BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Smart move -- with an
asterisk. Boston mayor Tom Menino wants to reduce the ticky-tacky
factor at historic Faneuil Hall, and replace souvenir shops with a
first-class National Parks Service visitors center. Donovan Slack has
the story
in today's Globe.
On the face of it, this sounds like
a terrific idea. There's something cheesy about letting the first
floor of Faneuil Hall -- one of our cradles of liberty -- be used as
a junk emporium.
But I pulled up short when I saw
this old quote from Frank Jones, who was involved in similar efforts
in 1990: "We're trying to raise Faneuil Hall to the same level of
consciousness as Independence Hall and the Statue of
Liberty."
I hope Menino doesn't intend to
pursue that particular vision. One of the things that makes Boston's
historic sites so compelling -- and so different from those in other
cities, including Philadelphia -- is that they are still being
used, and are not simply monuments to the past.
The reverential hush that surrounds
Independence
Hall, with its velvet-roped
exhibits of where the founders met and debated, may be appropriate to
that particular venue. But I'd hate to see the same thing happen in
Boston.
For that matter, the National Parks
Service hasn't exactly done a kick-ass job at the current visitors
center, at the Old
State House, which has the
feel of a little-noted afterthought.
Before moving ahead, Menino needs a
commitment that things will be a lot different if the agency
relocates to Faneuil Hall.
Why don't we just go back to
paper ballots? I'm serious. We'd have to wait longer for the
results. But the problems of technology appear to be
insurmountable.
New York Times columnist
Paul Krugman today writes
about the massive potential for fraud that exists with touch-screen
voting machines, which leave no paper trail. It wouldn't be difficult
to program such a machine to throw an extra vote to Candidate X for
every 20 ballots that are cast.
The best question comes from
Congressman Rush Holt, of New Jersey, who has filed legislation
requiring both a paper trail and open software standards. When told
by opponents of his bill that there has never been a problem with the
new technology, Holt asked, "How do you know?"
posted at 8:26 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
