Va fa Napoli, hipster.

I've posted before about culture war in Brooklyn, focusing on the fight between middle income car drivers who live in the outer parts of the borough and mostly affluent Park Slope bike riders. David Castillo, of Blue Barn Pictures, directed the photography for the video above; a clever take on the clash between older Brooklynites and recently arrived hipsters. Note that this also involves bikes.

Culture war, New York City style: it's about bikes.

Much has been written and said about the supposed cultural divide between coastal elites and heartland (or flyover country) just plain folks, but, as Alexander Nazaryan describes it in his Daily News piece, there's an internecine version playing out here in Gotham. His analysis of the kerfuffle over a bike lane abutting Prospect Park in Brooklyn, in which our Borough President, Marty Markowitz, sided with the gas guzzlers, is illuminating:

Markowitz, the consummate politician, was playing to his base: the ethnic whites of Jewish, Italian and Irish descent who drive along Prospect Park West to their homes in Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend and Midwood. On Prospect Park West live yuppies who couldn't tell Marty Markowitz from a borscht belt yukster - and couldn't care less. They're the ones doing the biking, the ones with no tangible roots to New York who might finally spend that year in France - where, of course, they will bike from patisserie to boucherie to the wineshop in perfect pastoral bliss.

Blog links: I'll take 'em where I can get 'em.

I'm thrilled to have gotten a blogroll link from Fucked in Park Slope, even though it's Heights, not Slope, strollers I have to dodge in my quotidian rounds.

And, yeah, it wasn't so long ago I was pushing one, myself.

Call me breeder.

Leon Kass wants you to drop that ice cream cone, NOW!

As a member, and former chairman, of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass has played an important role in determining the Bush administration's policy on matters such as funding of stem cell research, assisted suicide, and so forth.

Less well known than his views on these weighty matters are Dr. Kass's opinions concerning more mundane stuff. In his article "The Stupidity of Dignity," in the current New Republic, Steven Pinker serves up this juicy Kass quote:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America, but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive...Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays a lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ...Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to the mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ...This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

I just don't get it, Doc: "catlike" equals undignified? I guess you've never been owned by a cat.

Update: thanks to Eric of Classical Values, I now have the complete Kass quote, without ellipses, here. To be fair, Dr. Kass does admit:

I fear I may by this [ice cream] remark lose the sympathy of many reader[s], people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs.

He then goes into a diatribe against uncovered yawning, which is one with which I heartily agree. But failing to stifle or cover a yawn yields no pleasure. Dr. Kass would have us believe that the only reason for licking an ice cream cone or eating anything "in public" is "enslavement to the belly." Not so. On a balmy day, it is quite rational, even when not driven by the press of business, to choose the al fresco frankfurter (or suitable vegan alternative) over the confines of table. As for the ice cream cone, I think it really does taste better than with dish and spoon.

(Thanks to Just Your Average Joggler for the perfect image.)

Postscript on culture war.

It's not the big one I promised earlier - I'll try to get that done this weekend - but Meghan O'Rourke thinks reading Faulkner can help.

Can the culture war end in anything but scorched earth?

Digby has a scary take (these posts are from November, 2004, but are linked to a recent post of his; follow my link and scroll down to the posts headed "More Culture War" dated November 10 and "It Won't Work" dated November 9) on the origin and nature of the "culture war". It's not just a reaction to the sexual and pharmaceutical excesses of my generation in the 1960's. It's not, as one Ralph Keyes argued in his book, published in the 1970's, Is There Life After High School?, about whether we were "innies" or "outies" (in the social, not the navel, sense) in our teens. It's not even, as I've suspected, mostly about parents fearing baleful cultural influnces that will lead their children to grow up (in the words of the Austin Lounge Lizards) "stoned, left-leaning and gay."

No, according to Digby, its origins are pre-Revolutionary and rooted in slavery and race. It began with prickly defensiveness on the part of Southerners, that led to bellicose defiance and secession, and, following defeat on the battlefield, morphed into resentful vengefulness that "metastasized" throughout middle America. It can't be mollified, he argues, by any concessions on the issues of the day (abortion, school prayer, gay marriage and so on), because it can only be satisfied by a total victory that would entail trashing the Bill of Rights and instituting a theocracy.

But this won't happen, he argues, because the real (as opposed to the liberal, intellectual, academic and media) elite, which Digby identifies with "the church, the government and the corporations" will, much as Tom Frank contends, use these issues to manipulate the electorate for its own ends (presumably ever-lower taxes, leading to more money in collection plates, re-election for incumbents, and free rein for usurers, polluters and purveyors of unsafe products).

I think that, like many over-arching explanations, this has some truth to it, but fails to explain everything. I have my own overly-ambitious theory, which I'll set out in a later post. For now, as Samuel Pepys was wont to say, "and so to bed."