Getting Up to Speed – NYTimes.com
Jun/091
In France, Mellier pointed me to the small city of Reims, about 90 miles from Paris, which has effectively become a Parisian suburb since the opening of the Strasbourg line in 2007. You wonder if Bakersfield could become a bedroom community of Los Angeles. In recent years, moreover, some French cartographers who think about the social effects of train transportation have taken to creating new maps of Europe that simultaneously reflect the time and the distance between cities. These “time space” drawings of France (the technical name is anamorphic maps) have a distorted look as if someone crumpled a paper rendering of the country and pulled all the surrounding cities closer to Paris than they really are. Marseille is half its real distance from the capital, as are Strasbourg and Lyon. Mostly this is because of the TGV, which seems to have knit the country together in a way that air travel never did. Alain L’Hostis, a geographer at the Université Paris-Est, told me that the train has undoubtedly changed the psychological distance between places. For the French, he said, the mobility has created among many citizens “a feeling of belonging to a common or interconnected city.”
As a survivor of an Amtrak journey up the coast, I recalled those 13 hours unconnected to any California city at all — not a particularly pleasant feeling. When I asked Schwarzenegger about the social effects of a rail line, he quickly replied, “I think people will look at the state and not just say, ‘Oh, my God, I have to go from the south to the north, what a schlep.’ ” That was kind of like what L’Hostis said to me, but in a different way. After Schwarzenegger thought for a moment more, he said, speaking of his own commute by private jet: “I fly from Sacramento to Los Angeles, and it takes two hours. And if I would fly commercial, you would have to add an hour, or an hour and a half. Imagine. What if I could do high-speed rail?” I could picture a crumpled time-space drawing of his state. In my mind, and maybe in his, too, the big cities of California were already moving closer together. (from The Architecture Issue – Getting Up to Speed – High Speed Rail in California – NYTimes.com)
The prospect of American high-speed rail is horribly exciting to me. As the article states, Reims has easily become a suburb of Paris thanks to high-speed rail. Suddenly 30, 40, 50 or more miles is just a quick train ride away. Regional airplane flights would be a think of the past. Instead of flying from Kansas City to Chicago, you could take the train instead.
America is lagging behind when it comes to transportation infrastructure. Japan and Europe have been leading the way for decades. It took us nearly thirty years to finish the interstate system, and that was a major boom to travel and the economy. Since Eisenhower took inspiration from the German autobahn, it’s high time Obama take inspiration from the TGV in France and bring environmentally friendly high-speed rail to the United States. It also creates countless jobs in construction, engineering, and manufacturing. Seems like a win-win to me.
Reasons for Firing Carrie Prejean
Jun/090
Carrie Prejean reads from a bible during services at the Rock Church in San Diego Sunday, April, 26, 2009. Prejean has drawn attention for her comments against gay marriage at the Miss USA pageant, where she was first runner-up last weekend. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)
In the “karma is a bitch” department, Carrie Prejean, runner-up in the Miss USA pageant from California, has lost her crown (and title) of Miss California for breach of contract. And considering she’s been running around doing everything but (I don’t think the National Organization for Marriage is part of the Miss California USA pageant tour), I’m not surprised. The reason behind her termination was not her gay marriage comments from the Miss USA pageant in April. But should it have been?
Blogger Emma Ruby-Sachs at the 365Gay.com news site (run by LGBT-oriented cable network Logo) seems to think so. (For the sake of keeping this on-topic, I won’t go into my love/hate relationship with “gay news/gay media”.)
Yesterday, Carrie Prejean, poster child for the National Organization for Marriage and the newly conservative California, was fired.
When told of her firing by the celebrity radio host Billy Bush, Prejean insisted it was because of her answer to Perez Hilton’s gay marriage question during the pageant: “”It’s just because of my answer, I think. None of this would be happening right now if I just said, ‘Yeah, gays should get married. You’re right Perez Hilton.’”
If only that were true.
The press release issues by the Miss California and Miss Universe organizations states that the firing is, “based solely on contract violations including Ms. Prejean’s unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA Organization.” Since Prejean maintained her crown after the nude pictures surfaced and after Shanna Moakler resigned in protest, it is unlikely that her answer in the original pageant is the root of this dismissal.
And that’s the problem. [Emphasis added.]
“And that’s the problem”? I’m not quite sure the situation is being looked at objectively. Instead I get the impression that Ms. Ruby-Sachs wanted some comfort knowing that Ms. Prejean was punished for what she said rather than her behavior and actions required in her contract (as happened). “[H]aving someone who holds bigoted and discriminatory views as a figure head for a state is unacceptable,” Ms. Ruby-Sachs writes, as if Miss California USA is the California equivalent of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As much as people would like to imagine a beauty pageant winner holds some sort of celebrity outside of the beauty pageant circuit, they really don’t. Yes, there might be some little girls in princess costumes who dream of being a beauty queen, but by-and-large Miss California would have never been taken seriously if it were not for this controversy. Out of the Miss America and Miss USA winners of the last twenty years, I recognized three of them (Ali Landry, Gretchen Carlson, and Shanna Moakler).
Sure, at the end of the day, the right girl is now Miss California. But the decision was made too late and for the wrong reasons. In the same way that racism is not tolerated in world of celebrity and politics (when it is recognized, mind you), homophobia should not be appropriate for those appointed to “represent” a state or community.
Ms. Prejean’s original comments (reproduced below from Huffington Post) were not homophobic. She stated her beliefs and her values. Was her answer poorly worded and in parts incoherent? No doubt about it. Her association with the truly homophobic National Organization for Marriage after this all transpired is worthy of critique, but her stating an opinion doesn’t make her a bad person.
I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman. – Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA
Ms. Prejean’s right to free speech means that she should not have been fired for her words as Ms. Ruby-Sachs would have liked. I can understand not agreeing with Ms. Prejean’s response, and clearly Ms. Prejean is no friend to the LGBT marriage equality movement. But to state that Ms. Prejean should have been fired for having the courage to speak her convictions on a very divisive issue is ignoring that had her answer been in favor of gay marriage, we’d be seeing equal response from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. There are compromises to be reached, and the issues are not black and white. Zeal from both sides will get the struggle for marriage equality no where unless we respect differing views.
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