Comments on: My Wicked, Wicked Ways

By: Jessica Doyle (nÃ©e Harbour)

Jessica Doyle (nÃ©e Harbour) — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:42:37 +0000

God, I wish I’d known you were in town.

On Peachtree Center: can you tell all that was built in the 1970s? I’m a bit overly fond of arguing that one of Atlanta’s long-standing problems is that it started thinking of itself as a City with a capital C right when nobody — especially nobody white — wanted to live in said Cities. Thus MARTA, which got started in 1971 or so, was a serious mess from the outset, and Peachtree Center was designed in a way to minimize street life.

Midtown, north of where you were, is much more walkable now than it was even ten years ago, and downtown is starting to improve, but there’s still a ways to go.

More later when I am not behind on work. (In grad school now.)

By: jpool

jpool — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:34:48 +0000

I don’t live there anymore, but given that ATL cops are not generally worrying about pedestrians in midtown, my guess is that the hotels were worried that, as the out-of-towners would not know about drivers inablity to see them or alternate tendency to speed up when approaching them, they would soon have a bunch of dead or maimed historians on their hands. So of course the best solution (from a liability standpoint) was to have the police yell at the pedestrians, and of course put them in their place should they get uppity.

The verbal tactic of arguing with people not in the room is realy annoying, but what’s shocking to me about the text of the resolution is that this is precisely the sort of document that historians relish tearing apart when they confront it as a primary document. I tend to agree with you about the fact that professional and activist organization are more effective separately rather than conjoined, and so are resolutions on academic fredom and war policy. I probably would not vote for a speedy withdrawal resolution for the same reasons that you wouldn’t, but it’s a pefectly legitimate one to offer in its on terms. If those are the reasons for a speedy withdrawal, then they’re extremely selfish and small minded ones.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:46:01 +0000

Nweining: Yeah, that’s why I thought striking the “speedy withdrawal from Iraq” part made a fairly legit resolution. HAW wasn’t having it, though.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:45:03 +0000

They weren’t stopping traffic this time, actually–just yelling at people to head to the crosswalks, even when there was no traffic in sight. (I know, that’s where traffic is getting off the highway, so the sightlines aren’t great.) It also turns out that the hotels are the ones who pay for stationing a police officer there. (Seems to me that they might want to consider building a walkway over the road instead…)

In any event, it seems like handcuffing a guy in a business suit and hauling him away for doing no more than asking to see the cop’s identification (and I have to say that they looked more like private security guys in the uniform they were in on Friday, when it was raining) is excessive.

By: kmunoz

kmunoz — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 13:09:45 +0000

The police are posted on that street for every major convention. They’ve been there at every Dragon*Con I’ve been to since 2001, for example. They direct traffic and let people cross between the two hotels directly, once they’ve stopped the cars. Perhaps it was different this time, but generally speaking they treat the cars and the people the same – and if a car tries to zip past them, they get very, very cranky.

By: nweining

nweining — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 04:49:29 +0000

The thing is, from reading the text of the resolution it was *almost* a reasonable thing for a historians’ group to pass. They’d have done much better, IMHO, if they’d just focused more tightly on the bullet points about the current regime’s evil practices and left the war itself out of the complaint. A “Historians Against Creeping Fascism” resolution would have been much more defensible against your concerns, on the grounds that creeping fascism eventually imperils the free and honest practice of history in a way that urban poverty, environmental issues, etc do not.

But the lack of focus in these sorts of things seems depressingly common; think of the absurd conflation of “Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism”.

By: withywindle

withywindle — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:54:06 +0000

Thank you for doing your bit to help. I appreciate your attitude and your efforts.

By: Ralph

Ralph — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 19:38:47 +0000

Actually, I was surprised to see you at the Business Meeting and appreciate having had your support. I was surprised even more that you spoke on HAW’s resolution. There may be comfort in that unlikelihood of resolutions having any influence, but I do think that you and Sheehan identified their risk — of further alienating historians who disagree with them or with pronouncing on issues that have little to do with our common interests and wasting professional influence.