One of the other fatal problems with Libertarianism as a world view is the way it becomes a stack pole propping half-baked histories that are warped, filled with holes and disintegrating. Millton Friedman exhibited the tendencies of libertarians to fabricate history to suit the ideology with an interviewer who brought up the trepidation of New Yorkers toward the prospect of privatizing Central Park:

If Central Park were not owned by the government, it never would have become the filthy place it became. You forget what happened to Central Park. We–for years, for some years, a long, long time ago–lived on Central Park West. We were in New York. This was during the war …. We were able to take our children down to the park when they were babies … even with a teenage sitter, and nobody was worried about safety. But in more recent years, until the very recent years, Central Park came to be a place where you wouldn’t dare to that. It wasn’t safe. That was because it was a government park.

The central principle is that nobody takes care of somebody else’s property as well as he takes care of his own. If Central Park were privately owned, it would be advantageous to provide a recreational space.

The nearly-150-year history of New York City’s Central Park does not seem like the spiral to ruin that Friedman made it to be to serve his sermons against government. Instead, it seems to be a history of growing progress and democratization over the decades.

And Friedman was disingenuous in referring to how safe the park was in the mid-40s when his children were babies without mentioning the historical context of dramatic enhancements due to federal government money that flowed in the preceding decade from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Here is the actual history around the time Friedman lived near the park:

In 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia placed Robert Moses in charge of a new centralized citywide park system. During his twenty-six year regime, Moses introduced many of the facilities advocated by the progressive reformers. With the assistance of federal money during the Depression, Moses built 20 playgrounds on the park’s periphery, renovated the Zoo, realigned the drives to accommodate automobiles, added athletic fields to the North Meadow, and expanded recreational programming.

So, why does Friedman blame the extension of government oversight of the park for eroding safety in later decades? The 50′s and 60′s were characterized less by government control and more by private-public partnerships. Why not blame the accommodation of automobiles, which gave criminal elements quick access and egress?

The 1970′s, which were years of spiking crime rates in Central Park, were also haunted by a receding government in budget crisis and long-term decline in maintenance. These are the very years Friedman seems to be reacting to. However, there are no guarantees that private enterprise would have managed the park or prevented crime any more effectively. They would be just as likely to cut spending on maintenance and security to survive. The reality is that there was a correlation between lower government revenues and urban decay.

Milton Friedman’s diatribes against government prove to be irrelevant at the local level, especially when the history of municipalities does not mesh with his ideology. Unfettered big business would be no more effective and in some ways it would be more hazardous to the progress and democratization that civic processes create.

I do not intend to argue that personal, private expressions of opinion do not carry any intrinsic value or have their own kinds of influence. Hobbies and subjective pursuits are invaluable and can give rise to significant projects. What I am more focused on is the way writing as blogging is hemmed in and marginalized by attitudes that power, authority, and legitimacy arise elsewhere.

I am also not attempting to skirt the truth that blogging has often brought the minimizing on itself. Blogging has turned the publishing world on its head. Throngs of people who were previously unable to make their views accessible to a wide audience may now pile up their thoughts and jam the web with thousands of mundane meditations on anything anytime they can get online with a worldwide audience. Bloggers trivialize themselves to an extent through the sheer force of numbers, too.

But as long-form blogging (like I’m doing now) has started to recede to social media (Facebook) and micro-blogging (Twitter), the throngs are shifting and the people who stick around to blog like this are here because of certain benefits they derive from the writing.

Nonetheless, the shrinking remnant faces challenges. According to Stowe Boyd, big business and conventional media are rushing in and taking over:

Now the leading ‘blogs’ are either run by old media giants, or bloggers who have become new media giants. Social media has been strip-malled. The funky soulfulness of the early days has been replaced by SEO, ad networks, and ersatz earnestness.

The competitiveness and the accessibility of blogging are retreating, and bloggers like me face terrain much less wide open than it used to be.

