The Power and the Money

Fact of the day: Maine drug arrests

 It appears that Governor LePage has gone off the deep end. Among other things, he said this:

“Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the comment that black people are trafficking in our state, now ever since I said that comment I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state. ... I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

Well! The ACLU, among others, has requested Maine’s arrest records. But it is fairly easy to get the records from 2006. So click the link, go to page 8, and read that of the 5,110 drug arrests made that year in the state a full, wait for it, four percent were black. 

So he was right, only with the races reversed! Most readers can stop now, reblog this, tweet it, move on to other things. For the rest:

To be fair (although, why?) the data are from a decade ago. There has been an explosion in heroin use since then. But somehow, well, while it is remotely possible that Mexican cartel agents are involved in wholesaling, it is unlikely in the extreme that they are involved in retail distribution. Moreover, as of 2013, the number of drug arrests in the state had fallen to 4,359. (Page 28.)

Now, Governor LePage is not up for re-election, but because it is happening in this strange environment with a fat crybaby running as the nominee of one of our major political parties, it seems relevant to tag this post with this. 

I really do need to talk about Alabama. Until I do, go here. 

Help one American colony, and you gotta hurt another, or something, plus Maryland drivers suck

 Speaker Ryan may be helping the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico against the wishes of his caucus, but man is he letting them fly their freak flag when it comes to the District of Columbia. One Republican basically said that if Washingtonians did not like it, we could go join Maryland.

Bah. I do not like the idea because of a profound culture difference: Maryland drivers are terrible. And I mean terrible in a unique nowhere-else-in-America kind of way.

I just got into a yelling match with an asshole in an SUV who pretended to threaten to run me down when my kids and I were walking in an alleyway that he had turned into illegally. Fucking idiot, by the way, had a goddamned parking enforcement vehicle behind him when he revved his engine and lunged at me and my kids as we were walking. Pendejo. It ended poorly for him, as you can imagine. 

I have had conversations with Marylanders in bars who admit to thinking pedestrians should get out of their way in crosswalks. Add that to the way they honk at anything, and it makes you almost long for Virginia. Really, the craziness drops a lot among cars with District plates and dries up across the Potomac. Unfortunately, I only live a few blocks from Maryland, so I have to deal with them.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with drivers in that state? Disrespecting pedestrians and honking at everything. Where are we, Egypt? Brazil? Mexico City is becoming better than Maryland in this respect.

Note that I have lived in Boston and Miami. Marylanders do not drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. I drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. (Well, not Floridians.) Marylanders drive fine when it comes to signalling and stop signs and situational awareness and speed limits and respecting other vehicles ... well, except for the bloody honking. 

But while the honking is annoying, Marylanders deserve their own circle of hell for the way they treat pedestrians. WTF?

But despite these strong cultural differences with Maryland (do not get me started on their traitorious racist anthem) the actions of Congress are beginning to make me think that maybe retrocession would not be such a bad idea. 

The American housing crisis

I am beginning to think that the United States is facing a terrible housing crisis. The fact that we are is pathetic. We know how to build high-density housing in inexpensive ways. But we do not allow it. So places that boom in the northeast and California see little housing growth. But they see price explosions.

We are moving to Washington this summer. Our rent on a two-bedroom apartment (big enough for two adults and two small children) is $2525. When we moved in back in 2009 it was $2300. That is an increase of only 1.9% per year. In real terms, no change.

But the owners want to charge the new tenants $3200 for the same unit. That is an increase of 6.8% per year: well over inflation and a clear indication that something is off the rails in the Boston housing market.

The ultimate problem, of course, is that you simply can’t knock down the short buildings on this block and build more high-rises like the one in the background. It’s ridiculous. We are less than a quarter-mile from a T station; residential buildings here should reach 20, 30, 40 stories. But you can’t build them because, uh, Franklin Street is just so pretty as-is.

WTF? What in the name of God is wrong with Brooklyn? Build Brooklyn here! And for those of you in Brooklyn, go build Manhattan over there. Manhattan is great!

Here is my proposal for a tough tight restrictive zoning code.

1. Adjacent units shall not lose more than two hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year unless their current occupants so agree.
2. Monthly rents on a third of the units in any new rental buildings shall not exceed 0.003% of the median household income in the municipality per square foot. The price of one-third of any new for-sale units shall not exceed 2.5% of the median household income in the municipality per square foot.
3. New developments must at least double the number of units of any housing structures demolished in their construction.

