tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59114649133319679552024-02-21T08:13:02.905-08:00Tropics of Metablackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.comBlogger178125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-33947904989602029472012-03-01T07:15:00.002-08:002012-03-16T08:12:25.583-07:00Take the Old Grey Mare Out and Shoot It<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
Tropics of Meta has decided to move to a <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/">shiny new site</a>. </div>
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It has been a great two and a half years since we first hatched the idea of a semi-scholarly site that could serve as an outlet for our extracurricular writings, photography, and other projects. Most of our contributors were in various stages of grad school or had recently departed from an MA or PhD program, and we all felt a need for a space to discuss and share our ideas that we otherwise lacked in the often isolating world of academia. We also loved to write and felt like the dry, laborious style of most academic writing in journals and monographs was too limited; there had to be another voice or register in which we could talk about our research. (A more extended discussion of the relationship between blogging, writing, and scholarship can be found <a href="http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/revisioning/an-informal-history-of-informal-writing-cummings/">here</a>.)</div>
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Over time we have accumulated a pretty substantial body of work centering on urban history, technology, pop culture, diplomatic history and more. These areas of concentration reflect the interests of our editors and writers, and the new site features sections devoted specifically to topics such as <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/cities/">Cities</a> and <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/media/">Media</a>. We hope that you will check out the new and improved Tropics and continue reading our work.</div>
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<br /></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-46390233357933307022012-02-16T13:38:00.000-08:002012-02-19T06:50:23.643-08:00Joy and Pain: What Jeremy Lin Tells Us about 21st Century American Race Relations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">What would Kobe say?</span> </div>
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Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise.</blockquote>
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-- <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/mayweather-trashes-jeremy-lin-twitter-15578202">Floyd Mayweather, Jr</a>.</div>
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It is precisely the unfixed liminality of the Asian immigrant – geographically, linguistically, and racially at odds with the context of the “national” – that has given rise to the necessity of endlessly fixing and repeating such stereotypes.</blockquote>
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-- Lisa Lowe, <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/immigrantacts"><i>Immigrant Acts</i></a>, 19</blockquote>
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Floyd Mayweather is not a brain surgeon. The man punches for a living and he punches very well. However, all that head trauma must have knocked more than few synapses loose, why would Mayweather begrudge the new Asian American icon Jeremy Lin of his place in American sports lore? Mayweather has a long history of this from his choice to wear a sombrero when fighting Oscar De La Hoya to his numerous comments regarding Manny Pacquiao (who Mayweather once confusingly mocked for eating “sushi” which of course is Japanese not Filipino). Certainly, he’s not the only African American to begrudge an Asian athlete success. Shaquille O’Neal famously dismissed Yao Ming with the comment, "Tell Yao Ming, 'ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh." So what’s this all about and what does it tell us about 21st century America?<br />
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To be fair, Mayweather has a point. While Yao Ming and a handful of other Chinese basketball stars have successfully navigated the league, the league has NEVER seen an Asian American basketball talent perform at this level on this stage. That Lin plays for New York no doubt helps - the Knicks remain one of the league’s franchise teams. Even when they suck, and the Knicks have sucked mightily in recent years, the team has always turned a profit. So yes, the combination of Lin’s ethnicity/race and his location, the Big Apple, and his team, the New York Knickerbockers serve to highlight his success in ways that a player in Minnesota simply can’t. With that said, seven straight wins for a team without one of its key players matters, no matter the race or ethnicity of the player dragging the Knicks to a possible playoff spot.<br />
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Yet, Mayweather also points to a reality of American race relations: as the nation’s diversity increases over the 21st century, we will need to figure out how to discuss and think about race in America. The black white binary that dominated American racial thought – popularly and academically - seems to have little relevance in a nation where Asian American and Latino American residents seem to increase their numbers every year. Racism affects each of these groups, but in different manners and through different pathways. No one doubts the long established prejudice against Black citizens in America. The historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow remain central aspects of our nation’s history. Yet, Asian Americans and Latinos, notably Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, have their own histories of struggle.</div>
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The transnational nature of Asian American and Latino identity adds confusion for many observers. It goes without saying that media outlets like ESPN have noted how the Chinese government remains wary of Lin as a figure: 1) for his Taiwanese background and 2) for his devout religiosity. While ESPN and other outlets note this relevant fact, writers like Lisa Lowe and Charlotte Brooks have noted the stereotype of the “perpetual foreigner” attached to Asian American citizens has often served to undermine their status. With the internet, twitter, and the countless forms of social media out there, undoubtedly, Chinese citizens will be drawn to the Jeremy Lin narrative and ESPN should discuss this. However, it also reinforces the idea that Asian Americans maybe citizens but they belong to different shores. Overall, the media’s behavior has been mostly positive, though there have been several hiccups along the way as <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/sports/basketball/nba/story/2012-02-16/Asian-stereotypes-appearing-in-coverage-of-Knicks-Jeremy-Lin/53120426/1">USA today </a>documented Thursday (2/16/2012).<br />
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In <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/alienneighbors"><i>Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends</i></a>, Brooks charts the intense discrimination and segregation endured by West Coast Japanese and Chinese American populations in the first half of the 20th century. Even when finally accepted by white homeowners, this acceptance hinged on the international connections of Asian American populations rather than their place as American citizens. Brooks points out that this “transnational identity” undermined Chinese claims to national membership as they were seen as permanent foreigners, albeit welcome ones. Also, as with the Japanese American example, the arrival of larger numbers of African American residents recast white homeowner concerns that now Chinese Americans came to be seen, along with other Asian Americans, as the “model minority,” to be contrasted with more “troublesome” racial/ethnic groups. Accordingly, Brooks suggests that American interventionism in Asia along with pervasive domestic fears of communist infiltration and agitation “spurred white Californians to reconsider the impact of their segregationist decisions. In the end, the deepening Cold War short circuited the emerging pattern and replaced it with a far different one.” (193) Really, considering that the nation interned its Japanese American population during WWII, these shifts in attitudes are notable. <br />
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White homeowners continued to exhibit a desire to live apart from nonwhites; even when they accepted Chinese or Japanese American neighbors, they did so out of a sense of anti-communism rather than any nod toward racial equality. One white resident, who supported Nisei WWII veteran Sam Yoshira’s attempt to buy a home in Southwood (South San Francisco), commented, “My property values aren’t as important as my principles.” (Brooks, 206) Such admissions reveal not only latent racial attitudes but also the effect of FHA/HOLC housing policies that dismissed communities with nonwhites as eligible for home loans and the like. <br />
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Even before these developments, as writers like Nayan Shah and others have pointed out, Asians were denied the right to own land in many western states (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1913">look up the Alien Land Act in CA</a> 1913) and later prevented from achieving naturalized citizenship (they were labeled unable to assimilate). US policymakers depicted America's violent occupation of the Philippines much like Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden": bringing the torch of civilization and democracy to savages. To make matters worse, as Paul Kramer points out in <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/kramerblood"><i>The Blood of Government</i></a>, despite living under US imperial rule for several decades of the 20th century where US imposed education systems stressed American ideals of equality, Filipinos encountered violent racism on the nation's western shores when they migrated in the early decades of the century. Filipinos of the 1930s and 1940s had been raised under “benevolent assimilation” which cast America in idealistic and unrealistic terms. The history of struggle against American forces no longer existed (erasure through education) such that Filipino immigrants to the US articulated a sanitized version of US-Philippines history, while remaining shocked at the overt racism that few American educators bothered to mention.</div>
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Ironically, considering how Asian men and women are sexualized in modern America, white observers feared Filipinos, with their flashy clothes and sensual nature would seduce white women while Chinese men would ply innocent white ladies with gifts and opium. As for Asian women, one need only look at the <a href="http://www.uchastings.edu/racism-race/pageact.html">Page Act </a>of 1875 (it basically prevented Chinese women from migrating to the US using morality and their lack of male attachment as factors contributing to their rejection), to know that American officials viewed most Chinese women as sexually licentious and disease ridden. I won’t even get into the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act">Chinese Exclusion Act</a> (1882), the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen%27s_Agreement_of_1907">Gentlemen’s Agreement</a> or the numerous “driving out” campaigns along the West Coast in which Chinese and Japanese populations were forcibly and violently driven from towns. Needless to say, these campaigns resulted in economic distress, emotional strain, and often numerous deaths. In this environment, like Blacks in the South, Asian populations provided elites with a scapegoat for the larger economic ramifications of expanding capitalism and corporate development that largely punished local working class white communities. Collectively, the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts served as foundational texts for immigration laws (often restrictions based on race, class, gender, and ethnicity) of the 1920s to today (see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Gates-Immigration-Exclusion-1882-1943/dp/0807854484">Erika Lee</a>).</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Rudyard Kipling would be proud</span> </td></tr>
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When addressing Mayweather’s comments, it helps to consider these facts. Though Asian Americans endured stark racism in the first half of the 20th century, the arrival of large numbers of African Americans on the West Coast via the Great Migration (and the Second Great Migration) drove whites to accept Asian Americans as the lesser of two evils. While I doubt Mayweather had such historical constructs in mind, one can see parallels in today’s American culture that might drive some African Americans to resent Lin’s success. After all, as recently as the mid-1990s,<a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/americanapartheid"> Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton</a> noted that though housing segregation persists, Black Americans continue to endure its most pernicious forms while Asian and Latino Americans have been able to suburbanize at higher levels including integration into white communities. Moreover, plenty of East Asian and South Asian Americans have expressed racism towards Black Americans as well. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, the first thing every immigrant has done once reaching America was illustrate how he or she wasn’t black. So some African Americans surely see themselves as more “American” than recent Asian or Latino American arrivals yet economically, they have yet to enjoy the same level of success. Granted Obama’s presidency and the rise of a significant Black American middle class blunts this somewhat, yet still for some people, these issues bring up negative feelings.<br />
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Lin himself acknowledges that even when playing for Harvard, it was not unusual to hear racial slights – comments regarding “sweet and sour pork” – or the slur, <a href="http://www.tmz.com/2012/02/18/jeremy-lin-knicks/">“chink”</a>. Such obvious outbursts of racism don’t really deserve our attention, whatever place they come from, nearly everyone condemns them. No, it’s the subtle institutional form that plays a factor here. ESPN analyst and former NBA player Tim Legler suggested that Lin’s lack of opportunity may have also played a factor in his late bloom. Legler, who is white, noted that while Black players in the NBA believed he was a capable shooter, front office executives and some coaches, most of whom were white, viewed him as a liability largely because of his race. As Legler pointed out recently, Lin probably endured similar doubts. Granted, being from Harvard didn't help, most people don't recognize the Ivies for their basketball talent.<br />
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If Asians were denied citizenship, land ownership, and decent housing because of fears about disease, morals, and sexuality in the first half of the century, Lin’s ascent had been mitigated by nearly opposite racial concerns: Asian Americans' rise to “model minority” status meant they were great college students, lawyers, and IT specialists, not athletes. Of course, this model minority status probably rubbed some minorities the wrong way. Numerous writers have argued that the “model minority” construct, promoted by White American and sections of the Asian American community arose in the 1960s and 1970s as rebuke to other minority groups protesting for equal rights, notably the Chicano and Black Power movements. <i>Grantland</i> editor<a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7570431/jeremy-lin"> Jay Caspian Kang</a>, who is Asian American himself and frequently writes about race for the site pointed out that though white Americans promoted this construct, segments of the Asian American community held some culpability:</div>
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It has become standard issue for successful Asian Americans to just sort of avoid talking about race. This, I guess, makes sense along the spectrum of assimilation, but it's an inherently elitist stance that plays a bit too coy, especially in a country that has largely decided to turn a blind eye toward racism against Asian Americans. I have no doubt, given his comments in the past, that Lin thinks about his peculiar role in America's blackest network TV show. But for now, he and the Knicks have not said much about anything, really.</blockquote>
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The larger point here is that Lin remains a symbol of 21st century America, positively and negatively. He embodies the kind of social and political changes that we need to acknowledge. Discussions of race in America must incorporate these complex dynamics to fully understand, how we got here. White America does not own a monopoly on racism or racial antipathy. It exerts its own prejudices and biases, but so do other communities.</div>
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Floyd Mayweather may be an ass, but his comments at least open up space for discussion. Hopefully, we can fill these spaces with a useful dialogue that helps us understand each other and our nation more completely. To be honest, the aforementioned King may have articulated the awkward role that race continues to play in this story best. Speaking to fellow <i>Grantland</i> editor <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7579097/linsanity-bag">Bill Simmons</a>, Kang summed up the past two weeks neatly:</div>
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There's always going to be some shit kicked up by haters, but the outpouring of excitement and love has overwhelmed the usual racist clatter. That doesn't mean I haven't rolled my eyes a couple times or even gotten angry. But there's a difference between someone who says something a bit insensitive out of genuine enthusiasm and someone who is just trying to get off his bitter rocks. It's important to not hawk over Linsanity with that much vigilance; it's basketball and it's a bunch of dudes typing reactions on Twitter. There's just no reason to let a few racist assholes ruin the best party of the year. Yes, some of these comments have highlighted that we, as a society, don't treat all racism equally, but if you didn't know that already, you've been living in a hole somewhere. More important, if you can't look at Jeremy Lin and see why America is the greatest country in the world, well, then you don't understand America.</blockquote>
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Who knows what the “greatest country in the world” is, but “Linsanity” makes me feel better about this one.</div>
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[Editors Note - To its credit, <i>Grantland </i>addressed the racial aspects of Lin's rise
early and often. In addition to those articles mentioned above, <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7579418/there-goes-neighborhood-#8212-floyd-mayweather-tweet-williams-sisters-jeremy-lin">Rembert Browne's </a>recent essay only adds to the mix]</div>
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<i>Ryan Reft</i></div>less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-16188817367381965762012-02-14T19:47:00.000-08:002012-02-16T11:50:44.446-08:00Subculture Rub: Tracing the Winding Path of Street Art<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">From our perch in the early 21st century, when multinational corporations hoover anything remotely hip, it is easy to forget how hostile the climate for hip once was. The church, the law, capital and mass opinion all lined up against hip, as against a disease.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">-- John Leland, <i>Hip: The History</i>, 2009 </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When the image of scarf wearing, bespectacled black man in the
vein of the famous 2008 Obama campaign poster began popping up around D.C., Prince of Petworth blogger
<a href="http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/bestofdc/artsandentertainment/2011/best-wheatpaste">Lydia DePillis</a> wondered just who was responsible. After a circuitous route than took DePillis to DC
“wheatpaste” artists DIABETIK and DECOY, the local writer concluded the prints
belonged to one Steven Cummings. Of course, Cummings seemed to take no real interest
in reveling his identity. DePillis
and the Prince of Petworth
agreed that the portrait deserved recognition awarding it the 2011 best
wheatepaste for D.C. Yet
DePiIlis admitted the art itself seemed almost secondary:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">One of the most widely disseminated images appears to be a portrait framing a somber man of indeterminate age, who stares directly ahead through large circular glasses; a bowler hat and high collar complete the vaguely Victorian ensemble. The impressive part is the distribution: The artist has deployed the image all around the city, on telephone booths and boarded-up windows, as well as via small stickers attached to free newspapers.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">While some blog commentators suggested the images reminded
them suspiciously of the iconic 2008 Obama posters produced by Shepard Fairey,
others recognized that Cummings’s efforts were both an emulation and extension
of the kind of street art popularized by Fairey and Banksy. Cummings’s prints served simultaneously as subliminal
adverts for his own art exhibit at the Smithsonian affiliated Anacostia
Community Museum and a means to reshape abandoned D.C. buildings into something more the urban detritus. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fairey Fairey Everywhere</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Inspired in part by the work of Andy Warhol and built on
earlier movements like graffiti and punk/hardcore, the rise of street art
over the past few decades helped to reorganize conceptions of public space and
people’s relation to it. However,
though it shares obvious similarities with graffiti and is often miscategorized
as such, its aesthetic and ideological impulses stem from different sources. Much like punk and hardcore before it, debates about street art
encompass several important issues.
How do we debate art’s value? How much does the process or act count in
the creation of this art? To what extent, does the trajectory of street art
reflect broader trends of commidization of subcultural movements? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Punk Rock Redux </b></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja1M9X6dq067AK9ft-yoToXT5UcWbbwViUTu5tVkb52hUgIgEcapxfyu6avKf981XkVR6mmfuQgc2VV04QHZMNdf1qepWTC6L1abeFyVPRMUnImn0gBajSNbT3iHj9bjdwLG5lVH8rjiY/s1600/theclash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja1M9X6dq067AK9ft-yoToXT5UcWbbwViUTu5tVkb52hUgIgEcapxfyu6avKf981XkVR6mmfuQgc2VV04QHZMNdf1qepWTC6L1abeFyVPRMUnImn0gBajSNbT3iHj9bjdwLG5lVH8rjiY/s320/theclash.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Clash</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">[T]he tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture – in the styles made up of mundane objects which have double meaning. On the one hand, they warn the ‘straight’ world in advance of a sinister presence – the presence of difference – and draw down upon themselves vague suspicions, uneasy laughter, ‘white and dumb rages.’ On the other hand for those who erect them into icons, who use them as words or as curses, these objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value.”</span><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;">-- Dick Hebdige, <i>Subculture the Meaning of Style</i>, 1979, 2-3</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Writing in 1979, Birmingham School icon Dick Hebdige set out
to examine the meaning of style and subculture and its connection to race and
class. Hebdige juxtaposed the
development of various subcultures including Mods, Teds, Punks, Skins, and
others, illustrating how the style from each transmitted messages internally
and externally. Though he
highlighted the political aspects of style, Hebdige also cautioned that “the
meaning of subculture is … always in dispute, and style is the area in which
the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force.” (3) </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Context meant something as well. Punks took a post-modern
bricolage of items ranging from safety pins to rape masks to swastikas (ugh),
all meant to separate the objects from their original meanings. The rearrangement and
transmuation of objects, in use and meaning, set punk apart making it “kinetic
[and] transitive … concentrat[ing] attention on the act of transformation
performed upon the object…” (123).
