It Don't Matter To Me

It took seven weeks, but the Trump administration finally did something I actually agree with.

It forced the city of Washington, D.C. to dismantle and remove Black Lives Matter Plaza just north of the White House.

I'm sure I know why Trump wants that public art removed.  You, assuming you've followed my blog for awhile, know why I am glad to see it removed.  Because it's not public art.  It's a piece of overdone messaging.

For those who haven't followed my blog for awhile, let me explain.  Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the painting of the words BLACK LIVES MATTER in big yellow letters on two blocks of Sixteenth Street Northwest just north of Lafayette Square in response to Trump clearing out with heavy-handed force peaceful protesters demonstrating against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The two blocks were named "Black Lives Matter Plaza" and the big yellow letters were eventually made permanent, with a few cobblestones and bollards installed to make it look like a real plaza.

From the perspective of wanting to use public art to make a statement about police brutality, the whole idea of Black Lives Matter Plaza was asinine.  Painting a slogan in huge letters on a public street is an act of heavy-handed gigantism, the effect having all the subtlety of a fist in the jaw to make sure observers Get It.  The letters themselves are so gargantuan and oversized that they're best visible from a helicopter.  Maybe Mayor Bowser wanted to get Trump's attention when he was airborne in Marine One, but the effect of this stunt sort of lost its resonance when Joe Biden became President and the message Mayor Bowser was sending was an act of preaching to the converted.  The method of messaging overshadowed the message, much like Trump's reaction to the protesters a few days earlier overshadowed the message of law and order that Trump was trying to convey . . . and contradicted it.

And can we agree that the "plaza" itself was ugly?  The design of the plaza that resulted was a civic joke,  the cobblestones and rows of bollards  looking awkward and charmless.  Far from being a real plaza, the name suggesting a pedestrian space, the street was still accessible to motor vehicles.  In addition to being ugly, it was also redundant, as, as noted here before, Lafayette Square - a real plaza - stands between the southern terminus of Sixteenth Street Northwest and the White House.  And finally, there's the name itself.  Black Lives Matter Plaza is named for a slogan.  A good slogan, a meaningful slogan, but a slogan just the same.  I mean, of course, the great plazas of the world - Trafalgar Square, the Place Vendome, the Piazza San Marco . . . Black Lives Matter Plaza.  Not as dumb-sounding as the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky, but you get the idea.

Of course the PC crowd is all upset about this.  The CEO of the pavement marking company that originally painted the letters called the dismantling of Black Lives Matter Plaza "historically obscene."  It's obscene to dismantle a "plaza" that existed for less than half a decade?  That's not exactly the same as preserving a house Harriet Tubman once stayed in.  Other defenders of the plaza claim that an important message is being erased.  Uh, can I see you in my office, ladies and gents?  You still have the message.  No one is preventing you from saying the message out loud or continuing the Black Lives Matter movement in other ways.  But painting BLACK LIVES MATTER is big letters on two blocks of a street and naming it Black Lives Matter Plaza - I've said it before, and I'll say it again - does not solve anything.  It just makes people feel better.

Oh yeah, when the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality first started in the mid-2010s, there was the suggestion that their slogan should be "Black Lives Matter, Too," the addition of that fourth word meant to suggest that black Americans were a part of our society rather than a people separate from it. The idea was rejected.  Yeah, that worked out, didn't it?

Mayor Bowser said that the two blocks of the former Black Lives Matter Plaza will be replaced with new murals.  Good, hopefully, they'll be more colorful, more universal, and also more creative that painting giant letters from a cookie-cutter traffic-control font.   

Hamburgers and Pickups

The speakers at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, including Donald Trump, took a lot of cheap but effective shots at the Democratic Party, especially the Green New Deal, the individual components of which are actually quite popular but the totality of which is political suicide thanks to the idiotic way it was rolled out.  One speaker framed quite clearly the issue for Americans who may have trouble with the Green New Deal because of its call for regulations on cattle ranching and its call for more fuel-efficient cars.  The Democrats, he said, are trying to take way your hamburgers and pickup trucks.

This claim is as asinine as the Green New Deal's botched roll-out, but, simplified for a mass audience, it has resonance.  No food could be more American than the hamburger (even though it originated in Germany), and no car is more American than the pickup truck, a manly vehicle meant to haul big stuff in a country where everything big matters.  Ford's recent commercial showing a parade of past and current Ford pickups hauling everything imaginable, including, tellingly, a trailer carrying a Bob's Big Boy sign, to the sound of Jerry Reed's 1977 country-and-western classic "East Bound and Down", sums up America better than any rap video from Donald Glover can. 

