hub—which will reward the “decent folk” of a neighborhood for the work they’re doing in their places.

Not every town or city is an Allentown; every place has its unique social architecture. But wherever we live--which means, at present, wherever we are sheltering in place, wondering what comes next, and, quite possibly, relying upon our church and work communities, our family and friends, and our neighbors to get through the day--there are neighborhoods which need our help. Those overlapping, inefficient, weak ties between all of us, living next door or down the block from one another, are important for getting our places to make the beneficial shifts away from suburbia which this terrible pandemic makes possible. We should all find a good place nearby us to start.

The Coronavirus and County Authority

[This is a slightly updated and extended column of mine which ran in The Wichita Eagle on May 14, 2020; I'm late in getting it copied to here.]

Throughout this pandemic, we’ve gotten used to waiting on, listening to, and then either criticizing or thanking our elected leaders much more than usual. The reasons for this are obvious: during a public emergency we all, like it or not, depend upon those with governing authority who impose restrictions, provide support, and make decisions regarding public health.

What many Kansas have discovered, however, is that such authority isn’t always located where they thought it was. A lot of it, in fact, lies in the hands of Kansas’ 105 county commissions, probably the most often overlooked of all the state’s governing institutions.

To be fair, the same can be said for counties all across the United States. It’s common, in the political science literature, for scholars to admit that our knowledge of how county commissions make public decisions is sorely lacking. There’s no good reason for this, of course: County commissions adhere to the same public meeting requirements as other governing bodies. And yet, unlike the contentious fights that occur in city halls or the grandstanding that takes place in state legislatures--to say nothing of the constant attention focused on Washington D.C.--the day-to-day administrative work of counties often goes unnoticed by scholars and the media alike. Until, that is, a pandemic forces commissioners directly into the spotlight.

With few exceptions it is American counties, not cities, which have the ground-level responsibility for collecting data on health, overseeing the distribution of welfare, conducting the electoral business of democracy, and much more. But since county lines were historically drawn by state governments, dividing up their rural space without attention to the urban communities that later grew within them, it’s not unusual for those who seek and win county elections, and the officials they subsequently appoint, to become disconnected from the contentious, pluralistic reality they oversee.

There are, of course, plenty of contrary examples. In Johnson County, Public Health Director Sanmi Areola and his team have fought to communicate clearly across a complicated metropolitan area with many rival jurisdictions, as they have addressed Governor Kelly’s stay-at-home orders. In Shawnee County, the commission has mostly responded to County Health Officer Gianfranco Pezzino concerns positively, even contemplating, in the face of worrisome infection numbers, an unpopular extension of local lock-down orders as he recommends.

Still, examples of the occasional disconnect between Kansas citizens and those who run our counties aren’t hard to find. It’s not just a commissioner in Riley County attributing Manhattan’s low COVID-19 numbers to its lack of Chinese residents or commissioners in Sedgwick County joking about needing to talk more about the pandemic to justify the money they’ve received from the federal government. It’s simply the fact that in counties across Kansas, from Finney to Leavenworth, it has too often been the commissioners themselves criticizing state--or even their own county--health experts, playing to business or suburban communities that appear unaware of or unconcerned about what is happening in the downtown hospitals they depend upon. (It is worth noting that in 103 of Kansas's 105 counties, matters of public health are solely the province of county-level officials; only in Douglas County--with the city of Lawrence--and Cowley County--with the city of Winfield--are public health decisions made by a body that is jointly staffed and supervised by both the county and its primary urban area.)

The very shape of political institutions help form the beliefs of those who work within them. Consequently, as Kansas attempts to rebuild a new normal beyond the pandemic, thinking more seriously about home rule and the way cities, counties, and the state share governing authority should be near the top of every elected official’s list.

Star Trek, The Original Series, Season 2: The Second Binge

Season 2
Well, here's the next set. Once again, like Season 1, we watched them all the way through in original broadcast order. Season 2 of Star Trek isn't as strong as the first, but it has fine moments all the same. Just as before, no summaries here; just a grade and a few sentences explanation

Amok Time: A
Tightly plotted, with an impressive seriousness in the dialogue and performances (i.e., no sniggers about Vulcans and pon farr), McCoy is actually a smart, quick-thinking doctor, and the ritual makes sense instead of seeming needlessly Orientalist. Justly praised, and a great start to the season.

Who Mourns for Adonis?: B-
A pretty well-scripted effort, with good stuff for Uhura, Scotty, Chekov, and others to do, and a fun "Chariot of the Gods"-style story idea to boot, but not particularly well-executed.

The Changeling: C+
Oh wow: it's the first draft of Star Trek: The Motion Picture! Only not as good, because of plot conventions about how advanced computers worked that must have seemed goofy even in 1968. And really, there was no way to investigate Nomad's power, to learn from it?

Mirror, Mirror: A
A smart, fun episode; a great introduction to the Mirror University in Trek. The characterizations are delightful: Captain Kirk is quick-thinking and persuasively commanding, Uhura and Sulu are having a blast, and even "the Captain's woman" maintains her dignity, mostly.

The Apple: C-
If you ignore the colonialist mindset, I guess it's not that bad; our youngest daughter Kristen kind of liked it, but that may just have been the dragon cave. The actors playing the villagers were really committed, you have to say that.

The Doomsday Machine: A
A terrific script, with smart action, tension-filled performances, with Commodore Decker providing some real drama and pathos. One of the very best of the whole series.

Catspaw: C-
A Halloween episode! Nothing really original here--super-powerful and strange aliens studying humans get seduced by our emotions and sensuality, like always. What could have been fun was undermined by horribly cheap effects.

I, Mudd: D+
I don't know why anyone likes Mudd; is it just that there aren't any other recurring characters in all of The Original Series to cheer for? Anyway, another weak and deeply sexist episode, without much charm to help you look past it.

Metamorphosis: C-
What could have made for a really decent sci-fi episode--a genuinely alien creature falls in love with a human, who is repulsed by the idea once it is revealed to him--is undermined by an easy dodge in the direction of, and a shrugging acceptance of, heteronormativity and a little racism in the end, despite hints in at least one scene that the Enterprise crew was better than all that. Oh well

Journey to Babel: B+
Fun stuff--Spock's family, alien spies, and suicide missions. Sexist as always, but not annoyingly so.

Friday's Child: C+
A kind of confusingly structured episode. It's best understood, I think, if you just once again imagine the Federation (and this time the Klingons too) as a group of 19th-century imperialists trying to understand and bribe the primitives they want to colonize. Some fun stuff with McCoy though.

