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Morta Sotto Il Carro

Maybe she slipped and fell. Or maybe, in the early evening, just around sunset, she just didn’t see it coming. You know, little kids are always running around, playing, especially in groups. A group of children playing in a city street. Nothing unusual about that. Maybe tag. Maybe something else. It’s not as if it mattered. You can imagine, in your minds eye, a squealing group of little people tearing around a corner, maybe behind a parked wagon or something, yelling their heads off, not paying much attention other than to the moment. Kids are like that. In the moment. It’s not as if they have much else to think about–assuming they were a little lucky. Their awareness is is, not so much reflection. It’s why most of us remember being kids with some fondness. All we had to do was be a kid, and, especially in those days, there were no rules.

I imagine this little group of wild people was shouting in some amusing mixture of English and Italian. Some of them had been born over there. Some here. They probably all spoke Italian, somehow mutually intelligible, especially if their parents came from the South. Dialect you know, and barely comprehensible to us now. “Vieni qui!” Get over here! That much we would have understood. It is the categorical imperative of childhood. Works in church, school, at home, or playing. Anywhere a few were gathered. Laughter and love. And energy. Lots of it. Like small car, big engines.

Anyway, one of those kids was named Concetta Delia. She was eight years old (or maybe six, or maybe five), or so the newspaper said. And she would forever be. She, Concetta, was of another time. The Great War had not yet begun, so she was still part of the nineteenth century. Literally. Italy was still ruled by a King, Victor Emmanuel III. Italy, the nation-state, was barely half a century old. If Concetta knew anything about this stuff, she was in one of those odd moments when Kings and Presidents (and the occasional Emperor) decided the fate of some abstract nation, while little kids, as usual, played in the streets. But, now, increasingly city streets, which too were also an artifact of two centuries: a country lane meeting paving for the first time. A place for horses and manure now yielding quickly to automobiles, “power wagons” and grease stains. It happened slowly and then all at once. The race into the contemporary world had begun. And it claimed its casualties, as any race would. Concetta Delia was one of them.

Concetta’s parents were Pietro and Maddalena, then in their early thirties. I have no photos of them. I wish I did. They were my maternal great grandparents. I was fortunate to know them as an elderly couple when my Grandmother, Francis Villari, would take me to visit them at 809 Cross Street, “down the house,” as we always said, in South Philly.They were always very sweet to me–I was about 5 or 6 years old. Little did I know that Francis, my Grandmom, had a little sister, Concetta because, very confusingly, there was in the 1950s another Concetta, the only one I ever knew. She too was my Grandmom’s younger sister. There were two Concettas: one survived childhood. The other did not. Until this year, I had absolutely no idea. It’s funny. Italian families are inveterate talkers–communicative as songbirds–but they hide their secrets well. I learned that lesson as a kid. When to talk, and when to shut up. I don’t think I ever learned it well enough, but I got the idea. Some stuff you didn’t talk about. Concetta was obviously one of the things you never talked about. Never tell anyone outside the family, that sort of thing…….

It’s funny, you know. Because my Grandmother, Frances Villari, did sometimes let drop details about her childhood. I remember her telling me she had had scarlet fever. And I’m pretty sure she mentioned typhoid too. In Philly, that would have been during an outbreak in 1911 when the city’s water got polluted by a broken main in a pumping station and the city drew on the Schuylkill River, in which, upstream, God only knew what you toxic waste you got. Not for nothing did we call Philly Water “Schuylkill Punch” when I was a kid. . Anyway, Grandmom told me about this stuff, but of a dead little sister. Nothing. Maybe because I was just a little kid myself, and she didn’t want to frighten me. Hell, I was then no older than Concetta had been.

Concetta Delia

Article from May 9, 1914 Harrisburg Daily Independent (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) <!— –>
https://www.newspapers.com/nextstatic/embed.js

And if that wouldn’t frighten the Hell out of a little kid, what would. Especially one who had a trolley line running in front his West Philly home. Trolleys, albeit horse drawn, had been in that area since the 1870. In South Philly,electrified street cars had come in by the late 1890s. My guess is that they still probably looked something like this, maybe a little smaller.

You have to have some sense of what kind of neighborhood this part of South Philly was. It was sort of at the southern fringe of civilization. That doesn’t mean it was bad, but it was not exactly Parkside either. If you went about 3 miles South of 8th and Kimball, you would have hit an undeveloped part of the city known as The Neck. It was marshy, kind of ramshackle and home to Philadelphia’s resident colony of pig farmers, who made a living supplying the city’s 9th Street market with pork producer, including offal. It was not exactly a source of civic pride, even in 1914. It had the reputation as a place you went and got your ass kicked. So I’d guess Concetta lived in a place which was the bottom of the ladder of upward mobility for Italian immigrants, which her sister Frances certainly saw in her lifetime. Suburban Penfield, where Frances died at 94, was another world from pig farmers and The Neck. So these guys were one step up from The Neck. They were lucky to be there. Remember, they left Italy behind.

The Neck, a somewhat optimistic view

10th and Kimball, looking East. No, it isn’t a Hopper painting, but you see where he got the inspiration

Since the accident virtually happened on their doorstep, they would have known immediately. Probably a banging on the door, followed by screaming and shouting, in Italian, the neighbors. I can imagine Maddalena and Pietro running out into the street. And oh Lord, what did they see, Their child, Concetta, beneath the wheels of a trolley. It is almost obscene to try to imagine with a gathering crowd, people shouting, the driver frantic, my Great Grandmother and Grandfather in some frozen state of hysteria and shock. What do you do? I’m sure the trolley driver was petrified and would not move the car, because, as the story says, they called for a jack to raise the car off Concetta. God only knows how long it took for the jack to get there, to raise the car, and to extract the child’s lifeless, broken body. She was taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, at 8th and Spruce. That’s less than a mile, but it must have seemed like another planet. My guess is by motorized ambulance, but, really who knows? It could have been horse and wagon. My Lord, they may have physically carried her there, frantic. Only God knows now. I imagine the scene in different ways, each progressively more ghastly. Concetta was pronounced dead at Pennsylvania Hospital.

And now, I know almost nothing more. What I do know, from looking at the parish death register, is that little children died this way. Another three year old in February (1915?) “morto sotto un carro di transporto all’Ospedale Pennsylvania.” (dead under a transport cart, Pennsylvania Hospital) You can imagine the WASP doctors’ heads shaking. Why don’t they watch their children more carefully? Italians. What can you expect? You can fill in the mental blanks. They never change, do they? What can you expect from immigrants?

So a million questions run through my mind? Did anyone sleep for days after? Was there any kind of wake (did that even figure in death rituals in Italy then)? When was the funeral mass? There must have been one, no? How on Earth did they pay for it? How did they get the little girl to Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon? As the crow flies, it must be 6 or 7 miles, but you’d have to get across the Schuylkill River–in 1914, how or where where? There were ferries, true enough, and at least one bridge, but that was to West Philadelphia. Was there a procession, which even then was a tradition among Italians in America? Who bought the grave? Was there some kind of mutual aid among Immigrants there? You can see what Baldi Funeral Home looked like in 1908. I can’t imagine the child got that treatment, you know? High-end Edwardian. Probably a little more like the photo at the very bottom. How did they get out to Yeadon to visit the grave, because they must have. You know, Italians are not allergic to graves. How long did they mourn? She died on May 8 and was buried on May 11, which seems remarkably hurried. Or maybe it wasn’t.

My God, I know nothing about my own people. I don’t even know if I am asking sensible questions. I do know I have been thinking about this almost since I first ran across it. The story haunts me. My ignorance haunts me. The world as it was before I was haunts me. Draw your own conclusions. Who am I?

And speaking of haunting, the Delia ultimately moved to 913 Cross Street (https://thisgameisovercom.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1090&action=edit), again, nearby, less than a mile walking today. It was a bigger house and the family was growing. Another daughter, born in 1917, was again named Concetta, whom I knew as my Aunt Connie. And I am told by a church archivist in Philadelphia, Elissa Torre-Lewis, who has been of great help to me, that the practice of preserving the name this way was not uncommon. Another cousin, a Delia, told me she heard stories that Concetta lived upstairs on Cross Street, and occasionally came down to the first floor to make her ghostly presence known.

I never did see the second floor of that house in all the time I went down to South Philly to visit. Not once. Now I know why. But the next time I get out to Holy Cross, I’m going to find Concetta and leave a flower. Because I now know where she resides. In aeternum, amen.

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Qvam Pinus, Father

No. That’s not what you think it means, if you think it means anything at all. And this otherwise adolescent recollection has a serious point, especially with the way political life in the United States is evolving. I suppose I’m going to come across as a complete reactionary, but it’s not as if I care any longer. I am in the process of accepting my fate.

You must remember that the events I am recounting stretch back to the Dark Ages, AD (ok, CE if you feel better) 1967 or so. They involve the sensibilities and humor of adolescent males at an exclusively male Catholic school. In case you haven’t guessed, sensibilities change. While I still find some of this deeply amusing, you had to be there, I suppose. And the point I want to make is, again, serious. You may disagree. That is your privilege.

I had started one of these “bare, ruined choirs” things, but dropped it. I figures no one really cares what happened to the Church I grew up in unless they are at least 70, and maybe 80. And even then, I don’t know many who actually care. So instead I will simply say that love of the Latin language, amor linguae latinae, has been one of the apparent casualties. Oh, yeah. There are some schools where it is still taught–I insisted my son study Latin in high school, which I am sure did a great deal for male bonding, especially when some of his friends insisted on telling him it was “a dead language.” That is not only facile, but incorrect, as any educated person knows. The common figure is that 60 percent of words in English are derived from a Latin root by borrowing, if not direct descent. Which explains why we tended to crush the English SATs back then in a way that the publics (US version) did not. Their loss. And that is trivial. But education is in a bad way in USAmerica, so to Hell with it.

I would have studied Latin no matter where I went to high school, cause my Mother wasn’t about to see me run wild with the heathen (not to mention heathen women) at Lower Merion HS. So it was Catholic one way or another. And in those days, that pretty much meant Latin. The only questions I think was how much and at what level.

Now may Dad, God rest his soul, graduated from West Catholic High School in Philly in 1937. That was no some fancy ass place, and he had his Latin war stories for me. His favorite was “E et noli reddire.” This was to put me in my place when failing to translate “Go and do not return” satisfactorily, as he once did. Yes, imperatives, negative imperative, weird irregular verb form, all that stuff. I’m sure he never said that to anyone flying a B-17 in 1941, but it was what it was. I remembered how obnoxious quoting Latin could be when Robert Oppenheimer apparently said to Lewis Strauss before his security clearance hearing, “Nos morituri te salutamus.” which Strauss supposedly didn’t understand. Supposedly the Roman gladiators addressed the Emperor (really, te?) before the fun and games in the Colosseum (artist’s conception, below) If you haven’t read the transcript of the security committee or seen the Sam Waterstone TV series (I haven’t bothered with the recent movie) you’ll have to look it up. Heh. Maybe it’s apocryphal (more Latin). Anyway, Strauss didn’t much like Oppie, and this, if it happened, didn’t improve things.