Hence, I do not derive value necessarily from a horizon of infinite events and possibilities. Moreover, there is a personal component to blogging. However, there is also more than that, short of a sense that I can do anything I want with a blog.

With the consolidation of the blogging field around power and money, two attitudes arise: one political and the other economic. The first maintains that blogging-without-giants amounts to a glorified letter-to-the-editor. In this sense, local blogging does not affect social or political change. It merely exposes the blogger to political classes and party wonks who claim legitimate power. It has no effect at the grassroots.

The second attitude assumes that blogging short of a bankroll is strictly a matter of passion. In this sense, blogging means little beyond the intangible edification it gives the individual blogger. Value has little meaning outside the blogger if it does not accrue solids like disposable income or fixed assets.

There is some truth to these attitudes, but they also trivialize the difference blogging can make on occasion.

In the 6 years I have blogged hyper-locally, I have had a number of leaders tell me that my writing assisted them in informing and mobilizing people in their communities to affect change on various issues. It is true that blogging has also exposed me to political classes and brought in minimal revenue (which I donated to local non-profits), but I believe that my writing has had effects at the grassroots more than once, including motivating people, who might not have participated in the political process, to claim seats at the same table with elite classes in Nashville.

Based on my experience, I would argue that blogging is more than just op-ed, more than mere passionate hobby. It holds the potential to play an integral role in communities if the writer navigates the obstacles left by shrinking writing opportunities. And hyper-local bloggers need not focus narrowly on local issues to make a difference. They can also localize national and international events in relevant ways for their audiences.

Stowe Boyd argues for a “New Spatialism” where bloggers reconstruct web media on a human scale akin to New Urbanism. Not only would I warn Boyd based on my own hyper-local experience that New Urbanism finds its own ways to sell out to power and money (witness the May Town Center proposal in Nashville), but I would insist that the human scale is always-already contained in hyper-local blogging across various offline communities. There is nothing trivial about that.

However, it is disingenuous, since Nashville often does wait on non-profit relief organizations that contract with local government to organize volunteers. Hands on Nashville (HON) is one of those organizations. It says that it mobilized thousands in response to the May floods. While I do not question the truth of the reportage, I believe it is perilous in general for Nashvillians to accept a government contractor’s numbers on faith without some form of independent verification. But I digress.

Even before the May floods Nashvillians who wanted to volunteer for projects on neighborhood public schools, for instance, were required to sign up with HON for teams that were limited to a certain number of people.

Last year I wanted to sign up for a work day at my daughter’s school, which is practically in our neighborhood. The idea that people who live in the same neighborhood as community centers have more personal investment and “buy-in” to those centers is both logical and noble. When I consulted leaders at the school about chipping in for work day, I was told that I would need to volunteer through HON. When I went to their website I found that the dozen or so spots to work at the school were already filled.

While it may serve bureaucratic purposes to limit the number of community volunteers from the top-down, it also kills hyper-local initiative and self-reliance to restrict volunteer spots on a day dedicated to sprucing up neighborhood schools. I was essentially made to wait until this year to get a workday spot at my daughter’s school.

But after reading an e-mail sent to an East Nashville e-list (forwarded by Mike Peden) from Hands on Nashville, I’m not so sure that I will volunteer through HON this year either:

Hello East Side,

Are willing to spare 4 hours on 9/25 to benefit our community and its children?  Be a Team Leader and organize a team of 10-30 volunteers for four hours of service.

Hands On Nashville Day is the community’s largest day of service to Metro Schools. This year’s event is as important as ever due to the May flood. Over 20 schools experienced flood damage and although urgent repairs happened immediately, Metro Schools still have plenty of needs, such as

painting and landscaping, which are great projects for volunteers.

I am on the steering committee for this year’s Hands On Nashville Day and I would LOVE to see the members of this listserv form a team and commit to volunteer from 8am-12pm on September 25th.

The sooner you form a team, the better selection you will have of school sites at which to work.  The team can choose the project online atwww.hon.orgwhen registering (registration is between September 1 and September 24.)

