Hunkering Down In Dystopia

If my last post seemed overly optimistic in view of current circumstances, this one will remedy the impression.

As summer wanes, I should be looking forward to cooler weather, fewer mosquitoes, and settling in to the retired life with its time for Getting Things Done (things long put off due to busy-ness). However, not an hour goes by when I don't get a screaming, all-caps headline in my e-mail box from the Democrats, announcing that we're DOOMED, and that ALL HOPE IS LOST if I don't contribute more and more and more to the campaign. The Daily Kos (to which I am guiltily addicted) features one inflammatory "diary" after another in language every bit as offensive as anything you'd read in a tweet from one of the twits who truly believe that the Republican candidate is not an egomaniacal fascist but someone who will save us from whatever they want saving from.

The answer, of course, is to simply not read the stuff, and instead concentrate on the real news from more reasonable sources. So I turn to the Times (which disburses bad news much less shrilly than most other papers, including the Washington Post) and New Scientist, where my weekly science fix assures me that at least the UK (despite Brexit) is not as willing to abdicate reason as we are over here.

Last week's New Scientist, in fact, featured a story on the Indus Valley civilization and the possibility that it sustained a somewhat utopian culture for several hundred years. But hope that modern Western capitalism could produce anything even vaguely similar (warless, egalitarian, decentralized, prosperous) is slim. Instead we have news of all manner of mayhem: political, environmental, economic. And as the election draws nearer, and some polls indicate the possibility that the "Republican" candidate could win, I spend more and more time trying to find a place to live, off the grid preferably, somewhere far enough away from urban centers to be able to shelter myself from the consequences. We (the Beloved Spouse and I) are actually better off than the alt-right folks who swear they'll leave the country if the Democrats win, because there are unlikely to be any places for them to go that aren't even more culturally and politically leftish than we are here.

But TBS and I will undoubtedly just withdraw as far as we can into our domestic eu-topos, inside the fence, inside the walls, building our little suburban farm and trying not to go nuts.

Oddly enough, I've started wandering the neighborhood on a regular basis, getting to know the historic district in which we live. Quite to my surprise, the place is not completely populated by oversized, opulent mansions left over from McKinney's glory days. At least half of the houses I pass in any direction are smallish bungalows with eccentric yards, providing evidence of a wide variety of income levels. Some folks are clearly trying to take advantage of the current boom and are hiring contractors to put subway tile behind their cookers, replace their tile or corian counters (left over from the last boom) with granite, and replace their "dated" appliances with stainless steel. But some very nice fences are going up to hold urban chickens with fancy coops and small food gardens, many of these behind the smaller bungalows that have held on to their big lots. I'm truly enjoying the process of working through the streets and alleys to see what's there--and to get in my daily 30-60 minutes of not sitting on my backside.

Soon I'll make it to the local library (a nice walk up the street toward the town square) to start researching this house in hopes of obtaining historic status for it. If successful, it will cut the tax burden a bit and make the place more attractive should we decide to sell and skip town for parts west. The size and park-like aspect of the back quarter acre might make up for the fact that there's no central air or dishwasher in the house. And all we really need to do if we decide to stay is to find a way of blocking the light from the new Taj Mahal behind us (a rehabbed bungalow turned into a McMansion; the historic district covenants end in the alley between them and us), and covering up the piece-of-crap addition our northern neighbor has inserted on top of her already offensive fence. But thanks to a trip through an alley a few streets away, I've now got ideas about how to deal with both.

I'm still hopeful that the country will not abandon all reason and elect a clearly unqualified candidate, but my pessimistic nature requires that I prepare for the worst. In the meantime, I'll keep working on the house, walking the dog, hanging out in the garden with the cat, and preparing to shelter in place.


Image credit: I chose this image because it reminds me of my own neighborhood--and because it shows the hub of American political life as it once was--before modernity and urbanization changed it irrevocably.

Arcadian D.C. Uploaded by AlbertHerring to Wikimedia Commons. Montgomery C. Meigs's "View from the 2nd story of the residence of Mrs. Comre. John Rodgers, Franklin Row, K Street at 12 & 13 Sts, Washington, D.C., overlooking the backyard and adjacent neighborhood, and showing children standing on balconies," 1850. Library of Congress.

Sheltering In Place

Last summer I spent my first weeks as a quasi-retired educator doing what I called "philosophy in the garden." This involved spending a couple of hours reading Mary Midgley or John Ruskin whilst sitting on comfy chairs out back with the puppies. Sometimes I read aloud to them (which no doubt made folks who walked by in the alley wonder about my sanity; but then, they probably already do), and sometimes I just sat and enjoyed not doing anything productive.

