themacinator

Tyche Hendricks: The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport

2012-01-23T18:53:00.000-08:00

The United States has an obsession with the border that seems to get bigger and badder every year. Americans trot along, doing their thing, invoking the "American Dream" and the "melting pot" until any excuse comes along to point the finger at someone else: immigrants, like invasive germs, must be the cause of the problem. Borders, strong immune systems, must be built up to keep Them out. In 1994, California passed Prop 187, which would have denied medical care and education to undocumented immigrants. The economy sucked, Pete Wilson was doing a pretty poor job at governing, and the dot.com boom hadn't taken off. Immigrants were an easy target. After 9/11, not only did the government shove aside civil liberties and start wars around the world, beefing up the border now had a plausible sounding excuse: the people who want to hurt "us" might get in! And worse, with another economic downturn, the political timing was right to play off of fears of "them" stealing "our" jobs. At the beginning of the Bush administration, according to Tyche Hendricks, there were 78 miles of pedestrian fence and 57 miles of vehicle fence along the border. In 2006, George Bush signed the "Secure Fence Act," which led to the construction of almost six hundred miles of fencing. (Note: President Obama did not stop the construction of the fence, and I believe all 670 miles of it have been completed. He has frozen funds for the "virtual fence," which is only a small blessing.)

The problem with this way of thinking is that it's all about a line, sometimes literally in the sand. Tyche Hendricks has written a beautiful book with a terrible title that convincingly argues for thinking about much wider view of the border: a region that includes not just the tiny patch underneath the fence, but also the huge area that comprise the border states, and in fact, both countries that have created and continue to shape the issues Americans are so obsessed with. Hendricks works from the Eastern-most part of the border in Texas to the Western-most part in California, and in each chapter she focuses on a border-straddling community, and deals with a border-straddling issue: environmental issues, education, jobs, health care, etc. The people who live on the border, or more accurately, in the border region, understand this concept, but for the rest of us, Hendricks brings the point home.

Pictured below is one of the places she describes, Friendship Park in Tijuana, a park that straddles Mexico and California. The photographer, Steev Hise, has captured people celebrating communion through a metal fence. Previously the park had a shorter, more permeable fence where food could be passed and hands could be held. Simple, everyday rituals like this are bifurcated and rendered tragic by the US/Mexico border policy. As Hendricks writes, "In a United States fraught by national security concerns, the fence became a physical display that the government was protecting its citizens from foreign dangers and unauthorized interlopers. That's one way of conceptualizing the border: strengthening its capacity to divide."

(photo used under creative commons license)

It's an unfortunate way to conceptualize the border, and one likely to continue to lead to the militarization of Mexico and of the border itself, of vast sums of money and lives wasted on the "war on drugs." Hendricks sums it up: "An attempt to partition the borderlands, to wall ourselves off, is unlikely to succeed." It hasn't succeeded in other countries, and it runs contrary to what America prides itself on: the mythology of Ellis Island and of immigrants coming to this country and Making It. "The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport" breaks this down into much more detail, and presents solutions that are meaningful, should the government ever decide to look at alternatives to militarization, racism, and exploitative labor. This is a must read.

Year of the Bugs: A Small Mold is Growing

2012-01-21T18:46:00.001-08:00

Anne Lammott: Imperfect Birds

2012-01-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

Oh, Anne, oh Rosie- how I loved you. In fact, fiction, how I loved you! It seems my fiction days are numbered. (I think I've dwelled on this before, but I've also dwelled on the numbering of my memory days, so I'll skip that one for now.) I'm going to blame my total dislike of this book on my falling out with fiction as the previous two "Rosie" books were some of my historical favorites. This book was so hard to read, so hard to engage with that I seriously considered putting it down, even as I kept reading it in the hopes of redemption. Both mom, Elizabeth, and daughter, Rosie, had gotten so lost in themselves that they were unlikeable: sure, Rosie is supposed to be unlikeable as a teenager, that's the plot, and Elizabeth is supposed to be a troubled, angsty, self-absorbed mother, but this is over the top. How many times can we hear that people love to look at Rosie, as if her beauty is enough to make us like her? How many times can we watch Rosie drowning in drugs and hear about Elizabeth's struggles to stay sober without Anne Lamott coming in and make the obvious, even necessary, plot adjustment: drug issues clearly have family- nurture and nature- components. Is Elizabeth really that much of a straw character- the dysfunctional stay at home, unable-to-use-the internet mom- that she can't even get out of her denial long enough to even stage a cliche intervention?

Rosie and Elizabeth are underdeveloped as characters: maybe if the books (this is the third in a trilogy) were read back to back the book would work, but it doesn't stand alone, and the last book was 13 years ago. Anyone else got a better memory than me? (Oh, everyone does, but not that good!) The book stumbles along with mini-crisis after mini-crisis: Rosie is a spoiled brat with a burgeoning drug problem, and Elizabeth and husband James deal with it over and over and over and over and over until the last ten pages of the book when they Deal With It in the most anti-climactic and overdue climax of, well, any fiction book I've read in awhile. I'm not sure why I feel so let down, but I feel so let down.

The Year of the Bugs: How Red is Your Sofafree?

2012-01-15T10:56:00.001-08:00

Hal Niedzviecki: The Peep Diaries

2012-01-13T14:36:00.000-08:00

It is very possible that Hal Niedzviecki has ruined blogging for me. I'm certain that this wasn't his attention, but "The Peep Diaries" makes online sharing out to be a sordid, if necessary and inevitable modern pastime. Niedzviecki's "Peep" is "a rapidly emerging phenomenon, a cultural movement steeped in and made possible by technological change" that stems from our contradictory need for more privacy- bigger houses, bigger fences, more space- and the need to share everything about ourselves and have people care about what we share- facebook, twitter, reality TV about "regular" people. Blogging is just one example of this: we put ourselves out there because we need to be heard and recognized as unique individuals. Successful bloggers have readers who depend on their bloggers for a sense of community: they turn to the blog for a reflection of their own quirks, for entertainment, for "peep." So until I read "The Peep Diaries," I thought of blogging as a creative outlet: I've always liked writing and writing helped me straighten out my thoughts. I have a "voice" for personal thoughts and a "voice" for public thoughts. I've always kind of written in my head- figured out what I would write, as opposed to what I would say, and blogging is the modern version of that. I don't read the visitor metrics of my blog very often to see who's actually reading the blog, though it is nice when those in my online circle leave comments, especially provocative ones, and my dad is very good about replying to each post.

But Hiedzviecki called me out: in peep, we blog for a sense of personal community, to create a virtual identity, a brand, a "person-product," as he calls it. To you, I am "themacinator." Am I disguising my identity, as I believe I am, or subconsciously am I creating a persona, an identity, "an entertainment product [that gives me the] power to invent a new person- the person you think you should be, as opposed to the person you actually are"? Readers of this blog know what I chose to put out there (duh)- they've compiled some kind of image of someone who reads a bunch of eclectic nonfiction titles, has a pit bull, is obsessed with the pit bull, takes photographs in a fairly mediocre but semi-serious way, is quirky, is involved with animal welfare and loves Oakland. But is that it? Perhaps I'm a psychokiller or something entirely more reasonable, maybe I actually have another dog that I don't talk about. Maybe I have a kid. I let out bits and pieces of my private life- Hiedzviecki would have you know that I do this both in a need for community and at my own risk: we don't know who is reading our online information for one thing, and for another it is most certain that google and other search engines and third party applications are, and that they're making money from them. I know this, and yet I continue to throw out information, including the benign stuff (photography, pit bull, Oakland), and tag my posts, making them even more accessible.

This is part of "peep": we know we're being surveilled (?), we seek it out in the name of safety, but we only want it on our terms. We want to watch people, and to some extent we want to be watched. But we don't want those same search engines to sell our stuff. Like Eli Pariser argues in "The Filter Bubble," we like the ease that comes with online surveillance: we get the results we want, more quickly. We also like the alleged safety we get from the millions of surveillance cameras we have installed everywhere, in public and private space, including in our own homes. As an incredible and heartbreaking example of the pervasive and uselessness of cameras, the Columbine incident was recorded on CCTV. The video cameras did not save fifteen deaths. I'm reminded of the recent murder of a young boy in Oakland at the scene of a rap video: the suspects were caught on multiple cell phone videos but remain unidentified. We document everything, but unless we're watching a show about crime on TV, we do it just for the "peep" of it all.

Niedzviecki doesn't offer any answers, though he offers plenty to be concerned about. His book is a good argument for de-facing yourself (I patted myself on the back for not being on Facebook, and for using twitter for a discussion board, rather than as a diary), but he doesn't do much besides say "this is the way of the future, but be careful!" He decides at the end that he won't put anything online about his daughter, and let her decide what her online persona will be. To me, this seems like a given, but I see that it is not: flickr is full of fabulous photographers who have shared their children with me, and I love watching them grow up. But will they love looking back at themselves age in a "virtual community?" He offers no alternative to inevitable online breaches of privacy: it's clear that we don't care enough about our privacy, and in fact welcome it when it's convenient, but Niedziecki falls far short of providing any sort of prescriptions for what we can do to avoid this. For example, my bank has recently required me to receive e-statements, or pay per statement. Of course I understand the rationale for this- cost, environment, etc- but I am also aware of what I am giving up. I have lost the option to control my information online. According to one study, "if every American actually stopped to read the privacy policy of every Web site they visited for a year, it would take them an annual average of 200 hours, or almost eight and a half entire days of fine-print peering." So, Hal? What do we do? If, as he argues (and I would argue against), "peep" friendships don't translate into "real" friendships, should we just call the whole thing off?

I'm going to keep blogging.

Dave Zirin: Bad Sports

2011-12-31T22:14:00.001-08:00

This is the last book I read of 2011. Somehow that feels worth mentioning, though It is not altogether that monumental. If I've labeled my posts correctly, I read approimately 35 books this year. I lost count about 7 times while trying to count back, so I'm not even going for an exact count. That would be ludicrous. "Bad Sports" weighs in in the bottom third of those books: Dave Zirin is a man I respect deeply as a public figure, but perhaps doesn't translate into book-dom. I highly recommend you tune into his podcast, "Edge of Sports" and follow him on Twitter: as he says, the man is fabulous at commentary "where sports and politics collide."

Zirin's thesis (and subtitle) in this book is well taken and generally well articulated: "owners are ruining the games we love." Professional sports- football, basketball, baseball and hockey- are owned by a bunch of really rich men who are living and leaching off of increasingly impoverished cities and managing to drive away fans at a time when fans need sports more than ever. This is particularly poignant to me right now as the A's ownership continues to sell of player after player- Trevor Cahill, Gio Gonzalez, and Andrew Bailey have all been traded for next to nothing in the past two weeks- in the hopes that the A's will get a new stadium Anywhere Else. The threat of the A's moving is being held over Oakland's head: fund a new stadium or else. Of course Oakland can't fund a new stadium for Oakland in a time where police can't afford to police, schools can't afford to educate, and I'm pretty sure that I popped a tire on a pothole again last night. So we've got a quagmire: ticket prices will continue to rise, fans will continue to be driven away, and someone, either Fremont or more likely San Jose, will pass a measure to publicly fund Lew Wolff and John Fisher's new stadium. John Fisher has a net worth of 1.1 billion and Lew Wolff owns a whole lot of stuff. Oakland will lose unless they pony up a bajillion dollars they don't have or the A's move, which ever comes first. Supposedly San Jose will not pay to have the A's, but I'm hardpressed to believe it. In the meantime, San Jose's arguments for the move- revenue stream, jobs, etc, are bogus: Zirin conclusively demonstrates that any jobs created are crappy, seasonal, and underpaid service jobs. Revenue streams may be accurate if you're talking about for the rich owners who win no matter who comes to the stadium through TV deals; average fans can't afford to come to the games as seat prices spike and concession fees rise.

I love Zirin's argument, which boils down to no more taxes for rich owners and community ownership of teams, ala Green Bay Packers. He does a great job articulating my beef with sports and over-the-top nationalism at the ball park, which I've ranted and raved about before. I had no idea I had it so good. In some places, faith nights involve post-game prayer sessions, hosted by the owners. In others, Sarah Palin gets top billing. But my situation is not unique. The sad thing is that the Packers' situation IS unique, and that pro football has written it into their bylaws that no teams like the Packers- team owned, with 60% of proceeds going to charity- will ever exist again. Sadly this also means that no team will be so enmeshed with their community, and no community so enmeshed with their team. I believe Zirin wrote (I've returned the book to the library) that there are 50,000 fans on the wait list for season tickets. Can you imagine if this were the case in Oakland? I can imagine, in a distant dream. A girl can dream.

The Year of the Bug and The Year of the Bugs

2011-12-31T21:44:00.000-08:00

So this is the last shot of the year for The Year of the Bug and the first shot of my new project: The Year of the Bugs: 52 Weeks of Sofafree. Stay tuned.

Alice Ozma: The Reading Promise

2011-12-27T09:12:00.000-08:00

Alice Ozma has written a book on fathers and daughters and reading that is almost the exact opposite of the last book I read on fathers and daughters and reading, Alexandra Styron's "Reading My Father." Where Styron wrote the depressing story of her famous father, their strained relationship and his descent into madness, Ozma has written the story of an unknown single dad and his daughter muddling through it very much together. Where Styron's memoir is painful, Ozma's is poignant. Styron wrote years after the fact and Ozma is in her early 20s. Styron's book could win "most depressing expose of a famous father/daughter pair of the year," which is why it's exactly the kind of book I normally read, and Ozma's is much more of a fast, feel-good read, which is why I was surprised at how much I liked it. Together they make a great set. I found myself laughing out loud in a slightly embarrassing way at this book- reading is Serious Business for me, and this Ozma has an endearing personality that is captured perfectly in her writing style. I'll sum it up this way: My dad will hate this book, my mom will love it, which is strange, since the book is the story of dad reading to daughter every night for 3000+ nights. If you like reading, and you like funny, sweet stories, this one's for you.

Julie Guthman: Weighing In

2011-12-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, I believed Michael Pollan. I'll be honest, that once upon a time and long ago and far away wasn't actually that long ago- it was last year, in this same bed that I'm writing in now. He has a pretty unassailable slogan, after all: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I'm not very good at following the majority of his instructions, even as a vegetarian: I'm very good at eating food, but not at the "not too much part," and even as a vegetarian, I eat a lot of non-plant matter. I'm pretty sure diet coke is not a plant, no matter how hard I try to wedge it into that food pyramid in the "vegetable" category. But something has been bugging me ever since the anti-obesity campaign hit stride a few years ago: it feels like a fad. I grew up when eating disorders were rampant, and now it seems like eating disorders were a fad. And I don't think either of these things are true: body image issues and weight issues are so much more than fads or trends, but the current focus and attendant billboards about healthy snacks and books and magazine articles and talk shows seem like we've moved from an age of plenty (the late 1990s) when the issue was rich people with too much, trying to starve themselves to look too thin, to the late 2000s, an era of a lot less, with poor people being seen as too fat. And all of this seems really simplistic. In the late 1990s we were told (without much to back it up) that people of color (excluding Asian Americans as usual) didn't have the same issue with eating disorders because of cultural acceptance of different body weights. Now, we're told by experts, including Pollan, that weight issues are especially prevalent in low income neighborhoods (read: people of color and poor whites) because of lack of education about and access to healthy food. These people can be thin and healthy, too, they too can "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," with the right programs and policies in place, and less subsidized HFCS (high fructose corn syrup, the enemy.

Well, not so fast. Did eating disorders (the kind leading to starvation and binge/purge, not the over-eating kind) go away because people were educated about eating more and/or lost their money in market crash? Sidenote: Julie Guthman has written an amazing book in "Weighing In," but it's not at all about eating disorders. I picked up the book, though, because of the way the back of the book (yes, I judge books by their covers) manged to say both "obesity" and "obesity epidemic" in quotes in three sentences. And I was not disappointed. Well, a little, because I do feel like there is a connection that Guthman left unmade between the anorexia decade and the obesity decade, but I understand why she left that alone: "Weighing In" takes on (and conquers) much bigger topics, and if you understand and apply Guthman's arguments, eating disorders can be explained, as well. Guthman takes on a lot- Pollan is a formidable foe with lots of influence- so I forgive her for not getting to this detail. After all, eating disorders are my hangup, and this book is about a lot more: the subtitle reads "Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism." Yeah, that's a big one.

I am not going to be able to sum up Julie Guthman's very big, very cogent, and very persuasive take on why Pollan et al's tactic falls short and perhaps even is dangerous. It's too multifaceted, and she's an expert. I've tried, and failed to explain to my family, avid foodies and Pollan fans (remember, was one of them till last week), though in my defense, I hadn't finished the book. This short piece from 2008 gives a sense of some of Guthman's main points (though not all): Pollan's critique of corn subsidies is great, but his argument fails dangerously when the discussion turns from farm policy to fat bodies. First, the evidence between food consumption and size is weak. Second, discussion of weight serves as "admonishment" and creates anxiety about weight, leading to obesity. (Guthman drops this argument in the book and picks up a much more solid argument about the missionary zeal with which the Pollan-ites go about their health mantra in a new form of the white man's civilizing project.) Third, authors like Pollan, Jane Goddall and Marion Nestle along with Morgan Spurlock of Supersize me take on a holier-than-thou position: if they can control themselves around the enemy (HFCS) and fast food, surely obese people must be of a weaker strain.

At best, fat people are seen as victims of food, genetic codes, or metabolism; at worst, they are slovenly, stupid, or without resolve. Meanwhile, she notes, many thin people can indulge in all manner of unhealthy behaviors without being called to account for their body size. In other words, fat people are imbued with little subjectivity no matter what they do, while thin people are imbued with heightened subjectivity no matter what they do.

These are only three short issues that Guthman brings up in this (very) simplified article. I won't convince you if you're sold that the end of food commodity subsidies and the bringing of fresh fruit to school lunches is the way to a Better Life and Skinnier Children.

Guthman's book is divided into nine refreshingly easy to read chapters, each with a title in the form of a question. Wisely, "What's Capitalism Got to Do with It?" is left till the very end (right before the conclusion) so that by the time Guthman gets to the meat of her argument- like what I did there?- we're left nodding along with the argument that capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal incarnation, causes obesity. Placed earlier in the book, we'd be tossing away "Weighing In" as a Marxist piece of trash cashing in on the Pollan fad (yes, I'll be here all week). Guthman argues that "bodies have emerged as a growth industry in the context of contemporary capitalism." It's a complicated economic argument, but essentially Guthman uses a theory David Harvey's 1982 "Limits to Capital" where capitalism is self-limiting. Eventually capitalism runs out of ways to earn profit, and then comes the crisis of "overaccumulation." This is especially true in the case of food: there is a limit to what humans can eat. One of the ways to fix these crises, according to Harvey is the "spacial fix": "the displacement of the problem of overaccumulation elsewhere in space." Previously this could read as a new colony or globalization. Guthman argues that the new spaces are our bodies: "in the interest of economic growth, contemporary US capitalism has helped to create obesity as a material phenomenon and then made it a moral problem that must be resolved in a way that is equally kind to capitalism." The way this works is complicated, but it starts in the food production and distribution chain: farmers all the way through food service wrokers are paid a tiny amount, thus creating demand for exceedingly cheap food (this is one of the main places she finds fault with Pollan's arguments that subsidies are the problem. Low wages are the problem). Wages are kept low so purchasing power drops, creating a market for the credit and banking system that kept the economy running, until it didn't. The poor people who make this food were the vast majority of people who lost the biggest when capitalism hit its limits during the market crash. Not coincidentally (these issues were dealt with in previous chapters), this is the population most likely to be obese, and not to be able to afford the Good Food the Pollan advocates (and admits is more expensive). In the meantime, the health care, weight loss and pharmaceutical industries are all winning from this man-made epidemic: "weight loss itself is a commodity."

This book reads like a butterfly and stings like a whole bunch of bees. I was convinced by Pollan and Raj Patel and now feel like a racist dupe. It's not enough to go to the farmers market, which Guthman points out, makes those of us who can afford it feel like we're Doing Something- shopping local isn't enough. And I've been humbled when thinking about my passion regarding food justice and food deserts: I try to be aware of how activism affects agency, but Guthman called me out. Bringing a box of organic okra to black people in the ghetto is not really going to change the system. It's insulting. The only place Guthman falls short is ending without real constructive Next Steps. She criticizes Pollan for this very shortcoming, but I'm left not knowing what next. I am left like it doesn't matter what I eat- both biologically, ecologically, and ethically- though I don't think that's what Guthman would tell me. The conclusion, "What's on the Menu?" is a blank slate. Looking forward to ordering the chef's special.

The Year of the Bug: Fading Away

2011-12-25T21:44:00.000-08:00

This is the second to last week of the project. Mac is so happy to be out of the spot light.

On Christmas, a Note About Hannukah

2011-12-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

To Goyim everywhere: Merry Christmas. And to goyim (including: makers of Christmas and holiday pageants, sellers of holiday greetings and holiday schwag, makers and givers of holiday cards, government institutions, schools, "inclusive" givers of cheer, and in some cases, Jews) everywhere: a note about Hannukah.

Hannukah is not the Jewish Christmas. Christmas is a Very Important Holiday for Christians, as on Christmas day in the morn, Jesus, the savior was born. This, one might say, is the basis of an entire religion(s), let alone the Reason for the Season. Hannukah is No Such Thing. In the Torah (aka the Old Testament), Jews also have Very Important Holidays. Hannukah is not one of them. In fact, Hannukah is what's known as a festival commemorating a historical event in the 2nd century, and is generally considered to have been written later than the rest of the Torah, and takes place later than the rest of the Torah (the rededication of the Temple).

So why all the fuss about Hannukah? Well, because Jews matter, too, dammit! And we're an understandable "other" if we all celebrate and give presents at the same time! So, why not have a Hannukah bush and give gifts for 8 days right around the same time as Goyim are giving presents around a tree? Why not eat fried food and chocolate? (Okay, Jews never need an excuse to eat, important holiday or not!) Hannukah is much more tolerable than our real Very Important Holidays: New Years in the middle of autumn (Rosh Ha Shona) or even worse, the terrible day where we fast and atone- I suppose Catholics can relate to atoning, but Catholics aren't exactly the most understood religious group in America, either. And the fasting we do on Yom Kippur isn't really that normal either. Much, much easier to consume consume consume along with the Goyim in December.

I'm not laying the blame at the feet of Christians. I like to blame Hallmark and Walmart as stand-ins for all the corporations that need Jew's money as badly as they need everybody else's. I'd also like to blame a general assimilationist culture that can only figure out one culture at a time really needs to understand Jews because we're a vocal bunch, and giving a token nod in our direction is a good idea. See, we're inclusive! Blue and white lights! Menorahs downtown! We GET you! And it's not like Jews don't play along. Historically Reform Jews are even part of the assimilationist process- bringing organs and wood pews into our temples to look just like good old American WASPs. And I'm complicit: I love my WASPy temple, and I love getting gifts every December. But I felt guilty this month introducing my boyfriend to Hannukah: I think he heard his first dose of Hebrew when we lit the candles. My family exchanged gifts like good modern Jews. We ate latkes. It was the only "Jewish" I did all year. And my dad put matzoh meal on top of the bread. Joke or where we've come? Only the Hannukah bush can tell.

