On Thursday, the Times foreign desk updated us on the development of "class consciousness" in Cuba. On Friday, the Times nation desk portrayed complaints about airplane noise in Silicon Valley as exposing a "class divide." Today, the Times metro desk gets into the action, managing to fit a routine article about an environmental cleanup of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn into — sure enough — what seems to be emerging as the newspaper's standard Marxist analytical framework of class struggle.
Here's the relevant passage:
One part of the E.P.A.'s plan for the 1.8-mile canal would require the city to build an eight-million-gallon sewage storage tank so that the area's combined waste and rainwater sewers would not overflow during heavy storms and contaminate the canal. But the site the agency has chosen for the tank would place it under a park that has a popular 3-foot-9-inch-deep swimming pool, fondly known as the Double D pool because it is between Douglass and DeGraw Streets.
...Children from Park Slope, Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens mingle with those from three nearby housing projects.
"There's nothing like getting into a bathing suit for neutralizing class lines," said Holly White, a mother of two young children who learned to swim at the Double D and caper there much of the summer....
Construction of the sewage storage tank would close the pool, and possibly an adjoining playground, basketball court and skate park, for years; officials have not said whether they would come up with a temporary alternative. ... The E.P.A. says that in any case, the pool will one day have to be dug up since it was built above the remnants of a plant that manufactured natural gas from coal and left behind a residue of toxic coal tars.
As if without the calming effect of the swimming pool, the residents of Brooklyn would be engaging in violent class warfare, as they usually do when they aren't wearing bathing suits.
You wouldn't know it from reading the Times article, but this pool is an outdoor pool that is open only from June 28 to Labor Day. Somehow, miraculously, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens manage to stave off the class clashes with public housing residents during the other ten months of the year without the assistance of the pool.
As I said in some of the previous posts, it's nearly comical, but aside from the humor, it can be annoying, because even if all a reader wants is an update on the canal cleanup, he's nevertheless subjected to a lecture from the Times (or a source the paper chooses to include) about "neutralizing class lines."