{"id":13,"date":"2007-03-20T07:14:33","date_gmt":"2007-03-20T15:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/?p=13"},"modified":"2007-03-26T07:52:37","modified_gmt":"2007-03-26T15:52:37","slug":"fry-street-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/fry-street-etc\/","title":{"rendered":"fry street, etc."},"content":{"rendered":"

In one of my former home towns a group has organized to try to protect part of a street on which I once lived from developers. They have a nifty blog<\/a> with pictures and all sorts of info. I am thinking of something I wrote some years back about one of the first<\/a> Fry Street businesses to close during the present era. Fry Street, of course, goes way back, but in the past it has always been funky: that is, back when we still referred to the former teachers’ college that is Denton’s largest employer as North Texas.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nowadays North Texas is UNT. The institution is growing and gentrifying. With SMU\u00a0vying for\u00a0the George W. Bush presidential library<\/a> to be, and the Dallas\/Fort Worth metroplex turning istself into a right-wing theme park, Denton and North Texas seem destined to be homogenized into the same stream of dollars that has littered I-35 with car dealerships, strip malls, and restaurant chains. There’s even a Hooters in Denton, now, though the Save Fry Street<\/em> website threatens nothing more dangerous than Borders and Starbucks.<\/p>\n

I’m uneasy about\u00a0gentrification, being a latter day urban pioneer and living in a St. Louis neighborhood that I somewhat guiltily hope continues to gentrify fairly rapidly (last week somebody was robbed at gunpoint half a block from my house around 10:30 pm).\u00a0But I wish the folks on Fry Street success in fighting the wowsers. It’s always too bad that a developer with money can force perectly viable businesses out of a neighborhood. We say we believe in property rights in the United States, but I think what we really believe in is bucks. Bucks trumps it all, and everything from sex to God is for sale, including my alma mater.<\/p>\n

Back to war news. Here’s a clever little anti war video<\/a>. I begin to think things have turned. Op eds by Anne Applebaum<\/a>, Richard Cohen<\/a>, and E. J. Dionne<\/a>\u00a0push limits of discourse that were pretty solidly in place only recently.<\/p>\n

I’ve said I think continued engagement in Iraq is morally required of us Americans, but I’m not sure what I think that should look like. I believe we have to clean up the mess we have made to the best of our ability, and I think we must try to determine what our country’s real strategic interests are in the Middle East, given the rise of Islamic militancy outside Palestine since the 1960s. Here’s a link to a pretty good Middle East discussion site<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In one of my former home towns a group has organized to try to protect part of a street on which I once lived from developers. They have a nifty blog with pictures and all sorts of info. I am … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}