The Deadly Years: D
I feel like I've seen this one episode more than any others, and thus I have a weird fondness for it, but man, the ageism is terrible.

Obsession: B-
Not a great episode, but a basically nice sci-fi tale about a weird monster and an obsessed captain. Kirk's focus and the others' response to it is better and more believable than it was in "Conscience of a King" from Season 1.

Wolf in the Fold: C
Jack the Ripper as a space ghost! A crazy, goofball idea, carried off with more than the usual amount of sexism (women getting killed right and left, and did they actually bring Scotty to the planet just to get him laid?), but I guess it's okay fun all the same.

The Trouble with Tribbles: A
A great comic episode; probably their greatest. But it would have been better if Cyrano Jones have been played by Harry Mudd. Why not give him a decent episode to appear in for once?

The Gamesters of Triskelion: C-
Too goofy to dislike too much, but man, what was going on Uhura and Lars? Hey look, an Andorian! And man, Kirk can play the ladies. His gambling of the Enterprise itself is way out of character, but whatever.

A Piece of the Action: A
Totally hammy, and totally fun. I really should go through the episodes and count how many times the Enterprise's mission basically involves finding a lost landing party, or fixing what some earlier landing party did wrong, or rescuing the planet from a landing party gone crazy or bad.

The Immunity Syndrome: B
A cool straight-up sci-fi episode, with far-out space weirdness threatening the Enterprise. How much better this would have been with better special effects! Plus, it has some wonderful interplay between Spock and McCoy.

A Private Little War: B-
This is a frustrating episode, because watching it with any open-mindedness makes it clear what a fabulous story they had here. Unfortunately, they dressed it up with a lot of unnecessary hamminess from the "witch," and failed to make clear the obvious critique of Kirk's and the Federation's mindset, as was present in the dialogue of the characters (I think this episode has the only honest to goodness debate between officers on the bridge). The mix of sex and violence as social corruptions makes the episode particularly heavy, and you wonder if there was supposed to be a parallel between the doctor treating Spock and the witch treating Kirk. Anyway, it has potential, but never comes together.

Return to Tomorrow: C+
A predictable and somewhat boring set-up--godlike super-beings again?--but once they've possessed the crews' bodies, you've got a cool sci-fi premise, with strange beings with unknown motivations wrecking havoc. Kirk's big speech about the purpose of space exploration is oddly out of place, and there's too much of the usual Star Trek romance, though admittedly serving a somewhat different purpose here.

Patterns of Force: A-
How many of the problems some may have with this episode are a function of the fact that we think the lessons of Nazism are different than what was apparently believed by television scriptwriters in California the late 1960s? Anyway, a thoughtful episode, a good bit of sci-fi plugged into the utterly lame economies of the television budgets of the time.

By Any Other Name: B-
Some straight up moralistic sci-fi, with some nice touches to capture the alienness of the Kalvens. But with a lame, completely anti-climactic ending.

The Omega Glory: D+
Yet another parallel Earth, and this is the worst from the entire series, I think. Not because of the acting--crazy Captain Tracey is actually kind of great--but the fight scenes and general plotting are filled with inconsistencies, bad cuts, and stuff that just doesn't make sense. And that ending? Oh man, that's just wingnut stuff there.

The Ultimate Computer: B
Talking the master computer to death, again--a trope that will never die! But while the automation vs. humanity plot points are pedantic, this one shows inklings of AI all the way back in the late 1960s, so I give them some credit there. And the character of Daystrom is genuinely compelling.

Bread and Circuses: A
Once again, a parallel Earth, but this one makes up for "The Omega Glory"; it's really the best conceived and delivered parallel story from the whole story. Lot's of efficient details make the typical Star Trek cheapness seem plausible ("Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development"!), and it manages to cram in some genuine satire as well as some dark and very adult uses of sexuality (is Marcus mocking Captain Merick because he's weak-willed, or because he's gay?). I know some don't care for the explicit--and rather reverent--mention of Christianity at the end, but I adored it, and still do.

Assignment: Earth: B-
Hey, Gary Seven is Doctor Who! Or at least has what looks like a sonic screwdriver. Anyway this is a manifestly half-done episode (why did Roberta even show up in the apartment?). I can't imagine it would have been a good television in its own right, but I give them points for trying, and for truly launching Terri Garr's career.

What Mayors Need

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Last week, Mayor Whipple had a rough time during the city council meeting, with his request for a deputy somewhat embarrassingly tabled in the face of both criticism from other council members and a long list of online attacks that got read into the record. The whole affair has already been critically commented on, but as a break from talking about the coronavirus pandemic all the time, let me beat this dead horse one more time--most because I hope it will revive.

Not immediately, to be sure. Some members of the city council argued that any discussions about additional staff in the city's government needed to wait on the completion of a comprehensive review currently being conducted by the city manager's office; others pointed out that the politics of hiring a major new city employee at a time of government furloughs, increasing unemployment, and great economic uncertainty are pretty dubious, to say the least. And beyond that, there was disagreement between Mayor Whipple and different council members over how best to describe the duties of such a deputy, over who would be the likely candidates for such a position, and over whether or not a city employee already exists who could fill exactly the sort of policy research and community outreach role he's requesting. (The office in question is part of the city's Communications Team; it seems unlikely to me that any such a person could serve as full-time city-wide assistant to the mayor, in the way that community service representatives may at least potentially serve individual city council members within their districts, but the lack of specificity in the mayor's proposal and his subsequent presentation of it leaves the challenge somewhat unresolved.)

For all those reasons and more, it will probably be a while before Mayor Whipple contemplates trying again. But when the pandemic lessens and the staffing review is complete, as they both eventually will be, and when he can bring forward a more detailed proposal that better clarifies and responds to all of the above, he definitely should. Why? For reasons closely related to those I advanced back in December: that Wichita, when it looks at itself, and when at its peer cities around the country, should realize the need for a stronger, more democratically responsible form of government, and giving the mayor a deputy--a chief of staff, an executive assistant, call them what you will--is a small but important part of moving in the direction of such empowerment.

What does empowering the mayor have to do with democratic accountability? It is, in my view, a matter of public expectations. Wichita, like every American city over the past 30 years (which, incidentally, was when our current city council electoral arrangement was established), has changed. Our slow-growth (or steady-state) city certainly hasn't changed as much or as quickly as many others, but Wichita's urban population is nonetheless more diverse, its economy more complex, and its political culture even a little more blue than was the case a generation ago. Cities are organic entities, to be sure; new changes will always be overlaid on those that came before. But that's not a reason to take seriously where things stand at present. And the present situation, partly due to increased (and, unfortunately, often justifiable) frustrations about transparency and decision-making in our city government, is one that looks to the city government, and the person who at least nominally leads it, with the expectation of seeing a genuinely balanced, genuinely responsive, and most importantly genuinely decisive path providing, one that works through the welter of conflicting needs and demands presented by the various constituencies in our city. Hence, the argument goes, to deal effectively in our present (and still evolving) urban environment, whomever is elected mayor deserves more direct help, more resources for information and analysis, so as be more fully accountable to the citizens who look to that office for leadership.