Yet, as Hebdige also noted media, society, and business recuperate
subcultures through commodization, making it less threatening but also freezing
their importance. “Once removed from their private contexts by the small
entrepreneurs and big fashion interests who produce them on a mass scale,”
argued Hebdige, ”they become codified, made comprehensible, rendered at once
public property and profitable.” (96)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Thirty years later, <i>New
York Times</i> reporter, John Leland placed the punks, mods, and other
subcultures seen as “hip” in a longer historical context, noting that what once
threatened the status quo was now marketed as a consumer necessity by corporations
and multinationals. As Edward Morgan noted in his recent book on mass media
portrayals of the 1960s, political meanings of important historical epochs have
been overwhelmed by profit driven media and culture. Figures like Che Guevera, silk screened onto countless
t-shirts, no longer represent rebellion (or at least not real revolution) but
rather have been transformed into “a mass produced commodity itself or the
seductive hook to draw one into consumption.” (Morgan, 264) With these warnings acknowledged, one
can argue that even in this more ambiguous environment, movements and subcultures
emerge that at least momentarily challenge dominant ideas and ideologies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Punk did this.
In Britain appropriating the language of crisis, punks mocked the “alienation
and emptiness which [had] caused sociologists so much concern, realizing in a
deliberate and willful fashion the direst predictions of the most scathing
social critics,” writes Hebdige.
They celebrated in “mock heroic” language the decline of community and
the “collapse of traditional forms of meaning.” (79) The spectacle of punk’s
commodification aside, today, street artists like punk style and graffiti art
before them, use fairly blunt instruments to populate public spaces created by
neoliberal economics with distorted visions of consumerism. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4t0aVjfWnWza09SGdQ7oWel_UqtK3GdFCWMaSodtAkCdWuJ4rSHXY9P_CG-tUX9TG6oGlWSWZwXl_LEbTVRjYCGjOWhWFDHxrzzGSf_54s_Y4xYWrLYyWZgHeQhSWpFFXJjiMMv4nwDw/s1600/53183232.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4t0aVjfWnWza09SGdQ7oWel_UqtK3GdFCWMaSodtAkCdWuJ4rSHXY9P_CG-tUX9TG6oGlWSWZwXl_LEbTVRjYCGjOWhWFDHxrzzGSf_54s_Y4xYWrLYyWZgHeQhSWpFFXJjiMMv4nwDw/s320/53183232.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">McLaren at work</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yet if <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/arts/music/09mclaren.html">Malcolm McLaren</a>,
the Sex Pistols manager and widely acknowledged cultural conman, used the Sex
Pistols to promote himself and punk more widely while cashing in on the
controversy, what are we to think of street art practitioners like Banksy,
Shepard Fairey, Space Invader and others? McLaren’s
antics with the Sex Pistols drew inspiration from the Situationist movement, which
promoted public acts of absurdity or provocation to force social change. Yet, looking back at his experience
with Johnny Rotten et al., McLaren argued it really wasn’t about what the band
created: “I never thought the Sex Pistols would be any good … But it didn’t
matter if they were bad.” With this in mind, how do we think about street art?
What do Cummings' above provocations mean in 2011? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Exit through the Gift
Shop </b></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiz1kzoVuP4wXZf_eGruvS1TNjbWhbUMoWZK8kfB4DPTDP8U0R30D1-UtmVeZ06C1D6GFwex-TebCdPdTdDTKUOYgp1RjO9Gy46YReBHCLkUXFazEK-f4lNPedXX0pdlpH0m-pqwSPwjA/s1600/nofuture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiz1kzoVuP4wXZf_eGruvS1TNjbWhbUMoWZK8kfB4DPTDP8U0R30D1-UtmVeZ06C1D6GFwex-TebCdPdTdDTKUOYgp1RjO9Gy46YReBHCLkUXFazEK-f4lNPedXX0pdlpH0m-pqwSPwjA/s320/nofuture.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Bansky </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I am quite willing to agree that graffiti is Art, but I don't believe the act of painting them is an art form, if you see what I mean. Or maybe you don't. You may be too old to understand my argument.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;">-- <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100428/REVIEWS/100429978">Roger Ebert</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It probably sounds rather obvious to note how much the
process of making art, and the background story behind the artist have come to
reflect artistic worth in the eyes of critics, collectors, and to a certain
extent, the broader public.
In many ways, the Banksy directed <i>Exit through the Gift Shop</i> cleverly
interrogated this idea. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Though meant to be about the brief history of street art it came to be defined by Thierry
Guetta, a street art enthusiast and amateur documentarian who spends nearly a decade serving as roadie to
some of street art’s greatest practitioners (for what it’s worth Guetta, like
McLaren, ran a clothing shop).
For years, Guetta filmed and aided Bansky and others’ in their artistic
endeavors. Though Guetta filmed hundreds of tapes, his lack of organization and
poor filmmaking skills never resulted in any real documentary. When asked by Bansky to produce one, Guetta’s finished product left the
mysterious street artist shaking his head. Yet, Guetta didn’t spend all those
years at essentially apprenticing for naught. Instead, with the encouragement of Banksy, the
entrepreneurial spirited Guetta developed his own moniker, Dr. Brainwash, and
proceeded to knock off derivations of those artists for whom he had apprenticed.
He managed to get an article in the June 12, 2008 of the L.A. Weekly - more or
less hyping his upcoming show – which ultimately resulted in Guetta selling
millions of dollars of street art. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnaD83ViUeERjbQlufwW7ooZZI5Du6KSLhXUsIUxkE8aC3F6J5YwuxRnZDVYLblmIc6JWkJENTroSul1oDgK5tYn3JI6FqE4XWYB6xMJ_AcMSTloAF9ipBsipuS4D6QoFUNcc6DM3_X1A/s1600/banksy-park-city-sundance-ourkitchensink.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnaD83ViUeERjbQlufwW7ooZZI5Du6KSLhXUsIUxkE8aC3F6J5YwuxRnZDVYLblmIc6JWkJENTroSul1oDgK5tYn3JI6FqE4XWYB6xMJ_AcMSTloAF9ipBsipuS4D6QoFUNcc6DM3_X1A/s320/banksy-park-city-sundance-ourkitchensink.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">more Banksy</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: small;">While some have called the documentary a brilliant
distillation of all that is wrong with the art world, others have applauded the
documentary as a film but questioned the veracity of its story. “As a documentary, <i>Exit Through the
Gift Shop</i> is as about as reliable and structurally sound as that house-front
with the strategically placed window that falls on top of Buster Keaton,”
admitted the Guardian’s <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/04/exit-through-the-gift-shop-review">Peter Bradshaw</a>. Ebert acknowledged the same in the
opening line of his review but argued this “only adds to its fascination.” The movie’s inclusion in the best
documentary category at the 2011 Oscar’s only ratcheted up the controversy;
after all, This is Spinal Tap (1984) might be the greatest doc about rock music
ever, I mean providing it wasn’t fictional, which uh, it was. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Certainly, many critics noticed the movie’s arc seemed
suspiciously perfect. On-line magazine and <a href="http://thesuperslice.com/2011/06/27/was-exit-through-the-gift-shop-a-hoax/">“cultural aggregator” thesuperslice.com</a>
perceptively broke down <i>ETTGS</i>, pointing to numerous scenes that suggested
Banksy and Fairey collaborated to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes. Others pointed
out that the movie’s authenticity remained beside the point: the capriciousness of the art world and
the increasing importance of hype served as Bansky’s message, the truth behind
Guetta didn’t matter. “The fact that the art world was unable to see through
the hype is not in dispute, and that’s the important part of this story,” noted
<a href="http://angryrobot.ca/2010/10/28/exit-through-the-gift-shop-hoax">one observer</a>. Besides, the same critic noted, if
process matters, didn’t Banksy deserve credit for basically proving that not
only could he counterfeit money (the movie features a scene in which Bansky
reveals thousands of fake 10 pound notes with Princess Diana’s face on them)
but also an entire movie. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Still, as superslice argued, Bansky’s “hoax” accomplishes
several goals. It widely
publicized street art, documenting a phenomenan that seems perfect for the post
X Games extreme age. Remember, the street art skill set revolves as much around
selecting the most spectacularly difficult spaces for appropriation. Gymnastics and a keen disregard for
personal safety might be as important as aesthetics. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNkOLRmN7mhCo9Bm5Eo8TnjP28OGdtF1EYhDuo9nKgzjjYmo9uJO1I1reniwNX1a4gvgKm4yF0wIyy6dId6UflS6oNz9psa9AZ_ynH9ug9rto-Jmn4awSKlP6p2AZ2W7wZAgGufZ_d_YY/s1600/2508695615_7361d11105_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNkOLRmN7mhCo9Bm5Eo8TnjP28OGdtF1EYhDuo9nKgzjjYmo9uJO1I1reniwNX1a4gvgKm4yF0wIyy6dId6UflS6oNz9psa9AZ_ynH9ug9rto-Jmn4awSKlP6p2AZ2W7wZAgGufZ_d_YY/s320/2508695615_7361d11105_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yet, much like the celebrated skateboard doc <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2010/10/recreation-revolution-working-class.html"><i>Dogtown and ZBoys</i></a> in which director Stacy Peralta documented the very Zephyr skating team he
helped pioneer, <i>ETTGS</i> serves as a vehicle for Banksy and Fairey to secure their
place as street art icons (a dubious term considering the anonymity of most
street artists). Peralta raised
the Zephyr team to godlike status. As numerous critics noted, he never
adequately addressed this obvious conflict of interest. Superslice alleges a similar occurrence
with <i>ETTGS</i>:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It’s A Banksy Film that’s deifying Banksy as the greatest living street artist and will soon make the case for him as the greatest living artist by trashing both the opinion makers (those duped by MBW and the so-called greatest living artists, Hirst & Koons et. al.)... </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Again, like punk and street art, context mattered for Team
Zephyr. Whether one considers
skateboarding akin to ballet or vandalism, the Zephyr team’s appropriation of
local schools for honing their craft re-imagined these spaces into places
of creativity and opportunity. Style proved as important as content not only to
the teams’ coaches but too all its key members. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoJ59Cr_SCNm3iw4lmKrVr8-UzzVHrLMT-wW-Apdkvrt4G7G091_UFrAhqOpZeZoDFYnfwhIMWUbI2qWQkTxMdEI8DGa5PsmkTlTGjrO3tPQSaiFpKBF2C05u_dyd-ip2i6Atuq9R59R0/s1600/jay_adams_lite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoJ59Cr_SCNm3iw4lmKrVr8-UzzVHrLMT-wW-Apdkvrt4G7G091_UFrAhqOpZeZoDFYnfwhIMWUbI2qWQkTxMdEI8DGa5PsmkTlTGjrO3tPQSaiFpKBF2C05u_dyd-ip2i6Atuq9R59R0/s320/jay_adams_lite.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Using schools</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It must be noted, in many ways, the kind of vertical skating
style Zephyr created, through appropriation of public and private spaces (empty
swimming pools that didn’t belong to them), had never been seen before. As numerous skaters admitted, Tony
Alva, Peralta, and others drew on surfing for their style but there were no
antecedents for the ramp based maneuvers that show up on today’s ESPN X Game
highlights. Individuals like Banksy do not emerge out of the artistic ether without drawing
upon earlier inspiration. For observers like superslice, Banksy exhibits a love
hate relationship with Andy Warhol.
One moment Bansky emulates Warhol’s sense of self and manipulation of
media, while a second later, he is using his art to promote an anti-capitalist
critique of the world. Warhol seemed to have fewer problems with capitalism,
art and commerce or at the very least he never displayed the same kind of
political discomfort that Banksy exudes.
Of course, while Banksy should be applauded for voicing reservations
about capitalist hunger, it also remains a truism that as a recent <i>Economist</i> article pointed out, some of
history’s greatest artistic epochs depended on rich patrons and nefarious
moneylenders. “Great financial centres have often been great artistic centres –
from Florence in the Renaissance to Amsterdam in the 17<sup>th</sup> to London
and New York today,” the British magazine opined. “where would New York’s SoHo be without Wall Street.” (<i>Economist,</i>
The Dangers of Demonology, January 7, 2012) Would Banksy’s images mean as much had the West not
witnessed over 20 years of neoliberal economic development often hollowing out public
spaces for corporate logos and adverstisement? In this way, the old debate
rages on regarding the balance between art and commerce. How much was Cummings “wheatpaste”
explosion about reshaping vacant D.C. buildings into a medium art and how much
was just about Cummings?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Street Art 2012 </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPq-adQa0Evb7gQDNVmZC-6u0MmPhyphenhyphenjmiy-x3SY-i9W8cvbsmhVNrq1k9pDE42dIIHGalhoM8TJm54R-z2jryz5uPNctsF9H_rRI7AKg5nB4gw0K2OTkOBAG9AXFr5K2m7I4ZDn0pisQk/s1600/OFF-FIRST-FOUR-EPS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPq-adQa0Evb7gQDNVmZC-6u0MmPhyphenhyphenjmiy-x3SY-i9W8cvbsmhVNrq1k9pDE42dIIHGalhoM8TJm54R-z2jryz5uPNctsF9H_rRI7AKg5nB4gw0K2OTkOBAG9AXFr5K2m7I4ZDn0pisQk/s320/OFF-FIRST-FOUR-EPS.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I was fearless /wanted all of it/high on pcp/I could do anything /we were rubberheaded /we got tranquilizers from a leather motorbag/Peace in Hermosa, Wings over Inglewood/I surfed the walls on angel dust/four finger baggies across those ruling hills /my reckless driving , I’m in your living room/I crashed my face and broke my tooth /exposed a nerve was spitting blood/chorus/check under the wood forgot his pills/he’s kind of in a riptide/try not to see/Peace in Hermosa, wings over Inglewood.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">-- <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%28http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4R9DDD61-c%29">"Peace in Hermosa", OFF</a>!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When Southern California hardcore OFF! put out their <i>First
Four EPs</i> album in 2011, writers noted it sounded like music for the current
age. “It's an economic shithole out there right now-- the same conditions that
led to hardcore in the first place,” grumbled <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14919-first-four-eps/">Paul Thompson</a>. “This music is
built for a climate of frustration and powerlessness, and its bare-knuckled
punch-in-the-face is a long-needed wake-up call to nostalgic escapism.” The album’s final song, “Peace in
Hermosa,” both lyrically and sonically sounded like a night spent on uppers
gone awry. Clocking in at 1:32,
Keith Morris’ vocals fade out in a slow dirge as the pills wear off and dark
reality comes seeping back into the narrator’s life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Unlike hardcore’s heyday, the early 1980s where Ronald
Reagan’s optimistic credo of “It’s morning in America” contrasted with the
threat of nuclear annihilation, today Americans struggle through much worse
economic times and live under the hazy unknown of terrorist attack. OFF! doesn’t so much challenge the
status quo as document it. Punk
rock and hardcore simply meant more in their original contexts:
deindustrializing crisis ridden Britain and falsely optimistic Reaganite America. The Dead Kennedy’s “Kill the Poor”
sounds a lot funnier in this context.