Latin was the lingua franca of the Pre-Vatican II Council (1962-1965) church and even if you spoke it badly, you were expected to get by on formal occasions. I heard amusing stories about whitebread Philly types getting around in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s by using some Latin with a priest (Habes-ne uxorem? Olim, sed non nunc: roughly, “Are you married. Not any more.”), and I know until quite recently you could still go to Rome and study Latin with an American priest in “boot camp” form (he has since passed on). There is still a Pontifical Academy for Latin (https://www.pontificiaacademialatinitatis.org/) although, hah, hah, its text is in Tuscan (Italian). But in those days, even as the Roman Catholic Church was losing its Roman Imperial soul, you could still expect to do Latin in a Catholic high school. I knew people who did it in college at Villanova, but I opted for Castillian (Spanish) as, perhaps, a shade more practical. Or, as we said, “relevant.” As an Anglo doing Mexican history, “cultural appropriation” is now more fashionable than “relevance.”

So, here we were, fourteen years old for the most part, and beginning our journey in Latin with the Piarist Fathers at Devon Prep. I doubt any of them were trained classicists and we never got the reconstituted Classical Pronunciation. It was, well, ecclesiastical pronunciation, of which which I thought Keewees Romanus Sum (Civis Romanus Sum) was some sort of put on. So, for the real toffs (I didn’t know any Harrovians then, thank God), we weren’t for real. And, to an extent, our first two years were sort of watered down. Oh, we learned the basic grammar and all that, which was quite enough, cause Latin is, like modern German, an inflected language–the form of the word would change with case, number, gender, that sort of thing. And of course the damned adjectives had to agree, so the possibilities for screwing up even basic stuff were numerous. My first sentence: “Livia puella est.” Followed by (I think) “Livia pulchra est.” Ok: Livia is a girl. Livia is a pretty girl. Hey man, it was 1965. What do you expect? This was an all boys’ school and the priests figured they had to hook us one way or another. The life and adventures (chaste) of pulchritidinous Livia beat talking about Roman plumbing. Cause we all were immediately trying to figure out how to hit on Livia. In Latin. Use your imagination and pretend you are a fourteen year old guy. And so it went. Until Year III.

You didn’t have to go on after Second Year, but I think maybe between 5 and 10 of us did. And all of a sudden, Livia the Hot was gone. In her place was some guy named Cicero and another one inauspiciously dubbed Cataline. Very bad news. We had gotten watered down Caesar in our Second year (“Gallia omnia divisa est in partes tres?), but not in the original. All of that suddenly changed.

My first two Latin teachers were Piarist fathers nicknamed Stubby and Dizzy. The nicknames were quite appropriate, Stubby was a Polish priest with an unpronounceable name (to us) who was short, squat, and gentle. I never saw him get angry–and it wasn’t as if he had no provocation from us. I think it was because all of us realized–even the idiots–that he was something special and endearing. His name was Fr Soczowka, Sch. P. He was followed directly Second Year by Dizzy. Stubby, then Dizzy.

Diz, of course, was another matter. He came by his moniker honestly.

He seemed distracted, addled, occasionally made no sense when he spoke, and was kind of crazy. By name, Fr Julius Olszewski, Sch. P. he was generally placid enough other than for his enigmatic sayings (“Make round on 29”–I have no idea) and occasional eruptions when we were screwing around (always) (“I will give you such a kick that your head will turn around and you will never suppose”). He also took great exception to being called Dizzy, which is understandable. We did get as far as De Bello Gallico, at least a watered-down version. It proved useful in providing names of various barbarian tribes into which we divided as teams playing pick-up basketball (I never got beyond the Suevi, who stunk), so there was that. Also, iacta alea est and crossing the Rubicon and, well, that kind of literary thing. No one got hurt and we learned ablative absolute and subjunctive verb forms Besides, we were reading both volumes of Brinton, Christopher and Wolff in two years of Western Civ, so we had some idea of what was going on. Two years. Literally Plato to NATO. I’m still working off some of that from half a century ago. No regrets, by the way. In any event, there was once a jock strap war in his class. Yup. I’ll leave it to your imagination.

Latin II with Diz

In Latin III, the fun came to a halt, for a while at least. First, we got a stone serious teacher. His name was Stanislaus Swiatek, Sch.P. He didn’t screw around. He was genial enough, but nobody messed with him. He was, colloquially, Stan, although no one dared call him that to his face. He was wiry, medium height, curly hair but balding, fingers stained by nicotine, and a raspy smoker’s voice to accompany it. He radiated “no bullshit”, and lots of stories circulated about his exploits in 1956 when he may have eaten a few Russians alive in Hungary. I could–and can–see it. He was a tough central European customer down to the soles of his feet. And then came Cicero and Cataline.

We got a serious text, none of this schola bona est crap. Uh uh.

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?”

A colloquial modern informal translation of this might be: “Dude. Cataline. How long do you plan to torque us around?” That’s not strictly accurate, of course. “How long will you abuse our patience, Cataline. How long will this madness of yours continue to make fools of us? And to what end will your unbridled arrogance be on display?” That’s a little better, probably not for purists, but you get the idea. Cicero (106-43 BCE), a famous Roman statesman, consul, and source of adolescent nightmares second only to Calculus, was here denouncing his rival, Cataline, whom Cicero claimed was part of a plot to overthrow him as consul. And Cicero (Kickero to the toffs) saw Cataline off, as in put to death. I think that appealed to Stan, cause he grinned wickedly when he worked through the speech with us. And he emphasized (I realized in retrospect), that Cicero was going for the kill by insisting that “nos eludet” should be rendered as “make sport of us”. For a guy whose native language wasn’t English like Stan, that was something, because the root of the Latin verb “eludere” was “ludus” or game. So if you wanted to be coarse about it, there was a sense in which Cicero was accusing Cataline of “screwing around” with a central Roman institution of governance–disrespectfully–, you know, playing cat and mouse with the Roman Senate. I remember venturing (as if it were yesterday) that “mock” would be a better choice. Stan wasn’t having it. “Salvucci. He is brigand (yeah, Stan used that kind of vocabulary and diction).” As if to say, “Kid, you may may mock me, but Cataline was toying with someone well above him. He had it coming.”

See, what you got, even as a dense kid, was some idea of the power of language to shape reality. In a way, to create reality. While your Mother may have crassly seen Latin as a means to a 730 in the English SAT (yeah, our class had an 800, but it DC, not me) you were getting a far more subtle lesson. And, yeah, the idea that a traitor was going to be held responsible for his actions–big time–rubbed off too. You may not have gotten all the details, but slowly, there was an accretion of the notion of responsibility, especially public responsibility. You know: “Salus populii suprema est lex.” The Highest Law is the Good of the People. Oh, yeah. Lessons from a dead language. You think Trump or his henchpeople (there, better?) ever learned them? I doubt it. And then there was subjunctive mood (now largely lost to English), tense sequence, periphrastic, deponent and, mirabile dictu, other horrors. And don’t tell me this stuff didn’t stick. It did. It has

Oh man, you are too serious, as one of my less beloved classmates informed me a few years ago. Yeah, well, that’s life. Some are. And some aren’t. But if you think all it was was Sallust, Livy, Nepos, and Pliny the Elder (and, on my own, with assistance from the Assistant Head, Fr Magyar, or “Wheels” as he was fondly known, for part of senior year, Tacitus, Germania, guess again. This was high school and we were, well, never lost for creative ways of messing around. You had to let off steam somehow, because in those days, it was all steam. A different world, believe me. Everything was punishable by expulsion. And our Head, an austere Hungarian we called “Nose” (guess why), didn’t mess around. And we knew it.

Well, Stan was not in the best of health (he died from heart problems in 1971), and at some point in the year, he was replaced by Father Kalman Miskolczy, Sch.P., a tall, lean, red haired guy with a distinct bump on his forhead which produced the cruel but universally held (even among the lay faculty) nickname, “Ripple.” (Dizzy got similar deference: the then current pop-song saw to that.) There was also a cheap sparkling wine of that name in those days, so I guess that helped, although most of us looked for beer. Oh boy. Ripple was something else, and he was comic relief (inadvertant) to Stan’s intensity.

********

Some of this is hard to explain, and we certainly didn’t sound very serious. But you try reading Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis. If I’m not mistaken, Pliny the Elder met his end investigating the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 73 AD, so he is regarded as a serious classical scholar. The work is one of the largest surviving extant classical texts. In a way, it was a bit odd. Pliny the Younger (his nephew) actually provided extrabiblical evidence for the existence of Christians (and historical existence of Jesus Christ) in his Epistulae (as did Tacitus, Suetonius, and quite a few others) , but I guess the textbook got his uncle, the Elder and the natural history, and so did we. On very rough inspection–now years removed–it looks a little easier to construe than some of the stuff we were doing. But, I mean, having teenage boys reading long passages on Roman flora and fauna, or, for God’s sake, clouds, was almost certain to result in wandering minds. Wandering minds, then, led to mischief. And mischief, with Ripple, usually led to catastrophe.

“Pinaster nihil est aliud quam pinus silvestris minor altitudine et a medio ramosa, sicut pinus in vertice. Copiosiorem dat haec resinam quo dicemus modo. Gignitur et in planis. easdem arbores alio nomine esse per oram Italiae quas tibulos vocant, plerique arbitrantur, sed graciles succinctioresque et enodes liburnicarum ad usus, paene sine resina.”

Ok, I thought I’d take an honest pass at this without looking at a translation to figure out why this particularly passage set off the wildest convulsion (there were several) in Latin III under Ripple. I’m not going to do this literally, but basically, it is a description of a type of pine tree. Y’all remember, The Pines of Rome, and justly celebrated they are. Older Philadelphians may remember that Respighi’s theme was the sign-off music that WFIL-TV used in the 1950s back in Philly, back when television was “a vast wasteland,” unlike now, unending font of cultural metaphors it has become. But that obviously wasn’t what flipped us.

Qvam Pinus!!!

“Pinaster is nothing other than a variety of wild pine, somewhat less bushy than usual in the middle than at the tip top. Let us say, it gives off a copious resin.”

Oh, oh. I’d say use your imagination, but since you’re well beyond juvenile sniggering, I guess I better help out, because I am not well beyond juvenile sniggering. “Pinus”, of course, bears a deadly homonymic resemblance to the English word “penis.” (NOT in Latin, of course). And if you want to start a riot in an all male Catholic school of the 1960s you might think of a discussion of the penis led by a sort of out-of-it-Hungarian who was a figure of fun anyway. Add to that “bushy” (Oh my God) followed by, do you believe it, “copious resin.” Surely, you don’t require any more assistance? Oh man, we were, and I remember this vividly, off to the races.