Year of the Bug: #Buginarug in the Light

2011-12-20T08:25:00.001-08:00

John Gibler: To Die in Mexico

2011-12-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

It is very hard to legally obtain a gun in Mexico. For one thing, there is only one gun store in the country, and it is run by the military. But according to at least one source (and they're hard to find), 80,000 firearms were seized in Mexico in the four years between 2006 and 2010. Those years are significant, because 2006 was the year that Felipe Calderon took over the office of President of Mexico and launched his war on drugs with the support of the United States. The war, it turned out, was actually a militarization or para-militarization of Mexico that has basically involved supporting one drug cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, while targeting the other, smaller cartels, perhaps in the hope that if this cartel controls everything, Mexico's problems will go away. Or perhaps, more likey, Calderon understands what is really happening: without drug money and gun money, the Mexican, US, and world economy will be in even worse shape. John Gibler writes

High-level federal officials in United States government know all of this and go along with the theatrics, because, among other reasons, the US economy is also buoyed by the influx of drug money. The defense industries profit handsomely from arms sales to armies, police, and the drug gangs themselves; the police are addicted to asset orfeitrue laws; prison guard unions are addicted to budget increases; and the criminalization of drugs has proven a durable excuse to lock people of color in prison in a country still shackled by racism.

The US needs the drug war, no matter how bloody and deathly it is for Mexico, and "To Die in Mexico" is a reminder of just how bloody and dealthy the drug war is for Mexico: really bloody and really deathly.

I read and write about Mexico and la frontera a lot. Maybe I can't get over Mexico in some Freudian way that Laura Kipnis talked about in "How to Become a Scandal": Just as societies need scandals to have clear examples and deliniations (borders) of the edges of proprietery, maybe I (and the US) need Mexico to denote the Other, the not-us, the "see what could happen but won't happen here?" Even in Oakland, there are no statistics like in Mexico: Gibler calls the unsolved and uninvestigated murder rate of 95% a "95 percent impunity" rate, and we're talking about more than 38,000 homicides in the years since Calderon launched the drug war redux: 2006 to May 2011. That's approximately 20 murders per day in Mexico; Oakland's rate of over 100 per year, while extraordinarily awful, becomes somehow tolerable in the face of this violence. Further, Oakland's murder victims have names and their killers usually (often?) face some kind of justice. In Mexico people are killed twice, according to Gibler: "First the obliterate your world;... then, once you are gone, they will turn your body from that of a person into that of a message." The message (or the scandal) is that of impunity: the murder becomes a photograph in one of the "Nota Roja" papers that specialize in bloody depictions of murder scenes, and a sin of omission in journalism, crime reports, and policing. "Those who look on you will see only death."

Gibler has written a wonderful little book for those interested in Mexico, journalism and violence. He gives some, but not enough, look at the bigger picture both in Mexico and at how the US has created and extended the problems. The book is a fast read, if you can stomach the violence which is interspersed with moments of hope, if hope can be found in mothers fighting for investigations that will never be investigated or journalists maintaining integrity in the face of murder attempts. It's a glimpse into territory that is hard to glimpse, for the reasons that Gibler writes about: the government and cartels have created a culture of silence that makes exposure impossible, and death is a pretty high price to pay for investigating the truth. Further, the US has a lot at stake in preserving the story that Mexico is telling about itself, so Americans also have little incentive to put out any real information. Gibler has opened a dialogue in the face of lots of obstacles.

John Seabrook: Nobrow

2011-12-15T17:23:00.000-08:00

Here's "Nobrow" in a nutshell. It would be very possible to end this review here: John Seabrook has culled his book down to the essentials. The "story" lays out the premise of the book, the style the book is written in, and sums it all up: once there was "highbrow" and "lowbrow"- a way for Americans to divide make class judgements by culture, and now this is rendered useless by "nobrow": consumer culture as a source of status. He even uses some of his examples: fancy mass-produced furniture, buying produce, installation art, etc.

The problem with "Nobrow" (the book, not the story) can be summed up quite simply: Seabrook is a New Yorker writer. This in itself is not a problem; in 2009 I even mentioned one of his articles as one of my favorites. The problem is that sometimes New Yorker authors can translate their long articles into books and sometimes New Yorker authors can't translate their long articles into books. Unfortunately I think that Seabrook falls into the latter category. His subject (summed up in the subtitle "The Culture of Marketing + The Marketing of Culture") is fascinating but his approach falls short. Seabrook strings together some New Yorker articles that he's written- a piece on (then) child prodigy Ben Kweller, an inside look at George Lucas and merchandising, even a fascinating look as the New Yorker as a purveyor of culture before, during and after the Tina Brown years. The book is a look at the relationship between culture and marketing that is part personal journey with hints of Bret Easton Ellis, part investigative journalism, with a hint of academic sociology writing. It just doesn't work. Do read the short version, as the concept is quite interesting. I'd love to see Seabrook put together a follow-up, post-internet version of his thesis, also as short version. Seabrook, you out there?

The Year of the Bug: Santa Got Left Behind

2011-12-11T21:17:00.001-08:00

Poor Mac didn't get to go to Santacon because themacinator can't drink and Mac.

Only 3 weeks left and he's off the hook. Onto bigger and sofafreeer things!

Year of the Bug: They Multiply

2011-12-05T08:34:00.001-08:00

Laura Kipnis: How to Become a Scandal

2011-12-03T17:48:00.001-08:00

Depending on who you believe, Freud has either been debunked or remains the key to understanding all of humanity. If fall into the "Freud was right, and the it's all about shit and sex" camp, then you will probably enjoy "How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior." If, like me, you are somewhat skeptical of claims that diapers make for the best scandals because they're about bodily functions, this book may fall short of credibility. I had high hopes, too, because celebrity scandals really are a fascinating modern phenomena, but Laura Kipnis tempers all of her great insights with noxious Freudian references, leaving the foul taste of oozing poop in my mouth. (Really, the vivid details are necessary, according to Kipnis, to get the sense of primal disgust across.)

We all have guilty pleasures: I can't get away from Diet Coke or reading in bed All Day Long or CSI. Some people look down on me for this, or shake their heads in disbelief. But everyone understands that these are pleasurable endeavors; we're supposed to enjoy sugary drinks, relaxing, and craptastic entertainment. On the other hand, most people are also sucked into what Kipnis calls "one of the few reliable growth industries," scandal-tainment (my word), and I'd venture that most of us feel somewhat bad about watching celebrity train-wrecks. Sure, the media plays them out for us day in and day out, but that doesn't mean we feel good about being desperate to know the next update in some one's stalking story or weight loss story or whatever. But we all do it, even people like me who hide their heads in the sand from the majority of pop culture. I'm not talking about stopping for a moment of silence for the death of a famous person. Tragedy, Kipnis writes, "is supposed to concern noble feelings and high motives," and when there is a tragedy, we don't feel guilty about rubbernecking: we also don't care for very long. Think about the deaths of Michael Jackson and Steve Jobs. In the latter case, the world has mourned the loss of an innovative thinker. In the case of MJ, his life and death meet Kipnis's criteria for a "genuine scandal": "pathos and tragedy, it should have gravitas. It should jar our sense of social tidiness a little, it should incite unanswerable questions about human propensities and the moral compact and the ongoing battle between the anarchy of desire and the sledgehammer of social propriety." Over a year after MJ's death, the trial of his doctor/murderer is still big news. I have a feeling there will not quite be the same kind of stir over the tragedy surrounding Jobs.

The best part of Kipnis's book is that she validates our sleazy fascination with scandals. (More on low-brow culture next week when I finish my current book.) She goes further than okay'ing scandal, she backs it up with academic-sounding arguments thus taking away any guilt one might feel in following the rise and fall of one's favorite stars. The only drawback is that much of her argument is propped up with Freudian psychology, which I've already said is not entirely convincing, but in order to feel good about ourselves and our scandal addiction, let's suspend disbelief for a minute. "Culture," Kipnis writes, "needs scandal." (Italics belong to Kipnis.) Cultures are built on social norms, and scandals serve the vital role of reminding us a) what the norms are by breaking the norms and b) showing happens when the norms get broken. It's bad, real bad. She continues: "It appears we're the kind of people who enjoy watching people 'get what's coming'- probably not the most admirable trait in a population, but after all, it's our norms that are being violated. (Communities are enclaves of shared norms-scandals are what define a community.) The media may whip things up for motives of their own, but it's our standards that have to be breached, and we care about these breaches, deeply." Basically, Michael Jackson enabled us to talk about race and sex, because he was so outrageously scandalous that we could "other" him, and say that is NOT us, that is NOT our values, our community would not do x, y, or z. The community could then reestablish guidelines by punishing him for his supposed sins: in fact, the job of society is to make the scandalizer feel their punishment in public. You can't change your predetermined race, Michael! You can't touch little boys! And monkeys? What's up with monkeys!? Shame On You! Scandals can't happen without us, Kipnis writes, and remember that culture needs scandal. So sit back, drink your Diet Coke, watch CSI, then read all day. Don't feel bad if you're reading about people going down in flames of scandal. Just don't read this book about it.

The Year of the Bug: Shimmer

2011-12-02T14:27:00.001-08:00

totally forgot to post this one.

Paul Berman: The Flight of the Intellectuals

2011-11-28T16:49:00.001-08:00

In the days since I've finished reading Paul Berman's "The Flight of the Intellectuals," I've thought of a number of ways to write this review. One is to write a book just like it. Paul Berman has an issue with the way current influential intellectuals deal with Islamism, and he sums it up in the last two sentences of his book, while spending 200 pages on something entirely tangential. But the book itself is a (short) full-length response to an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2007. Journalist Ian Buruma profiled Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim of Egyptian descent (his father was exiled from Egypt). Berman dislikes pretty much everything about this article, and the intellectual trend that it stands for, and is either lucky, privileged, smart, well-respected or some combination of these things, enough to have authored an entire book in response. So my first thought is to write a book in response to a book. Or at least to write a book in response to an article I didn't like and add an aside, ala the many asides Berman throws in: "By the way, this book is a followup to reading "Flight of the Intellectuals," wherein Paul Berman explicates his feelings after reading a New York Times Magazine article for 200 pages. Which is not to say that this book has anything to do with that book, just that this is where I got the fabulous and slightly self-aggrandizing idea."

I ruled that one out though, because I'm not upset enough with any one particular article to write an entire book, or even a short book, and I'm not famous enough that anyone would publish it. (Paul Berman is author of the best-selling "Terror and Liberalism.") Then I thought I would write a sort of summary of what this book is about, but really, it's about a long and complicated subject that I don't know anything about and would bungle if I got anywhere near summarizing Berman's summary. The subject is Islamism, and its supporters and detractors, and the semantic complications of words like "fascism," "totalitarianism," "terrorism," "moderate," etc, and how these words seem to have caused modern scholars to follow the wrong Islamist leaders down the wrong path. This review does a nice job of summarizing the book.

I ruled both of these approaches out. I ruled out not reviewing the book at all, because I actually did like the book, which reads like an extended lecture from a very entertaining and engaging college professor, and I learned a lot about a very interesting and timely subject. The book was extremely well-researched: it seems like Berman may have read every book in every language remotely related to his subject. (Sidenote: strangely, while he refers to each book in his text, he does not use footnotes, end notes, or include a bibliography.) I also ruled out not writing up anything about the book because right before picking up this book, I put down another book, something I really really have a hard time doing, and am still feeling guilty about. I tried so hard to read "Triumph of the City" by Edward Glaeser, and failed. The book is written in a style tried to emulate an entertaining and engaging college professor, and while it appears that Glaeser also knows his subject thoroughly, he throws in examples like they are common knowledge. The book is written for popular audiences, and, being part of this audience, I have no idea what he is talking about. The book fell flat, where "The Flight of the Intellectuals" kept my interest for all 200 pages of a response to a magazine article. Strangely, Berman's polemic works.

The Year of the Bug: Weary Bones

2011-11-21T16:09:00.001-08:00

Ross Perlin: Intern Nation

2011-11-18T19:27:00.001-08:00

Sometimes a thing is so ingrained, so taken for granted, so normalized that the thought of challenging it is almost embarrassing. Internships, at least for Generation Xers and forward, are one of those things. In order to get a "good job," a person of a certain background goes goes to the best school she can, and while studying, either during the school year, or most definitely during the summer, does at least one unpaid internship. This is not considered demeaning or ridiculous, even though from the outside, the thought of someone working for free is counter-intuitive and perhaps even illegal. It's just "what you do." After college, this person of a certain background hopes to find a job of a certain status, and all of these types of jobs require "work experience," and internships are seen as the way to have "work experience" on a resume, regardless of the type of work, the quality of work, or the the payment received. But this is the status quo, and to challenge it seems ludicrous: pay me? For an internship? Where I am learning? And getting free resume padding? Possibly at a nonprofit where they can't afford to hire me?

Ross Perlin's "Intern Nation" is a counterattack to these prevailing and dangerous ideas. He challenges interns to stand up for themselves, governments to enforce existing laws, businesses to do right by their flexible employees, unions to pay attention to all employees, universities to correct the institution of internships that they have started, and on and on. It's a mess. Little known fact: The underpaid or unpaid internship (or internships) you did before, during and after college were illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), enacted in 1938 and modified in 1947 to exempt a group called "trainees:" a broad group that has come to include the people we now think of as "interns." Only, this group is not really that broad, and employers everywhere have figured out how far to stretch the exemption. The FLSA did things like establish the federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and end child labor. Pretty nifty, and pretty unimpeachable. Per Perlin, no one really argues with "the elimination of labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well being of workers." Then came the 1947 exemption: "trainees" were allowed to receive a "training wage" that fell below minimum wage or even no wage at all, in exchange for vocational training. There are VERY specific criteria which must be met for a position to qualify however, and EACH one of these must be met:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to that which would be given in a vocational school;

2. The training is for the benefit of the trainee;
3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation;
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and on occasion the employer's operations may actually be impeded;
5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the completion of the training period; and
6. The employer and the trainee understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

Ask yourself if this list sounds like any internships you are familiar with or have participated in. The last two items on the list are perhaps more for the protection of the employer, so that they don't get left with some obligation of payment to the intern/trainee, and are the only ones that I've actually seen in practice. But I have never seen/heard of an internship with *any* of the criteria listed in numbers 1-4, let alone all 6, and remember, all 6 must be met for an internship to be exempt from the FLSA standards. This means that the thousands and thousands of unpaid and underpaid internships taking place each year are illegal. And no one is fighting it. Employers and universities (more later) are taking advantage of young people, students, unemployed people, sector switchers, under-employed, etc, in an enormous, unregulated way.

There are a multitude of problems with this. Legally, unpaid interns are not considered employees, no matter how long they've worked there. No pay=no rights. Perlin describes the case of one student in New York who was required to do an internship in order to receive her degree in social work. Immediately on beginning her internship, where she did the same work as a paid employee (a clear violation of numbers three and four above), she was the subject of sexual harassment. She attempted to sue the harassing doctor under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, but the case was thrown out of district and appeals courts "holding that Bridget didn't count as an employee, and therefore had no right even to stand in the courtroom and make her case." The reason she wasn't counted as an employee? She was unpaid. As Perlin writes: "no wages, no benefits, no vacations, no overtime or sickpay--therefore also no rights in court."

Here's one of the places where the universities come in. Bridget was required to do an internship to complete her degree, under the theory, one supposes (I don't know exactly how it went down at Bridget's school) that work experience is a) complimentary to classroom experience and b) vital to post-graduation employment success, especially in a field like social work. In this way alone, universities are condoning the industry of internships whereby kids go and provide unpaid labor to a variety of employers. In the meantime, universities help employers feel better: "a convenient myth has been making the rounds that interns earning academic credit fall outside the FSLA. A significant percentage of employers using unpaid interns now hide behind this urban legend, requiring their interns to be enrolled in college and to submit proof of the credit received for an internship." Even better, the colleges make money for each credit- and sometimes substantial money. "Colleges and universities have allowed the academic credit myth to spread in part because these credits, closely linked to tuition, now form a significant revenue stream at may institutions." Perlin gives numerous examples of the ways people make money off students' unpaid labor: some colleges won't give credit for internships, but studetns want the "jobs," so they find colleges who will give credit and pay close to 5,000 for the "privilege" of a useless credit. Other colleges accept the credits, and why not? They don't have to teach the students anything, or really do much of anything: the students find the internships, pay for the privilege of having a credit on their transcript, and the college has no overhead. It's free tuition. Additionally "situated learning" and "experiential learning" are in right now, along with the idea that a kid needs an internship to get a job. So what if not much learning is done? So what if no skills are learned at the job? Academies respond, necessarily to pressure from persuasive, influential, and monied parents, and internships are hot on the lips of these folks. So what that academia was behind the initial move towards the FSLA and the end of child labor in the first place? Internships are educational!

I'm working backwards: maybe we could call it saving the best for last. Because Ross Perlin starts "Intern Nation" with one of my favorite subjects: Disney! Way back in 1955, Disney created "Disney University" as the training division of the mega-corporation, and starting in 1972, outside universities really started sending students there. First came a hotel management department in New York, then a culinary school in Rhode Island who wanted to use the much bigger kitchen space (get it? schools saving money by partnering with corporations?), and in the 1980 the "College Program" was born. Interns lived on site, paying for room/board out of their tiny paycheck, and do pretty much any shit work you can think of at the park: cleaning hotel rooms, making french fries, etc. Unionized Disney workers are being slowly replaced by sleights of hand: "casual workers" (interns, college program interns, part-timers, casual temporaries, etc) cannot exceed more than 35% of hours worked at Disney World. At this point, these casual workers make up 1 out of every 4 hours worked, but the numbers can be tweaked deceivingly, and Disney doesn't really care how they are balanced out. Further, there's been a hiring freeze on full-timers, but of course no freeze on (underpaid and untrained) interns who rotate in and out. Add this to my long line of concerns about Disney.

Beyond the basic issues I've laid out here, Perlin goes through a whole list of equally or more disturbing effects of internships. There's the Washington DC internships that are basically filled through nepotism, or at the very least through connections, which means there is no sense of meritocracy, or a chance for anyone new to make it in. This, of course, has racial and class implications: how can new leadership emerge if they can't get the resume padding needed from the posh internship if they can't get the posh internship in the first place? Further, most internships have this risk: unpaid and even underpaid internships are a financial hardship for all but the wealthy, which means that the average student cannot afford to pay to play at work. Colleges requiring internships are thus solidifying an already existing unequal playing field. Further, with no evidence that these internships lead to real jobs, real WORK during the school year or summers might actually be more important than internships, but is downgraded: no internship, no credits, no resume padding.

And no one is saying anything. Read it and fight back.

The Occupation Continues

2011-11-16T17:14:00.001-08:00

So I never wrote the Promised Part 3 of my Occupied Oakland blog, but it's still coming. I didn't write it because I've been literally torn up inside about Oakland: a crazy, messed up, beautiful city that is really part of my identity. It seemed like it couldn't get worse after Scott Olsen, the war vet, was nearly killed by a canister of tear gas to the head, and then someone was murdered a few yards from the Occupy Oakland camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza. At first it appeared, and OPD confirmed, that the shooting was completely unrelated to OO: the murder was the cities' 101st murder of the year, and it would be completely thinkable that, based on these numbers, someone would get shot downtown. But everyone in City government who was on the fence about the movement was quickly off the fence and demanding the removal of the encampment, citing this kind of violence and misuse of police resources.

It was clear to me (and everyone in the world audience, probably), that Occupy Oakland was about to be kicked out. And I'm also pretty sure that it was clear to everyone that the Occupiers didn't want to go. Mayor Jean Quan managed to bungle the situation repeatedly- telling the protesters that they could move to a different space, causing one twitterer (?) to write that "We've reached a semantic impasse. You can't just say "Would you guys move your occupation over here please?" That's not an occupation." Recently, she mentioned a conference call with 18 mayors, and the story went viral: Occupiers everywhere have taken this as proof that there is a conspiracy to evict camps in a coordinated manner all over the country. Members of the City Council held a press conference about OO, saying it had to go, and got shouted down. (I'm still unclear why they chose to hold the presser by Lake Merritt, unamplified, and then why they lost their cool and returned the jeers of the protesters with chants of their own, making buffoons of themselves.)

I'll cut to the chase: I practically didn't sleep until the camp was evicted. I don't watch the news because it's overwrought and full of half-truths, but it's REALLY hard to turn off twitter, especially when you know some of the people writing, and you've learned to know others, and whose feeds to trust. The problem is, it's a constant influx of information, and of stressful information. I knew Alex had been shot at Occupy Oakland within 2 minutes of it happening (literally), and I can follow along with General Assemblies online. It was common knowledge that the police were going to raid the camp, and it soon became common knowledge what date (last Monday in the early AM) the police were going to raid, even as the Council and Mayor said "you have to leave immediately" and served eviction notices with no precise time. And I couldn't sleep, because of how poorly the de-occupation went last time. Strangely, this time, the emptying-out of the camp went smoothly, as these things go. About 30 people were arrested, no injuries or use of force incidents were reported, and the park re-opened about 6pm. The Mayor and the Chief and the City Administrator gave a (ridiculous) press conference thanking everyone for a job well done, and said the park would be open for free speech but never for lodging. Occupiers, including me, met at the Main Library that afternoon, and marched back to Frank Ogawa Plaza, where they were indeed allowed to assemble, though not "lodge" (i.e. camp).

My first inclination was to be proud of the city- the City and the Occupiers- for a peaceful evacuation of FOP. I agreed with Desley Brooks (and the later Council Members) that the movement was about more than the patch of grass that the Occupiers were Occupying, but had come to see the Cities' mishandling of the situation as a valid enough reason for the Occupiers to keep on Occupying. Many of the people in the tents at FOP were homeless, or poor, or mentally ill and were receiving services and basic shelter from other Occupiers. There was food at the Plaza, and books, and religious leaders, etc. There were tents. And these people, these "others" that no one in the City (capital "C") wanted to see, were camping on City doorstep, en masse. The City claimed that this was unsanitary, and unsafe, and hurting local businesses, but the truth was, many of the people that were living at FOP were people that the City does not want to see, and certainly not as a big group. Homeless people are easier to deal with one at a time, in a doorway, or alley, or somewhere you don't have to see them at all. It's probably true that some big business chose not to sign a lease in downtown Oakland: the camp was unsightly, and homelessness is unsightly. But it's real, and it's part of Oakland. I couldn't be proud that the solution the City came up with was to disperse the camp via the police. It was great that nobody decided to respond to the 600 police officers in riot gear with violence, as I expected, but that was besides the point: Occupy Oakland has been removed.

I'm sure the City feels it has won: the encampment has gone. But what have they won? They claimed that downtown Oakland was safer before OO, but I disagree. Tons of money was poured into "Old Oakland" a long time ago, but it sits mostly vacant. I wouldn't walk around there at night, but I did on Saturday, because I went down for the march that OO held in solidarity with Egypt. I did feel safe: there were people around, which generally makes me feel safer. I have never seen downtown Oakland with that number of people on a Saturday night. The City claims OO is bad for business, calling on the Chamber of Commerce's threats about companies leaving and being destroyed. But the Chamber doesn't represent local businesses, rather, they are a group of people made up of large corporations.