One obvious response to this is reflected in the previously mentioned editorial: but Wichita's mayor isn't supposed to lead! Instead, under the council-manager system of government Wichita currently has, the mayor is just the chairperson of the city council, which collectively sets policies for our city manager, who executes all the actual decisions. Isn't asking for a deputy or chief of staff disregarding all that?

Now Mayor Whipple and some of his advisors insisted in some online discussions of his proposal that his request isn't connected to a desire to change Wichita's city charter, and thus re-structure form of government. Personally I suspect--given that so many, when they first saw this proposal, immediately thought in terms of power grabs anyway--that the mayor’s proposal would be better served, and thus would better serve the city in the long run, by just connecting it to various arguments about our government structure outright, and talking explicitly, alongside the need for mayoral assistance, about the need for a more accountable form of leadership in Wichita. That might involve thinking about the number or term length of city council members, or the role of the city manager, or any number of other possibilities.

But even if one is determined not to go so far, it doesn't change the reality of the aforementioned evolving public expectations, which are being experienced by city leaders everywhere. True, Mayor Whipple, when he made reference to other cities whose mayors have chiefs of staff, executive assistants, or deputies to assist them, did mention some which have (wisely, I think) made the change over to a strong mayor form of government: Tulsa, Omaha, Colorado Springs, etc. However, he could have just as easily mentioned various cities in our region which still operate under the council-manager system--Kansas City, KS, Kansas City, MO, and Oklahoma City, for example--all of which also have recognized the need to provide their mayors, as individuals representing the city at large, with chiefs of staff, to do exactly the kind of community engagement and research that our mayor asked for last week.

In short, even without thinking about other ways to address Wichita's governance needs, the mayor's request is one that reflects the same political and policy realities that numerous other city governments have recognized. So I hope that this proposal--given some re-writing and lots of back-room discussion--will return, perhaps stronger and better grounded for having gone through the wringer once already. Mayor Whipple, and the city itself, deserve it.

The Archangel on a Bicycle

And I imagine, bringing the Good News to the countryside on Easter morning. By Jean-Marie Pirot (Arcabas). Thank you, Alan Jacobs. And happy Easter, everyone.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: Wichita's Weaknesses and Strengths

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, it's sometimes easy, here in Wichita--a large city nonetheless somewhat isolated and disconnected from the larger metropolitan areas of the country, a city which centers a largely rural and therefore much more low risk part of the state--to be unclear if we're overreacting or not reacting enough.But feeling as though we’re stuck in the middle, feeling divided, is nothing new for a mid-sized city like ours.

In general the news for Kansas overall seems to be pretty good. It is looking like the spread of the virus, as it peaks in April, won't be as deadly as we feared, almost certainly in part because of Governor Laura Kelly's (and locally, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse's) insistence on pushing for stay-at-home orders as early as possible. But is it true that, in taking these actions, Wichita will suffer even more than it would have had the city, and its surrounding county and state, not shut things down? Obviously you can find folks who self-righteously insist upon just that. The evidence suggests otherwise--but all the same, there's reason to worry. My best guess, on the basis of both observations and ongoing research, is that Wichita, and most of our state generally, will be able to weather this month, and the next, relatively well--but that rebuilding afterwards may be confronted with some real difficulties.

On the positive side, comparative data provided by Wichita State University shows that, as Kansas’s economy is generally much less dependent upon service, entertainment, and tourist sectors than is the case elsewhere, we haven’t seen quite the same level of job losses and business closures statewide. The mainstays of Kansas’s economy–food production, manufacturing, education, and health care–are broadly considered essential, and thus have mostly been able to continue to operate.

That’s no comfort, of course, to the many Kansans who are suddenly facing unemployment and real economic distress. Nor does it lessen the fear which so many of us have here about the possible loss of so much that adds to the quality of life here in Wichita–the restaurants, the theaters, the bookstores, the "third places," and so much more. And that is what puts a question mark beside this otherwise good news for the folks in this city--Wichita is actually enough of a metropolitan economy that it does, in fact, include significant service and entertainment sectors. Not nearly what New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or even Kansas City has, of course, but still, enough that, as the Wichita State study shows, a few of the negative economic effects (like regarding air travel) which are below the national average for Kansas, are slightly above it for Wichita. Not much, but slightly. This is why it is vital for Wichita to take seriously questions about how to keep money in the pockets of as many Wichitans as possible (providing maternity leave for city workers whose vacation and sick leave are being used to help support their fellow furloughed workers is one good idea) that probably aren't even on the radar screen in many smaller cities. Small actions, such are withing the jurisdiction of the mayor and the city council, may make all the difference in enabling Wichitans to enjoy the same lower level of economic pain and disruption which will likely characterize the rest of the state for the duration of the pandemic.

Something similar might be said regarding psychological pain and family disruption. Nowhere in Kansas--and certainly not even here in Wichita, the largest single city in the state--do we see the kind of urban density which characterizes those cities that have seen the largest outbreaks, and thus have had to take the most extreme actions for the sake of public health. But even if such measures become necessary here--and again, given the success that we've had in flattening the curve they hopefully will not be--they still wouldn’t play out the same way that they have in larger urban agglomerations. Simply put, Kansans--and Wichitans too--generally have easy access to rural space. When it comes to mental health and minimizing domestic conflict, that matters. As one writer suggested in The New York Times, social distancing in an environment when families have gardens, fields, and locally grown food readily available to them, is a very different prospect from social distancing when three people in a cramped downtown apartment have to maintain 6 ft. distance from one another, and when even the parks and sidewalks are often so crowded with people trying to find some openness that they become sources of stress and have to be subject to further regulation.

In a way, it might be Wichita's very in-betweeness which will make this city a real model insofar as such matters are concerned. We have a genuinely large population with a low enough level of density that nearly all of its residents can take advantage of rural space for physical and mental rejuvenation relatively easily. That's not to say that there aren't problems which some Wichitans could face in this regard; one may think of transportation and access to some of that (mostly privately owned, and sometimes fiercely patrolled) open space, particularly for poorer Wichitans in the downtown and southern parts of the city. And of course, the safety and maintenance of the trails and bike paths and road shoulders by which we can make use of that space once we get there is a question as well. As city leaders take a look of where to cut costs in the face of the financial hit the city is taking, and will continue to take, one hopes they're recognize that is, also, is part of the value and resilience of the city, and will attend to the costs of those easily overlooked resources accordingly.

