Ich Ben Ein World-Class Bostonian

I’m one of those ex-youngsters who believes that any crowd bigger than three people should be dispersed by mounted police using tear gas and pepper spray.  As such, the thing I find most astounding about the convention center debate is that the state would even consider catering to loosely organized mobs of out-of-towners.  In my ideal world, any shiftless foreigner dumb enough to ask “which way to The Hard Rock Cafe” gets a sharp jab in the ribs with the business end of a billy along with a terse advisory to “move along”.  Fortunately for everyone, public safety isn’t one of my areas of responsibility.

Like everyone else here, though, I am charged with thinking about the state’s business.  Unfortunately for all of us, the powers that be in this state, most notably the Technocrat Party house organ known as The Boston Globe, have taken up the idea of building a big new convention center with public money. Now, I try not to argue with The Globe because it’s a lot like arguing with the television, emotionally satisfying but ultimately pointless.  However, every now and then they publish some assertion so stupid that it can’t be allowed to pass uncommented.

The most recent example of this is the June 21st editorial pushing a new convention center for Boston.  Stuck in the middle of this muddled rehash of the convention center epic political psycho-drama is the ridiculous assertion that some corrosive form of suburban/rural/outside-495 ‘parochialism’ is scheming in the background to sink this beknighted public works project.

There are two problems with the ‘parochialism’ argument that The Boston Times needs to get over before it can be wrong on a world-class scale like its New York parent.  The first problem is so obvious that I regret having to kill a tree to tell you this, but a new convention center confers no benefit on anyone who lives his life outside Route 495. Citizens of Buckland and Shelburne Falls know that if they spend a nickel in extra taxes for a convention center, then their net from the whole thing will be negative five cents.

The most irritating part of the parochialism argument, though, is its brazen assumption that anyone who doesn’t work in a nasty part of Dorchester has no right to a sense of ownership of the biggest city in the state.  Well, to paraphrase a rude bumper sticker “Yes I DO own the city (and thanks for asking).”.  It’s our city too, as much as any Billy Taylor’s, but the fact that we don’t speed past Columbia Point every day on the way to a hermetically sealed working-in-the-city experience somehow negates that in TBG’s eyes.

Ask yourself, what does this project mean to my experience of the City of Boston?  More traffic? Undoubtedly.  More disruptive construction?  Certainly.  Less parking?  Always.  More two-dollar-bagel boutiques? Absolutely.  More high-pay, low-stress jobs thrown down the MCC patronage hole?  You bet.  More commercial destruction of the urban residential neighborhoods that many of us moved here from?  Unfortunate, but a neccessary sacrifice to the god of world-class-cityhood.  In short, I can’t picture a single alleged benefit of the convention center that would improve my experience of Boston, and I suspect that most other suburbanites who don’t hold jobs at the State House feel the same way.

Whose interest is served by having a world-class city?  Not mine, that’s certain and no one I know, either.  In fact, name me a world-class city and I can name you a half-dozen world-class sacrifices the residents of that city had to make to earn that dubious honor. The first sacrifice that your average citizen makes in order to live in a world-class city is that he can’t live there anymore.  You see, in a world-class city, everything has a world-class price tag on it, especially everyday luxuries like rent and food.  The second sacrifice a world-class citizen has to make is to reconcile himself to a world of extremes.  The city’s poor are poorer, and the rich richer and more obnoxious.  The scandals are bigger and the crimes, more horrific.  The editorialists are even more smugly self-assured, though that hardly seems possible here.  None of these seem like things your average Bostonian would want. 

If world-classness is so undesirable, why then does this bad-penny of a political jingle keep turning up? The simple, hidden truth behind the call to world-class cityhood is that there are a few people here who think of themselves as world-class citizens who want the city to cater to them and their friends from out of town.  If you want to join them you can try, but if you don’t you can just leave.  Up or out.  This kind of ruthless political thinking is very popular these days among those who view themselves as progressing relentlessly up.  It even has a faint odor of rotting democracy about it, since anyone can be world-class as long as they commit to leading that kind of ruthless political life.  Among this class, ‘growth’ (defined as THEIR stuff growing into YOUR space) and ‘change’ (defined as changing YOUR salary to something more Mexican, and YOUR house to something smaller and further from the world-class city) is treated as some sort of natural law.

For all their liberal wind-bagging, the editorial poobahs at The Globe promote this inhuman philosophy the same way Moses promoted the ten commandments, as the assumption from which all else springs.  Their straight reporting goes along for the ride, treating the convention center decision as a simple matter of appeasing enough state house lawyers to ram some loophole-ridden gravy train through the legislative process.  That’s precisely wrong, and plays straight into the cycle of narrow economic interests driving bad legislation.  Politics, for those of you who’ve been staring out over Morrissey Boulevard too long, is the art of convincing a majority of the people that your plans will be good for them.  When it comes to the convention center, I don’t see the benefit, and noone is trying terribly hard to convince me.  Ridiculing this disbelief as parochialism is hardly a convincing argument.  It’s not world-class journalism either.

John Rodley is the man for whom the phrase “Don’t get me started” was invented.