And we’re done! No parking requirements, no height restrictions, nada. Just the above. And truth be told, I would prefer to replace clause (2) with a tax on luxury units. Calling Bill de Blasio! (Or Muriel Bowser.)

Note that this is an incredibly restrictive code. Just less so than the bullshit we currently have. Historical preservation is stupid, un-American, and contributes to income inequality.

Massively. How much of the increase in income inequality is due to changes in housing costs? I suspect it is large; someone should do the decomposition.

Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground!

 It has been a little harder to keep up the blog than I had thought. Work is quite pressing. But every so often, something comes up that the rest of the internets seem to be ignoring. So, in the interest of showing how Boston is changing, I would like to mention that Sunday was the fourth annual “No Pants Subway Ride,” in which people ride the T without any pants.

Of course, as you might expect, the “No Pants Subway Ride” didn’t start in Boston in 2007. It started in New York in 2002, and has since gone international. An example of the influence of the internet! I can hear some of you shouting. Well ... probably not. I mean, I’m sure that this idea in particular spread via the internets, but anyone familiar with the 1960s will find lots of similar events, and let’s not mention the decade after that one. Moreover, the participants physically rally before removing their pants. So please no conclusionamating about the awesome marveliciousness of our new interlinkeded planet. 

It isn’t really a surprise to find that it’s spread to Boston ... Boston has a giant 250,000 person college town laid atop the real city of 1.7 million. While Boston itself is not the sort of place that would smile upon pantless T-riding, the college town appended onto it certainly would. So no surprise there. And it has also spread to such unsurprising places as Philly. After all, the city that celebrates Mummer’s Day is not going to have a problem with pants-removing on the Orange Line. 

I have to admit that it was a bit more unexpected to find that it had spread to the Mexico City. But when you think about it, that reaction makes no sense. The D.F. long ago left behind its cultural conservatism. 

My excuse is that the rapidity of the cultural changes in Mexico between 1990 and today have left me reeling. Still, the United States changed even more between 1960 and 1980. So it is far from unprecendented. And why wouldn’t the chilangos take advantage of the opportunity to ride the subway without any pants?

My worry that it presages the end of Mexico’s unofficial ban on shorts.

Here is a much better photo of the Mexico City event, courtesy of El Pinche Holandés:

 

Race, roads, or regulation? Canadian and American cities

 When asked why Canadian cities are so built-up compared to American ones, Martin Wisse of the Netherlands suggests, “No white flight.” It’s an appealing answer, given America’s massive urban ghettoes, but it’s almost certainly wrong.

 

Consider the differences between Seattle and Vancouver. For an American city, Seattle is very white and disproportionately childless. The city, however, splatters across the horizon, with few high-rises outside the central business district, while Vancouver is relatively compact and its proliferating residential towers reach to the sky. All this despite geography in Seattle that should encourage density!

The Seattle-Vancouver comparison alone should make you doubt the validity of the “white flight” hypothesis. There are other reasons, however, to reject it. Until 1990 none of Canada’s metropolitan areas declined in population — the country didn’t see shifts in economic geography like what turned cities like Buffalo, Detroit, New Orleans, Flint, Akron, Pittsburgh, Dayton, and Syracuse into what they are today. (The 1990s recession changed that, but the places that shrank tended to small, and located in Atlantic Canada or northern Ontario and Quebec.)

More importantly, white flight can’t explain why the nonblack sections of American cities look rather different from their Canadian counterparts. Nor can white flight (by itself) explain why American suburbs strongly resist residential high-rises, whereas Canadian ones (Montreal excepted) take to them with relative zeal. For example, Chicago’s North Side does not look like Toronto, save for a belt along the lake. Nor does Boston’s central and northern urban area — Back Bay, South End, North End, Southie, Brookline, Allston, Brighton, Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Watertown, Arlington, Belmont, Charlestown, and East Boston — look much like East York or Scarborough. It is true, of course, that the great American ghetto is an American phenomenon, created by America’s strange racial caste system, but racial tensions don’t explain why Houston looks very different from Calgary.

So if isn’t race, then what is it? Another possible culprit is roads. American cities have a lot more freeway-miles per capita than their Canadian counterparts. The logic is not that freeways destroyed the neighborhoods that they cut through. I’m sorry, but speaking as someone who grew up in neighborhoods that had roads driven through or beside them, that argument is just stupid. (Yes, this applies to Toronto.) The plausible logic, rather, is that inner city neighborhoods were always relatively undesirable, but without subsidized freeways it would have harder to leave them for lower-density suburbs.