Still, in general, it would be fair to conclude that Wichita, and south-central Kansas overall, has available to it the opportunities and the resources keep the economic damage and the social consequences of the pandemic minimal. But that, unfortunately, is not the whole story. We have to think about long-term impacts, and not just short-term ones.

As the same Wichita State study warns, food production and manufacturing in Kansas is heavily dependent upon supply chains in equipment and trade that the overall economic health of the nation effectively determines. Service workers and others who work in more creative or information-dependent sectors of the economy can snap back as soon as paying customers return; the same cannot be said for larger industries that need to wait for raw materials to ship or are dependent upon extended networks of specialized workers. The fact that Wichita, as mentioned above, actually does have a decent-sized service sector, will mean that, as the larger mainstays of Kansas's economy slowly struggle back to life, it may be the collective action of activists, entrepreneurs, and urban creatives in our city that will be end up being essential to whatever support will be needed for workers in the aircraft industry and others in the meantime. Of course, given how much of Wichita's workforce is tied up in heavy manufacturing, which over the past year has already taken many 737 Max-related hits, maybe the best we can hope for is a wash.

Agriculture may be another problem. True, the likelihood of the virus spreading widely in isolated Kansas farming towns is quite small. But as the work force in Kansas’s rural counties is also quite small, and as many of those counties–thanks to Republican opposition to extending Medicaid—lack basic health care resources, even a small outbreak could be devastating. The resulting could be a domino effect, with unproductive or failed farms and feedlots forcing closures in ancillary food industries across the state, many of which are concentrated in south-central Kansas, with Wichita as their hub. Ultimately we may see a hastening of the already underway rural population collapse in western Kansas, with long-term social, economic, and political consequences for our city, as more and more people throughout the region come to Wichita seeking medical care and basic economic opportunities, contributing our aging population and probably not adding much to the overall tax base. It's a good thing that Sedgwick County's population is just over the half-million mark, thereby qualifying it for at least a slice of the $150 billion the federal government has earmarked to help out state, county, and municipal governments; in the months to follow this pandemic, with so many liabilities building up and so much potential revenue off the table, it's going to need it.

As we wait to see what this plague brings into our lives, our task as Wichitans must be to use the resources we have–a large population, one which is likely to find ways to remain relatively stable, socially and economically, in the short-term–to reach out and help make more resilient those places likely to struggle the most as Kansas recovers from this pandemic, whenever that recovery fully comes.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: A Week of Triage

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

This has been a week of triage for our city.

With the Sedgwick County Commission at first resisting and then finally submitting to medical opinion (and political pressure) regarding the need to order many businesses and places of public gathering to close for the sake of minimizing the potential spread of the coronavirus on Monday, the other shoe--which every small business-owner and all of their thousands of supporters throughout the city have known was just waiting to be dropped--came down on Tuesday, and the scramble find a new normal began in earnest. We'd seen libraries, movie theaters, restaurants and shops of various kinds, and so much else start to limit their hours or close down entirely last week; this week it finally became official. The question becomes the classic one which arises in every emergency, every instance of limited resources: what can be sustained, what can be changed, and what can't be saved?

Like many Wichitans, towards the end of last week I made the time to check in on places of business I was most worried about surviving the loss of commerce which this order--and, let's be honest, the even stricter ones likely to follow it--is going to entail. We stopped by Manna Wok and Grace Asian Market to get some bulkogi and kimchee (and commiserated with the owners who said they were praying their business would survive), and Little Lion Cafe for some ice cream (and commiserated with the one worker on staff who was slammed with orders from worried folks like me). We checked in at Bagel Haus, Pollo Express, TJ's Burger House, and Prost. Everyone has their favorite little spots, of course, and fortunately there are a couple of websites providing regularly updated lists of what places have online ordering, which ones have curbside pick-up, and which have simply closed for the duration. How well online patronage will help the local dining scene over the weeks (and perhaps months) to come remains to be seen.

What I worry about the most, though, isn't the loss of the wonderful and diverse food these local restaurants provided, but rather the spaces they created. You don't have to be an devotee of urban sociology or civic republican theory to recognize the immense value of "third places"--those locations where one is not at work, nor at home, but rather in an open-ended (while still closely defined) arena of connection and interaction. We're talking about the YMCA, or the public library, or community centers--all of which, of course, have needed to close down to prevent people congregating and spreading the virus further.

Places of commerce do this too--not all of them, and not all equally well, but some specialize in it. Indeed, for some the fact that they can provide a space for young and old, rich and poor, regulars and newbies, like-minded folk and trouble-makers, all to occupy a particular place and observe, listen to, laugh with, and learn from other actual flesh-and-blood human beings is exactly their business model. There are many establishments which may advertise this--but none embody it as well as Wichita's bookstores.

Watermark Books & Cafe (full disclosure: my wife worked there for over eight years) has had to cancel all its book clubs, reading groups, and story times. Sarah Bagby and her management staff have had to let their booksellers go, and close their doors, which has been a terrible loss for the College Hill community--to say nothing of the innumerable elementary and middle schools which Watermark regularly brought authors out to--which the store has become so entwined with over the years. Eighth Day Books, the tiny linchpin of a sprawling spiritual community (the Eighth Day Institute, of which I am a member) that connects together churches and faith groups throughout the whole region, is focusing on online and phone orders, as EDI's regular gatherings have had to be suspended, and access to the store limited, with the small, devoted staff of Eighth Day hunkering down to weather the storm. And Prairie Dog Comics, home of some of the best RPG game nights anywhere in the state (and where I buy my daughters copies of  Ms. Marvel), has had to pack up its tables and end its evenings of gaming, restricting itself to fulfilling phone and online orders, and only allowing browsers into the store on a strict reservation basis. All of this, and more, doesn't just threaten businesses--it threatens a by-product of commerce which is far more important that the commercial transactions themselves: namely, people getting together and sharing their literary passions, their spiritual insights, their geeky delights, with those in the same space.

In the larger sense, of course, cities have always been about the civic and commercial creation of such spaces. The reigning ideal of urban life, after all, is to live in a place where complex social connections could co-exist with what an old professor of mine once called "the heterogeneity of anonymity"--that is, a place where we are sufficiently strangers to each other to allow all sorts of original communal associations to emerge, without the burden of the past traditions, prejudices, or authority. That ideal is rarely achieved, obviously--and considering the importance of traditions to who we are, making that urban ideal into an idol is plainly wrong-headed. But it's appeal is undeniable all the same.