Just this week I came across several articles and/or blog posts about leisure (the sources are recorded in the latest Cabinet post), and revisited John Hodgkinson's Brave Old World for his advice on what to do in November ("Kill Pig"), which took me back to his page on The Idler (to which I used to describe in a digital edition, but it seems to have disappeared). I'd subscribe to the print edition, except that I'm trying to winnow down my stacks of periodicals I can't bear to toss by trying to get at as many as possible online. So I'll just mosey by every once in a while, and read his books. It is, in fact, time to read the chapter on December: "Feast."

And just a couple of days ago, I wrote in the Cabinet about Maria Popova's wonderful page called Brain Pickings, in which she discusses Josef Pieper's book (1948), Leisure: The Basis of Culture. So even if I'm not now hanging about at the bottom of the garden with puppies (they're snoozing here in the study with me), I'm still philosophizing about doing very little in the traditional sense of work.

Given the state of the world at the moment, I might also seem to be hunkering down, trying to stay away from it all.  It's not just the blowing people up and the guns, although that's probably not a bad reason to stay home and out of it, but the sheer idiocy that seems to be taking over in the public sphere.  Donald Trump's ridiculous pomposity; Ben Carson's willful ignorance; everyone else's ideological shortsightedness and terror at the possibility of losing voters if they admit that climate change isn't just a communist plot. 

Thirty years ago I'd be out doing something--volunteering, teaching, trying to combat the Dark Side in imaginative ways. But now I'm not. I'm reading more, writing more, and cooking more, fighting personal battles against household food waste, mouse infestations, dreary days, and (twice a week) treading educational water by teaching and trying to prepare lessons that will engage and inspire. The Beloved Spouse has it much harder, because rather than trying to teach art history to art students, he's trying to teach students to think when they flat out don't want to. So, two years down the line, the plan is for him to retire and for us to do something more enjoyable with the rest of our lives.

And so the decision that faces us is whether to shelter in place (stay here and do the best we can in a part of the world that seems to abhor the life of the mind, but where we have a well-loved daughter and a house), or to move to somewhere, not here. I've written about the fantasies (Living In Interesting Times), but my desires ebb and flow as we weigh the possibilities. For example, for a time we were intrigued by the idea of Montana, but realized that it's too far away from either child and any family, and that we'd be more isolated than we might really want to be. So now the exploration of possibilities has moved west, to eastern Washington State, or perhaps Oregon, where we have family and friends, or even to Owens Valley, should a reasonable place show up when/if we start thinking seriously about any of this. But the ties that bind us here--all the work on the house, the proximity to other family--are pretty compelling, especially when I'm feeling particularly tired, and particularly (mentally) lazy.

This probably seems extremely trivial and self-serving in the moment. But having spent some serious time fighting the good fight, trying to help make meaningful changes, and ultimately achieving only very small victories, I think we might have earned a respite. Some of our (admittedly few) friends feel much the same way, so perhaps these sentiments really reflect a coming of (old) age, or another rite of passage. 

Or, they might simply stem from more than a week of dreary, driving rain, mud, soggy leaves, and post-Thanksgiving capitalist overload.  We did go out over the weekend--but only to buy coffee filters and have a nice lunch-time conversation after not leaving the house for six days. But we didn't participate in any of the buying frenzy that doesn't even wait for the holiday to end. Last Thursday's binge-watching of the original Star Wars films and an appropriately themed Thanksgiving meal with the Daughter, the Boyfriend, and the Dog provided a bit of an anodyne to the weather-related malaise. And that's probably reason enough to tick the "shelter" column on the decision list. By the time we can actually do anything, maybe we'll have built a strong enough argument for one or the other that the final choice won't seem nearly as onerous as it does now.

Stupidism

It may be a sign of age, but I do try to be moderate in most things (I lack "passion" some would say); every now and then, though, something really gets up my nose and a rant just bubbles up--kind of like a spit-take. 

It's not enough that both political parties are yanking stuff out of context to support "arguments" about what the other guys are doing. The most egregious of recent examples is being used by the Republicans to paint Obama as being "anti-small business" because he insisted that we don't do anything on our own in an unfortunately worded (i.e. longer than one sentence) comment about our dependence upon infrastructure. 

But the so-called "Liberal Media" (capital letters--as on the truck I occasionally follow down the highway to Dallas that sports a bumper sticker in the window that says "I don't believe the Liberal Media"), in their efforts to sound more non-partisan, occasionally feed the shark.  Last Thursday morning, in NPR's coverage of Romney's speech before the American Legion, a reporter on Morning Edition quoted one of the most blatantly racist remarks I've heard spoken publicly in some time.  A woman, when asked what she thought of Obama, said "I just don't like 'im; can't stand to look at 'im. I don't like his wife; she's far from a first lady. 'Bout time we get a first lady who acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady."