One should not forget that punk and hardcore pushed back against a
bloated music scene, filled with progressive virtuosity (King Crimson, Yes,
Styx, REO Speedwagon) but devoid of passion. Process – or the lack thereof –
meant everything. Knowing how to
play your instrument paled in comparison to the act of playing it. On OFF!’s new album not a single song
lasts more than 1:45 and like a Banksy piece it’s gone before you know what
happened. It’s not hard to see the symmetry between bloated 1970s arena rock
and a twee art world invested in ivory tower video installations of the
1990s. Street artists embraced a
more visceral take on creativity, one that like punk and hardcore, provided a
big tent for anyone with the right instincts. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In many ways, street art represents a snarky update on the
graffiti and hip-hop of 1980s, but it also demonstrates an ideological symmetry
with punk and hardcore . Good street art both documents and challenges the
staus quo, yet as with rap, the tag or print used operates as an alter ego. As Hebdige noted at the outset, for
both those who place such work on a pedestal and others who denigrate its
existence, Banksy’s simpering apes and menacing rats and Fairey’s Andre the
Giant mean something. How’s
it’s positioned, where it’s placed, the art itself, all matter. Though the act of graffiti can
certainly be considered political (tagging NYC public transit subway cars must
say something right?), much of its direct message wasn’t. If graffiti grew to international
popularity, it did so through individuals applying their craft in specific locales. Street art like Fairey’s Andre the
Giant/OBEY image multiplied through a transnational network of like-minded
people. Though Fairey argues the
message one draws from it remains idiosyncratic, the whole idea of placing it
in these settings is to force people to reconsider their environment. Graffiti may have promoted this subconsciously but fewer artists
wrote manifestos like <a href="http://people.southwestern.edu/%7Ebednarb/su_netWorks/projects/granger/phenom.html">Fairey’s 1991 take on Phenomenology</a> (and no William Upski Wimsatt's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Suburbs-William-Upski-Wimsatt/dp/1887128441"><i>Bomb the Suburbs</i></a> probably doesn't count since half of it is about hitchhiking.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The process by which street art comes into being shares more
than a little in common with punk and hardcore: the strict DIY ethic. Populating public spaces with guerilla
art characterized by irony or sarcastic critiques of foreign policy,
consumerism, race, and countless other political positions, heightens the very
importance of its placement and the space it occupies. If English punks employed the language of crisis to mock the very authorities so worried about Britain and its youth, so too do street artists use the very marks of consumerism and coporatism as a means of critiquing those very systems. Unsurprisingly, characteristic of such a diffuse movement, there exists a diversity of street art
styles. For example, aesthetically,
the brutal Andre the Giant/OBEY images of Fairely send one message, while the
tongue in cheek work of mysterious street art collective (well it could be an
individual but the anonymity of the movement makes these distinctions tough) <a href="http://www.trustocorp.com/">Trustocorp</a>
blend in colorfully with the wider environment. In recent months, Charlene Weisler's urban <a href="http://thestarryeye.typepad.com/streetart/fabric-string-and-yarn/">montage blog</a>, much like <a href="http://thesuperslice.com/2011/09/30/trustocorp/%20-">superslice,</a> has documented "yarn bombings" across NYC. More organic and craft-oriented than Trustocorp, artists like Jessie Hemmons cover familiar objects in brightly colored "yarn bombs", perhaps most famously the Wall Street Bull. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-zIUHpu-IOb9p3NdRuCVA9XZ1_vMMenYy7EQktUvHNZwQmPZnbDVotlOTjmgUxg7znwvS524l8HkSLzmfSZsE_0vaK7GDUeLfS9cl5neAYiezF0RrPgOhSmPt4S_gjiGIuP8MRAXCv4s/s1600/22-SOUL-CLEANSER-494x330.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-zIUHpu-IOb9p3NdRuCVA9XZ1_vMMenYy7EQktUvHNZwQmPZnbDVotlOTjmgUxg7znwvS524l8HkSLzmfSZsE_0vaK7GDUeLfS9cl5neAYiezF0RrPgOhSmPt4S_gjiGIuP8MRAXCv4s/s320/22-SOUL-CLEANSER-494x330.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">"I am you demon cleaner"</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0CWOEihACE4TETXAQ6825U20GxdHH4n9XZHkmlnzvJHYmPWYYb_g7pp86V84ErKPh82GkFtXRcRcZv3LrEZP9b0C-0NtFRu8EQg9EzdYJWXuygVuD8kWNow_4Qgqxa-FLJtXKNhlAKLw/s1600/04-Tabloids-LA-494x373.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0CWOEihACE4TETXAQ6825U20GxdHH4n9XZHkmlnzvJHYmPWYYb_g7pp86V84ErKPh82GkFtXRcRcZv3LrEZP9b0C-0NtFRu8EQg9EzdYJWXuygVuD8kWNow_4Qgqxa-FLJtXKNhlAKLw/s320/04-Tabloids-LA-494x373.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'd like your finest fake tabloid please </span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Delancy St. (Lower East Side)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Wall Street </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">While, Trustocorp’s work questions consumerism, race, and
foreign policy cleverly, one could argue the context and clandestine process mean
as much as the image. The work
draws attention for its placement as much as its aesthetics. Many reviewers called Dr. Brainwash’s work derivative, but
to uncultured viewers like myself, Guetta created some clever images. Besides, couldn’t one argue that Fairey’s
OBEY campaign was built on a derivative image reproduced and rearranged in
public spaces countless numbers of times?
As noted by DePillis at the outset, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of
the image might be just as important as the print itself. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Street Art + BK Adams
+ Steven Cummings = </b></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Was there ever any doubt?</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">My idea was to make BK be known and recognized. I really enjoyed BK’s art and the things he created, I just felt nobody knew who he was. The quickest way to get recognized is to be seen as someone who is hip or cool. In our conversation BK told me a story how he liked to sleep outside, that he had gathered some trees and he was going to build a bed where he could sleep outside. I went to his studio on Maple View Place to photograph him as he built this bed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">-- Text from Steven Cummings photography exhibit “<a href="http://www.gosmithsonian.com/museums/anacostia-community-museum/">Call and Response: Community and Creativity</a>" at the Anacostia Community Museum </span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">When people try to get to pure about it, hip leaves the building.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">-- John Leland, <i>Hip</i>, 11</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The 2012 photography exhibit “Call and Response: Community
and Creativity” by Steven Cummings illustrates the influence that street art
has had on more conventional artists but also demonstrates the ways in which it
has become (and perhaps always was) as much a tool for self promotion. Local photographer Cummings spent the last couple years
collaborating with D.C.’s “eccentric” BK Adams (or Art Man as he calls himself)
whose work had been featured in 2010 at the Anacostia Community Museum. Local media depicts Adams as an elusive
eccentric working near the now hip H street corridor, an area that features run
down store fronts next to fast food joints next to homeless shelters next to
boutique “new American creative” restaurants. Throughout Cumming’s retrospective, Adams appears like the
lost member of TV on the Radio, nearly always maintaining perpetual motion,
like an artistic inspector gadget (or as a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/22/AR2010022204808.html?sid=ST2010022204888%20%20https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif">2010 <i>Washington Post</i></a> article described him “a walking matisse” who lived
in a “Never Never Land of art” obsessed with making found objects “beautiful”).
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Who put this fucking chair here?</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Adams drew attention in 2010 for his numerous public art works
that apparently were independently installed. In an attempt to “beautify the city,” Adams clandestinely
planted pieces throughout the city, perhaps most famously, a blue chair atop a
poll that led the local <i>Hill Rag</i> to
ask “Who put up that mystery chair?”
However, in the vein of Banksy and others, Adams splashed photos of
himself with the words “I AM ART” all over the city. One Columbia Heights blogger complimented the prints but
asked, “I’m not an art expert so I’m not sure who is depicted …” Adams’s “self-portrait” prints bear
more than a passing resemblance to Dr. Brainwash and others.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0ogBGV1DFlFKkJrNUdzZUAokhZFWEDWBZIUbHOCRIVCey-sIth3GpxmzqkjC9EncmS-7vMdB_v4U00qtNfGyVTHsfSi_FOrEXSpyMIlOIocDrIt2IYpVjOsslZ5ig8KW0hrgm_EFdnDI/s1600/brainwash-stencil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0ogBGV1DFlFKkJrNUdzZUAokhZFWEDWBZIUbHOCRIVCey-sIth3GpxmzqkjC9EncmS-7vMdB_v4U00qtNfGyVTHsfSi_FOrEXSpyMIlOIocDrIt2IYpVjOsslZ5ig8KW0hrgm_EFdnDI/s320/brainwash-stencil.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Dr. Brainwash</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The collaboration between the two men appears to be mutually
influential. Working and occasionally residing in, appropriately enough, a
Victorian home perched on the hills of SE Washington D.C., one can see
Cummings’ interest in working with Adams.
Adams’ backstory makes for an intriguing narrative. A former truck
company owner turned public artist working in a home that overlooks the largely
African American community of Anacostia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Cummings’s collaboration with Adams reveals two artists
playing with ideas about race, history, and identity (one could toss in street
art here as well). Steven Cummings photos of himself, others, and Adams
playfully ask questions about Black identity without stridency or even any
direct racial implications. Cummings’s text provides a straightforward
narrative that admits to wanting a larger audience and professes to be
following in the footsteps of Andy Warhol and Basquiat. If African American style and culture
seemed trapped in doo rags and hardcore rap in the 1990s, Cummings suggests a
myriad number of ways out of this sartorial corner in the 21<sup>st</sup>
century. Others have noted the
shift in style among prominent Black Americans. With Kanye’s Bipster fashion, Odd Future’s skatepunk
aesthetic, and the <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7346656/the-rise-nba-nerd">“rise of the nerd-look”</a>
among NBA players from Kevin Durant’s press conference backpack to Lebron James’s
hipster glasses, Black style seems far less limited and more diverse today than
20 years ago. Granted, one could
argue this has as much to do with who the media decided to highlight, but Allen
Iverson – incredible talent that he was – was never going to rock a backpack to
a press conference. Cummings’s photo of Adams, replacing Huey Newton in the
iconic photo of the Black Panther leader only enhances this aspect of his work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Does it matter that the way in to Cummings’s work depended
in part on street art origins that amounted to self promotion? Sure Cummings remained silent about bombing the city with his "wheatpastes," but since they effectively served to advertise his work across the city- they stretch as far as Takoma Park near the D.C.-Maryland border - one can't discount this point. To their credit, Adams and Cummings appear completely aware of street arts' radiating meanings. One could even argue that
Cummings and Adams purposely appropriate and gently mock the very street art
discussed here. Obviously, street art’s credo can’t be summed up by one person,
but whatever definition one ascribes to, Banksy and others clearly intended to
engage their audiences politically.
Adams and Cummings do this, but also don’t hide their hope that others
will see their work and be inspired. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the end, who even cares anymore how an artist gets our
attention? Forest rockers like Grizzly Bear sell their songs to car
manufactures and in the process expose themselves to thousands of new fans who
never would have known about them.
Street art like skateboarding and punk has probably crested as a underground political movement, but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. OFF!’s new album reimagines hardcore in its
most stripped down form, making something very old sound very new. It won’t sell any copies and but it
remains a stark take on 21<sup>st</sup> century existence and probably one of
the greatest hardcore albums of the last 30 years. Twenty years from now, someone will revisit<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955" name="_GoBack"></a> street art’s early days, remapping it in old ways that seem
new. In fact, maybe Steven Cummings, BK Adams, and others already have.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Ryan Reft</i></span> </div>
</div>less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-78291164987928362892012-02-08T06:04:00.000-08:002012-02-08T06:13:32.748-08:00Teaching the New Deal in the Occupy Era<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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During a graduate seminar this Fall, we discussed <a href="http://jeffersoncowie.com/Jefferson_Cowie/Jefferson_Cowie.html">Jefferson Cowie</a> and <a href="http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/alumni/profiles/faculty/Nick-Salvatore.html">Nick Salvatore</a>’s excellent article on the New Deal, <a href="http://www.jeffersoncowie.com/Jefferson_Cowie/The_Long_Exception.html">“The Long Exception,”</a> and our thoughts inevitably turned to comparisons of the 1930s and the present moment. These were the early days of the Occupy movement, when the protests were first beginning to confuse those who believe every political action needs to come with a bullet-point policy platform, and critics of the Left were already sharpening their critique of the smelly, lazy folks who had nothing better to do than sit around in the park all day. To me, the protest seemed to function so beautifully because of its aimlessness. The inertia of its participants symbolized the problems of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness more perfectly than any statistic about jobless claims or any proposal for tackling the economic crisis ever could. I looked at it and saw Hooverville.<br />
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Yes, the Occupiers included many militant anarchists, some of whom espouse the creed of “Fuck work,” and the encampments inevitably included many people who were already permanently out of the labor force—homeless men and women who slept in the parks and public spaces before the Occupy movement arrived. But most of the participants represented a younger generation who looked to the future with little hope for success, as traditionally measured—the endless hours they spent idling in public space were a visible testament to the fact the bigger economy did not have a lot of use for them. If it did, they would be somewhere else—teaching school, building roads, packaging bad mortgages as valuable investments, or whatever it was that people did before our society starting hemorrhaging work.</div>
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So Occupy has provided a powerful visual message of a system gone awry, in a way that thousands of individual foreclosures or firings never could. Such tragedies appear to be isolated incidents; they happen behind closed doors, in offices and factories; at their most noticeable, we see their traces in neighborhoods where dirty, mildewed toys and furniture pile up on the curbside, the remnants of a some unlucky local’s former home life. <br />
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I mention all this only because our class discussion of the contemporary crisis turned on such signs. The graduate students in the course said that they know, in an abstract sense, that there is a profound crisis affecting the country, but they admitted that the evidence of the ongoing, grinding recession was hard to find in the course of everyday life. They have homes; most of them have jobs and families; they are going to school; and when they go to Target, they do not see chaos in the streets or lines of people snaking around the corner next to a soup kitchen.</div>
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Actually, one can easily see such scenes in Atlanta on any day of the week and in any year in recent memory. The churches of downtown are nearly always surrounded by disheveled, dislocated individuals who wait for money, food, and help in general, but most Atlantans have been so long inured to seeing these people that it eventually stops making much of an impression. My first impression of Atlanta, when I visited over a decade ago, was that of “a giant Starbucks full of homeless people”—and in that regard it has not changed much, boom or recession or anything in between.</div>
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Nevertheless, my students and I can know that unemployment is high, home prices are at catastrophic lows, mortgages are under water and families are suffering from hunger and homelessness, yet American society somehow seems to be going happily about its business. The immortal image of the Depression is a bread line—a long queue of people in black and white, in trench coats and floral print dresses and fedoras, standing on a corner, waiting to eat. Or men selling apples on the street—presumably men who were lawyers or architects before the collapse. We think of ruined businessmen jumping from hotel room windows. <br />
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For better or worse, I do not know of too many Wall Street tycoons who felt compelled to end it all after destroying the livelihoods and savings of thousands, even millions of ordinary people around the world. If anything, they have taken their bonuses instead.</div>
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Of course, all these symbols might be described as a kind of Depression kitsch. For many people, the real Depression was probably not as deeply felt as we imagine, just as the 1960s for most Americans did not really mean smoking dope and jumping into leftist radicalism. (Look at any yearbook from 1967—you will probably see more crew cuts than love beads.) <br />
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But these images are what we think of when we think of the Depression, and the Great Recession of 2007-now does not seem to fit the bill. Perhaps the explanation is simply a Trumanism. The thirty-third president famously remarked that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours. For a lot of people, maybe the current crisis does not hit close to home, especially if one comes from a prosperous, educated, solidly middle or upper class family. I know that many members of my family have been hit by layoffs and the threat of foreclosure or homelessness, but that may not apply to all of my students. I was surprised to see that almost no one in the class raised their hands when I asked if they knew someone who had gotten a college degree but could not find a job, or a good job. (I had assumed that was quite normal, although I am told that the unemployment rate for holders of a bachelor’s degree in Atlanta is actually 4%.)<br />
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I do not think it is just that the students at Georgia State University are privileged and insulated from economic hardship—far from it, in fact. The real reasons why the toll of today’s crisis seems invisible for many have to do with culture, policy, and the New Deal itself. Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore’s perceptive argument in “The Long Exception” is that we should not look at the New Deal as the historical norm, from which we have deviated as the liberal welfare state has been dismantled since 1970s. Too many narratives, they suggest, assume that an interventionist economic policy that aims to ensure the public good by propping up employment and providing social services is the main current of American history, and the counterrevolution of Ronald Reagan and George Bush has somehow taken us off the track of normal historical development. Cowie and Salvatore suggest that the New Deal itself was the aberration, a set of policies that were out of step with the broad sweep of American politics. The 1980s and 1990s were not just a Second Gilded Age; they were America reverting to its norm, which before and after the New Deal era was always committed to individualism, property rights, and the free market.<br />
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Cowie and Salvatore make some excellent points. The 1880s and 1980s look a lot alike in some ways, and not just in terms of venal politcians and a general economic free-for-all. As Paul Starr has noted, the supposedly libertarian era of the late nineteenth century also saw morality campaigns against pornography and other forms of vice that mirrored the Reagan Era’s strange combination of free market ideology and puritanical hysteria about threats to public virtue. <br />
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But I am not sure that calling the New Deal an exception is quite right. It did represent a historical break, as Americans had to discard trusty bromides about limited government and individual initiative to consider the benefits of collective security. (Jennifer Klein has discussed the meaning of “security” as a new ideal for Americans in her excellent work on Social Security, insurance and healthcare.) The Depression was a crisis that forced a profound rethinking of American assumptions about government and policy, and I do not believe that we have truly abandoned this set of ideas, no matter how much we find rugged individualism seductive and the “nanny state” unacceptably un-American. <br />
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We still have Social Security. We still have food stamps and FHA loans and the minimum wage (at least technically—many people work for a lot less). We still have the Great Society addenda to the New Deal, and Medicare is one of the most politically explosive and technically problematic components of government today. No matter how much the Republican Party would like to end and/or privatize the program, they also realize its great utility as a sacred cow. All of these programs have at least ameliorated the most brutal effects of the economic meltdown, making life minimally bearable or sustainable for many people who would otherwise be hungry, jobless, homeless, sick, on the street—and potentially disruptive.</div>
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From this perspective, the New Deal era never quite ended. We tend to think of the heyday of liberalism ending in 1968, or 1972, or 1980, when political forces that were hostile to the welfare state gained a great deal of power and momentum, but from their own perspective their gains agains the welfare state have been relatively paltry. They lowered taxes on the rich, broke the political power of unions such as PATCO and the Teamsters through anti-labor policies and deregulation, and ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996. Many of the liberal policies of the 1930s and 1960s remain in place, helping to sustain the ordinary function of society and cushion some of the worst blows of the recession. That we are in a moment when the political zeitgeist seems to have turned toward dismantling many of these government programs that make life minimally sustainable for the poor and unfortunate is frightening, but their durability should give some cause for hope—greater hope than one would feel after reading the prodigious liberal historiography of New Deal decline. <br />
