Byrne-ing Down The House
A quick post about my most recent read: David Byrne’s “Bicycle Diaries”. Yes, that David Byrne. It’s really more about his observations based on various cities he visited than it is about cycling, so it’s not surprising that the two bits I want to share from it have absolutely nothing to do with the bike.
In his section on Berlin, he talks about the Stasi, the East German secret police:
The combination of psychological and Orwellian horror is hellish and weirdly seductive. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threats, or economic incentives. It seems it’s something that many national security agencies do from time to time. (“If you see something, say something.”) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, and after a while no one knows who’s informing on whom.
The quoted phrase rings loudly in any Bostonian’s ears, because the MBTA transit police have been drumming those exact words (authored by the Department of Homeland Security) into our heads for more than eight years, encouraging us (as described here) to be on the lookout for anyone carrying a backpack, holding an aerosol can, or “acting in a rehearsed manner”.
Orwell’s rep as a visionary becomes that much more impressive when you realize that he was only off by 17 years.
The other interesting bit was a quote from Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, which goes like this:
In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy. A sidewalk is a symbol of equality… If democracy is to prevail, public good must prevail over private interests.
His perspective in that last sentence is profoundly interesting for those of us in 21th Century America, torn as we are between the American dream of freedom to acquire and amass unlimited wealth and the protests of the Occupy movement, which make it abundantly clear that the American dream is inaccessible to most, and has resulted in an unsustainable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite minority.
Just some thoughts, sadly having nothing to do with cycling whatsoever.