UNESCO Tentative List: Update

So in April the UNESCO World Heritage folks updated the tentative site list for the United States. This is a big deal, because the last update was in 2008, so it's been nearly a decade.

Anyway, here are the new potential sites. The ones I've seen are in Bold:

Big Bend National Park, Texas



Brooklyn Bridge, New York



California Current Conservation Complex, California ("a contiguous conservation zone from Point Arena in the north to Point Piedras Blancas")



Central Park, New York



Early Chicago Skyscrapers, Illinois



Ellis Island, New York/New Jersey



Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, Northern Marianas Islands



Marine Protected Areas of American Samoa, American Samoa ("includes the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa, Rose Atoll Marine National Monument and Rose Atoll National Wildlife Refuge")



Moravian Church Settlements, Pennsylvania



Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, Pacific Remote Islands (Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Wake, Johnston, Palmyra, Kingman)




Thoughts:

1) That's a lot of water. I'm rather surprised four of the ten are marine sanctuaries.

2) Ellis Island shouldn't be its own site - it should be combined with the existing Statue of Liberty designation.

3) Big Bend is cool. It's a very nice park. It's reason for inclusion apparently is 130 million years of fossils, which is crazy, but not like, Grand Canyon crazy.

4) On that same front - half natural and half cultural... I have complained we don't have enough cultural sites. This doesn't do all that much to fix that deficit. Especially if three are in New York City and its environs.

5) Not long ago (in fact just a few days before the new list was updated) I put forward what I thought would be good cultural additions. One was the architectural heritage of New York, and this included Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, along with a bunch of New York's most famous buildings. All nine of Chicago's early skyscrapers on the tentative list are kind of... blegh. I get why they went with Chicago, but it really took off in New York, you know? When people think "skyscraper" they think of the Empire State Building, not the Second Leiter Building.

6) Bethlehem Pennsylvania? A 1740s colonial era Moravian settlement? I think the Russian settlements in Alaska would be more nifty, if you're going to nominate that sort of thing, but whatever.

7) However: at least the three New York City sites and Chicago's skyscrapers are all post-1776. We currently only have one confirmed site made after America's founding - the Statue of Liberty. And while the Chicago buildings get close, most all being built in the 1890s (one was completed in 1899), nothing was nominated from the 20th century in this batch, which is disheartening.

Proportional Senate?

What if we had a proportional Senate?

It's an idea popular out here in California. In this scenario America would retain an upper and lower house, but both chambers would be based on population. While the House of Representatives would be chosen by individual districts, in our version the Senate would still, as now, be voted on by the whole state.

So Minnesota, the most consistently Democratic state of all (and the only one to have voted Dem in every Presidential election since 1976) would get something in proportion to their Electoral College votes.  Oklahoma, the most reliably Republican state, (the only one to have voted Rep in every Presidential election since 1968) would likewise get something in proportion to their votes.

Now we want this upper chamber Senate to be smaller than the House, so we can’t use the Electoral College numbers – otherwise the amount would be larger. I think too the smallest states should retain two votes. So if Wyoming gets 2 Senators for 500,000 people then California gets…156.

Perhaps only one Senator per 500,000? Still, that leaves us with 78. Because, you know, California is 78 times larger than Wyoming. Hell, San Francisco is larger than Wyoming.

The problem, then, may be that the House of Representatives is too disproportionate. Constitutionally the proportion originally was one Representative for every 30,000 people. If this proportion held true today there would be 10,387 Representatives. An act in 1929 capped the size of the House at 435 Representatives, with a little over 200,000 people per Representative at the time.  Now each Rep stands for an average of 700,000 people.

Again, Wyoming gets at least one Rep, so you’d have 1 rep = 500,000 people in the House of Representatives. Then you’d have 78 Representatives for California, and not Senators. The total number of Reps in this model would be (using typical rounding up and down rules):