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Indeed, we might look at the New Deal as merely a response to a uniquely catastrophic crisis, but such a perspective assumes that such crises are genuinely unique and exceptional—i.e., that capitalist democracy trends toward an equilbrium, and only a truly exceptional event could throw American political culture off its normal course. The economic crises of today (and likely tomorrow) suggest otherwise. We may be in another New Deal moment—though, as the students in my class suggest, the current emergency remains poorly understood and inadequately addressed, even by the critics of the status quo. <br />
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This is why the Occupy movement has been so important. The Depression was not just breadlines spooling out from soup kitchens; it was also workers engaging in sitdown strikes, disrupting the normal flow of production by occupying their workplaces and refusing to move. Such tactics have since been disallowed by the courts and Congress, but their militancy and physicality lent an urgency to protest that no handbill or speech could express. <a href="http://occupywallst.org/">Occupy Wall Street</a>/<a href="http://occupyatlanta.org/">Atlanta</a>/<a href="http://occupycharlotte.org/occupy.html">Charlotte</a>/<a href="http://www.occupydsm.org/">Des Moines</a> has been a modern sitdown strike, and the legal and political authorities have taken typical steps to snuff it out. The symbolism of a contemporary tent city remains—it calls people’s attention away from Kim Kardashian’s wedding, as well as the tired explanations that pin blame for the recession on feckless homeowners. It focuses attention on problems of inequality, poverty, and injustice—where the focus ought to be, in my opinion, and where it clearly has not been for most of the time since 2008, despite the occasional flare-up of discontent toward bankers and their bonuses.<br />
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There are deeper currents of discontent and opposition, of course, and we have seen these sometimes ugly, irrational outbursts in recent years. Since Obama’s election, we have seen instances of terrifying violence: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_stack">Joseph Stack</a> flying a plane into a government building in Austin, Nidal Malik Hassan’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting">shooting spree at Fort Hood</a>, an attack on the National Holocaust Museum, and Jared Loughner’s <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/01/dreams-of-redemption-quasi-religious.html">deadly assault on Congresswoman Gabriell Giffords</a>, which claimed the lives of several other victims. Such events need not be barometers of political or economic disorder. A wave of school shootings hit the country in the mid-to-late 1990s, when unemployment was low and wages were rising for some Americans. As Lawrence Goodwyn pointed out in his classic study, <i>The Populist Moment</i>, most people for most of history have been poor and oppressed, yet uprisings against injustice have been relatively few and far between. Unpleasant conditions do not necessarily give rise to resistance, and prosperity does not necessarily ensure social placidity. If anything, the idea of a “revolution of rising expectations” can explain why people in a society where conditions are actually improving can imagine a better future and seek even greater social change—such a development arguably occurred throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan in the 1960s. People see that change is possible, and want more. Likewise, one might expect that widespread suffering and injustice would prompt people to riot in the streets, but social disorder has been relatively limited in the United States. The same, of course, cannot be said for Europe or the Middle East in 2011.<br />
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Political and social change is, ultimately, not a mechanical process. The past is unpredictable, as the Soviets used to say, and the future is even more so. In retrospect, the Occupy movement looks like a belated and inevitable expression of people’s frustration with an unfair system where those who wreaked havoc on the lives of millions were allowed to go free and a grinding “recovery” has failed to help many people in dire straits. But there was little that was inevitable about the men and women who endured the heat and cold, arrest and imprisonment to make their case against the inequity of the American establishment. People may very well express their rage through other channels, such as self-destructive drug or alcohol abuse or random acts of violence. Recently, a series of devastating arsons has affected Los Angeles, with the suspect's motive reportedly a <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2012-01-24/justice/justice_california-arson_1_arson-fires-hollywood-arson-edward-nordskog?_s=PM:JUSTICE">"rage against Americans"</a>; around the same time, several firebombings hit a mosque and Hindu temple in Queens, the most famously and proudly diverse borough in New York. The attacks at first appeared to be hate crimes, motivated for religious prejudice or racism or xenophobia. While the alleged perpetrator <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/suspect_being_questioned_in_queens_aYvr8A7kYk45WMhUCcBh2N">seems to have been motivated by a personal vendetta</a>, the real story remain unclear. </div>
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At such moments, we see America burning—in much the way one would expect a society where great gaps separate the fantastically wealthy and the barely surviving, where people cannot find education or housing or healthcare at a cost that is even remotely sustainable, despite the fact that resources exist in abundance. The Great Recession may not be the Great Depression, but it has its own resistance and its own anger and its own combustible and unpredictable ingredients. The exclamation point on a long era of free markets, fear-mongering, inequality and unemployment might be the molotov cocktail that hit places of worship throughout Queens: a Starbucks frappucino bottle, lit aflame.</div>
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<i>Alex Sayf Cummings</i></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-81306155899494707592012-02-02T05:14:00.000-08:002012-02-05T08:23:12.135-08:00Life in the Fast Lane: An American Catholic's Experience of Ramadan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Photo by Nathan Hartle</span></td></tr>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan">Ramadan</a>, while quite familiar to well over one billion Muslims, represents a religious practice more universal and extreme than most Americans have ever experienced. The rules of the month-long fast are intimidating; during daylight hours, participants are not allowed to eat, drink any kind of liquid, smoke or have sex.<br />
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For Muslims, the month of fasting represents a chance for self-reflection and to practice self-discipline. For a non-Muslim in a Muslim country, the experience of Ramadan is eye-opening. I was a visitor in Morocco during the month of Ramadan in 2011. I had never been to a place so religiously monochromatic<style>
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</style><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>about 99% of the population of Morocco is Muslim<style>
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</style><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>with so many undertaking the same practices at the same time. Nor had I ever before witnessed a practice that demanded its participants to undertake such hardship. But as the days of Ramadan passed, the devotion of the Moroccan people to the fast fascinated me, and ultimately led me try a fast of my own.<br />
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The closest a Catholic upbringing like mine offers to hardship is the season of Lent, the forty-day stretch leading up to Easter during which we are asked to sacrifice one, and only one, activity that we enjoy. The guidelines dictating one’s choice of sacrifice leave room for interpretation, and whatever accountability exists is of a non-corporeal variety. It is easy to pick something you secretly dislike, like broccoli or flossing, or to let the practice slide completely. The only places one is likely to be under the observation of fellow Catholics are at home and at church. Even in those places, the few individuals who know what you have chosen to sacrifice are unlikely to observe you closely or, in reality, to care.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Nathan Hartle</td></tr>
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The intensity of Ramadan in a place like Morocco is of an entirely different order of magnitude. The rules of the fast are specific, and known by everyone. While exceptions to the fast are made for those who are unwell, traveling, or pregnant, it is rare to see anyone breaking the fast in public. Even tourists are sometimes chastised for failing to comply<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>I was once called out for eating a piece of bread while walking down the street. Ramadan is a collective experience, and everyone shares the rewards and the hardships.<br />
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The hardships are not to be trifled with. Ramadan in 2011 began at the start of August, and lasted the entire month. In the eleven-month Islamic calendar, the length of which causes the holidays fall at a slightly different time of the season each year, Ramadan had for the past few years been migrating into the summer. Each year, the hours of daylight
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>the hours in which the fast is in effect<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>were getting longer. In Fez, the massive and ancient city in northern Morocco where I spent most of that August, temperatures in celsius could reach into the 40’s during the day, and rainfall was brief and intermittent.<br />
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The effect on the temperment of the populace was dramatic. Being deprived of food and water during the heat of summer had about the effect on people’s moods that one might expect, and flaring tempers and shouting matches were common. I saw a few fights in streets and marketplaces.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDN_L9TOPjQpl68Hx1gWHf1uboRpf5FjUizRWvLu2t4P_cJ236tLwd1trUKFeuKad6PV1X4i7if0gRLbygOVbuLXdokVSkD2wOnw88C6FT7UTCrLzNtTatunVJBk_uS9-XMp8XMTTFPpY/s400/Nass+-+sleeping+in+Jamaa+el+Fnaa.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDN_L9TOPjQpl68Hx1gWHf1uboRpf5FjUizRWvLu2t4P_cJ236tLwd1trUKFeuKad6PV1X4i7if0gRLbygOVbuLXdokVSkD2wOnw88C6FT7UTCrLzNtTatunVJBk_uS9-XMp8XMTTFPpY/s320/Nass+-+sleeping+in+Jamaa+el+Fnaa.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div>
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I decided to try the fast for myself, for a number of reasons. I was living and working in a hostel at the time, and the Moroccan members of the staff encouraged me to try it as a way to better understand their religion. Also the idea of practicing self-discipline struck a chord with me. I wanted to see how difficult such a restrictive regimen would be, and if I could gain a greater understanding of what the rewards of the practice are and why it has endured for so long. In short, I hoped that fasting would help me to understand why people fast.<br />
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My ability to gain such understanding would be inherently limited. As I am not a Muslim, I would be missing the single most integral part of the experience<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>that of faith. Since the fast was nearing its end around the time that I was making my plans, my fast would also by necessity be a miniature version of the full experience. With such limitations, I did not know if I would gain much of benefit from the experience. But with the encouragement of my coworkers, I decided it was worth a try.<br />
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My plan was to start one week before the expected end of Ramadan<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>the official end of the fast is determined by astronomical observations and its exact date is not known until it arrives<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>and continue until the fast was declared to be over.<br />
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I was taught a fasting routine by the staff, a few of whom spent most of their nights sleeping on cots in the courtyard. The fast would begin around 4 am each day, but typically we would wake up even earlier to give us time to eat before daylight. We use this period to binge, eating and drinking as much we felt was necessary to get us through the daylight hours. Since my work at the hostel was mostly limited to the evenings, I then had the privilege of going back to sleep, in the process putting as many daylight hours as possible behind me. Then I would go about my business for the day, staying indoors as much as possible and trying not to exert myself. I figured that the less sweat I produced, and the less I moved around, the more water I would conserve.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Nathan Hartle</td></tr>
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The downside of this strategy became obvious quickly<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>it led to a lot of slow, boring days. Though Morocco’s latitude was nearly equal to that of my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, the sun always seemed to be a little closer to the earth and a few watts more powerful, and most days it was in no hurry to go down. Even after sleeping in for as long as I could each morning, there remained a lot of daylight left to burn until sunset.</div>
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The most challenging of part of my very-abbreviated fast was the passing of time. At no point was I deprived of food and liquids for long enough to cause severe discomfort, but I did feel a nagging, shapeless discomfort that caused the days to drag on interminably<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>during times like these II felt drained of all energy, unmotivated to leave my bed or to accomplish anything. I always seemed to be on the verge of headaches and nausea that never quite materialized.</div>
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Even those with a lifetime of Ramadan experience didn’t seem immune to these effects. Everywhere I went I saw people splashing themselves with water to keep cool, or napping away the daylight hours. Shopkeepers would sleep on the floors of their stalls in between customers. As sunset approached, groups of men would gather in restaurants, waiting around tables until the call to prayer, broadcast over loudspeakers, signaled the end of the fast. Even the people getting in fights never seemed to do much more than shove each other, as if they didn’t have the energy to throw a punch.<br />
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The week dragged on, and I began to hope that the fast would end earlier than expected, no longer caring so much whether I achieved the full week that was my initial goal. Each day ended the same<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>the staff ate a meal together at sundown, sharing a large tray of meat and rice or coucous. Then, feeling reenergized, we would serve dinner to the guests.</div>
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Ultimately, I was six days into my fast when Ramadan was declared to over. I never reached the full week that had been my original goal, but I can’t say that the difference mattered much to me at that point. I had learned nothing that would have been changed by one more day of exhaustion and headaches.<br />
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What did I take from the experience? As I rediscovered the joy of unrestricted dining in the days following the end of Ramadan, I reflected on the irony of what I had done. There was little about the experience that I could not have predicted from the beginning and perhaps spared myself the trouble. Depriving yourself of food and liquid for days on end feels about how one might think it would feel: it sucks, and any thoughts I had of gaining spiritual insights as a result of this minor ordeal seem silly in retrospect.<br />
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What I failed to gain in knowledge, however, I gained in perspective. Knowing that a week-long fast is going to be unpleasant is certainly not the same as experiencing it for oneself, and having done so has given me a deeper respect for the power of belief. The choice to fast for an entire month, made by countless millions of people over centuries, is a stubborn and collective show of will that my brief part in has made me appreciate all the more. Some have gone along with the practice out of social pressure, some have been made to comply by force, but enough have participated of their own accord to make it something worth remembering. And taking part in.</div>
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<i>Nathan Hartle</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.nathanhartle.com/">Nathan Hartle</a> is a freelance writer from Davidson, NC, who has spent much of the last year traveling in Portugal, Spain, Morocco and the United Kingdom.</span><i><br /></i></div>
</div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-83570386968808217802012-01-23T07:45:00.000-08:002012-04-17T13:39:21.580-07:00Nixon in Space: The Familiar Political Personality of Newt Gingrich<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_gingrich">Newton Leroy Gingrich</a> will surely win a place in our forthcoming sequel, <i>The American Political Tradition 2: The Revenge</i>. The original Richard Hofstadter <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/08/dog-days-classics-american-political.html">classic</a> profiles the giants of American political history, showing how each man’s life story captured the political zeitgeist of the day in its own, idiosyncratic ways. Herbert Hoover, for instance, represented the crisis of American individualism, and Abraham Lincoln the nineteenth century myth of the self-made man. </div>
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I often like to ask students who they think would appear in an updated version of the 1948 book. Barack Hussein Obama is a ready answer. “He’s like a fictional character, but real,” Bob Dylan once <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/04/bob_dylan_obama_like_a_fiction.html">said</a> of the President. His remarkable life—the mother from Kansas, the father from Kenya, the extraordinary rise through the upper echelons of American education and politics—tells a story not just about African American political leadership in the late twentieth century but the broad sweep of civil rights, multiculturalism, the culture war, and so much more. One assumes Ronald Reagan would find a place in such a volume as well, not only for what he did as president but for all he has symbolized since leaving office.</div>
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But Gingrich—ah, Gingrich. The amphibian first name, the Seussian surname. On one level there seems to be no one quite like him. Only one of our presidents has ever held a PhD, and most successful politicians do not make a point of showing off their erudition, yet Gingrich flaunts his status as a historian and litters his grandiose pronouncements with a range of historical allusions that have been known to raise eyebrows. He privately describes himself as a <a href="http://www.slate.com/slideshows/news_and_politics/gingrichs-doodles.html">“definer of civilization”</a> on an epic mission, and he publically portrays himself at war with a vicious, secular, socialist Left that is determined not only to destroy him personally but to consign America to the dustbin of history. No other candidate, no matter how incompetent or deranged, has won the honor of having two distinct personalities recognized by journalists, who are always prepared for <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/boyernewt1.html">Good Newt or Bad Newt</a> to show up. <br />
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Yet Newt Gingrich’s trademark combination of manichean political warfare and boundless ambition does remind us of someone in American political history: Richard Milhous Nixon. The most immediate parallel is undoubtedly the Southern Strategy, which Nixon invented and Gingrich appears to have revived with his smashing primary victory in South Carolina. Nixon sought to win over the formerly Democratic South with talk of “law and order” that would appeal to white voters who were unsettled by busing, riots, and the growing assertion of black political power. Keep in mind these weren’t the rough stereotypes of massive resisters but rather the metropolitan white collar middle classes of the New South (see Matthew Lassiter’s <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/suburbanreview">The Silent Majority</a></i> or Rick Perlstein’s <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/08/building-perfect-echo-chamber-1970s-and.html"><i>Nixonland</i></a>).</div>
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Republicans have been bashing “welfare queens” and blowing racial “dog whistles” ever since to win the hearts of Southerners. While Mitt Romney has attempted to exploit racial tensions occasionally—with attacks on <a href="http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/24/7462989-2007-redux-romney-hits-sanctuary-cities-again">“sanctuary cities”</a> sheltering immigrants, for instance—the robotic frontrunner has never really adopted the pugnacious style that many conservatives desire, especially after living under the tyranny of a militant black nationalist dictatorship for the last three years. (Whether Romney’s “deficiency” in this area is a matter of temperament or merely a prudent decision not to make inflammatory statements that could hurt him in the general election is hard to say.)<br />
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Newt, on the other hand, cut his teeth as part of the generation of ambitious Republicans who took out old-school Democrats across the South, winning election to a district in suburban Atlanta during the 1970s. He knows his race-baiting backwards and forwards, and he has a knack for forming memes that burrow into the brain, capturing a whole complex of racist assumptions and anxieties in one pithy phrase. His “food stamp president” line would undoubtedly make <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater">Lee Atwater</a> and Sarah Palin proud. His victory suggests that South Carolina Republicans, at least, want someone who can voice their rage toward the President and his parasitic supporters more than the technocratic expertise and business skill that Romney has for sale.</div>
