Biden in Kiev, the Brave Stuff of History

FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS

President Biden’s heroic trip to Kiev this week, and subsequent powerful speech in Warsaw, is the stuff of history books. Americans and freedom loving folk everywhere need to appreciate the profound import of what is transpiring on our globe among its human inhabitants right now.

At the rate things are going, I would venture that Joe Biden stands a shot at eclipsing the greatest presidents in our history, and only now are the optics of his more recent initiatives beginning to show that.

If the West, led by the U.S., succeeds in its current campaign to repel Putin’s ghastly offense against human lives and basic values in Ukraine, everything of the last 12 months, beginning with President Zelenskii’s tone-setting proclamation when the Russian invasion began that he did not want a ride out of there, but ammunition, will have taken on an epochal, “world historical” hue.

From here, it will take an extraordinary uprising of the Russian people, themselves, to finish off Putin’s criminal enterprise, much as it has been the brave will and activism of the American people to reject Trumpism in the last couple of years which has brought humanity back from the brink of destruction.

Imagine if Trump had won the 2020 election, or was able to remain in power one way or another. Putin would be halfway across Europe by now.

Putin is interested in far more than simply Ukraine. His messianic obsession is to take the Russian Empire to new heights of global dominance, and to that end, doing so with the blessing and full-throttled support of leading ruling class elements in the West.

They agree on the need to trounce democratic institutions and leaders of the interests of working people. Such was the case 100 years ago when the leaders of the capitalist class in the West readily crossed national boundaries, aided by the convenience of all being members of one ruling family (all present for the coronation of England’s King George in 1911), in a global assault on the rising working classes that took the form of what became the wholesale slaughter known as The Great War, or World War I.

It was not a war between rival nation states, it was a war against humanity itself, against the rising sentiment that ruling circles should not be allowed to subject the rest of humanity to arbitrary tyranny. By throwing millions of mostly young men into a meat grinder of a war, these rulers held onto power by means of a genocidal crushing of their potential adversaries.

These ruling class persons, made of the same stuff as those who have managed to monopolize the lion’s share of wealth and power in the U.S. today, utilized every means of shaping the public dialogue on issues to obfuscate the public’s perception of events and their significance, to bring forward those with dishonest and dissembling views on these events.

Their challenge, even as today, has been to confuse the public in a democracy that owes its founding to the achievements of the U.S. Founding Fathers. Enough Americans have been duped to buy into their version of history and events to allow these greed-obsessed degenerates to hold onto power.

Every time a leader has emerged who effectively defeats their plans, he has won the adoration of millions against the deceivers. Lincoln was such a man. FDR was such a man, and to lesser degrees others who have defined the West by a different set of values. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and even JFK and RFK. We saw what our ruling class did to them.

But Joe Biden now clearly belongs on that list, too. His (and our) enemies are advancing the ploy that he’s too old to govern, and once again there are enough in his own party who don’t get it, and are as such repeating that mantra.

Leadership is the most important commodity we have in the defense of democracy. Zelenskii has demonstrated it in Ukraine, and now Biden has not only in the U.S. but in the West more broadly, and globally in defense of democracy.

Regulation, a.k.a the public’s protection, and taxation are tools, but none so important as an inspired and motivated voting public.

As the county board revs up for a March 18 final vote on Missing Middle housing rezoning, an array of recent developments have drawn notice from backers and opponents.

Arlington’s NAACP protested the board’s removal of the option of allowing seven-eight-plex structures countywide from the Request to Advertise approved Jan. 25, citing possible violation of the Fair Housing Act.

Arlington’s examination of solutions to the attainable housing shortage drew national attention in the D.C. Commercial Observer for Feb. 13. It quoted Brookings Institution housing specialist Jenny Schuetz remarking that “this whole discussion has gotten very dramatic,” and “very out of character because Arlington is a nice, wellbred middle class.” Her own view is in favor. “Opponents act like the world is coming to an end, almost regardless of what is proposed,” she said.

Critics in Arlingtonians for Our Sustainable Future and Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency can take heart from a reversal in Gainesville, Fla. After lame-duck city commissioners last August approved similar rezoning to allow more housing types, a newly elected board voted this month to cancel it, as reported by Bloomberg Feb. 2.

Longtime Arlington scribe Scott McCaffrey — now editing the new GazetteLeader — on Feb. 9 wrote that the Missing Middle plan had been tactically renamed “Expanded Housing Options” as shown in a “test drive” by Christian Dorsey. Not really, county spokes- woman Erika Moore told me.

“Missing Middle is still the name of the study that has been going on since 2019. Expanded Housing Option development is the phrase being used in the draft Zoning Ordinance language to describe proposed additional housing types that would be allowed if approved by the board.”

There is a new take on the under-explored theme of perceived threats to social status— cultural and psychological forces that influence behavior in a policy debate intertwined with the American Dream. During a recent community conversation, a homeowner said Missing Middle units would “punish me for my success.”

Supporters in the national movement for rezoning consult Connecticut journalist Lisa Prevost’s 2013 book “Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate,” and YIMBYs of NoVA recently posted a favorable analysis of Arlington from the National Association of Realtors.

But the most recent entry on the status question comes from witty author Chuck Thompson, whose latest book is “The Status Revolution: The Improbable Story of How the Lowbrow Became the Highbrow.” He spoke to me from Portland, Ore.—considered a model for Missing Middle policy—to explain that our understanding of human fixation on status has evolved since the 1950s heyday of best-selling author Vance Packard’s “The Status Seekers.”

Today status-consciousness is recognized as a “measurable biological function” rather than “a malign thing, a social problem or a personal or moral failing.”

Yet attitudes toward the “things we need—a home, a vehicle, a job—are changing” and form part of the debates over housing, Thompson said. But people are less likely to view status as a “zero-sum game” in which one’s gain is another’s loss.

Thompson is not a fan of Portland’s loosened zoning. “I have some sympathy for the NIMBYs” who bought into single-family neighborhoods and spent money on their home. But the real problem, he says, is “too many people.”

Thompson also sympathizes with today’s young people who face a steepening climb to the middle class. The homeowners in rezoned neighborhoods, though it “might feel a little weird at first, are going to get used to it,” he added. “It’s where society’s going.”

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Vandals in my neighborhood?

On a recent morning walk I counted not one but three downed sidewalk traffic signs. The upended poles included a yield sign at Sycamore and Langston Blvd., a signal light near bus lanes at the East Falls Church Metro, and a traffic lane indicator sign at N. Tuckahoe St. and Langston.

I sent word to Arlington police, but they said they received no petty crime reports. So I sent photos to the police and to Environmental Services. The next day the flattened signs were removed. Were all three by the same perp?