Posted 4:02 PM by Gene

Today out of nostalgia I paid a Web visit to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I lived too long. Once it was a center of productive industry; today, like most towns, it's a quarantine for poor people. (The surrounding county has become a smiley-faced sprawl of office malls and house-flipping, and awful crimes that indicate the quiet ways of the native "Dutchmen" passed into history long ago.) To overcome its uselessness the locals have flung several hundred millions on make-work RENDELLIUMS, first a ball park (with naming rights sold to a publisher that started in Lancaster and moved out of town) and now an attempt to make a convention center out of a defunct department store, apparently (and suitably) over budget. Part of the scheme is a Marriott, the town fathers forgetting that in another spasm of urban renewal they built a Hilton (!) that sits underused several blocks north, next to a gaping urban-renewal hole the town fathers sometimes fill with infernal street fests.

Lancaster faces a peculiar American conundrum: There is no true reason for being for America's cities any longer, LEGENDARY WELCHES and JE$$Es having taken care of them in equal and equally malevolent measure. Why do RENDELLS continue to believe that casinos, ball parks, convention halls, "the AHTS" and street festivals are the equivalent of industry? Why do they persist in building their debt-laden white elephants? Why must they always milk the taxpayers dry with their corrupt and worthless schemes?