The Democrats need a rejoinder to Republican scare tactics aimed at the Green New Deal.  The Green New Deal may advocate policies to make beef production more environmentally sustainable but no one is being asked to give up beef, be it hamburgers or sirloin steaks.  And there'll still be pickups for people who need them, and a lot of folks out in the American heartland do need them, as well as carpenters and handymen in the big metropolitan areas on the coasts.  But the Green New Deal recognizes that most urban and suburban car buyers don't need a large truck, and, based on the fact that buying habits and living patterns are affected by government policy, seeks to encourage Americans who'd be better off with something more sensible than a Silverado or an F-150 to buy a smaller car or take more mass transit.

The only problem is, you can't put that explanation on bumper sticker.

As for me, I mostly eat hamburgers made out of poultry meat, and I don't need to tell you again that my car is a Volkswagen Golf - as European as a Ford F-150 is American - so I can adapt to a more environmentally friendly economic policy easily.  But I'm not like most Americans - something I've been reminded of in no uncertain terms - and if the Democrats have any shot of regaining the White House, they have to sell the Green New Deal to its skeptics rather than preach to the converted.  Too bad that is not going to happen.  While the Republicans have a perfectly succinct argument against it - "They're going to take away your hamburgers and pickups!" - the Democrats won't be able to come up with anything nearly as catchy.  Maybe that's because they screwed up the introduction of the Green New Deal so thoroughly, from its cow-fart references to suggestions of an undersea rail line to Hawaii (all graphite and glitter, apparently) to supporting people who don't want to work to the very fact that much of this was first-draft stuff that never should have gotten out, that they're stuck with defending the indefensible.  I'm sure that the Green New Deal's backers think that, with time and tact, they can make their plan in its totality popular with American voters.  Of course, they are flat-out dead wrong.  Because what's true of new vehicles is also true of policy proposals - you only get one chance to launch.   

And the launch of the all-new Chevrolet Silverado (above) has been pretty impressive!

So, Democrats, are you going to prove me wrong and sell the Green New Deal effectively?  Are you gonna do what I say can't be done? 'Cause you've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.  

Sticking It To the Democrats

Remember when Volkswagen tried out all sorts of slogans in the U.S. market back in the eighties, and not one of them lasted?  "Volkswagen Does It Again."  "Nothing else is  a Volkswagen."  "It's not a car.  It's a Volkswagen."  "German engineering.  The Volkswagen way."  They rang true with the customer base, but they didn't sell more cars.  Which is why the campaign committee that oversees U.S. House races for the Democrats needs a new slogan for the 2018 midterm elections - they need more voters - and it's asking the Democratic base to go online and select one out of four to put on bumper stickers.  And these are the slogans the committee has offered for the base's consideration:

They're so awful, even the base doesn't like them. In other words, they don't even ring true with the loyal customers.

"Resist & Persist" is probably the best of them, which is sort of like saying that Des Moines is the most exciting city in Iowa.  It doesn't explain what we should be resisting or why we should be persisting.  "She Persisted, We Resisted" has three problems.  It doesn't say who "she" is (Hillary Clinton?  Elizabeth Warren?  Nancy Pelosi?  Beyoncé?),  the use of past tense suggests that the fight is over (and that the Democrats, apparently, lost) and we still don't know what the hell they're talking about.  What did they resist?  Last time I checked, nothing.

"Make Congress Blue Again" isn't a goal, it's a pipe dream.  But the big flop slogan of the bunch is "Democrats 2018: I Mean, Have You Seen the Other Guys?"  Yes, I have.  And I saw the other guys, the Republicans, laugh in your faces!  Because when I saw the Republicans, they controlled the Presidency, Congress, and most of the state governments and you, the Democrats, were too busy coming up with lame, cutesy-pie slogans that don't tell us what you stand for or why we should vote for you.  I will not vote Republican in 2018, but if you're going to get anyone else to vote for you, you're going to have to do better than all that.  Because there are whole lot of other people who won't vote Republican but likely won't vote at all  These slogans aren't going to get them tho the polls to vote Democratic.

As I've already mentioned, the base hates these slogans, and they're actually being asked to choose one of them in this stupid contest.  It's lot like a general election, or even a Democratic presidential primary; you're given a choice, and you're too dismayed to bother because you don't like the only choices you get.  (Given the choice between a woman who couldn't win the general election and a non-Democrat who could never be nominated by the party, I opted out of the New Jersey presidential primary.)   The Democratic rank and file pretty much let the Democratic House campaign committee know how displeased they were with the choices by going online and by insulting the committee and chiding House Democrats for not coming up with slogans that say what the party stands for (does it stand for anything?)   And the Republican House campaign committee couldn't resist offering a suggestion of its own:

You know, I just remembered that one Democrat came up with a slogan that pretty much sums up what the party should be all about:  "Rebuilding the American Dream."  But Democrats won't likely use it, because it originally came from this guy! 

Martin O'Malley did come up with another slogan . . .

. . .but "New Leadership" will never ring true as long as the Democratic Party prefers the old leadership.

 And we know what happened to the last party that relied on old leadership.

Here's a slogan:  "Democrats: Continuing the Traditions of the Party of Clay and Webster."