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The other trait Newt shares with Nixon is a fondness for bruising, scorched earth tactics distinguished by a willingness to demonize the enemy in any way possible. Just as Newt’s political rise began in the heyday of the Southern Strategy, Nixon rode to power on the coattails of Joseph McCarthy. While shamelessly denying his own dubious ethics, Nixon was ready to impugn the character and patriotism of his opponents, wielding the twin cudgels of Communism and Anti-Americanism against all comers. His 1950 Senate opponent in the 1950s was “the Pink Lady,” while Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern became the standard-bearer of “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion” in 1972.</div>
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In his 1972 re-election campaign, Nixon may have employed a bevy of dirty tactics that included break ins and sabotage, but he also eschewed “traditional party labels" and touted “his connections to Democrats... downplaying his own Republican affiliation,” according to <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/schulman70s">Bruce Schulman</a>. Nixon wanted his campaign to promote “the new American Majority … not [the] Republican majority.” This is the same Nixon who with one side of mouth promoted black capitalism and through the other approved COINTELPRO, a program of domestic surveillance and espionage that targeted civil rights groups and many have claimed contributed to the assassination of Black Power leaders like Fred Hampton.<br />
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Like any good Republican of the New Right, Nixon played upon the politics of symbolism. When Mayor Lindsay lowered the American flag to half staff, to mark the number of dead from Vietnam and again later to acknowledge the tragedy at Kent State, New York construction workers and Wall Street financiers joined together in patriotic rage. On May 8, 1970, the Hard Hat Riot began when 200 construction workers, all dressed in brown overalls carrying with them American flags, assembled near Federal Hall to protest Lindsay’s decision. The workers began targeting boys with long hair and beating them with their red and orange hard hats, and Wall Street’s warriors soon appeared in support, chanting slogans like “Lindsay’s a Red!” and “Raise our flag.” For Nixon, this was the not so silent majority he coveted. Though the President did offer loopholes for unions in his wage and price controls, which left many on Wall Street uneasy, he didn’t have to give union hard hats any real benefits—just symbolic ones or a strident but economically meaningless cultural recognition. In the end, the <i>New York Times</i> provided the very image that symbolized Nixon’s ambitions, argues Perlstein, “the stockbroker and the pipe fitter joined in solidarity in the act of clobbering a hippie—their common weapon the American flag.”</div>
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The defining feature of such attacks is their emptiness. They target intangibles such as patriotism, Americanness, and values, not on differences of policy or, really, even ideology. Anyone can say their opponents are against America. Historians have noted that Nixon was notoriously flexible and even endorsed a number of policies that would be considered “liberal” today. Can you imagine a Republican courting organized labor? What he wanted was power, not to raise or lower the tax rate by so many percentage points. Newt, too, has chagrined activists on the right by claiming to be the one true conservative in the race (as signaled by the efforts of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/285787/winnowing-field-editors"><i>National Review</i></a>, evangelicals and others to coalesce support around other candidates). He has been blasted for his opportunistic willingness to sit down with Nancy Pelosi and endorse action against climate change; another heretical act was his acceptance of the idea of a federal mandate to buy health insurance, a position that many other conservatives have abandoned since it became part of Obama’s hated healthcare reform legislation. Nixon also considered a health reform plan that was not terribly different from the one Democrats passed in 2010. Like Newt, his true allegiance was never to conservative ideology but to himself.</div>
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Many readers might say, “So what?” It’s not exactly news that politicians care more about seeking power than enacting policy. Or that most will do or say whatever it takes to win an election. Few elected officials get into politics to pursue a coherent ideological plan, save for the occasional Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders. </div>
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However, the similarities between Nixon and Newt remain salient. They both premise most of their attacks on allegations of anti-Americanism, they both see themselves as under constant attack, and they identify the source of their persecution in an East Coast elite in academia, government, and the press. Nixon took advantage of anti-Communist hysteria in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while Newt seized on the reaction to civil rights, black power, and the Great Society to write his political ticket. The former Speaker of the House’s unlikely and stunning political rebirth may owe to the convergence of both sources of conservative anxiety—race and leftism—in one figure, Barack Obama.<br />
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To the Tea Party, 2012 might look a lot like 1968. America recently abandoned one questionable military conflict, while it remains entangled in another. Of course, 1968 witnessed the Democratic National Convention, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, a visible cohort of young Americans openly protesting on campuses and cities, and series of urban riots that taken together convinced many Americans that the nation stood on the precipice. So while thankfully we lack the violence of urban uprisings and political assassinations, we’ve swapped them for 9/11 and the throbbing existential threat of terrorism. Debates about the debt ceiling and the aforementioned economic meltdown highlight one thing 1968 didn’t have: widespread economic distress. The only thing that could ruin the economies of the mid-1960s was Vietnam, while the wars of the twenty first century consumed federal money at perhaps the most inopportune time. Culturally, the Occupy Movement serves as evidence for many conservative Americans that the Left functions as little more than a thinly veiled fifth column of radical boogeymen. An unwashed twenty first century SDS? A burgeoning Weathermen for the new millennium? Unlikely, but from the perspective of many a Tea Partier, many of whom remember the 1960s, the whole scene looks frighteningly familiar.</div>
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It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate … sent all the way from Texas. Black-and-white-spotted. And our little girl – Tricia, the six-year old – named it Checkers. And you know the kids love that dog, and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.<br />
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A trip back to the 1950s reminds us of one last parallel between the two men: both Nixon and Gingrich proved capable of adroitly manipulating "the media" even while they complained about being persecuted by it. In September 1952, then-Senator from California stood before the American public and media fighting for his political life. Accused of improperly accepting gifts and funding, Nixon delivered his Checkers speech to a national audience. For Nixon supporters, an unscrupulous media sucker-punched the beleaguered Vice-President. As Rich Perlstein says, they "interpreted the puppy story just as Nixon intended it: as a jab at a bunch of bastards who were piling on, kicking a man when he was down, a regular guy, just they could do it and he couldn’t fight back.” </div>
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Nixon exploited this perception for decades afterward, but what’s more important was the combative response. After all, Gingrich’s performance at the opening of the last South Carolina Republican debate defined him for many South Carolina voters as a sort of “anti-politician.” Yes, that’s right—a Washington outsider who was once Speaker of the House and has long owned a home in Maclean, Virginia, a tony suburban town just outside DC. Gingrich laid into CNN's John King when he dared ask about his ex-wife’s claims of infidelity. “To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign,” Gingrich boomed, “is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine." As David Brooks recently <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/21/david-brooks-gingrich-is-just-unelectable-video/%29">noted</a>, Gingrich’s rise in South Carolina depended heavily on his debate performances, a strength of the former Georgia Congressmen. When he “attacked” Juan Williams and John King last week, he epitomized the kind of aggressive unapologetic conservatism the GOP thirsts for. The <i>New York Times</i> quoted one supporter describing Newt as “real … he answers the questions, he has good ideas… Mitt is kind of a flip flopper, more of a politician.” The idea of Newt as the anti-politician—well, if you can pull if off, genius.<br />
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Ironically, Barack Obama also has positioned himself as anti-politics—performing a maneuver that parallels Newt’s own attempt at taking a high-minded stance above the normal political free-for-all. Obama’s trademark rhetorical strategy during 2008 was all about rising above the sort of baby-boomer culture wars that defined the Clinton-Gingrich struggle of the 1990s, heralding a new era of rational political debate and compromise. We all know that post-partisan Shangri-la never materialized, given Democrats’ determination to push through with a once-in-a-lifetime chance at a liberal agenda and Republicans’ equivalent decision to obstruct Democratic progresss at every step of the legislative process. But Obama also chose to position himself above the democratic fray, in a way that was not too different from Newt’s posturing against the media, which he accused of trying to foster petty discord whenever they asked him a tough question. Any of the candidates on the debate stage would be better than Barack Obama, Gingrich said, and he was tired of the liberal media trying to turn them all against each other. Newt thus presented himself as the team player who cared more about conservative principles and beating Obama than naked self-interest—not unlike the liberal Democratic President who claims to be sick of he-said-she-said political bickering but is still fully prepared to fight a knock-down, drag-out political battle for power.<br />
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Ultimately, Newt is not quite the same as Nixon, and certainly not the same as Obama, even if both might indulge in anti-political fantasies. Both Newt and Nixon bring a deep-seated resentment to the liberal establishment in the arts, education, and media—a middle class kid who went to Whittier College and Duke, instead of Harvard and Yale, Nixon hated the superiority of the Northeastern cultural elite, not unlike Gingrich, who came from modest circumstances to earn a PhD in history but was ultimately turned down for tenure. His never-ending tirades against the left-wing academic elite definitely seem to smack of one who has nursed a decades-long bitterness about the liberal establishment that denied him professional approval. Both Nixon and Newt possessed a deep animus to the haughty men and women who enjoyed the privilege of greater cultural capital.</div>
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In the end, though, the forever-persecuted Newt somehow holds onto an innate sunniness that bolsters his appeal. Despite Newt’s apocalyptic rhetoric about American decline, he remains steeped in an optimism than Nixon could never match. It is part of what makes his rollicking, egomaniacal id so fun to watch. Newt came of age in the time of Sputnik and <i>Star Trek</i>, and he adds a uniquely Newtonian sci-fi spin to the dark morass of Nixonian paranoia. He remains deeply invested in an enthusiasm for technological and managerial solutions to everyday problems, reflected in his sloganeering endorsement of Lean Six Sigma as a cure-all for American governmental bureaucracy. <a href="http://twodarkbirds.posterous.com/?tag=judewebre">Jude Webre</a> aptly described the current GOP divide as Rand vs. Toffler: a split between the bleak worldview of libertarians and business conservatives who bemoan the strength-sapping spread of the welfare state and a rather different yearning for technocratic, gee-whiz, high-tech solutions that Newt Gingrich embraces, despite his culture-warrior bonafides. His opponents may laugh at ideas like colonies on the moon, but Gingrich simply pooh-poohs their small-mindednes. He marries McCarthyite and Nixonian paranoia to a bottomless reserve of assurance in not only his own abilities but the possibilties of solutions and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/what-are-newt-gingrichs-big-ideas/2011/08/25/gIQApk8pIQ_blog.html">“big ideas,”</a> as he never tires of putting it. </div>
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In this weird combination of optimism for the future and bleak pessimism about the relentless onslaught on Western civilization, Newt Gingrich is quite unlike the pit of neuroses that was Richard Nixon. Both men may have perceived threats and attacks from all sides, but Newt takes the battle to the enemy with a kamikaze zest that is entertaining and fundamentally distinct from Nixon’s insecure and paranoid persona. Then again, one of these men was twice elected to the presidency—a fact that says a lot about America as a democratic society in 1968 and 1972, when it saw fit to elevate a man like Richard Nixon to its pinnacle of power—while Newt Gingrich’s fate remains untold and, at the moment, far less propitious. He may be the snarling white id of the South, back to exact its vengeance against Rockefeller Republicanism, but most observers still discount his chances of winning the GOP nomination, much less the presidency. Whether Newt’s fortunes today say more about us as a people or him as a candidate remains to be seen.</div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-41898489513053821702012-01-19T03:28:00.000-08:002012-01-19T03:28:03.863-08:00Tropics of Meta's Best of 2011<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4IQ4Urwb7gvJT17f9GRfaX56ffGx2i7SldtlmT0uZpP17XSv_1odLR5gsgvwiXaHY6TAse1SyrHQWOe-7Vp24NoIRei_6gERkfQZnJPmFMl33cRYQixj8SkFs9uQyQoGz7Y-C9Qc0NXu3/s1600/T+of+M+in+2011.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4IQ4Urwb7gvJT17f9GRfaX56ffGx2i7SldtlmT0uZpP17XSv_1odLR5gsgvwiXaHY6TAse1SyrHQWOe-7Vp24NoIRei_6gERkfQZnJPmFMl33cRYQixj8SkFs9uQyQoGz7Y-C9Qc0NXu3/s400/T+of+M+in+2011.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Our friend <a href="http://www.kevintbaker.com/">Kevin Baker</a> recently wondered aloud whether 2012 would be the Year that Tropics Broke, after seeing our <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-aha-chicago-way.html">rundown</a> of the best papers at this year's American Historical Association meeting posted by a colleague on Facebook. 2012 might very well be the year that we auto-tune or meme our way to national notoriety, but in the meantime we would like to offer a different kind of recap: a list of our favorite pieces from 2011. From the <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/04/mountain-goats-and-music-of-survival.html">Mountain Goats</a> to <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/11/bergman-on-mars-lars-von-triers.html"><i>Melancholia</i></a>, and from the inspiring scenes of the <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/02/imagining-multitude-in-cairo.html">Arab Spring</a> to the ongoing antics of the <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/05/stalking-tax-man-pervasive-influence-of.html">Tea Party</a>, we have tried to offer a semi-informed perspective on the unfolding of history over the last year. Here are some of our picks:</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Fire and ICE: The Realities of 21st Century Urban Development </b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The first in our series on the "post-industrial society" and the role of high-technology industries in American cities, <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/01/fire-and-ice-realities-of-21st-century.html">this piece</a> focused on university-led redevelopment in New York, Philadelphia, and southern California. Drawing on the work of Mike Davis and Themis Chronopoulos, the post examines local resistance to the expansion of New York University, as well as the increasing dependence of cities on such development to shore up their coffers and credit ratings in a neoliberal policy environment.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>The Rural Roots of America's Cities of Knowledge </b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Another installment in the post-industrial series, Keith Orejel's <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/01/rural-roots-of-americas-cities-of.html">essay</a> urged readers to refocus attention away from the big city world of the "creative class" and toward the relationship between high-tech development and rural America. The Sunbelt's image of prosperity, Orejel suggests, belied the reality of poverty and population loss in the countryside, as mechanization pushed farmworkers off the land and better opportunities in cities such as Charlotte and Atlanta were taken up chiefly by educated transplants from outside the region. Meanwhile, rural workers moved into low-wage retail, trucking, and other industries that flourished in the shadow of the New Economy's gleaming "cities of knowledge."</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Neoliberalism's License to Ill </b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Discussing the work of the late Tony Judt, Adam Gallagher explored the damaging effects of neoliberal policies in <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/01/neoliberalisms-license-to-ill.html">this piece</a>. In the name of holding the line on spending and big government, American policymakers have, in the last thirty years, pursued a relentless course of privatization and deregulation, even as tax cuts for the wealthy fueled rising inequality and military adventurism blew up the budget deficit. The 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent Great Recession seemed to illustrate the devastating impact of such policies, yet the resurgence of the GOP and the rise of the Tea Party showed that the US political elite has refused to abandon its allegiance to old homilies about the so-called "free market."</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>How We Got Here: Stein, Cowie, and Arrighi on the Post-Industrial Economy</b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Continuing the post-industrial series, <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-we-got-here-stein-cowie-and-arrighi.html">Joel Suarez</a> examines the divergent approaches to economic change taken by Judith Stein, Jefferson Cowie, and the late Giovanni Arrighi in their widely read studies. Arrighi employs the sweeping perspective of world-systems theory to explain the United States' meteoric economic rise in the twentieth century, placing the country's turn toward deindustrialization and finance in the 1970s as part of a long-term cycle of imperial expansion and decline. In contrast, Stein focuses on the nuts-and-bolts of economic policy, highlighting how deliberate political decisions about taxes, subsidies, and trade favored industries such as finance, insurance and real estate (see "FIRE and ICE" above) and undermined traditional manufacturing. Cowie's <i>Staying Alive</i> instead looked at the cultural dimension of deindustrialization and changing perceptions of class in the 1970s. Despite methodological differences, and the difficulty of reconciling large-scale and small-bore explanations, each of these scholars can concur on one point: the 1970s were a crucial turning point in the political economy and culture of the United States.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Hefner, Hughes, and Rogen: Playboy and the Origins of the 21st Century Hipster</b> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b></b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b></b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The unending search for a definition of the hipster continues in <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/02/hefner-hughes-and-rogen-playboy-and.html">this piece</a>, which offers a new genealogy of the cultural type. This piece deemphasizes the significance of familiar antecedents such as the beatniks or punks and instead ties hipsters to a different ancestor: the playboy of the 1950s, the prototypical, self-absorbed urban sophisticate. Drawing on the work of historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo and essayist Ian Svenonius, "Hefner, Hughes, and Rogen" proposes that the most salient characteristic of the hipster is demographic; the virtually unprecedented emergence of a large, educated group of unmarried, childless twenty-and-thirtysomethings has given rise to hipster culture, as culturally savvy young people with disposable income and few responsibilities can devote time to putting birds on things and issuing cassette-only electro-pop covers of Bollywood songs. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Teaching to the Test: The Middle Class, Teachers, and School Reform in the 21st Century</b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/04/teaching-to-test-middle-class-teachers.html">this piece</a>, Ryan Reft and Shane Updike draw on their experience as educators to weight the implications of movements for education reform, particularly for American cities. Charter schools, accountability, and teacher unions come under consideration, as well as the controversial career of former Washington, DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who made fighting unions and firing incompetent teachers her signature policy.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Video, Terror, and the Politics of Reality TV </b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Written in the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing by American commandos in Pakistan, <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/05/video-terror-and-politics-of-reality-tv.html">this piece</a> compared the way that images of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were constructed in the media after their respective downfalls. Specifically, it discusses the lurid and humiliating use of video to degrade the formerly powerful men, who were viewed in the American media undergoing dental examinations (in Hussein's case) and pathetically watching television (in bin Laden's). Such portrayals evoked practices of shaming and voyeurism that resembled those made popular by reality television in the last decade. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Pedaling Your Politics: The Variable Meanings of Critical Mass</b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/07/pedaling-your-politics-variable.html">This piece</a> explores the controversial practice of critical mass by bicyclists in a variety of cities, considering the political dimension of the tactic and the different ways it has been received in San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, and elsewhere. Despite the somewhat confrontational nature of critical mass, which involves bicyclists taking over streets and other public spaces, conflicts over the practice have not deterred the growing embrace of bicycling as an environmentally friendly mode of transit or bike-friendly policies as a means of enhancing traffic and transportation in cities such as New York.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>American Arab Kitsch: From Ahab to Abed and Back Again</b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/07/american-arab-kitsch-from-ahab-to-abed.html">This essay</a> takes a long view of portrayals of Arabs and Arab-Americans in American pop culture, from the novelty songs of Ray Stevens and Pinkard & Bowden to the increasing presence of purportedly Arab characters in twenty-first century pop culture. It considers the vagaries of politics and international affairs on perceptions of Arabs, who occupy a peculiar position between honorary white people (Lebanese Republicans such as John Sununu) and swarthy, hysterical terrorists (the Crimson Jihad in 1994's action hit <i>True Lies</i>)<i>.</i> One of the strangest aspects of American pop culture's treatment of Arabs is the fact that such characters are nearly always played by South Asians rather than actors of North African or Middle Eastern origin (Sayid on <i>Lost</i>, Abed on<i> Community</i>, and so forth), underlining their status as nonwhite in the American imagination. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Building the Perfect Echo Chamber: The 1970s and Political Discourse in the 21st Century </b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This wide-ranging <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/08/building-perfect-echo-chamber-1970s-and.html">essay</a> looks at Rick Perlstein's <i>Nixonland</i>, among other texts, to consider how the conflicts of the 1970s set the course for today's hyper-polarized, Red vs. Blue political culture. Richard Nixon saw the value of exploiting the cultural, political, and economic differences between the so-called "Silent Majority" and increasingly vocal groups such as people of color, gays and lesbians, and others on the Left. John McMillian's history of the underground press and the New Left, <i>Smoking Typewriters</i>, and Edmund White's memoir of gay life in New York, <i>City Boy</i>, provide further perspective on the splintering of American culture during this era, as people divided along lines of political, sexual, and cultural identity and nurtured new subcultures that became increasingly unintelligible to those outside each group. The result was an America that looked less like a cohesive polity, capable of addressing its most pressing and intractable issues, and more like an archipelago of echo chambers, where liberals and conservatives talked only to their own kind and viewed each other with resentment and mistrust.<br />
