ABOVE: a home in Boca Pointe, Florida. BELOW: Townhomes in nearby Charleston Place
What is immediately apparent is the scarcity of informal socializing within many of the enclaves. On a mild evening I drove through one section after another of Boca Pointe, where some 2,000 houses and apartments have been sold, and saw hardly anyone out walking or in conversation with neighbors. The landscape's beauty felt embalmed. From Boca Pointe, I drove to Charleston Place, a nearby neo-traditional development that Duany and Plater-Zyberk, extrapolating from the development patterns of old sections of Charleston, South Carolina, had laid out with orderly rows of townhouses closely facing narrow, straight streets. In this suburban development people were out walking in twos, threes, and fours, many of them chatting with their neighbors. Some were strolling along narrow linear walkways of brick, which run behind the walled back yards and have rose trellises above them.
The well-defined, pedestrian-oriented outdoor space helps Charleston Place generate informal community activity, not simply a community image. A major defect of the shared outdoor space in planned-unit developments is that it is rarely defined tightly enough to invite people. The buildings, even when beautiful, are not arranged to create places that feel semi-enclosed and therefore special.
Philip Langdon, from the article "A Good Place to Live," The Atlantic, March 1988
RIP William F. Buckley, Jr: The good old days of clean-cut public debate
I tend to get nostalgic for the days when people could engage the issues without getting childish and personal.
Reality bites. Here's a clip from the era before William F. Buckley, who passed away this week, developed that way-back-in-the-chair posture that became his trademark; he's sparring with Gore Vidal. In the space of just over a minute, Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley calls Vidal a queer. Buckley then threatens to "sock you in your g__damn face, and you'll stay plastered."
Ah, the purity of intellectual jousting ...
Interestingly in light of our current situation, Buckley says "I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot at American marines and American soldiers...". In Iraq today, the Bush administration "eggs on" - - i.e. hands bricks of money to resistance fighters who were blowing up Americans with IEDs just weeks before - - so they can join the "Iraqi Security Volunteers" (aka Sahwa, or "the Awakening"). This is part of the "surge.'
The PR guys at the official United States army website shines this turd as if writing the text-crawl for a the beginning of a new Star Wars film.
Cue music:
Inspiring, But, as most any real army soldier on the ground in Iraq would tell you, not really true. Listen to a correspondent in Baghdad:
And when the money stops? Back to Star Wars - remember the scene in the last prequel when the clone army got their signal from the raisin-faced emperor and turned their guns on all the Jedi?
Anyway, in the meantime enjoy some old fashioned civility, Buckley-style.
(Also: From Slate - "Why Did William F. Buckley Talk Like That?")
(Video found at the New Yorker Blog).
Posted at 10:44 AM in Commentary, Current Affairs, Politics, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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