Perhaps the real question, then, is what has the City lost? Multiple times in the contentious pre-second-eviction City Council meeting, the Mayor and various Council Members described Oakland as a "progressive" city. But it's clear that the City is beholden to large companies, dependent on outdated, fear-driven police tactics, and feeling very threatened by a small group of people trying to change the world. In the meantime, the weakness of the Mayor has been laid out internationally, the City Council has embarrassed themselves, and the already trashed reputation of the police department has done nothing to repair their image. Meanwhile, campers are temporarily being allowed to stay at Snow Park, a tiny corner park in an upscale neighborhood right by Lake Merritt, but out of view of the politicians, though the Mayor and Chief Jordan have said that this is is only temporary. On Monday I spoke to a feel people who were staying at Snow Park who were clearly transient: they are Occupying because these tents are their permanent dwellings. The Mayor has mentioned "vouchers" for homeless facilities at the old Army Base, but is this the answer? Or enough of an answer?

Meanwhile, I'm very intrigued by the Occupy movement, at least its incarnation in Oakland. It's far from perfect, but there is definitely something very real going on. I have not been to a General Assembly yet to see the actual proposals in action, but I have gotten a sense of how the proposals are made and how communication works. The encampment, on Saturday before the second coming of the Police, was similar to when I saw it during the General Strike, though less crowded of course. It did not, contrary to rumors, smell like feces or anything else particularly bad. I did see a joint being rolled, but this must should be taken in context: downtown Oakland is host to Oaksterdam, including a marijuana university. I'm taken with the process, if not entirely by the crowd or the results.

I spoke with a man when I was down at the library on Monday, who said he stayed around the corner (possibly at Snow Park), and was a little bemused by the whole thing. We watched a young Asian kid, dressed in an emo-punk style, buy two gas masks from a very large white man in his mid-30s, who looked to be making a killing. Two young indie white mid-20s behind us were shaking their heads: "those don't work." My new friend, a black man in his mid-40s, commented that the Occupiers, who he visits every night, were here, but had no idea what was going on here. They want to get arrested, he said, they want to get teargassed, but what do they know? I agreed, and shared that sentiment. The speeches we were listening to where very passionate and articulate and idealistic. At one point, someone condemned violence and a tall young white man in expensive athletic gear smoking a cigarette muttered loudly that this was a privileged position to take. I looked at him and looked away before arguing with him. My new friend and I talked about how in my neighborhood, far to the East of Lake Merritt, very few people seemed to have heard about OO, or at least care about it. They are even less likely to come out when surrounded by a crowd of people who seem to tempt fate with willingness need to be arrested. For my neighbors, principles may not be worth going to jail for. That idea sounds foolish. We compared the situation: people who are there in body, but unclear on the concept, and people totally clear on the concept, and not there in body. At least in this context, I feel like OO has an excuse: this is a new movement, and one that has potential, and going through growing pains. The City on the other hand, has nothing of the sort.

The Year of the Bug: To Think, Perhaps to Sofafree

2011-11-14T21:30:00.001-08:00

Year of the Bug: Heads Up 7-Up

2011-11-07T08:12:00.000-08:00

Occupy Oakland (re)Visited Part 2

2011-11-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote a little bit (okay, a lot) about what had changed since my I first wrote about original feelings about the Occupy Wall Street movement in general and the more local Occupy Oakland movement. I end up writing forever time-wise and word-wise and decided it would be better for all parties involved if I broke my thoughts up into chunks. When I first posted, I hadn't had anything to do with Occupy Oakland, and had only participated in a Global Day of Action in San Francisco on October 15th. After that, and especially after October 25th when the police and the protesters had such a terrible night, a friend of mine started heading down to the General Assemblies that Occupy Oakland holds every night at Frank Ogawa Plaza (side note: OO (the Occupy Oakland Movement) has renamed FOP "Oscar Grant Plaza," as I mentioned yesterday. Somehow I cannot bring myself around to calling the plaza this. I think part of my resentment is that Oscar Grant's murder happened in Oakland but had nothing to do with Oakland. Memorializing the park in front of City Hall after him reiterates that this horrific piece of violence is another piece of Oakland violence.) Every day my friend and I would dialogue about her experiences at the General Assemblies, and about my concerns, as well as my experiences working with police and the city. I also watched the following video, which I found enlightening about the intelligence of OO and the truly democratic process that goes on. It's almost 10 minutes long, but I encourage you to watch it.

From what I understand from my friend, S, who goes to the meetings, a proposal is made via the "People's Mic." Since the General Assembly does not use amplification, one person says something, and people serving as the People's Mic shout what was just said so everyone can hear it. This part, she says, is long and boring. Then the Assembly breaks into groups of 20, and discusses the proposal. The groups come to consensus about the proposal, then have someone present the group's view to the General Assembly. The large group then comes to consensus or does not. There is a huge variety and diversity of views, and not everything goes the way each group member or group would like it; for example, in the above video, the letter which I found incredibly sane and well thought out, did not pass. It was written prior to the eviction, and perhaps would have avoided some of the conflict. But the democratic process that is going on involves creativity, growth, and mistakes.

I ended last time with a note about my optimistic boss and my total skepticism. October 25th, she believed, would lead to Oakland as a whole having a better dialogue. I rolled my metaphorical eyes (I hope I didn't roll my real eyes at my boss.) But the dialogue did start happening. After October 25th, Oakland became the center of media attention, including internationally. People started discussing what was working in OO and what wasn't working in OO, and what was and wasn't working in other places. Reporters from reputable and progressive news sources sent reporters to OO to live, live-tweet, and report. People I know from twitter moved their attention from OccupySF to Occupy Oakland. (By the way, for excellent independent and reliable reporting about OO via twitter: @JoshuaHol of AlterNet, @pixplz aka Justin Beck, and @tigerbeat aka Steve Rhodes.) OO was where it was at. Notably, the Council and Jean Quan weren't really part of the larger discussion. City Council held off on discussing OO till a special City Council meeting Thursday, October 4th, but more on that later. Meanwhile Quan has held some press conferences in typical politician style: saying a whole lot of nothing. (For excellent coverage both as it happens and with behind the scenes stuff, follow @matthai of the SF Chronicle.)

The Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA) put out a remarkable letter asking for clear leadership after the events of October 25th. The letter stated in part that "As your police officers, we are confused," and asked "the citizens of Oakland to join us in demanding that our City officials, including Mayor Quan, make sound decisions and take responsibility for these decisions. Oakland is struggling – we need real leaders NOW who will step up and lead – not send mixed messages." This was a bold step for the police to take- speaking out of school- and a welcome one: it showed what I had believed to be true, that individual police officers did not want to be in the position that they were in on the 25th, but were thrown into an unsafe situation by whichever combination of authorities. They acted as they were trained (which may need revision), and the situation escalated, but the OO mess was not a situation the police wanted to be in the middle of.

The OPOA letter was put out after OO called for a general strike on Wednesday, November 2nd. The strike was an amazing success. For the first time I went out to Occupy Oakland, and it really was, in most ways, as cool as S had told me. There were So Many People there. Official estimates have put the numbers at 5000-7000, especially when people were marching to shut down the Port of Oakland, and some (crazy) people have said there were 100,000 people out that day. Unions came out, families came out, Buddhists came out, individuals came out, Mac came out (of course). Oakland came together and I haven't felt that optimistic about Oakland in a very long time. People were in downtown Oakland all day, and after I took the old dog home, they marched on the port, closing it down. I was worried about this part of the day, since the last action (that I know of) in the port in 2003 went really badly and I thought the crowd would be spoiling for a fight after October 25th. I was wrong. The crowd was not spoiling for a fight, and the police had decided not to respond at all unless there was a call for service. (They eventually came down and basically provided traffic control toward the end of the evening, and late there was another confrontation.) The lack of police presence during the march was noticeable: at every march and parade there are cops controlling traffic. During the strike people on bikes blocked off the street, and the march carried on, peacefully. I left when windows got broken, but it was clear in later videos that those "outside agitators" really were the culprits: each act of vandalism was clearly someone in all black, who had come spoiling for a fight. When I was walking in the streets, you could see these people, and see that they were a tiny minority of people. Thousands of people came together in Oakland to march for a better world. It was very cool. I didn't go with the marchers to shut down the Port, but you can see the vastness of the numbers who did.

photo courtesy of Brian Sims, cc

The general strike happened on a Wednesday, the day before a pre-planned City Council meeting on Thursday that was scheduled to be all about OO. The meeting was interesting for it's calmness: only two people were escorted away from the mic, one who was clearly mentally unstable and the other a young activist who hadn't learned or didn't care about moderating his passion in front of The Establishment. As always happens with the Oakland City Council, nothing was decided. First, City Administrator Deanna Santana gave a summary of her attempts to deal with the Occupiers, and the reasons they had to go, including a fancy powerpoint presentation and lots of big lawyer words. Her assistant, Arturo Sanchez, went over all the things he had done in the camp and all the signs he had posted, and all the times he had been rebuffed, and showed pictures of all the awful things he had seen (like open flames and buried electrical cords.) The Police Chief spoke, and was interrupted, and sounded like perhaps public speaking is something he is not fond of doing (unlike Chief Batts) and basically said his guys did great, and that the encampment was a public safety issue. The Mayor spoke and defended herself and said she had done some wonderful stuff but couldnt' do it while this was going on.

Then the Council listened quietly to over a hundred speakers, most supportive of the encampment and Occupy Oakland, some supportive of OO but not the encampment, and a few, mostly business owners, ready for the whole thing to go away. The speakers had some great points about what OO is about, about where the city has failed them, and about other alternatives. And then each Council Member spoke. Rebecca Kaplan gave an impassioned speech about how the movement was wonderful and Oakland has always been progressive, and about how police are people too. Desley Brooks unleashed a can of whoop-ass on Kaplan for being inconsistent in public and behind closed doors, but said she supported OO, but that everyone involved needed to think beyond a patch of grass. Pat Kernighan, who represents District 2 which includes one of the wealthiest parts of Oakland, ranted on about getting OO the hell out of dodge. Nancy Nadel did her best to sound radical while saying she knew she didn't have the votes for her resolution, and Ignacio de la Fuente was incoherent, but got the point across: Occupy Oakland was bad for business. Libby Schaff "agreed with what everyone else had said" which was impossible, since the speakers before her had disagreed. President Reid talked about his pride in the marines and commiserated with Scott Olsen and apologized for the police brutality, and Jane Brunner was AWOL. And nothing got done, because, as always, the Council tabled the important question of the day till the next meeting.

So my boss and I were both right: dialogue *is* happening, between the city and the occupiers, and even within the city. There is great potential for change here. AND the city is incompetent, as usual. The city administrator's attempts to justify the raid on the encampment were feeble, and as someone on twitter said, looked like an attempt at CYA (cover your ass) in the face of potential fallout. As usual, the City Council sounded like they not only agreed but that they could barely stand to sit at the same dais with each other, let alone do anything but make speeches across each other. And the citizens spoke at the Council, but did not dialogue with them, proving the point that each side was saying: "no one will talk to me!" As of Thursday, cooperation seemed at a minimum: the Police, the City Administrator, the Mayor, the City Council, and the Occupiers seemed to be sitting on separate continents, and no one was willing to hand anyone else a boat and paddle. But I'm still optimistic.

(Coming soon: part 3 of 3- the Occupy Movement and Race.)

Occupy Oakland (re)Visited

2011-11-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong, and sometimes I have to keep learning. A lot has changed in two weeks since I wrote about it, and I've learned a lot and continue to rethink my position on Occupy Oakland daily. In two more weeks I may be embarrassed by this post.

In the timeline of Occupy Oakland events, probably the most famous is the early morning of October 25th, when OPD was ordered to evict the occupiers from Frank Ogawa (renamed Oscar Grant) Plaza. The city had been warning the protesters to move since October 21st, and conflicting accounts have been given as to how much communication there was between officials and occupiers, but I'm guessing that official accounts of how much they tried are overstated, and that the way Occupy Oakland works did indeed make these attempts difficult. The city doesn't work that hard to surmount difficulties, however, so I am not placing blame on protesters. Police moved in on the encampment in the early morning hours for practical and safety reasons: there are less people in downtown Oakland at 3 AM, so if the eviction went badly (which it did), less people would be likely to be hurt. After the people were removed, clean up crews from the city would still have time to clean up before the city opened for business.

The removal didn't go down smoothly. The protesters didn't want to leave, and the police plan, if there was one, didn't seem to go right. Non-lethal "defensive" weapons like tear gas, flash-bangs, and rubber bullets were used. It was bad, and it was quickly national news. That night, it got worse, as the protesters came back, and so did OPD, along with police from something like 14 other agencies. Tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bangs- it was a scene. Everything was live streaming all over the world: comments were made on Al Jezeera that this kind of scene would cause a US invasion in the Middle East, and they weren't far off. Sadly, a war vet who was already on the ground was hit in the head with a tear gas canister in a clear act of police brutality which was caught on video and quickly became a flash point for the whole world. In a city known for its violence and for the violence of the police (not least Oscar Grant, which had the misfortune of occurring in Oakland while not actually involving OPD), October 25th was exactly the kind of event that brings Oakland into the center of media attention.

The whole thing was, unsurprisingly, handled terribly by the city. Mayor Jean Quan was out of town when the police moved in on the Occupiers. (Note: I've never liked her.) When asked, and she had to be asked because she wasn't going to take control of the situation and offer information, she said that she had no idea the eviction was going to happen. This was unequivocally the wrong answer. Either she really didn't know it was going to happen or she lied, and knew when it was going to happen, throwing her staff under the bus in an attempt to save face in a crisis. If she didn't know, it begs the question of what the hell is going on in this city (as if that question wasn't already begging an answer): police Chief Anthony Batts (fortunately) just quit a few weeks ago and Quan appointed Howard Jordan to Interim Chief, with rumors that she would eventually chose him as Chief. It later came out that the City Administrator Deanna Santana and Interim Chief Jordan had been working on the plan for five days, and that Mayor Quan had signed off on the plan. It is still not clear to me exactly what Mayor Quan didn't know, or why her fundraising trip to DC was more important than what was literally an occupation on the doorstep of City Hall.

October 25th and the aftermath was, for me, like watching a dog fight at a dog park. Totally foreseeable and totally preventable. You put a whole bunch of humans with their lattes in a small fenced area with dogs who don't know each other, and there will probably be a fight. (Leave it to themacinator to throw in a dog analogy.) The dog park is the opposite of setting your dog up for success. The city's job is to set her citizens up for success. On October 25th the city failed both the protesters and the police. (The city also failed the rest of Oakland taxpayers who will foot the immense bill for the operation.) Mayor Quan had initially told the protesters that they could occupy the Plaza. Then the protesters were told by paper notices that they had a certain amount of time to vacate the plaza. Communication between police and protesters, between the city administrators and protesters, between any city agency and protesters, it appears, had been minimal. I believe this is due both to lack of trying on the behalf of the city, and due to the way that the Occupy Oakland movement works. Multiple police agencies, all under the aegis of OPD, each with their own tactics and "tools" were ordered into a situation that quickly grew out of control. Predictably, escalated police presence led to escalated violence on the occupiers side. Where previously the Occupy Oakland movement had been almost universally peaceful, a night time operation involving hundreds of under-prepared police and hundreds of passionate protesters galvanized them into another afternoon and night of violence.

I was left very shaken on the afternoon of the 25th (before the night of violence that left Scott Olsen, the Iraq vet injured) and the 26th of October. Mayor Quan called for protesters to come to the plaza between the hours of 6am and 10pm for "free speech activities" and I felt sick to my stomach. What exactly are "free speech activities" and why can they only take place during certain times? I felt like dragging her back to Berkeley's invisible free speech monument. I wanted to remind everyone that Oakland has *real crime to fight, not a bunch of people camping and causing a rat problem. I felt like screaming cliches about violence causing violence, and fighting fire with fire never puts the fire out. I was not a happy camper. I came to work the next day and my boss, who believes in positive thinking, was upbeat and optimistic, about how this was a great place for Oakland to start. If it were possible, themacinator would have been rendered speechless. It's not possible, so I answered with ranting about dog parks, Quan, etc. She answered with support for Quan, and that at least the police didn't use machine guns like in the '70s. But, aside from these absurdities, she has been right: Oakland may have found a way to move forward.

themacinator has been rendered sleepy by all of this blogging and will save the rest for another day.

Daniel Ellsberg: Secrets

2011-11-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

This is the best book I've read all year. Looking back, I've read 29 books so far in 2011, and I've read some REALLY good books. Daniel Ellsberg is one of those very important historical political figures that I (and you?) had never heard of. I learned of this book when I went to hear Garry Wills talk, and he basically said that "Secrets" is The Book on the consolidation of presidential power. I'm not one to doubt the man who is probably my favorite public intellectual, and he's right: Ellsberg is the man. The short version of Ellsberg's importance for those, who, like me, are clueless: In the 60s Ellsberg worked for the Rand Corporation, which was and is a Think Tank with access to important government documents. He worked for the government in various advisory positions that allowed him access to ultra top secret documents and high-level officials. He was trusted and trustworthy, and very good at his job. He also had combat experience: in the 50s he served in the Marines, and almost uniquely among those at the Pentagon, volunteered to go to Vietnam and learn what was going on on the ground in 1965 to 1967. Other officials flew in for a day or two and flew out, or relied on word of mouth. Ellsberg, on the other hand, visited every province in Vietnam affected by the American "pacification" project.

Ellsberg's investment in the war started at an interesting position given the anti-war pacifist he became: at the beginning of his tenure, Ellsberg's main priority was the absolute avoidance of further use of nuclear weapons. When "Secrets" begins, Ellsberg calls himself "a dedicated cold warrior." His interest in stopping the Vietnam War at that point had nothing to do with the war itself: he was mostly concerned with preventing nuclear warfare should the conflict escalate into war with China, which he believed that the Johnson administration's choices would certainly cause. In 1964, Ellsberg was a naive Pentagon employee: basically an assistant to the assistant to the Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, and understood that all the insiders agree that the course of the Vietnam war isn't going well, and that the next step would be increasing the US involvement. As then-President Johnson came closer to deciding what direction to go in increasing the involvment, Ellsberg got a taste of what it means to work in the White House when his boss, John McNaughton, told him that if President Johnson asked for his (McNaughton's) opinion, he would give him the official opinion, the opinion of McNamara, even if it wasn't what McNaughton felt was best. "I knew why he was telling me this," Ellsberg explains.

He didn't define what he meant by loyalty, but it was clear enough from his story: Do what's good for your boss, the man who hired you; put that above what you think is bets for the country, above giving the president or the secretary of defense your best advice if that would embarrass your boss... I was shocked. Lie to the president? Deprive him of your own best judgement, when he was asking you for it, on a matter of war and peace?

As it turns out, this was the crux of the American situation in Vietnam. Loyalty, the absolute necessity not to embarrass anyone and to hide the truth, kept the United States embroiled in a war that was not winnable, or as Ellsberg later decided, was not even a legitamite war (if there is such a thing). By 1967, Ellsberg came to the conclusion that one of the "lessons of Vietnam" stems exactly from this strange loyalty leading to lies and bad policy:

the impact on policy failures of internal practices of lying to superiors, tacitly encouraged by those superiors, but resulting in a cognitive fauilure at the presidential level to recognize realities. This was part of a broader cognitive failure of the bureacracy I had come to suspect. There were situations... in which the US government, starting ignorant, did not, would not learn.

When Ellsberg finally had enough, he leaked The Pentagon Papers: 7000 pages of historical documents (already historical in 1969 when began copying them) of the hsitory of US involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Ellsberg reached a place where he felt he could no longer be a part of the government, but that he had key access to information and important people that gave him the unique position of potentially stopping the war. With the release of The Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg hoped to pressure Nixon and his adminstration, or Congress, or the public, into stopping the war. The papers tell the clear story of the lying that the executive branch told the to Congress and to the public. They contain detailed history of what went wrong at every step of the way, starting with French involvement. What the Pentagon Papers don't include are the documents that Ellsberg knew existed: memos to various presidents from the very beginning advising that involvement in Vietnam could go nowhere good. At each step of the way, presidents had top advisers saying, in effect, "Don't do this!" and at each step of the way, these statements were hidden away.

This was so not just because of the charges of "weak on communism," "appeasement," and "defeatism" that could be expected... Of more importance, such documents, if leaked, would reveal that a president strongly inclined to escalate had had a real choice... an extrication option that was actually recommended by advisers of great authority. That revelation would burden the president with personal responsibility for all that followed from his decision to reject their alternative. Hence hte need to keep this advice unusually secret from Congress, from the public, and even from people like me in his own bureaucracy.

Basically, lies got the US into the war (really, the French wanted their colony back, and the US backed them up), lies kept the US in the war, lies kept the parts of the US governement from knowing what was really going on in a war that they were authorizing funding for and kept the part of the government that was involved in waging the war confused about their own war, and kept the public totally in the dark. The first time I realized this was hearing and reading Wills, but Ellsberg said it again: the total secrecy was a bizarre irony. The public was told that details could not be revealed and that "state secrets" must be kept so that the enemy wouldn't know what was happening. In this way, Johnson and Nixon were able to wage top-secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, without Congress or the public knowing. But the people in Cambodia and Laos, and the government of North Vietnam, from whom the secret was presumably was supposed to be kept, knew exactly what was happening. They were being bombed, and they were fighting back. There was no secret there. The "secret" was the secrecy itself.

In 1967, Ellsberg had an eye opening moment when someone leaks the number of troops that President Johnson was about to request: 206,000. This was the first time the public had heard a remotely close-to-real number, rather than the usual 40,000 or so that Johnson usually talked about. The trick was usually to call up troops, then ask for them after they had been deployed. After the leak, Ellsberg realizes that there was a "thin- yet almost impermeable- membrane that separated the executive branch from the legislative in terms of infomration. I had seen for years how effectively the president could lie about his policies, with the safe assumption that his lies would not be exposed... I now saw how the system of secrecy and lying could give him options he would be better without, or it could dangerously prejudice his choice." For example, Johnson was pressured by the military at this point, and couldn't fall back on the checks and balances that Congress and the public might have provided. At this point, Ellsberg was ready to do something big, something big enough to stop the war, or at least to pressure Johnson to change. Read the book for the full details on how he went about leaking the papers, and to whom.

While I was reading the book, and getting to the point where Nixon is elected on a vow to get America out of the war "with honor" while knowing that he will do no such thing, President Obama announced that the US would have all soldiers out of Iraq by the end of 2011. There is really nothing like a White House insider to make a person extremely cynical, and I'm pretty sure Ellsberg's book is the best place to start to wipe any last naivete out of your eyes. I will paraphrase Ellsberg's understanding of the Vietnam war's history after he completed reading the Pentagon Papers for the first time:

1. There were no 1st and 2nd Indochina wars like the history books say, just one 25 year long conflict.
2. The war was actually an American/Vietnamese war. The war was first French/American v Vietamese war, then just American v Vietnamese, fighting against "American policy and American financing, proxies, technicians, firepower, and finally, troops and pilots." (i.e. There was no civil war in Vietnam.)
3. After the late 1940s, the war would have ended had the US not funded it. After 1954, there would have been no war if the US and their Vietnamese funded allies had not violated an election that had been negotiated in Geneva.
4. This was not a civil war, nor an "aggression from the North." The Vietnam war had "one side [which] was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power-which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest... In terms of the UN Charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression."