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<b>Decide Yourself If Radio's Gonna Stay: A Post-Mortem of R.E.M.</b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/10/decide-yourself-if-radios-gonna-stay.html">post</a> reviews the long history of R.E.M., the Athens, GA band that defined the course of college radio and indie rock in the 1980s before achieving massive popular success and gradually sinking back into obscurity by the late 1990s. Written from the perspective of a long-time listener from the South ("southern boys just like you and me," as Steve Malkmus said in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DvVYwXqFEE">Pavement's tribute to the band</a>), the piece considers how R.E.M.'s heady mix of 60s psychedelia and post-punk energy typified the early 1980s moment of crisis in the record industry, which was stuck in its post-boomer, post-disco doldrums. The band's first single, "Radio Free Europe," was not only an impressionistic take on the state of the Cold War at the dawn of the Reagan Era, but a call to arms for independent music to chart its own course -- a harbinger of how indie rock would develop in uneasy tension with the mainstream of the music business.<br />
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<b>And the Most Read Posts of</b> <b>2011</b><br />
<ol><li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/04/demonizing-don-henley-unwrapping.html">Demonizing Don Henley: Unwrapping the Byzantine Politics of a Boomer Icon</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/03/not-your-model-minority-complexity-of.html">Not Your Model Minority: The Complexity of Asian Americans in 21st Century Film</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/02/hefner-hughes-and-rogen-playboy-and.html">Hefner, Hughes, and Rogen</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/04/teaching-to-test-middle-class-teachers.html">Teaching to the Test</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/03/market-volunteers-role-of-race-gender.html">Market Volunteers: The Role of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the All-Volunteer Army</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/07/learning-from-tiny-tower.html">Learning from Tiny Tower: Mobile Gaming and the Post-Industrial Society</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/07/learning-from-tiny-tower.html">FIRE and ICE</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/04/me-and-you-and-everyone-we-know.html">Me and You and Everyone We Know: Newsweek's Sex Problem</a></li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/03/mapping-ineffable-nebulous-flow-of.html">Mapping the Ineffable: The Nebulous Flow of History in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-sense-of-mom-ideology-of-20th.html">Making Sense of Mom: The Ideology of 20th Century American Maternalism</a> <b> </b></li>
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</div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-64498542631691894482012-01-12T12:41:00.000-08:002012-01-17T08:15:16.531-08:00The 2012 AHA: The Chicago Way<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Can you spot the Medievalist in this picture?</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Chicago dogs, deep dish pizza, nasal Midwestern accents, and sunny 50 degree days. Three of these things are associated with Chicago in January. Perhaps the larger forces of the universe took sympathy on the army of academics that descended upon Chicago last week for the annual American History Association conference (one might note the annual meeting of the American Economics Association also held there conference in the Windy City last week, throttling native Chicagoans with questions about opportunity costs, endogenous influences, credit supply in the age of financial crisis and so on). The dark arts of academic employment deserved at the very least blue skies and semi-warm weather. As always, a fetid mix of desperation and hope – desperation because well the market for tenure track jobs still sucks, and hope because the conference revealed a number of insightful new scholars and ideas that promise to lead the field in the near future.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>1. The 1960s and Chicago</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">MLK at Soldier's Field 1966 - Chicago Freedom Movement</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Chicago ‘68: Rethinking Local Black Activism and the Battle for Urban America</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Too often tropes about the 1960s portray the early years as a simmering cauldron of racial and ethnic egalitarian possibility only to be betrayed by the violent and ultimately disappointing rights movements of the decade’s conclusion. However, several scholars pushed backed against this characterization arguing that the late 1960s proved vital in influencing the local Black Power movement and establishing the policy arcs of the 1970s in terms of Black homeownership, community activism, police organization, and politics of space visa via museums.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, "Tenant Unions, Rent Strikes, Fighting Foreclosure, and Eviction Blockades: Black Chicago’s Struggle for Housing Justice"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor illustrates how the image and reality of rat infested homes led to tenant rights organizations in Chicago’s black communities of the late 1960s. While many historians suggest Martin Luther King’s housing justice movement failed due to the machinations of Mayor Richard Daley (MLK once described opposing Daley as akin to punching a pillow) and his influence over traditional sites of Black political opposition (think Black churches and elected leadership) for Taylor, MLK’s attempts to establish housing justice proved not the culmination and throttling of a movement but rather a catalyst for a coherent and effective campaign for minority homeownership. While many have portrayed the King - Daley encounter as one that ultimately contributed to the fracturing of the civil rights movement, Taylor points out that post-King Black Chicago continued to fight for fair and equitable housing. The rise of tenant unions and similar organizations utilizing a variety of means to protest poor conditions (picketing, sit ins, rent strikes) forced many landlords to address their concerns and in several cases enabled tenants to eventually transform housing contracts into mortgages. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Erik S. Gellman, "Faith in Black Power: Chicago’s Urban Training Center for Christian Mission, 1966–70"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Erik Gellman explores the role of Chicago’s Urban Training Center (UTC) in creating black led organizations and activism that persisted well into the 1970s. Though started by predominantly white University of Chicago seminarians who employed the U of C lab model, the UTC soon came to be dominated by Saul Alinsky like social action. This shift coincided with a shift in leadership as increasing numbers of local, largely black residents came to the fore. The UTC’s efforts helped to connect Chicago’s geographically divided Black communities. Importantly, UTC graduates contributed to wider social movements in the city from Operation Breadbasket (led in part by UTC alum Jesse Jackson) to the Woodlawn Organization. Gellman focuses especially on the Coalition for United Community Action (CUCA), who in 1969, successfully protested for better integration in the building trades. Additionally, the UTC encouraged participants to move past simple “survival” politics focusing increasingly on economic justice and access to capital as branches of the UTC tried to establish connections between Chicago’s financiers and the city’s Black organizations, a kind of precursor to today’s LISC. The opening of numerous other similar campaigns in cities across the nation (locally as well as the aforementioned CUCA provides one example) based on the UTC model points to the importance of this organization in dialogues regarding agency and 1970s social movements. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBVRU5leXWqEqFGgUBx63fo9d-i2Ixa1siw-13FSqg8uy5V8EuvC_g0OrMIP5pItZn0313l8H1nrz_B_PTZYo_Qqg-kC1qgTV2rxrSsYdBzHtraw04SER_S-XlxYNFkjtz-ZLsdT1r3F4/s1600/Margaret+Burroughs.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBVRU5leXWqEqFGgUBx63fo9d-i2Ixa1siw-13FSqg8uy5V8EuvC_g0OrMIP5pItZn0313l8H1nrz_B_PTZYo_Qqg-kC1qgTV2rxrSsYdBzHtraw04SER_S-XlxYNFkjtz-ZLsdT1r3F4/s320/Margaret+Burroughs.jpg" /></a></span> <br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">DuSable Museum co-founder Margaret Burroughs</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Ian Rocksborough-Smith, "Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History in the Black Power Era: The Washington Park Relocation"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In his recent work <i>Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles</i> (2011), Danny Widener delves into the role of black artists in defining twentieth century metropolitan struggles. Widener focuses especially on the role that black artists and artist organizations played in crafting aesthetic and political critiques that challenged municipal institutions and structures in the name of a broader African American working class. In a similar fashion, Ian Rocksborough Smith analyzes the role of Chicago’s DuSable Museum in “transmitting African American values” to the broader public while impacting Chicago’s “cultural physical landscapes.” The DuSable Museum created a middle class space among the wider Black Arts cultural milleu and amplified Black Chicago's place within the public sphere. Established in 1961 and originally located on South Michigan Avenue, by 1974 the Museum set up shop in Washington Park. Rocksborough Smith explores both the decades long build up among black "cultural workers" like Margaret and Charles Burroughs (the husband and wife founders of the museum) who built on the tradition of Black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s-1950s and the struggle to successfully move the museum to a larger venue. The Burroughs and others created a vital Black cultural and intellectual life that emphasized African Americans contributions to the world and protested Chicago’s and the nation’s denial of Black history. The museum’s relocation to Washington Park – long a site of the city’s Black culture from the Bud Billiken day parade to weekend festivals and craft markets – proved more difficult than expected. A former police station, the city dragged its feet regarding the new location until a petition campaign that included esteemed journalist Vernon Jarrett and Alderman Ralph Metcalfe (himself a critical figure in Chicago’s political scene) along with local cultural actors such as the Field Museum, Art Institute, and Chicago Historical Society, forced the municipal government to relent. Selling itself as a “bootstrap public cultural resource”, museum advocates adopted a rhetoric that highlighted its commitment to Midwestern history and art and cultural practice. The Museum served as a critical “free space” in an emerging Black power movement. In the 1980s, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-11-21/features/ct-met-burroughs-obit-1122-20101121_1_bronzeville-faheem-majeed-artistic-talent">Margaret Burroughs </a>advised the city’s growing Mexican/Mexican American museum to create its own independent cultural space, illustrating the continuing importance of a diverse racial and ethnic presence in the public sphere. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">AAPL members speaking to the press circa 1968</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Megan Adams, “Beyond the Police Riot: The Politics of Chicago’s Patrolmen after 1968”</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For too long, 1968 Democratic Convention and the 1969 assassinations of Chicago’s Black Panther leadership defined the CPD. To outside observers, 1968 Chicago appeared to be divided between a recalcitrant white police force, the minions of the aforementioned Mayor Daley, and a largely white left oppositional presence that erupted in violence amid the collapse of the Democratic party. UC Berkeley’s Megan Adams pushes back against this characterization pointing out that while the above events certainly remain significant, the CPD through the establishment of the Confederation of Police (1965) created an internal site of protest and cohesion. Though largely white, the Confederation eventually claimed 8000 members with a small but significant minority presence (The Confederation even elected an African American as its president in 1972) The 1968 formation of the African American Patrolman’s League (AAPL) provided another powerful means of internal protest as the Confederation and AAPL rejected their economic (no collective bargaining agreement until 1981) and political treatment (under the then newly created IID – basically Chicago’s internal affairs division – police lacked many of the rights guaranteed to criminal defendants under Miranda v. Arizona including the right to remain silent) under the monarchical Chicago mayor. The AAPL’s critiques (along with its 1975 lawsuit against the Federal Treasury for providing funding to Daley that the AAPL argued encouraged segregation within the CPD) led to increased minority representation within the department as 1976’s graduating class consisted of the largest proportion of non-white offices in Chicago history. The affirmative action program established within the CPD would later be emulated in cities like NY, Detroit, and Seattle. Reminiscent in some ways of Edward Conlon’s 2004 work <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Blood-Edward-Conlon/dp/1573222666">Blue Blood</a></i> (admittedly not an academic work), the Harvard educated New York City police officer depicted a force whose internal workings operated in numerous political directions including dissent. Moreover, Conlon suggested the perception of the NYPD’s fealty to Rudolph Guliani proved false as many officers believed Guliani had reneged on promises regarding economic issues. Likewise, Adam’s work gets at the complexity of municipal workers as both symbols of and political actors within cities, especially those living in the hot house environment of the late 1960s. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>2. Not Your Parent’s Reconstruction</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reconstruction - Part of a larger, longer more troubling story</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Expanding the Boundaries: Putting American Reconstruction in National and Transnational Terms</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For the past two decades or so, transnationalism has proven a powerful lens for re-evaluating established historical epochs. Under this rubric, the idea of an established American post-Civil War federal power no longer seems so obvious as ethnic and labor tensions in northern cities, conflicts with Native Americans in the expanding West, and a resentful and violent Southern resistance to Reconstruction suggests a nation very aware of its weaknesses and less sure of its power and stability. Operating in large part in dialogue with the work of Elliot West, Nancy Bercaw, Gregory Downs, and Carole Emberton reconfigure Reconstruction and Western expansion as two parts of a larger process of national transformation that reflected the broad economic and political anxieties afflicting American citizens. (In addition, one might suggest, as commentator Stephen Kantrowitz did, that gender and worries about masculinity in the face of western expansion and rapid industrialization deserve some attention here.) The panel’s presenters remind audience members of works by Rebecca Edwards, Nancy Cott, Alison Sneider, and Amy Kaplan while employing theoretical frameworks of Michael Foucault (especially in regard to the importance and influence of discourse and the political role of bodies/remains) and Tony Bennett among others. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiupH3Gx2a7TUN9LsgsWtXHwrn_UFeI4QJNkQZMUMZSxXovOG5JO0bBFjQd16vXAegNfPESEn94XZpcnIr82MQILb_n9Vj2xSoRiknD10ZxAQdvSghry_sMRAAStgJGnPXGBFCiH0QeFOw/s1600/captain_jack_kintpuash_tshirt-p235535968950657043zvjg0_400.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiupH3Gx2a7TUN9LsgsWtXHwrn_UFeI4QJNkQZMUMZSxXovOG5JO0bBFjQd16vXAegNfPESEn94XZpcnIr82MQILb_n9Vj2xSoRiknD10ZxAQdvSghry_sMRAAStgJGnPXGBFCiH0QeFOw/s320/captain_jack_kintpuash_tshirt-p235535968950657043zvjg0_400.jpg" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Celebrating or commodifying Modoc leader Captain Jack?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Carole Emberton, "The Other Panic of 1873: Federal Authority in the South and West"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Drawing on the aforementioned West and Amy Kaplan’s influential work, <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/kaplanarchy">The Anarchy of Empire</a></i>, Carole Emberton looks to reconfigure how historians think about Southern Reconstruction and Western expansion. Instead of viewing them as distinct and unrelated processes, Emberton encourages historians to consider them as two pieces of the larger project of national expansion and transformation. Focusing on the importance and meaning of two events: 1) the assassination of American General Edward R. S. Camby at the hands of the Native American Modac tribe and 2) the massacre of 100 freemen miltia members at the hands of the white supremacist White League of Colfax, LA, Emberton suggests that each represented justifications for US imperial reach in the South and West. The racial logic upholding both events illustrated a complex nexus of race, federal power, and citizenship. For example, many Southerners viewed the occupation of the South by federal forces as hypocritical since the government refused or failed to achieve any sort of equivalent occupation of Native American lands by the military. Open resistance by Native Americans, in the minds of some Southern observers, deserved federal retribution making federal occupation of the South an even greater insult. Emberton juxtaposes this example with efforts by the Colfax White League and the federal government in part to illustrate that in each case, the established narrative argued that white actors had attempted to negotiate peace with recalcitrant actors, whose violence in the face of such negotiations justified state and vigilante violence. This in turn, supported America’s late nineteenth century imperial ambitions that by 1898 supported occupation in the Philippines and elsewhere under the rubric of American tutelage. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-oxtw1Wit6CuXnADDuFn6mdCG8qWxK0vejIC0y1T2LYQZsABAeajNJC1mJylvgk5c1bliHF8SRAZlVw5BEcGAyghWjpz24Y2z3zMew4Nl4miC37K09F3H3a9lvBzIUy2MOhDtlR_t0pw/s1600/Mitchell%252C+Mexico%252C+Central+America%252C+West+Indies.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-oxtw1Wit6CuXnADDuFn6mdCG8qWxK0vejIC0y1T2LYQZsABAeajNJC1mJylvgk5c1bliHF8SRAZlVw5BEcGAyghWjpz24Y2z3zMew4Nl4miC37K09F3H3a9lvBzIUy2MOhDtlR_t0pw/s320/Mitchell%252C+Mexico%252C+Central+America%252C+West+Indies.jpg" /></a> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Americans' imagined Mexico was as colorful as this map in the 1870s </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Gregory P. Downs, "The Mexicanization of American Politics: The Transnational Reconstruction of Authority in the Postbellum United States"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Like Emberton, recent Choice Book award recipient Gregory P. Downs argues rather than putting to rest questions of federal stability, the decades following the Civil War represent a national government struggling to address crisis in Northern cities, pacify Native Americans on the Western frontier (notably the defeat of US troops at the Battle of Little Bighorn), and impose federal authority over the rebellious South. Critical postbellum American observers characterized US political fortunes with comparisons to an imagined Mexico defined simultaneously by tyranny and anarchy. However, Mexicanization’s meaning depended largely on context and political interest. When debating federal occupation of the South, Southern critics pointed to the tyranny of French intervention in Mexico (non-democratic monarchical rule) as a corollary to federal occupation of the South under Reconstruction. In other moments, the inability to completely end Native American uprisings in the West and the actions of paramilitaries like the KKK or the various White Leagues that developed across the South pointed to the anarchy of imagined Mexico in the United States (some observers ironically argued that Porfirio Diaz’s overthrow of Huerta served as example of Mexico’s instability, which is not well … accurate). In order to promote their own interests, Democrats and Republicans alike utilized the rhetoric of Mexicanization. This relationship moved in both directions as some Mexican liberals professed an alliance or brotherhood with the US justifying Mexican limitations on rights in the context of Reconstruction. