Thursday, May 19, 2005
More on Trump and the Twin Towers...
I still like this idea, though a columnist brought up a good point; That it took quite a while to get all of that office space (at the original WTC) rented. If that's still gonna be an issue, then the practicality of this project is questionable. Still, the proper response to the destruction of such an American icon, is not to complete the work of the terrorists, but to rebuild and turn their "martyrdom" into empty, meaningless gestures.
Swiped from the Daily News...
Trump twin tower plea
Build a new, taller WTC
BY PAUL D. COLFORD
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
If Donald Trump's "new" design for the World Trade Center site looks familiar, that's because it is.
Engineer Ken Gardner has touted his plan to build new twin towers for more than a year, even displaying a 9-foot-tall model as recently as last week on MSNBC.
Trump, who has dismissed the planned Freedom Tower as "a disgusting design," will now champion Gardner's twin towers concept at Trump Tower today.
Unless Gardner modified his design before today's date with Trump, the proposed north tower would be the world's tallest building at 1,858 feet, even taller than the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.
Still, Gardner and Trump have no say in the matter.
Howard Rubenstein, the spokesman for Larry Silverstein, the main developer of the World Trade Center site, said: "Donald Trump is both a friend and a respected colleague of Larry Silverstein, and Larry is always interested in what Trump is thinking.
"However, Larry Silverstein's only concern right now is designing a safe and spectacular Freedom Tower in keeping with the well-established master plan for the site."
When Gov. Pataki was asked yesterday if he was upset that Trump was presenting an alternative design, he said: "This is New York, and people do what they want to do."
He added: "Larry Silverstein owns the development rights. The Port Authority owns the land, and we have a public process that has resulted in what I believe is a visionary master site plan that is being implemented intelligently and appropriately."
That didn't stop Trump yesterday from fuming, "Why are we building this monstrous 'skeleton' known as Freedom Tower? If Freedom Tower is built, the terrorists win."
This isn't the first time that Trump and Gardner have hooked up.
For last year's run of "The Apprentice," Gardner told Fox News Channel that he built an architectural model of Trump Tower in Chicago, where winner Bill Rancic went to supervise construction.
His design for the World Trade Center site - done with architect Henry Belton - can be seen at www.makenynyagain.com.
With Joe Mahoney
Swiped from the Daily News...
Trump twin tower plea
Build a new, taller WTC
BY PAUL D. COLFORD
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
If Donald Trump's "new" design for the World Trade Center site looks familiar, that's because it is.
Engineer Ken Gardner has touted his plan to build new twin towers for more than a year, even displaying a 9-foot-tall model as recently as last week on MSNBC.
Trump, who has dismissed the planned Freedom Tower as "a disgusting design," will now champion Gardner's twin towers concept at Trump Tower today.
Unless Gardner modified his design before today's date with Trump, the proposed north tower would be the world's tallest building at 1,858 feet, even taller than the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.
Still, Gardner and Trump have no say in the matter.
Howard Rubenstein, the spokesman for Larry Silverstein, the main developer of the World Trade Center site, said: "Donald Trump is both a friend and a respected colleague of Larry Silverstein, and Larry is always interested in what Trump is thinking.
"However, Larry Silverstein's only concern right now is designing a safe and spectacular Freedom Tower in keeping with the well-established master plan for the site."
When Gov. Pataki was asked yesterday if he was upset that Trump was presenting an alternative design, he said: "This is New York, and people do what they want to do."
He added: "Larry Silverstein owns the development rights. The Port Authority owns the land, and we have a public process that has resulted in what I believe is a visionary master site plan that is being implemented intelligently and appropriately."
That didn't stop Trump yesterday from fuming, "Why are we building this monstrous 'skeleton' known as Freedom Tower? If Freedom Tower is built, the terrorists win."
This isn't the first time that Trump and Gardner have hooked up.
