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COMMENTARY
May 30, 2012
Procrustes
Which city is this? The question has often come to mind, as I've looked at pictures depicting urban skylines, across North America, and now around the world. In my experience, if one walks through a city, one will find "the local." But there is less and less to choose at the skyline level, where the most distinctive buildings are the worst monstrosities.Most people no longer walk, except for exercise. They drive from home, perhaps in a highrise, to an office which may be in a skyscraper, though the "radiant city" envisaged by Le Corbusier, and other city planners from a century ago, has not been realized. We have the towers, but not the ground-level park. Below, the slums were cleared for circuit-board housing, and shopping centres, in fields of asphalt. Yet human enterprise persists on tiny scales. I was reminded of this reading Joanne Kates's goodbye column, in a Toronto newspaper. For 38 years, she reviewed restaurants for The Globe and Mail. In that time, a whole foodie culture blossomed in Toronto, as also in Ottawa, and every other English-speaking city of which I am aware. Each new restaurant was one-of-a-kind, and the base of customers who knew something about gastronomy hugely expanded. Yes, and no, to her many interesting observations. Kates, who cultivated a chameleon invisibility when on assignment, was actually looking for good "restos." She is herself, however, a member of a class, and when she says we're all foodies now, she is speaking of her class. Over the same four decades a much larger class accommodated themselves to eating in assembly lines. Home cooking was seriously retrenched, and family life, centred around the table, largely ceased to happen. I am using food here - though a very big topic, given that we must eat to live - to stand in for everything. The life of cities, their pe-culiarities, can never be quite extinguished. Even under Stalin, I am told, Moscow life had many eccentricities, and those who get rich under Communism, as now under Islamism, or just democratic bureaucratism, will always demand some flavour and style. But what about the others? The burger franchises, the grocery, drug, clothing, and hardware franchises for that matter; the proliferation of things like professional sports, lotteries, casinos, and "online entertainment"; the cubicle life of the "knowledge-based economy" among people with less and less family to return to; the wiring of humans to electronic "devices" - all these things conspire against the communal life that is itself a condition for becoming fully human. And I omitted prayer. Now to newspapers. Several in the Postmedia Network are cutting back under severe market conditions. Our proprietors are trying to save the local component in each paper, by consolidating the non-local at a single location. Printing, except it seems for junk mail and flyers, is being obviated by electronic transmission, and they are trying to make the best of that. These trends are hardly restricted to Postmedia. What we lose, in each town where one or more independent newspapers once published, is something larger than the comparative leisure with which big broadsheet pages were scanned. Each spoke from its town, on all the issues. Local views, even local insights, on national and international affairs, are being replaced with generic views. Among a certain class, more and more abstracted from the life of any actual community, the equivalent of a "foodie culture" is sustained. In blogs and elsewhere, discussion will continue, and news will circulate as it has always done. Among a much larger class, that dimension is collapsing. The list of things that involve everyone is being compressed to what fits through the iPhone: the tapeworm portal. Democracy was predicated on informed citizens. That it has always erred on the side of idealism, I will readily grant. But representative democracy, in our own constitutional form, required local participation. We sent members to Parliament to represent local views on national questions. We had municipal governments for the local stuff, and provincial for the inter-municipal. The system was supposed to work bottom-up, not top-down. Now, we have what amounts to national electronic polling, among participants who, however well or ill informed, are not anchored in any way. They exchange views only with the like-minded, and where opponents are encountered, only tweet abuse. Civility requires faceto-face. This inevitably contributes, mightily, to the top-down arrangements of the Nanny State, in which everything is decided at the universal level, and imposed at the local - whether by actual agencies of the government, or through the provision of services by faceless corporations, themselves regulated on the national scale (though with overlapping provincial and departmental jurisdictions, to assure dysfunction). Its symbol is Procrustes: the rogue blacksmith in Greek mythology, who made travellers fit on his iron bed, either by stretching their limbs till the joints popped, or sawing them off at the edges. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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