Halloween in Boston

After the American Century

In the Halloween streets of Boston costumes. Dracula in the subway, a cowboy in the diner, and a gypsy in the bookstore. Free candy at almost every cash register, and even in a serious office a bit of playful clothing, an odd hat, flashing electric earrings or a wild orange tie.

Whatever may be wrong with the US economy, whatever fears may clutch at the heart (or the wallet), Americans still know how to be playful and a little crazy. There is an edge, and it is not getting dull.

This playfulness should not suggest frivolity, for it is the flip-side of the energy and drive that Americans pass down through the generations. Yes, there are problems, and I write about them here in this space often enough. But there is no lack of enthusiasm and shared good humor nevertheless.

OK, this is just Halloween, but the levity is a sign of good mental health, despite the bitterness about the banks, despite the partisan politics, despite the 9% unemployment, and despite the weight of individual difficulties. Walking around the city today was a reminder that the country is far more than the sum of its problems.

American Sonics

After the American Century

Public space in United States does not sound like Scandinavian public space. Take Logan Airport as an example. The passenger waiting in its international terminal is subjected to a soundscape that is quite unlike that one finds in the airports of Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, or Amsterdam. I name these because I travel frequently enough through them to feel certain that I can generalize. Boston's Logan is all about commerce and cacophony. There are frequent loudspeaker announcements about flights, delays, and the like. There are TV stations hanging from the ceiling that all broadcast CNN the last few times I was there. And there is a third sound, a airport radio station bombarding the trapped passengers with music and advertisements.

They have arrived hours early, as required for security, and for several hours they must negotiate waves of sound. In certain locations they can hear CNN fairly well, but move a few steps and the airport "radio" sets up an interference pattern. The three layers of sound – announcements, radio, and television – further compete with the hundreds of cell phone conversations (often annoying loud), plus there is the tintinnabulation of tiny headsets chipping away at the brain cells of younger travelers. Conversation can then only take place at a higher decibel level, producing a roaring cacophony in the departure zone. After several hours in the maelstrom of sound, the already weary passenger climbs into a plane. By then one may have decided to buy one of those special headphones that cancels out background noise.

The comparison between these American soundscapes and those in Scandinavia and Holland could not be more striking. In Copenhagen or Oslo, where I sit as I write this, all three of the sounds amplified in Logan are absent. I hear only human voices, of people who are nearby. If I close my eyes, I can hear the sound of luggage being wheeled past or the laughter of a woman behind me. I can hear myself think because most people speak softly and apparently think that others have what might be called sonic rights.

Is Logan airport an exception or a typical case? Compare it to an American sports stadium, and it seems rather typical. In the stands one hears continual announcements, organ music, the radios of fans who want to hear the sportscaster tell them more about what they are seeing, and most important of all, there is a giant scoreboard, showing instant replays and producing pyrotechnic displays as needed in response to the game. If a fan goes to buy a hotdog down behind the seats, small televisions are positioned so that the game is still visible.

The American public soundscape is multivocal and competitive. It is commercialized, and the sales pitch is seldom far away. It is loud. It demands concentration. And it forces my fellow Americans to speak loudly. Many develop a vocal range from forte to fortissimo. Meanwhile, Scandinavians are sotto voce. They can spot an American without looking, from their sonic voice print. Yesterday I heard every boring word of a conversation between two American men, who were seated at least 20 meters (yards) away in an Oslo restaurant. They were not boors. But they were loud, having been conditioned by tens of thousands of hours in the American soundscape.

In Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman declared he would sound his "barbaric yawp" over the rooftops of the world. That was in 1855. He knew then that Americans as a tribe did not go quietly about. That was before the loudspeaker or the radio, back when a singer or a speaker needed a room with good acoustics, and just as importantly, the audience had to know how to restrain itself or no one would hear. Whitman's audience also could communicate back to the stage far more easily than one canm today in the electrified soundscape. For as sound was electrified and broadcast, the communication changed. But I begin to digress. If the historical background for American sonics might sound like it needs to be researched more fully, the book is already out. Get hold of a copy of Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (MIT Press, 2002). Please do not try to read it in Logan Airport.

The American today is not only a multitasker, but adept at hearing many things simultaneously and filtering out all of it except a single conversational thread. It is also a kind of skill to block out everything entirely, in order to concentrate on a laptop while sitting in a coffee shop. Or, in my case, sitting on a train, as I am now in Denmark. But train has a "quiet car" where talking and cell phone conversations are banned. American concentration, Scandinavian sonics.