I'm not an expert on either the Iraq war or the Vietnam wars, and I know that the quagmire comparison has been made endlessly. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger, in an eerie prequel of Iraq, said that "peace is at hand." The Vietnam war ended in 1975. If you have forgotten (and I wish I had), George W Bush told us that the Iraq war was over, "mission accomplished," in 2003. If troops are really leaving at the end of the year, they will have remained 8 years later. Some things have certainly changed in terms of transparency: where a Johnson or Nixon could send troops to Vietnam and go on fake missions, or have them bomb countries without the public knowing, technology has advanced to the point that the world knows what happens instantly in most of the rest of the world. This type of transparency works up to a point, however. When George Bush started preparing for the Iraq War after 9/11, few people were really surprised, and fewer believed in his pretenses for war. Again, the a foundation of internal loyalty and lies, much in the way that Vietnam-era Presidents and Administrations psyched themselves into starting and continuing an amoral, expensive, and deadly war. It was technically easy enough this time around to find out the lie in the yellowcake story, but just as hard, or harder, to put a stop to the war machine Bush put in motion.

Read "Secrets" and hope that there's an Ellsberg Jr. out there that is already working on something as massively damaging to the war machine. Too many people are dying.

Year of the Bug: Dino x 3

2011-10-27T21:03:00.001-07:00

The Year of the Bug: Coordinated

2011-10-23T20:47:00.001-07:00

#OccupyWallSt

2011-10-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm having issues with the Occupy Wall Street Movement that is everywhere right now (including the spinoffs OccupySF and OccupyOakland). My issues are not related to the common critiques of "what the hell do they want?" and "how the hell are they going to get them?" since I think there are a *lot* of valid demands, some of which are nicely summed up here. Nor am I particularly concerned with the lack of leadership in the "movement" (can a movement lack a leader and structure?) since this seems to be how a lot of the Arab Spring went down, with some/limited success, and honestly, may be the future of networked organizing and revolution.

My issues are slightly different, and partly brought on the other day when I saw a middle aged white woman on CNN speaking as a Tea Party representative. She was asked if she felt there were any similarities between the Tea Party movement and the OccupyWallSt movement. She looked straight at the camera and said something to the effect of "No! Well, we all hate big companies taking our money. Who the heck [sic] doesn't? But other than that? I mean, what do they want??" But I think there are more similarities than the Tea Party representative was willing to own, and surely more than the Occupiers are willing to own. What leftie or liberal out protesting is going to be willing to take that comparison in stride?

Caveat: my only hands-on experience with the Occupy movement was when I went down to 101 Market on Saturday for the Global Day of Action in San Francisco. I got there a little bit after the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence did their thing and arrived right about the time when mass chaos ensued and before protesters started their march, which, it turns out, ended up at City Hall. I left before the end- it had been a long day. Apparently, I missed a very cool thing. The other part of my experience comes from the ever handy twitter which serves as live word of mouth from friends you don't even have. I have been avidly following a couple of acquaintances who are trustworthy sources, and sometims follow the #OccupySF and #OccupyOakland tags. While I wouldn't claim any kind of expertise on the subject, I do feel entitled to a few opinions on the subject.

So here are some of my concerns:

1. Target audience: Per Adbusters Magazine, who, per my understanding, is one of the impetuses behind the movement, one of the stated goals is "to end the monied corruption of our democracy." This is a noble goal, and one I stand behind. The statement includes that OccupyWallSt is "inspired by the Egyptian Tahrir Square uprising and the Spanish acampadas" both of which, also to my understanding, were demands for more democratic governments. So, if the goal is more democratic governments, and transparency, then I suppose I understand camping out in front of City Hall, like the Oakland protesters are doing. However, if the goal is a less corporatized government, than I'm not sure I understand targeting local governments at all. Today the OccupyOakland movement targeted banks (and even got a little disruptive in a Chase branch), which feels more authentically anti-corporate, and the OccupySanFrancisco events often start at 101 Market St, the home of the Federal Reserve, which makes sense: the symbolic home of the nation's money. But local city governments are not responsible for the lack of separation between business and government that I think most of the 99% would agree has caused a lot of the mess we're in both financially and morally. Sure, there's corruption out there, and some local policies sure seemed tied to corporate ones (the San Francisco Twitter Tax Break comes to mind). But to me, the target is the state and more, federal government and the corporations who are holding hands, or maybe even being a little more intimate than that. Local protests on big issues are important, but the Occupy movements seem to have missed their targets, which are perhaps more aptly the folks in DC, corporate headquarters, and locally, state senators/congresspeople, governors, and senators/congresspeople who are more likely to have any real ability to change anything. Right now, I imagine corporations don't really care at all about OccupyEverything: people are out in their tents using internet service, talking on cell phones, driving, and carrying on normal business. This benefits, not hurts the people the Occupy movement are fighting.

2. Misuse of resources: In the same vein, local governments are the ones picking up the tab for these protests. I discussed this with a friend, who rightly pointed out that this doesn't mean that we shouldn't protest. Every protest involves the use of resources: police come out whether we like it or not, public works cleans up afterwards, etc. But these protests are going on for weeks, taxing the small resources that are available. Again, this is not an argument against the movements, or protests in general. However, because of the lack of organization, OccupyOakland, at least, will not talk to the police or the city. (Don't take my word for it: Mother Jones on the ground just quoted this story.) So, when things like the day of action come up, police send out Every Officer for the "just in case" scenario. This does no one any good. Police officers are part of the 99%, and are under orders to be out there: although the public voices won't say it, the officers are people too, who have families and mortgages and payments. A large officer presence alone escalates the situation and creates a cycle where protesters get resentful/violent and officers get resentful/violent, and the whole situation gets out of whack. Then the brass feel they "need" to send officers en masse to each event, and the protests remain contentious. And each time this happens, more money is drained from the cities' budget. If the movement cooperated, in the form of dialogue, with officials, much of this could be avoided. I am not suggesting cooptation, or caving, or anything of the like: just another place the movements seem to be missing the mark. I have been to many permitted and unpermitted marches and actions where police are allocated appropriately and inappropriately (most recently the complete overreaction to OpBart). The difference here is the scale: weeks have passed that could lead to months without dialogue.

3. 99% of who? There is the potential for collaboration and discussion and growth through OccupyWallSt.


OccupySF, courtesy Steve Rhodes, Creative Commons

But what I've seen, and I think is visible in these two pictures is something that I wouldn't call representative of 99% of the United States, or even the Bay Area. Perhaps it's different elsewhere, or at different times, but this is what I saw, and what I've seen over and over again in pictures. White people, dressed in comfortable clothes, mostly young-ish, some families, and some older people. Some have signs to the effect that they have advanced degrees and can't find work. Many have fancy cameras, and almost all are armed with smart phones. Homeless people sleep in the park where OccupyOakland is camped out, but are not, per a reliable source, part of the tent city. They don't have tents (they may have been given tents since I last heard). These are some onlookers at the march pictured above in SF. Note distinct differences:

Occupy SF, courtesy Steve Rhodes, Creative Commons

Based on the Good article I linked to above, the top 5 demands of the OccupyWallSt'ers are:

1. Affordable Health Care

2. Jobs

3. Home Stability

4. Affordable Education

5. Credit Card Relief

They established these demands/goals by combining a list of posts into these 5 categories. Taking for granted, for a moment, that these are the most demanded 5 demands of OccupiersOfEverything, it begs the following two questions for me, which I hope are being asked. 1. Are these the demands representative of People of Color? Of people of all economic standings in the 99%? Of which parts of the 99%? 2. What can this movement do to be more inclusive, inviting, and accurately representative of the needs of the 99%? Of people of color? Of the truly poor? Of the entire 99%? Like the feminist movement claims to be for all women, this movement has the very real potential of claiming to speak for a huge portion of the population while speaking to and for a select, privileged few. I had a small insight into this when I went to the inspiring and inclusive Life is Living event in West Oakland a couple of weeks ago. A couple of young white kids were handing out OccupyOakland fliers there. But they were doing little more than handing out fliers to a bunch of blank faces who were too polite to say no. For this movement to be anything more than more preaching to the choir, all of the above issues will need to be addressed.

I am part of the 99%. But I will not be in a tent at City Hall.

Edit to include this awesome piece with Rachel Maddow and pretty awesome intellectual Tim Wise calling it like it is.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Your Dog Is Fat

2011-10-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

No, really, it is.

I've always had an issue with fat dogs. Maybe it's because I have my own body image issues, but it's so much easier (unless there's a medical issue) to control your pet's weight. Maybe it's because I Just Care. Maybe it's coming to a head now because I'm not an animal control officer anymore, so I am dealing mostly with the pets of well-off people, who a) can afford to keep their dog in all kinds of food and b) generally have the education to know what a healthy dog looks like. And maybe it's because of my 52 Weeks for Dogs project, where every week, I see these dogs, and while adorable, there are a few that are morbidly obese. While most of them are normal, there are maybe only one or two or lean/fit dogs. Most are OK, and a few are very round. And really, some are so fat that I'm shocked each time I see a body shot. These are people who are doting on their dogs, which shows. But they're hurting their dogs. Out of discretion and sense of community, I've been unable to gird my loins and post a discussion there, and won't post any examples from the group here.

I have, however, posted a picture of an Irish Wolfhound up above that was tied up outside of Gordo's a couple of weeks ago that is Really Fat. The dog took up the whole sidewalks, as Irish Wolfhounds are bound to do, but the owner was also really proud of her weight. Irish Wolfhounds, he said, run 150-200lbs. But this girl is one of the biggest females in the Bay Area, he also said. Well, yes, she is. You can't see her waist at all. She was also an older girl (I can't remember if he said 6 or 8) which is old for a wolfhound. And fat. And probably extremely uncomfortable. Fat causes extra weight on the joints, especially for giant breeds. And older dogs already have extra pain in the joints. Why do this to our pets?

I've conveniently uploaded a weight chart here. Peruse it, and if your dog looks anything like the one above or the ones below, use it. Sometimes it's hard to see because we live witdh our dogs every day- changes can be gradual or we get used to the way our dogs look. It's not like we're putting them in jeans every day and one day realize we need to buy them a pair of fat pants. Maybe have someone who hasn't seen your dog come look at him and force her to give you an honest opinion. If you need tips for doggy weightloss, I can provide those, too. But love your dog, don't overfeed him.

Year of the Bug: Tramposofafree

2011-10-17T17:24:00.000-07:00

Mac McClelland: For Us Surrender Is Out Of The Question

2011-10-09T08:39:00.000-07:00

Mac McClelland is an amazing writer, in the trickster genre. I kind of want to be her. "For Us Surrender Is Out Of The Question" would be completely unreadable if McClelland wasn't so witty, gritty, and down to earth, because Burma and the Karen refugees living on the border of Burma are possibly the most depressing subject I've read about recently, which is saying something. I folded down a page in my library book (!) to remember to include just a tiny portion of the depressing statistics McClelland throws into the real life picture she paints. McClelland briefly crosses into Burma (she actually stays in Thailand with Karen refugees) and describes the situation there:

Myawaddy looked like Thailand might if Thailand experienced twelve times the infant mortality and fifteen times the child mortality- the second-highest child mortality rate in Asia, after Afghanistan's- if the life expectancy were nearly a decade lower, and if its GNI were a fifteenth of what it was despite its having abundant natural resources. It looked like Thailand might if Thailand, which is just a little bit smaller and a little more populous than Burma, spent 40cents per capita on health care rather than $63, or provided 0 percent of childhood vaccinations instead of 100 percent, or were one of only five countries in the world that forbade Boy Scouts, or were the poorest country on the continent and one of the seven poorest countries in the world but had still managed to double the size of its military troops and buy billions' worth of weapons over two decades despite not being at war with anybody but its own run-down people.

Are you shocked and awed yet? ZERO percent childhood vaccinations? Doubled military size? McClelland details just how the illegitimate Burmese government went about doing this- conscription of young boys, forced portering, etc- in other parts of the book. And 40 cents per capita on health care? I felt guilty that I couldn't put this book down, because it was so well written. On the other hand, McLelland is a genius: the Karen refugee human rights workers she stayed with asked her to tell their story to the world, and she has done so with success.

So what's going on in Burma? Well, it's hard to know, because free press is illegal and a Burman education is hard to come by, but in a nutshell, Burma's been at war for a long time. A really long time. Partly ethnic strife, partly religious, partly over resources, partly over borders, and later, anti-colonial- the wars in Burma have been going on for thousands of years. The British were particularly good at playing factions of Burmese (the Karen and the Burmese, for example,) off of each other, which led to internecine warfare that continues today. Aung San Suu Kyi, probably the most famous Burmese person around, called for a democratic government in the late '80s, and that was probably the first and last time that Burma almost made it. She was quickly placed under house arrest, won the popular election, and the junta cracked down. Aung San Suu Kyi has won the Nobel Prize: she's still under house arrest. As McLelland writes, "verboten is the distribution, in any medium, of any information that is unfriendly to the state, the state ideology, members of state government, the state of state government, the state socialism program, the state of the economy... etc" So all the stuff that goes down with no way for the international community to really know about it. And if they knew about it, they wouldn't really do much, it turns out, because Burma is resource-rich. Under both Clinton and Bush, lip service was paid to the "tyranny" (Condoleezza Rice's term) that exists in Burma. There are sanctions in place, and some public outcry from famous people. But Burma's oil and gas make real solutions unlikely. The Junta makes bajillions from countries like China, France, Thailand, and yes, the United States, who have business interests in Burma. The people of Burma don't see the money, but why would the government change, when the international community keeps the money rolling in? Worse, many countries are still selling military equipment to the Burmese government.

Burma is dying, and the international community is facilitating the blistering, bleeding death. Read "For Us Surrender Is Out Out Of The Question" for a much less melodramatic, much more informative, fascinating, eye-opening picture of the worst global situation you've never heard of.

Week 40: A Dual Post on the Changing of the Seasons

2011-10-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

I usually leave Mac's 52 Weeks shots as stand-alones, but I can't leave yesterday (the Phil's elimination from the Post-Season) without saying something, and I'm in the process of writing two other posts, and I am too much of a perfectionist/symmetrist (I just made that one up) to have two separate posts on one day. And Mac's wistful longing to get out of the fucking rain is the gentle version of the morose inertia that has settled over me. April, are you here yet?!

Game 162 came and went without the usual extreme sorrow and trips to the depths of despair, becuase since the discovery that baseball is not JUST about one (shoddy) team, and the newfound discovery of a (super) backup team, my baseball pleasure has expanded immensely. I now get 324 games a year, and miraculously, a postseason. With the Phillies, you're almost guaranteed a World Series, which means an extra three weeks/month of baseball! What's not to like? Well, what's not to like is the extra adrenaline rush that sustains the season an extra five to ten games and then sends you crashing down even further into the inevitable reaches of hell that comes from worshiping at the altar of baseball, and liking Only One Sport. Wait- there *is* only one sport.

Well, last night, my (backup) team was eliminated. The season is over. I honestly don't care if the Brewers go all the way, though it would be pretty sweet to see the Brewers and the Tigers in the World Series, just for a kind old time, American dream kind of thing. I'm feeling this deep anxiety: what will I listen to at night? How will I stay up past 8pm every night? Does it matter? What did I do last year? And the year before that? WHY IS BASEBALL SUCH A CRUEL LOVER? Oh, Mac... get me a coat, and let's go inside. It's going to be a long winter.

Week 39: Sad. So Sad.

2011-10-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

Mac officially is counting the weeks to the end of this project.

Moneyball: The Movie

2011-09-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

This is not a book review, and it's not really even a movie review. I don't see enough movies to even know where to begin or to trust my judgement. I've even been accused (falsely) of not liking movies. They just aren't my thing. But of course I had to go see Moneyball, and it was semi-mandatory to see it on opening night. I am also the sister of a minor star in the movie: my sister was one of the (few thousand) people who served as audience members for the movie, so I felt it imperative to get out there and support her. I actually felt all immediate family members should have received free passes, but apparently Brad Pitt and Sony Pictures had different feelings.

The movie was disappointing. I searched the entire time for my sister and couldn't find her, so I am tempted to give the movie the score of "career minor-leaguer", but this would be biased. Instead, I will set aside my personal relationships and give a more appropriate and better score of "4.50 ERA." My boyfriend, a movie connoisseur (and aforementioned accuser), loved Moneyball, and couldn't understand why my main concern: Moneyball, the movie, was lacking in baseball. I think our main difference in understanding were the following: a) he's not a Student of the Game, and b) he had a more realistic expectation of the movie because baseball is not Life for him. (Also, I think he likes almost every movie he's ever seen. Possibly including "Waterworld.")

Without spoiling the movie for you, though there is nothing really to spoil since Moneyball is based on a) a book almost everybody has read and b) a baseball season we've lived through, the following would be my movie review, if I did that sort of thing.

Walking in, I was expecting either the story of BeaneBall/Moneyball or an A's movie, which, thinking back, was too much to hope for. The movie was actually The Billy Beane Story, also known as A Brad Pitt Vehicle (which I understood much more clearly when I saw that the movie was produced by Brad Pitt.) (Incidentally, google accepts "Pitt" as a real word, which suggests that google agrees with my assessment: Moneyball and life revolves around Brad Pitt.) The fat guy, Jonah something-or-other, as Beane's assistant, was awesome- and the closest thing to making the Story of Moneyball. The best part in terms of a baseball movie, and the I appreciated most, was that Art Howe was absolutely skewered and presented as a royal ass. I don't know how he'll take that now, but Art Howe- the man(ager)- is a royal ass, and he was done to absolute perfection in the movie. (Note: Art Howe hated the movie. Link via the sister/star.) It's easy to see how the post-Howe managerial hiring decisions have been made: A's managers are managers who are gonna listen to Billy Beane, even on things that are left up to managers on Every Other Club. The best part in terms of watching as an A's fan were the two or three clips of Bill King announcing on radio. i seriously almost cried. I think one of the calls was during the 20 game streak, and he was announcing (Korach was in there, too) the A's joining history. It was an amazing flashback. Bill King was The Man.

Towards the end of the movie, and this is spoiler-ish but nothing that's not obvious current events, Billy Beane is portrayed as a hero for turning down an amazing sum of money from the Red Sox to be their GM and sticking with the low-budge A's. As movies go, this is a sweet touch. As reality goes, it's still true, but hard for a 2011 A's fan to swallow with the current ownership and Beane appearing to have given up on the A's (and possibly BeaneBall) altogether. In the meantime, the Red Sox have clearly stuck with it (or a version of BeaneBall+money) and made it work. The Red Sox have a vastly larger budge, of course, but it seems like BeaneBall either has failed- the A's don't win- or the A's aren't using it anymore. For a much more sophisticated analysis, read the (as always) incisive write-up at the Todd Van Poppel Rookie Card Retirement Plan. The movie ends sweetly, but almost a decade later, the adoption of BeaneBall doesn't feel so sweet in Oakland.

Here's the short version:

Brad Pitt is the Hideki Matsui of the 2011 A's. Gets a select number of audience members to the theatre who otherwise wouldn't come to see a movie about baseball economics. They will be happy because he's in Every Single Scene and disappointed because the movie is boring. He works out a lot and his muscles are shown a lot so they might be cheered up.

Baseball fans will go see the movie will be bored because there's not enough baseball. Bill James and BeaneBall fans who go to see the movie will be disappointed because there's not enough math, and the A's don't win the pennant. (They shoulda known this ahead of time.)

A's fans will go see the movie, but only two of them will wear their shirts in the theatre, if they go outside of Oakand, and one of them will be named themacinator. They will be so excited to see their favorite stars portrayed by actors they've never heard of, and to see Mt Davis full. Then they will remember it is a movie.

Recommendation: see it, because you can't not. But don't get your hopes up.

Year of the Bug: Holistic Remedy

2011-09-26T19:25:00.000-07:00

Alexandra Styron: Reading My Father

2011-09-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read a book by William Styron, you are missing out. If you have only seen "Sophie's Choice" the movie, and not read the book, you're selling yourself short. (I confess, I haven't seen the movie, but the book is one of the books that I would call "a classic," therefore, even if the movie is The Best Movie Ever, you need to read the book.) And, if you've ever dealt with depression, either personally or with someone close to you, "Darkness Visible: a Memoir of Madness" is a must-read. When it came out, in 1990, it was also a breakthrough: a famous, wealthy, white man eloquently describing what crippling sorrow feels like, before Prozac, before advocates attempted to lift the stigma through "depression is a disease like any other disease, like diabetes" cliches and campaigns. I suppose I have a dead-white-man crush on William Styron, along with Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stegner and John Steinbeck. It doesn't hurt that, with the exception of John Steinbeck, these men are all quite handsome. They just don't make dead white men like that anymore.

It's easy for me to have this kind of long-distance love affair with William Styron, though: he's not my dad. Alexandra Styron has done an amazing job parsing William Styron as a dad, as a writer, as a man, as a man who suffered from life-long, paralyzing depression. She writes with sure-footedness over a subject that is laced with treachery, and with a wit and humor that recalls her father's: the way Alexandra and William bonded was through their dark wit. It shows on the beautifully written page. While "Reading My Father" is not the only biography of William Styron, Alexandra, as a family member, clearly has the most access to potentially revealing information. She also has the most at stake, and "Reading My Father" could be a gloss over of the story of a Great Writer. The book is neither: Styron writes a memoir/biography that honors her father in its honesty by presenting the man as both the ogre that he could be, the demons he suffered from, and the greatness he was capable of. William Styron's story is a tragic one: a man unable to free himself from depression to enjoy his charmed life. His four children seem to have survived the brutal force of his anger and sorrow, at least in Alexandra Styron's telling- but again, she has a lot to lose in an honest telling. On the other hand, Alexandra Styron doesn't leave readers feeling sorry for Styron, or his wife (who bears much of the burden of William's tragedy) and children, but with a better understanding of the madness that eventually, she posits, was his cause of death. A moving book, Styron fans will not be disappointed.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided

2011-09-18T20:05:00.001-07:00

I was discussing my issues with Pink with a friend and she recommend I read Barbara Ehrenreich's 2009 book, "Bright Sided." I was reading "Reality is Broken" at the time, and struggling with the concept of positive psychology, so I was stoked to see that the library actually had this book. Not only did they have the book, they had more copies than I think anyone will ever read. Some day I will understand which books libraries buy and which ones they don't. I wish libraries still stamped due dates on the backs of books: then I could make my own informal, anecdotal study, about who reads what books. Or at least who reads the books that I read.

