A Friday Night Ritual

Pittsburgh is a city of traditions. And it's that way because it contains a multitude of ethnic groups, each of which is very cohesive, and very proud of its traditions, and -- in particular -- perfectly happy just being itself, without trying to ape any other group, or to fall for that "melting pot" scam whereby the Norman Rockwell-style New Englanders get to stay the way they are and everyone else has to become a bloodless shadow, or as E. Michael Jones, publisher of "Culture Wars", terms it, "deracinated". These groups live among each other in harmony and in a state of symbiosis, reinforcing each other's identity, attending each other's carnivals, church functions, musical events, and so forth. They appreciate each other's culture, in other words. This is what real diversity is all about -- not this strained, politically burdensome thing the term has come to mean of late. When it's spontaneous, and organic, and real, it works. When it's something that is mandated by laws and regulations, it fails miserably. It's as simple as that.

What got me started thinking about this was that I participated, earlier this evening, in a ritual which is probably about as ubiquitous as any other in Pittsburgh -- the Lenten Friday Night Fish Fry. Now, this is not something that is done in a half-hearted way for people who have nothing better to do on a Friday night. It's a big event -- a social, family event -- and every Catholic church in town has one, as near as I can tell. The one in my parish church is big. The food is inexpensive and very good -- especially if you have a starch deficiency (so common among us poor Pittsburghers), since one receives not only a very large slab of (breaded) fish but french fries, macaroni and cheese, and a roll about the size of a James Michener novel (hardback edition). Now, the noise level is such that if someone set off a string of Chinese firecrackers, it wouldn't even be heard. This can be bad for the digestion, but I didn't notice any deleterious effects. One can socialize, at least in theory, but most of the communication is by way of body language -- as in, "too much starch". All in all, it's a very good event.

But here's the point: It's a church-based social event, it's happening in a large city, and it's attended, overwhelmingly, by middle-class families. That last fact alone ought to remind us that, in many American cities, there simply is no middle class, only the rich and the poor. We seem to have forgotten how pathological this is, and simply take for granted -- well, of _course_ the rich live in cities, because they can afford it, and of _course_ the poor live there, because they can't afford to live anywhere else, and of _course_ the middle class live in the suburbs, because they can't afford to live in the cities. End of story. And yet, if you take a look at American cities prior to World War II, and immediately afterwards to varying degrees, you will find that those cities had the "classic", if you will, distribution of population by income, social class, racial and ethnic and occupational groups. You did not have a situation where everyone has to commute to somewhere else. You did not have people working miles from home, among strangers, then going home to neighbors whose workplace one never saw. Part of the explanation for all this, of course, is economic, i.e. simple supply and demand. A city like San Francisco is in high demand as a dwelling place. It has water on three sides, so expansion is out of the question. As someone said, "It's so expensive, only the homeless can afford to live there." The homeless, and those with plenty of discretionary income. Ditto Manhattan, ditto some parts of Washington, D.C., and so on. On the other end of the spectrum you have wastelands like the South Bronx; Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit; and [insert your favorite "bad" place here]. The question is always, is this an inevitable stage in the evolution of cities? Jane Jacobs, recently deceased, a pioneer in the analysis of cities and their discontents, didn't think so. She rightly saw many of the ills of cities to be based on government policies, which were in turn based on wrongheaded, or just plain wrong, ideas about economics, sociology, and psychology, and mainly on a refusal to see, in an unbiased fashion, what works and what doesn't. Then we have political pressures which encourage public officials to arrange things so that certain captive constituencies stay in urban areas, and other constituencies are scattered to the four winds. (For a definitive discussion of this phenomenon, see E. Michael Jones' "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing".)

Now Pittsburgh, especially since it's in the Northeast and also part of the so-called "rust belt", seems to have escaped the worst predations of "urban renewal", even though the city government is unabashedly socialist and doles out "welfare" to both unions _and_ corporations on a daily basis. (Try _that_ out on your economy!) But despite all this, we have a full-spectrum city in terms of social class, income, racial, ethnic, and occupational groups, as well as a large higher-education sector, a huge medical sector, and a growing "high tech" sector. (There are even one or two steel mills still kicking around somewhere.) Somehow, the worst sorts of government-sponsored blight have been avoided or minimized, and while there are depressed areas and plenty of vacant lots and "brownfields" (old factory sites), one is hard-pressed to find the vast no-man's-land areas of many other cities in the Northeast and elsewhere. And frankly, it would not surprise me one bit if the persistent cohesion and assertiveness of our many ethnic groups didn't have something to do with this. There are certain people that you mess with at your own peril. And sometimes they even acquire a bit of political power. And what they mostly have is a sense of loyalty and a sense that, by gosh, this is where they want to live, and damned if they're going to let anyone throw them out.