Recently Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist, mourned seeing the people of NYC forced to isolate themselves. "Historically, cities have made it easier for people to live alone without experiencing constant loneliness," she wrote, noting that choosing to live in a city is "to depend on interdependence." To be isolated from one another, in particular from those third places where the rich possibilities of community are most regularly realized--as they were and, God willing, still will be, at Watermark, Eighth Day, and Prairie Dog--strains urban interdependence as nothing else.

In some ways, our city might be considered better able to handle such a strain than many other, larger cities--which, not incidentally, is where coronavirus outbreaks have been most severe. Because Wichita dominates, but does not encapsulate, its rural surroundings, there is still plenty of space for mandated isolation to take fulfilling--or at least less cramped--forms. Goldberg quoted a psychologist who observed how the impact of quarantine and the closure of beloved spaces depends much upon where you live; the loss of socially enriching spaces will be felt differently "if you’re able to stroll around your farm and pick the produce you’ve been growing,” in contrast to those who are “living in a one-bedroom apartment with three roommates" whom they have to nonetheless keep separated from. While not every Wichitan can easily get out to Andover or Yoder to pick up farm-fresh food from local butchers and producers, the obstacles to doing so--or to even having immediate access to such oneself--are far smaller than they are to even the residents of Kansas City or Oklahoma City, much less Dallas or Chicago or Denver.

At the same time, a city like ours, perhaps exactly because common places of complex interaction and community feeling are spread far apart and are relatively few in number (not to mention too easily bought out and torn down by local financial players), when a crisis comes it is that much easier to retreat to our private locales, set aside public concerns, and forget about the ways in which a city could be made more resilient in the face of threats to its urban existence--and particularly, threats to those spaces which ground the emergent communities and associations central to city's character. You saw some of this, perhaps, in the Sedgwick County Commission's initial reluctance to face the questions of triage which this pandemic is making unavoidable. Wichita's political culture isn't one which has been historically characterized by a great deal of openness to affordable alternative transportation, sustainable food networks, and other strategies for keeping cities' cultural and commercial connections functioning even as the threat of disease mandates a distancing for a time. Perhaps, though, surviving this pandemic will bring about a change.

First we have to survive it, though, and that means helping our essential places survive, even if--maybe especially if--they aren't considered "essential" in the eyes of the government. Talking with Warren Farha, the owner of Eighth Day Books, this week, he expressed his determination to find a way through this challenge, and get to the other side. People--maybe not all the people, all the time, but enough of them, often enough--want and need to come into a place they know, among people they know, looking for the books and art and insight they know they will love, if they can only find it. "You can't replace all that with online shopping,” Warren said to me; “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves." Maybe they're not going to come in for a time, he admits--but that just means the desire will be all the greater afterwards. I think our job, as we sort out our next steps in this unprecedented week we've experienced, is therefore to find ways to triage our limited time and dollars, and to deliver them in whatever ways we can to help keep these wonderful places alive, until the community connections they enable are able to fully bless our city once again. I've no simple solution as to how any particular Wichitan can or should do that--but I'm pretty we should all think about how.

Star Trek, The Original Series, Season 1: The First Binge

Sometime in January it just occurred to me: I, a 51-year-old Star Trek fan of many decades, actually only know the Original (and best!) Series the same way practically every other Generation X nerd knows the series--as a rerun. For as many times as I've watched the original episodes--and we're talking many, many times--I'd never seen them in actual broadcast order. And for that reason, I knew there were a couple of episodes here and there that I barely knew, so rarely had they made it into the usual Saturday-afternoon rotations--or, for that matter, onto the ancient VHS tape collections I made decades ago and still have stuck in a drawer somewhere. Thus, a determination was born: since the entirety of the Original Series is available on Netflix in original broadcast order, why not just watch them all? And so I began. [Note that this was a determination that I came to months before any kind of coronavirus or quarantine talk; fortuitous to give myself a binging goal so early, don't you think?]

So what's this? My report on the complete first season, which we finished last night. Yep, that's right: we. To my surprise, my wife and youngest daughter (age almost-14) decided to come along on this ride. I'm grateful for them; they snark and ask questions and sometimes even get sucked into these more-than-a-half-century-old, 50-minute-long television episodes, making the whole experience that much better. I'm going to keep my comments to just a sentence or two about each; no need to provide any sort plot summary or extensive reviews, as there's a million people on the internet who have already done that much better than I. Indeed, if you somehow stumble onto these blog posts expecting any kind of thoughtful engagement, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I'm not looking for discoveries myself; just an attempt to re-familiarize myself, in a different way, with something so deeply a part of my pop consciousness that I couldn't extricate myself from it if I wanted to (and I don't). If you're in the same boat as me, though, well, enjoy!

[Additional note: now that we're stuck at home so much more than before, maybe it won't take us 2 1/2 months to get through each of the next two seasons. But really, who knows?

Season 1
"The Man Trap": B-
The very first episode broadcast. A decent premise, with some nice sci-fi touches (the alien appearing differently to Kirk and McCoy was well done), but overall a rather hammy execution.

"Charlie X": C
A spooky narrative concept, with lots of disturbing potential, and an ending that was genuinely sad and creepy. But with what was essentially an all-powerful immature brat onboard, wrecking havoc, why doesn't Kirk freak out? Kind of poorly acted, it seems to me.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before": C+
This is was the second pilot; you can't deny that Roddenberry & Co. didn't let anything go to waste. Once again, this one is built around a spooky--if predictable--science-fiction idea; mostly, the episode's story makes you think of a different, smarter Kirk which was never fully developed.

"Naked Time": B
Oh man, this episode is easy to mock, but it's really great fun. Filled with all sorts of 1960s-style sexism and stereotypes, it tells its story while playing all of them honestly and with great heart. A slight episode, but the show's first really solid one.

"The Enemy Within": B
Again, a ridiculously easy episode to mock, and again, one heavily dependent upon various sexist and deeply Freudian tropes. But the story itself is genuinely kind of scary as well as profoundly adult, deserving a remake today (consider what could be done with Yeoman Rand, a rape survivor who assumes she needs to cover up for her captain!).

"Mudd's Women": D
Their first real stinker. It's an offensive episode, more for its basic stupidity (the Enterprise ran out of power because it extended its shields around a cargo ship?) than its dumb, condescending, clumsily (as opposed to forgiveably dated) message.