For last year's run of "The Apprentice," Gardner told Fox News Channel that he built an architectural model of Trump Tower in Chicago, where winner Bill Rancic went to supervise construction.
His design for the World Trade Center site - done with architect Henry Belton - can be seen at www.makenynyagain.com.
With Joe Mahoney
Labels: nostalgia, solutions?, terrorism, Truth
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
The Redneck Problem (but it's not the one you think)
Another swipe from the New York Post. One might get the idea, that I actually like this paper. I don't. Doesn't mean I won't look through it every now and then. This piece expresses a suspicion I've harbored for a while, especially about "ebonics", and why (to my ears), African-Americans sound completely different to Black Africans across the non-American diaspora. This is not to say we all sound the same, but there are similarities I hear in various dialects that suggest some sort of relationship. To me, African-American (not counting the Geechees, which I've probably spelled wrong) slang sounds completely removed from that relationship.
The other points are interesting as well. I plan on buying Mr. Sowell's book and giving it a read.
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
May 17, 2005 -- THE plight of have-not blacks in America's urban ghettos, says economist Thomas Sowell, can be laid at the feet of white people.
And not just any white folks. The culprits are that particular breed of white people known as "rednecks."
If you've followed the writings of Sowell for as long as I have, you'll know that he's not saying anything as simple as racism accounts for today's black poverty. He's saying something much more complex and, to my mind, far more intriguing.
Immigration from the British Isles to the New World was not so random as many of us imagine. Most of the settlers of Massachusetts, for instance, came from near Haverhill in East Anglia. Virginia aristocrats came from the south and west of England.
And the Deep South was populated largely by immigrants from the northern borderlands, Ulster and the Scottish Highlands — from "among people who were called 'rednecks' and 'crackers' in Britain before they ever saw America." And these are the people who formed the culture — the speech patterns, preaching styles, social behaviors, propensity for violence and attitudes toward schooling — that became the culture of Southern blacks, Sowell claims in his new book, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."
And it is this cultural heritage, he argues, "more so than survivals of African cultures," that has produced the urban black culture of today.
So what?
So this, says Sowell: The redneck culture has been a developmental millstone for both blacks and whites imbued in it — witness the lower academic achievement in the Deep South.
But he says it has been preserved most faithfully in the black ghettos — just as the French spoken in Quebec retains formulations now considered archaic in France. Indeed, in a fascinating switcheroo, the redneck culture has become, to many of its defenders, the authentic black culture and, on that account, sacrosanct.
And it continues to be a millstone, though many of the penalties it extracts are blamed on racism.
But as Sowell argues — and has been arguing for decades — the racism explanation cannot account for differential outcomes among blacks from within and without the redneck culture. For instance, a recent study found that most of Harvard's black alumni were either from the Caribbean or Africa or were children of Caribbean or African immigrants.
It is interesting to read the Sowell analysis alongside University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson's new book, "Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)."
I hope it won't give away too much of the plot to reveal that his answers to his own questions are: No and Yes.
Dyson, who can coin a phrase with the best of them, spends a large part of his new work defending the "knuckleheads" of Cosby's inelegant description against those who (like Cosby) believe their refusal to adapt the manners and language of the middle class is holding them back.
Or as Dyson puts it, defending the Ghettocracy from the Afristocracy.
The point, as he is at great pains to make, is that there's nothing wrong in the ghetto that an end to racism wouldn't fix. For Cosby to suggest that slovenly language and dress have anything to do with the trouble that black youth are in is to blame the victim and "let white people off the hook."
And Cosby, whom Dyson "deeply respects," etc., has been letting white people off the hook for years — with his universal (rather than an authentically black) approach to humor and even with his toweringly successful Huxtable family (which reassured white TV viewers that the nightmare of racism had ended and it was safe to lay their guilt aside).
The danger is that in our zeal to score points off one another, we'll forget what the game is about in the first place. Dyson, for example, roundly defends the black youngsters whose circumstances sparked the Cosby campaign; but he has no practical advice for them. It is up to the rest of us, he suggests, to keep alive the faith that racism is the only explanation we need.