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The Army Medical Museum circa twentieth century</span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Nancy Bercaw, "Human Remains and the Measure of Freedom: Military Medicine and the Reconstruction of Race in the Post-Emancipation United States"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Arguably the most theoretical of the three papers, Bercaw's piece draws upon theories by Foucault, Tony Bennett, and one might suggest Ann Stoler, to explore how governmental display of Native American and African American remains prove illustrative of larger issues regarding race, citizenship, and federal power. From 1867 – 1898 the army (via the Army Medical Museum established in 1862) collected over 23,000 Native and African American remains, thus, creating a racialized archive that removed the humanity of the individual, thus relegating them to the role of specimens used as evidence of American racial order in an age of an insecure federal power and burgeoning imperial hopes. Curators displayed Native American skulls as proof of a vanishing “pure race” that could be reduced to a racial taxonomy. In contrast, African Americans, newly emancipated had been, at least in theory, given citizenship. As the United States’ first non-white citizenry, the museum displayed the organs of dead freedmen and women but did not identify them by race. African American skulls were not included suggesting that though still perniciously discriminated against, the government refused to display the skulls of its own citizens. Conversely, Native American skulls, offered “a visual archive of a dying race.” An assuring notion for a nation that as already copiously noted struggled to quell Native American resistance while adjusting to the legal inclusion of African Americans (Bercaw argues that one of the museum’s leaders displaced his discomfort over the newly inducted citizens by projecting his anxiety onto Native Americans, a people “rejecting U.S. power”) Like Ariela Gross in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Blood-Wont-Tell-History/dp/0674047982/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326082844&sr=1-1">What Blood Won’t Tell</a></i> or 2006's Ann Stoler edited collection <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Empire-Geographies-Encounters-Interactions/dp/082233724X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326082706&sr=8-1">Haunted by Empire</a></i>, Bercaws’s talk engaged ideas regarding the expansion of citizenship whether within its borders or at its imperial edges. Bercaw's insights further our understanding of American racial policy that has long been messy, no less so than during the tumultuous years of the postbellum nineteenth century. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>3. The Modular Military?</b></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here, there, everywhere!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Everyday Soldiers: The Limits of Militarization in Postwar American Society</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In recent years, historians and social scientists like Michael Sherry, Ann Markusen, Beth Bailey, Jennifer Light, Roger Lotchin, and Caroline Lutz among others have reflected on the place, role, and influence of the military on domestic civilian life, national and regional economies, and its relationship to citizenship. The increasing public private nature of military expenditures led Eisenhower to famously warn America of the nefarious military industrial complex while C. Wright Mills provided an early definition in <i>The Power Elite</i>. Still, the idea of the military often evokes thoughts of an unstoppable bulging force. Instead, the <i>Everyday Soldiers</i> panel suggests that militarization assumes a more adaptive or as one commentator noted “modular” nature, capable in some forms of near invisibility, making it arguably an even more insidious presence. (To once again paraphrase <i>The Usual Suspects</i>, “The greatest trick the devil ever performed was convincing the world he didn’t exist” – yes T of M likes to gender the devil.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">[Editor’s note: The presence of a long haired Walter Sobchak in the audience made <i>Everyday Soldiers</i> the “it” panel of the AHA.]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">UMT recruits praying for some excitement</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Amy Rutenberg, "Failure at Fort Knox: Public Opinion and the End of Universal Military Training"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As the military moved into the immediate postwar era, atomic age fears envisioned that the next war would prove “sudden, large, and deadly”. For some military and government officials, this meant America’s male population needed to be broadly prepared for rapid military conflict. However, public ambivalence about a “garrison state” (notably in the shadow of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism) limited the scope and vision of official plans. Though part of larger War Department plans spanning back to WWI, after a legislative push in 1944, the government instituted an experimental trial program at Fort Knox. In "Failure at Fort Knox", Reutenberg examines the publicity arising from this experimental program illustrating public ambivalence and the limits encountered by the military even in this trial effort. From the outset, the Fort Knox experiment faced opposition from a broad array of groups. Many Americans viewed the military as the improper place for the cultivation and transference of moral and civic values. Critics argued that churches, schools and families proved better conduits for such ideals. Emphasizing physical health, good hygiene, and other middle class virtues, the Fort Knox program consciously avoided strict regimentation (it offered GED classes, a swimming pool, and other accoutrements of middle income life). Participants “responded as individuals and developed as individuals”, no doubt to reinforce at the least the idea of a democratic America (for example, rather than the usual forms of discipline in the military the Fort Knox UMT employed a demerit system and had a trainee court.) Unfortunately, the government failed to ever explain why this sort of preparedness proved so vital and why the military should be the institution to install moral and civic values rather than civic and religious groups. Additionally, media portrayals depicted this service much like the Boy Scouts, thus engendering skepticism and resentment among veterans and others. Even worse, the military's own brochure stressed the program as more a right of passage than a plank in national security. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBpgbs8O2dx5McuWL3onH0foae7KBRZNISsOluQ2aRCDnuUaxQ4KtNq40R9vQKhXJZXxypR6aXSNzufHTpOe0-jDDj0XKzLbsEzAYx3tLApaIRO_9da9ULXYAXfgOm59X2C9BBJ3sT5Uo/s1600/shape-of-things-to-come.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBpgbs8O2dx5McuWL3onH0foae7KBRZNISsOluQ2aRCDnuUaxQ4KtNq40R9vQKhXJZXxypR6aXSNzufHTpOe0-jDDj0XKzLbsEzAYx3tLApaIRO_9da9ULXYAXfgOm59X2C9BBJ3sT5Uo/s320/shape-of-things-to-come.jpg" /></a></span> <br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Short answer? Yes. PCYF Ad</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Rachel Louise Moran, "The Advisory State: Physical Fitness through the Ad Council, 1955–65"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When in an episode of <i>Mad Men</i>, the scurrilous Roger Sterling suffers a heart attack, the cynical ad executive mutters to the paramedics, “All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. I did everything they told me, I drank the cream, ate the butter. Then I get hit with a coronary.” Mid-1950s America looked pretty unhealthy from a modern day perspective, but as regrettable as we view dietary habits and physical fortitude of the nation’s citizenry in the 1950s and 1960s now, Americans of that era shared similar fears regarding their own children. Impending invasion and large scale war, all necessitated a physically fit population. Rachel Louise Moral suggests that this fear served as proxy for larger worries about America as a “nation of weaklings” thus inspiring Eisenhower to establish the President’s Committee on Youth Fitness (led, for a time by everyone’s favorite Republican Tricky Dick Nixon) which worked with state and local organizations to help coordinate on issues regarding the physical fitness of the nation’s youth. Though it helped to coordinate efforts, the PCYF did not fun state or local efforts. Established under Eisenhower, the PCYF (later known as the President’s Committee on Physical Fitness – PCPF) expanded significantly under JFK. Through public private partnerships and alliance with the Advertising Council (the AC – which today is known for producing PSA’s like McGruff the Crime Dog and Smokey the Bear) the PCYF/PCPF recorded profits but failed to make any significant improvement in the physical health of the nation’s youth. Celebrity endorsements, corporate partnerships (Kodak, Diet Rite were early participants), and the Ad Council’s guidance – all at nearly no cost – greatly improved promotion. PCPF publications and the legendary “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFofqe26t-4">Chicken Fat</a>” recording (which sold over 100,000 copies in its first year) helped to put the council in the black. If the council failed to improve the actual health of Americans, it did contribute to the establishment of state and local fitness councils and also points to the increasing neoliberal approach regarding government presence in American lives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHosAeTgyfmvogD3wbI-4bfbDYiZULFzYwF6y0jx3sl28KrGuPBcO6eQMaA-qj597MSBd00jcUmpv648FKgwZLvLJKiRMJQmpmh66VdCXbfgF0dSsyNNpktKR4Ijt9YnEztKED-8N8QOM/s1600/ssman.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHosAeTgyfmvogD3wbI-4bfbDYiZULFzYwF6y0jx3sl28KrGuPBcO6eQMaA-qj597MSBd00jcUmpv648FKgwZLvLJKiRMJQmpmh66VdCXbfgF0dSsyNNpktKR4Ijt9YnEztKED-8N8QOM/s320/ssman.jpg" /></a></span> <br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maybe this isn't so new...</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Joy Rohde, "The Rise of the Contract State: Privatizing Social Science for National Security"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Warfare-Welfare-Defense-Intellectuals-Problems/dp/0801882737/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1326373740&sr=8-2">From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems</a></i>, Jennifer Light examines how military experts influenced urban policy and thinking in the post war era. In this way, Cold War technological innovations and beliefs came to shape urban development. Trinity University’s Joy Rohde performs a similar service by highlighting the place of social scientists working for Cold War national security councils in late twentieth century and their effect on military conflicts and urban population control. Though 1960s activists rightly critiqued the university/military partnerships of the period, eventually forcing the military off college campuses, they in no way ended the prevalence or influence of these military intellectual think tanks. Instead, away from the gaze of critics or the rigor of academia, the Pentagon and federal government established research institutes like the Special Operations Regional Office (SORO) or the Instituted for Defense Analysis. Not only did research institutes like SORO continue their research, they expanded their purview into civilian life, thus, further militarizing the nation. Population control and domestic security became new focuses. Here Rohde reinforces ideas put forth by Jeremy Suri in <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/suridetente">Power and Protest</a></i>. Suri argued that during the Cold War, China, the USSR, France, and the US all shifted their national security attentions domestically to squashing internal dissent. Rohde provides more evidence of this while also pointing out the privatization of militarization identifying the same neoliberal force that culminated in private militia’s like Blackwater. Moreover, much as Light suggests, Rohde illustrates how this public private nexus of social science experts later morphed into a revolving door of intellectuals passing in and out of government offices, later using their connections to gain contracts and establish private security firms creating a veritable security state embedded in various sites around the D.C. Beltway. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>4. Rocking the Cold War</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cFwOmMlIXPezn0L6RcvfS3EKgAukRJXOqvSuY56TSXuNYbVsFKLRQfvTKX1yTTFIekv_lTOd2K2qSMI5uqAAe2VTJH9DPJYfmpZXCvvbp721UpK5Mjd-r_odqhGKpN2hjZKNvaWfS7A/s1600/rockagainstreagan.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cFwOmMlIXPezn0L6RcvfS3EKgAukRJXOqvSuY56TSXuNYbVsFKLRQfvTKX1yTTFIekv_lTOd2K2qSMI5uqAAe2VTJH9DPJYfmpZXCvvbp721UpK5Mjd-r_odqhGKpN2hjZKNvaWfS7A/s320/rockagainstreagan.jpg" /></a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Punking Ronnie</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Cold War Kids: The Ideologies of Punk in the East and the West</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-size: small;">.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><br /></i>What would a T of M account of an academic conference be without a panel on the importance of music and culture? <i>Cold War Kids</i> addressed this pathological need. Not to be confused with the similarly titled band (think the song <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1810338610">“Hospital Beds”</a>), panelists explored the intersection between punk, politics, race, and Cold War attitudes. Though none of the panelists formally referenced works by Birmingham School writers like Dick Hebdige and to a lesser extent Paul Gilroy, Gilroy and Hebdige’s spirit inhabited the panel like Sid Vicious at a Sex Pistols Reunion tour. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ehiDLsgLAVHTpq5l8aRxruIxq0CD2zwHc_R1xJlbPnhnRhhk22Ow_VbYl5m7PQD680yQScfBtZYOTk4JFpc9WSrayHjwCa6NAcYC1mfPjzOmKqkCiFanS1oGnehPCn3D71uXiVekRiw/s1600/weirdos_.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ehiDLsgLAVHTpq5l8aRxruIxq0CD2zwHc_R1xJlbPnhnRhhk22Ow_VbYl5m7PQD680yQScfBtZYOTk4JFpc9WSrayHjwCa6NAcYC1mfPjzOmKqkCiFanS1oGnehPCn3D71uXiVekRiw/s1600/weirdos_.jpg" /></a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Weirdos and nuclear annihilation</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>M. Montgomery Wolf, “'I Keep Thinking of World War III': American Punks Rock against Reagan"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Throughout 1998’s <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlYj6uhs22U">SLC Punk!</a></i>, main characters Stevo (Matthew Lilliard) and Heroin Bob (Michael Goorjian) rail against Salt Lake City’s conservative Mormon culture while denigrating the presidency of Ronald Reagan. SLC Punk! serves as useful analog to M. Montgomery Wolf’s examination of 1980s (mostly West Coast) American punks like LA’s Weirdos, the Adolescents, the Circle Jerks, and of course, legendary San Pedro outfit The Minutemen (Michael Azzerad’s excellent <i>Our Band Could Be Your Life</i> contains a great chapter on the Minutemen along with others on Fugazi, the Replacements, Minor Threat, Big Black, and so on). While early punk cohorts eschewed political statements (though one could argue the Clash, though obviously not American, might represent an exception to this rule), this “second cohort” though not formally aligned politically, expressed dismay at Reagan’s simultaneous sunny optimism (remember “Morning in America: Prouder, Stronger, Better”) and apocalyptic nuclear vision (S.D.I. and the constant threat/rhetoric of nuclear annihilation). In “Paranoid Chant,” the Minutemen find it hard to carry out the day’s tasks without returning to the paralyzing fear of nuclear war and WWIII. Cultural productions like “The Day After” (still the highest rated TV movies of all time), in which small town Kansas dealt with the aftermath of nuclear engagement, only heightened this incongruous tension between yuppie individualistic positivism and the dark reality of atomic age existence. Perhaps D. Boon expresses it perfectly in “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnFiWwhGgAk">Paranoid Chant</a>," “I try to work but all think about is WWII … I don’t worry about crime anymore/so many frightened faces/I keep thinking of Russia/Paranoia scared shitless!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hating Mitterand, Communism, and immigrants</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Jonathyne W. Briggs, "Force de Frappe: Rock against Communism in Socialist France"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If American punks reacted to Reagan’s domestic and foreign policy doctrine with absurdist bursts of music critiquing the burgeoning New Right warrior, conservative skinhead French punks responded by creating their own sense of community. Still, as Indiana University’s Jonathyne W. Briggs points out, the kind of community they established focused on fascist racist right wing leanings that opposed what they saw as creeping communist and multicultural influence. For a emerging group of racist skinheads, the Mitterand administration, the Common Program (an agreement between France's socialist and communist parties to basically get along), communism and immigration threatened French identity. Conservative newspaper <i>Le Figaro</i> summarized the fears of punk/skinhead bands like Tolbiac’s Toads, Kontingent 88's or SK when it labeled the new French government a “Marxist Collection.” Instead, French punks emulated the working class white supremacist strain of punk known as Oi! to promote a confused nationalist vision of France that opposed the multiculturalism of Mitterand’s administration while appropriating Nazi symbolism as a means to assert a new French identity and create a “third space” between capitalism and communism. Not even Le Pen’s National Front went so far as to utilize Nazism in their definition of the French body politic. If Mitterand wanted to assimilate France’s Arab and North African populations, band’s like Tolbiac’s Toads wanted the nation to eliminate them and encouraged violence against communists and immigrants alike. If many French citizens viewed the French Revolution ambivalently or even as a national catastrophe, for these skins it proved essential to French identity as one prominent skin commented, “Robiespierre was a true skin.” Apparently, the revolution’s contribution to the creation of socialism in the 1800s escaped many skinheads. Though the feared Marxist take over never occurred – the Common Program agreement collapsed in 1985 – the movement of French skins reveals simmering cultural tensions within 1980s France and signposted future issues regarding immigration and French identity that bedeviled France in the 1990s and 2000s. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Brygada Kryzys </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">- offending Polish sensibilities everywhere</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Raymond Patton, "The Struggle over Punk in Communist Poland: Notes on Deconstructing 'The Alternative'"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When is style political even when it’s not meant to be? In his 2009 publication, <i>The Power of the Zoot</i>, Luis Alvarez illustrates how Zoot suit subculture, its interracial nature, sexuality and style, formed opposition and in some moments, unwitting assistance to American WWII policies. Though hardly overtly political, the style, dress, demographics, and sexuality of the subculture threatened American domestic normatives regarding race, gender/sexuality, and consumerism (though as Alvarez points out it, it also drew many Zoots into the wartime economy that ultimately supported the very war effort and culture they opposed). Though no organization or spokepersons emerged, in part through style the subculture garnered negative attention by many white Americans and authorities (witness the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles) Similarly, drawing on Stuart Hall (regarding his theories about how the struggle for culture creates political constructions and identities) and one might assume the aforementioned Hebdige (notably the work <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Subculture-Meaning-Style-New-Accents/dp/0415039495">Subculture: The Meaning of Style</a></i>), Drury University’s Raymond Patton illustrates how Poland’s punks in the 1980s ignored the kind of direct political stances that their peers in France and America came to embrace, yet ended up occupying a political space visa via their expression of style. Opposing political institutions in Poland – Solidarity and the Communist Party (CP)- attempted to co-opt the movement only to be horrified by the style and music of punks like Clinical Death and Brygada Kryzys (translated Crisis Brigade). The explosive popularity of punk with Polish borders and its apparent critique of communism attracted the attention of Solidarity who initially tried to incorporate the aforementioned Brygada Kryzys but found their musical stylings (both in sound and appearance) to be in conflict with Solidarity’s vision of Polishness. Yet, the subversiveness that turned off Solidarity stemmed not from political stances but ideas about Polish identity and style. In the case of the CP, punk’s place in culture symbolized a larger rift within the party between reform and Stalinist retrenchment. Clearly, Stalinists rejected songs like “Radioactive Block” by Brygada Kryzgs (which according to Patton when translated consists of seven words mostly having to do with concrete, which as the presenter accurately noted probably was a brilliant distillation of Warsaw’s built environment under communist rule) while reformists believed that the movement provided a bridge between the party and the new youthful generation so deeply invested in punk. In this way, Solidarity and Stalinists (religious organizations like the Forum for Catholic Though looked none too fondly on Polish punk as well), political opponents in most contexts, shared similar fears regarding punk’s influence (one CP official labeled it “electrification plus epilepsy”). Unfortunately, as in most stories of subcultures the success (can one say commodification?) of punk in Poland also meant the very bands performing lost control of the medium’s message.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>5. Other Notable Papers</b></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Ben Coates, "Transnational Legal Networks and the Limits of American Power, 1906–39"</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">T of M alum Ben Coates looked at the Institut de Droit International, or Institute of International Law, a network of lawyers from Europe, the US, and Latin America that was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founded in 1873, the Institute saw itself as "the legal consciousness of the civilized world”—it brought together advocates of international law from a variety of nations, each bringing the distinct perspective of his or her own political culture to the broader project of establishing some of kind of institutions to enforce international norms. English lawyers cited case law; the French, sociology; and Germans sought to reconcile international law with their own philosophic and political tradition of the ideal state. Advocates of international law hoped to create a system that encompassed and reconciled the national law of individual countries. Coates observes that their goal was riven by contradiction: why would “international law” need to be “internationalized”? The group’s meetings brought together lawyers in the hope that they would produce a better, more scientific system by exposing legal practitioners to counterparts with a wide range of perspectives. (The group even institutes quotas for various countries to ensure diverse attendance—at least to a degree.) These international lawyers remained proud of their own national legal traditions despite being “wary of nationalism in the abstract,” Coates says.