Sharing: Barbara Ehrenreich

Posted on March 20, 2009

Mostly out of laziness I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it’s not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am “baby,” “honey,” “blondie,” and, most commonly, “girl.”My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour—which, from the want ads, seems doable—I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes—like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord’s Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns. Still, it is a shock to realize that “trailer trash” has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience and go for a $500-a-month “efficiency” thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five minutes if there’s no road construction and I don’t get caught behind some sundazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it’s a sweet little place—a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, the trailer park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished. Read more

Sharing: John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick

Posted on February 16, 2009

In the Kalahari Desert of northwestern Botswana live tribes of hunter gatherers called the !Kung San. They are often described by outsiders as living proof of the survival advantages of strong social bonds. “Most creatures get what they need to live from their physical surrounding,” researcher Roy Baumeister wrote. “Humans, in contrast, get what they need from each other and from their culture.” A quick look at the !Kung’s physical environment shows us why they are so deeply embedded in each other’s lives.Coming alone into the !Kung’s home range, a city dweller would find miles and miles of dust and scrub vegetation. If dehydration didn’t kill him first, the same city dweller would most likely starve to death pretty quickly. Yet archaeological excavations show that this region has been occupied by the same cultural group, living the same way in the same spot, for more than eleven thousand years. In the Kalahari, rainfall is scarce, summer temperatures exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit, winter temperatures dip below freezing, and given the presence of lions, “fast food” could easily refer to you or me. Living off the land in a place this harsh makes clear why early humans could ill afford to be nasty and brutish, at least not toward members of their own social group.Even though the !Kung live in the midst of seemingly limitless real estate, a Kung village is half a dozen huts tightly clustered around a small, cleared circle. Despite any desire for privacy, all doors face in toward the communal space. If you were to spend the night in such a village and see lions’ eyes gleaming in the darkness just outside the ring of cooking fires, you might begin to appreciate why, for early humans, feelings of isolation were linked with fear, the fear that still remains at the core of our experience of loneliness.The anthropologists, Irven Devore and Richard Lee, first made contact with the !Kung living in the Gobe area of the Kalahari in 1963. Six years later a young woman named Marjorie Shostak arrived in Gobe for a two-year stay. She had no particular training in fieldwork—she was simply in Africa with her husband, the physician and anthropologist Mel Konner. But she decided to make use of her time by becoming fluent in the !Kung language and trying to get beyond the cultural and professional barriers to understand hunter-gatherer life on a personal level. The result was a book entitled Nisa:The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, in which Shostak’s account of life among the !Kung was interspersed with vivid monologues by the woman she called Nisa. The book became a literary sensation because it did not portray ancestral society as a war of all against all, or as a tableau vivant of the noble savage. Instead, it presented ancestral life as a soap opera, a tangle of intense social linkages in all their messy melodrama. Read more

Sharing: Tobias Wolff

Posted on December 28, 2008

Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders–a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.

With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. “Oh, that’s nice,” one of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, “One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.”

Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. “Damned unfair,” he said. “Tragic, really. If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.”

She stood her ground. “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said. “I just think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.”

“Unforgivable,” Anders said. “Heaven will take note.”

She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard’s neck. The guard’s eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun. “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. “One of you tellers hits the alarm, you’re all dead meat. Got it?”

The tellers nodded.

“Oh, bravo, “Anders said. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in front of him. “Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.” Read more

Sharing: Barack Obama

Posted on December 3, 2008

A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan. It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for most of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

None of this concerned me much, for I didn’t get many visitors. I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate company exactly. I enjoyed exchanging Spanish pleasantries with my mostly Puerto Rican neighbors, and on my way back from classes I’d usually stop to talk to the boys who hung out on the stoop all summer long about the Knicks or the gunshots they’d heard the night before. When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs—“Scoop the poop, you bastards!” my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we’d laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed.

I enjoyed such moments—but only in brief. If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.