Is Sowell's redneck culture a better one? Perhaps more to the point, is it salable?
One thing seems beyond dispute: Maybe we haven't laid racism to rest, but we have reached the point where what we do matters more than what is done to us. That's great, good news. Would somebody write a book about it?
E-mail: willrasp@washpost.com
The other points are interesting as well. I plan on buying Mr. Sowell's book and giving it a read.
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
May 17, 2005 -- THE plight of have-not blacks in America's urban ghettos, says economist Thomas Sowell, can be laid at the feet of white people.
And not just any white folks. The culprits are that particular breed of white people known as "rednecks."
If you've followed the writings of Sowell for as long as I have, you'll know that he's not saying anything as simple as racism accounts for today's black poverty. He's saying something much more complex and, to my mind, far more intriguing.
Immigration from the British Isles to the New World was not so random as many of us imagine. Most of the settlers of Massachusetts, for instance, came from near Haverhill in East Anglia. Virginia aristocrats came from the south and west of England.
And the Deep South was populated largely by immigrants from the northern borderlands, Ulster and the Scottish Highlands — from "among people who were called 'rednecks' and 'crackers' in Britain before they ever saw America." And these are the people who formed the culture — the speech patterns, preaching styles, social behaviors, propensity for violence and attitudes toward schooling — that became the culture of Southern blacks, Sowell claims in his new book, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."
And it is this cultural heritage, he argues, "more so than survivals of African cultures," that has produced the urban black culture of today.
So what?
So this, says Sowell: The redneck culture has been a developmental millstone for both blacks and whites imbued in it — witness the lower academic achievement in the Deep South.
But he says it has been preserved most faithfully in the black ghettos — just as the French spoken in Quebec retains formulations now considered archaic in France. Indeed, in a fascinating switcheroo, the redneck culture has become, to many of its defenders, the authentic black culture and, on that account, sacrosanct.
And it continues to be a millstone, though many of the penalties it extracts are blamed on racism.
But as Sowell argues — and has been arguing for decades — the racism explanation cannot account for differential outcomes among blacks from within and without the redneck culture. For instance, a recent study found that most of Harvard's black alumni were either from the Caribbean or Africa or were children of Caribbean or African immigrants.
It is interesting to read the Sowell analysis alongside University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson's new book, "Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)."
I hope it won't give away too much of the plot to reveal that his answers to his own questions are: No and Yes.
Dyson, who can coin a phrase with the best of them, spends a large part of his new work defending the "knuckleheads" of Cosby's inelegant description against those who (like Cosby) believe their refusal to adapt the manners and language of the middle class is holding them back.
Or as Dyson puts it, defending the Ghettocracy from the Afristocracy.
The point, as he is at great pains to make, is that there's nothing wrong in the ghetto that an end to racism wouldn't fix. For Cosby to suggest that slovenly language and dress have anything to do with the trouble that black youth are in is to blame the victim and "let white people off the hook."
And Cosby, whom Dyson "deeply respects," etc., has been letting white people off the hook for years — with his universal (rather than an authentically black) approach to humor and even with his toweringly successful Huxtable family (which reassured white TV viewers that the nightmare of racism had ended and it was safe to lay their guilt aside).
The danger is that in our zeal to score points off one another, we'll forget what the game is about in the first place. Dyson, for example, roundly defends the black youngsters whose circumstances sparked the Cosby campaign; but he has no practical advice for them. It is up to the rest of us, he suggests, to keep alive the faith that racism is the only explanation we need.
Is Sowell's redneck culture a better one? Perhaps more to the point, is it salable?
One thing seems beyond dispute: Maybe we haven't laid racism to rest, but we have reached the point where what we do matters more than what is done to us. That's great, good news. Would somebody write a book about it?
E-mail: willrasp@washpost.com
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