Irony
I had to share this blog brief from Publishers Weekly.
The owner of the Lehigh Valley Mall in Whitehall Township, Pa., is proposing adding "a lifestyle center," in front of the main entrance to the mall, according to nj.com.
The biggest change since the mall's 1976 opening, the new section would have a "town-center atmosphere" with five freestanding buildings and include such businesses as a "large bookstore."
This sounds suspiciously like trying to recreate a downtown.
I agree. Wonder how many millions it would take to recreate New Albany's historic downtown? And isn't it stomach-churning to think of all that great lifestyle space being underutilized, allowed to deteriorate, and shuttered. Even the looters know the value of downtowns. They just want to recreate it in another place.
Talk about wasted resources.
The owner of the Lehigh Valley Mall in Whitehall Township, Pa., is proposing adding "a lifestyle center," in front of the main entrance to the mall, according to nj.com.
The biggest change since the mall's 1976 opening, the new section would have a "town-center atmosphere" with five freestanding buildings and include such businesses as a "large bookstore."
This sounds suspiciously like trying to recreate a downtown.
I agree. Wonder how many millions it would take to recreate New Albany's historic downtown? And isn't it stomach-churning to think of all that great lifestyle space being underutilized, allowed to deteriorate, and shuttered. Even the looters know the value of downtowns. They just want to recreate it in another place.
Talk about wasted resources.
posted by All4Word at 3:22 PM
4 Comments:
I failed to note approval for your choice of the noun "looters."
Didn't Ayn Rand use this, too? And "second-raters"? The latter's always been my personal favorite.
Caught me!
Indeed, on this, the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, an occasion marked by outstanding re-releases of her seminal works of fiction, I admit to admiring her take on those who consider it their due to take from others.
I do not subscribe to her philosophy of objectivism and generally find those who follow her political theories to be repugnant and Darwinian.
Yet, her fiction can speak to my heart.
I've often had long discussions with conservatives who are shocked to discover my admiration for "Atlas Shrugged." I simply explain that my admiration is for the strivers, particularly Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart, who set aside their natural instincts to provide and to serve.
No matter the denouement, I do not think we have the right to "shrug."
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During my senior year in high school, I took the senior college-prep English class taught by Bob Youngblood. Early in the year, we were required to read Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” which I knocked off in three or four days, and couldn’t resist holding up in class as an example of a book so easy to read that it was barely worth the time – not true, of course, but I was possessed of an inexplicable cockiness at the time.
The cure for my affliction was soon in coming. My public display of disdain for Dickens was greeted with an invitation to visit Mr. Youngblood the following morning, and when I did, he noted that owing to my vastly superior reading skills, a book not previously on the syllabus had been added to my required workload.
He handed me Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” smirked, and said I had something like three weeks to read it and report back to him.
It took every spare moment of the time allotment for me to finish. We’d been exposed to nothing like Rand’s epic in eleven years of school. At the time, I was on a Steely Dan kick, and the song “Kid Charlemagne” always reminds me of reading the book, which by turns inspired, confused and annoyed me … but my, what a work it is!
Otherwise, Randy’s views about Rand and her philosophy pretty much mirror my own: Amazing focus, thought-provoking premises, and unsustainable conclusions.
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