It had not been my intention to watch the South Hills Memorial Day parade.
But I’d had business on West Liberty in Dormont, parked in store’s parking lot, and when I came out, the street was closed and the parade was about to begin. So I probably had the most comfortable seat, in my car, watching the parade go by.
It was pretty much what you’d expect, celebrating everything I loathe—police white supremacist gangsters, the military, scouting, marching bands, the occasional car dealer who didn’t pass up a marketing opportunity—but also a few folks I definitely don’t loath: firefighters and paramedics. Lending further support to my impression of scouting as preparation for military service, some boy scouts carried a banner for Marine Corps veterans who I guess couldn’t carry it themselves.
As the parade went on, I started noticing omissions. Dormont, Mount Lebanon, and Brookline (a Pittsburgh neighborhood) sent white supremacist gangsters, firefighters, and paramedics, but even as the parade took the South Hills name, lots of other South Hills communities were absent. Though the Allegheny County sheriff sent its mounted patrol (from South Park), Green Tree, Beechview (a Pittsburgh neighborhood), Banksville (a Pittsburgh neighborhood), Scott Township, Baldwin Township, Whitehall, Baldwin Borough, Castle Shannon, and Bethel Park were all absent, never mind communities farther out.
The “South Hills” are not, to my knowledge, formally defined. I’ve been loosely counting everything on the west side of Route 51, which runs through a couple of long valleys, out to West Elizabeth, out to South Strabane, and east of Washington Avenue/Pike (not the same as Washington Road) and Morganza. In Canonsburg and points south, I draw the western boundary at East and West Pike Street (I would use Interstate 79, but I strongly doubt it existed when the “South Hills” term was first coined. It’s a pretty massive area, but it includes a coherent group of hills about as distinct from surrounding areas as you’re gonna get in the Appalachian Mountains.
So either Dormont and Mount Lebanon appropriated the “South Hills” name for their parade or other communities nonetheless did not feel welcome to participate in what was really a Dormont and Mount Lebanon parade.
And because Pittsburgh is a heavily segregated place, this parade was a very white affair. There were a few Black faces in the crowds lining the streets, a few Black faces among those marching in the parade, but I can’t say this parade was representative of South Hills as I conceive it, let alone Pittsburgh.
Work
Fig. 1. Yeah, this is me. The sign says, “If you’re whining about a labor shortage, STOP ignoring my job applications!” And the QR-code leads here. Photograph by author, January 16, 2023.
Lizzy McLellan Ravitch, “A tight job market dangled opportunity. Instead, workers found burnout and uncertainty,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 29, 2023, https://www.inquirer.com/jobs/labor/labor-market-burnout-wages-philadelphia-federal-reserve-20230529.html
Illiberalism
Fig. 2. Photograph by Joachim F. Thurn, August 1991, Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F089030-0003, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
“The outcome of the May elections suggests that Turkey has now shifted closer to a Eurasian autocracy than an illiberal European democracy,” Soner Cagaptay, Turkey scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in Foreign Affairs.
“Just as [Vladimir] Putin had acquired sweeping executive powers in Russia, [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan had now become Turkey’s most powerful elected leader since the country’s first free and fair vote in 1950 — in effect a new Sultan,” Cagaptay added. “More symbolically, like Putin, who has increasingly portrayed himself as successor to Russia’s greatest tsars, Erdogan also began to embrace the trappings of an imperial head of state.”[1]
Ishaan Tharoor, “Erdogan becomes an era-defining electoral autocrat,” Washington Post, May 30, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/30/erdogan-autocrat-electoral-power/
Theranos
Adam Lashinsky thinks Elizabeth Holmes got a fair trial, but that bigger high technology grifters have learned nothing from her conviction.[2] The second part of that seems tautological; if ambitious grifters had an alternative to grifting, would they grift?
Adam Lashinsky, “As Elizabeth Holmes heads to prison, has Silicon Valley learned anything?” Washington Post, May 29, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/29/elizabeth-holmes-prison-silicon-valley/
Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh
Infrastructure
Fig. 3. Post-collapse scene at the Fern Hollow Bridge, photograph by National Transportation Safety Board, January 29, 2022, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Jonathan D. Salant, “‘This isn’t safe’: A lack of truck parking on Pennsylvania’s highways alarms drivers,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 30, 2023, https://www.post-gazette.com/news/transportation/2023/05/30/pennsylvania-highway-truck-parking-safety/stories/202305250117
Gilead
Right-wing militias
Incarceration
Fig. 4. Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. Photograph by Twelvizm [pseud.], December 27, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Emma Folts, “Federal financial aid is returning to PA prisons. But getting a college degree inside won’t be easy,” Public Source, May 30, 2023, https://www.publicsource.org/pennsylvania-department-corrections-prisons-pell-grants-inmate-university-college-education/
- [1]Ishaan Tharoor, “Erdogan becomes an era-defining electoral autocrat,” Washington Post, May 30, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/30/erdogan-autocrat-electoral-power/↩
- [2]Adam Lashinsky, “As Elizabeth Holmes heads to prison, has Silicon Valley learned anything?” Washington Post, May 29, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/29/elizabeth-holmes-prison-silicon-valley/↩