A quintessentially American photograph
I was looking through the photos stored on my IPad to delete some because of memory when I ran across this one, from I think April of 2019. I had an errand to run in Binghamton, NY involving a dry cleaner and I took this picture through my windshield at an intersection.
It’s ordinary. So ordinary. Kind of tired-looking. These days there’s something American about that, but that’s not what caught my eye. What caught my eye was the names of the businesses: one Irish, one Caribbean, one Indian.
What’s so American about that is precisely that it’s ordinary. It’s in a small out of the way city that used to be heavily industrial, not anywhere near a major metropolitan area. If I want to go to a decent department store, because the Macy’s at the mall closed, it’s more than an hour away. There’s nothing all that close. South is Scranton, bigger than here but not very big; at least that has a Krispy Kreme. North is Syracuse, where there’s Stuff. Between Binghamton and Syracuse is almost entirely rural. East is nothing close, eventually the Catskills. West is Metropolitan Elmira, followed closely by Metropolitan Corning. Nothing is close and most of the nearest places don’t matter.
The closest thing of note to these stores is something that’s not there anymore: not far was a street that at one time had the greatest concentration of bars in America. There are very few left. When we’re not stuck in an epidemic, I play music in one of them some Tuesday nights. The building is over a century old. It’s probably been a bar for a century. The grandfather of one of the guys I play with used to drink here, an Italian guy. Lots of Italians here. Add that to the Irish, Caribbean, Indian.
For a while we’ve had a President who wants to screw with immigration. Who the Hell does he think we are?
10/27/2020 @ 1:48 pm
I am working on a piece about the defect in the American character that Trump has revealed to us. BTW, not for nothing, I was handicapping the Senate races yesterday and I see the Democrats picking up five seats. Kelly will win in Arizona, Gideon will win in Maine, Hinkenlooper is a sure thing in Colorado. I think that Cunningham will pick up Georgia, although that is a longshot, and I am betting on Greenfield to be Ernst in Iowa, but those last two depend on a big turnout for Biden. If Biden wins, Cunningham and Greenfield will win.
10/27/2020 @ 2:42 pm
I’m curious how you’’ll identify the defect. If I were asked, I’d say Resentment Uber Alles. What’s extra bad about the resentment is most of it is based on myths.
I heard a woman recently talk online about how Brexit happened, and a lot of it was driven by dark advertising on Facebook, ads that showed up in limited areas then disappeared without others knowing it was there. Wales favored Brexit. When she asked, she started hearing about Turks. What? Turks? What the Hell? It turns out that someone had been running ads saying that if they stayed in the EU they’d get an enormous influx of Turkish immigrants. They panicked. It was complete bullshit and it’s undermined the UK horribly. We have similar crap going on. One thing we know is that there is an inverse relationship to contact with a minority and resentment of that minority. The people who are most terrified of illegal immigration on our southern border are people in Great Lakes states. Nobody in Texas is afraid of Mexicans.
10/27/2020 @ 11:48 pm
I don’t know what’s going on with the comments.
10/31/2020 @ 9:06 pm
GREENDOOR CHRONICLE
I just tripped upon Two Trees W.B. Yeats,
confused by the Y eats sustained irony
perplexed by his parenthetical existence:
(1865-1939) as now I’ve spiked a magnifique weeping cherry afore nearby rumors of first Roosevelt Rustbelt frost
at darkness slipped into clean white shoes aghast at the stashed corn nuts deep in the left toe.
near petrified sharply honed as that rhyme scheme of root
doorstep a chimney sweep smudged with soot…
and dear koshersalaami, 999 words I see, one more roll and roil: a bale lifted, tug twined barge slow in tow…a glimpse unbroken…2.5 more days the story goes blue ever blue VOTES as blue snow…a DNC landslide! LOVE RESCUE.
blue like the moon, eternal flame: SUNLIGHT at NIGHT!
10/31/2020 @ 9:52 pm
Plenty of sunlight at night at the moment, reflected off full moon.
I walk my dog late at night so now I look at the sky. Because of recently looking at Jupiter and Saturn in the same part of the sky and the fact that Saturn is far dimmer than Jupiter primarily because of distance, I’m looking at the sky more in 3D. And now when I look at the moon I see it differently. I see it as a half sphere, a dome, being as the back half is normally invisible. I ask myself where the sun is, at night, and the moon always points to it. The midpoint of the arc (aside from when full) points toward how far “below” where I am on Earth the sun is. If it’s halfway through darkness, the crescent points downward. That’s one dimension. The other, what I might call lateral, is determined by phase. If the moon is full, it’s farthest from the sun and it faces us and the sun at the same time. If it’s alongside us, we see a half moon. If it’s closer to the sun than we are, we see a varying sized crescent because the dome is pointed mostly away from us. It doesn’t look flat to me any more.
11/01/2020 @ 12:57 am
Way cool! 138 days until St. Patrick’s Day! Another lost hour, without Orion’s meteor shower.
Nor is the hour gained, single day retained, devil’s triangle, pelicans scoop tepid water, another
hurricane, all the weathered ballast offcourse, those mountainous waves, only oxygen to crave….