Alabama – 10
Alaska – 1
Arizona – 14
Arkansas – 6
California – 78
Colorado – 11
Connecticut – 7
Delaware – 2
Florida – 41
Georgia – 21
Hawaii – 3
Idaho – 3
Illinois – 26
Indiana – 13
Iowa – 6
Kansas – 6
Kentucky – 9
Louisiana – 9
Maine – 3
Maryland – 12
Massachusetts – 14
Michigan – 20
Minnesota – 11
Mississippi – 6
Missouri – 12
Montana – 2
Nebraska – 4
Nevada – 6
New Hampshire – 3
New Jersey – 18
New Mexico – 4
New York – 39
North Carolina – 20
North Dakota – 2
Ohio – 23
Oklahoma – 8
Oregon – 8
Pennsylvania – 26
Rhode Island – 2
South Carolina – 10
South Dakota – 2
Tennessee – 13
Texas – 56
Utah – 6
Vermont – 1
Virginia – 17
Washington – 15
West Virginia – 4
Wisconsin – 12
Wyoming – 1

So instead of 435 Members of Congress, we would have 646 – all proportional by population as the founders had intended. But not as unwieldy as the original ten thousand. Slightly larger, and far more fair.

Returning, now, to the Senate. Each State would need at least 1 Senator, but if proportional then of course you get the same number as the House, of 646. Instead let’s say you get one senator per million – and still round up for the smaller states, each of which has over 500,000. Here you’d end up with the following:

Alabama – 5
Alaska – 1
Arizona – 7
Arkansas – 3
California – 39
Colorado – 6
Connecticut – 4
Delaware – 1
Florida – 21
Georgia – 10
Hawaii – 1
Idaho – 2
Illinois – 13
Indiana – 7
Iowa – 3
Kansas – 3
Kentucky – 4
Louisiana – 5
Maine – 1
Maryland – 6
Massachusetts – 7
Michigan – 10
Minnesota – 6
Mississippi – 3
Missouri – 6
Montana – 1
Nebraska – 2
Nevada – 3
New Hampshire – 1
New Jersey – 9
New Mexico – 2
New York – 20
North Carolina – 10
North Dakota – 1
Ohio – 12
Oklahoma –  4
Oregon – 4
Pennsylvania – 13
Rhode Island –  1
South Carolina – 5
South Dakota – 1
Tennessee – 7
Texas – 28
Utah – 3
Vermont – 1
Virginia – 8
Washington – 7
West Virginia – 2
Wisconsin –  6
Wyoming – 1

And as such the total number of Senators would sit 336. What would its political makeup be?

Using 2016 Presidential Election data, let’s presume that all of the Senators would be from the same party in a state. If this were the case (which it wouldn’t be, but I figure it would sort of even out to be overall) the Senate would look like this:

134 seats for Democrats and 202 for Republicans, or 39% Democratic-held. That said, 2016 was a real shellacking for Democrats. Trump picked up every swing state and then some. If you go with 2008 Election numbers the Senate may be 216 Democrats to 120 Republicans – 64% liberal held.

All in all, would a proportional Senate help Democrats and liberals? The answer is…eh? 2016 was a particularly disproportionate picture of allegiances, as long-time large democratic strongholds went for Trump. But Obama’s ascendency was also unusual (Indiana voted for him – the first time they elected a Democrat since 1964!). The truth is somewhere in between – but of course that would mean the Senate calculus would potentially shift drastically every two years. Our proportional House of Representatives, though, would in an outlier Trump year be 290 Democrats and 356 Republicans, or 44% Democrats.

The current House is 44% Democrats. So that tallies. And the current Senate is 48% Democrats. So although the idea of a proportional Senate to help liberals take control is appealing under the current system they actually have more seats proportionally, and somewhat more control.

Of course this whole post if moot anyway. As the Constitution states at the end of Article Five:

“…and that no state, without its consent [emphasis mine], shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate”

This is, in fact, the only section of the Constitution therefore which cannot be amended.

Oh well.

Reflections on Music

This has been a very music-intensive month.

