Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I had to blink twice after reading this Editorial at Bloomberg News today — “A Little Commercialism Can Help National Parks.” ( www.bloomberg.com/...)
Although not as far along as the proposal which I opposed in June of 2003 when I lived in Massachusetts, to rename state parks for the highest bidder in auctions, it comes from the same misguided set of values that the Republican Right has driven since the election of Reagan. And the Governor of Massachusetts, when my letter opposing this notion appeared as the lead “Letter to the Editor” in the Boston Globe on Thursday, June 12, 2003? It was Mitt Romney.
Here is how I addressed those values from the American Right. The question I didn’t get to, due to space limitations, is: what will the Democratic Party’s “centrist” response be, how much do they share these “pubic private partnerships" - and worse, the aspirations of Market Utopians to take over all of public space, what's left of the commons, and perhaps, thinking of cyber-space, a good part of “private” privacy as well.
The bill, if I recall correctly, never did come up for a vote. If something like it has passed since then, I’m unaware of it. If you live in Massachusetts, please enlighten us.
Here is the text of my letter from more than a dozen years ago:
"One can view the Legislature's proposal to rename state parks for the highest bidders as an act of budget desperation, as the Globe did in its May 15 editorial, "On Wal-Mart Pond?" - but I think that much more is going on.
The sponsors are trapped in an ideology that is willing to overturn the very essence of meaning and memory as represented in the names of public places, and give them over to the power of money.
Existing names reflect Indian origins, natural features, donors, and famous public figures. That is entirely as it should be.
This does not exclude businesses from future namings: If Home Depot wants to buy 1,000 acres of watershed land and donate it for public purposes, by all means and previous logic, its name should be put on it.
But renaming places by auction sadly substitutes a purely monetary formula for what should be a more diverse and organic process, one that rewards civic participation and excellence in a variety of fields.
This proposal should be troubling to conservatives, who ought to, more than others, value place, tradition, and the long train of memories already attached to cherished public places. But that is precisely why this proposal is so revealing: Driven by their ultimate values (market worship, cutting taxes, shrinking government), some conservative are now willing to erase names and history; a sure sign that something very radical is taking place.
It ought to bother us as much as the expansion of the term 'bottom line' to replace older, more sentimental words like 'essence,' 'core,' and yes, perhaps most revealing of all 'heart,' in fields totally unrelated to accounting.
These are symptoms of a movement that wants to remake all of society into the market's monetary image. For the sake of balance, memory, and history, I urge citizens to oppose it."
I’d better add, and I’m sure many of you are already thinking the worst, what would Trump do if he gets his hands on our national parks? I don’t want to even imagine the sights, and the signs…
But I can easily imagine the problem, the huge backlog of work that needs to be done in our existing parks, lending itself to a portion of the tasks for a new Civilian Conservation Corps, or WPA, those worthy ideas waiting in the wings of our historical memory, if we have any left after 30 years of ideological purges, if and when we decide to pursue genuine “Full Employment,” not the shell of the idea represented by the current numbers and spin from the Center.
PS I guess there is no getting around it: this is an “ideological” posting in a nation which proclaims it doesn’t have one (Neoliberalism surely, still not mentioned in the long campaign or the many debates) nor does it have social classes. Yes, well… so let me up the ante here. One of the Right’s favorite tropes is the concept of “dependency,” as in “dependency on Washington” or on the “federal government.” Perish the thought of being dependent on anything, anyone, much less the federal government. Yet surely Kos readers can see, in the matters at hand here, both the one I addressed in Massachusetts, and the budding one here, not as far along, courtesy of big donor Michael Bloomberg’s editorial board. Is there not a “corporate” dependency looming, one which will destroy democracy, having now captured the political process almost (Thank you Bernie, for standing like a “Stonewall” against it), bent most of the non-profit sector to its will, going after public schools...the one the late Sheldon Wolin warned us about in his last book: Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Citizens who don’t want to put their money up in a formal budget to protect the National Parks, which really help protect our history and Nature, would, as both leading candidates seem inclined to promote, vote readily for another trillion dollar gambit in a Middle East which we still do not understand.