I remember there was an old man living next door who seemed to share my disposition. He lived alone, a gaunt, stooped figure who wore a heavy black overcoat and a misshapen fedora on those rare occasions when he left his apartment. Once in a while I’d run into him on his way back from the store, and I would offer to carry his groceries up the long flight of stairs. He would look at me and shrug, and we would begin our ascent, stopping at each landing so that he could catch his breath. When we finally arrived at his apartment, I’d carefully set the bags down on the floor and he would offer a courtly nod of acknowledgement before shuffling inside and closing the latch. Not a single word would pass between us, and not once did he ever thank me for my efforts. Read more

Sharing: Hooman Majd

Posted on October 29, 2008

Laat, like many other Persian words, can be translated in different ways and some dictionaries use the English “hooligan” as the definition, although it is in fact wildly inaccurate. The laat holds special places in Iranian culture: a place that at times can be compared to the popular position of a Mafioso in American culture, albeit without the extreme violence associated with him—and at other times a place of respect and admiration for the working-class code he lives by. Hooligans are anarchic; laats fight only when necessary and to establish their authority.Iran’s cultural history of the twentieth century prominently featured the laat and with perhaps more affection the jahel, the onetime laat who had elevated himself to a grand position of authority and respect in a given urban neighborhood. The jahel, a sort of street “boss,” occupied himself with many different illegal and quasi-legal activities but, unlike gang leaders in America, rarely found himself the target of police investigations—partly because the police were often from his social class, partly because the police were doled out many favors by him, and partly because the governments under the Shah were loathe to disrupt or antagonize a class of society that could be relied upon for support, should it become necessary to buy it.The last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when forced to flee the country in 1953, found great use in the jahels and laats of South Tehran when the coup organizers intent on restoring him to power (financed and organized by the CIA) hired a prominent and formerly pro-Mossadeq laat, Shaban Jafari, better known as Shaban Bimokh (Shaban the Brainless), to successfully lead a counter-uprising in the streets of Tehran, and mercilessly beat any anti-Shah demonstrators they came across. Using street savvy toughs rather than military gave the Shah the cover of populist sentiment in his favor, not to mention the convenience of violent reprisal perpetuated in his name, rather than directly by him and his forces.The laats and jahels came from the lower and therefore deeply religious strata of Iranian society and were strong believers in Islam themselves. But they were notorious drinkers and womanizers, not to mention involved in prostitution and drugs. The jahel code, at least they themselves believed, was one of ethics and justice. Shia ethics and the occasional sin would be repented for later, as is possible in Shia Islam. The code extended to their dress: black suits, white tieless shirts, and narrow-brimmed black fedoras perched at an angle on their heads. A cotton handkerchief was usually to be found in their hands as a sort of fetish, and the famous jahel dance in the cafes of working-class Tehran involved slow spinning movements with the handkerchief prominently waved in the air. Read more

Sharing: Thomas Friedman

Posted on October 5, 2008

The city of Tianjin, China, is home to many of China’s big automakers, and in September 2007, I was invited to speak at the China Green Car Congress there. Yes, China, which has been steadily improving its own auto mileage and pollution standards now holds a conference to talk about the latest in green-car technologies. Who knew? The venue was the Marriott in Tianjin and the audience was mostly Chinese auto industry executives—some pretty tough-looking car guys—who listened to my remarks, via translation on headphones. I thought hard and long beforehand about what to say to this group that might stimulate their thinking and give them a perspective they hadn’t heard before. In the end, I decided to go for the jugular. The basic thrust of my talk is as follows:“Every year I come to China and young Chinese tell me, ‘Mr. Friedman, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years, you got to have your Industrial Revolution based on coal and oil, now it is our turn.’ Well, on behalf of all Americans, I am here today to tell you that you’re right. It’s your turn. Please, take your time, grow as dirty as you like for as long as you like. Take your time! Please! Because I think my country needs only five years to invent all the clean power and energy efficiency tools that you, China, will need to avoid choking on pollution and then we are going to come over and sell them all to you. We will get at least a five-year jump on you in the next great global industry: clean power and energy efficiency. We will totally dominate you in those industries. So please, don’t rush, grow as dirty as you like for as long as you want. If you want to do it for five more years, that’s great. If you want to give us a ten-year lead on the next great global industry, that would be even better. Please, take your time.”At first, I could see a lot of these grizzled Chinese car guys adjusting their earpieces to make sure that they were hearing me right: “What the hell did he just say? America is going to clean our clock in the next great global industry? What industry is that?” But as I went on, I could also see some heads nodding and some wry smiles of recognition from those who got my point: Clean power is going to be the global standard over the next decade, and clean power tools are going to be the next great global industry, and the countries who make more of them, and sell more of them, will have a competitive advantage. Those countries will have both the cleanest air and the fastest-growing business—not a bad combination.That is the point I was trying to drive home in Tianjin, by making it into a competitive issue: The longer China focuses on getting its share from a world that no longer exists—a world in which people could use dirty fuels with impunity—and the longer it postpones imposing the policies, prices, and regulations on itself that will stimulate a clean power industry at scale, the happier I am as an American. Read more