I am sympathetic to this argument, but I have some doubts. (Not least that my wife and I prefer dense inner city neighborhoods to the suburbs.) It is almost certainly true that American-style sprawl requires massive investment in freeways. Fewer freeways, more density. More density, more high-rises. The problem? If density the key, why does Los Angeles look so different from Toronto despite being denser? The 11.8 million people who live in Los Angeles’s urbanized area (that is, the area defined by the lights visible from space at night, minus fringe areas with a population density below 1,000 people per mile) are packed in at 7,068 per square mile, whereas their 4.6 million Torontonian counterparts live at 6,835 per square mile. Perhaps it is the freeway net that allows Los Angeles to splatter its density more uniformly than Toronto, but that feels ad hoc as an explanation, especially since Toronto’s suburbs are actually very densely-populated compared to Boston, Chicago, or New York.

The other possible explanation is regulation. In this view, roads may have contributed to American sprawl, but zoning is what really keeps it in place. For this view to be correct, Canadian zoning has to be less strict than American zoning. Are Canadian cities more likely to approve density, allow smaller lots and narrower streets, require fewer parking spaces, and permit higher buildings? This is not hard to believe, considering the far greater control that provincial governments exercise over municipalities in Canada, but I do not know the answer.

 

In point of fact, the “roads” and “regulations” hypotheses may be hard to disentangle. If a lack of roads drives up land values (by limiting the effective supply of land), then there will be more political pressure to allow dense development. After all, people need places to live. On the other hand, if it is easy to get out to the burbs (via all those freeways) then there will be less political pressure on inner-city areas to permit taller buildings. Cambridge, for example, saw a high-rise boom in the 1970s, which the city deliberately stepped on. As a result, the Central Square subway stop (where we live) is stupidly surrounded by two-story buildings instead of 20-story towers. Our building was built in the early 1990s, and was effectively capped at five floors. Without Boston’s two ring roads (I-95 aka “Route 128” and I-495), the pressure to build up in places like Cambridge would have been harder to resist.

 

In fact, however, it is possible to disentangle between “roads” and “regulations,” by testing for the effect of zoning changes on land values. Of course, it’s never that easy — endogeneity is always a problem. Ed Glaeser has a paper suggesting that zoning is determinative in shaping American cities in California and the East Coast north of Virginia. He has a particularly-detailed study of Boston that supports the zoning hypothesis: market forces (given the existing road net) would make Greater Boston rather denser were the regulations less restrictive. (Newton would look like Brookline; Brookline would look like Brooklyn; and Boston itself would be filled with high-rise towers.) On the other hand, his same work implies that in most of America it is the road net what produced sprawl, and not race or land-use regulation.

In short, most American cities sprawl because the federal government built roads out to the horizon. The exceptions are along the coasts, where U.S. cities would look more like Canadian ones in the absence of tight zoning laws. The increasing segregation of immigrants appears to be an effect of the above, rather than a cause. Of course, the great American ghetto is a striking and horrible thing, but we would have had them with or without freeways and zoning.

Halloween is ...

 ... a great time to be a Yankees fan in Roslindale, Massachusetts.  You can tell people that you're only dressed like a Yankees fan when they take issue with your shirt.

It didn't work.  Having the other much better-looking Yankees fan with me did.

Looking forward to tonight.  Off to get some beer, gonna watch this one at home.  But for those of you who live in Boston and are looking for right-minded folk to see the next game(s) with, the Thirsty Scholar in Somerville is becoming an unofficial Yankees bar.  Don't tell the propietors.

Sometimes, libertarians have a point

  The New York Times today published a story on how foreclosures in New England are disproportionately hitting old triple-deckers. “Triple-deckers” are squat three-story buildings common to the region (pictured below). Most of them are condominiums these days, but many are owned by the resident of one of the units, who rents out the other two, or by absentee landlords. 

Unfortunately, the author didn't limit herself to simply stating that the foreclosures have disproportionately hit triple-deckers. Instead, she decided to write a fact-free piece that implies, without any hard evidence, that the housing collapse is threatening to destroy the triple-decker, and with it, tear apart the urban fabric of New England. What percentage of triple-deckers have are foreclosed? We don't know.  What percentage of foreclosed triple-deckers are vacant?  We don't know.  We do hear stories about abandoned lots in New Bedford ... but New Bedford has been declining for decades. Has the recent housing bubble really worsened things? We have no idea.  It is a remarkably badly-written article. 

