A Salute to Hurricane Isaac

Hurricane Isaac caused the Republicans to cancel the first day of their convention in Tampa, Florida, and now, a week later, is going to bring a lot of rain to the first day of the Democratic convention. Is this Mother Nature trying to get our politicians' attention?

The Peace Candidate Always Wins

Bill Maher is celebrating his show’s 10-year anniversary. Every week he shows a memorable clip from a past show. In the August 31 show’s clip he was speaking to Ron Paul in May of 2007. Paul said, “The peace candidate always wins. Logic tells us we can make a better world in a much easier way than causing wars.” Paul was talking about the 2000 election when George W. Bush said he opposed Clinton’s nation-building adventures and the attempts to make America the policeman of the world. Bush had insisted that his administration wouldn’t do those things (which they of course proceeded to do but it was too late then), and that’s one of the reasons W. beat Gore.

I was struck by this comment because I have had the opinion that Americans are a war-like people. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe we’ve just been manipulated over and over again. I thought of WWI—Woodrow Wilson won because he promised to keep America out of the European war, but as soon as he won Wilson started figuring out how to get us into the war. The U.S. didn’t join in WWII until we were actually attacked. Nixon won in 1968 partly because he said he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War—he didn’t but we didn’t find that out until after he was elected. I’m sure a historian could provide plenty more examples.

In 2008 McCain was joking about “bomb bomb Iran” while Obama talked about healing our relationship with the world. Obama won. Romney just made clear in his acceptance speech at the convention that he has embraced the neocons of the W. era. Romney used bellicose rhetoric not only about Syria and Iran but also about Russia. I found myself wondering, ‘could this Republican war-mongering mean Obama will be re-elected?’

In this show’s New Rules Maher made a fascinating comment about the Republican Party’s attempts to erase the past. For a party that positions itself as the guardian of traditional values, of the Norman Rockwell-America of our dreams, in last week’s convention they worked hard to obscure their own recent past. The most recent Republican president and both the most recent view-president and vice-pres candidate weren’t invited: no W., no Cheney, no Palin.

Birth Control Pill for Men

My husband was watching the news yesterday while I was cooking dinner and stopped briefly on HLN, where a female doctor was discussing a new drug that can suppress sperm production in the testes. So far the research has just been done on rats, but it’s the first drug molecule that’s small enough to get through the testes’ protective blood-barrier, so it’s a milestone in the search for a male contraceptive.

The doctor went on to say that in her clinic they do far more tubal ligations than vasectomies, because “guys don’t like anything that messes with those areas.” You can hear someone on the set laugh and clap, which is really unusual. The woman newscaster who took over from the interview commented, “You should see the faces of the men in the studio right now,” making a face like someone grimacing in horror. The implication was all the men were appalled at the thought of choosing to destroy their sperm.

I have wondered for many years: why aren’t men clamoring for a male contraceptive? In these days when paternity can be definitely established via DNA tests, a one-night stand can result in 18 years of child support—your wages garnished by court order. You have a child, but you’re never the father because you never had a relationship with the mother. What a nightmare!

I can’t imagine being a man and putting my life in the hands of a woman, having to trust that she’s not lying to me about using birth control. It appears that the ability to impregnate infuses many men’s image of their sexuality and they can’t imagine separating the two.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

I saw the film “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” on HBO recently. What an amazing film about the power of humans to transcend tragedy, as well as the resilience of nature. The filmmaker, Lucy Walker, was going to make a short film about the Japanese fascination with the cherry blossom, which is evidently a very important part of their culture. Then the tsunami hit, and she integrated the two stories in a fabulously beautiful way.

Some of the Japanese interviewed say the cherry blossom is revered because of its ephemeral nature—it blooms for just a few days and then is gone. They even love it when the petals fall from the trees; among their many names for the blossoms is one for “fallen petals in water.” A man who raises cherry trees, who is descended from a long line of cherry-tree growers, said, “perceiving transience heightens appreciation.” This is the message of the film: life is short and when we think it’s going to go on forever we take things for granted. When we are in touch with the truth that life can be taken from us at any moment, we appreciate every moment. That may sound trite, but this film says it in such a graceful way it feels fresh and powerful.

The film begins with a stunning video of the tsunami coming towards the camera, taken from a hillside above a town, with residents of the town all around exclaiming as they watch the destruction unfold. At first you can’t really see anything happening, the wave is so far away, and then you can’t believe your eyes as it comes towards you and it becomes clear how vast the devastation is. The wave ends up almost reaching the hillside and the sense of panic is communicated through the voices of the people all around; it’s an emotionally gripping experience.

The beauty of Japanese culture comes across in the second half of the film as the cherry blossoms begin to open among the destroyed houses: the reverence across age groups and gender for the beauty of a flower. There’s the sense of a poetic nature that seems to me to be totally missing from American culture, and when I see a depiction of a culture that has it, I really feel the lack.

Mass Production Means the Death of Style

Just a few days ago I and my husband were judging the date of a YouTube video by the hairstyles and clothing of the people in the audience at a concert. Usually when we look at films or TV shows from the last 70 years we can pretty easily guess the decade in which they were created. Kevin Drum posted this interesting observation: "Kurt Andersen writes in Vanity Fair this month about something that I've noticed too: visual style hasn't changed much over the past 20 years:

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it.

....Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

You can pretty quickly recognize a movie made in the early 70s or the early 50s. But the early 90s? In movies like Silence of the Lambs or Basic Instinct, only tiny clues give away when they were made.

Andersen's theory is that we're victims of future shock: "In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out." That doesn't really sound very convincing to me, but his basic observation about the inertia in fashion and other visual cues over the past couple of decades seems fair. Anybody got a better explanation?"

My explanation: corporitization of culture. Everything is mass-produced with the sole criterion the lowest manufacturing price possible. Design costs money. Our Wal-mart culture would rather have cheap look-a-like basic clothing made in sweatshops in Asia rather than spend a little more and have individual, stylish, but more expensive clothing. Everything's cookie-cutter. Cars have no individuality. Our electronic hand-held devices are minimalist - no room for anything but function. This stripping-down has been a steady process through the last hundred years but it took a long time to eliminate style this completely (think about the style in antique handcrafted wooden cabinets, a typical one had scrollwork and carved ornaments, and compare that to a typical piece for sale in a furniture store today).

Mr. Anderson's idea that we are overwhelmed by newness is a common misperception about history; that our time is notable for its disruptions due to rapid technological change. The Industrial Revolution upended Great Britain, tore up cultural foundations that had been in place for centuries (an agricultural/artisan pre-industrial economy), and replaced them with profoundly new lives for the working class: mechanized factory jobs and city living replaced a much less regimented rural existence. 

Hidden Ways our Government Favors the Rich, part 1

I’m rereading “Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich” by Kevin Phillips, published in 2003, and it has really sensitized me to ways our government's policies are slanted towards the rich.

For instance, today I read an op-ed, The Famine Next Time, in the New York Times about the current famine in Africa. The article asks: why do we never solve the problem of famine? There’s enough food in the world. The crisis builds slowly over months if not years; action could be taken before it becomes a full-blown catastrophe. Yet we seem to have to wait until we see starving infants on TV before we are moved to act.

What jumped out at me was this line: “By the end of June, with the crisis in full swing, the United States had committed a total of about $64 million to Kenya, much of it in the form of food supplies (this doesn’t include relief for the Somali refugees). But food aid loses at least half of its value, according to the Government Accountability Office, because we ship actual food instead of sending cash for local purchase, like most countries.”

What is this food aid but a subsidy to American agriculture, particularly the large-scale companies like Archer Daniels Midland? In a similar way we “give” military aid to various countries around the world with the stipulation that they purchase Americans weapons with that money. Our foreign aid is just another way to funnel cash into our corporations and their principal beneficiaries, the investor class, in other words, the rich.

The article describes a farm in Kenya, in the middle of the famine/drought zone that was

a green oasis — a farm, a greenhouse, a well, a water pump, a windmill. Running around were the first happy, healthy-looking children I had seen. This is the Kutulo Farm, a women’s cooperative in Wagberi, where they grow kale, cabbage and peppers. They received money for the well from the European Union, but otherwise have done everything on their own. They would like to expand, said Adey Issack, one of the founders, but have no access to credit.

Programs like the Kutulo Farm are significantly cheaper to start and maintain than sending mounds of food aid at the last minute, in large part because they leverage the skills and knowledge of local residents to do the work. The current crisis is a painful demonstration of how well such an approach works: those few communities that received small, well-designed assistance are weathering the drought relatively well.

Rajiv Shah, the head of U.S.A.I.D., told me during a trip he made in July to Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp. “It is one-tenth the cost to provide effective agricultural support and help communities gain food security than it is to provide food aid at a time of famine.”

Our aid dollars could go TEN times further if we gave the aid in cash instead of sending food.

I titled this "part 1" because I am sure I will be adding lots more examples here.

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

The editors of Adbuster magazine (where the Occupy movement was first conceived) published an article about the future of the movement in the Washington Post last weekend, "Why Occupy Wall Street Will Keep Up the Fight":

Occupy was born because we the people feel that our country and our economy are moving precipitously in the wrong direction; that America has evolved into a kind of corporate oligarchic state, a “corporatocracy”; and yes, that what is needed is a regime change — a Tahrir moment of truth in America.

This winter, they suggest, will be a time for the movement to regroup, network, and brainstorm. In my experience talking to people there is a hunger out here among the older generation who want to be part but can’t, for various reasons, be part of an occupation group. What are we hungry for? I think the people of this country want to have a conversation about what sort of country we want to be.

Do we want to be a plutocracy, a nation run by and for the one percent?

Do we want to be the world’s merchant of death, selling weapons to the world? With a military that dwarfs the rest of world's forces combined? A country that maintains enough nuclear weapons on alert to kill the entire human race? That spends half of its budget on the military instead education, infrastructure, and research to improve the lives of its citizens?

Do we want to be the country with the highest percentage of its citizens in jail? Do we want to be a country that imprisons people so that corporations can make a profit on their imprisonment?

Do we want to be the country with the worst health care outcomes in the world because the medical-industrial complex likes it that way?

Do we want to be the country with the lowest living standards for the developed world?

Do we want to be the country with the most limited social mobility?