Say what??  How are we supposed to take that?  We'll never know, because the report didn't include any follow up.  Did the reporter ask her what she meant by her remarks?  (Note: Apparently Ari Shapiro didn't have time clarify; see the Wonkett post linked below).  But it's certainly a sound bite--one that rankled some folk other than me (the Obama Diary; Left In Alabama; Wonkette). What are we to make of this?  How can we not see this as racist, without more context? Unless, of course, she didn't think Laura Bush looked or acted like a first lady, either. Hillary Clinton was, of course, one of those uppity wimmin who didn't do much of anything first-lady-like, but somehow I doubt that this woman's remarks were directed at the most recent Mrs. Bush.

I usually applaud NPR for the length of its stories, but this one short bit, designed (I guess) to show how much support Romney has among older vets, failed miserably because it leaves so many questions to be asked--and answered.  Is NPR editing for effect?  Boy would I love to have heard what else that woman had to say; maybe she just didn't like all the sundresses and bare arms.

Every day, probably five or six times every day, I get requests from the Dems to fork over another 5 bucks to address some quip by some Republican.  I told the nice lady on the phone a few months ago to just take my name of her call list because 1) I'm not going to answer anonymous calls and 2) I'm smart enough to give what I can (or want to) when I can or want to.  I  pay enough attention to the news to know that whatever problems I have with Democrats pale compared to what the so-called Republican party wants to do.  My friends--and even my parents--thought I was a right-winger when I was a kid--but compared to those guys in Tampa, I'm a flaming Communist. This is not only not my father's Republican party, it's not even my own from 1964.

As the saying goes, everyone's entitled to their own opinion; but they're not entitled to their own facts (or, as C.P. Scott editor of the Guardian, reportedly once said,  "Comment is free, but facts are sacred").  The Republicans ignore factcheck.org and fundamental rules of logic at their peril, because what little faith I have in American intellect leads me to hope that most of the populace will wake up before the election and decide en masse that they don't want to joint the Stupidism movement.

A post-script:  I got a chance this morning to unload on a survey conducted by the Obama campaign; in my comments, I asked that the Democrats refrain from taking quips out of context and reporting or using any information that couldn't be verified as factual.  If anybody actually reads my remarks, I'll be happy; I'll be ecstatic if anybody actually pays them any heed. Also, as I was looking for an illustration for the post (knowing that I wanted something to do with the old "three wise monkeys" story), I ran across this on Wikimedia:

It's by Stuckist  artist Peter Absalom; whilst Stuckists are a rather laudable group (they oppose the kind of conceptual art that particularly annoys me), I was reminded by the picture that their name was chosen in much the same spirit as I've decided upon "Stupidism" to describe our present political malady.


Image credits: The Three Wise Monkeys relief decorates the Toshogu temple, one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites at Nikko, Japan. The Peter Absalom work is noted above, but I also got that from Wikimedia Commons.

The End of Plutopia?

I wrote about the United States as a "plutopia" back in 2008, and what follows is my latest take on the subject.

Recent political shenanigans regarding the debt ceiling have brought some interesting responses from thoughtful folks who have somehow risen above the snark and recognized a very painful but evident truth: We cannot go on as we are.

Last Sunday's Opinion section in the Daily Poop ran a reprint of David Leonhardt's New York Times article on consumer spending and its role in the current economic stagnation. In it he notes the chicken-or-egg dilemma: which comes first? Consumers spend less because the economy's bad, or the economy's bad because of consumers' new-found frugality?

This has been a burning question for many, and for some time. I know I'm not spending as much and am putting much more into savings, paying down remaining debt, and being much more mindful about what I buy. But for me it's not so much a cash issue as an environmental/philosophical one. I'm trying to practice what I preach, especially in my consumption choices: higher quality, more sustainably raised food; adhering to Morris's dictum about not having anything in my house I don't consider beautiful or useful; being miserly about utility use. I can't tell you when I last went shopping without a particular item in mind, and I've lost track of the number of things I haven't bought because I decided (after much contemplation) that I really didn't need it. That's, in fact, why I'm typing this post on my three-year-old Gateway PC notebook instead of a nice shiny new iMac.

I do still slip occasionally, but mostly it's small change: an app for the iPad (now over a year old), a new DVD (we tend to watch movies more than once, and don't go to the cineplex much because of the cheesy background music you have to listen to and ads you have to watch before the feature starts), a few books from Half Price. In Whole Foods the other day, I made my first impulse purchase in quite some time--three bars of lavender goat milk soap. I fell for the smell.

