VENTING

Those massive Big Dig vents have only one thing in common with cell phones and immigrants: They are discriminated against because they are new.

One is inanimate concrete and iron towering into the sky, blamed for being so even though Boston is rotten with such things lucky enough to be offices or apartments. One is tiny and electronic, blamed for people carrying on loud conversations -- although it's better than two people talking loudly face to face. One is living, blamed for any number of things by people who are (an old argument) undoubtedly the children or grandchildren of immigrants.

The car-exhaust vents, though, are set apart by origin: They are the frantic, reverse-engineered compromise of a project costing billions of dollars more than intended.

They are also set apart by disguise, something unworkable for cell phones or immigrants as a class. In the North End, the vent is a faux high-rise lurking among the real thing; the one toward the waterfront, however, is isolated, the tallest thing for city blocks, and the city has decided on disguise by beautification. Blue and yellow rectangular panels are placed with 1960s-space-age randomness on the face of what otherwise looks like a monument to functioning fascism, a Ministry of Truth. The panels draw the eye, the effect opposite what's desired, and somehow stand out from the structure itself.

This is a nun wearing clown makeup, a spectacle that would make anyone uncomfortable, and it is all the worse that government has engineered it all, piling mistake atop mistake atop mistake.

The vents were bad enough, but they were what they were. Now the city has taken something functional and turned it into a monument to incompetence.