Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Okay, Missoula, this is getting a wee bit ridiculous. A customer in here today received a call on her cell phone from a friend who had just gotten hit by a car while he was biking. Now, I don’t know who was in the wrong in this case, but this is the third time in the past week alone that I’ve heard about recent collisions between bikers and drivers on Missoula’s streets. Combined with my quiet rage against the half-dozen or so drivers who in the last year would have hit me (as a pedestrian, on foot) had I not been watching, I think it’s time we slowed down a bit–even bikers, but cars especially–and kept our eyes open and on the road. Stop all the way at stop signs. Just because the light’s green doesn’t mean you can make your turn right away. Keep your eyes peeled. Put down your flippin’ cell phone and get those hands on the wheel. Don’t bike with earphones jammed in your ears–your iPod can wait.

I know Missoula’s better than most cities when it comes to courtesy for bikers and walkers, but we can still do better. Right-of-way isn’t going to matter much when you’re over at St. Pat’s getting your face stitched up and your bones re-aligned.

Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone:

The Republican party returned to power at the beginning of this decade thanks to a brilliantly innovative political hybrid represented in its most advanced form by the Bush-Cheney ticket — a high-tech engine of ruthless neocon capitalism wedded to a half-literate aristocrat dunce hiding his alcoholism in born-again Christian platitudes. Add corporate money to fundamentalist-Christian demographics in a country as dumb and superstitious as America, and you can vaporize a century’s worth of Al Gores and John Kerrys.

[and, oh, it gets better:]

The Bible-thumpers, mainly working- and middle-class whites with limited educations from the landlocked states of the South and the Midwest, would seem to have had little in common with the archpriests of the neoconservative movement, who as it happened were mainly Jewish academics with fancy degrees from the East and West Coasts. But they did: They shared an almost equal disdain for democracy, free speech and learning, and paradise for both groups was an intellectually mute America of vast malls, prisons packed full of ungrateful blacks, shitty TV programming to keep the brains chilled and 200-foot-high electrified fences along the Rio Grande. And lots of hero worship of soldiers, if not so much in the way of VA benefits.

This vision looked unstoppable for a while; there was a time in the early Bush years when this mean-spirited program of flag-waving, gun-toting biblical nationalism looked destined to become a kind of continental religion, a Church of America our missionaries would spread everywhere — and woe to those liberals and Frenchmen and other heretics who didn’t get with the program! Then we left them in office for a while, and it turned out that our would-be nationalist priests were totally stupid and completely incompetent at running anything at all, much less the world economy. And suddenly the red states stopped looking so much red as broke and fucked and responsible for a giant mess that even they didn’t pretend to know the way out of.

OK, I haven’t seen the minutes, but what the fuck, City Council? Monday (the 28th) I get an e-mail on Bob Jaffe’s city listserv from Bob Giordano (of the Missoula Institute for Sustainable Transportation) saying that the City Council tonight will take up the question of whether to adopt the 3-lane Broadway Vision Plan from Orange Street to Madison, so — get involved. The plan, as described, looks and sounds like something I can support. So I write a short e-mail to the Council saying yes I think it’s a good idea, pedestrian safety and forward-looking transportation are good for business, blah blah, I support this plan, thanks. Today I wake up to a Missoulian article saying, for starters, that Mayor John I Am Not In the Pocket of Business Honestly I Just Want What’s Best For Everybody Here Folks Engen opens up the debate by saying heh heh, look, everybody, I can assure you right now we are NOT gonna extend this “road diet” into downtown. I guess that’s the end of the debate. Or is it? Again, I haven’t seen the minutes. I only know what Keila Szpaller writes in the paper. So then, according to Keila’s article, a whole bunch (perhaps a small preponderance) of citizens stand up to speak on the issue, John Engen’s assurances notwithstanding, and say YES adopt the 3-lane Broadway Vision Plan, it’s a great plan, it’s what we need, go for it. Engen must’ve been all [eyes shifting right and left, laughing nervously] Hold on just a second everyone, we haven’t heard from [cough] the Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce! One lonely Chamber guy gets up and sites a “survey” showing that 78 percent of the Chamber members don’t support the plan. This must have surprised no one, as when has the Chamber ever supported anything involving public safety, the public interest, anything forward-looking, or anything that involves spending money. Councilman Wilkins, though, is not convinced by a survey. He wants the Chamber members (who, most of them, probably have golf league Monday nights?) to show up and make some noise about this in person. Why exactly this will make a big difference to Wilkins, who must already know the outcome, we can’t say. I would assume the survey is probably accurate enough. In any event, the measure is postponed to give the bidness community (along with the consultants at Crandall Arambula, et al.) time to get better organized. To change the subject, Councilman Strohmaier raises a new topic: there’s an out-dated glue-sniffing ordinance; he came across it in his winter reading. He wants it expunged from the books. The issue goes to a vote.