I can still hear the voice of one of my classmates (initials RH) shouting out, “Aw, father, quam pinus.” And Ripple smilingly obliging with “Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by another, shouted somewhat more brazen (initials JS), “Hey, Father, heh heh, are you quam pinus?” “Yes, Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by an explosion of laughter, grinning and shouting of “quam pinus?) directed at each other, inevitably followed by–you knew this was coming–“copious resin.” I do think Ripple lost control of us for at least ten minutes, as we accused each other of being “quam pinus” “sine resina”. You had to be there, believe me. This was a class which ended up with several National Merit Scholars of various degrees, all of whom were dissolved in laughter, with poor bewildered, befuddled Ripple trying to figure out what the Hell was so funny. And finally losing it too, realizing something was going on , and he had to put a stop to it. “Quam Pinus, Father!” Yup. Devon Preparatory School. Pietas et Litteras. Anno Domini 1967. Laudetur Iesus Christus.

It’s a shame, really. At that point, at least some of us could pretty much read medieval Latin texts on sight. You know, descriptions of kids skating, festivals, which was nothing in comparison to what we had been basically compelled to do. We might have been able, but we were silly kids and did silly kid stuff. I didn’t know–how could I–that there was a huge body of Latin literature–mostly of a religious nature, such as sermons from the Spanish Empire in later centuries, that nobody, to my knowledge, had really worked through for any reason. Then.

But wait, let it never be said that while on I was on right track, I followed the wrong train. Or maybe that’s just what my career about. Check this brand new volume out. OUP, no less. Like Marlon Brando, I followed the Econ, my Rod Steiger, a one way train to Palookaville. Had I followed Stan, I could have been a contender. Congratulations Professor Laird. You wrote the book I should have written, not something about debt, woolens, or–God forbid–the importance of factor endowments in Mexican economic history.

Quam pinus, Salvucci. Better, as they said on the walls of Pompeii, Magister spado es.

Cubicle Crazies

It has been a long time since I really enjoyed driving. When I was younger, getting in a car and going somewhere–anywhere–was a way of relaxing. This was especially true when I owned a car that you could drive. I didn’t learn on a stick, but I got there a soon as I could. The best car I ever drove, just for sheer driving pleasure, was a German Ford –called a Fiesta. It was such a stripped down model that I had to buy a kit to put a glove box in. No air-conditioning or any of that stuff. Barely a radio and that was AM. But it got the job done. Once I learned how to double clutch and coast, I could coax fifty miles to the gallon out of the little devil. You serviced the car itself, and that included the usual oil changes, but even installing a new seat that I got from a junk yard. I drove it across country three times with nary a hiccup, including Philly to Chicago in a long day. Of course, I was 28 years old, which simplified matters. I once drove down from Princeton to Philly in an ice storm by sticking to the grass median on then I95. I wasn’t fearless or crazy, but I knew the car. It gave up the ghost at 130,000 miles or so. That was in California, and I often wondered if somewhere in the Southwest or Mexico, the little mother, suitably rehabbed, continued on. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Driving a VW Golf, by then in South Texas, I still liked driving, but Texas was different in 1990. Not just politically. Driving from San Antonio and back was actually fun because there was very little between the cities. Not an open sore of sprawl as it is now hosting some deportation-happy loon running a monster pickup at 90 miles per. That would be I35, the NAFTA Highway. The less said the better, because it is crazy dangerous, always torn up, and, yeah, full of feral Texans who think “defensive driving” means keeping a shotgun or a 9 mm at all times. The charm is long gone, along with the bluebonnets: I often avoided going up to the University of Texas, great library be damned, because it just wasn’t worth the aggravation or the risk. It was Trump Turnpike, literally. Seeing some obscure document, however important, just wasn’t worth it.

When I would come back to Philly for visits, I’d think how much more sedate roadways seemed. Talk about misleading first impressions.

Since coming back, I’ve have to reconcile myself to a memory map of Chester County that is hopelessly out of date. I mean, it used to be a straight shot from where I lived on the fringes of Devon (for two years or so) to what was then called the Gateway Shopping Center. That was one of those midrange spots where you could get a decent burger and pick up some Coltrane in a music store, you know, that sort of thing. And if you wanted more, it was easy to get to King of Prussia mall, old style. That had been a hangout since high school. It accommodated itself to changing income and taste as you got older. It was ok. Not high-end, but it served the purpose. The traffic was manageable, if not exactly light. Route 202 was the main artery. t just ran North and South, with very few twists and turns. Getting lost was impossible, even for me.

Now. Managgia. This is what we have now Yeah, I know AI can’t spell cartographic, but I’ll be damned if I could reconstruct this nightmare by hand. Driving it is bad enough. The first time I hit it, my reaction was “where the f**** am I? And WTF is this?” Once upon a time there was a GE Re-entry Division plant adjacent to the Turnpike that was a landmark of sorts. I always wondered what the Hell went on out there. In 1980, I found out, courtesy of Phil and Dan Berrigan, when they broke into the place and hammered on Mark 12A nuclear weapon nose cones and poured blood on documents, a favorite trick of the Bros Berrigan. Well, surprise, that ain’t there any longer–there’s some Netflix Experience thing instead (figures) and neither is the simple 202 to KOP.

The whole area has exploded with offices, apartments, condos, high density housing–my God, gone is the greenery of yore. The first time I hit this thing, I was not only lost, but in mortal danger, because the GPS thing saying one thing, the signs –ah, the mystifying road signs– something else incomprehensible, my spouse was telling me in was in the wrong lane, and I a posse of vicious BMW’s with the bright lights flashing obscenities in some code that I was not privy to was on my tail. And talk about aggressive driving. Hell, they made San Antonio look like Amish Country. I was, honest to God, really scared for the first time since I got lost on the freeways in LA and found out that the Johnny Carson routine about Matinee Lady and the Slauson cutoff was no joke.

Anyway, I was really freaked out. And having now done it a couple of times –more or less successfully, I appreciate something else added to the mix. They generally don’t drive the BMWs or Escalades, but there are a lot of low slung, manacing looking SUVs with names like Trapper or Hammer driven by youngish to middle age guys and gals who ALWAYS seem to have mayhem on their mind. I have labelled these people, unfairly to be sure, “Cubicle Crazies.”

I know. That’s not nice. Maybe it isn’t even true but with offices and companies and business “parks” in the area–a corporate Disneyland–I cannot believe there is no truth to what think.

You are cooped up all day with people you may or may not like. You are doing work you may or may not enjoy. And life goes on and is just out of reach. You may have an insufferable boss. Or some pretentious idiot. Or someone who has decided they do not like you, God knows why. But you soldier on because, as Kevin Spacey says in Margin Call, “I need the money.”

Anyway, you are taking care of business (or “the enterprise” in corpobabble). You went in fresh and came home dead tired. Life. Tough luck.

So I get that when it’s rush hour, and you get into heavy traffic, and some imbecile won’t budge an inch so you can get into an exit lane, you might get peeved. You may be hungry, pissed off, late to pick your kid up or missing the ball game. Or maybe you’re just sick of it all and you mistake your SUV for some kind of power trip–you know the kind, a KIA with loud pipes. You are giving your day job the finger. Good for you.

Problem is, I happen to be there too. And I may be retracing a map of 40 years ago that no longer exists. And you get impatient. And then I get pissed off with your climbing up my back and flashing your lights. While I would like to consider myself a model of composed decorum behind the wheel, I am a Philly kid. We are taught various colorful means of self-expression. In various tongues. And lately, my patience is not what it used to be. Grumpy old man. I don’t know. I don’t really care. It’s a stereotype and may well fir me. Would not be the first time. But I find the current generation of incompetent, distracted, irrational or otherwise aggressive drivers hard to take. I see you on the phone or even watching a movie (!) while you you take a vehicle that is otherwise a deadly weapon and use it casually to put my life (or others’) in danger? I don’t like it.

So, get off my lawn. And, while you’re at it, my highway too.

Another Fall in Philadelphia

If you know the original Hall and Oates song, well, you know it’s pretty bleak. “Seven million people without hope…I feel my back up against the wall.” Hey, chill. I’m not there. Not even yet. I mean, at all. Remember, I wanted to get back here, kinda…sorta…so I tend to be buoyed by the first real indications of a change of season I’ve seen in years. Didn’t really get one in California. Or Texas. And man, that really bummed me out.

Especially Texas, where you had to turn on the air conditioner on Thanksgiving. For a kid who knew that steam heat started on October 15th as a kid in Penn Wynne, I would get catastrophically depressed. You know, no leaves falling (or burning, which really put a tang in the air before the tree huggers banned the ritual, for the greater good, I suppose) When you felt a cold tinge to the wind, leaves burning, and Lewis Jones pumping steam under the sidewalks and banging away in your radiators, it was fall. Nothing could spoil it, really, although the murder of Jack Kennedy came pretty close (Hell, the NFL played that weekend–it was only the President). It was not just one thing. It was everything. Fall in Philadelphia, and I did not dread it in the least.

That stream heat stuff was truly iconic. If you don’t know what central plant heat was (I doubt it “is” anywhere any longer), man, you missed a real marker of the age. Lewis Jones was established in 1918 as part of a centralized steam heating system that would send pressurized steam through pipes out to communities where the lines had been laid. Overbook and Penn Wynne were two places (Yeadon, PA was another), and Penn Wynne, especially was conceived as a planned community by the McWilliams and Meloney builders. It was a big deal because you dispensed with coal, which I distinctly remember from West Philly. Clean, safe (sort of, if you didn’t live near the boilers), reliable (well, not always) and modern. Steam heat. Like from “The Pajama Game” (1956), “I got steam heat, but I need your love to keep away the cold”….Ah, forget it. You are probably not old enough

I could go on forever about the glories of steam heat. Like, for instance, where the pipes ran close to the level of the sidewalk (Trent Road), the lucky owners of the homes never had to shovel the sidewalk after a snowstorm, because the snow would not stick. Honest to God. It was like a miracle. 4 feet of snow and Trent Road was clear. Now I wonder if the value of that service was capitalized into the price of homes there. Grin. What a term paper in economic history that would make to stick some smart-ass kid with. Go find that on AI. I should’ve done it myself when I was at Villanova before Lewis Jones went bankrupt in 1973. If you’re thinking the first Energy Crisis must have had something to do with it, well, yeah. But that wasn’t all.

When you’d drive down City Line Ave in Philly you’d probably see a couple of vent stacks merrily bubbling steam away into the night. You know, pipes break, especially stuff laid in the 1910s. So your product was going up in smoke, literally, which isn’t a money maker. And the ability to regulate your home temperature was, well, iffy. Our basement, where the main line came through, had this asbestos covered pipe with some ancient connector that looked like something from the Arms of Krupp. But the basement was always comfortable, even on the snowiest of days, which made for a great hang if you were practicing trumpet or reading some forbidden book–The Catholic Marriage Manual was one of my favorites. Anyway, the rest of the house was full of radiators that had a steam bleeder which you adjusted to squeals and cacophonous banging, hoping to get some reasonable mean. For about fifteen minutes, the house sounded as if Chick Webb were practicing drums, but then it calmed down. All in all, the system was oddly reassuring, because if there were noise, there was heat. And the steam the bled into the rooms–or heated air–always smelled a bit like rice cooking. So you had the olfactory angle covered too. If you get the the idea that I really enjoyed the entire production, I did. It’s another element of my childhood which is now unrecoverable, because a heat pump is a poor substitute for steam heat. Take it from me.