…. You will notice that there is a $25 registration fee per volunteer. You will also receive a T-shirt and an invitation to the Celebration after-party from noon-2pm at Limelight.  Plus, you’ll get that warm fuzzy feeling you

get when you do good.

If you are interested, please email me back off list.  Thanks!

Shelley Madison

Since when do we start charging volunteers a registration fee to volunteer? This seems to be bursting the meaning of voluntarism beyond commonly understood boundaries. Not only is HON making it harder for people to volunteer in their neighborhoods, but they seem to be trying to skim revenues off of our good will.

I am disappointed that Metro Nashville Public Schools and Mayor Karl Dean’s office are more interested in contracting with large, growth-oriented organizations and not promoting local voluntarism through the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods. There are a number of neighborhood associations in and around the schools in the North End who would probably devote work days to campus upkeep.

However, even if Metro and its contractor HON are going to organize county-wide work days for local schools, they should refrain from putting up barriers to voluntarism like restricted lists and registration fees.  In the meantime, I am not going to wait on any higher power, including Hands on Nashville, to be involved in the upkeep of our neighborhood schools.

UPDATE: Despite the fact that the e-list message above in no way communicates that the “registration fee” is not compulsory, Hands on Nashville responded to me today on their twitter stream, insisting that the fee is not required. It seems to me that what distinguishes a registration fee from a donation or an offering is the voluntary nature of the latter. The message is unclear, perhaps misleading, but take note now that your fee is actually more of a donation than a fee. I have worked in the non-profit world for a couple of decades, and in my opinion, Hands on Nashville needs to make a clear distinction between their volunteer and fundraising efforts, particularly because they are also a government contractor. As a private extension of Metro government, HON ought to consider renaming their “registration fees.”

UPDATE (August 17): HON contacted me through the Twitter stream to say that they are changing the name of the $25 registration fee above to “$25 suggested donation.” They did the right thing in my opinion. Now if they can find a way to make the Metro Schools work day more inclusive by targeting the neighborhoods in which the schools sit or working with PTOs directly, they will have vastly improved the September event.

In response to Mayor Karl Dean’s request in May for an audit of police crime statistics, Metro auditors have hired a California-based company with no prior clients to help figure out if the department has been skewing local crime statistics.

The company, Elite Performance Auditing Consultants, has agreed to look at police policies and practices for free (aside from travel expenses) in return for a glowing letter of recommendation by Metro afterward.

Earlier this summer I offered the view that calls for this audit were more election year pretense for attention-seeking politicians and less an initiative of reform. Conservative Metro Council members have been the main advocates of this witch hunt, especially CM Jim Gotto, who is looking to make the leap this year from the Courthouse to the General Assembly. Aside from such opportunistic office-jumpers with an interest in keeping their names in front of voters in the news media, Mayor Karl Dean is logically also interested in channeling this investigation to his advantage for a second term.

Ostensibly, the latest report makes the audit seem more like a sweetheart quid pro quo designed not to make too many political waves about a police department and a former chief with high local approval ratings. If the hunt fails to procure any witches, then hiring a company with no experience will allow Metro to evade charges of wasting money; although hiring an inexperienced company to conduct a circus-like investigation of problems that look like they are caused by differences in TBI data collection and those of various municipalities seems like a squander.

One of the inescapable ironies of these unfolding events is that Mark Swann, the Metro auditor who hired the EPAC auditors to investigate MNPD, was hired under Metro Council stipulation that he have at least 5 years of experience. Let’s hope Nashville is getting its money’s worth with him. He told reporters that he believes EPAC will be an excellent resource.

Another irony is that Mr. Swann answers to the Metro Council, which generated the audit referendum that was eventually passed by popular ballot. The bill was sponsored overwhelmingly by conservatives, who used their antagonistic relationship to former Mayor Bill Purcell to fuel their efforts. Now one of those conservatives, Michael Craddock is not happy with the selection of EPAC. The math of redress is simple: the auditor is accountable to Metro Council. There is no blaming anyone else should this investigation go pear-shaped for its lack of seriousness.