Republicans Struggle to Find a Candidate

Here in Boston, where I had my hair cut this morning, Mitt Romney does not seem popular. He once was governor of the state, and he also ran the Olympics, and normally such things make one respected. But my barber assured me that Romney was "a two-faced liar" who told every audience whatever they wanted to hear, and who did not stand for anything. This was the most direct expression of what many others also have said to me. Furthermore, rumors float about that some Democrats dislike Romney so much that they have changed their voter registration to "Independent." This will give them the right to vote in the Republican primary in Massachusetts - voting against Romney in his home state. In other words, they want to embarrass him. It may be that few people are actually going to do this, but the rumor itself suggests an unusually active dislike.

Nevertheless, on the national scene, Romney has begun to look like McCain's most serious Republican rival. Fred Thompson has dropped out of the campaign, and Huckabee is so short of money that he cannot afford to give journalists free transportation. He has decided to cut back his appearances in Florida and concentrate on more evangelical places, notably Georgia, where polls put him in first place. Still, cutting back on travel for the press is one of the last things any contender will do, because the press are vital to keeping your name and opinions before the public. In Florida's primary, coming up on Saturday, that leaves McCain and Romney as the main contenders, which Giuliani a potential spoiler. At the moment Romney is leading in the Rasmussen polls, with 27%. McCain is close behind at 23%, and the former Mayor of New York at 20%. [Update Friday 25th: since writing this I have seen several other polls that put McCain slightly ahead, but the margin of error is 5%, which means they are in a tie. But these polls also show Giuliani falling back to about 15%, in a tie with Huckabee.] Since Giuliani has spent far more time and money in Florida than the other two men combined, he seems to be fading out of the race. But note that slightly more than one third of the Republicans say they have not entirely made up their minds yet. In other words, "undecided" is winning just at the moment.

And what the Republicans cannot decide upon is not just which candidate to support, but what policies they stand for. Each of these men stands for something quite different. McCain comes from a military family, in which four generations have now gone to the Naval Academy. He is a maverick on social issues, and does not appeal to the Huckabee backers. The religious Right only likes Huckabee, in fact, as Giuliani has been married too many times and does not get angry about abortion or praise Jesus. Worse yet is Romney, whom the largely Southern Evangelicals do not like because he is a Mormon and in any case a Northerner. So this numerically important, if intellectually stunted fundamentalist rump of the Republican Party is in a crisis. There is even talk of running a third party candidate if an unacceptable candidate wins the nomination. For more sensible Republicans, Romney represents the business wing of the party, the employer class. Before serving as governor he was a successful capitalist.

For those readers who know their Protestant theology, the differences between these candidates can be explained in the theological terms. Ever since European Protestants came to the New World, they have struggled with two incompatible ideas about how one achieves salvation: the doctrine of grace vs. the doctrine of works. Huckabee is all about grace, the word of God, and the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit. There are millions of people in the United States who believe in the reality of Angels, who refuse to accept the theory of evolution, and who see nothing wrong with "speaking in tongues" in a church service. Huckabee is their man, and he represents the idea that the only way to salvation is through grace raining down on the unworhty sinner. Romney may be a Mormon, but his career is all about hard work and achievement, or the doctrine of works. A man earns his way into heaven. By prospering in this world he shows that he will be one of "the elect" in the next world. Ever since the seventeenth century, Protestants have disagreed about whether grace or works is the correct doctrine. Churches have broken into warring sects over these matters.

For those immersed in the doctrine of grace, Giuliani, with his Italian background, is the worst thing imaginable. For he is a very secular man. He is not just a Catholic, which for several hundred years was thought a terrible thing. He appears to be something even worse, he is a lapsed Catholic, with three divorces and liberal positions on abortion and other family value issues. A man like that, to the religious right is Godless, liberal, and clearly untrustworthy.

McCain is another matter, representing the warrior class. A potential slayer of infidels and defender of the American faith, he is more acceptable to the religious right in the sense that he stands for some moral absolutes. They respect that. But McCain has also been a maverick on social issues. He too seems secular, certainly neither a Creationist nor Bible-thumper. So the religious right is uncomfortable with all the candidates except Huckabee. However, the non-evangelical Republicans, the ones who went to real universities, gag when they hear Huckabee pontificate.