Of course, the steam boiler ran at very high pressure. In the aftermath of the company’s demise, reports came out that the pressure–if there was an explosion, would blow a boiler about three miles. Funny how no one one every mentioned that in the heyday of the Lewis Jones Company. You know, the past always looks pretty good when you realize you had no idea what was really going on.

And then there was the Norway Maple on our front lawn that supplied an endless variety of multi colored refugees from the summer. Damn. You could predict two thing. The Eagles would lose (from 1963 on) and a shower of red, yellow, brown, green, tan and all the colors in between would carpet our front yard. It was gorgeous, although my Mom hated the tree because it was “messy.” But I could and did spend hours look at the mottled remnants, getting high on the perfect legal smoke issuing from the pile burning, and watch the days get shorter and the sky get grayer every day. Believe me, if anything contributed to my disdain for Texas, it was the absence of Fall. In California, you could always drive up into the Sierra if you could get away from grading papers or writing lectures, and one year, we had snow on Mount Tam visible from our apartment window. Snow. Unusual, but savagely great with a good zin that you could get for $5.00 a bottle than on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. Texas had nothing to match it, and, I guess, Philly really didn’t either. But we didn’t have steam heat in Berkeley either. Hell, we were lucky to have heat half the time, but psychic income covered that, according to Governor Moonbeam.

There were always those days, sometimes in November, when God gave us snow flurries in Philly. Usually they didn’t amount to much, but there were a few very cold years in the early 1960s and snow on the ground for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8. See a Philly Catholic boy had no clue about the Guadalupe or the Virgencita or any of that–nor did the pre diversity Church require us to. It was really a remarkably insular existence, wrapped up in leaves, frosty bay windows, and the good Sisters of Mercy raining Hellfire down on our pubescent Sodom and Gomorrah–“boys let me see those hands.”

Oh, yeah, the new television season started in the Fall. That was always cool too, even if we had only three channels and the Star S[angled banner for sign off at 1:30 AM. Yeah, I snuck down to the living room to watch some times, and if I got caught, I said the radiator in my room had been whistling or banging or some other lie, simply because there was something transcendent in being up with a Test Pattern on WCAU in the Fall. Even Sunrise Semester was fun, with some poor schlub from Penn lecturing in black and white about Natty Bumppo as the House on Harrogate warmed up noisily for another day of pre-Vatican socialization.

Hell, my family was all there too. I didn’t need much more. That was Fall in Philadelphia. I miss it, honestly, even if I’m back for the final chapter. It ain’t the same. No steam heat. No burning leaves. And my family is gone.

The End.

I Don’t Know if AI Is Coming for Your Job, But Here Is What It Is Doing To Mine

Every few days, another newsletter lands in my inbox warning that the robots are about to take everyone’s job. The copywriters are panicking, the coders are updating their resumes, and the graphic designers are looking into carpentry. I can’t tell you whether generative artificial intelligence is going to replace your tax accountant or write the next Great American Novel. But as someone who spends his days squinting at centuries-old handwriting and trying to make sense of historical economics, I can tell you what it’s doing to mine.

It isn’t taking my job. It’s turning me into an editor for a remarkably eager, wildly fast, and occasionally delusional research assistant.

For the uninitiated, historical research—particularly when dealing with 19th-century commercial manuscripts—is a slow, solitary grind. You sit in front of a monitor or in a dimly lit archive, staring at ink that bled through rag paper two hundred years ago. You decipher the erratic handwriting of Spanish merchants, piece together obscure vessel names, and reconstruct long-forgotten trade networks line by painful line. It is high-friction work.

Enter the Large Language Model.

Drop a digitized page of early 19th-century cursive into the prompt box, and within seconds, the machine spits out a full transcription and translation. The speed is staggering. What used to take an entire afternoon of paleographic decoding happens in the blink of an eye.

The catch? The machine is a confident bullshitter.

It doesn’t tell you, “I’m not quite sure about that squiggle on line four.” It simply guesses with total conviction. It will happily turn a historical merchant named Francisco de Borja Migoni into “Francisco de Paula Misoni” without batting an eye. It will read the name of a merchant vessel—say, the Tarantula—and transform it into absolute nonsense because the script was a little cramped near the margin.

If you trust it blindly, you aren’t doing history; you’re publishing machine-generated fiction.

And that is where the nature of my work has fundamentally shifted. The core labor is no longer just the manual labor of transcription. The labor is now verification. The job is cross-checking every proper noun, verifying every vessel log against independent databases, and knowing enough context to call out the algorithm when its imagination gets the better of it.

The machine brings incredible speed and unprecedented processing power to the table. But context, historical nuance, and the ultimate responsibility for truth still belong entirely to the human staring back at the screen.

Is AI coming for your job? Maybe, if your job consists entirely of tasks that require no judgment, no domain expertise, and no healthy skepticism. But if your work relies on knowing the difference between what looks right and what isright, the game isn’t over. It just has a whole new set of rules.

PS This blog was written by AI. None of my RS (real stupidity) was required

The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place, But None There Do I Think Embrace

Quite. You know the saying, “Be careful what you wish for? You may get it.” Yeah, funny that. A few years ago, I wrote a piece, not my usual cynical crap, about a little girl from South Philadelphia, Concetta Delia, who was run over by a trolley at the age of eight (?) in 1914 and perished. She was my maternal grandmother’s sister–I call her grand Aunt–but I leave the exact degree of affinity to someone like James Maule, my DPS classmate who is expert in these matters. I was, quite honestly, very touched by the story, which I had only recently learned. And like all stories dealing with common people in the past, there’s a lot you don’t don’t know. And may never find out.

So a million questions run through my mind? Did anyone sleep for days after? Was there any kind of wake (did that even figure in death rituals in Italy then)? When was the funeral mass? There must have been one, no? How on Earth did they pay for it? How did they get the little girl to Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon? As the crow flies, it must be 6 or 7 miles, but you’d have to get across the Schuylkill River–in 1914, how or where where? There were ferries, true enough, and at least one bridge, but that was to West Philadelphia. Was there a procession, which even then was a tradition among Italians in America? Who bought the grave? Was there some kind of mutual aid among Immigrants there? 

The title, Morta Sotto Il Carro, is a stock Italian phrase for a cause of death, meaning, more or less, “got run over” which was listed in the parish records. You think, well, it must have happened a lot. Yeah, I guess. But the questions were real, you know? My maternal great grandparents lived at what was sort of the bottom tier of habitable South Philly, so I knew they could not have had much. And Holy Cross Cemetery, where Concetta was buried, was a long way from the city, In 1914, there would have been some settlement, but Yeadon and Springfield (the surrounding towns) were largely, as far as I knew, post World War II developments. Why go so far? Weren’t there Catholic cemeteries in the city? Some parishes had them, you know, small graveyards. Like Saint Dennis, in “Humphreysville” (after the Humphrey House, still standing on Haverford Road (now Havertown), but that was out in the wilds too, so the parish had land.

Until Saturday August 15, 2026, I had no answers. But I did have this relentless urge–the Hound of Heaven, my style–to get out to Holy Cross and see the grave for myself. Since my paternal grandmother and grandfather were buried there, I wanted to go anyway. You know, the atavistic impulse of a pre-Vatican Catholic to “bury the dead” from the Spiritual Works of Mercy (Old Style Catholic, which, for better or worse, I am, at least in conscience). Now that part of Delaware County has been going through some changes in the past few years, so there was some resistance to my making the short trip (there had been a gang shoot-out in situ), but I figure, hey, I am a city kid at heart. And it’s my city too, dammit. So off I went. Besides, I am a trained historian, in part, so I know how to do this stuff. It does not pay off in any other way that I can see other than personal edification.

I guess, with one brief exception, I had not been out to Holy Cross in about sixty years. I remember going out there one Palm Sunday with my Dad to buy one of those incredibly woven palms in the shape of a Cross that florists used to mount on frames for use at grave sites; now, with the florists, long gone too. I also figure, alas, the Salvucci family doesn’t go in for graveside picnics these days, if it ever did. The Delia are mostly in Sts Peter and Paul in Broomall, known colloquially as Two Guys. I figures the odds of this poor abandoned child ever being visited were slim to none, so I’d, ah, kill two birds with one stone (sorry). I’d check out my paternal grandparents’ grave, which I doubt anyone had visited in a lifetime, and then go look for Concetta.

I knew this might not be easy because although Concetta’s death certificate said Holy Cross, I could never find her in the online registry. “Paperwork.” I figured. 1914 was a long time ago. Uh, uh. I found something else, much more revealing. And I must admit I left the Holy Cross a bit shaken.

On, Concetta is there, all right.

But in an unmarked common gravesite, a sort of Catholic Potters’ field. Ostensibly maintained by the Little Sisters of the Poor. For the indigent.

For the indigent.

You dig? My family. 1914. Too poverty-stricken to afford a burial. When I say I have this odd sort of prelapsarian chip on my shoulder about the status of Italian immigrants in America, you will understand why I left with it reinforced. I forgive, yeah. But I don’t forget. Something a lot of my academic colleagues could never quite get through their heads. But even this shook me up. And, alas, I have virtually no faith in my fellow man–excuse me–human.

The gentleman administering the cemetery, with whom I sort of instantly bonded, a guy from Jersey named Ron Johnson, basically had to lead me to site because he knew I would never find it myself. Find it? Hell, I had no idea it existed. And my first reaction, once I was alone, was shock, and then anger. I do anger well, you may have noticed. See, an academic once made the mistake of accusing me of white privilege. He meant no harm, God knows, but he became part of the reason why I think the Berkeleys and Columbias of this world are hopeless. You’d think they’d know better. They don’t. And I can’t convince myself it is an accident.

Well, let’s get back to the Main Event. I stood there, largely speechless. This is a part of the cemetery which is much older, and the gravesites date mostly to the 1920s, 30s, 40s’ and 50s. So there isn’t much, ah, traffic. I was completely alone in a sea of tombstones and a couple of fancier vaults–one of which even had an altar and a predieu insider (from when there were priests to say Mass while they weren’t getting into something worse). So I thought I could talk to Concetta out loud. There was no one around to see that I was clearly disturbed, so I could make my peace with the kid. Poor thing. Two years later, another Concetta Delia was born, whom I knew as my Aunt Connie in the 1950s and 1960s. It was apparently pretty common to recycle a name of a dead child in the Italian community, or so I have been told. But about the younger Concetta sotto il carro I knew nothing. No one ever spoke of her. So this time I spoke to her directly. Which I will do from now on in. And it’s none of your business.

You think I’m being melodramatic or sentimental or some stuff, huh? Go ahead. Vaff–as we say. I got a little more insight into the life of my ancestors. And, like I say, I forgive.

But I don’t forget. Ever.