"What Are Little Girls Made Of?": C
A decent sci-fi story (an ancient and long-dead alien civilization which left behind humanoid robots, good enough to replace the real thing?), but the whole thing is just weakly developed. Watch out for red-shirts falling into pits.

"Miri": C-
This one gets a lot of hate, but I don't think it's that horrible. Once more, a decent and spooky central concept (kids living on their own, their adolescence extended, eventually contracting the plague that killed all their parents when they hit puberty), but the casting is terrible--what, there were no 12-year-olds available?--and its ham-fisted treatment of "growing up" is just annoying.

"Dagger of the Mind": C+
Better developed than some; in Noel you have an actually competent 60s-era female character (and are we supposed to understand that Kirk was embarrassed or confused about his previous encounter with her, even before she messed with Kirk's memories?), elevating a by-the-numbers story of a megalomaniac needing to be stopped.

"The Corbomite Maneuver": B
This was supposed to be the first "official" episode after the second pilot was accepted; if you know that, then that'll help you look past the painfully obvious "morale of the story." Cheap sci-fi, but solid.

"The Menagerie," Part 1 and 2: C-
First part of this recycling of the original pilot is much better than the second part; it builds an interesting story out of the idea that Spock is faithfully executing one final order for his former captain. The second half drains any interest in what's going on, though, through various deus ex machina moves.

"Conscience of the King": D
Actually kind of boring, with an entirely predictable twist, and Kirk's supposed obsession isn't well communicated at all.

"Balance of Terror": A
This is Star Trek's first truly great episode, and the fact that nothing about it is original is entirely forgivable. It's pure adventure story-telling, a straight-up submarine battle, both nicely told and really well acted.

"Shore Leave": C
Dumb, but take the whole thing as fundamentally unserious, and you can have an okay time. (Man, McCoy is a horn-dog.)

"The Galileo Seven": A-
I'm not sure what the problem some people have with this episode is; it's one of my favorites, because Kirk is actually mostly off-screen, and we're given time to follow the development of Spock as a commander, and the others dealing with a non-human commander (the only really weak bit of writing, if you can ignore the ridiculous ogres-with-spears as the requisite monsters, is why McCoy was on the shuttle craft at all).

"Squire of Gothos": B+
Another slight and not particularly serious episode, but it's a genuinely fun bit of science-fiction, and William Campbell turns Trelane into a actual comic tour-de-force.

"Arena": B
Kirk's willingness to put ship and crew in danger to pursue the enemy is out of character, but the build-up to the stand-off is pretty good, overall. The actual face-off with the Gorn isn't pretty good too, if pedantically handled; it's kind of a small tragedy that the whole thing is so meme-worthy

"Tomorrow is Yesterday": D
Our daughter actually thought it was a funny episode, so I'm glad someone enjoyed it. I though the acting was wooden and the narrative is poorly thought through and has enormous, annoying plot holes (why won't Captain Christopher and the guard remember everything when they're put back in their own time?).

"Court Martial": C
This one has some nice scene-chewing by Cogley, but on the whole a potentially great story is wasted with a bunch of perfunctory scenes and passion-less acting (just like Kirk never showed much concern for Finney--hey, maybe it was a meta-commentary!).

"The Return of the Archons": B-
Once more, a story with lots of potential (it's the Purge, 50 years before the movie!), but none of that potential is really ever explained or worked out. Plus, it introduces one of the worst of all Star Trek cliches: outsmarting the computer!

"Space Seed": A
Deservedly praised. This is a tightly plotted story, with far fewer of the usual loose strings in Original Series story-telling. Khan is consistently brilliant but also arrogant and dismissive throughout, as he should be. It's also interesting to see, through the eyes of the script-writers, how 1960s sexists imagine what a "real man" would be like. For once, Kirk isn't the alpha male!

"A Taste of Armageddon": B
Another smart and genuinely cool sci-fi idea. The episode shows that the writers hadn't thought much about the "prime directive" yet; is Star Fleet a bunch of imperialists imposing their beliefs on an alien culture, or are they the British in India putting an end to suttee, freeing a society from a stagnate murder cult? Also, I liked that the predictable jerk ambassador is given redemption.

"This Side of Paradise": B+
Continuing a run of mostly really great episodes, this one gives us, upon reflection, a sad, desperate, and somewhat manipulative woman (interestingly, it was my wife who spotted the undertone of a wanna-be lover finding an excuse for imposing her choices on Spock), and a Kirk whose heroic escape from the spores really fit with his character, even if it wasn't developed enough. Needed more Southern doctor McCoy!

"The Devil in the Dark": B
A monster conveyed through awesomely bad "special effects"--my daughter actually remembered this one from when she was a child, when we would pull blankets over ourselves and pretend to be "hortas" sneaking around the house. Overall, it's a fun story, with hilariously hapless miners and a hammy Spock.

"Errand of Mercy": A-
This is a wonderful introduction of the Klingons, with great--and really well-scripted--performances by the Organians. It's probably the best of all the many "the crew of the Enterprise meets a super-powerful race that just can't be bothered with humans" episodes; in Season 1 alone, we have, besides the Organians, the Metrons from "Arena," the Thasians from "Charlie X," and Trelane's mother and father from "Squire of Gothos." And there's more to come!

"The Alternative Factor": D
Ending a wonderful run of mostly top-flight Star Trek episodes, this one is confusing, poorly plotted and developed (did anyone on the Enterprise ever even ask where Lazarus came from, or why he was on that planet?), to say nothing of following through on a science-fiction idea that they no means of depicting except with some truly terrible visual effects.

"The City on the Edge of Forever": A
The best, most mature, most serious, tightest, and most effecting of all the Original Series episodes. Everyone knows it, because it's true.

"Operation--Annihilate!": C-
Man, why did you have to end the first season with the stupid flying pancake/amoebas? As so frequently the case--but thankfully, less so towards the end of the season--you have weak acting and weak plotting here, and a reset (the secret Vulcan eyelid!) that wasn't foreshadowed at all. A let-down of an ending, for what was, for the most part, a really decent season of television.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: The First Week

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

It’s dark and quiet Wednesday morning here in the Fox household, March 18, 2020. It’s been dark every morning–and mostly grey and cloudy and cool all through the days as well–for pretty much a whole week now, appropriately enough. Partly that’s because our schedules, both external and internal, haven’t caught up with the hour in the morning we lost less than two weeks ago when Daylight Savings Time began. But most, I think, it’s because of the gloom which has descended upon many of us here in south-central Kansas in the past seven days, with the weather–unhelpfully but perhaps unavoidably, reciprocating.