Even my support for the wine industry is dwindling, because I recently realized just how much we were spending, and just how much sleep I was losing (and weight I wasn't losing) thanks to an extra glass or two above my supposed limit of one glass per night. So now we're opting for fewer bottles per week, focusing on the highest quality we can afford.

But that's just it. Frugality on one end breeds job losses on the other. Mind you, I don't think my old friend Matt Lavelle is going to personally suffer if I cut back on the fermented grape juice (especially since I don't have easy access to his wines). But if everybody got this stingy (or perhaps this thoughtful?), it would make a huge difference. Which is why I wish people would start boycotting the crap loaded onto shelves in supermarkets and demanding better quality, more nutritious, less environmentally degrading stuff.

"Wait!" they say around here. "If we stop buying our high-fructose corn syrup beverage of choice (the one with no nutritional value at all, and enormous cost to the rest of us in terms of land-use and consequential medical costs), what happens to all those poor folks who work for Dr. Pepper (or Frito Lay, or whatever)? They'll lose their jobs!" Not to mention the fact that doing anything to deter folks from buying said liquid uselessness (like taxing it) means more nanny-statism, more big gummint interference in my god-given right to make stupid choices.

Well, maybe not. The other day, having not had time to drop by Starbucks for my weekly venti non-fat latte (major indulgence), I went to the school bistro for something with a tad of caffeine in it to get me through the afternoon. For a while they stocked HonesTea, but that was gone. Ultimately, the only thing I could find that wasn't simply vitamin-enhanced sugar water or HFCS laden anything (or ginseng-augmented "energy drink"), was "all-natural" Snapple Lemon Tea. A bit too sweet for me, but it only had water (filtered, of course), tea, lemon, and sugar. I'd have been happier with it unsweetened (having long ago weaned myself from sugary drinks), but at least this offered an alternative to the rest. Snapple, of course, is owned by Dr. Pepper. And get this; the company has a manifesto ("social responsibility report") that includes, among their five year goals, "Continue to provide a full range of products, with at least 50% of innovation projects in the pipeline focused on reducing calories, offering smaller sizes and improving nutrition."

I'm a bit suspicious of their motives for offering smaller sizes, for which they will probably ask current prices, but hey. It's a step.

Frito Lay, another big local employer, has already started marketing more healthful choices, although I've yet to take them up on any new, more nutritious offerings. I'll have to wait until I run out of Clif bars and have to run down to a machine for a snack. At any rate, Frito Lay, too, has a section on their website devoted to "Our Planet," and it includes 43 things they're doing or going to do to help save the earth (they apparently started recycling their packing materials back in 1939), including using renewable energy sources and other fairly expensive investments. There's also a "your health" section which is somewhat less convincing (potatoes and corn, although "all natural," are, after all, pretty low-quality carbs to load up on--especially since we all know that "you can't eat just one" chip). You can also pretty much bet that the farms that corn and those potatoes come from are laden with chemical fertilizers.

Given that we're not, as a still comparatively wealthy population, going to give up ours snacks, I guess all this represents a small step in the right direction. Especially when one considers the under-served poor in areas where few supermarkets exist and a cheap way to fill your stomach is to buy a bag of Fritos or down a slug of Snapple from the local ice house (Texan for convenience store).

When we look at what confronts a large part of the world, however, we're still an absurdly wealthy country. For example, we don't generally die of intestinal diseases because almost everybody has access to a toilet and we don't have raw sewage running through our neighborhoods. I actually attribute my iron gut and resistance to tummy upsets to my childhood in then-underdeveloped Asia, where I was exposed to all manner of bugs I'm now apparently immune to. But appallingly huge numbers of children and adults elsewhere die every year of diseases that could be eradicated with decent sanitation (and it doesn't have to be water-hungry flush-toilets, either).

What I do want to question here is the basic premise that in order to be a great nation, or even a fully-employed nation, we have to keep buying stuff. And we have to keep employing people to make stuff. And this stuff should be big and/or expensive: refrigerators, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, houses, computers. But in order to keep these folks in jobs, we have maintain the whole planned obsolescence ethos we bought into, probably as far back as when Henry Ford started turning people into automatons on assembly lines. None of this big stuff can last so long that we only buy it once, or twice, or even three times in our lives. We have to keep buying new ones, the more frequently, the better.