My paternal grandparents; a marker for another indigent child; and the Little Sisters of The Poor general marker

Somewhere here rests Concetta Delia. You gotta be pretty heartless if this doesn’t get to you

Can you tell these were the guys who built part of West Philly. No unmarked graves for them…..Money whitens

Philly is the Paris of the USA (humor)

I actually read that line in the Philadelphia Inquirer, what passes as a newspaper of record in my readopted home town. Having spent nearly forty years in Texas, I think I know B-S when I see it. I’m not here to tell you that isn’t really true, because you’re not an idiot. Or if you actually read my blog, maybe you are….and so am I. Who knows these days? As Pontius Pilate supposedly said to Jesus Christ, “What is Truth.” (John 12:38)

Of course, I’d probably hold much more firmly to these observations had I been here for forty years. But I haven’t been. Which is precisely the strength and weakness of much of what I will say. Driving around Philly through my old haunts is not in-depth study, and for sure, sorting out cause and effect, or what matters and what does not, well, you take your chances. But it is a bit like remembering Jack Kennedy. In my mind, he never aged. Cause he didn’t have the chance. But in the real world, if we have the chance, we age. As we age, we change. If we are lucky, the change is gradual, and you wake up in the last third of your life and say “How the Hell did this happen?” I’ve heard that from more than a few of my contemporaries. The honest ones.

I have gotten dropped back into a very different version of the city in which I grew up (born in 1951). Yes, it was changing as I left in 1980. And if you were to think about it, you could probably say–well, this was already underway. Because it was. My occasional visits home, some longer than others, were pretty revealing–in retrospect–but I was not in a mood to be absorb much. I had little kids with me, and my parents were aging. That was plenty. That Philadelphia appeared to being going to Hell was really not my concern. So if that observation really annoys you (and it will annoy some people), read no further. Cause this is only likely going to get worse.

Maybe I should wait until I have been here at least a year to say some of this stuff. But by then the shock will have worn off and for all I know, I may not be around then. You know, like a guy said to me, “At this age, don’t buy green bananas.” Point taken. Reluctantly.

It is not obvious to me, at least from the data, that Philly is any poorer than it was when I left. The poverty rate has fluctuated, and lately, believe it or not, it has ostensibly fallen. Ok. I cannot pick and choose among facts like a squirrel looking for nuts in a forest. But some nuts will look more enticing than others. That’s life. Objective truth is hard to find, no? At least that’s what we are all told–which may be part of the current problem. “Tell me your truth?” Right. You might as well say “Lie to me as you best see fit.” Even a stat book I’ve used says “Say I have found a truth.” That is not the same as “I have found the truth.” But I am not qualified to discuss such esoteric matters, so I leave you to the philosophy guys. There are some pretty good ones around Philly.

There are some things I do hold pretty firmly too. Nothing (or almost nothing) is free. Free means someone else is paying. So when my Democratic friends start tossing around free health care, free child care, free love–heh, heh. I keep silent. I hear, but I do not listen. There is no such thing. If I take an afternoon, voluntarily, having a good time horsing around with kids whose mental age I probably share, it is not free. I could be doing something else. That something else might be limited to working as a checker in Whole Foods (I see lots of old dudes there), but the chain will compensate me. So what I get out of providing child care gratis must at least make me feel as good as if I got the $50. If not, slavery in some form aside, why would I do it? Like it or not, the Econ reason that way, and I don’t have a problem with it. Your football coach in high school who taught economics wrote TINSTAAFL in sold caps (not cursive, please) so you would thenceforward think any further training in economics was superfluous. Maybe so. A lot of people evidently don’t get that, especially in public life.

Where to begin? How about West Philly? The definition of West Philly is pretty elastic, but I’d say that’s where I spent the first decade or so of my life (along with an ample dose of South Philly). I’m struggling to convey how much West Philly has changed. And, really, how little I suspect it actually matters. Since 1990, the population has flipped, from being mostly white to mostly black. That of course, strikes anyone who grew up around there in the 1950s. And you will find any number of knuckleheads who will explain virtually any change in living conditions by that fact. But really, is it so different?

Technically, I grew up in Overbook (although the library branch was called Haddington). You know, Wilt Chamberlain graduated from Overbook, so anyone who tells you that blacks in West Philly are a novelty is full of it. Will Smith came from a parish on the edge of West Philly. Let me put it this way.

I can imagine the Welsh (as in Haverford Ave) who lived out in what was then West Philly around 1900–rural, for sure, as the Italians slowly made their way out to the distant fringes of the city (then known as Blockley) They must have been thrilled with their swarthy new neighbors, their exotic foods, weird lingo, and their penchant for settling differences with a knife (at best). There goes the neighborhood, you know. Yeah, I know. A matter of perspective. We were the undesirables then. And, if you look back on payroll records from the early twentieth century–from Philadelphia–Negros and Italians were not individually named. A residence for workers at Dennis Kelly’s mill in what is now Ardmore Junction (on Cobbs Creek) basically said well the place has got lots of people, Italians, Negros, whatever. If I have to dig these things up, I can. But I have a PHD, so trust me (hah).

Two things impress me about Philadelphia. The poverty and the violence. There is no point in denying either. Last night I was entertained by watching broadcast news pointing out (in between the Phillies screwing up the ASG big time) there had been 28 homicides in the last month, gun violence, and, at times, seemingly random. Yeah, someone got shot while mowing a lawn–and not by ICE, for a change.

There are some people who will say these are inseparable, poverty and violence. They may well be. But the way they try to prove it in Philly is not so convincing: the association between redlining and gun violence. Look. You’d have to be blind, or stupid, or simply dishonest not to see the association, but, as my stat colleagues always say, correlation is not causation. And, apart from that, there are also significant parts of the city that were redlined (pink) in the 1937 map where there is not so much gun violence. If you know the city, you’ll say, yeah, nobody lives in Tinicum marsh around the airport, so unless you have armed geese, the odds are low that you will find much violence there. But it is also the case that in some parts of the city that were redlined, population is now not as dense as it was when the redlining maps were drawn. And they are still pretty violent. Or maybe they weren’t as violent in the past as they are now.

Hmm. Can you say “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Yeah, but people with guns use guns to kill people. C’mon, be realistic. In 1937, there were about 0.35 guns per person, as far as I can tell. Today, today the number is 1.2 to 1.5 per person. Dude, that’s 4 to 5 times as many. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t prove anything, right. Ok. But if you do some kind of thought-experiment where guns didn’t exist, no one would die by gun-related crime. Yeah, I know. Cain and Abel and the righteousness of the Lord before the Flood (“I ain’t happy with these people so I’m gonna drown ’em all; Genesis 7 if you are keeping score) People use what they have at hand to whack other people, and guns are a lot more effective than shovels (I had an ancestor who had to split town because he crowned his Boss with one “back in the the day”: I have no idea how that turned out) You want to strangle someone. People resist. You want to shoot them. How far can a good shot be from a victim armed with a Glock? So easy, even a child can do it, God forbid.

Tell you what. At the risk of attempting the impossible (and of oversimplifying the connection between race, class, income, national economic policy–Hell, even geography–) let’s try to look at this in a slightly less loaded way. Ultimately, the question may come down to some form of what the Econ call Granger-causality: does income chase race or does race chase income. I can’t give an answer to that. No one can. But maybe I can point out a few points to give you pause, especially if you’re the type to think “Hey, it’s THEIR fault,” whoever you’re THEIR of choice might be. I got to do with some numbers, and for that I apologize, but you can’t really avoid it. If you are asking why poverty is so widespread, well, you are asking why a particular measure of welfare is what it is. Like Augustine said, you can’t “ask was there time before time” without sounding like an idiot. And, sadly, many of my colleagues, especially in my own field (Latin American Economic History), regard standard economics, basic statistics, all of it, as boring as Hell at best, and the Devil’s work at worst. That’s my problem, true; but because it leads them into saying so many demonstrably idiotic things, it’s their problem too.

Ok. Let’s looks at a few things. Real income growth, the dollar, and manufacturing in Philadelphia in the 1970s. In Philly, according to the statistics I can turn up (and God knows if they are reliable), from 1940 to 1970, real per capita income doubled. That tells us that the the average annual rate of growth was about 2.3 percent. In 1940, about a third of the city’s output and employment was in manufacturing, and immediately after World War II, if anything, that share grew. That healthy growth in local income pulled manufacturing along–not the only source, for sure, but not trivial. I remember the new subway cars in Philly in 1960, because at the age of nine, I asked my Grandmother to wait for a new train (God love her, she did). Those cars were built by the BUDD Company in Philadelphia. which also built for other rail lines, like the Reading Seashore Line. Believe it or not, we built stuff then, and Philly built a lot of it. They even manufactured textiles in Philly then: not a lot, and nothing like it had been back in, say 1910, but it was something.

By the 1970s, alas, making stuff was all on the way out, sealed by the end of something called the Bretton Woods Agreement 1971. I won’t bore you, ok, but previously the dollar had been convertible into gold. That ended, and when it did, the dollar’s value was supported by supply and demand, not by the price of gold.The net effect on the US dollar was a decline in its purchasing power (why: because there were too many dollars floating around and nobody wanted them as much anymore). From 1970 to 1980, the dollar lost about a third of its value in terms of foreign currency. And that was a lot.

Normally, you’d say, but doesn’t something like that help domestic industry–Philadelphia–by making imports more expensive: technically, a depreciation of the home currency? Yeah, but that is only a part of the story. Remember–or look up–what happened to the price of crude oil in 1973, which, priced in dollars, meant that the oil-producing countries got ticked off and got together to raise the price of crude. Unless you were Texas (you can boo here), this was not a good thing, for it immediately pushed up the cost of energy to domestic manufacturing, which is basically, the cost of doing things, cause no energy, machines stop. And raw materials prices, which is the facere in manufacturing. In 1973, no surprise, we went into a savage recession, which means demand and employment dropped. The recession hit Philly especially hard, because manufacturing was hit hard, and Philadelphia’s trip into the great wasteland of deindustrialization in the 1970s was on its way. You lose an industrial. base, you don’t regrow another one overnight, if ever. And you lose jobs, residents, tax base, you name it. The air goes out of the balloon. Fast.

Look at both graphs, 1970-1980. Remember, correlation isn’t causality, but it ain’t chopped. liver either. Notice something? You win the internet today. The 1970s weren’t good for the dollar, or for Philly’s per capita income.

There was other stuff going on too. Like urban removal–I mean renewal. We all remember Kevin Bacon’s dad (Ed Bacon) as reinvisioning downtowns. Philly got Society Hill, Market Street East, Love Plaza, and the demolition of the Chinese Wall. It also got the demolition of any number of viable neighborhoods and degraded the stock of affordable housing. Man, Society Hill is nice, but Remember when the Towers went condo around 1980 and a small unit went for $50-$75 thousand dollars, if not more. You think a working stiff from Oscar Mayer could afford that? No. They went to Thorofare, New Jersey. And then there was the Schuylkill Expressway, which got going out in the great beyond in the early 1950s and hit the city around the time I was growing up in the late 1950s. It finally hooked up to….New Jersey around 1960 (I think). So you could make it easy, for people with car to get in and out of Philly from the suburbs and Jersey, leaving behind the folks who could at best afford mostly marginal housing and could not migrate–maybe because they couldn’t afford a car. Can you say poor people? Especially poor people without access to capital markets (redlining). Can you say minorities? I think Poverty sort of Granger -caused minorities in Philly, but that’s only an intuition, not a rigorous econometric exercise as required by The American Economic Association. Still, sort of makes sense.