A week ago, on Wednesday, March 11, I was wrapping up my classes at Friends University in anticipation of spring break. Students were handing in their midterms, and telling me about their travel plans. Of course people were aware of the coronavirus threat; I’m originally from Washington state, and my mother still lives there (my father having passed on some years ago), so as the news tumbled forth from Seattle and elsewhere about cancellations and quarantines, I got regular updates from siblings and others. We all knew it–meaning both the virus and the panic--would be in Kansas soon; every informed person did. Yet from the top of the national government all the way down to the local level, the mood was...ordinary.

Maybe that’s not what you were feeling a week ago; maybe you’re a prepper that had already rushed out and stocked up on toilet paper back in February. Most of us aren’t that, and I certainly wasn’t, and neither were any of my colleagues at Friends. Our president spoke at a regularly scheduled university-wide community meeting that afternoon, and she said she didn’t anticipate anything that would require any major changes. We talked about the mission of our small liberal arts college, talked about the integration of Christian values and higher education, talked about and made plans for all the usual things. She wished us all a good spring break, reminded us to wash our hands and stay home if we were sick, and then we left to get our Thursdays and Fridays in order.

But, of course, they weren’t in order.

Late that Wednesday night, the cold weather rolled back in, and the University of Kansas announced–following the decisions of various major institutions of higher education around the country made that same day–that they also would extend spring break by a week, ask students to vacate student housing, and go to online education thereafter. Immediately, the dominoes started to fall. An NBA players tested positive for the virus, and by the following morning the word was out: the league was suspending all games until further notice. Throughout Thursday, March 12, the announcements kept coming. Other local universities--Kansas State, Wichita State, more--were following KU’s example, telling students not to return after spring break, but to work from home. March Madness was announced to be going forward without an audience, and then was cancelled altogether.

By Friday, March 13, there were reported coronavirus cases throughout Kansas, including one patient who had just been released from Wesley Medical Center here in Wichita. Our younger daughters were home, with their spring break having begun, but I was attending another, hastily-called, university-wide meeting, where our president, having been in conferences with other college presidents and Sedgwick County officials since 7:30am, informed us that Friends was following suit: two weeks of spring break, followed by online instruction. The rush was in full swing. Sedgwick County and Wichita started issuing the first of their cancellations and restriction orders, with the grand re-opening of Naftzger Park being the first casualty. And still the weather remained cloudy and cool.

It was a rough weekend, as anyone who went shopping can attest and looked in vain (as I did) for certain particular items (really, a mad rush on powdered milk?) can attest. The early farmers market that Saturday, March 14, at the Sedgwick County Extension Center was cancelled, so I couldn’t stock up as I do once-a-month while the regular market is out of session. (I ended up driving to Hutchinson to hit up our long-time local meat connection, Phil Nisly, at his farm-slaughterhouse directly.) There was a death in our extended family–not coronavirus-related; it was an elderly relative, and had long been anticipated. But there would be no funeral, in the same way that there was no church on Sunday, March 15, as our congregation had cancelled all gatherings at church buildings for the foreseeable future, as so many other denominations had. So, no chance to say a final farewell, no chance to mourn with family we almost never see. We needed to cheer ourselves up and hence, anticipating that movie theaters would soon close as well, we sneaked out over the weekend to see the new Pixar film, Onward, in a mostly empty theater. (No Wall-E, but pretty good!) Just in the nick of time, as it turned out.

Monday, March 16, dawned--sort of, anyway--and the long-process of sorting out the weekend and finding a new routine begins. The YMCA had announced they were closing their facilities on Sunday, cancelling all their classes; hence, my wife did her Zumba class in front of a screen. She went into work, wondering how Watermark Books, where she has been a bookseller and event coordinator for eight years, will ride out these quarantines and cut-backs (shop local everyone–keep Wichita’s small businesses alive!). Our second-oldest daughter consoled herself with the fact that, while her end-of-semester concerts were cancelled, at least the Chipotle she works at has a drive-through, and thus may be able to survive social distancing better than some others. Then yesterday, Tuesday, March 17, the governor and state education commissioner finally dropped the other shoe, as we all knew they would: all public schools are closed for the remainder of the year. Our sixteen-year-old is freaked about what shifting to online assignments will do to her grades, and our almost-fourteen-year-old, usually a dismissive teen-ager, kind of teared-up, realizing that her eighth-grade formal won’t happen, and sadly counting up all her friends that she never got contact information for. And still the grey skies continued, with an oozing, tail-end-of-winter wet accompanying us all through Monday and Tuesday.

Still, the seasons respect no virus; springtime is here (or will be, officially, tomorrow–and there’s even a chance of some proper sunshine by the end of the day on Thursday!). So all day yesterday, ignoring my wet socks and the mud, I did as I’ve been planning to do since January: redesigning and improving my garden space, with the aim of making for a more productive and more attractive crop this summer. So I plowed everything up--borrowing a rototiller from a neighbor, as I have ever year for close to a decade now--then raked it, purchased boards at Home Depot, built new raised beds, laid them down, hauled ten wheelbarrow-loads of compost over, then topped it off with 16 40lb. bags of topsoil from our local Ace Hardwart. It looks nice. Now I just need to put down the mulch on the walking paths, and step one of the garden rebirth will be ready, maybe just in time for spring.

One week into the full effect of the coronavirus panic here in Wichita, and we’re hunkering down for the long haul, like everyone is. Someday it will be summer, and there will be fresh peas and tomatoes to enjoy. Keep your eyes on the (still-distant) prize, everyone. Eyes on the prize.

Presidents' Day Questions for Ralph Hancock

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Ralph Hancock, a political theorist at Brigham Young University, is a fairly notorious figure in certain tiny Mormon slivers of the internet, which I happen to partake of regularly. I never took a class from him when I was a student at BYU, but I've interacted with him, in person and online, dozens of times over the decades; we're friendly, if not necessarily good friends. Recently, Hancock made waves with a piece he published in Utah's Deseret News (a Mormon Church-owned newspaper), arguing, in reference to the recent impeachment vote, that Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who voted, along with every other Republican save one, to find President Trump not guilty of the impeachment charges, had acted like a true statesman; Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator to voted to convict Trump, had not. This is a position I disagree with, to no one's surprise. So this President's Day, I'd like to pose some questions for Ralph--not with any illusion that anyone's mind will be changed by voicing such questions, but because I honestly want to understand just what it is he's claiming about American statesmanship circa 2020, and why.