First off, my father and I have been working to convert vinyl to MP3. The albums are both LP-only: they've never been turned into CDs or released on iTunes or anything like that. The first is Eubie Blake, the great ragtime composer, the other The Eastman Winds Ensemble. Very different, but both very good. I discovered them because each year I check the National Recording Registry and listen to their long-form music inductees. At this point I've tracked down nearly all of them, with a few exceptions:

1. The Cradle Will Rock OBC
2. Precious Lord: Thomas Dorsey 
3. Oklahoma! OBC
4. Peace Be Still: James Cleveland 
5. Azucar Pa’ Ti: Eddie Palmieri 
6. The Continental Harmony: Gregg Smith Singers
7. New Orleans’ Sweet Emma Barrett and Preservation Hall Jazz Band 
8. Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues 
9. Carousel of American Music 
10. It’s My Way: Buffy Sainte-Marie
11. People: Barbara Streisand (I thought it was just the song, but apparently it's the album) 
12. Signatures: Renee Fleming 

Second, more substantially, a close friend had a baby, so I dug out an old cassette from my childhood of lullabies, and converted that to MP3. In punchline fashion I started to fall asleep while recording it. Songs I'd not heard since I was very young came back to me almost instantly, a Proustian madeleine moment. A couple I had rediscovered as an adult: Golden Slumbers, I learned, was originally a Beatles song. Autumn to May had been a hit for Peter, Paul, and Mary. Upon investigation some of the tracks are well known, like the Paddle Song / Land of the Silver Birch (a childhood favorite) which apparently is popular with the Canadian boy scouts. Others, though, I've never heard anywhere else. Remarkably, there is a track listing provided by World Cat so I guess the Library of Congress has a copy? Or something? Very odd.

Thirdly, for the past two weekends I have been going from my new home down near Monterey up to San Francisco for Taylor Mac's 24 Decades of Popular Music. I could write volumes on the premise, but a nice job has been done already on SF Gate here. So read that article before continuing... but just in case you're in a tl;dr mood the premise is: 24 hour show, covering popular music in America from 1776 to 2016, starts with 24 musicians onstage and wheedles them down to just Taylor Mac by the final hour, 246 songs, and 24 costume changes. Four, six-hour segments, with no intermissions.

That doesn't begin to cover the experience, though: it's 60% American history lesson through song, 40% audience-participation with 'Hair' overtones. Taylor Mac is in drag (when wearing clothes), there's nudity, burlesque, beer pong in the audience, knitters on stage, pole dancing, on multiple occasions Mac has gone up to the Mezzanine or Balcony for a spell to entertain the plebes - just as he has on multiple occasions rearranged the seating of the entire audience and asked many audience members to be on stage for up to two hours at a time. And then there are the Dandy Minions - his impish, clothing-averse helpers who go throughout the audience and ensure the crowd is participating, and made thoroughly uncomfortable. To paraphrase a statement Mac made during the show:

"I don't like audience participation, you know, because it always feels like they're trying to force their fun on me. And I'm like 'Fuck you I'm not going to have fun!' But when I make you do it, it's different, see, because I want you to be uncomfortable."

Perhaps 40% history and 60% revelry, then.

So I've now been on stage three times, and there's still a fourth six-hour part this upcoming Sunday evening. It's been a blast, and like everyone else I'm sort of stunned that he's able to keep going and remember so many songs, poems, and the overlying narrative. There have been parts I didn't care for (I still maintain hour 11's Mikado set on Mars was stupid) but others have been breathtakingly powerful, and left me astonished. Last night, at the end of the decade/hour which covered 1936-1946 Mac mentioned, almost off-hand, that the War ended when America dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, and then went into the most stunning and overwhelming rendition of 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' that the audience was silenced in reverie of a coupling of song and tragedy I'd never have dreamed of, but complimented each other perfectly. I've been to Hiroshima, and from now on I expect Taylor Mac's plaintive pitch-perfect cries of 'yippee kai-yay, yippee kai-yo' will come to mind whenever considering that devastating moment of post-modern America's birth, and the recognition of our tragic ascendancy to superpower status.

In short: I'm a fan of the show, and September's dedication to music has been most rewarding.


Coda:

At one point Mac was onstage reading Joyce's Ulysses, and I had a thought which nicely sums up my feelings towards 24 Decades: What must it feel like to know you're a genius, reading the words of another genius, as you are in the midst of your own defining artistic endeavor? 24 Decades was one of three works short-listed for the Pulitzer, and has been critically acclaimed, yet it is of a type where you have to be in the room to fully get it, and in a very real sense will die with him - you can't do a revival fifty years from now. This is so very unlike Joyce's art which can be disseminated freely (these days) and will continue to be passed on. After reading the last pages of the book Mac paused, and smiled, and I think he was reminiscing on exactly that - but experiencing it in a way none of us in the audience will likely ever get to feel for ourselves.