Everything that has transpired with this audit since Ronal Serpas was hired away to New Orleans causes me to continue to question the results, which are due out this fall. Even if they offer solutions unique to Nashville, the political motives and tenderfooted consulting render them suspect.

At the time Metro Police insisted that tracking and classifying crime was a highly subjective exercise. Like the proverbial blind men who survey an elephant, various agencies divide and interpret the data based on their own limitations and angles.

News from the Rutherford County paper, a story that slipped past media attention here in Davidson County, seems to support the Metro Police department’s defense. In an opinion piece in the Daily News Journal, editors underscore discrepancies between Greater Murfreesboro police statistics and TBI stats.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation recently released the 2009 Crime in Tennessee report, which showed a 1 percent increase over the last three years in offenses but a staggering 26 percent decrease in arrests in all Rutherford County law enforcement agencies, including La Vergne Police, Smyrna Police, Murfreesboro Police and Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office.

Those agencies reported 19,817 offenses but only 13,400 arrests, compared to 2008 when there were 19,614 offenses and 16,600 arrests.

Murfreesboro made only 3,284 arrests in 2009 compared to 5,140 in 2008, according to the TBI. Meanwhile, Smyrna’s arrests fell by 34 percent, from 3,300 in 2008 to 2,150 in 2009, and La Vergne’s arrests dropped by 23 percent. Arrests reports at the Sheriff’s Office have remained stable, largely because it has a full-time warrants division.

TBI’s numbers don’t jibe, however, with Murfreesboro’s crime data. In January, MPD reported that officers made 8,000 arrests in 2009.

The discrepancy is caused by the way the TBI and Murfreesboro record arrests. Typically, if a person is charged with five different offenses, TBI will record only the major offense. On the other hand, if a Murfreesboro officer stops a person and charges them with five offenses, if an arrest is made, the officer is credited with five arrests.

So, the issue of inconsistencies between state and local crime data is not in itself indicative of problems exclusive to Metro Police. Indeed, a few Metro officials and local journos seem ready to smear Ronal Serpas with a broader systemic or interpretive difficulty.

And for his part, New Orleans Police Superintendent Serpas is building a reputation for involving the local community in his crime stats meetings just like he did in Nashville. He also continues to emphasize community policing. Chiefs who act deceptively or refuse to be transparent do not do things like that.

Perhaps Mayor Karl Dean needs to focus less on Ronal Serpas and more on solving discrepancies between Metro and TBI crime data.

There have been questions raised in the public about the validity of Nashville’s crime statistics …. Public safety is a top priority, and it’s just as important that people feel they are safe.

- - Nashville Mayor Karl Dean last week

In Nashville, residents had an overwhelmingly positive view of the police, with surveys showing an 85 percent satisfaction rate …. “There are concerns of the crime reporting both inside and outside the department,” said Councilman [Jim] Gotto. “I don’t know whether the numbers are right or wrong. I just want someone to look at them closer.”

Gotto acknowledged that the numbers may not matter much. “Hey, the community really likes him,” he said. “They feel pretty safe.”

- - Sunday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune

Nashville just lost a police chief who by most accounts could go anywhere he wanted. Despite general recognition, even among opponents, that Ronal Serpas’s use of a Comstat statistics system made Nashvillians, Washingtonians, and New Orleanians feel safer, Mayor Karl Dean is directing that Metro resources be spent to conduct an audit based on a nebulous complaints that he says that hears from “the public.” 85% of the public was satisfied with the Serpas-lead police force, so why is the Mayor not producing more evidence of widespread dissatisfaction to support his fishing expedition?

Certainly, NewsChannel5 reporter Phil Williams failed to convey much local dissension about Serpas’s crime numbers beyond conservative Republican Gotto, who is running for state political office.  Hence, Gotto needs media attention and name recognition. However, Gotto concedes to the press outside of Nashville (which ironically got his name wrong) that the crunched anomalies are practically inconsequential.