I forgot about I95, alias the Delaware Expressway. Or the Crosstown Expressway that never was. I leave the proof of the exercise to the student (translation: I’m too lazy to do it myself). Or the Schuylkill Expressway. Or the Vine Street Expressway. Hell, they all destroyed viable neighborhoods or made it easy to work in the city and then get out. Which is just what happened. The fact that Philly had a wage tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back. You didn’t have to live there. Just work there. The rates were different, but nobody was gonna live in a deteriorating city when they could have a Leave-It-To-Beaver experience of a white picket fence which was easily reachable. You tax something, by the way, you tend to get less of it. The only part of supply side economics that strikes me as remotely true.

The city tax base crumbled and so did the public schools. My parents, religion aside, would not have let me within a mile of a public school–probably for my own good. But if you think they were teaching the virtues of deferred gratification, self-discipline and good citizenship to their clientele, you are an optimist. Survival skills, really. If that. The people behind charter schools in Philly were minority. Go figure (sarcasm). The kids in parochial schools wearing uniforms are minority. Go figure. The public schools are now a disaster.

So here we have modern Philly. Supposedly a bit on the upswing because when you hit bottom, you attract–bottom feeders. And Penn has decided to do penance for University City, whose construction wiped out another viable West Philly neighborhood. So Parkside and Mantua and even parts of Southwest Philly, are now a place for investment. As the Brazilians say, money whitens.

Meanwhile the bad stuff that happens when people get priced out of their existing neighborhoods is slowing making its way into Delaware Country, which is getting scary in places. I’d go into considerable detail about which neighborhoods used to be tranquil but are in transition, but I’d simply try your patience and probably get into trouble by saying “What do you expect?” People gotta go somewhere and Southwest of Philly is the path of least resistance. Does the observation make me a racist. No. It makes me a realist. Although I am certain to have readers who use the term “racist” lightly. I can imagine what Philly and its suburbs are going to look like 50 years from now. But I can’t make any money off of being right or wrong, so who cares what I think? I do know one thing.

We had better learn tolerance and nontribal ways of thinking politically in this damn country, or human relations are only going to get worse. And I am not optimistic. We have not learned much in the last forty years, believe me. That’s what I have learned since coming home.

PS I am obviously talking about West, North and South Philly. NOT Chestnut Hill, Germantown, Mt Airy, Roxborough or Manayunk. That’s another world, and doesn’t even feel like Philly.

No Mexicans. No Mushrooms.

I know what you’re thinking. Not magic mushrooms. Honestly, I don’t touch anything. I am this way by nature, as God made me. No, today, I took a trip out to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, the self-proclaimed “Mushroom Capital of the World.” And for very good reason. I went to contribute something to the sorry state of the narrative about immigration in the United States, especially the one retailed by Trump and that crypto-Nazi Stephen Miller. You know, immigration bad. Job killer. Creates crime. Not their best people. All that crap. As someone who comes from an immigrant family, I find this tripe unusually disgusting, even coming from a group of halfwits like Trump and the Boyz.

Now, ordinarily, the approach to this is either some airy-fairy economic theory that basically boils down to free trade never hurt anyone. Well, I don’t entirely believe that, but this is going somewhere else. I want to talk about jobs, loss of industries, stuff like that. For sure, I subscribe to the Sermon on the Mount. You know, Matthew 5:3-10. In fact, I pretty much think of the 10 commandments as boilerplate, because very few of us are going to murder, steal, commit adultery or worship false Gods (your statue of Donald Trump is your problem, kiddo). But this stuff about being, meek, merciful, pure in heart (!) is pretty tough stuff to do on a daily basis. But that’s what the Man said. So, for Heaven’s sake, how can you subscribe to the hate-filled trash that Trump and his minions spill and follow the teaching of Christ? It comes down to that, you know. The Villanova Pope (had to get that in) basically justifies his stance on what these awful people in the Republican Party practice by saying, yo, what would Jesus say? Well, we all all know what he said. So let’s stop screwing around, ok? No one needs their intelligence insulted, especially Jesus Christ.

But, let’s face it, it may be consul of perfection to respond to spiritual incentives, but, like a favorite Capitalist once said: “People work for money.” Yup. That’s true. And as a sometimes Econ, I tend to favor down-to-Earth explanations of what the effects of various immigration and trade policies are. But, not just in theory. I want to point to one industry in the United States that has been arguably saved by immigration: the mushroom industry. And the city of Kennett Square. Today, I was there. I last passed that way probably in 1969 or so, and what I saw then was remarkably different. And unlike all the usual narratives about how it was always better in the past, this one was the reverse. I thought Kennett Square was a dump and a lot of the green houses and structures were literally falling apart. In my mind’s eye, I can see all the broken glass that was there half a century ago. Today? Ho boy? Thriving. Lovely. a kind of postcard for what almost-rural Pennsylvania should be. And, frankly, the Mexicans did it, or contributed substantially to it. If you don’t like what I am about to argue, you can leave now. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

A few caveats. I am not a specialist on the subject of the mushroom industry in Pennsylvania, which, I believe is the largest source of output in the United States. I am not a specialist in the history of Pennsylvania, much less Chester County, where Kennett Squares is located. Nor, really, am I an authority on Mexican immigration to the United States, or the various legal regimes to which is has been subject. So take it all with a grain of salt. Except the larger point. No Mexicans. No Mushrooms.

First of all, in Pennsylvania, at least, mushrooms are big business. According to the USDA (unless that creep Musk has managed to eliminated that department too), Pennsylvania accounts of 69 percent of button mushroom sales volume in the United States. The direct value of sales in $534 million, and the estimated Toal impact (some kind of multiplier around 2 must be assumed, which is standard) is $1.1 to $1.2 billion. That is of the same order as the Philadelphia Phillies professional baseball team generates in total spending. So, if you say, who cares about mushrooms, I’ll counter who cares about the Phillies? Maybe we should change their name to the Shiitake Sluggers. We already have the Iron Pigs in Triple AAA.

You can’t imagine Philly without the Phillies? Well, I can’t imagine pizza without mushrooms, so shut up.

The local folklore attributes the origins of the industry in Pennsylvania to the Quakers. Sounds good. It would be be better if it were the Lenni Lenape, but you can’t have everything, can you? By the time you get to something vaguely contemporary, you have a large number of Italian immigrants settling up in the business in the 20th century, some of whom are still at it today. I mean, who better. After all, Isn’t your opinion of Italian immigrants really “keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em shit.” No? Well, thanks. And the line is courtesy of The Departed. Anyway, at one point, I guess an economist would characterize the structure of the industry in Pennsylvania as “competitive,” meaning lots of small producers (hundreds, if not thousands, I think) who basically produced what market prices and their costs of production told them to do. Casual observation of the newer farms suggests that it is no longer the case, because they look capital intensive and fairly substantial. It’s taken a long time for the industry to shake out, it is more heavily regulated now than it was even in the not too distant past, and efficient scale is considerably larger. If you really want some Econ 1 diagram for this, let me know, but my guess is that you’ll take it all on faith. Like my students used to do. Whatever. Today the farms must be some form of imperfect competition, which means they have some control over pricing, if only because of product differentiation. We’ll let it go at that.

Now, it’s been at least forty years since I passed through Kennett Square, probably some time in the early 1970s or late 1960s. I have to tell you it did not present the picture of a rural pastorale that it does today. If fact, my distinct recollection is that a lot of the mushroom farms looked pretty crappy, broken down, with busted windows and neglected outbuildings. This is not what I remember. This is today

The town of Kennett Square looks like any upscale tourist attraction, with plenty of attractive residences, good restaurants, and those indefinable things that tell you “we’ll be happy to take your money.” The signs around the high school congratulate the class of 2026. In Spanish. I know of only one ICE raid there in the past year. It seems awfully tranquil and prosperous for a crime-ridden town whose principal industry is populated by “their worst” And, yeah, 68 percent of the mushroom industry’s labor force is Mexican–either immigrant or legally resident, or assimilated. If I don’t miss my guess, not to many of the kids born into Mexican families aspire to work in the mushroom industry. Sort of like the children of Italian Americans in South Philly get away from selling fruits and vegetables as soon as they can. That’s why Giordano’s at 9th and Washington, the flagship greengrocer of Ninth Street, is gone. Yeah, the kids–like Jerry Giordano– went to med school and stuff. Long gone, living in Arizona, I think.

See, working in mushrooms is no fun. It’s dirty, smelly, backbreaking, gritty–all those things that you really wouldn’t want your kids to aspire to. But for families from Michoacán in Mexico (a major feeder to Kennett Square, as the restaurant “La Michoacana,” this kind of employment may be dreadful, but it is better than what they have at home, not to mention there are no carteles operating in Kennett Square. In fact, which do you think is one of the fastest growing, most prosperous districts in Chester County? Kennett Square, which is growing at nearly 3 percent per year. Meanwhile older areas like Easttown and Tredyffrin are actually losing population. Boy, them Mexicans must be doing something right, because population is up, production in up. The median household income is over $80,000. The poverty rate is 5.3 percent. How’s that stack up against Philadelphia? You don’t want to know, believe me ($60,500; 21.3 percent) By any standard, Kennett Square has come a long way on the backs of Mexican workers. But, no, you don’t hear about that, do you?

You typically listen to some of the hate-filled drivel that spills out of the mouth of Trump and the garbage he surrounds himself with, along with the occasional news story about how some illegal raped a white woman. Does it happen? Sure. Is it typical. No. But in America, thinking is not our strong suit, obviously. Logic? Right.

I could go one and on. I could write a book, and a damn good one, on Italians, Mexicans, mushrooms, and Kennett Square. Unfortunately, it is one of several books that I could write, but I can read a life table as well as anyone–aside from the fact my back hurts.

Besides, no one reads books anymore. What’s the last one your read?

I have a suggestion.

Learn something.

PS Bill Taylor tells me that in March 31m 1995, Ted Koppel ran a Nightline piece on Moroleón in Michoacán that focused on family connections that weere feeding into Kennett Square. Unfortunately, the broadcast is preserved, but only available “for copy right reasons” at Syracuse University. Yeah, so if you want to see it, you need to take a trip up there. Sigh. Don’t ask me. I didn’t do it, but I am gratified that someone documented this in 1995.

https://www.facebook.com/quepasakennettsquare

Yeah. There is a FB page too. Which I stumbled on. Who knew?

https://www.facebook.com/quepasakennettsquare

And the Beat Goes On

So you know we left Texas. And we came back to Philly. After an absence of 46 years, more or less. A few impressions, fair or not.

We finally took an extended trip into the city, to Port Richmond, an historically Polish neighborhood, which we reached via West Philly. We were going to Czerw’s Polish Kielbasa, reputedly “the best in the city.” It is this hole-in-the-wall place on a barely passable side street where a gregarious local encouraged us to park on the sidewalk. Linda went in and was attended by a young Polish guy. And yeah, the kielbasa, which I cooked tonight, was out of sight. It is, more or less the first real meal we have cooked here. Fancy that: the Italian eats kielbasa in Paoli. You’re supposed drink Gibbons Beer from Wilkes Barre PA with, but I had some Clos de Bois cab. So the Scranton PA experience it was not, I fear, but it was damn good anyway. Tomorrow we’re gonna have pierogi, which I will wash down with Cape May IPA. If you aren’t jealous, you should be. It’s also damn good beer.