Barbara Ehrenreich thinks positive psychology and positive thinking is a whole lot of crap, and dangerous crap to boot. Although the first section about breast cancer, and the menace of the Pink movement, is the best section, Ehrenreich argues that societies' emphasis on positivity is even more dangerous than cancer: it caused the foreclosure crisis and the current economic tailspin. If McGonical's description on using positive thinking to make life what you wanted it to be was a hard happy pill to swallow, Ehrenreich turned it into a bitter pill that made me choke. I've been left thinking that McGonigal may have bought too much into the "studies" of popular psychologists (Ehrenreich shows that even the psychologists aren't so sure about their studies) and bought into them with such gusto that I'm now not even sure how much of her arguments about the importance and potential of gaming to believe. I was trying to convince myself that my time spent gaming is productive, "good" work, but after reading "Bright-Sided," I have a feeling that McGonical is acting out positive thinking: "if you expect things to get better, they will." If people in 2011 spend way too much time in front of their TVs or computers playing games and nothing good is coming from it, if we think that it will start to be something good, it will. What a relief for everyone using up their spare hours gaming! This is a perfect example of what Eherenreich writes about so perfectly in "Bright-Sided." And I feel like a fool for falling for it.

Growing up, one of my favorite stories was "The Little Engine That Could." The book is a variation on a story that originated in 1906 and was published in the above form in 1920. If you didn't grow up on tales of positive thinking, a small train carrying toys for children stalls before the peak of a hill and is shunned by tougher trains. Another small train who has never chugged over the hill decides that she can make it over the hill, and tells herself "I think I can- I think I can" and lo and behold, makes it over the hill and saves the day for all the small children waiting for the toys. The book makes sense in its context, and in its longevity. In the mid- and late- 19th century, "New Thought" developed as a response to or backlash against the depressing, self-loathing ways of Calvinism. "In New Thought," Ehrenreich explains, illness was a disturbance in an an otherwise perfect Mind and could be cured through Mind alone." Maybe the Mind couldn't cure contagious things like the scary infectious diseases that were all over at the time, but like the Little Engine in the story, the Mind was the key to fixing the general malaise that afflicted the middle class in the form of "invalidism." Medicine wasn't doing anything about the epidemic, so a man named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby stepped in, convincing his "patients that the universe was fundamentally benevolent, that they were one with the 'Mind' out of which it was constituted and that they could leverage their own powers of mind to cure or 'correct' their ills." And with that, positive thinking as a mindset/religion/American way of being was off. Mary Baker Eddy was an influential believer- she founded Christian Science, as was William James, who Ehrenreich calls "the first American psychologist." As this new happy methodology gained in popularity, it also came full-circle back to Calvinism: both the Calvinist and the positive thinker must constantly be on the lookout for mistakes made by the self. "The self becomes an antagonist with which one wrestles endlessly, the Calvinist attacking it for sinful inclinations, the positive thinker for 'negativity.'" Basically, even positive thinking is an anxiety-producing endeavor stemming from the depressing Calvinist doctrine of eternal damnation.

And here we are back at Pink and breast cancer, where the positive thinking brand has taken over so fully that women are told that they must think positively in order for their cancer to be cured. The alternative? Damnation in the form of the return of the cancer. Although there is no scientific evidence for this (nor was there any in the instance of New Thought and invalidism), optimism was recently cited as a "Breast Cancer Prevention Tip." As Ehrenreich writes, this is particularly alarming since "since there is no known means of prevention." Women (and men, who are also at risk of breast cancer) are not only being sold that thinking good thoughts will help them get through cancer, but help them avoid cancer. (In other chapters, positive thinking helps people lose weight, get rich, and find husbands.) Again, this is a dangerous subtext of something that, at face value seems innocuous: how could thinking good thoughts be bad? First, hearing things like "thinking positively makes you healthier" so often that they become "general knowledge" means that we are accepting incorrect information about our health: "it glides by without a moment's thought about what the immune system is, how it might be affected by emotions, and what, if anything, it could do to fight cancer." As in the example I cited in McGonigal's book, SuperBetter, it's hard to argue that if you do something that might make you feel better, and it makes you feel better, that it doesn't work. But Ehrenreich eloquently (and using many many backup studies) convinces the reader that it's bad science. Further, "rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugarcoating of cancer can extract a dreadful emotional cost." Women are supposed to think positively, because it will help. But if it doesn't help, or more likely, it can't help, and they get sicker, the women then feel doubly bad: physically and emotionally, because they have failed to do the work on their selves, just as the Calvinist who feels he is destined for damnation for a petty sin. What if McGonigal's game had not worked? What if she had continued to suffer symptoms of her concussion, or if her family had not played along, and told her to buck up and think positively, as the fans of Pink are essentially telling women with breast cancer? How would she feel in this case? More depressed, likely.

Ehrenreich has a distinctive style that alternately engages me and bores me. "Bright-Sided" has some extremely powerful sections, especially the chapters on breast cancer and the historical trajectory of Positive Thinking. She lingers on financial issues too long before bringing her story back around to the main point, but finishes strongly- fortunately the book is only 200 pages, so the lingering is short-lived. Her take-home point, that skepticism, realism, and questioning everything, is valuable, but not expanded fully. Finally, I do think there's a place for optimism, and crucially, the benefit of the doubt. While the Positive Thinking that Ehrenreich writes about disallows all agency- if you think it will be so, it will be so- I believe there is room for a middle ground out there. There is room for visualizing this positive scenario, and working to make it happen. Rather than working on the self to visualize the positive scenario, working externally, cooperatively, to make it happen. This doesn't involve merely the skepticism and realism that Ehrenreich advocates, but also positivity and optimism. Throwing out positivity with the Christian Scientists or the Pink people seems excessive.

Glitch Reset, Oakland Style

2011-09-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Glitch will be reset before the next test, and beta will end soon. All of our possessions will be lost, and we will start over.

Since I will lose my house, I decided to move out in true Oakland style and leave my house as is traditionally done in Oakland. First you see my yard. It is a weedy mess. I kindly left one parsnip standing. I also left behind my animals, because that's how we do. Then I left broken tools, some dirt, and some toxic waste out front of my house. My trashcans were overflowing. I'm sure the city can afford to pick that up. And finally, I'm sure my neighbors don't notice that I left the rest of my crap including chunks of rocks and spoiling food on the corner, under a tree. Someone will take care of it.

Reality is broken. Art imitates life- does gaming imitate life or life imitate gaming? In Glitch, my trash is valuable, even broken. Dropped items get scooped up so quickly that it sometimes feels like theft. In Oakland, even sofafrees are blight. Perhaps Jane McGonigal could come up with a game to prevent trashing Oakland, or to get rid of the trash once it was there. In the meantime, Glitch trash is way prettier and shorter-lived.

Year of the Bug: Return of the Sofafree

2011-09-13T20:40:00.001-07:00

Year of the Bug: #Buginarug Clean Bedding Edition

2011-09-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

Mandatory 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Post

2011-09-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

If you have read this blog, you will probably are expecting the typical lament of nationalism, and perhaps cynicism about patriotism I've written about before. This post is no exception, historic moment or not.

First, I'd like to encourage you to read this "Open Letter to New Yorkers on the 10th Anniversary of 911" from McSweeny's. The author is younger than me, and even more distanced from the event than I am/was, but sums up some of the feelings that I wrote about a couple years ago. The author was in high school in California and had never heard of Afghanistan. His high school treated the attacks like another upsetting day-in-the-life, and honestly, I understand how this could be done in a life of privileged California where the rest of the world is just that: the rest of the world. If it's not Europe or a founding country of civilization like Egypt, it's not relevant. Current events are United States-centric, and until 9/11, Afghanistan wasn't any of these things. The Taliban were relevant because of their atrocious treatment of women, but I imagine only certain segments of high schoolers cared about this. 9/11 hit home for the author when he moved to New York and realized just how hard the episode hit the city and her residents.

My response was not *as* detached, but the article made me realize that my emotional response, while strong, was not personal. The anger I have felt for the last 10 years is not personal. It is sincere, and deep, but it's anger not because I know anyone that was affected in New York, but because of what has happened, both to this country and to the world since then. My anger is not even mostly at the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, as horrible at that sounds. Osama won, certainly, and possibly in the way he intended: not just by killing people in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, but by the US government's reaction since then. The government has engaged in torture and justified circumventing the justice system, and the public has expressed minimal outrage and slowly come to accept this as necessary. The government has rescinded many civil rights and the public has expressed minimal outrage and slowly come to accept this as necessary. The government has coerced the international community to fight multiple unwinnable wars and then lost much of the country's moral standing in doing so. The public stood behind these wars in the name of terrorism, then expressed some minute outrage, and has now become so used to them that I'm not convinced much of the public even remembers how many wars and where we are fighting. The government has gone from a surplus budge to a fiscal crisis while spending vast portions of this money on these wars, and the public and public officials continue to argue about cutting spending in places like health care and social services as if this money is anything more than a drop in the bucket of government spending.

There are flags everywhere again this week. Certainly the flags are not as ubiquitous as they were in 2001, when I returned from Mexico and shocked at how my liberal California turned to a giant symbol of nationalist pride. But for me, the flag has become a symbol that I am embarrassed to be represented by. I am proud to be an American. I am horrified that America is the target of such hatred that attacks like 9/11/01 happen. And I'm even more horrified that 9/11/01 has been used to justify the deaths of even more Americans: soldiers and contractors. I'm horrified that 9/11/01 has been used to justify the deaths of Iraqis, Afghanis, and who knows who else. I'm horrified that George Bush is gone and we're still at war. I'm horrified that President Obama has not decisively ended the Patriot Act or ended indefinite detention, or ended the wars. I'm horrified that I can't look at the flag without being angry.

Jane McGonigal: Reality is Broken

2011-09-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is going to be another post that is about baseball without being about baseball- it's a book review about a book that doesn't mention baseball once. "Reality is Broken" is an attempt to pitch games as The Future. Jane McGonigal believes that games have immense potential for changing the world, and that writing off games and gamers as time wasters is no longer possible as generations are raised playing games. I have no idea how she feels about baseball, but I know how I feel about baseball, and I know how little I know about any other games. McGonigal is not referring to baseball players or baseball fans, or even football, basketball or chess players or fans. She's referring to players of games like Glitch and other (mostly online) MMOs.

But I'm going to start with baseball because I can. And because as the season winds down, it's also winding up. I mean, the A's are out of it, sure, but my backup team, the Phils are playing better all the time and breaking records daily. The intensity picks up as we get closer to the post-season, and while I'm preparing for hibernation, it's hard not to get excited when each game starts. I coordinate my day to listen to both the A's and Phillies games if possible, and I've written about this baseball addiction before. I posted a video of the A's playing their typical shoddy-ass style baseball as evidence of how devoted/addicted I am. McGonigal has a name for this self-torture that comes along with an addiction to games, and she's a fan of it. If I were forced to watch that video as work, or worked and saw something equivalent to that video, it would be "negative stress." But because it's a game, and because I'm choosing to participate (as a fan), it's positive stress, or eustress. When we're in this state, she writes, "we're confident and optimistic... this optimistic invigoration is way more mood-boosting than relaxing." McGonigal is really referring to gamers, not game-watchers (fans) like me, but there is something about the intimate experience of listening to a season every single day that suits the definition.

The comparison goes a step further. George Will's "Men at Work" opens with a quote from Warren Spahn, one of the best lefties of all time: "Baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time." Calling it an outside chance that the A's will finish winning half of their games this year is a stretch. The fact that the Phillies have won almost twice as many games as they have lost is phenomenal. This is not unique to baseball. If games aren't hard, they aren't rewarding: they don't provide the eustress. Gamers, according to McGonigal, spend 80 percent of the time failing. This obviously doesn't stop them from doing what they're doing (she quotes immense amounts of time worldwide spent gaming), and a recent study found that according to psychophysiological measurements, gamers had "positive emotion peaks" when they made a mistake. What happened, the researchers found, was that the players were failing "spectacularly, and entertainingly." I can relate to this as a baseball fan: when my team screws up, although I express outrage, indignation, disbelief and ironic belief, there is a sort of surge of adrenaline or excitement that makes the game more fun and interesting. I don't think that the players feel this way, though.

And here is where games part from sports, and from being a sports fan. When the gamers made mistakes in the study, and had fun, it was something about "the combination of positive feeling and a stronger sense of agency [that] made the players eager to try again." I have no agency when I watch or listen to a baseball game. The players have a sense of agency when they go to the plate and strike out or hit into a double play, and I'm sure they want to try again. But I'm not sure they find it fun or interesting to fail. Frustrating, embarrassing, etc. While this part of McGonigal's argument applies: "The more we fail, the more eager we are to do better;" the next part is unique to gaming: "The right kind of failure feedback is a reward. It makes us more engaged and more optimistic about our odds of success."

So I'm going to leave baseball behind now, and talk about the book, and how McGonigal believes that gaming is the future of social change. (This is either very good news for you, or very bad news for you, depending on whether you loved or hated the previous discussion of baseball.) First, McGonigal defines games as having the following four traits, and what these traits lead to that is missing in (first world) life:

1. A goal, which leads to a sense of purpose for players.
2. Rules which unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking through placing limitations on the way to achieve the goal.
3. A feedback system that provides motivation to keep playing, as well as promise that the goal is achievable.
4. Voluntary participation, which establishes common ground, and makes the hard work safe and pleasurable.

If we go back to baseball for just a second, we see that it fits well into this definition of a game, and can see how the definition works to make baseball so fun (and awful, and addicting, and such a relief from the "real world.")

After defining games, McGonigal asks readers to do their best to withhold judgement on games and gamers. She knows that even gamers judge themselves for "wasting time" playing MMOs online in attempts to achieve virtual goals, or instead of doing other things. I was able to suspend disbelief with this part of her argument, mostly. But I had a harder time when she moved into a discussion about "positive psychology" which is crucial to understanding why we should accept games and gaming as a reasonable use of time and potential world-changers. According to McGonigal, positive psychologists believe that "we are the one and only source of our own happiness:"

When we set out to make our own happiness, we're focused on activity that generates intrinsic rewards- the positive emotions, personal strengths, and social connections that we build by engaging intensely with the world around us. We're not looking for praise or payouts. The very act of what we're doing, the enjoyment of being fully engaged, is enough.

And games like MMOs give us this kind of fulfillment, whether we're succeeding at them or failing and falling off cliffs. Good games provide enough feedback and enough room for creativity that we feel successful. "Good games," she writes, "are productive. They're producing a higher quality of life."

If this sounds hokey to you, you're not alone. Millions and millions of people are spending millions and millions of hours not to decompress, not to avoid the "real" world, not because they like shooting things or because their parents don't want to educate them (I'm not saying any of these things are "the" reason), but because they've found the way to happiness: intrinsic self-reward. McGonigal says she expects disbelief- positive psychology is new, gaming is new, who's going to believe this? And maybe she's right, maybe I'm being a skeptic. She certainly convinced me with some of her examples (coming soon). On the other hand, I feel better when I'm reading than when I'm on the computer, and I feel much better when I'm outside. Her response to this would be that the way to get people outside would be to create a game. My response would be "why do we need a game to get outside? I should just GO outside! Back in my day..." Her response to this would be "If games make people happy and get people outside, why not use them?" This is hard to argue.

Some of McGonigal's examples of "good games" are really excellent. A few years ago McGonigal fell sick after a concussion. She just could not get well, which is not uncommon with victims of concussions. After a few months of not improving, she designed a game where she was the superhero and friends and family members had roles as supporting characters. There were achievements and levels that she had to achieve, and she improved rapidly as she "leveled up." There is no scientific proof that the game caused her to improve, but as she explains, she felt better after starting to play "SuperBetter," so it doesn't really matter whether the game helped her heal or not- feeling better helped her heal, and the game clearly had an effect on this. Another extraordinary example she cites was in England when there was a scandal over MPs putting their personal expenses on the government tab. In response to public outrage, the government did what governments do: they released information in a way that was meant to discourage public understanding: millions of scanned documents. A UK newspaper, the Guardian, decided to crowdsource the investigation into the illegible documents, and turned the project into what McGonigal calls "the world's first massively multiplayer investigative journalism project." People came and played in amazing numbers for the "emotional rewards of a good game," as the project was designed to give rewards in real-time as well as making the game feel social. In the first three days, 20,000 players analyzed 170,000 electronic documents. This amazing project had political results: 28 MPs resigned, and 4 MPs were charged criminally. MPs had to repay over a million pounds, and the expense codes are being rewritten.

Clearly, gamers have something to offer: political reform came quickly and swiftly- much more swiftly than if paid people sitting in offices had had to read through all of the documents. McGonigal goes on to propose other games that address climate change, oil usage, etc, but they seem exceedingly hypothetical. She repeatedly brings up the idea of the whole world coming together to play the same game for one day, which seems ludicrous: if we could all play for one day, couldn't we all get along for something slightly larger? On the other hand, everyone plays games. It's possible we *could* all start with tic-tac-toe or something tiny, and then realize the power that was harnessed from everyone, regardless of place, politics, resources, etc playing together and then move towards bigger things. Games clearly have a larger place in life than we've given them, as does play. We've ruled out play as something for children, something that we grow out of. But as more and more people spend more and more time gaming, McGonigal is right: the potential needs to be harnessed for something more than shooting virtual monsters.

Mac Moves

2011-09-09T16:13:00.001-07:00

Sometimes long distance friends are the best kind of friends. V made this from shots she took of Mac long ago at Fort Ord. It made my day. Probably it will make my week.

When Pink and Baseball Collide

2011-09-05T21:10:00.000-07:00

This isn't really a post about baseball, but I'm gonna start there. On Sunday I went to the baseball game, and I think it was maybe the bajillionth time I've run into Breast cancer Awareness day at the game.

Six hundred plus breast cancer survivors put on neon pink jerseys and form a pink ribbon on the field and release pink balloons and doves and more people wear pink in the stands and there are pink give-aways and pink between-inning speeches it's all very pink and emotional and inspiring. (Way better than the game I went to on Saturday that turned out to be Christian day at the games, though unannounced, and really bugged me. See my previous encounter with religion at the ballpark.) I'm not upset that it was cancer day- I mean surviving cancer is a wonderful thing. My grandmother had breast cancer and lived for about 30 more years and died of something entirely unrelated (though it may or may not have been cancer), and as cynical as I am, I'm certainly not going to begrudge celebrating life. (OK, I'm cynical when it comes to the yearly baseball Michael Milken campaign about prostate cancer, but dude's a thief. I can't help it.)

Well, actually the Milken story is rather relevant here, but this is where the story veers from baseball. One of Milken's lines, apparently, was "Greed is Good." And this is the problem with the prostate campaign, and why I get so frustrated that I'm cynical about a cause that fights a deadly disease: The fight against prostate cancer is run by the man who said "greed as good." And though Milken isn't running the breast cancer campaign, the line might as well apply to the campaign against breast cancer. There is a Problem with Pink. Here are some stats for you, as broken down by The Cancer Culture Chronicles: Komen, the "charity" behind much of the pink stuff out there, contributed less than 19% of their resources to breast cancer resources in 2010. So I'm at this game Sunday watching all of these women proudly standing on the field in solidarity and sisterhood with other survivors, wearing pink jerseys that were funded with money that could have gone to actually making a difference for them and other women. And fuming, of course.

So we've got problem number 1: The main foundation funding ("funding") breast cancer research is actually quite lame about distributing their abundant wealth. But there's more, of course. The Pink message encourages us to miss the target: breast cancer doesn't just happen, and the causes of breast cancer are Big Picture- not just genetic and not just solved with self breast-exams or mammograms. This blog from one of my favorite online action sites, Think Before You Pink, reminds us that though breast cancer affects individuals, it's a social and environmental issue as well, and must be "cured" as such. The decidedly non-pink Breast Cancer Fund website has clear sections on the kinds of environmental things that can increase the likelihood of developing breast cancer, including population markers such as genetics, race/ethnicity, where you live, and where you work. The research is being done, but sadly, the annual report is only in its sixth year. Contrast this with the Very Pink and glitzy shiny Susan Komen site. It's easy to see how much more research could be done, and how much more could be done with research at the Breast Cancer Fund site. Instead, we've got Pink.

And back to one of my favorite websites, Sociological Images, a recent study found that pink was self-defeating. Women exposed to all this Pink crap felt a personal threat- pink is so overdetermined as feminine that women take the Pink=Women's Disease to heart, and try to ignore it as a defense mechanism. This leads women to be less likely to donate money to anything breast cancer related and less likely to take the idea of breast cancer affecting them seriously. On the one hand, Pink makes the disease a personal, not global threat, and on the other, when the threat becomes personalized, natural defense mechanisms cause women to shy away from taking it seriously.

I don't have answers for this one, but as usual, when something is sending a very strong traditional cultural message, there's usually more to the story, and probably a better solution. In the meantime, I encourage you to follow along with Think Before You Pink, both the blog and the action campaigns, check out the research at The Breast Cancer Fund, and The Cancer Culture Chronicles, which can be a very difficult read, which is honest, not Pink. Pink is not difficult. It's traditional and trite and cheerful, and so not-cancer-like. I mean no disrespect for the strong women on the baseball field. I just hope we can change the marketing in time that the 600 survivors are the last 600 survivors, because there's no more cancer. I don't think Pink will do this.

Year of the Bug: Dying for Dinner

2011-09-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

(or #firstworldproblems, dog edition)

This is posted late here, but made it in time for the 52 weeks group.

I Am Too Old (and a lot of other things) To Play Baseball

2011-09-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

My dad gave me a copy of the New York Times magazine a couple months ago with a picture of Derek Jeter on the cover. I kept flipping through the magazine thinking that there must be an article that wasn't about the Yankees that he wanted me to read. But no, the cover story, the one with the Giant Jeter Bobble Head on the front, was actually the point. I sucked it up and read it- and learned that there are good lessons to be learned, even from the enemy Yankees. You can and should read the whole article here. Basically, Jeter just turned 37 in the biggest baseball market there is, and no one can stop counting the seconds until he retires. Or dies. Because he's just that old. On the flipside, he has also just reached an amazing baseball milestone, 3,000 hits, and is the revered captain of a team that has flourished since he joined 15 years ago. (They've only missed the post-season once since then. Can you see why I hate Jeter AND the Yankees?)

But baseball lifespans, Michael Sokolove explains, are "foreshortened versions of a human lifespan." Baseball players (not just Jeter) are exciting to watch because they're exaggerated versions of what we wish our physical selves could be: how many times have we told ourselves we could hit that pitch that the lame pitcher threw and the lamer pitcher missed, and been awed when the awesome hitter took the awesome pitcher deep? Baseball players (and all athletes) just like us, try to compensate when their bodies start to fail them- they eat better, maybe they exercise more or differently. But baseball players' bodies aren't failing them at 75 and getting arthritic. They're failing them at catching up with that awesome pitch, and they can only hit weak grounders instead of awesome liners or homeruns. Sokolove knows: there's just no compensating that even the best athlete can do. Even Jeter. It's just that the best ones were so good to begin with, they can play longer. So Jeter is not quite dead yet. Me? I'm already too old to play.