Now, I can see trading in the old energy-inefficient fridge for a shiny new one with LED lights and that uses far less electricity. I can even see trading in the ten-year-old Civic that gets 35-40 mpg (if you drive like an old lady) for a new hybrid that gets 50-55 (again, if you drive like an old lady). But there are people who buy or lease a new car every couple of years and actually go through dozens of automobiles in a lifetime. These folks are also more likely to buy bigger, more expensive vehicles that get much poorer mileage on a tank of gas. But that's what the Plutopian economy requires: buy more, more often.

But alternatives do exist, and before I go off on this any further, I'd like to recommend that folks take a look at Juliet Schor's web page on Plenitude. Her suggestions are rather radical--for example, perhaps we should work less rather than more to create a better economy--but I think truly promising. I've mentioned her before, but I'm in the process of re-reading her book (the first one I bought for the iPad) and she makes even more sense now than she did a year ago.

Your homework, Dear Reader, is to go to her blog and meander through it. That alone should give us more to talk about . . . And while you're at it, check out this week's Owls' Parliament for a related article, and a superb comment by one of my former students. It offers me hope for the future, because these folks are the ones who're going to have to live in it.

Image credit: A US Food & Drug Administration poster promoting corn, from 1918. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Finding the Middle

I feel like Peter Finch's character in Network--who has become a metaphor for frustration since the film premiered the year my son was born (1976--which probably explains why I never actually saw the movie itself). But the tag line "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" has been floating around my head for the past couple of days.

It doesn't help that I've also been watching Max Headroom, via the bad-transfer DVDs we bought last month--another emblem of a good concept (not unlike Firefly) that couldn't get the ratings it needed in order to keep it in production. Max was a mid-eighties phenomenon that presaged digital media expansion and inhabited a dystopic future similar to that depicted in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner (1982).

Admittedly, I'm rather preoccupied with things dystopic/eutopic at the moment, because I'm writing a Philosophical Perspectives course for the Winter quarter (Technology and Utopia), and am finishing up a short story that involves life after a Coronal Mass Ejection causes an Electromagnetic Pulse, knocking out all solid-state electronics and screwing big-time with The Grid (the stuff I was talking about here last month). The story, however, is a utopia. No, I don't think we'd necessarily find ourselves living in garbage dumps and smacking each other about with machetes after a big calamity.

If all this isn't enough, I'm also reading Charles Robert Wilson's Julian Comstock, a thoroughly engaging literary thought experiment about life after Peak Oil and the False Tribulations. Wilson, at least, hasn't forgotten that it hasn't been all that long since we were doing without electricity altogether (emphasized rather vividly in the two movies we watched this weekend, Silverado and The Illusionist). He's also about the only science fiction writer I'm reading these days, because I'm so not into cyberpunk and military SF/schoolboy warcraft crap. I think that one reason I'm fond of non-zombie-related Steampunk is that it tends to rely on rather imaginative combinations of old technologies and Art-Deco streamline-aesthetics, rather than on blood, guts, and dismemberment by squiddy aliens.

So, yes, I'm being cranky again, primarily because I'm getting more and more frustrated about the state of modern politics, and their handmaiden, modern media.

Why all the movies and old TV shows this weekend? Several reasons: pledge fortnight on PBS (I've paid my dues and I am not willing to sit through hours of drivel from Yanni and Celtic Women which have not one thing in common with regular programming; I want my Doc Martin, damnit!), and the growing number of utterly annoying commercials for pharmaceuticals, primarily the ones that deal with male erectile issues.

My main objection to television these days actually lies in the coverage of the news, and (except for PBS) the apparent inability to report events without hyping them into the stratosphere. The ratings games that gave rise to critiques in the form of Network and Max Headroom are alive and well twenty and thirty years later--and I'm just plain tired.

The demise of civil disagreement and calm, reasoned, argument has driven me away from my television set as a primary vehicle for news. Since I haven't been able to stomach having the tube on before four or five in the afternoon for the last several years, my mornings begin with a good cup of coffee and the Daily Poop, usually the funnies first, and then a leisurely stroll through the various sections. Since I've got my mornings off this quarter, and can afford the time if I'm not grading, I can then peruse a magazine or two either in print or on the iPad, before I have to get to work. I'm frequently rewarded in one venue or another, and today I found an article that warmed my little soul right up: about a new organization called No Labels. According to its website (and a nice little introductory video), its aim is to bring back the same civil discourse I've been lamenting the loss of. Whatever our views, we ought to be able to share them, discuss them, and locate some kind of common ground without screaming at each other, and this organization is grounded in that hope.

Normally, I'm not much of a hopeful person. But that may change if this movement gets up enough steam--before that's all we have to run the show.

Image credit: Hungarian television set from 1959. ORION AT 602 - 1959. By Istvan Takacs, via Wikimedia Commons. The font is "Typewriter" by P22.