But there is one thing mentioned which, if true, is completely insane: 

Modern zoning laws, Ms. Friedman said, would never allow three units on such small lots. “If we have four three-deckers on 12,000 square feet and could only get two on that amount of land now,” Ms. Friedman said, “we are losing six units. So it’s very important to us to sustain them.”

Can that be serious? Boston zoning laws require less density than currently exists? That is flat-out crazy. I am not opposed to all zoning laws, of course. I would hate to have somebody block out my ability to see the sun, for example. But the Boston law is just egregious. Of course, it’s only a problem if there is in fact demand for housing in the parts of Boston where buildings are being abandoned ... so I doubt the premise. Ms. Friedman is probably worried about the housing for other reasons. 

That said, the general point holds. Zoning is very costly in this country. I do not approve. 

War and remembrance, American version

  The story of the Finnish Guard has been fascinating.  And it has one excellent modern parallel.  In the South End of Boston, in a formerly Puerto Rican area (now filled with native-born Americans pushing baby carriages) you can find the following monument:

Monument to the memory of the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico

This monument is dedicated to the heroic Puerto Rican soldiers who made up the glorious 65th Infantry Regiment, whose actions on the battlefield surpassed the standards of bravery and determination. 

They said to us, “We will have peace even though we have to fight for it,” and so we fought in the mountains of Heartbreak Ridge and marched from Inchon.  We froze in the winter and broiled in the summer.  There were moments when we were completely outnumbered but we kept fighting and many of us gave our lives for liberty, justice, and peace.

The 65th Infantry Regiment played a key role in the most heroic episodes ever seen, showing the courage, valiance, and heart of the Puerto Rican soldier in the person of Ángel Luis García Ledesma, the most decorated Puerto Rican soldier in history.  This brave fighter sacrificed his life to cover an enemy grenade with his body, absorbing all its explosive power, thereby saving his compatriots.  For this heroic deed, he was decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Purple Heart, and monuments have been erected in memory of this transcendental moment of contemporary history.  Today we honor with pride the 65th Infantry Regiment, an example of valor and determination in defense of liberty.

What words aren’t in the monument? 

Great debate attempt #4: There may be hooptie politics in the U.S. of A., but functioning machines there are not

  Some time ago, I took issue with the use of the word “machine” by two commentators on this blog. Short version: They talked about the role of machines in the election.  I said, “There are no more machines.” They said:  “You’re wrong. Patronage politics lives.”

I now believe that it is time to reassert my contention. There is no more Chicago machine. There may, in fact, be no more political machines in America.

What’s a machine, you ask? Simple. Machine politics happens when politicians make promises and levy punishments on voters at an individual level, and not merely as members of an ascribed group. It isn’t machine politics to support EFCA in return for a union endorsement or union contributions. It is machine politics to tell Joe the Union Leader if he gets his local gets out a certain number of votes, he’s gonna get federal contracts steered his way. 

Obviously, the boundaries are grey. They usually are. (C’mon. This blog has an “empire” tag.) But you can make a strong case that machine politics is dead unless you choose to draw the line so broadly as to make everything into machine politics. 

Consider the Board of Revision of Taxes, in Philadelphia, where I write this. 

In theory, its an independent organization, appointed by elected judges and funded by the school district. In practice, Republican and Democratic Party leaders give jobs away to people who work hard on election day. Machine politics!  Except … uh …. the BRT was originally part of a Republican machine. (Hard as it is to imagine, many northeastern cities, like Philly and Jersey City, were once controlled by left-leaning GOP machines.) As the city became more Democratic, Democrats got control of more of the posts. A real machine shouldn’t let that happen — why would its constituents have an incentive to switch? But the Republican Party has managed to retain control over 20 of the 78 seats on the BRT and give them to the people who get out its votes despite a complete collapse in the ability of the Philadelphia GOP to, you know, get votes out. If one machine replaced another, that shouldn’t happen either. What’s going on in Philadelphia seems more like straight-up corruption rather than machine politics, conventionally conceived.
 
Or consider what a real machine did back in 1972, and try to imagine it happening today. 

