Two items for today. Short ones. It's hot, and the trains of thought melt before they get very far.

1. I was reading Geoffrey Nunberg's very to-the-point attack on the mythology of the two Americas (red state - blue state) that live on different planets. According to Nunberg, both David Brooks with his pop typologies (are you NASCAR or Tour de France?) and George Lakoff with his political metaphor coaching services (do you see the state as a strict father or a nurturing mother?) are performing the difficult feat of simultaneously trivializing and exacerbating our national contradictions. In the spirit of reconciling the apparent split of red and blue, here's a competition for all you fearless readers and comment-posters out there.

Can you invent a bumper sticker that will express two opposite political sentiments at once? The hinge will often be irony, sometimes a pun. You'll get a maximum of 50 points for the cleverness of the hinge and additional points based on the distance between the opposites you clang together. Here's a sample to get you started:

2. S Shirazi's recent post about imagined futures that didn't turn out that way makes me turn back to a book I've long admired: Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford U P, 1977). A Pattern Language is part of a series of books meant to reshape architecture on the scale of human bodies and human activities. They had a bit to do with the “new urbanism” associated with the late Jane Jacobs. Here's a sample (a bit of critique, a bit of recommendation):

I go in and out of a lot of public waiting rooms, but I don't think I've ever been in one where the receptionist got up, came forward and offered me a chair. Possibly they do this in certain private jet dealerships, but I wouldn't know. The architects are thinking of doctors' waiting rooms. The reception area where I take my medical business is by no means bedraggled-- it's clean and modern-- but you are certainly walled off from the receptionists by a high counter with glass partitions behind which they sit like the gatekeepers they are, tapping on keyboards you can't see and speaking into those little telephone headsets. After offering up your insurance card you go back across the gray carpet and sit. I wouldn't describe it as “welcoming”-- and let's not forget, this is an establishment catering to the salaried and insured, within a great teaching hospital.

The authors of A Pattern Language add that their ideas about reception areas were “originally proposed by Clyde Dorsett of the National Institute of Mental Health, in a program for community mental health clinics.” There's the kicker.

Imagine what a country we'd be living in if folks who walked into community mental health clinics got the Lear-jet treatment (coffee, a comfortable chair, and would you like a magazine?)! I like the curve the authors were extrapolating from in 1977, but the least I can say is that history hasn't bent that way. As of 1981, with Reagan's plan to shift the burden of social services to underfunded state and local agencies, community mental health clinics were lucky if they could stay open, forget about raising levels of service. For most people unfortunate enough to be in that kind of need, the street became the treatment area of choice. And in general, even for so-called normal people, a public service open to all is designed to be as unwelcoming as possible. If you were worth anything, you'd be going private, wouldn't you? God forbid that anyone get comfortable enough to feel at home in the places of free universal service. Since privatization and deregulation took over, to be a citizen is to be nothing, to be (barely) tolerated in your wicked dependency, but to be a consumer is to have worth and identity. “Public” is a synonym for punitive, unless private donations come selectively to pad and decorate the cell. Imagine how different things would be if we Americans didn't feel there was something immoral about treating nobodies like somebody.