Now, I really didn’t come back here just to eat and drink. I wanted to see for myself what a half century of progress has done for (or to) The City of Brotherly Love. And there I gotta say I wasn’t expecting much. I wasn’t disappointed. Philly was a mess when we left. It is is even more or a mess now. Why?

Well, let’s start with the obvious. In the 1980s, the poverty rate was about 20 percent. In 2015 the rate hit 28.4 percent . In the last few years, the rate has fallen back to what it was when we left. So having hit a terrible peak, poverty here has regressed to its miserable customary mean. A half-century of no progress. Not exactly chamber of commerce tourism material.

Why the Hell Philly is so poor is a combination of bad policy and bad luck. The bad policy is a tax on employment; redlining large residential areas; and the migration of manufacturing to places where labor was cheaper but equally productive. The bad luck was the result of reconfiguring patterns of mobility via the Schuyllkill Expressway to effectively shunt the city’s middle class into the suburbs, something Mayor Dick Dilworth called “the white noose.” Educated workers fled and their jobs went with them. Oh yeah, being the target of Republican yoyos from the middle of nowhere resident in Harrisburgh–the Capital of the Keystone State–shaped a resolutely antiurban policy bias that wreaked havoc on funding for public transportation, a higher minimum wage, and on and on. The collapse of public education in Philly did the rest, especially now that you need more than a strong back for a good job. A perfect storm.

But weirdly, the Philly pattern in uneven. Some formerly terrible neighborhoods–or just ordinary ones–are gentrifying, and you can see young urban homesteaders striding across streets like Girard Avenue as if they owned the place. Believe it or not, no one belongs on Girard Avenue, especially right above the Philadelphia Zoo, where the cages probably protect the animals from the residents. And some formerly streetcar suburbs like Bywood, Darby, and Sharon Hill are clearly headed in a different direction, driven by the same spillover from gentrification that makes longtime residents apoplectic. It is not a good formula for community relations, so, surprise, a ride into some parts of Philly is apt to show a rather high cop-to-civilian ratio. I was astonished at the number of cop cars around Kensington, an old industrial district which appears to be both gentrifying and falling apart at once. Don’t ask me. Cool new nightspots accompanied druggies sprawled around the intersection of what is called K&A. You think this stuff about growing inequality is really a myth? God. It’s all I could think about. I’m not saying Philly is unique, but it’s what I know, and certainly not what I remember from my childhood and adolescence.

But wait. There’s more. I didn’t just venture into the infamous Badlands. I also paid a visit to my former undergraduate institution, the “Catholic Ivy,” Villanova, alma mater of Pope Bob. Talk about a different feel. I’m not sure where to start, because it’s changed as much as I’ve changed. A lot.

I graduated in 1973. The President of Nova was an Auggie named McCarthy. He had “a narrow vision” as they say of him in the Order. That means he was an asshole who hated gays, women, liberals, longhairs, Commies, intellectuals–Hell, everyone. He was a nasty piece of work and alienated my class–’73 is notorious for not giving to Vanillanova, although maybe Pope Bob will loosen a few purse strings (I doubt it). Any event, it was us against them, and we had priests with nicknames like Flyshit, which sort of tells you about how beloved some of them were. Nova is R2 D1–no dummy, not Star Wars, but academic/athletic classification. The posted tuition and fees are about 65,000 per year, fwiw. When I attended, tuition was $1600 per year. Not per week. Per two semester year.

If that doesn’t tell you something about how Nova has changed, I don’t know what will. My God, the place used to reek of nicotine and cheese steaks. Now it reeks of money. And so do the students. My daughter, who did music at Rice University on the tuition-exchange plan, thinks Villanova feels a lot like Rice. Believe me, coming from her, that is not a compliment. But if you want to toss around “privilege” ga’head (Philly-speak for “Go ahead.”) It’s obviously like wooder (water) off a Wildcat’s back (their fierce mascot) to them. A lot of the students–especially the women–look like something out of central casting for “The Breakfast Club” or “Pretty in Pink.” Ya’know, Westwood East. In my day, a lot of us still looked like the relief crew for Jersey Turnpike maintenance, or maybe the top track at Bonner or Prendie. Uh uh. Them days are gone, obviously lost to rising costs.

And the campus, Good Lord. The Villanova of my era was sort of like Gaul: divided into three parts. The main campus; the law school and seminary; and Good Counsel Hall, which was put up to accommodate the newly-admitted female population. Now, forget it. Not only is the place sprawling along Route 30 almost down to Radnor. A bunch of faux Gothic buildings sits where the commuter parking lots once broiled in the sun. Now Villanova has acquired Cabrini College in Radnor and Rosemont College, other lesser Cathlicks. I have no idea what Villanova plans to do with them. The powers that be at Villanova apparently don’t either. It won’t become VillaRoCa, because those colleges have been acquired out of existence–I think. It’s sort of like Villanova versus the Main Line, and Nova is winning. Wildcat world is growing by leaps and bounds. And the main campus is getting a new library building, courtesy of Vic Magritti, ’56, a construction magnate who laid 20 million bucks on them for the another library that doesn’t want books. Somebody has got big plans for the place–and that was before Nova claimed the Papacy.

Did anyone say Notre Dame or Georgetown? Obviously, that’s the objective, no? They want the kids at Notre Dame and Georgetown to wear Villanova gear as a mark of aspirational status. In my day, it was the other way around. Kids at VU wore Fighting Irish or Hoya merch. Times do change. Big crosses now subtend Route 30, much to the annoyance of the woke locals who thought they bought bigot rights when they got their little piece of Heaven in the neighborhood (no pun intended). Sorry. You get the whole program now, and probably a new football stadium on some sunny future day. Hey, what matters?

I was in a Philosophy class taught by the brilliant Jack Caputo in which Bill Atkinson (Fr. Bill to you), now on the fast track to sainthood, led off the class roll. Now you’re as likely to sit next to a basketball player who is the first NIL millionaire. Seriously. This is Trump’s America, in case you haven’t noticed. The BMW has replaced the VW as Chester County’s preferred mode of upper middle class transport. It’s all too much for me, clearly

Remember “And the Beat Goes on?” The Boomers’ “Moonlight Serenade.”

La di da de de. La di da de da. The message is the same.

And bye bye Country Joe. Just when we need you the most…….

re

No Plato Please, We Is Aggies

Y’all may have heard of the great rivalry between The University and A&M. No? Where you been? Somewhere with Yankee values? Where they believe in civil rights, gun control, and other noxious forms of socialism? Figures. We got to get yore mind right, as the man famously said in Cool Hand Luke. Cause some men–and I do mean men, don’t need wimmin (women) here-just don’t want to learn. Bless their hearts. But you will learn the Truth as we teach it in Texas. Now I have perfessed at The University, although that was many years ago. Austin was different then, with The Drag and Quackenbush’s, even if Fred Akers had replaced Darrell K. Royal  as Head Honcho of Football. Nothing is forever. Other than God.

Now, Christianity is big in Texas, as you surely know. Hell, during Covid Pandemic, there were even Texans who claimed they didn’t require to be masked for protection in public places because they werer Godly people. And by God they sure as Hell meant the God known as Jesus Christ, not some demonic representation thrown up by one of them Islamic cults. They’re sort of like snake handlers, you know. I didn’t say they were snakes, mind you, although there are quite a few of them there as well. Just to be clear.

Many of my devoted readers–probably a dozen at last count–know that I graduated from Villanova University, a near contemporary of the Holy Father, although he was a math major and, therefore, smarter than me. But he is an Augustinian priest, and Villanova is run by the Augustinian Order. Now, they–the Augies–may not be as rigorous as the Society of Jesus or as voluble as the Dominicans, but give them credit, they do tend to know something about Saint Augustine (he had no direct connection to the Order). No, people didn’t walk around spouting Augustine or anything. In my time, the BTOC (Big Theologian On Campus) was probably Theilhard de Chardin, with people like Heidegger and Sartre up there too. But you could take a course on Augustine (and Aquinas), although nobody forced you to. And people did. It was the 1960s and there was more than a bit of honest idealism in the air, even at Nova, made famous on national television as The Beercats by Ed McMahon in banter with Johnny Carson. You read this stuff because you hoped it would make you a better person–or to impress the newly-admitted women. Whatever.

If you read Augustine, you inevitably bumped into The Confessions and The City of God. Hell, we had mosaic at the entrance to the library with the famous words, “Tolle, Lege” from The Confessions, which, on hearing (from some precocious kids) sent Augustine to St Paul and his conversion from Manicheanism. At Villanova, it was tough to miss as you walked into Falvey Library. Book, read, library. Get it?

Well, Augustine had been classically educated, so he had read the Greek and Roman authors, one of whom was, you guessed it, Plato. Geez. Surprise. One of the founding fathers of Western philosophy. Amazing. Now, to avoid accusations that I am making this stuff up, I am reproducing an article from “The Battalion” (sic) A&M’s paper of record, January 11, 2026. Here goes:

A reading from Plato’s “Symposium” has been removed from the syllabus of a philosophy course in order to comply with revisions to Section 8.1 of Texas A&M’s Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure policy, fostering national attention and online controversy.

The course, PHIL 111 Contemporary Moral Issues, had its syllabus altered to remove a section featuring content university administration claims contains race and gender ideology, subjects that were defined and unanimously approved to be restricted from instruction in November 2025.

One text from “Symposium” that was stricken from the syllabus includes Aristophanes’ Myth, which contends that humans were once single beings that were separated into two sexes after ancient gods became fearful of their combined power, posing questions about sexuality, soulmates and the nature of love. Another, Diotima’s Ladder of Love, assigns a hierarchical structure to different forms of love and attraction.

Supporters of the changes argue that the relatively progressive ideas of gender and sexuality presented in the readings fall out of compliance with the introduced changes to Section 8.1. The professor who instructs the course, Martin Peterson, Ph.D., believes his First Amendment rights are being violated. 

“Please note that my course does not ‘advocate’ any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues,” Peterson wrote in an email to department head Kristi Sweet, Ph.D., that made rounds online. “If you interpret System Rule 08.01 § 2.1(b) as prohibiting these topics, I would like to remind you that the U.S. Constitution protects my course content.”

If Peterson fails to comply with the revisions, he would be forced to be reassigned to an upper-level ethics course, an email from Sweet reads.

Peterson told the Houston Chronicle that he would consult with legal counsel and consider pursuing litigation against the university. Various free speech organizations have spoken out against university administration, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.

“Texas A&M now believes Plato doesn’t belong in an introductory philosophy course,” Director of Campus Rights Advocacy at FIRE Lindsie Rank said in a statement published to the organization’s website. “ … This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic content.”

Administration contends it is not the stance or goal of the university to restrict the discussion or assignment of philosophical texts or ideas, but to ensure compliance with updated policies.