The reason I'm too old, and you better sit down for this, is that the prime of a baseball players' life is 26-30 years old. My dad, when talking about upside of a recent call-up or trade, used to say "Well, he's an old rookie," and I'd think 23 or 26 isn't old! And we're both right. In the real world, 26 isn't old at all. But the changes that start happening in the body around 30 coincide with the skills most needed to make baseball players successful. It's depressing, but Jeter is dying. He's in the old folks home of baseball. He probably is in assisted living. Part of me, the Yankees hater in me, is gloating. The young person in me is having a heart attack and joining him there. Physically, the things that you need to hit a ball just start to deteriorate: "fast-twitch" muscle reactions, eyesight, and visual processing. The time of pitch-leaving-pitchers hand to decision-about-swing is so miniscule that these things are key to success, and you just can't make them last, even if you work out every second like Roger Clemens. (Read the article to understand what they are and how they actually work.) Roger Clemens is famous for his workout routine (and possibly also his performance enhancing drug use), but according to Sokolove, you just can't work yourself into a younger person.

Getting old is touchy. Sokolove got himself banned from the Yankees clubhouse for proposing this article, which was being written for the New York Times- quite something. In baseball, the take-home message is, if you start out great, you can stretch your career till you're 40, or maybe a little longer. You'll still be good, but people will think you're washed up, and heckle you mercilessly and wonder why you didn't retire sooner. If you're good, you better get to the Majors when you're young- like real young- like by 25, and better get out before you're 35 to salvage any dignity. And if you're mediocre (by baseball standards, which is, of course, tremendous), you better STILL get up early, and get out early, before you're the laughing stock of people like me. The other way to think about this is that if you're a fan, taking age into account is vital when evaluating new additions to a team or judging a players' performance. Hideki Matsui isn't just bad, he's old: he's past his prime, and his body is hurting his chances. The A's younger players should be playing at the top of their physical abilities- if they're not, they're not going to get any better. And me? I guess it's not bad enough that I'm a girl. I'm too damn old.

Year of the Bug: All Tied Up

2011-08-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

I take pictures of tied up dogs. You can see some of them that i've taken with Instagram in this little montage:

and many more on my "All Tied Up" set:

It's one of the things I "collect" in my photography because I think it's fascinating the situations people will put their dogs in. Some of the dogs seem fine with being tied up. I used to tie Mac out for brief seconds in the first year that I had him, because he would just sit there, as he sits in the car, all alert, but not stressed. This was before he was posed a threat to small dogs, cats, or any kind of human. I never left him longer than it took to get a coffee or soda. I see dogs tied out like this, that look comfortable or relaxed, and I see dogs that are clearly bite risks, and I see dogs so stressed out they look like they're going to shit themselves. I've seen a few dogs lately tied up wearing muzzles, one dog I saw twice in front of a bag of kibble, and some dogs I see seem truly not to care that their owners aren't there. During one heatwave, I saw two dogs hiding under cars, they were so hot.

Anyway, this is Mac, tied up next to Gordos, where I see a tied out dog every single time I go. Mac was not unattended at any point. I promise blogging will resume shortly. I'm caught up in the World's Longest Book, which slowed me up, and my laptop was at the Vet. We're all good now, and should return to regularly scheduled programming.

Year of the Bug: Do You Want This?

2011-08-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

The look I get when I say "do you want this?"

GB Tran: Vietnamerica

2011-08-13T08:16:00.001-07:00

When I told a friend about this book, she asked me "Where has themacinator gone, and what have you done with her?" She had recently read my posts about my forays into gaming and when I mentioned that I had checked out a graphic novel at the library, it was true, it sounded like I had swapped myself out for a new, kind of creepy version of myself. In my defense, I had no intention of checking out a graphic novel, and also in my defense, the book is actually not a novel, it's a graphic nonfiction novel. Go figure that one out. I believe the term is graphic memoir, but I'm not an expert in this particular type of geekery, so I can't be sure.

"Vietnamerica" by GB Tran is a family story of Tran learning his family history in Vietnam, and to some extent, of the cultural breakdown as the family becomes Vietnamese-American. There is a pretty cool clip of the story of writing/drawing the book on Tran's website, that actually helps make the book more intelligible. As my first graphic (nonfiction) novel, it took me about half of the book to get used to the format, and I found myself not really following until the second half. By then, I was used to the characters- I could visually understand who Tran was, who was his dad, his mom, etc. Partially my confusion was due to the vast number of family members (the family tree was incomplete, vast, and introduced way too late), and partially it was due to my rookie-ness at the format. Only in the second half did I realize that the tight cursive script was Tran's mother speaking her story, and that the boxed writing was a different voice. I could then distinguish Tran's voice, his father, etc. It was an "aha" moment- I didn't always need to follow visual cues- the writing was a "font," and I could use the fonts to tell what was going on. This probably should have been obvious.

I also found myself victim to sensory overload. The art in this book is incredible. "Vietnamerica" is full color, but the schemes for each type of scene are muted and limited; the visual themes repeat as story lines come up. The art is really beautiful- Tran is clearly a gifted artist. I almost felt guilty skimming over the art, as each frame is visually arresting. Again, I'm a reader of traditional books, though, and really didn't know how to take it all in. The book is not enough to be a "standalone" traditional book, and I can't really judge it as a graphic (nonfiction) novel, since it's my first. But it's gorgeous, and the story is moving, if a bit thin. Glad to see that my library carries it!

Louisa Thomas: Conscience

2011-08-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

Louisa Thomas has written a masterpiece, against some substantial odds. First, "Conscience" tackles a very well-covered subject in World War 1. Second, the hook Thomas uses to get into WWI, while a lesser-known subject, Norman Thomas, is a family member- Thomases' grandfather. It would be easy to slip into sycophantic flattery of the great man, but Thomas avoids this, for the most part. Norman Thomas (Louisa Thomas refers to him generally as Norman, to avoid confusion with his three brothers- Arthur, Ralph, and Evan) stands out as a historical figure: he served the poor, had progressive beliefs about pretty much everything, and eventually one of the founders of the ACLU. The book doesn't read as an ode to Norman, though I imagine much has been white-washed. Thomas writes of the disappointment Norman caused his father as his beliefs strayed farther and farther from his Presbyterian upbringing, his tendency to flip-flop on his political beliefs, and the reliance on his wealthy wife's money. None of these can really be pointed to as strengths on Norman's part.

So what's the big deal about the Thomases? As the tag line for the book tells the reader, Norman was one of four brothers involved in the war: two became pacifists, and two became soldiers. Norman was the oldest. All four went to Princeton, and the pacifists both followed in their father's footsteps and became ministers (though both faced challenges in actually passing the minister test when they wouldn't be nailed down on literal interpretations of the bible). The Princeton thing is a big deal, because the four Thomas boys became very well-connected, to the point that they were on speaking terms with Woodrow Wilson up to and through his presidency. Norman, especially, was in with movers and shakers, especially in New York. He married well, and started his career path high, as the minister to the church to the mucky mucks on 5th Avenue, before realizing that he was destined for smaller worldly things and bigger spiritual paths. By the end of the book, he's left the spiritual world all together for a more moral and ethical truth, though whether or not he attains a clear idea of truth is debatable.

His brother Evan also struggles with truth, though in a more self-focused way. While Norman seems to have a picture of what he is fighting for: class and racial equality, a sense of justice in the world; Evan thrashes about looking for purpose. Thomas either can't figure out what Evan was doing with his life or nails it that Evan couldn't figure out what Evan was doing with his life. Eventually he decides that he is a pacifist, and an "absolutist" at that. Although he is abroad when President Wilson decides to enter into the war, Evan returns to the states in order to get drafted and then object to the war. While Norman struggles with how to take an appropriate anti-war stance, Evan takes his marching orders in order to defy them, and is insulted when the army cannot let him go as far as he would like to take them. For me, this is the most thought provoking part of the book. Thomas writes, quoting a reporter of the time,

Conscientious objectors represented "a residue" with "peculiar beliefs"- and yet there is a note of respect here, the refusal to subordinate oneself and submit to the "opinions of others or to force." That ambivalence is part of the American ethos, in which community is forever balanced against the individual, the state against the rights of men. Conscientious objectors demanded to be released from the heaviest burden placed upon citizens, the willingness to kill and die for one's country. The health of a democracy requires minimal coercion. But the health of a state sometimes requires that men do things they object to. Conscientious objectors brought that tension to the fore. That is why they could not be ignored.

It is exactly this ambivalence that makes America America, that makes peace patriotic, that makes me un-American. Without the ability to object to serving the state in the most serious way, there is no freedom of speech, and there is no democracy- there is only The State, and perhaps fascism, or totalitarianism. The will of the state is all there is. On the other hand, at least the way it is now, without the state having the ability to force service onto its subjects, there is no state, and only a few on the extreme left (right?) would argue against the state altogether. Further, it is an enormous privilege to say "I don't believe in fighting," and then leave the fighting to some one else. Evan had the option of doing alternative service, like working on a farm, but being an "absolutist" was jailed instead. Where does privilege end and conscience begin? Thomas does a fascinating job at bringing up these issues through individual characters and leaving the questions open. The foils of Norman and Evan, who take two separate paths to objecting the war, are good ones: Thomas presents the reader with two of the possible paths, and leaves her alone to find her own.

Games, Gender, and Glitch

2011-08-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

I have never played a "game" before I played Glitch. I've played games, but not GAMES games. Like MMO games, WoW (I don't even really know what this stands for- I think the second "W" is for something about war, but whenever I try to say it, "Witchcraft" comes out.) I've played card games online, scrabble, you know, really intricate things like that. I defaced myself before people were playing games on there all the time- or maybe they were playing games on Facebook already, but I wasn't into it. What I'm getting at is that this is Very New to me. Maybe this is just a really long caveat, though I've thought about it for long enough to stand behind what I'm going to say.

About a week ago, a man posted on the Glitch forums (which get REALLY cranky between tests) that he suspects Glitch of being "too estrogen driven to attract male players." He explained his position: he's a "normal" guy a little older than me with a wife and kids, enjoys the game, but finds it "girly"- my word, not his- the original quote is his. In short, the game is too pastel, there aren't enough wardrobe options that are masculine (they might even have been designed by gay males, conflating gender and sexuality), and the mark of a subscriber is a pink heart. The poster was ripped a new one, chastised, and generally told to fuck off. The thread spiraled more and more out of control and in different directions. As I've been known to, I managed to stick in my $200 and "take it too far." I've decided to reformat and reshare my thoughts on the gender implications of Glitch here now that you've got my caveat and context (you bored yet?).

Of course, I took it too far, and got a take home message that the original poster probably didn't intend at all. For me, the bigger point about gender and Glitch (and games in general!) is actually far from cosmetic, though cosmetics are clearly part of the package. The genuine question in the poster's question: is glitch a "girl's" game? I think the original poster was asking this, although crudely, by saying he'd have to "hang my masculinity on the wall" to play the game. What kind of online games, specifically MMOs are appropriate for men? What kind of games are just "games"? Is there such a thing? On a most basic level, I'm clearly not implying that (as the poster almost suggested) girls should play princess" and boys should play "shoot 'um up," but we are socialized this way from very young, and from the tiny bit I've dipped my toe into the vast world of MMOs out there for the it seems like that's still how adults are playing.

Some examples from real life virtual games: Many of the players at Glitch call themselves "FS" refugees. Faunasphere was a game you played through Facebook (I believe), that went under earlier this year. Some descriptive language from FS's FB page:

Adventure waits in a mysterious, abandoned world, overrun with living pollution. Charming creatures known as Fauna have survived in this beautiful yet inhospitable environment. Join your friends and build a new, clean world.

and a nice summary from Joystiq. If you hadn't read any of the above description and just looked at the picture immediately below, who would you think would be most likely to play this game- men or women? While the game is also marketed to children, but the "FS refugees," as they call themselves in Glitch, are primarily adults. The adults, I believe, are majority female.

On the other hand, there's World of Warcraft. (The second "W" in WoW.) Check out this picture and guess the marketing bias. I'm not making this shit up, though I may be taking it to far. For an idea of where i'm coming from, check out the awesome site Sociological Images.) Think about who "shoot um up" games are marketed to, and gun toys, and war games, from a very young age: boys. Then think of the kind of things that are marketed to girls: playing house, barbies, ezbake ovens, paper dolls etc. We grow up from kids who play kids' games with these things to adults who play adult games with naked ladies and blood or cute animals. Of course, there are human exceptions, no denying it.

And, there are game exceptions, and in my opinion, Glitch is one of them. On the face of it, Glitch is not an exception, and this is where we come full circle to the poster in the Glitch forums who has a great point: many of the window-dressings *are* girly. On the surface, Glitch is a more traditionally feminine game: if I asked who it is marketed to according to mainstream, heteronormative, patriarchal tropes, the clear answer is women. Players dress avatars like they are paper dolls, tend garden patches and plant trees, and there are no weapons. Until the last test, players couldn't even do anything when an "attack" occurred- all they could do was cooperatively revive animals after the fact.

(photo courtesy of Fae)

The awesome part, though, is that glitch is subversive, in that it's not a particularly "girly" setup, *because* of all of the cosmetic things mentioned above. The avatars are androgynous, the clothes are cheeky, the sexual innuendos are (as far as I've bothered to read into them, being the prude that I am) not particularly "sided" (correct me if i'm wrong!). Glitch is probably not "different" enough to appeal to people who like "manly" games. People who want to bomb things and destroy things and kill people and see blood, men or women, probably aren't going to want to discover how to make salt, or be thrilled to get random kindness from a garden patch. I stand by my theory that Glitch has something to offer for the gamer who wants to opt-out.

The game also allows for both cooperative and competitive play- another area traditionally thought of as divided by gender. Players do not cooperate to destroy other players, but to do structured things like open new areas of the game, or less structured activities (like the art project pictured above). There are leaderboards, but they are deemphasized (I played for weeks before I knew where the leaderboards were) which suggests that they are not the focus. Glitch is not a game that thrives on competition. Glitch is not about winning or losing: when the player closes the window, a dialogue window pops up telling the player they were "just about to win the game!" Dying is encouraged. On the other hand, competition is not frowned on: players can take androgynous, cross-dressed avatars, and, without a weapon away. There are trophies and badges and levels, and some players say they compete against each other and some argue that they're only challenging each other.

More: A great interview from far more knowledgeable people at Joystiq about gender and video games.

An explanation of a recent study of demographics of MMO's from Geekery, using the the Bartle Test.

Year of the Bug: Brown Dog Free

2011-08-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

not quite the shot i was going for, but with the Diana, you never know what you're going to get. plus, i had to stand in the middle of the street, and all of a sudden, as i pressed the shutter, there was an ENORMOUS dog bark that scared the crap out of me, so i decided against taking a couple back up shot with the iphone.

Year of the Bug: Smarty Bull

2011-08-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

(not really)

This was the one and only shot I took this week: I mean I literally posed Mac once and clicked the shutter once. Mac swatted my glasses off, and I can't see without them. I kinda checked the back of the camera to see if it looked tolerable, put my glasses back on and gave up. I haven't had much inspiration lately, so when it actually *was* a tolerable shot, I chose it. Shortest photo session ever.

This is A's Baseball.

2011-08-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

This is bad baseball.

This is why radio is better than TV: I don't have to watch it.

This is proof of my addiction: I'm still listening.

This is bad, and funny, and terrible.

This is A's baseball.

Earl Swift: The Big Roads

2011-08-01T17:45:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, my sister coined the term "readable nonfiction." It's possible, of course, that someone used the word previously, but I'm going with this story. Earl Swift's story of America's interstates is, for the most part, readable nonfiction. It's also, and I hate to do this, quite meandering, and almost lost me to other pursuits about half way through. I suppose Swift had a big project, turning a hundred year history of road building into a readable story, and he almost succeeded.

I've mentioned Jane Kay's "Asphalt Nation" before: that book really takes an anti-interstate stance, after providing the history of the roads, in short form. Swift, on the other hand, attempts a more "neutral" stance, allowing historical figures to make their own arguments for and against the various repurcussions of 40,000 plus new miles of highway. "The Big Roads" could easily be titled "The Big (white and one token black) Men Who Made the Big Roads," and each of these men bring different perspectives bear. Although I think Swift's viewpoint is fairly clear- dismay at the homogeneity of the country now ruled by the interstates- he leaves stronger opinions to the men behind the roads. These are men like Carl Fisher, an entrepenuer who was ahead of the curve in realizing that "horseless carriages" were the Next Big Thing, and turned out to be one of The Forces behind the interstates. Quite buearucrats like Mr's Turner, Fisher and MacDonald who spent their lives as tireless public servants working to develop the Best Roads engineers could make. And those Other Guys, big ones like Lewis Mumford and little ones like Joe Wiles who spoke up for other ideas of "progress."

It's undeniable that the federal/state partnership that led to the interstates has created immense progress, not least in safety. I would venture that few of Americans can say that the interstates have brought them no discernible benefits. Sure, traffic sucks, and will continue to suck, forever. Caltrans will continue to be the butt of three quarters of all the jokes, and an enormous money sucker, but the maintenance of the highways is truly a first world problem. So what's the big deal? Well there's the homogeneity that my grandmother called "etcetera" and that Earl Swift shares some personal feelings about. Small towns were devestated by the interstates for multiple reasons. Some of them were just plain left behind: the interstates were designed for ease of construction and expediency, not for the sake of the people living nearby. So towns were left 5 to 50 miles away from the freeways, for example, and the offramps became destinations. The chain restaurants and motels that we all know are direct results of the interstates. And homogeniety isn't just seeing the same 5 chains over and over: highway planners were proud that you could drive from state to state and see a consistent road, driving without knowing you had crossed state lines. Sure, state lines are arbitrary, but in a country so proud of its heritage, and so diverse in environment and population, a unified view for 3000 miles is perhaps not a strong talking point.

This is just the beginning, and "Asphalt Nation," though over a decade old, is clearly the better read from an activist perspective. For history, and making your own call about where to go from here (man, bad pun central!), "The Big Roads" is a good start. The books probably read well together, although it's been years since I've read "Asphalt Nation," and they may overlap. Poignantly, for a Bay Area native, Swift uses the Embarcadero Freeway as an example of just how little the road planners worked with localities when planning, designing, and building freeways. Below is a picture of the Embarcadero, which was finally torn down in 1994, after the earthquake damaged it in 1989. (Photo by egcd32 used under creative commons license.)

The area near the freeway was dark and depressing, and quite scuzzy. The Embarcadero and Ferry Plaza is now a thriving area, and I imagine a tourist destination. I don't know- I go there, but I don't do much with tourists. I'm one of those tourist-scorners, and don't keep up with their destinations. It's beautiful now, too, and unfathonable that anyone, even the best planners anywhere, would have thought to block the view. "The Big Roads" is the big picture behind small pictures like this, all over the country.

(post teardown, photo by Telstar Logistics, under creative commons license.)

Year of the Bug: Photo Head

2011-07-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

so mac is apparently fine. the vet as decided on an "allergic reaction" to an unknown event. i'm going with that for now since i have no other alternative, really. all of his bloodwork was normal, and nothing really fits, so, allergic reaction to nothing in particular it is.

he's definitely feeling better- it was a challenge to take this shot because he was so wound up. on the other hand, he was doing that weird arousal thing that has been going on the past two months and is very un-mac-like. my boyfriend is here, though, and was trying to be my photo-assistant. we have to remember not to do that again.

the point was to get mac in front of the fauxlaroid-wall, and i knew it was going to be hard, since the fauxlaroids are a little too high for mac's head. he just would not hold still. hopefully by the end of the year, they'll be a little lower down and we can get a shot with the full bokeh effect.

I'm Not a Vet

2011-07-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

I don't even play one on TV.

The official un-diagnosis for Mac is "allergic reaction to something." An unknown something. I'm not satisfied with this answer, but it seems to be what we've settled with now. T came to the vet with me and Mac yesterday morning. Everything, and I mean everything, on Mac's blood test and urine test came back normal. Mac had a slightly abnormal thyroid result from the initial blood test, along with a normal one, so they re-ran it. And the retest came out exactly normal, which ruled out thyroid problems. The urine test was normal, even with the extra test for Cushing's. Mac's glands had been huge, which gave T and me the horrifically scary thought of Lymphoma, but by yesterday, they were back down, basically ruling that out. His good ear itched so much that he thrashed away when the vet stuck the ear-looky-in thingy, and she couldn't really examine it, but she said what she could see looked fine. So now we have teeth that are unexaminable and and an ear that is unexaminable. I am starting to feel like the owner of a "normal" dog owner- the kind of dog onwer who has trouble trimming her dogs' nails, or has to muzzle her dog at the vet. Mac is a lot of things, but intolerant of the vet is not one of them.

But apparently I've got an allergic dog with symptoms that don't seem allergic to me, who is hard to examine. It's strange, and unsettling. The good news is that I don't have a dog with cancer, or a dog with thyroid problems, or a dog with Cushing's. Or at least I think I don't.

Confessions of a Budding Gamer

2011-07-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Something new and slightly disturbing has been happening on themacinator homefront. This new thing is Glitch. I've written a few times about my struggles with addiction, and while I may sound like I'm belittling addiction when discussing things like baseball and Diet Coke, I don't mean it that way at all. If you read this (basic) defintion of addiction, you'll see where I'm coming from. Clearly, addiction is not ruling my life, which I am thankful for, but it's something I think about, and fight. I would love to turn off this A's game right now. It's ugly. And I can't. See #7: "Desire to cut down. Have you sometimes thought about cutting down or controlling your use? Have you ever made unsuccessful attempts to cut down or control your use?" Answer: Yes.

So I've found a new problem. I am a beta tester for the new thing in MMO's, Glitch. I have never played, or wanted to play an MMO. I honestly don't really know what an MMO is, and am linking to the wiki because I have nothing better. It's my understanding that these are games, basically, where many people play online together. Sometimes, many people play online together for many, many hours. Massivly addicting multiplayer online games. Let it not be said that themacinator did not spend too many hours on her computer prior to discovering the MMO. I have been a screenager since I was a small child on a grey-scale Mac, and though you won't catch me reading an e-book, I do use the computer A Lot. A lot a lot. But I've avoided it as a source of Step 5: "Neglecting or postponing activities. Have you ever put off or reduced social, recreational, work, or household activities because of your use?" for the most part. I do remember a time in my chlidhood where my sister and I would tell our parents that we had to wait till it was a good time to pause, or until we died, to eat dinner, or whatever we were supposed to be doing.

Glitch is my new addiction. I heard about it through some people on Flickr, including some people who left to become employees at Glitch. I heard it would be beautiful, and like no other game anyone had ever seen. So far, this has proved true. It's gorgeous. And it's like no other game I've ever played: it's not competitive. It's cooperative if you want it to be, and can be played alone, or in groups. Until the last two tests, there were no bad guys. There are a couple of bad guys now- the "Juju's," who look like upside down Jell-o cups and steal your stuff, and the "Rook," who attacks animals and requires cooperative play to stop. Get this: there are NO weapons. A pacifist gamer's dream.