So, why is Mayor Karl Dean bent on helping Mr. Gotto against the memory of a well-received former police chief when most of the Mayor’s constituents are not raising hell about Comstat, given their experience of crime? There is no doubt that Gotto is getting love and support from the powerful state GOP. However, Mayor Dean’s own recommendations of Mr. Serpas to New Orleans concede that Nashville was safer after his arrival than before. This about-face makes no sense until we let ourselves think as the politicos do.

I cannot help but be curious about the timing of the internal audit. Reason dictates that the Mayor should have conducted an internal audit of MNPD’s Comstat when he took office 3 years ago. A new Mayor conducting a comparative audit of the police department to evaluate the tools they use to fight crime is expected.

But now an audit looks like a waste of resources in a time where economic downturn and natural disaster tax Nashville.

And my curiosity extends to the internal audit itself. A proper audit should be independent with no political strings attached to the Mayor’s office. Internal audits conducted by a Mayor who aspires to re-election smack of influence and chicanery.

Any attempt to find “the dirt” on former Chief Serpas at this point looks like a design to help Karl Dean win a second term.

The Mayor cannot afford spikes in crime in a post-Serpas Nashville. His office relies on the public perception that streets are getting safer. Ronal Serpas is gone and not likely to challenge any attempt to spin perception of his tenure in Nashville. New Orleans will keep him busy enough.

Dare I suggest that the Mayor has seized the opportunity, even with the lack of public demand, to use the police department to steer his next campaign into an advantageous position?

Pardon me for trying to think this out along the lines of the politicos, because this uproar matters little to those who do not hold political aspirations. I’ll be taking this audit with a grain of salt encased in a wish that Metro had put our resources to better, higher use.

So, now that something happens that deserves national attention, you’re leaving us alone. We’re OK with that. Because we’re helping ourselves. That’s how we roll here. The volunteer effort here has been amazing …. Nobody is bitching at FEMA. Nobody is looting. Nobody is getting raped at a shelter. We’re helping each other. We’re cleaning up and we will move on.

Implicit in this preoccupied reaction is a response to the old nemesis, New Orleans. It’s a slam against another American community by placing ours on a higher moral plane. Don’t get me wrong. I concede that the Big Easy has its corruption problems and it is one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country. Whenever I visit New Orleans I’m much more on guard than I am in Music City. Wayward is also something that Americans and tourists in general reward New Orleans for being.  We incentivize misbehavior in some places over others. But that’s a subject for another time.

What is most striking in the Nashville narrative is that at its base it is a disingenuous re-write of history. It is a judgment call based on a fabricated all-things-were-equal scale.

First, let’s put something to bed. The claim that there is no looting in Nashville is wrong. Police have reported incidents of looting. One TV news station indicated that during clean-up discerning who is looting and who is legitimately cleaning up is difficult. Based on that uncertainty alone, it is no more than wishful thinking to claim that there is no looting in Nashville.

The slam here is unmistakably addressed at images of flooded New Orleans in 2005 when at worst criminal opportunism reigned and at best poor people who had no way to evacuate broke in to stores and stole food to survive.

The rub, the difference here between these two cities is precisely evacuation. Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans two days before Katrina’s landfall and the failure of the levees. Consequently, 1 million people fled from the Big Easy in those 2 days. There was no evacuation in Nashville in advance of our 1,000 year storm event. Nobody knew what to do. Metro government was hamstrung because, unlike New Orleans and its recent history of hurricanes, we only had 2 or 3 other years in the last century to compare this event to. And hurricanes are not just big rain events. They are approaching monsters to coastal cities and the risk is certain.

