Deconstructing development
In regards to your recently published article “Think outside the big box” [December 9], I first should commend your effort to get proactive with the oft-cement-shoed and mortar-minded developing community at large. However, I found myself considering the implications of this rampant elephant stomp that could be called commercial real estate, and unfortunately (apologetically) regressed into a soupy bowl of communal frothing. It sounded a little something like this: Holy Lincoln Logs, Lego Man—this situation has gotten out of Jenga.
Sure, it’s painful to see developers plaster-casting the free-loving world every time they hear a nickel drop, but what’s worse is that our critique of this situation fails to identify the real mechanisms at work here. In addition, all along the misguided way we’re wagging fingers in our neighbors’ faces, pretending that their Wal-Mart visit has somehow sent them falling face first down a set of karmic stairs.
Look, civilizations are complicated things, and what’s more, they flourish in near direct accordance to the successes of their governing systems. We are a nation that is founded on a free market system, and—yoo-hoo, hello!—that boils down to a bawdy little word known as “competition.” People are competing because that’s what a democratic, free market capitalist society engenders in its game plan. People work in the hopes of making enough money to gain the right to set up a business designed to take someone else’s money, land and assets.
Sure, it would be great if everyone had the awareness, moral depth and ethical span to incorporate a sincere way of managing the world’s natural resources, but the truth is, people are just trying to take advantage of what they’ve been told is theirs for the taking.
I’m not suggesting that there is no proper recourse for this ignorance, for we should ballyhoo any and all ignorance and attempt to change it. But why isn’t anyone calling this thing by its real name, capitalist greed? Or, I guess it could also be called opportunistic, mindless evolution. Whatever the case, big boxes are just one of the chest-thumping manifestations of a free market society bellowing its territorial grunt.
That’s the problem, Joe. So quit pretending your freely traded coffee bean has three extra cc’s of caffeine and that Starbucks is Juan Val-Mephistopheles, because the truth is the common consumer is just that: commonly paid, commonly led and commonly fed.
Jerry Gaura
Crozet
Building foundation
I believe the buildings on the Downtown Mall you identify as “four corners,” or the Wachovia buildings, were once the home of The Metropolitan Restaurant (Johnny and Julie Wilhelm, proprietors), Charlottesville’s largest. Probably no one who ate lunch at The Metropolitan (no relation to any current eateries of that name) ever did so again. At night, however, during the late 1940s and early ’50s, the place was crammed full—and I mean really full—of beer and wine drinkers (no hard liquor allowed then!) listening to the music of Fred Tilman on bass, George Pollock on guitar and yours truly on accordion. Unfortunately for local history buffs, doubtless few, if any, remain who recall the place—Johnny and Julie left for Upper Marlboro, Maryland, where they could have slot machines and serve mixed drinks, and I graduated from UVA and left the area until I retired back here to Ivy.
Jeffrey J. W. Baker
Ivy
Put the primary first
Even if I were to accept Ted Rall’s premise that it is proper for Democrats to emulate Republicans by short-circuiting the democratic process and rallying behind a chosen leader selected by fiat and not via state caucuses and primaries [“Cancel the primaries,” Afterthought, December 16], what of his declaration that “Patriots must support the candidate with the best chance of defeating [Bush], whoever he is”? A lot of us think that candidate is Wesley Clark rather than Howard Dean, and have polling data as well as intuition to back us up.
If nothing else, the ripples from the capture of Saddam remind us that one day’s “foregone conclusion” is tomorrow’s shattered truism. In my judgment, Clark is the major Democratic candidate most immune to the vagaries of the headlines. And I also think he’s more likely than Dean to be an effective president if elected. So my own patriotic duty is clearly to support him through the Virginia primary.
If Rall’s Democratic lockstep had been the rule when the 2004 campaigns began, John Kerry would have been anointed as our candidate a year ago after Al Gore dropped out for good. There would have been no grassroots explosion, no evolution of blog politics, no Dean for America, no Draft Clark movement, no Sharptons and Kuciniches as moral gadflies. Is that the rewriting of history Rall would prefer?
I’ll fight hard for Howard Dean if he’s the eventual nominee. But on February 10 I’ll be voting for my own candidate, thank you.
David Sewell
dsewell@cville4clark.com