The Urban Archipelago

From the editors of The Stranger in Seattle:

The Urban Archipelago

I am not in agreement with significant portions of their manifesto and a lot of it is chock-full of excessive rhetorical flourishes -- but it certainly feeds that part of my soul that is a bit pissed off.

Excerpts:

It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. And we are the real Americans. They--rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs--are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers.

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities. An overwhelming majority of the American popuation chooses to live in cities. And John Kerry won every city with a population above 500,000. He took half the cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000. The future success of liberalism is tied to winning the cities. An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.

These, of course, are broad strokes. We all know that not everyone who lives in the suburbs is a raving neo-Christian idiot. The raving neo-Christian idiots are winning, however, so we need to take the fight to them. In this case, the fight is largely spiritual; it consists of embracing the reality that urban life and urban values are the only sustainable response to the modern age of holy war, environmental degradation, and global conflict. More important, it consists of rejecting the impulse to apologize for living in a society that prizes values like liberalism, pluralism, education, and facts. It's time for the Democratic Party to stop pandering to bovine, non-urban America. You don't apologize for being right--especially when you're at war.

| Robert J. Vanderbei's Electoral Map Variations |

Last Day in Paris

Well,

I thought I'd post some photos, but I forgot to bring the camera's battery with me. No big loss since I was not in the mood for photography after all.

I will return to Philadelphia tomorrow and the last day here has the same emotional tones as the hours after the last Morrissey concert I saw in Chicago last month.

Here is a list of a few spots / moments that linger in the mind from the last two weeks:

• The Pause Café on the corner of Rue de Charonne and Rue Keller. A great spot to linger over coffee for hours and then slipping into dinner time as the crowd begins to fill in. It also had a role in the film When The Cat's Away - which I recommend highly. To make matters more interesting, I bumped into the actor who played Djamel in that film: Zinedine Soualem.
• An interesting choice of films shown on French television stations before and after the U.S. elections (such as Johnny Got His Gun and Wag The Dog) and the disbelief over the results of the elections. The general mood over here is that the U.S. population seems to be more religious and moralistic than initially thought and that the European Union now has the clear duty to become a "counterweight" to the U.S. for years to come.
• Paris-St. Germain's miraculous (and undeserved) comeback to win 3-2 over Olympique de Marseilles after being down 0-2.
• The discovery that Café Orbital no longer exists. The discovery of Café du Commerce in the Butte aux Cailles neighborhood offering free WiFi.
• Finished three books during my stay: Saint Morrissey, Wittgenstein's Poker and The Philosopher's Dog.

This trip was dominated, unlike previous ones, by staying put and letting the hours slide by slowly rather than walking all over the place.

In Paris

I have been in Paris since Oct. 29 and will be here until Nov. 13. I'll try to post some photos as soon as I begin taking them and slurping them into the blog via some kind of Internet connection. Right now, I am piggy-backing on someone's open wireless connection from within the apartment I rented at Rue Crillon, near the Marais and Bastille.

Until the photos come in, here are a few of the highlights up to now:

A good plate of roasted meats at the L' A.O.C. restaurant on R. des Fossés St-Bernard in the 5th

Saw "East of Eden" (dir. Elia Kazan) for the first time at the Le Grand Action cinema on R. des Ecoles, also in the 5th. Good thing I saw this since I just finished the book "Saint Morrissey" by Mark Simpson and he discusses Morrissey's obsession with James Dean.

Met an old college friend (whom I had not seen for about 7 years) and his wife, David and P.Y., and we strolled about the Marais. We had wine and cheese at the Petit Fer à Cheval and dinner at Cafe de L'Industrie - the latter in the 11th.

Visited La Défense for the first time in about four trips -- my initial intuitions were correct: not a very compelling place unless you are curious to study large-scale, monumental corporate projects and architecture.

Tonight, I'm planning on seeing Pedro Almodovar's "La Mala Educación" at the L'Entrepot -- a great cinema, culture house, bar/lounge thingy.

Well, that will do for now. I don't know how long I have before the free wifi is pulled from under my feet.

By Eric, 11:55 AM in Cities, Food and Drink, Travel

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