In 1972, Richard Daley the Elder could already see the writing on the wall: the days of the classic machine were coming to an end. Royko’s Boss came out in ’71. Michael Shakman began his famous suit arguing that patronage politics violated the 14th Amendment. Ralph Metcalfe defected from the machine with the wonderful quote, “It’s never too late to be black,” and managed to stay in office. His candidate for governor lost. So when a bunch of goo-goos challenged his control over the selection of candidates to the Democratic National Convention, he showed what a real machine does. They attacked the churches where the reformers organized and destroyed their records. Attacked, as in mobs and beatings. The Partido Nacional Revolucionario would have called that a porra. Richard Daley the Younger, I should add, led the porra that assaulted a Catholic Church in the 5th District. They then disrupted the election of the at-large delegates from Cook County. 

Daley lost anyway, save for the at-large. He sued, and when the U.S. Supreme Court punted, he got a machine judge to seat his hand-picked slate over the elected delegates. Except that the judge couldn’t do anything, because, well, the Supreme Court had kicked the problem back into the hands of the Democratic National Committee. Daley’s case wasn’t helped by the fact that in a massive failure of vision his slate contained only one Italian last name and three Polish ones. That’d be like, well, uh … you know, lots of Irish political machines shot themselves in the head over this sort of oversight, be it Chicago’s failure to integrate Italian and Poles and African-Americans, or Boss Flynn of the Bronx trying to pretend for a stupidly long time that all these Jews and Puerto Ricans would just go away. (The Jews did. The Puerto Ricans are. But the machine went away first.) 

Wrap your head around that happening in the 2012 . You can’t. It wouldn’t. Not even in places like San Antonio, where machine-like organizations still exist in a way that they’ve faded in Chicago and Philadelphia. Those cities have a problem with corruption, but I’m just not seeing the machines. (Michael Nutter is many things, including a plausible future President of the United States, but a machine politician is not one of them.) Boston, well, Boston kinda sort has a machine, sorta, but it’s weak, and survived because the Irish were smart enough to turn things over to the Italians. Cambridge has one that survives only out of apathy and indirect elections.

New York City could have replicated machine politics. It had an ethnic base and plenty corruption, while Jews and Italians were replaced by Puerto Ricans and African Americans, who were in turn displaced by West Indians, Dominicans, and Chinese. 

Yeah, I know, hugely diverse immigration stream and all that. But a political entrepreneur could have built a machine on a simple West Indian-Dominican-Chinese tripod … heck, they could have built on West Indians alone.

Only they didn’t. And if you tell me that’s because West Indians don’t make good American politicians or don’t become citizens or otherwise lack the necessary chops I will be unable to contain my laughter. It’s because, I think, American institutions and political culture currently make machine politics impossible. The combination of law, free elections, and prosperity has destroyed the great American political machine. 

In fact, the same combination — or at least two of the three — has also wounded the great Mexican political machine. They hang on in parts of Mexico, but generally the country’s politics resemble U.S.-style interest group politics, not the machine politics of yore. “Porras” cause riots after university soccer games; they don’t assault polling places and beat up opposition politicians. They’re also weakened in Panama. I’m not sure that I’m particularly happy about Martinelli’s victory, but it isn’t a victory for machine politics. 

Now, machine politics isn’t dead in Latin America, despite some bruising. Consider “Daleyismo” in Venezuela. ¡Viva la maquina! The Nestor-Cristina team in Argentina is very good at this sort of thing. Danny Ortega is less good at it, as his need to resort to vote-stealing shows, but even the great Daley had to do that on occasion. Correa and Morales, in different ways, are trying to build machines. Dominican politics is dominated by machines, albeit not hegemonic ones … and I think you could say that Mr. Uribe’s conservatives have built there own odd sui generis electoral machine. 

So machine politics lives on in América, but in America it is almost impossible for me to imagine the kind of tactics used by the Socialists-Peronists-Sandinistas-MAS-Conservatives achieving anything other than a wave of negative news stories followed by indictments.

I know less about the Old Continent. There are some machine-like things in Italy these days, although I think a new word is needed for Berlusconi’s very 21st-century political strategy. But to repeat myself, electoral machines no longer seem to exist in America.

Am I wrong? As always, I’m happy to change my mind. And just to be sure that we’re on the same wavelength, a “machine” doesn’t need to be as powerful as the Cook County Democratic Party under Richard Daley to qualify. It just needs to be able to win elections on the basis of personalistic relationship and individual patronage. 

“Champagne on Ice”

 This comes from the archives.  It was posted on another blog on January 21, 2008.  Considering that the football postseason is now entering full swing (and that only Philadelphia survives as a team that can grab my interest) I thought it apropros to repost it now.

