That pontificating whippersnapper Simek got me thinking yesterday about the fetishism of the past to which a surprising number of you folks cling. A mediocre sub-urban fish joint shuts its doors and that boy waxes rhapsodic about — well, by his own admission he’s not precisely sure what. Lordy!
You want Dallas to return to its imagined heyday of 1906? You soft-shelled ninnies wouldn’t last a minute back then. Why the pungent odors wafting from the great, relatively unwashed mass of humanity alone would knock you flat before you could scamper across Main Street. Even if you could manage the feat, enjoy wiping the paste of dust and well-ground equine excrement from your soles when you reach the other side. And the heat! My god, the heat! No artificial refrigeration to ease summer’s onslaught, no sir.
Simek laments the paving over of some unremarkable street downtown without taking a moment to celebrate all that replaced it: Big Macs and Quarter Pounders — cheap, ready-made meatz™ on demand! Only the decadence of the 21st bourgeois affords the leisure time necessary to cry a river over nonsense like that and the dearth of those deathtraps known as streetcars in today’s Dallas.
And spare me the suggestion that New York, a city suffering beneath the eternal indignity of having been founded by a bunch of wooden-shoe-sporting tulip traders, somehow more nobly embraces its past than does Dallas. The Rotten Apple simply has a lot more past than our own one true city. Besides which, it’s disingenuous to pretend that vast swaths of that lesser burg haven’t also been leveled and raised anew time and again during its history.
What rubs me rawest about Simek’s latest web log diatribe is his assertion that in Dallas it’s “difficult to encounter that near-past in any form other than the imagination or photographs.” Horse pucky!
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
[before-after after=”https://assets.dmagstatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Main-and-Akard-1918-after.jpg” before=”https://assets.dmagstatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Main-and-Akard-1918-before.jpg” height=”401″ width=”635″ id=”MainStreet1918″]
What’s he want? A return to hand-cranked automobiles and street toughs hawking newsprint? If you aspire to that dream of the ‘90s, it’s alive — in Portland:
[d-embed][/d-embed]
Take me to the river,
John Neely Bryan is founder of the city of Dallas and an expert on all matters. For advice, to have a dispute adjudicated, or seeking wisdom on any of a myriad of topics, [email protected].