Ralph's short piece spends most of its length setting up a philosophical argument regarding the place and the nature of partisanship in our odd political moment, in which we (or, depending on what kind of right-wing or left-wing critique of American voting practices you prefer, "we" in scare quotes) govern ourselves through a pluralistic democratic arrangement wherein certain civic republican ideals and standards are nonetheless at least ritually given a place (the senators taking an oath to judge impartially, and not in accordance with political pressures, during an impeachment trial, for example). Ralph thinks Romney's speech explaining his impeachment vote demonstrates a poor understanding of the place of partisanship today, thus making his appeals to conscience and ethical and religious principles an annoying distraction. (He's made this argument similar to this about Romney before, charging him with failing to recognize that the "foundation" of civic virtues like "decency" and "civility"--which Romney condemned Trump for lacking, as he obviously does--are more "vulgar" virtues like "courage and loyalty," which Trump, in Ralph's view, has plenty of.) The key paragraph in this section, I think, is this one:

To take political responsibility is to reckon with the inevitable fact of partisanship. Anyone really interested in making a difference for the better for our country must recognize the need to have political friends and to beware of enemies. To recognize the reality of allies and adversaries is not to debase political action but simply to reckon with the actual partisan situation. The question is whether Sen. Romney has frivolously spent his political capital (in Utah, especially) or wisely traded it in order to make some powerful new friends in the national political arena....[I]t is hard not to question the otherworldly “profile in courage” of a political gesture that results in immediate celebrity among the great and powerful, if not among the more vulgar in Washington or in Utah.

I'd like to understand whether Ralph, who has insisted multiple times over the years that he is a strong advocate for "original constitutionalism," sees this as a necessary correction to Madison's (I agree flawed, but important and admirable all the same) claim that a properly constituted "extended republic" could effectively sideline the problem of parties (or "factions," as he put it), or whether he actually does hold with Madison, and instead simply believes that "reality of...the actual partisan situation" today requires fighting fire with fire. I'd love to learn it was the former, and thus be able to count Ralph, whatever our other political disagreements, as an advocate for pushing our system in a parliamentary direction wherein partisan divides are treated more honestly and responsibly. My suspicion, however, is that it's the latter, in which case the long theoretical case he makes in the first four paragraphs seems like so much throat-clearing.

Either way, the meat of condemnation of Romney's vote, and his praise of Lee's, comes immediately after this:

Senator Lee deftly framed his decision in the context of the larger partisan conflict over the design and purpose of our constitutional republic. For decades...progressives have worked to overcome the limitations of federalism and the separation of powers by transferring more and more power to unelected “experts” forming a virtual fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy. Trump’s alleged constitutional offense, from the standpoint of progressive or “living” constitutionalism, consists precisely in overriding the authority of expert bodies or the prevailing “inter-agency consensus.” Lee is a frank partisan of the original Constitution and a critique of its progressive reinterpretation. True solicitude for the constitution thus dictates, he concludes, not righteous indignation at the president’s use of executive power, but the defense of his Article II powers against the increasing arrogance of the fourth branch.

I would really like to understand better some of the assumptions Ralph is making here--assumptions which operate, I should note, without ever mentioning any details of the allegations about President Trump made in the articles of impeachment, thus obliging readers of Ralph's column to assume that the truth or falsehood of those allegations is irrelevant. Leaving entirely aside larger historical and theoretical debates over constitutional interpretation and the definition of "progressivism" being used here, the crucial leap I see here is the idea that the "experts" who expressed the "inter-agency consensus" against Trump's bribing or threatening or pushing of President Zelensky (presumably this is a reference to the testimony of Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Lt. Col. Alexander Vidman, and multiple others), actually constitute a unified body that seeks to operate as a "fourth branch of government," outside of the will of the executive or legislative branches That these individuals and others were actually operating within the reach of the executive branch--hence Trump's ability to fire them--complicates this assumption somewhat, especially in light of the centrality which Ralph grants to partisanship as a necessity of proper statesmanship.

While it is true that conservative stereotype of the progressive interpretation of the U.S. Constitution has involved the progressive empowerment of various agencies, boards, and other institutions within the executive branch, I have never heard it said that President Woodrow Wilson or other progressive bogeymen of the conservative imagination were empowering such agencies in order to limit presidential discretion by way of "expert consensus." On the contrary, the conservative knock against them has long been that these agencies and experts centralized power in the office of the presidency. So in what way, exactly, can executive appointees hypothetically undermining the actions of a president via expressing their critical judgment against him in impeachment testimony be understood as following through on a progressive agenda to centralize power?

I think I can imagine one way, but only one. If Ralph is a complete adherent to the theory of presidential power laid out by Attorney General William Barr, then presidential power must be understood as something that belongs not to the executive branch, but to a single person, wholly and entirely. The executive branch, under this (I think frankly ahistorical, and others agree) interpretation, then the people around the president must be understood as his partisan tools, nothing more or less. Thus, any Republican appointee of President Trump who dissents from or really is just in any way critical of Trump's actions has failed to follow their partisan role within the constitutional structure of the executive branch, and must be understood as acting independently, in alignment with those progressive forces, hiding behind their civil service protections, acting as an unelected, undemocratic force.

If this is correct, then Ralph is arguing--or at least as best as I can construct the argument--that if ours is to be a responsible constitutional democracy, it must firmly resist any kind of intra-party dissent within the executive branch, because absolute partisan unity is central to the executive (that is, the President of the United States) governing--including, I suppose, making phone calls--the way he or she chooses to, and giving the presidency wide freedom in what they choose to do holds off or at least hampers the development of an elite body of undemocratic, unelected others.  Hence, Lee is acting a statesman in voting in support of the president, and Romney, invoking an "impartial" ideal to justify his vote against the president which fails to reckon with the necessity of an executive being free from push-back from his own partisan tools, is not. Have I got this right, Ralph?

I think there are huge historical and theoretical problems with this, and I say that as someone who is entirely willing to dump on Madison, praise parliamentarianism, and join in rolling my eyes at obviously partisan individuals and organizations cloaking what they do in civic republican language. But that's not what Ralph has done here; I think he's made a different kind argument, one that I would really like to understand better, because not only does it not seem to fit the "original constitutionalism" Ralph has so long praised, but it doesn't even seem to entirely fit the conservative complaint against progressivism which so many adherents of "original constitutionalism" have long put forward. Yes, I know; Occam's Razor suggests that Ralph doesn't actually believe any of this; that's it's all motivated reasoning, same as my response, and that his column and my response here is all just so many pointless words tossed around. But noentheless I'd love to be humored, at least a little bit. Ideally I'd love to hear from Ralph himself, but if anyone would like to explain to me what I've misunderstood about his claims, I can't think of a better way to honor Presidents' Day than to argue about it all.