Good morning. It is a gloriously sunny but cool Saturday morning. This suggests that the day ahead can be spent moving about the city or reading on the porch, without the worry of oppressive heat and humidity. Our family hasn't fully embraced this time as summer out of respect for our youngest who is still in high school and who should be ramping up her schooling as her year nears the end with tests and final projects due shortly.
Just like our cats who are also sitting by open windows, I have no plans.
How America Bought Ireland Over twenty years ago, a friend of mine and myself drove The King's Highway 2, from Montreal to Toronto. It ended up being a much longer drive than the frantic 401 that we opted to forgo. But, in exchange for this time, we had a much less agitated drive and saw so much more of a small town Ontario that we didn't even know existed. Since so much of the traffic that once passed through these small towns had disappeared decades ago, could you only see the remnants of what once was: run down or shuttered motels, vintage diners, and gas stations. At one stop, we had some of the best truck-fries I have ever had, as we took a break from driving, sitting at a picnic table sitting in tall grass and watching a lazy stream go by.
While I have driven small stretches of Highway 2 west of Toronto, I haven't taken Highway 2 from Windsor to Toronto in its entirety. This means when we need to take a break from the 401, we pull into an OnRoute, like everyone else. ONroute LP is a Canadian service company which has a 50-year concession to operate highway rest areas along Highway 400 and Highway 401 in the province of Ontario until 2060.[1][2] The company was founded as Host Kilmer Service Centres, a joint venture between international hospitality company HMSHost (a subsidiary of Autogrill) and Kilmer van Nostrand (an investment company owned by Canadian businessman Larry Tanenbaum).[3] ONroute was acquired by Arjun Infrastructure Partners and Fengate Asset Management in May 2019. Last Saturday, I settled into watching a video that someone on Mastodon strongly recommended. The video had this description: "There's a petrol station in Ireland dedicated to Barack Obama?? That's weird! I wonder why that would be." The video is called, How America Bought Ireland and it is by a duo who have dubbed themselves, The Leftist Cooks and it clocks in at just over an hour and a half. Yes, it's another one of those loooong YouTube videos that starts with a very small topic (Why is there a gas station in Ireland dedicated to Barack Obama?) and then slowly expands and then quickly expands the topic until they get around to explaining everything. In my humble opinion, this video starts off really well. The creators deftly connect the story of one man and one gas station in one small town, to the story of many small towns and how the people in those small towns now work and eat after a highway plaza causes travelers to bypass their restaurants and stores. I was less of a fan of the delivery of the last third of the video, but I respect the ambition. It does the work of wondering why it was deemed necessary to build the highway bypass in the first place. In doing so, the story tell tells explodes in scale to explain what was The Celtic Tiger by the way of Ireland's colonial history, with a pit stop of a brief history of Barack Obama, along the way.
The Republican Party has belonged to Trump for a long time I was chatting with my sister about how things feel more unsettled this summer than last. We speculated that it likely due to the lack of government response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine and the growing anxiety around the upcoming U.S. election.
I don't actively follow American politics closely as I find that it's next to impossible to not know what's happening North of the border as I follow lots of news sources and writers. And it's next to impossible to be unnerved by the upcoming election because so much is at stake. I can't say that reading Dave Karpf's The Republican Party has belonged to Trump for a long time did much to relieve this discomfort, but I appreciated what clarity and insight this short essay brings as he tries to put himself in the shoes of some of this first students, who are in their 30s now, and have only known a Republican party led by Trump. I particularly liked this passage from it: Mind you, I don’t have a simple or elegant solution in mind. I have long been convinced that the democratic project as fundamentally fragile. It only sustains itself through ongoing, collective effort. And people will only put in that effort if they believe that government can and should play ahelpful role in their lives.
I remain convinced of that simple truism: the best case for Democracy is made by government working well, and the best long-term comms strategy revolves around trumpeting the ways that the government has, in fact, been here to help.
But time kind of slows to a crawl when you’re a professor in your mid-40s. I’ve been teaching the same set of classes to similar groups of students for a dozen years. The students graduate, and grow older, and go on to live fulfilling adult lives. Meanwhile a new batch takes their seats. They read Alinsky and Schattschneider, I lead them through the very same debates about power and strategy that I’ve honed for decades now. They enter a political world that looks different to them than it does to me. And at some point… maybe one that has already passed, their sense of the world becomes more true, while mine becomes trapped in amber.
Franklin's Earthworm Theory of Social Change Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to gather together a depressing series of works about and around U.S. politics and the election. These things just happen.
Please consider offering from Debra Chachra as a palette cleanser: I described myself as ‘earthworming’ to some colleagues and then had to explain the reference. “I have long subscribed to what I call Franklin’s earthworm theory of social change. Social change will not come to us like an avalanche down the mountain. Social change will come through seeds growing in well prepared soil — and it is we, like the earthworms, who prepare the soil. We also seed thoughts and knowledge and concern. We realize there are no guarantees as to what will come up. Yet we do know that without the seeds and the prepared soil nothing will grow.” Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (1989).
Links from Previous Week 23 Issues
Aeolian Links
Last week's questionIs there a regular arts festival that you particularly enjoy? What do you like about it? - 👨🎤 : My town has a yearly summertime outdoor art festival. It takes place on a single Saturday, and runs from just 4:00 p.m. to midnight. The festival attracts all sorts of people, not just “contemporary art lovers,” and it’s much more fun (and stimulation, and feeling of community) than the standard issue community events (with their pony rides, face painting, etc.)
- 🤾🏽: I love the idea of Nuit Blanche (means “white night”, began in 2002 in Paris, France as an overnight art festival to showcase contemporary art in public spaces) but I have yet to experience it's "No Sleep Just Art"
This week's questionWhat's your favourite popsicle or ice cream recipe? Answer below or use the friction-free survey form.
|