“Texas A&M will teach numerous dialogues by Plato in a variety of courses this semester and will continue to do so in the future,” the university said. “… The head of the Department of Philosophy rejected one section of Philosophy 111, a core curriculum course, because the professor slated to teach the class had included modules on gender and race ideology. These were added following the new policy approved by the Board of Regents specifically prohibiting the teaching of such ideologies.”

After consulting legal counsel, Peterson opted to remove the contended section and replaced it with a module of lectures on academic freedom and free speech, which reportedly is set to include a New York Times article covering the controversy. 

If you ask yourself what in God’s name is going on here, welcome to Texas. Greg Abbott and his confreres in Austin have, for political reasons, pursued a relenless policy of seeing that the state defines gender in a binary way, assigned at birth. HB 229, passed by Texas Republicans in May of 2025, prohibits Texas instititions from defining gender as anything other than binary. There have been a series of rulings saying, in essence, boys are boys, girls are girls, and that is that. That’s as God intended, and if you have a different idea, well tough. Nobody gives a damn about psychological or biological evidence to the contrary. Case closed. And that means you really can’t teach anything else, especially if you are at a state-related institution. And the Aggies (A&M) have been busily looking to reassure Austin that they are in compliance with God’s will as well as Abbott’s. So your syllabus better not be including questionable materials–like some of Plato’s perv musings. Texas has standards, you see. New York values, as Ted Cruz reminds us, will not do. So there.

Now, there is obviously a problem here, no. Texas and many Texans hold that they are a bulwark of Christianisty and of Christ Jesus. The issue isn’t whether the Greeks did Greek, although they assuredly did. I doubt anyone really cares. It’s an Adam and Eve thing, you know. God didn’t create Adam and Arnold, or Eve and Emily. The Bible tells us so. So shape up or ship out.

What, you ask, has any of this stuff to do with Augustine? Well, Augustine, a fourth century father of the Catholic Church, was heavily influenced by Plato. Book VIII of City of God is awash in Platonic thought. Indeed, Plato pretty much says when it comes to thinking about God and that sort of thing, well, all you really need to do is read Plato. The technical reasons for this need not concern us, and it’s not like I am the person who should be explaining them. The issue is that one of the most influential texts in the history of Christian thinking sort of, well, baptized Plato and drew on him for its notion of God himself. Can you really be a Christian and excise Plato? Well, no. Guess what? College Station, we have a problem. A big one.

Of course, you must be thinking, no one wants to be ridiculed. As Texans say, considered all hat and no cattle. You know what? They don’t care. One of the great things about not sharing the values of the wider culture is you can ignore it. In this patch of God’s little acre, you alone matter. So what if some pinhead liberal (Salvucci) snickers? What’s he know? You are the King of Alamo Heights or Olmos Park or some other overprivileged enclave, and the only thing that matters is what you and your inbred circle of friends think. You are the Big Fish in the Little Pond. This is why Ted Cruz is such an arrogant jerk. He epitomizes the attitude. And if you don’t like it, he’ll just go off to Cancun. This is why Greg Abbott dumps immigrants by the busload in Northern cities. Is he an asshole? You bet. Does he care? Not a bit. He is the King of Texas (well, actually the Lieutenant Governor is, but details, details).

And this attitude is, alas, shared by more than a few Texas institutions. I never could quite understand why Trinity’s reruiting pitch was that you will never be taught by a graduate students. We’re too good for that. Really? The grad students in Econ at Berkeley were some of the smartest, most creative people I ever met. One of them, Louis Johnston literally signed on as a coauthor of Ben Bernanke and Robert Frank’s economics textbook. You think they knew something? Another, Jeff Dayton-Johnson, is Vice President for Academic Affairs & Dean of the Institute at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. I mean really. You wouldn’t want them teaching your kids? You should be so lucky.

You just sound out of it when you say this kind of stuff. And in the final analysis, that sums up Texas. Out of it. Do I sound harsh? Too bad.

Ad-Vanced Hypocrisy a la JD

Why belabor the obvious? JD Vance is a disgusting phenomenon, even in a collection of worthless, vile politicians. There is something vaguely nauseating about him although he is saying or doing nothing. His looks? Well, not his fault, you can say. Besides, looks can be deceiving, although his resemblace to a third-rate flunky in a college you thankfully didn’t attend is probably not misleading. Yes, JD does stimulate the gag reflex like few others in the Trump Administration can, although Stephen Miller comes a close second. After all, we cannot all be the worst product of random tryst between a Neanderthal and a particularly odious ex-girlfriend, although Miller makes one wonder if Himmler somehow eluded cyanide in 1945? Nor have I read Hillbilly Elegy. Are there SparkNotes? I hear that can get you through Yale these days: as an intellectual diversity admit.

But look, let’s get to the point. Vance has given us a testable economic hypothesis: housing is expensive in the United States because we have 30 million illegal immigrants pushing up prices. Fine. Let’s think about this.

Typically, economists think of prices being determined by supply and demand. There is a market for housing, so we might start by thinking about stuff that affects the supply and demand for housing. We keep it simple. You want complicated? Go to an economics journal. You can have all the Greek letters and mathematical squiggles you want. But basically, it’s all the same story.

Try to keep supply and demand separate in your head, although that, too, is an oversimplification. The demand for housing (a composite of various places people live) clearly depends, at least, on the number of people who want housing and the means they have of paying for it. Well, the ad-Vanced thinkers say “Hey, libtard, you keep saying that immigrants are people too. And there are a lot of them in places like Texas. Don’t they matter?” Well, of course, especially in places like Harris county, Texas, where Houston is situated. But the broader question is, in general, do immigrants–legal or otherwise–carry the most weight.

Well take River Oaks, a nice subdivision. It is mostly white (64 percent) with a median household income of $120,000 per year. The state of Texas would be more like $42,000 (depending on household size). You know who lived in River Oaks? Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, the energy trading company that went bust (sending Andy to jail) in a $2.5 million casita.

HOUSTON, TX – NOVEMBER 6: (FILE PHOTO) Former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow (L) arrives at the federal courthouse for his arraignment November 6, 2002 in Houston, Texas. Fastow pleaded not guilty to 78 charges including fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice for his role in allegedly hiding debts and inflating profits at Enron Corp. The unfinished River Oaks mansion once owned by former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow, and recently sold to another energy company official, sustained minor damages in a fire December 1, 2002 in Houston, Texas. Houston fire department investigators said that they believe the fire was deliberately set. It’s been a year since an accounting scandal bankrupted energy trading giant Enron Corp., and the home was one of many that Fastow used as equity for a bond that released him from fraud charges in October. (Photo by Brett Coomer/Getty Images)

Now does Andy look like an illegal to you? Like of Juan and Maria fame? Uh, uh. I’m sure Andy had housekeepers, gardeners, leaf blowers and assorted domestics to keep him in the style to which he was apparently accustomed. You think Juan and Maria were in the running for Andy’s place–or that they had anything to do with its market value, aside from help maintaining it? C’mon. You know better. There is a study by a guy at Duke that suggests immigrant demand adds $2,000 to the price of a house in Harris County. $2,000–not $2 million. If it were the other way around, Fastow would have been doing his own lawn instead of figuring out ingenious ways to cook Enron’s books. Or I’d be there begging for a job. And I’m not. So, face it, JD’s just so story is designed to appeal to the peasant covetousness of his followers in the hollows of Appalachia. Not a serious attempt to explain why housing is costly in the United States. $2,000 is peanuts, not serious money, but who said Vance was a serious person, for God’s sake?

Around 1980, a gentleman named Landon Jones wrote a book called Great Expectations (catchy title). It was a kind of a popular thing that thought a bit about what the passage of the Baby Boom generation through the US economy would probably do to wages, prices, you know, the stuff that a serious economist should have been thinking about rather than why Keynes was wrong. In any event, Jones figured the more or less simultaneous entry of 75 million new souls (the Baby Boomers)( into labor and asset markets was bound the have some predictable effects as they aged. Like housing markets, for instance. What happens as that group enters the labor market, saves, and goes on to buy property. Guess? Yes, an increase in demand raise the price of housing relative to other stuff.

Why? Because Rome wasn’t built in a day, silly. It takes time to expand housing supply. Even then, you have your antigrowth nuts, NIMBYs, zoning Nazis, and places like San Francisco on a peninsula which just ain’t gonna get any bigger–it ain’t Houston, friend. Without putting too fine a point on things, the long-run supply of housing is subject to rising costs. Do you remember that boring Econ 101 class where some nerd tried to show how such a market adjusted to increased demand? Rising relative prices!!! What does this have to do with illegal immigration. Honestly? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You could see it coming half a century ago if you were breathing (or not watching the NFL on six channels as we now do). There may be a number of qualifications, fine points and subtleties with which we can dress the analysis up, but honey, can you say supply and demand? And the you wonder why Trump and Vance are running America into the ground? You voted for them, blockhead. Because illegal immigration, right? Stunad.

If you’re like me, it helps to see this stuff

So here. The evil bureaucrats at the Treasury Department (we still have one, amazingly) have done the work of showing the Boomers aging out. Because there are so many of us, we are absorbing more and more of the households. We got more assets from years of earning and can outbid the younger cohorts at the bottom of the pyramids. You following this? It has nothing fundamentalyl to do with immigration, pace that fascist nitwit Vance. He’s full of it. Surprise!

By the way, if you choose to hate Boomers, go ahead. I didn’t start the fire, as Billy Joel sang. I didn’t ask Hitler and Tojo to start a war and mess with the sex lives of otherwise innocent Americans who would then make up for lost time after the shooting was over. I didn’t ask to be born in 1951. You got it. If not, GFY.

Now, on to where immigrants do matter: the labor supply. First, understand that half the cost of putting up a house is labor. Say 40 to 50 percent. So if you raise labor costs in construction by 10 percent, you going to push up housing prices 4 to 5 percent, which is a Hell of a lot of money on a forty year mortgage. So anything that reduced the supply of labor in construction is gonna make housing more expensive, right?

Well it turns out that immigrants, legal, illegal, who knows, have a lot to do with the labor force in construction. How much?

Well lookie there. A lot. And in places like Texas, Lord, even more. So why would you want to run off immigrants (the ICE-man cometh) who are the backbone of the labor force in construction when you are worried about rising costs? It makes zero sense. Zero. You reduce the labor supply you drive up costs–and then say immigrants are to blame. No, idiot. They are the solution. You got it backward. And then add to that Agent Orange has steeply raised the tariff on lumber from Canada to about 35 percent! You know how you frame a house? Duh. With lumber. And then you have the nerve to blame immigrants for rising housing costs when you are doing just about everything you can to drive those costs up.

Hey, a lot of Americans are obviously dense. But I’m supposing you are not one of them. These fucktards in the Trump administration are the problem, not Juan and Maria. Actually, Juan and Maria are the solution. But you’d never know that by the toxic spew coming out of the Trumpers, Vance included.

So do yourself a favor. Wise up. Get these people and their God-forsaken policies out as soon as you can. They have already done a lot of damage and hurt a lot of innocent people. Please do not help them to screw even more.

Ok? I could say a lot more, but, for now, take this in. You have been had, maybe. Fix it. We’ll continue with this stuff on immigrants next time.