Frogs for Snakes

According to a post on the tech blog Slashdot:

“Classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. One school district subjects badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in special detention. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because they find classical music repugnant.”

I don’t need any convincing– the local Sprouts market has been playing loud ’60s rock and roll to get me to shop at Sunflower since they opened. Face it–Freddy and the Dreamers, bad then (IMO), haven’t aged all that well.

According to the BBC, the French Immigration Minister yesterday rejected a man’s citizenship application because he forced his French wife to wear a head-to-toe Islamic veil, citing naturalization law that requires anyone seeking citizenship to “demonstrate a desire for integration.”

France officially does not recognize race or ethnicity, holding that citizens are simply and completely French. The argument against the veil, presumably, is that requiring the veil deprives a woman of rights and so violates the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, on which the republic is founded.

Although their refusal to recognize ethnicity seems to have caused them some problems, notably in their official inability to treat a poorly assimilated group differently from a well assimilated one and so tend to their specific integration needs, the general attitude is laudable: We are French, not hyphenated-French.

We think, or we thought, that the U.S.A. had been better at integrating our immigrant population into mainstream culture than most of Europe, but recent acts of home-grown terrorists should cause us to reconsider how good we are at it.

And we should also wonder if the conflict between the values of a liberal, secular culture and fundamentalist, religious one aren’t just intractable.

At the Boulder City Council’s recent goal-setting retreat, council member Suzy Ageton, one of the most consistently thoughtful people we have seen on council in recent years, expressed a wish for executive sessions, wherein the whole council could meet for deliberations outside the public view. In a follow-up editorial, the Daily Camera pointed out that the charter change that would be required for executive sessions was rejected by Boulder voters in 2008 — 14 months ago.

Last year, as a study session to consider the role of Boards and Commissions and the way members are selected,  one council member suggested that Boulder again consider allowing non-citizens to serve on boards. When reminded that the voters had rejected that idea, she responded “Yes, but not by much.”

The council member who reminded her that the electorate had decided against the idea made a similar statement, or at least a similar logical jump, a few years ago. After a council pay raise had been rejected by voters in consecutive elections, he was attempting to justify an expenditure for child-care for council members, arguing that even though voters rejected council pay raises, the vote was close and proponents hadn’t even campaigned. The logic of that argument, I thought at the time, went something like this: “The voters expressed a narrow preference for not increasing our pay. But we didn’t campaign, and if we had campaigned they would have expressed a preference in favor of a pay raise, so obviously they would like us to have increased compensation.”

If that reminds you of Vizzini in the Princess Bride saying “So I cannot possibly choose the wine in front of me,” good.

A guy shouldn’t imagine a trend from three data points, especially if you’re relying on memory for two of them, but I’m pretty seriously bothered by this casual observation that elected government officials seem to consider an election not so much a decision-making process, but rather a preference-expression process, like a poll or a focus group, making recommendations rather than decisions, recommendations that would, of course, be trumped by the superior knowledge of the political elite.

This apparent understanding is a mark of what I have come to believe is an increasing disdain of our municipal government for the citizens, which is precisely mirrored in the increasing disdain the citizens have for the government.

The New York Times is suggesting that local TV and radio stations will get a huge boost in ad revenue following the Surpreme Court’s striking down federal regulations on campaign spending by corporations.

While you may not be able to quite buy an election, you can come pretty close, and the mosteffective technique you can buy is “attack ads”– aggressively negative advertising of a candidates failings, or shortcomings.

Attack ads breed voter cynicism, reduce voter turnout, and contribute to the kind of political polarization that has rendered California ungovernable and given us the town-hall meeting hatred of 2009.

So a likely by-product of the Supreme Court action (it’s more than a decision, seems to me) that we can add to decreasing relevance of political parties and small donors is increasing polrization and the hatred it spawns. So we’re looking forward to a fun election season.

Yesterday, at the beginning of their annual goal-setting retreat, some members of Boulder City Council publically questioned the wisdom of considering an emergency ordinance that would allow camping in public places in Boulder.

The action was taken in responce to intense lobbying by 60 or so members of the “homeless community”[1], many telling heart-wrenching stories, no doubt true, of their travails. The mayor admitted to feeling “boxed-in”, others, according to the Daily Camera, pointing out that they should avoid rash decisions based on emotions but should, rather, think policy decisions through [my words] before acting.

No one wants to appear heartless, especially when the cameras are on, and collectively we have failed our least privileged in this country, but allowing camping in public parks[2] would have effectively denied their use by the rest of the population which seems to violate most notions of justice.

Of course, now council might seem to be willing to tell people whatever they want to hear to get them off their back only to reneg later (“tell us yes but do us no”  in one of my father’s favorite phrases), making them just like every other group of politicians in the world, so it will be interesting to see how they handle not THIS issue so much as similar situations in the future.

Anyway, they deserve some credit for re-thinking the situation, though I’m pretty sure some private communications from constituents helped motivate that.

[1] A ridiculous term, I think. “Community” denotes a social coherence that just isn’t there–this was lobbying by members of an interest group, but the syntax is awkward: “…members of the homeless interest group…” just doesn’t ring.

[2] That’s assumed by many to be the outcome of an ordinance that halts issuing tickets for camping in public places.