For the sake of argument, let’s make things equal. Let’s assume we faced the same monster and that we evacuated 1 million people in advance of it last weekend. Could we realistically argue that no looting would happen simply because of who we are? Despite the comparative self-congratulation Music City seems bent on while inordinately preoccupied with national validation, the realist in me says that vacant homes and unwatched businesses would have been looted during a mass Nashville evacuation. The only question in my mind would be whether it was on the same scale as that in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Dispensing with the myth of the unbearable absence of looting also brings down the idea that we’re much better at taking care of ourselves than New Orleans was. After all, we are not evacuated. We are here to take care of ourselves. And my suspicion of undue arrogance leads me to believe that had 1 million New Orleanians stuck around the Big Easy, they would probably be more competitive in showing a volunteer spirit. The people of New Orleans, outside of the lower classes who had no choice, would not be waiting on FEMA, which kept failing them so miserably, so spectacularly in spite of federal promises about rebuilding New Orleans to the contrary. Many would have been able to serve their community as enthusiastically as Nashvillians are serving theirs.

Behind the Nashville hand-wringing is a tale of two cities, one moral and self-sufficient, the other unforgivable and incapable. What makes it a tale is the poetic license taken building castles in the air while history-as-it-happened played out on a less legendary scale. Sometimes actual events simply fail to fit the stories we tell ourselves.

Privatization seems to be the absolute state toward which Metro Nashville Public Schools are headed in order to compete via market principles with the private schools.

MNPS Director Jesse Register recommends it privatize.

Karl Dean intends to privatize.

The Obama Administration is mandating charter schools in Nashville.

As a newly minted public school parent I’m concerned that we’re going to lose the public option. So, I’m looking for alternatives for reform of our insular school system without giving it and revenues to private investors who have no public mandate to act in our interest other than what they can acquire from it.

Here’s one idea from Austin, Texas (via Elaine Simon and Eva Gold in The People Shall Rule: ACORN, Community Organizing, and the Struggle for Economic Justice, ed. Robert Fisher, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009):

The Texas [Industrial Areas Foundation] persuaded the state education agency to establish a $20 million Investment Capital Fund, which provides grants for school restructuring that incorporates community involvement …. the funding stream provides an incentive for schools to work with Texas IAF [Alliance Schools Initiative] ….

In order to become an Alliance School, teachers must vote to join. Each Alliance School forms a “core team” of parents, community members, and school staff that identifies and addresses important issues. Through this process of collaboration and relationship building, IAF groups seek to establish a “relational culture,” where teachers and parents see and act on mutual interests.

Why not create an indigenous, community-based, self-reliant, grassroots public model to empower kids to higher performance instead of depending on wealthy, largely white corporations that flock to public money and flee from public mandates?

If various federal, state, and local government entities are bent on disassembling the public education system and selling schools off to the highest bidders and indigence raiders, perhaps those of us invested in the public option should consider building alliances that leverage resources to protect smaller portions of the larger system.

Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy.

– Josh Marshall

Recently ensconced City Paper editor Stephen George created a blogospheric, twitterific stir yesterday with his profile of Metro Council member Emily Evans. Despite his confessed efforts to deflect charges of sympathy for or hits against Evans, he incurred the wrath of several social mediarites, including Aunt B, who cavorts in the twilight zone between bona fide blogging and local news media.

On the one hand, I believe that George is correct in arguing that “Convention center crusader” is neither a sympathy piece nor a hit piece.  On the other hand, the narrative of the story belies a profound bias against Emily Evans as a parent who both “bailed” on her job and generates extreme reactions from quarters from which George distances himself as reporter.

On Twitter yesterday I argued with some that George’s story was more balanced toward CM Evans as critic of the Mayor’s Office than anything we had seen from any print publication going back to last year. First, my simple count of the positive adjectives vs. negative adjectives that George seems to choose himself to describe her seem equal. Second, the fact that George described the anonymous character assassins honing in on Evans as subscribing to conspiracy theories is more than a slight step forward for local journos. Third, I would concede to George that his story personalized CM Evans more effectively than had been done by by echo-chamber beat reporters in the past.