To sum it up, not only is the Republican Party struggling to find a candidate, it is struggling with its own identity. Bush could win over Evangelicals with a bit of coded rhetoric now and again - which was also the old Reagan tactic. Both gave fundamentalists the sense that their values were honored in the White House. Reagan and Bush II were mostly rhetoric, however, and they did not use too much political capital actually trying to stop the spread of gay marriage, prevent the teaching of evolution, or get prayer back into the classroom. It seems that neither Romney nor McCain nor Giuliani will play that game. The Reagan coalition seems to be dead.

Yet politics makes strange bedfellows. What if Huckabee became the vice-presidential nominee? Surely not Giuliani and Huckabee. But Romney and Huckabee? McCain and Huckabee? Then the Evangelicals would rejoice in their temples, gird up their loins, and march out on the campaign trail to do the Lord's work. It is a frightening prospect.

Parking in Boston, or Homesteading in 2008

Last week I was in Boston and happened to learn of a widespread local practice there. Whenever a blizzard hits, the City does a poor job of clearing the snow away, and many homeowners must dig themselves out of the drifts. And when someone has shoveled out a ton or two of snow to create a parking space, it seems only natural to lay claim to that space and not give it up to parasitic strangers or neighbors who have not done so. Once a space is cleared, the homeowner hunts around in the basement and brings out some old plastic furniture or perhaps some orange plastic cones "borrowed" from a construction project, and puts them in the space, to block access to the spot while out doing errands. Your sturdy Bostonian lays claim to the parking space, and dares anyone to encroach on his hard-earned spot! 

If you have ever been to Boston, then you know that parking is scarce even in good summer weather. When I lived there, I often had to circle the neighborhood many times to find a space. I had a permit pasted in the car window to park on those streets, in theory at least, but in practice the city did not provide enough spaces and earned a large revenue by fining people who parked illegally. Competition was so fierce that everyone also knew where the various illegal spaces were, the ones that carried various levels of fines, depending on whether one was too close to a corner, blocking a hydrant, stealing a space from the handicapped, or just remaining for too long in a commercial space. Everyone in Boston always has several unpaid parking tickets, as they continually struggle to find a place. After a big snow storm the competition for spaces gets really frantic - the technical word for this is parking dementia - and I sympathize with those who feel they have a right to a space if they have cleared it. It's not as if the City did anything, other than handing out lots of parking fines.

Yet the Mayor of Boston, quite logically from his side, announced that the streets belong to the citizens as a whole. People do not gain ownership of public property by shoveling snow! But surely the Mayor has forgotten his basic John Locke, whose works are at the foundation of American government. Locke argued that people gained the right to own land by mixing their labor with it - investing themselves in a particular place. If you put your sweat into the land, it ought to be yours. Societies, in Locke's view, were formed by independent people out of their own free will. They joined in a social contract. But it could be broken later on, if the state could not provide the protection and the services it should. This theory is presumably familiar to my readers, and I do not want to insult their intelligence by too long a summary. My point is that in Boston, when the government fails to clear the streets, the social contract temporarily breaks down. People are forced back into a state of nature. They become hunters of parking spaces, carving out of an unforgiving Nature the vital necessity - a place for the car - that they know is the birthright of all Americans. It seems like it is in the Bill of Rights, maybe number eleven. Instinctively, the Bostonian feels that those who labor in the snow earn the right to the space that lies beneath it. They are urban homesteaders. They are like Americans on the open prairies of the nineteenth century who benefited from the Homestead Act. They claimed land, but it was only granted to them on the condition that the claimant lived on it and developed it. 

The precedent seems clear. Your Bostonian, in the spirit of American individualism is only homesteading in a new place, the city street. The activity is thoroughly American: Lockean individualism combined with a refusal to depend overmuch on the State.  And if someone should move the battered lawn chair, and put a foreign vehicle into that space, it constitutes a trespass upon that man's sacred parking spot, which he cleared and maintained by the sweat of his brow. In the face of such outrages, a Bostonian feels it is only right to issue threats, to order the miscreant away, and if that fails, to slash the tires, or bash up the intruding car a bit. And so we see recapitulated the basic history of the United States: first, raw Nature (the blizzard), then rugged individualism and homesteading, followed by turf wars, and concluding with the Mayor's (re)imposition of state law. 

This is a seasonal ritual, of course. New blizzards are bound to come, and the city will soon again revert to a "state of nature."