Here is what I wrote in the Glitch Forum, a little paean to Glitchiness:

The discussion about herbs, and what they're good for, made me realize why I like glitch. I'm not much on the herbs myself, but I love going to the community garden and gardening. I collect purple flowers, and hand them out to others standing in there, tend the garden, keep a few rubeweeds and hairballs for myself for trips to nostalgia-land, and then head to a mailbox, where I send 1000c worth of mail to all of my friends: a flower per friend! I love a game where it's fun to hang out and make people happy.

The backstory, and so personal, envision my dia-de-los-muertes glitch lying on a therapy couch, is that I was traumatized as a young child my mother's repeated telling of how *she was traumatized by playing Monopoly. This was before the Civil War and the pieces were wood and metal, and her sister was (is) very competitive. When things didn't go according to plan, my aunt would throw these pieces at my mother, leaving painful marks. Therefore, my mother would not play boardgames with my sister and I, not even the quaint ones like CandyLand. I do remember Chutes and Ladders, but she also hates snakes, so maybe I made that up.

I grew up HATING competition. My sister and dad would play hours of hearts, but what a mean-spirited game! You gang up on people and dump hundreds of points on them! Ouch! Mean! Unfair!

The point is, Glitch is not only not competitive, it can be cooperative, and you don't even HAVE to play it like a game. It can be mindless niceness. I'm sure this isn't what draws other people to the game, and I can just put on my rose-colored glasses and assume that the other day when I dropped 100 planks, one at a time, that the person following behind me picking them up one at a time and not saying a word, was really actually quite grateful, but the point is, IT DOESN'T MATTER! I was having fun, not competing, being nice, and the game allowed for it! When I do those races quests with other people, and I've already done them, I wait at the finish line! I let people win! And I love that!! The game allows for it- maybe even encourages it! Or, if I win, the Glitch asks me if I want to do it again, and then I let them win the second time. WOOO! Anti-competition.

Of course, not everyone plays like this, which is also fine. But it's my ethic, and it's so Anti-American, and anti-real-life, it's just such a wonderful break, and fits right into my mindset. I can play, and lose too! Or share, at least.

OMMMMM.

In this little piece, you can see a tiny bit of the creative pieces of Glitch the funny herbs and the places you travel to where "Nostalgia weighs heavily on your shoulders." There are planks to drop, or splank with, and there's races that are OK to lose. Not everyone plays this way, but I do, and it's OK. So, how do I quit a game that let's me lose? That let's me opt out of gaming? The addiction that wins for losing?

So that's me in the upper left corner. If you want to sign up for Glitch (pusher!), I think you're supposed to do it through the homepage, and it requires Facebook. CLARIFICATION: only invites require facebook. I do not and will not have facebook. This game is not played on facebook. In fact, I got an invite without facebook. There are ways :)

Year of the Bug: Embarrasment of Riches

2011-07-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

If you know Mac in person, or study his every hair follicle and body change in pictures, you can see that he is not quite himself in this picture. He's feeling unwell, and has been for awhile, but the changes seem to be accelerating, and I'm starting to take them more seriously. You can see the baldness and head-discoloration on his head above his eyes, and his "puffy" look around the face and neck here- that's why he's not wearing his collar. His neck around his lymph nodes keeps swelling to the point I have to take his collar off. I have blood work in process, and I'm going to have them run another test for cushing's. Hopefully it's nothing. Actually, hopefully it's SOMETHING, something fairly mild that can be treated/managed with a pill.

I'm fairly philosophical about this right now. Since the big scare almost a year ago, I've sort of come to terms with the fact that Mac has been a long wonderful life lesson, and that I have gotten more from him than I can ever give him, except a soft bed and a life free of pain. I mean, intellectually I know that, so right now I'm just trying to make him comfortable and figure out exactly what is going on ASAP. He's not really in pain, right now, but clearly there's something wrong- my room is covered with the hair he is blowing off, he's blowing up like a blimp, then dropping down then blowing up again, and he's agitated at times. But I know we'll figure it out, so I'm calm. It's not like when he hurt his back and the dog was so clearly suffering. I know he is, and that he's being stoic, but it's not as acute.

So here he is, getting ready to enjoy his dinner.

Michael Chabon: Maps and Legends

2011-07-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

I can honestly say that I have no idea what I just read or why I just read it. Somewhere I must have read a review of Michael Chabon's "Maps and Legends," so I put it on my "to read" book to look for at the library, and whenever a book shows up at my tiny branch of the library, I check it out. But that doesn't mean I know what I'm getting, and you know how library books don't have little blurbs on the back, so even if I wanted to, I can't judge the book by its cover. The first half of this book appeared to be little jaunts into Chabon's favorite genres, or authors he felt were exemplars of these genres. He is most interested in the short story, which he feels has been pigeon-holed into one tiny motif repeated over and over. Instead, if I understand it correctly, since Chabon never explicitly spells it out, the short story could include many more formats including the ghost story, the detective story, maybe even the comic or graphic novel. However, the first half of the book reads like a random collection of literary criticism, rather than a treatise on authors Chabon likes, so I'm making a leap here. Maybe this is actually a book of essays that Chabon feels like he can publish? At one point in the second half of the book, Chabon writes that now that he's won the Pulitzer, he feels like he has more authority (read: liberty/privilege) to write and publish whatever he'd like.

The second half of the book is much more interesting: it reads as a literary memoir, or a memoir of Chabon's writing life. Although there's still very little structure, the essays follow some sort of chronological progression through his life, and give some insight into the progression of his writing life. The most fascinating part of both parts of the book, however, are Chabon's breif, but alluring, discussions of what happens on the borders and edges of the map of literature and truth(hence the title). In this half of the book, Chabon appears to be narrating his life as a memoir, albeit a slightly fantastic life, but toys with the reader at the end, questioning whether the work is a memoir at all, or pure fantasy. In the last few pages, Chabon manages to tie all of the sections together thematically, though only in a very tenuous way. Once again, I've finished a book that I'm not exactly sure while I was reading in the first place. Chabon writes beautifully, which kept me going for awhile, as did the gorgeous book itself, which was an argument against ebooks: the hardcover edition has a lovely 3/4sized, detailed warp, and the pages are thick and set in a beautiful print. I literally loved to read the physical book. Unfortunately, that's the most redeeming thing I can say about "Maps and Legends."

The Year of the Bug: Trifecta

2011-07-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

(Posted on Flickr on Wednesday for Sofafree Wednesday)

Taken for:
Year of the Bug
TGISFW
'Roid Week 2011

A strange thing happened while I was taking this picture. This is the "usual spot" by my house, which is a very quiet spot. But this time, along with 2 sofafrees, there was a strange old white man with those new giant earphones who had decided this underpass was the perfect place to wax his nice car. He had picked the spot directly next to the box of rotting animal that has been sitting there for weeks. I have no idea what kind of rotting animal it is, but it's so rotted that all that is left is juice and really really bad smell. Why this man was standing next to it was a mystery.

There was also a "three seater sleeper" Oakland Public Works truck parked in front of a dumpster, so I felt like I had to hurry, in case he was going to pick up my dumpster. But he wasn't- he eventually just picked up the dumpster and left.

Then a dude with a little pushy thingy for groceries full of his life's possessions walked by on his cellphone. Only the public works man seemed to think any of this was at all odd: me with my neon green diana taking pictures of my dog hopping on and off trashed sofas, rich-looking white dude waxing his car under an underpass next to rotting goo, or dude with his life in a cart on the phone.

Ah, Oakland.

Arizona, All Stars, and Anti-Americans

2011-07-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

(photo stolen from MLB.COM where no photographer is attributed)

Today is the 82nd annual Major League Baseball All-Star Game. I've never really liked the All-Star game or the All-Star break. The All-Star Game, probably because I was raised by my dad, who felt it was a silly waste of time: after all, it meant nothing when I was growing up, and was a break from the serious business of 162 games of competition. Now that it "matters" in terms of home-field advantage for the World Series, I still don't really like it. I used to love taking dozens of the old school ballots from the men at the top of the aisles at the game and punching out my favorite players during the A's games. Without fail I chose the A's players, or players on our Rotisserie league team, or my favorite players from the baseball cards I assiduously collected. Occasionally I would fill a ballot out for my dad with wiser selections. I was a sentimental voter, and it turned out I was just like everyone else voting: the picks are meaningless precisely because they are popularity contests. Every year players who are on the disabled list get picked because they're Big Names or from Big Name Teams or because they had Big Years the year before, even though they aren't the best at their positions. It's understandable, but doesn't make me like the All-Star game any more. Punching those ballots was fun. Then the voting went online. Gone was the tactile feeling of the hard paper and the little hanging chads, and gone was any shred of interest I had in the voting. The A's radio announcers urge me to vote online for the A's top possibilities- this year Coco Crisp and Josh Willingham, and I feel scornful: really? top possibilities maybe, in AAA baseball! And somehow the voting changed this year, though I can't follow it at all. I gave up altogether, but I'm confused every time the Phillies' announcers tell me that Shane Victorino is in the running for some last available roster position. And any interest I have in making sure the "right" players are selected, that the team is accurate, is gone. The All-Star team is a popularity contest. I'm an anti-establishment non-joiner. Lame.

But there's more to my cynical dislike of the All-Star game than the strange grade-school popularity contest feel of it all. The All-Star game is three days where MY season is interrupted. For six months, I'm deprived of my day-to-day livelihood. Then I get into the swing of it, and about 90 games into it (for some reason the All-Star game comes a little more than half way into the season), I am forced to sit on my hands for three full days. WHY? The players have a whole season off. Why do they need three days? The announcers don't need it, although they sure sound like they do when they talk about their vacations to Mexico and the shore. Is MLB prepping me and the other diehards for winter? Just a little taste of mourning? Or are the rest of the fans itching for this, this spontaneous exhibition of frivolity in the middle of the season? Somehow I doubt it. The real fans, at least, I think are about real baseball. This is a game, a show, a show of a game, not working at play.

So this is why I'm not into the All-Star game on a normal year. But this year, I'm particularly perturbed by the All-Star game, as it's hosted in Arizona, by the D-Backs. Although it appears that progressives may have forgotten that Arizona has declared itself anti-brown, and over a year ago, I wrote about the issues with hosting the All-Star game in Arizona. This article, also from May of last year, touches on some of the issues of hosting a major sports spectacle in Arizona. Besides the immense amount of money that MLB will implicitly approve being poured into the economy (while other jurisdictions and companies are still boycotting the state), brown players ask "why would I want to go there as an All-Star, simultaneously being honored and potentially being asked to leave because of the my skin tone?" (my paraphrase) Great question! Last year, stars like Adrian Gonzalez said they would not take the field in the All-Star game (see the awesome Edge of Sports piece on his subsequent flip-flop) because of SB 1070's "immorality."

Ultimately, though, Major League Baseball decided they didn't care about morals, or racism, or really much of anything besides the bottom line. I'm not sure who reached this decision, or how they came to it, but they did, and the player's union followed suit. Per Zirin of Edge of Sports, Gonzalez was always going to follow the Player's Association's lead, and the Player's Association started out by talking big about a boycott, but wasn't really going to follow through. There's money in it for the individual players in the form of All-Star bonuses (whether the players compete or not) and there's obviously tons of money in the event for Arizona and the D-Backs, and lots of money in the All-Star break (including the Home Run Derby and whatever else they're doing, I don't really keep up obviously) for all of Major League baseball. If you open up the MLB site right now, you can't possibly keep track of the sponsors. I'm sure the same was true if you watched the broadcast. It's no Superbowl, but the sponsorship is pretty intense.

So where does the anti-American part of my post come in? Scroll back up to that picture at the top. It's Robinson Cano, New York Yankee and winner of yesterday's Home Run Derby, and the man who pitched to him, his dad, Jose Cano, former Major League pitcher. Both of the Canos were born in the Dominican Republic. And made/make their living in the most American way possible: playing at the sport of baseball. Look at the picture again: it's a portrait of patriotic pride that even I can get behind. Father and son, in jerseys that say "American," as in "American League," but the point is not lost, triumphant with trophy. The men are two shades of brown, and I have now told you that they were born outside of the United States, but they are being celebrated as American. I mean, even their shirts say so. But they are being celebrated like this in Arizona, where, though race may not be considered as a "sole factor" in deciding when to verify immigration status, it can still be used as a factor. The "sole factor" wording is a work-around for racial profiling. I am willing to bet Mac on the fact that I would not be asked for any proof of residency. Jose and Robinson Cano, on the other hand, without their jerseys and entourages, might very well be, especially if a truck was pulling over to them on a corner (the law prohibits hiring people on the side of the road).

Dave Zirin also boycotted the game today. I proudly join him as an anti-baseball, anti-American. I'm waiting for someone to tell me to go back to Iran. Or Cuba, or the Dominican Republic. But not Arizona, because I'm not American enough.

David Sirota: Back to Our Future

2011-07-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

If anyone could write a scathing critique of the 80s, it would be a product of the 80s, a child who grew up in the 80s and was obsessed with the culture of it, the politics of it, the semiotics. This person is David Sirota. This person is most definitely not themacinator. Though I'm only a couple years younger than Sirota, and probably squeezed in just before the end of being an 80s kid, I was (fortunately) sheltered from most of the schlock that Sirota argues created the world we are still living now. The Eighties^TM were not just ten years like any other "historical period," they are, both for him personally, and for the nation (and when the US is affected, you know what happens next), now: "The eighties fixation in our current culture and politics may not really be a resurrection at alll... our fetish may actually be the intensification of an ethos that never actually went extinct, in part because no epochal force ever intervened to kill it."

In the 80s, ideas and propoganda went viral much more easily as it was the first decade where every household had a TV, a VCR and cable, and most had video game consoles. (Part of the rock we lived under came due to lack of cable my entire home life and lack of video game console until late teens. This is not a complaint. This book is one of the many times I give thanks to living outside of the culture machine.) Just as we're seeing media conglomerates merge and merge and merge into smaller monopilies, in the 80s, "50 conglomerates controlled the vast majority of the newspaper, broadcast magazine, movie and publishing firms." And their products were designed specifically for vertical integration. Sirota gives the example of the movie "ET": not just designed for the movie theatre, you got the little alien and his buddy terrified of the government on TV (all the time), on the Atari, in your Happy meal, your action figures, the little give-aways in the cereal boxes, the cartoons, the binder covers, etc. And the marketing, of course, was aimed at kids. The propaganda was everywhere, and for the kids of The Eighties^TM (who are the leaders or burgeoning leaders) of today, "we were a tabula rasa without today's well-honed bullshit detectors, and the first imprint on our psychological blank slate- the pulverizing imprint of 1980s pop culture- has naturally been the most lasting."

One of the most enduring traits of The Eighties^TM that comes back over and over to both pop/mainstream culture and themacinator is post-racialism. Remember Bill Cosby aka Dr Huxtable? I'm not sure you could forget- I'm pretty sure reruns of "The Cosby Show" are playing all day every day on one of the cable packages somewhere on a TV near you. "The Cosby Show" worked (i.e. succeeded in making money while portraying a black family) because the characters and the show didn't make the audience think about blackness or race. "The logical conclusion," Sirota writes "is that to be 'black' is wholly separate from, and maybe even antithetical to, being 'American.'" While "The Cosby Show" was still airing, 60 million people watched the Huxtables each week. The well-to-do black family was appeasing to white audiences: economics trumped race and aussaged fears. Bill Cosby also chose not to talk about or confront any issues that could remotely be linked to race or bigotry in a single episode of the show. Nor did he include any black culture that could potentially threaten the idea of a post-racial family. Dr Huxtable and family were acheivable black role models for black families (supposedly) and changed white people's attitudes toward black people in the "my brother's wife is black" kind of way.

Now, substitute President Obama in both his pre-election campaign for Bill Cosby/Dr Huxtable, and you've got a scary situation that speaks to Sirota's point: The Eighties^TM aren't over. Read this quote and answer this question: Is this a reviewer speaking about "The Cosby Show" shortly after it came out or a shockjock talking about Obama during his campaign? "I forgot he was black for a few minutes!" Does it matter what the answer is? Here's another quote, you pick the referent: The New York Times wrote that [insert your answer here] is forced to play a game "of trying to appeal to the widest possible audience, which means offending as few people and groups as possible," which Sirota adds, "when it comes to race, that's Establishment-speak for 'whites' and their unrelenting desire for the wholesale absolution that the transcendance brand affords." (The answers: The first quote was about President Obama, and the second was about Bill Cosby. But I think they're interchangeable, which is the point.)

There's a lot more to this book. Even more fascinating, to me, was the section about war and the military, and patriotism, which I may write about more later, but I tend to get slightly fanatical about the military and war, and the argument is slightly (though not terribly) complicated, and deserves a real treatment, not a hysterical one. The book is funny, and nostaglic, and is full of "aha!" moments for really anyone over 28. And anyone under 28 should relate, as The Eighties^TM are back, or never went away in the first place. Highly recommended.

Year of the Bug: Dog Tested, Mac Approved

2011-07-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

In honor of the revelation about the origin of sofafree, it was crucial to make this picture this week.

The Story Behind the Sofa Free in Oakland

2011-07-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

We all know my obsession with free seating for multiple people, no matter where the sofa, but of course I'm happiest with sofafree in Oakland. So encountering this article was a particular revalation. I have noticed an escalation of dumping in my neighborhood, and not just of lovely furniture. Trash, boards, dead animals, all the kinds of things I associate with the "ghetto." It's ugly. Sofafree, even at their most tacky, are NOT ugly.

The bottom line of the article, and I urge you to read it, no matter what your stance on roadside seating, is that Oakland (not surprisingly!) has a terrible big trash pickup policy. Basically, unless you own your home or live in a small building like I do, you can't schedule a bulky trash pickup. Most landlords aren't going to go thru the trouble of getting a dumpster brought out for their tenants each time they move, so to the curb your crap goes. I will admit I had NEVER been to a dump before I moved to Santa Cruz County, and I will also admit that I still don't know where the nearest one is. Looking now, I see it's off Davis, in San Leandro. Renters without much disposable income (which is what many moving renters are) have no incentive except goodwill and common sense to go to the dump.

Even better than this article is the fact that a reader was inspired to create a facebook page (I know, icky) devoted to the sofafree (or dumped couches, from his perspective) in the Adam's Point neighborhood of Oakaland. I've been inspired to make the slideshow above, which is devoted to only sofafree shots I've taken in Oakland since the series started. (There are way more, but not posted to flickr.)

It's weird how things come around, because almost exactly two years ago, I talked about sofafree in a philosophical manner. I get it that sofafree is trash, that it is blight, disrupting the landscape. But it's also a way to look at the landscape differently, sort of like street art, or good graffiti. It's a comment on where we are as a scoiety, of what we expect in our neighborhoods, of what "neighborhood" is. Knowing the background of what causes so many sofas to be lying around, besides just sheer laziness, backs up my theory that sofafree is a worthwhile photography/documentary subject, not just for beauty, but for provocation.

(Thoughts appreciated!)

Year of the Bug: Bucket Brigade

2011-07-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

It's county fair season and the original idea was to have mac pose with something from the fair but i failed to find the appropriate prop. I found this plastic fire hat at a game at the carnival part, and the carny told me it didn't belong to anyone, so I took it. My boyfriend suggested Mac pose with a bucket. I couldn't figure out what on earth we was talking about, but duh, it's the old timey fire fighting tool. Of course, our bucket is plastic, and the red-cross is actually orange duct tape, but I figure it fits perfectly with the pit bull firefighter, the garden hose, and a plastic hat.

No one can say he looks depressed in this shot- look at that tail and his longing eyes at my photo assistant's cheese!!

Note: I absolutely can't believe this year is half over. I'm sad about this- it's the all-star break coming up, so baseball season is also half over, which we all know means depression. It means winter is coming up, and it means I *really* need to find a job.

T.C. Boyle: When the Killing's Done and A's Updates

2011-07-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

I finished this book almost a week ago, but really didn't have anything to say about it. Almost a year ago I said no more fiction reviews, then kept writing them. And even though I just heard about this book less than a month ago, I can't remember why I put it on my list. Did I hear about "Tortilla Curtain" first or both books together? I don't know, but this book was overdone and trite and maybe the reason I had never read TC Boyle in the first place. I can't blame the man- it appears he has written/published 19 books since 1979, has a blog, and also writes short stories. Not all of his books can be catchy and interesting. This one also veered into one of my all time favorite topics: animal rights. Boyle had a fascinating take on AR activists, but each character was an overdone stand-in for any real in-depth analysis to take place. And unfortunately, everybody drowns. That's not a spoiler: everybody, from the first chapter, drowns. It's inevitably dull when any tension ends with drowning.

In other news, I attended a very fun A's game today. A's games are always more fun when the A's win, and when you get to win with 10 of your closest friends. OK, 5,000 of your closest friends? Judge for yourself. (click the picture to get it bigger)

The announced attendance was 13,822, and for once, I don't think that's off by more than 5,000. The stadium DID fill in more than that, though the majority of us hid under the overhang, as it was blazingly hot. The picture, taken as usual during the national anthem, was not taken from my assigned seat (I did not get kicked out), but from a seat about 10 rows back, where we sat the entire game to avoid the sun. The shade doesn't usually hit our assigned seats till about the 5th or 6th inning, and it was 90 degrees. Way Too Hot. So my official guessed attendance was about 7000-8000. Maybe 10,000, but I don't even know what that looks like anymore. It was definitely better than earlier this week.

So what next for the A's? I suggest reading at least one of these articles/links/writings about the A's- food for thought (more than any TC Boyle book you're likely to pick up).

A depressing comparison of Walter Haas and Jon Fisher by Baseball Oakland.

Midway Marks by the excellent Todd Van Poppel Rookie Card Retirement Fund (best blog name ever).

Sentimentally, I miss Mark Ellis. He was a classy guy till the end, and clearly was choked up in the part of his press conference that I heard when he heard about his move to the Rockies. I hope that the A's treated him well when they traded him- he had the most tenure with the A's, and was definitely one of the most solid players during that tenure. As we've seen the last 2 years, defense is clearly an underrated commodity. His fielding percentage (until the last month or so) was amazing, and I remember his errorless streak very clearly. An anchor at second is crucial. I get why he was traded, but he was an underappreciated, quiet guy. He was never going to be flashy, and he was never GREAT, but he was good, and he was an A. Weeks is young and sparkly, and the A's need that. Totally understand, but I'm acknowledging that a veteran player, that hasn't bounced around, is also important. Weird to go out to the park and have Coco Crisp or Gio or Cahill be the old-timers on the club. Pennington? Suzuki? Just strange. Life goes on, and I wish the best for Elly.

Oh Say Can You See Any Fans In Attendance?

2011-06-30T09:06:00.000-07:00

Yeah, me neither.

This is my required panorama of the stands at first pitch. I will acknowledge that there were about 5k by the end of the (40 minute) first inning. That Moscoso sure knows how to slow a ballgame down. There is not a chance that the announced attendance of 17,006 (48.5% full) is anywhere close to accurate. The $2 BART seats weren't even close to sold out. We sat in special half-off seats- the A's honored the Cal Baseball team yesterday and gave a special price to people who used a Cal code on ticket orders, and those seats weren't filled. There were entire empty sections.