It was cold yesterday.  It was cold in Massachusetts.  It was even colder in Green Bay, like negative 17 degrees ... negative 31 with the wind.  Third-coldest postseason game in NFL history. 

The New England game ended the way I like.  The Green Bay game did not.  Overtime, Green Bay wins the toss, an interception, and then Lawrence Tynes gets the third field goal attempt after botching the first two.  Did anyone catch Giants coach Tom Coughlin’s temper tantrum after Tynes messed up the first?  I hadn’t seen anything like it since basic training.  Sadly, though, it seems to have worked as a motivational device.

Anyway, I know Giants fans, and they simply don’t deserve the victory.  Everyone disenchanted with money-drenched professional sports has to love the plucky little municipally-owned team.  And anyone annoyed by fair-weather fans (as a former Bleacher Creature, this often afflicts me at baseball stadiums not located in Boston or the Bronx) has got to love the dedication of those who love the Packers.

“It makes me feel like a sissy,” said Troy Aikman on national television when Fox cut to that shot. I have to agree. Over to you, Carlos.

CARLOS:  It wasn't a bad win for the Giants. I’d say they consistently outplayed the Packers. Coughlin found a nice mismatch between Al Harris and Plaxico Burress and exploited it, and I do think familiarity with former Giants Ryan Grant’s rushing style helped them stop the run.

I am disappointed in McCarthy's inability to improvise a new game plan, but then I remember that it’s his second year as head coach. Ever.

I would like to point out to all professional football referees who might be reading this blog that making bad calls in favor of one team is not negated by making further bad calls in favor of the other team.

And while Giants fans might not deserve the win, it’s not like they have any stake in the team either. Some plutocrat does, or some bookie, and the team might as well be on Mars. Instead of grassroots interaction, you have a media circus (look at the rise and fall of Tiki Barber). It’s no wonder that Giants fans are volatile.

As for the bikini’ed fans, all I can say is: ah, my people.

CARRIE:  The best part about that photo is all the guys who aren’t paying the slightest bit of attention to the women, because they’re focused on the game.

Nostalgia

As a fan of the Green Bay Packers, I have to say that this is shaping up to be a most exciting football season. I've been a Green Bay fan since becoming friends with Carlos. 

But my football loyalties are shallow. I'm a baseball man, a fan of the once and future dreaded (but always hated) New York Yankees.

I follow them around. That's me at Fenway. I had doffed my hat at the moment that photo was taken, but look at the two guys standing below my right arm.  Yankees hats.  And look at the fellow seated in front of them. A Derek Jeter jersey.  We are there, in the bleachers of Fenway. The opposite would not occur in Yankee Stadium, not unless the Red Sox fan in question wanted humiliation. Or possibly violence.

The Bleacher Creatures of the Bronx are the fellows who learned to chant obscene comments about the sexuality of Dice-K's mother in Japanese. Two senior professors once took me to a Red Sox game against Toronto. They weren't surprised, exactly, at my comportment. 

In some ways, Boston and New York are inverses. In NYC, nobody could care less if you wear Red Sox paraphenalia. In fact, Manny Ramírez managed to blow a shot at turning most of Washington Heights and a big chunk of the Bronx into part of Red Sox Nation. (Guess how he blew it.  Right.)  In Boston, though, people feel free to yell at me in the street for wearing a Yankees hat. (And so I mostly don't, except around Harvard Square.) On the other hand, Yankees fans do fine inside Fenway, even in the bleachers ... and the reverse ain't true in the Bronx. (I wouldn't risk it on the D-train after a game neither, to be honest.)    

So why am I a baseball fan? Three reasons. (1) I actually played it back in the day.  Sure, now I have trouble throwing a ball ninety feet, but I played the real thing, unlike football.  I think I played tackle football maybe, like, twice in my life, and even then it was way way watered-down because we used neither pads nor helmets and I am still here to talk about it. (2) I understand baseball.  People who don't understand baseball won't admit this, but the game is actually simpler than football. And (3) ... history.  Baseball's just got hella more history than football. 

Which brings me to nostalgia. I rarely give Brink Lindsay props. After all, he has no idea what really caused the Great Compression, mistakenly believes that the Democratic Party lost white male votes outside the South during the 1960s and 1970s, and claims that the Great Society contributed to "an explosion of crime, urban riots, family breakdown, and welfare dependency."  But he did say one very very clever thing about nostalgia for the 1950s, when baseball ruled supreme, and today's political debates:

"Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there."

True or false?