Sharing:

Posted on September 14, 2008

I don’t think it’s an accident that luxury cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the ship were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in.

Not so the megalines. It’s no accident they’re so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decayaction of the sea. Our ship, The Nadir, seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little third world guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan, a type of nautical hoist (like a pulley on steroids!) with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat and walked away with a nod.

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But on a luxury cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue.

But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this regard the ship’s constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out. Read more

Sharing:

Posted on August 8, 2008

At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on tv, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass’ as we sometimes call it.”

I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently anti-drug and remained that way until my freshman year in college. Throughout first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.

I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them—how biblical, almost—to witness my complete turnaround. The reverent mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-tv movie:

Friendly fellow from down the hall: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.

Me: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.

Handsome roommate of friendly fellow: Let me give you a shotgun.

Me: A shotgun? What’s that?

Again, the handsome roommate: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.

Me: Where do you want me to lie?

I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought. Read more

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Posted on July 23, 2008

To be perfectly honest, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee. His Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country, not because his ministry was so very large, but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism. Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the state of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity—i.e. end of times prophecies; the belief that Armageddon is coming and that with it, the true believers will be whisked up to heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth and generally suffer various tortures.

The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, busses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most end timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key showdown.

Practically speaking, this manifests itself in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies. Support that Israel has been happy to receive despite the fact that church doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle—with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown to them by American evangelicals if they knew for instance that ardent end timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the second coming. Read more

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Posted on July 3, 2008

In past moments of national division, young people have played a disproportionate role in deepening the American democratic experiment. The black freedom struggle and the anti-war movement of the 1960s were largely sustained owing to their vision and courage. As older folk become jaded, disillusioned, and weary, the lively moral energy of reflective and compassionate young people can play a vital role in pushing democratic momentum. Yet one of the most effective strategies of corporate marketeers has been to target the youth market with distractive amusement and saturate them with pleasurable sedatives that steer them away from engagement with issues of peace and justice.

The incessant media bombardment of images (of salacious bodies and mindless violence) on TV and in movies and music convinces many young people that the culture of gratification—a quest for insatiable pleasure, endless titillation, and sexual stimulation—is the only way of being human. Hedonistic values and narcissistic identities produce emotionally stunted young people unable to grow up and unwilling to be responsible democratic citizens. The market-driven media lead many young people to think that life is basically about material toys and social status. Democratic ideas of making the world more just, or striving to be a decent and compassionate person, are easily lost or overlooked.

This media bombardment not only robs young people of their right to struggle for maturity—by glamorizing possessive individualism at the expense of democratic individuality—but also leaves them ill equipped to deal with the spiritual malnutrition that awaits them after their endless pursuit of pleasure. This sense of emptiness of the soul holds for wealthy kids in vanilla suburbs and poor kids in chocolate cities. Neither the possession of commodities nor the fetishizing of commodities satisfies people’s need for love and self-confidence. Instead, we witness personal depression, psychic pain, and individual loneliness fueling media-influenced modes of escapism. These include the high use of drugs like cocaine and ecstasy; the growing popularity of performing sex acts at incredibly young ages; and the way so many kids have become addicted to going online. This disgraceful numbing of the senses, dulling of the mind, and confining of life to an eternal present—with a lack of connection to the past and no vision for a different future—is an insidious form of soul murder. And we wonder why depression escalates and suicides increase among our precious children. Read more

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