With any city that one can come to love, it is also inevitable that one casts a critical eye.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

I have now lived in Pittsburgh six years, longer than in any other city in my life apart from my home town. Some of it I adore. Some of it I find profoundly depressing. Let's start with the second part first and then go out on a high note.

Three items, all last week, one of them Pennsylvania-wide, but with Pittsburgh certainly not excluded:

1) The State Board of Education decided tentatively last month that it would cost too much, and that there weren't enough teachers anyway, to require all Pennsylvania students to learn a foreign language.

That approach is xenophobic at its base, defiantly ignorant of the world that Pennsylvanians and Americans live in and part of an effort to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist. America has a seriously negative balance of trade with the rest of the world. It has to borrow some $2 billion a day from China, India, Europe and the Arabs just to be able to keep paying the interest on America's national debt.

A major constraint on America's ability to even approach winning the war in Iraq is our lack of people who can speak Arabic. We see our soldiers trudging along the streets there with no possibility of having a clue as to what is going on in the heads of the Iraqis with whom they interact. They lack not only a knowledge of Arabic, but also anywhere near enough translators.

Then there is business. America's only hope of trying to keep up with a racing China is to have Americans who can speak, read and write Chinese. Such people are necessary to staff American offices in China; they are necessary to deal with Chinese business people coming to the United States. There are translators, but anyone who has ever tried to have an important conversation with someone through a translator is made immediately aware of the constraint that involves. I worked through translators in Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. I hated working through a translator. One is dependent and the possibility of misunderstanding is enormous.

Finally, there is the personal development aspect of learning a foreign language. There are some ideas that can be expressed in one language but not in another. One expands one's ability to think by learning a foreign language. And we want to deprive our Pennsylvania students of that because it costs too much. What about the marching band, or the football team?

2) Ask almost anyone to name the biggest barrier to a prosperous Pittsburgh Downtown. The answer is almost invariably parking. It costs too much. So on Jan. 1 our City Council lowered the parking tax by 15 percent to try to help. Did parking rates drop? No. Where did the 15 percent go? A neat $5.2 million went quietly from the city budget into the pockets of the rich handful of parking lot owners, starting with Merrill Stabile, president of the Alco Parking Corp., who owns 22 of the 60 lots audited by the acting city controller.

What is City Council going to do about this? Probably nothing. Is there any financial relationship between its members or other city authorities and the parking lot owners? As of now, the tax rate is scheduled to go even lower, putting even more of the taxpayers' cash into the pockets of the lot owners, unless the City Council takes action.

In the meantime, keep paying the lot owners those big fees to rent that little bitty space. Or just stay out of Downtown and watch it continue to die, in spite of the new office buildings and residences. We have always done it that way.

3) The surveillance cameras. We are told that candidate mayor-for-life Luke Ravenstahl and Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala, Jr. think it would be a great idea to increase the number of surveillance cameras already observing and recording life Downtown and then add them to high-crime areas of the city. Downtown in general isn't a high-crime area, even though there have been occasional daylight shootings on Smithfield Street and Fifth Avenue.

Crime prevention is one element. If criminals thought they were being filmed they might think twice given the increased chances of apprehension and conviction. On the other hand, without increased police presence and involvement, the risk would be that license numbers and shadowy figures would be caught on camera, perhaps carrying out aberrant or abhorrent activities, but with no result whatsoever in terms of prevention or punishment. Future good TV?

The way it is now, any policeman standing on the corner of any major Downtown intersection at rush hour -- never mind traffic surveillance cameras -- could fill the city's coffers with fines for blowing red lights without even trying. In March 2003 a camera Downtown recorded the brutal murder on the street of an elderly woman. No arrest or prosecution ever occurred.

Perhaps the most interesting question as the surveillance-cameras affair evolves will be which company, with which connections, will get the contract or contracts. Some $3.4 million in federal and city money is involved, which could explain some of the interest in the matter. This one will bear close watching.

I haven't left much space for what I like.

First, the flowers. All over the place, bright, appealing, enriching to our senses.

Second, the Pirates, in spite of all, but perhaps more the ballpark we built for the Wheeling-based owners rather than what they have filled it with.

Third, the plethora of theater in the city, which permits us to choose on a given night between "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" by Quantum Theatre, "Oklahoma!" by Civic Light Opera and "Hedda Gabler" by the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre. (Would you like to be mystified, wallow in nostalgia or think about suicide?)

Pittsburgh is a good place to spend the summer. Nos. 1, 2 and 3 above can all be fixed, and should be.