Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Sometimes I see spots, and they’re granular…

It’s a weird sensation: take a basic idea — but it has to be something big, like …oh, beauty — and then read around in various and different-from-one-another fields, and let the basic idea act like a filter, …or is it like a connector?  Whichever, but you begin to notice basic transferability or kinship between systems.

It’s a heck of a weird feeling, and I wish I could capture it a bit better.  Thinking, and then thinking about thinking…  And then thinking about things.  So much to think about.  I guess that’s what granular can also mean: the occasional move away from fuzzy to something quite a bit more salient?

I had a minor moment or two like that after watching Umair Haque’s Video Response: A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution and left a comment in response.

Referencing it here is a mnemonic for me.  I wish I could do that as easily with the other moments, which happen while I’m out and about, observing something out there, without a free hand to scribble (or type) it out.

A comment on “Sarah Palin: the liberal voter’s worst nightmare” by John Carlson

Crosscut Seattle published Sarah Palin: the liberal voter’s worst nightmare, by John Carlson, a “longtime Republican” who in this article “enumerates the many ways by which Gov. Sarah Palin could become the most beloved national figure since Ronald Reagan.”

Ok, let’s just agree to disagree here.

What really interests me is a reader comment by “Blue State.”  Entitled “Sarah Palin will not be the wave of the future,” he (or she?) writes:

The entire Republican convention, including Sarah Palin, highlighted the fact that there aren’t “red states” and “blue states” — there are urban areas and rural areas. The Convention was a bizaare effort to make the entire country believe that it should become a small town, with all of the worst attributes of anti-cosmopolitanism that involves: religious fundamentalism, hating Europe (huh?), belittling education and achievement as “elitist,” parochial discrimination against people who aren’t just like you.

Fortunately, demographics are fighting back against this vision of America. More people are living in cities. More people are tolerant of gay people and people of other countries. More people think that it’s not un-American to speak two languages or to eat French cheese. Hey — FEWER PEOPLE ARE HUNTING! It’s a fact!

Sarah Palin is a throwback. She’s not America as most of us know and love it; she’s the face of the past, not the future. The Republicans may well succeed in moving the country back a few decades, but we won’t stay there forever.

I grew up in a small town, by the way. As my mother used to say, small towns are places where everyone rallies around you during bad times and stabs you in the back when you’re doing well. That’s what Sarah’s smug whinnying about Obama’s popularity reminded me of — the small town determination to “bring somebody down” when they’re rising above the crowd based on merit, rather than being “just like everybody else.” (emphases added)

I think that’s one of the most trenchant observations I’ve come across so far.  And I think it shows what’s at stake: that smart cities might be the victims in this election.

And oh my, was Blue State’s mother ever right about the small town mentality.  It explains and illustrates so much of what I see in my town, which is experiencing growing pains as it finally becomes truly a city.  Here, too, the prevalent thinking has been to bring down those who are successful, also known as the Tall Poppy Syndrome.

It’s cynical, and useless, and very bad for cities.