And yet, the A's "Guest Services" were quick to kick anyone sitting in the wrong section out of their seats. Although you can see that no one was sitting pretty much anywhere, no one was allowed to move a few rows around. The banal anal retentiveness of this boggled my mind. We all payed to get in, and clearly no one paid to sit in those empty seats, but "Guest Services" person after person moved person after person out of vacant seat. It was bizarre and unfriendly. I've been to Giant's games- sold out games- where the Guest Services (not in quotes, because they provided a service, and treated fans like guests)- were less anal about seating, and much kinder, in the process. I sat in my own seat, but watched these people do their jobs in a letter of the law manner.

And I saw the A's play craptastic baseball. Against a craptastic team. Cliff Pennington made his 10th error of the season and Kurt Suzuki made his 5th. I'm not quite sure what's going on with these guys- they both were excellent defenders in the past, and I don't know if injury is to blame, or can be to blame, for piss poor defense. Guillermo Moscoso seemed determine to allow a full minute elapse between each pitch to ensure that the fielders behind him were even more slow and indolent than usual. I saw Ryan Sweeny stifle a yawn at one point. Seriously. And he was absurdly focused on the Marlins that got on base. He could not, however, hold them, and they ran on him and Suzuki all night. The A's seemed to be hitting the ball hard, at least from my angle, and directly to outfielders. The one ball that almost actually landed was caught, and of course the A's left the bases loaded and Suzuki hit into a double play the one time the crowd stopped stifling yawns. If Bob Melvin was managing, I couldn't tell. Sure looked like Bob Geren was back. It was a sad night.

I highly recommend reading Baseball Oakland's great piece on the A's ownership and how we got here.

David Rohde and Kristen Mulvihill: A Rope and A Prayer

2011-06-26T20:09:00.000-07:00

On November 10, 2008, journalist David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan by a hardcore group of Taliban, and held by them, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for 7 months until his unlikely escape. Only two months before his kidnapping, Rohde had married Kristen Mulvihill, a photography editor at a fashion magazine, and promised her this was his last dangerous war correspondent adventure. He had already been kidnapped once before, and his release was negotiated at the highest levels of government. He was done, but decided to do one last interview with a Taliban commander, without telling his wife. He knows there is a risk, but decides the risk is worth it for the book he is writing about the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"A Rope and A Prayer" is the story of Rohde's time as a hostage/captive and Mulvihill's time as the wife of a hostage or captive, told in alternating voices. As I read the book, I enjoyed it, and learned a depressing amount about the sickening, chaotic, worsening situation in Afghanistan. The more time that passes between finishing the book and reading this, the more resentful I feel toward Rohde, on a more small, personal scale. The authors are about 40, and the marriage is the first for each of them. Although Mulvihill writes that she knew what she signed up for when marrying a war correspondent, Rohde told her that he would not jeopardize his life, and clearly took an unnecessary risk. Throughout the process, at least in her telling of the story, Mulvihill is supportive and resourceful, and almost never resentful. She is grateful to all of her family and to Rohde's family for their support, and really, goes above and beyond. Rohde, meanwhile, thinks about his wife, and surviving, but seems to feel worse for the two men who were traveling with him and whose lives he has endangered. Clearly, this is a terrible situation, but the epic guilt that seems implied in the set up is missing.

Aside from the personal aspect I found wanting, the book is a fast read, and the kidnapping gives Rohde an insight into current events in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan that he probably wouldn't have had just writing the book he planned to. An entire area in the Southwest of Pakistan which borders the Southeast of Afghanistan has been designated the "Federally Administered Tribal Areas" or FATA and is basically ungoverned by any officially recognized government: it is Taliban and Al Qaeda territory. Though Pakistan says that they do not harbor Taliban or Al Qaeda, Rohde was clearly held by Taliban and for most of his time in captivity, living in the FATA, which was clearly Taliban-run country. He had a number of guards and met a few commanders, and was distraught by the extremism he saw. He tells of guards who watch videos of suicide videos and decapitations of hostages the way other young men watch pornography or music videos: "The constant images of violence seem to numb our guards to the idea of death. Over and over again, human beings are killed on the small screen in front of us... the videos are cynical efforts by Taliban commanders to brainwash their foot soldiers. While death is ignored in the West, it is embraced in the videos. Death, the message goes, is not a distant fate. Instead, it is a friendly companion and a goal." These are the kinds of insights Rohde shares, along with more global, political and regional ones. While fascinating, the reader is left with the feeling that the book could not have existed without the kidnapping. And that Rohde wouldn't have had it otherwise.

The Year of the Bug: Artistic Style

2011-06-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Both the picture, and the prop!

Attendance and Sadness

2011-06-17T19:19:00.000-07:00

As the A's face the Giants tonight in a sure sellout, I would like to share a story of the A's woes in a series of panoramas of some of the games I have attended so far this year. Note the preponderance of green (i.e. empty seats) all over the stadium in all of the shots except the Yankees game.

May 2nd, A's vs Texas Rangers. Announced attendance 9,193. Highlight: Actually seeing Matsui hit a homerun. Actually, I believe I called it. Sarcastically.

May 15th, A's vs Chicago White Sox. Attance: 19,018. I don't remember anything about this game. I am absolutely sure there were not 19k people there.

May 17th, A's vs LA Angels of Anaheim. Attendance: 12,190. A's Jewish heritage night, which was horrendous, as was the weather. The A's were possessed by another offense and scored 14 runs. I was sick, so we only saw 8 or so of the runs. The actual attendance was close to 5k.

May 30th, A's vs NY Yankees. Attendance: 35,067 (sellout). Terrible game, all around. Read about it here.

June 16th, A's vs KC Royals. Attendance: 11,775. Definitely under 10k at the ballpark. Amazing game in the sun, the A's scored 8 runs in the sun. Jamile Weeks showing a spark on a dull team. New manager Bob Melvin ejected, Gio wild and all over the place- 100+ pitches in 5 innings.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

2011-06-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

Last month I read another book by Jon Ronson, which was equally catchy, but much more interesting. "The Psychopath Test" is a meandering book, if a short, confusing book can be called "meandering," in the sense that Ronson starts one place and ends up somewhere completely different, with many many twists along the way. I never quite figured it out. I believe the book was about psychopaths: what a psychopath is, in terms of the person himself, his behavior, the diagnosis, the basis of the definition, etc.

The subtitle of the book, "A Journey Through the Madness Industry," and the way I came about reading this book, is the most interesting (and least touched) part of the twists and turns: the fact that journalism is in the business of marketing madness. Journalists and media seek out madness that is just mad enough to make a story but not mad enough to lose the audience. The reason we, the readers/watchers/consumers, eat up certain madness and not others, is that it rings true: "The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming and in a recognizable way... We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are." He goes on that journalists are also in the "business of conformity:" they present mad people not as examples of people to emulate, but as warnings. People can be themselves, but not crazy like they see in teh media (and in the psychology bible DSM-IV).

This is a fascinating premise, a story that tells a lot about modern medicine and madness and media, especially in the United States. And it's not what Ronson dwells on- it's one short chapter. Rather, he goes on and on about a couple psychopaths or possible psychopaths that he meets, and sells it as investigative journalism. I'm not buying it: it seems more like a long, semi-sarcastic piece you might see in the Village Voice or some such free paper. The potential is there, but the book falls short. Don't bother getting on the hold list at your library, like I did.

The Year of the Bug: Double the Fun

2011-06-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

Mac and chartruese sofafree, x2!

T.C. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain

2011-06-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

T.C. Boyle's "The Tortilla Curtain" is the first fiction book I've read in a Long Time, and it was worth it. I wish I could tell my mom that it was a piece of light reading, but it wasn't. It was a fast read, and well written, but it was harsh, and has so far stuck with me pretty much all the time (I finished it a few days ago), probably because it hit close to home. One of the two main characters is a upper class white dude who prides himself/makes his living on his liberal sentiments, and even is willing to stick his neck out for his environmental beliefs. When he's actually confronted by the reality of what he stands for, though, he finds out that he can't walk the talk at all. Piece by piece his image of himself crumbles. This hits home because I talk a big talk, on themacinator and in my life, and I have a pretty strong idea of who I am, or who I want to be. I acknowledge my racism as I struggle to be anti-racist, but the fact that I acknowledge my racism is hard, since sometimes it's a whole lot bigger than I'd like it to be. I find myself being a snob in a class sense, and I drive more than I want to. I could go on. T.C. Boyle doesn't let his character go on, and he doesn't let the reader let him off the hook, either.

The white dude lives on a hill and hits a Mexican immigrant who has crossed the border (the tortilla curtain, which strikes me as an amazing image) and is living illegally in a protected wildlife area with his car. Get it- living in the hills and the flatlands? The immigrant is almost killed, and the rich white man struggles with his conscience, trying to forget it after paying the man $20. One by one, the hill dweller's principles are challenged. He has to build a fence around his yard to protect his wife's fluffy dogs from coyotes, though he is a nature writer and finds the idea of fences horrific. He loses his open spaces to the home owners association, though in theory, he believes in America as land-of-the-free. And the immigrant that he has run over becomes the face of the evil that is changing him, or at least his perception of himself.

Meanwhile, the immigrant is living a crappy life far from the American dream in the prison of his broken body and the ravine he has secreted himself and his wife in. He is devestated, but too proud to admit it. He is insulted that his wife is even thinking of making money, and takes out his rage and impotence on her. Everything he does seems to fail, out of bad luck, he believes. His whole life has been a story of misfortune and things gone wrong. He even drags a young pregant wife into the mess. Is he a metaphor for Mexico/Mexicans? Or for the havoc immigrants wreak on unsuspecting (white) Americans? Whatever he stands for, he's a good foil for rich dude, who becomes what he hated. I suppose he proves a point if you were a reader who already hated the liberal-minded man on the hill. On the other hand, if you're someone like me, who feels sympathy but can't really know empathy for the man living in the flats, he calls us out: it's not enough to talk the talk, and we'll never be able to walk the walk. Finding a common ground, a meaningful path is something even fiction can force on us.

Year of the Bug: I Can't Even See My Feet!

2011-06-12T18:56:00.000-07:00

(around that big head)

Ciscolo posted this wonderful shot of 4 paws and I was inspired, though I knew mine would be slightly different. Mac is SO sick of the camera, and strangely weirded out by posing between my legs, though he has no problem standing like this. But I knew that I wouldn't be able to see my feet, or his feet. Mac has a BIG head.

This is the first picture I'm posting with my new toy- the Mini Minox that I got at Photojojo. It's a quirky little beast- retro digital??

Eli Pariser: The Filter Bubble

2011-06-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

It's a big brother world out there. And not, Eli Pariser of Moveon.org, wants you to know, of the creepy, government looking for terrorists kind of way, but an even more insidious way: every click each of us makes online is being monitored to make the virtual world more about us, because each time we like (and "like") something online, someone somewhere makes money. So each time we click, our online world gets a little more "perfect": we're a little more likely to see something that we like, or that fits who we are, which becomes a cycle (called personalization). Our online world fits us a little better, and we fit our online world a little better, because we're less likely to see anythign out of our comfort zone. It's the online version of The Big Sort. I was thinking this almost from page one of "The Filter Bubble" and was practically dying when Pariser quoted "The Big Sort" mid-way through the book. We are where we live, and we are what we google.

What's the big deal? I like to get accurate search results. It's kind of like predictive text on the cell phone: for the most part, it's really nice that my phone knows that most of the time I'm typing "A's," not "as," and "Mac," not "Max." So it's nice when google knows what I'm searching for. I had no idea that when I search for soemthing, I'm going to get different results than when my roommate searches for the same thing, even though I think we have fairly similar tastes. Pariser gives the example of two friends who demographically appeared pretty similiar: white, left-leaning, and college educated. They both typed in "BP," but one woman got results about oil-spill and one got a promotional ad for the company. Try it with someone you feel close to. Searching becomes a rabbit hole: the more left-of-left links I look at, the more left-of-left links the companies that mine and buy data from search engines and servers are going to send me to. I will continue to receive certain kinds of directed hits, and will have to work harder to see anything different. Until I read this book, I didn't know this: I was ghetto-izing myself (and still will, as the searching stuff is sub-conscious, behind the scenes stuff of strong algorithms). Learningn takes place in the face of new information. New information is withheld in the personalized world of the internet.

Other issues with personalization are more societal. One is disturbing and oxymoronic: stereotyping. As data becomes mroe and more personal, individauls begin to be judged by who they know. If people like me, or people I like tend to have problems with credit, then I might have problems iwth credit, too. This might influence my ability to finance a house, or increase my credit rates, even if I don't have a problem with credit. Decisions we make based on personalized filters can affect us in bad ways, and we don't even know this is happening. "Companies that construct [your life] choose which options you're aware of." More and more, we "like" the personalized world about what our friends are eating or wearing, how to cook dinner, what Weiner is showing to whom, but we miss the big problems of the day. As Pariser puts it, "As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikeable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country."

The take home point for me, is that the richer we get, the thinner our lives become. We can live wherever we want, but where we want to live may not be that great for us. We can move to Celebration, Florida, in the hopes of a Disney-built utopia, but really, we're in the search of a store-bought happiness. We can use the internet to discover all kinds of shit, and I'm not saying we should opt-out, but Pariser is trying to open our eyes to the fact that we may just be digging ourselves further into our own rabbit hole. It's more than the fact that my eyes were just opened to the fact that google is telling me what movie I'm going to like, it's the fact that google is telling me what is news. I opted out of tv and broadcast media a long time ago, and felt like maybe the internet was the answer. Now, Pariser is yelling at us, we need to re-democratize the internet, and take back the personalization of our own lives.

I Am Unamerican: Baseball and Nationalism Continued

2011-06-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

As if I didn't know enough about my unamerican-ness already, I turned on the radio in the car today to see if the A's pregame show was on, and heard my recent topic of separation of baseball and state being blasted. (The pregame show wasn't on yet.) I never listen to talk radio, and I certainly don't listen to shock-jocks, and I imagine this was some sort of combination of shock-jock-sports-talk-radio. Apparently Goshen College has decided to stop playing the national anthem at sporting events, something they only started in January. Their students, faculty, board, and alumni felt strongly enough that the pacifist, Mennonite tradition was not represented by the anthem to stop playing the song. (You can read more about Mennonites and peace at their website.)

The sports shock-jock (I'm not going to bother looking him up- partially because of the filter bubble, which will be the subject of my next book review) continued haranguing Goshen College. Clearly, they were unamerican, because Americans play the national anthem at sporting events. Although I didn't understand the logic, if Goshen College was American, they would play it, and because they're not, they would have sat around and had tea with the British. Obviously, the country was founded on revolution, and war, and so that's part of sports. The host said if he was on a team in the same conference as Goshen, he would make sure to beat Goshen so badly they'd never forget it, like 200 to nothing. A co-host (?) on the show suggested some alternatives: "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" which I suppose were supposed to be patriotic without being war-like, but he didn't expand, and then the host suggested "This Land is Your Land." This struck me as kind of funny: Can you imagine singing a song which has been adopted as a camp song before a sports game? It really brings home the "play" aspect of sports, which I don't think was the intention of Mr Shock. The Fox News story quotes some residents disapproving the decision, suggesting the college take its views to Iran or Cuba- this is not unlike what the radio show was arguing.

I got all of this in the two or three minutes that I could tolerate. Interestingly, this uproar does exactly what I proposed in the last blog: separates both church and state from baseball (and sports in general) at a small institution. The institution is a religious institution, though, which complicates matters: can baseball be played there without religious implications? I think in this case, Goshen College is making the decision to make the field a real playing field, for sports. The game is played out, as sports are, free of nationalism, free of religion, on the field. The school itself may represent Mennonite beliefs, but the field, by not playing the anthem (which has Judeo-Christian references throughout, especially in the verses not commonly sung) becomes religion-free. Pacifism, it is true, can be construed as a religious belief (the Mennonites are case in point), but by definition is not nationalistic. I believe it is patriotic to be a pacifist, but not in the aggressive sense. To me, Goshen College has figured it out.

Oakland Can Be Pretty

2011-06-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

Even if we all complain about it.

(courtesy of conradtse.)

The Year of the Bug: Eloise at the Plaza

2011-06-05T23:34:00.000-07:00

Remember the Eloise books? Yeah, Mac loves the hotel, he thinks he lives there now. We spent another week in LA, so the first is the shot I chose from the hotel, and the second is the runner up.

Lounging Poolside

The Church of Baseball

2011-06-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

On Memorial Day I went to the A's game. I specifically ordered these tickets in the off season because it was a Monday game, and at that point I was off on Mondays, and because it was one game of the only series that the Yankees were going to be in town. There are only two things that get me steamed without any discussion, and one is the Yankees. The game sucked, and my opinion of the Yankees hasn't changed any. They hit the ball hard over and over, making Trevor Cahill, who has looked awesome all year, look like a 5th starter on a team with crappy pitching. It was the first sell-out I've been to in at least 5 years, and it was great to see the (overstock.com) Coliseum full. It was not, however, great to see it at least half full of Yankees fans. Rude, pompous, blue and white wearing Yankees fans. This is Oakland, dammit. The sell-out was cool, though, even if it meant waiting in line for the bathroom (and concessions due to crappy Coliseum architecture) and a short line to get in, and a long line to get back to the BART platform. There were people there, dammit!

But what I really want to write about is the separation of church and baseball, and the state and baseball. If it's not written into the Constitution, it should be. About two weeks ago, I went to the awesome game where the A's scored 14 runs. I don't think they've scored 14 runs since then, total. But I was substantially creeped out because it was "Jewish Heritage Night." Now, you can accuse me of anti-Semitism all you want, and it may be that I'm a self-loathing Jew (I've been accused of this before), but the issue to me was not specifically about Judiasm. I do think that's a little part of it: There is something in the history of the Reform movement in particular that makes Jews in America sort of anti-ostentation. Blatant displays of religion on the part of Jews make me (and I believe other Reform Jews) cringe. But the real issue was that there was religion at my ballpark. MY ballpark, my sanctuary. There were little snippets of the religious groups on the big TV, and some people were walking around with Israeli flags (don't get me started, this is the other thing that gets me steamed). The messages that were on the screen welcoming groups to the ballpark were predominately religiously oriented. I've heard about other "heritage" nights on Phillies broadcasts, but I didn't think it would come to Oakland.

If I had to articulate my feelings that night, I'd say squeamish, grossed out, resentful. Religion, I think, doesn't belong at the ballpark. Baseball *is* religion. Serious fans, students of the game, come to the ball park (or turn on the TV or radio) faithfully, at scheduled times. We ritualistically stand up before the game for the national anthem (more on this later), and again for the 7th inning stretch and the singing of "Take me out to the Ballgame." We eat ceremonial foods like peanuts and hot dogs, and drink ceremonial wines. (I've written about this a little bit before.) Baseball is ecumenical: anyone, of any religion, can enjoy it. We leave our religious differences, our political differences, in the parking lot. We enjoy our games, because it is play. Religion is deadly serious, and doesn't belong or near the field.

War, nationalism, and patriotism are also, obviously, deadly serious business. They also don't belong on the field. I know that most would argue that baseball is patriotism, and as American as apple pie. I'm willing to concede this- we'll always stand up for the National Anthem, and fine, it's America's national pastime. Sure, baseball has a history of racism and exclusion (and still does- Matt McCarthy's wonderful "Odd Man Out" is a great reminder of this, and I listened to a great episode of Edge of Sports about Adrian Burgos' new book about Alex Pompez. Have you heard about the recent Civil Rights game in Atlanta?) But so does America. Some would argue that baseball is part of the progress in America, and I guess you could say that regarding civil rights, though I would also argue that it lags way behind in other areas- ever heard of a gay baseball player? will we ever see a woman baseball player (I don't think so)? How long will teams be named "Braves" and "Indians" and how long will fans accept and participate in the "Tomahawk Chop?" So sure, baseball is American, and makes "us" "feel" "American," whatever that means.

But on Memorial day, it wasn't just patriotism that I saw at the ballpark. And it was worse than the religion stuff, which I thought was pretty bad. First, though great to see a sellout, the stadium was padded with Yankees fans, who are by their nature, patriotic to the extent of bordering on nationalist. Okay, I don't know if individual Yankees fans are like this, but seeing the Yankees reminds me of the absurd, war-like nationalism that has been at the Yankees stadium at least since 9-11. The 7th Inning Stretch at Yankees stadium now also involves the playing of "God Bless America," which combines the eerie combination of religion and nationalism. And not only do they play this song every 7th inning, it's broadcast on the radio every game. I understand the grief caused by the terrorist attacks, and I understand that baseball, or any large sporting event, can bring people together. However, when civic pride crosses into a mixture of religious based nationalism with the audience standing and saluting the flag, it borders on fascism. I know I'm overreacting by associating the Yankees fans with shows of extreme nationalism like this, but after 9-11 everyone was wearing Yankees gear with that iconic "NY" logo. I don't think a third of them were Yankees fans. It was just The Thing To Do. Supporting New York, and by extension, America, meant wearing Yankees gear. If you aren't with us (the Yankees), you're against us.

Then the pomp of the Memorial Day game started. The A's players warming up on the field were wearing camouflage hats in some sort of cloth, army style, not the typical baseball caps. And then a ceremony started on the field, and it took me a minute to realize that they were swearing in new recruits to the Marines, right there on the baseball field. The baseball field, where men play a game wtih strict rules of comportment, had just become the entre for the battlefield, where wargames: deadly and lawless. I felt sick to my stomach watching the rookies, signing their lives over for tiny salaries and a life of extreme hardship: the baseball field was not the place for this. A marine threw out the first pitch to Dallas Braden, who was wearing a sling and a fully Army uniform, though he is not a veteran. The A's then changed into special Memorial Day baseball caps before taking the field, and we were shown clips of the soldiers who had warn them in the field before sending them back for the game. It was a lot.

I want to make something clear here. I am glad to be an American. I consider part of this to question and criticize what it means to practice my identity as "American." This is my understanding of patriotism. I appreciate people who become soldiers, who give up their lives as they know them, and often actually give their lives, following their understanding of what it means to be an "American." I think Memorial Day is very important- we need to remember and honor our troops. I also understand that it's not going to happen anytime soon that we honor them in the way I think is appropriate: by bringing them home from the many pointless situations they're in now: unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, standing on the DMZ in North Korea, etc. I do not, however, think that nationalism is productive. (See some better explanations.) It leads to jingoism, war, us/them mentality, etc. You could say, ala David Chidester, that baseball is its own form of nationalism: each team is its own mini-nation, and the teams compete for supremacy. The teams have strict borders, and homogeneous societies. Viewed this way, like Clifford Geertz and his cockfights, we're playing out (or watching baseball players play out) some serious stuff.

But the bottom line is, we're not doing the serious work of nationalism, war, or religion on the ball field. Baseball becomes the serious stuff. Fans are patriots of the game, we worship at the temple of baseball. I don't want to see marines sign up and take their oath. I don't want to see people, however proud they are, and know what religion they are. Our commonality is our love for the game. I can sit next to someone, and fine, maybe they're a Yankees fan, but we still love the game. And beer, and hot dogs. For 27 outs, war and religion and borders don't matter. I'd like Major League Baseball to consider this, and to stop confusing matters.