And there is the rub. Relative to Big Print’s sorry track record on covering the Music City Center proposal and in the safety of the Council’s vote to support it, George’s story seems to be walking back the uncritical conveyance of anonymous hits on Ms. Evans and other council critics of Karl Dean’s initiatives. His piece seems more like smoothing over press-empowered past rancor at loyal opposition. Given that the promiscuous print press sunk to a new low in coverage of the Music City Center, balance now seems like an express elevator to quality.

Indeed, Stephen George’s journal is much more about press equivocation and triangulation: staking out a space between “conspiracy theories” against CM Evans and “class warfare-style public sentiment” for her. But the balance here is illegitimate. Commentators throw around charges of “class warfare” too easily. Given that the last time Americans saw anything remotely  resembling a class war was almost a century ago, thusly impugning public opinion against the convention center is hackneyed and just silly. Note that he avoids comparing this affair to a civil war or to a culture war, which it more closely resembles than a class war. The editor’s insinuations of blind class ideology and rabble rousing are clear in his cast of aspersion on par with Courthouse skullduggery.

In the end this profile is more about George the Journo framing his profession between claims that arise from the anonymous Courthouse elite (whose beat must be sweet if reporters are going to access news) and claims of the public (who consume his paper’s news) than it is about CM Evans. He can set himself up pronouncing pox on both houses as an arbiter who writes neither for sympathy nor for hits. The dark side of that stance is that George does fundamentally nothing to change the Courthouse’s echo-chamber in the press.

Claims of balance provide him a shield for inaccuracies and latent attacks that bleed out of his narrative. He introduces the piece by insinuating that Emily Evans offers oversimplified protests against MCC. He falls into the trap that feminists have warned us about when we describe men as assertive and women as aggressive.

Worst of all, he pens this sexist and immature paragraph:

Evans looks more like a mom than a crusader. The married mother of three children — two of whom are teenagers — carries herself with a confidence borne of the careful combination of refined intelligence and a hint of arrogance.

George appeals to motherhood as if every single reader would intuitively produce exactly the same image of mom in his or her mind. His appeal is so general as to make no sense whatsoever, because moms are various and sundry. And the end of the paragraph confuses the appeal even more: moms are intelligent and arrogant? Later he tells us that as a mom, Evans “bailed” on her job. So, when they are not being inordinately ambitious in their careers, moms are flighty and noncommittal in the workplace?

A last point on George’s discussion of family/career life: I cannot remember a previous City Paper profile of a male council member that posed the problem of his responsibilities as a father relative to his position or his career. Hence, the City Paper lapses into a vicious double standard with George’s profile.

Like others, I find curious George’s unwillingness to paraphrase or to quote fellow CM Mike Jameson (an Evans advocate) absent cursing because his paper is a “family publication”; as if children have any interest in pouring over council member profiles. Surely, nothing CM Jameson said is as ill-mannered as Finance Director Rich Riebeling’s decent into indecency by referring to Evans with terms like “nuisance” or as the lies of anonymous politicos (who are just as contemptible as any other hiding in anonymity)  calling her “destructive.” The editor’s neglect of priorities is breathtaking.

I am hard-pressed to see Stephen George’s profile of Emily Evans, a hardworking, assertive advocate for community interests, as progress in any sense but one step forward, two steps back. More personal than the past, its merits are hedged in by contrived balance. George’s own gadfly remains a young warble living on the hide of anonymous sources and emotional extremity. He fails to portray Emily Evans accurately given my own experiences.

To live in the suburbs called physics, or Islam, or law, or music, or socialism, on must meet certain particular requirements and the houses are not all of the same imposingness. To live in the semi-suburb called common sense, where all the houses are sans façon [without fuss], one need only be as the old phrase has it, sound of mind and practical of conscience, however those worthy virtues be defined in the particular city of thought and language whose citizen one is.

The latter communities are those I intend to peruse, with appeals to the practical issues that impinge upon and affect the local knowledge imbued here. I’ve done this elsewhere; this time in a different key.