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The strength of international law in the era before World War I was its practicality, its closeness to politics and policy, but this pragmatism could also be a weakness. International lawyers hoped to create a system that accommodated national differences while enforcing some broad legal norms through some mechanism or another, but the their visions for international law reflected their individual national orientations. American law professor James Brown Scott, for instance, argued for a global system based on his own country’s experience, without quite realizing that the evolution of the United States was in many ways unique and not universally applicable. Scott suggested the US was an international entity itself, a federation of colonies or states that voluntarily accepted federal coordination. He did not want a world central government, but proposed an international body similar to the US Supreme Court that could adjudicate disputes among the states. Americans generally accept the authority of the Court without it needing to enforce its decisions; it holds power by virtue of public opinion and acceptance. To pursue his American-centric vision of international governance, Scott lobbied to increase number of american members. Almost all international lawyers agreed on some kind of adjudication of disputes, but not on the form of the institution. Eschewing Scott’s view, many other international lawyers wanted a more vigorous form of regulation; the creation of the League of Nations after WWI represented the more legislative, democratic kind of world government that Scott opposed. Scott promoted a Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Nations -- echoing, of course, echoed the Declaration of Independence, but endorsing only broad guidelines such as the right to exist as a state and the right to sovereignty over territory. The Institute ultimately failed to embrace his plan, and American political culture continued on its isolationist course in the 1920s. It would take more than two decades and another world war for a new system of international governance to take shape under American leadership.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Yael Sternhell, "Constructing the Enemy’s Past: The Federal Archives Bureau and the Road to Sectional Reconciliation"</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-size: small;">.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b>Sternhell, an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University, discussed the fascinating saga of how federal archivists attempted to tell the story of the American Civil War in the 1870s, working with and sometimes against the Southerners who possessed records of the Confederate government. The archivists’ initial goal, Sternhell says, was “preserving the enemy’s past” so future generations would remember “southern sins and northern virtues.” As commentator W. Fitzhugh Brundage pointed out, government record-keeping in the nineteenth century was generally abysmal; in one particularly tragicomic case, Tennessee’s state government used its own records for kindling, happy with their pragmatic use of useless paper to generate heat and save money. In this case, though, the narrative about the conflict written by the Federal Archives Bureau would help to shape public understandings of the war for years to come—part of the larger process of regional reconciliation analyzed by David Blight and other historians.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sternhell points out that Southerners were reluctant to part with the documents early in the 1870s, but later on even Confederate diehards like Jubal Early realized the value of turning over records when the federal government was prepared good money for them. The 1878 appointment of a Confederate general Marcus Wright as the Archives’ agent in the South also prompted Southerners to be more cooperative. Meanwhile, Sternhell notes tiny linguistics shifts in writings by federal archivists that seem to signal a changing perspective about the war; earlier on the Southerners were referred to as “rebels,” but over time the word Confederates came into more frequent, while federal workers gradually dropped the quotation marks around “Confederate States” and stopped using the word “so-called” as often. The implication seems to be that they increasingly took seriously the reality of a Confederate state during the war, rather than the earlier view of the Confederacy as a mere rebellion within the United States.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As Southerners and Northerners increasingly collaborated on the federal government’s Official Report on the war, a curious outcome resulted: the Report incorporated Confederate documents and Southern perspectives to tell a much less damning story about the war. The resulting document offered a seemingly “neutral,” fact-based accounting of the events of the war, Sternhell argues, which offered little sense of guilt, causation, or accountability. “The work of managing the confederate records and preparing them for publication… created a documentary basis for the brothers’ war narrative that would shape the nation for decades to come,” she says. The story of the Federal Archives Bureau and its documentary work on the Civil War offers an interesting and little-known chapter in the bigger story of postwar reconciliation and, indeed, the evolution of historical and documentary practices in the United States.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Jay Gould, strangling commerce and the press with telegraph wires</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Richard R. John, "'For the Benefit of the Whole Human Race': The Significance, Memory, and Legacy of the Postal Telegraphy Movement in the Nineteenth Century United States"</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-size: small;">.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b>A historian who writes on the <a href="http://dwmw.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/review-essay-john-richard-r-2010-network-nation-inventing-american-telecommunications-cambridge-ma-harvard-university-press/">telegraph</a>, <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674024298">telephone</a>, and <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3iWlzwe5dHoC">postal service</a>, John</span><span style="font-size: small;"> has been making the case for years that traditional business history fundamentally misunderstands the role of government in shaping and sustaining private enterprise. In this paper, he argues that conventional wisdom gets it wrong by supposing that innovative business comes first, and government regulation only comes along after the fact to stifle and constrain the activities of private citizens. The story of the telegraph is often view as demonstrating Americans’ fundamental preference for leaving communications in private hands, unlike, say, the heavy involvement of the British government in broadcasting (the BBC) or France’s state control of the telegraph. Historians often assume that inventor Samuel F.B. Morse’s effort to get the federal government to buy his patents and operate the nation’s telegraph network for the public good was a hopeless fool’s errand. However, as John suggests, public ownership of the telegraph remained a live issue throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The presumption that Americans always lean toward privatizing such infrastructure is merely the result of an ideological victory, in which defenders of big business established the virtue of “private enterprise” (a term that John argues came into wide use during the battle over Western Union’s telegraph monopoly). In fact, he pointed out, by far the biggest government agency in the nineteenth century was the postal service, the nation’s premier communication medium, and the Government Printing Office was the biggest publisher of printed material during the same period.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Historians have unfortunately forgotten or overlooked the postal telegraphy movement of the 1860s and 1870s, which sought to incorporate the nation’s telegraph system into the Post Office by buying out private operators (chiefly Western Union). Attendees at the AHA panel were likely surprised to learn that Ulysses S. Grant supported the idea and a law even passed in 1866 that would allow the federal government to buy up the telegraph lines. Grant’s postmaster general, John A.J. Creswell, believed that people have a right to “the best and cheapest means of communication and intercourse; no one had the right to extort the public by monopolizing a force of nature,” just like light and air. Creswell’s words reflect a view that was common in nineteenth century America, which held that the government should foster and even subsidize the freest possible circulation of information within the republic; the Post Office was not, as we assume today, a business that ought to run a profit. As Paul Starr and others have pointed out, American policy promoted publishing and communication by establishing the postal service and subsidizing the press by providing favorable rates for newspapers (what we now know as “media mail”). Public ownership of the telegraph would have fit into this same policy framework.<br /><br />As John’s paper made clear, though, the idea of postal telegraphy foundered in the face of machinations by Western Union and the speculator Jay Gould in the 1870s and 1880s. Americans at the time waged a lively effort to fight monopoly amid a widespread recognition of the threat posed by concentrated economic power, but some began to doubt the value of anti-monopoly legislation. If anything, some economists argued, </span><span style="font-size: small;">such measures paradoxically strengthened
the position of financiers like Gould</span><span style="font-size: small;">, who bought and sold industries like it was all a big game. Appalled by the venality of Gould and the callousness of Vanderbilt (who infamously said, “The public be damned!” when asked about the impact of his business’s actions), later businessmen learned to burnish the image of private enterprise. They adopted an ethic of public service—most notably Theodore Vail, who justified AT&T’s “natural monopoly” of the phone system by claiming to be committed to a higher motive than profit. At any rate, the war over control of the telegraph and what it meant for American political culture is a fascinating one, and one hopes that it will become part of a broader history of anti-monopoly thought in the US.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">You'd have to be crazy not to like this guy</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Yana Skorobogatov, "'The Higher Circles': The Western Intellectual Community and the Campaign for Human Rights in the USSR, 1968–84"<br /><span style="color: white;">.</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Skorobogatov, a PhD student at the University of Texas, revealed an untold chapter in the history of both Western relations with the Soviet Union and the human rights movement. Focusing on “intellectuals as nonstate actors,” Skorobogatov looks at how members of the intelligentsia in the US and Europe tried to develop a coalition with Soviet dissidents to defend the rights of persecuted intellectuals in the détente era. In the process, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and professional organizations in the sciences and academia set transnational values above national identity. Their efforts ran up against predictable resistance from Soviet authorities, who cited a 1932 act banning voluntary organizations as a pretext for suppressing human rights activism among scientists and other scholars. In response, dissidents argued that they were more like a group of co-authors than a formal organization.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Skorobogatov explained how Western scientists were haunted by the memory of corrupt and abusive science under the Nazis and sought to prevent the same abuses from occurring in the Soviet Union. They also identified with their counterparts in the USSR, who were increasingly accused of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia in order to incarcerate them under gruesome conditions and silence their dissent. (Such a maneuver avoided the need for a show trial and successfully impugned the integrity of the deviant scholar by discrediting their most valuable quality—intellect.) When one accused individual cited the Soviet Constitution to defend his right of free speech, one judge responded with incredulity. “Who takes Soviet laws seriously?” he said. “You are living in an unreal world.” (Enough said.) In response to such abuses, Western scholars decided to employ their “intellectual capital” as a weapon, Skorobogatov said, refusing to participate in or lend their own prestige to important scientific conferences in the Soviet Union. The efficacy of this tactic is hard to determine on the basis of the talk alone, and at least one audience member raised the question of whether Western scientists worked hard only to defend their “own kind,” as opposed to the many ordinary Soviet citizens who suffered oppression. In any case, though, this talk offered an intriguing window into the politics of science, international organizations, and human rights, as well as the internal tensions of détente itself.</span></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-70505684982753782692012-01-09T19:11:00.000-08:002012-01-10T05:38:03.870-08:00Richard Olney – The Worst Person in the World?<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
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If Keith Olbermann lived a hundred-odd years ago, there’s no doubt that Richard Olney would have made his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_with_Keith_Olbermann#.22Worst_Person_in_the_World.22_segment">“Worst Person in the World”</a> segment. </div>
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For starters Olney’s politics are not exactly Olbermannian. Richard Olney (not to be confused with the food writer of the same name) is known to historians for two acts in public life. In 1894, as attorney general, he convinced President Grover Cleveland to send federal troops to crush the massive Pullman railroad strike (and this despite the fact that the Illinois governor not only did not request the troops, but actually begged Washington <i>not</i> to send them). The following year, as secretary of state, Olney <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401803077.html">famously stated</a> that “To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” By “continent,” he seemed to indicate the entire Western hemisphere; by “fiat,” he seemed to suggest American empire. This is a record of capitalist class warfare and jingoism to make George W. Bush blush. </div>
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Then there is Olney’s personality. To call Olney a “flinty” New Englander (he grew up in Central Massachusetts before attending Brown and Harvard Law School) would be to understate things dramatically. Olney was nearly friendless, apparently by choice. His family feared him. He insisted on formal attire for home dinners and referred to his wife of many decades as “Mrs. Olney.” He banished his daughter on slim pretext. Many years later, when he happened to be seated across the aisle from her at a show, he marched out of the theater at the first opportunity without saying a word. </div>
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Olney kicked dogs. He fired servants for tiny infractions. He refused to write an approving letter of reference for his gardener of twenty years . (In response to the question “What failings?” on the reference form, Olney responded “The customary failings of a man employed so long in one place as to think himself indispensable.”) In college, as his biographer, Gerald Eggert, notes, Olney “seems to have given vent to his feelings from time to time by physically assaulting people who angered him.” In short, Richard Olney has a strong claim as the assholiest of assholes in the history of assholery. Considering the thoroughness of his misanthropy, one might best describe him as an asswhole.</div>
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Interestingly, when it came to foreign policy, Olney’s apparently Bush-ian positions were on closer inspection more Romneyesque. His 1895 declaration of hemispheric dominance seems more like a bluff to force the settlement of a long-standing diplomatic dispute, rather than an assertion of well-considered expansionism. Yet after leaving office, Olney gave a high-profile speech at Harvard calling on the country to join in “the colonization of uninhabited and unappropriated portions of the globe.” Within a couple of years, he had reversed himself yet again, giving his support to the anti-imperialism of William Jennings Bryan. Ex-President Grover Cleveland, in whose cabinet Olney had served, found it passingly strange that Olney, who was “largely responsible…for the doctrine of expansion and consequent imperialism, should now be so impressed with the fatal tendency of imperialism as to be willing to take Bryanism as an antidote.” Olney subsequently passed through several more twists and turns before ending up by his death in 1917 as an opponent of gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and a supporter of a multilateral Monroe Doctrine and hemispheric cooperation. His foreign policy might not be as bad as generally remembered. But he remained, to the end, a terrible person.</div>
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<i>Ben Coates</i></div>bchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10138911988783579609noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-14068723768667910472012-01-06T10:56:00.000-08:002012-01-07T07:05:38.629-08:00Why Rick Santorum (Almost) Won In Iowa: A Historical Perspective<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">For several months prior to the Iowa Caucuses of January 3rd, 2012, Rick Santorum, the former US Senator from Pennsylvania, and his presidential campaign languished somewhere between obscurity and irrelevance. While nearly every candidate, starting with Michelle Bachman and followed in rapid-fire succession by Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul, had risen to the top of the field as the possible challenger to frontrunner Mitt Romney, Santorum’s poll numbers remained frozen in the single digits. Despite having visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties—many more than once—and his invocations that he was the only “true conservative” in the field, on both social and economic issues, Santorum’s campaign remained unable to gain any traction in an otherwise opportunistic field. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> And then, just days before Iowans were to head to the polls, Santorum’s numbers quickly jumped into a competitive position with the leading candidates Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Santorum capped his meteoric rise by finishing in a virtual tie for first place with Romney, losing by a grand total of eight votes. Explanations for this dramatic ascent varied, but two predominated. First, it seemed merely to be Santorum’s turn. With nearly every other candidate having surged, only to eventually falter (whether due to alleged marital infidelities and sexual misconduct, in the case of Cain, or debate blunders, such as Rick Perry’s dramatic “oops” moment), Santorum’s campaign managed to achieve its climax at the perfect time. As conservative Republicans continued to search for a viable alternative to the far too moderate Mitt Romney, Santorum happened to claim the mantle of being the latest “anti-Romney” as the caucus date finally arrived. Unscathed by the negative attack ads that seemed to fell Newt Gingrich and with no time for a close inspection of his political or personal record, Santorum’s success was an example of timing truly being everything. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> The second theory, repeated with painful redundancy by CNN’s John King as he surveyed his digital map of Iowa’s counties, was that the touted evangelical vote had finally chosen its standard-bearer. Much like Mike Huckabee four years before, Santorum won most of his support from Iowa’s rural and small-town communities, areas where evangelical religion had always been presumed to dictate voting behavior. While Iowa’s urban and suburban counties seemed to favor either Ron Paul or Mitt Romney when the time came to choose, rural and small-town Iowans voted heavily for the former Senator from Pennsylvania. Indeed, Santorum, a devout Roman Catholic, often referred to himself as a “conscience conservative” and openly claimed to be the representative of America’s “family values.” These postures, along with his past stances on abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, and a variety of other religio-cultural issues, seemed to make Santorum a clear choice among Iowa’s rural evangelicals. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> And yet, when it finally came time for Santorum to approach the podium to thank his supporters for their help and Iowans for choosing him, he decided to downplay his cultural conservative positions. Rather, Santorum explained his success among rural and small-town Iowans in this way: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> I believe that we as Republicans have to look at those who are not doing well in our society…That is why I put forth a plan that Iowans responded to…When I traveled around Iowa to the small towns I found a lot of those smalls towns were just like the small towns I traveled around in Pennsylvania, they were towns that were centered around manufacturing and processing, those good jobs that built those towns. And those jobs slowly, whether its in Hamburg, whether it’s in Newton or anyplace in between, we found those jobs leaving Iowa. Why? Because our workers didn’t want to work, because our workers weren’t competitive? No. It’s because government made workers uncompetitive by driving up the cost of doing business here. It’s twenty percent more expensive to do manufacturing jobs in this country than it is in the top nine trading partners that we have to compete with. And that’s why we’re losing our jobs…So we [need to] eliminate the corporate tax on manufacturing so we can compete, we take the regulations…and we repeal all those regulations. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">According to Santorum, his political victory was the result not primarily of evangelical support, but rather of an economic program that promised to increase manufacturing employment through low corporate tax rates, deregulation, and cheaper labor costs. The desired result would be to make Iowa’s rural and small-town communities more competitive in attaining industrial plants. It seems that Rick Santorum was the only person commentating on the Iowa caucuses who thought that his victory rested upon what had been the central focus of the entire Republican primary: the economy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Rick Santorum managed a near victory in Iowa because he tapped into an economic program with deep historical roots. Indeed, one cannot explain Santorum’s appeal among rural and small-town voters without understanding the large-scale economic processes affecting the post-World War II American countryside. At the center of Iowa’s postwar economic transformations were rural and small-town communities who engaged in a widespread campaign to attain manufacturing and industrial employment to offset the loss of jobs rapidly disappearing in the agricultural sector. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the quarter century after World War II, Iowa’s farming economy experienced a dramatic consolidation as government policies and scientific innovations combined to create what David Danbom termed “the production revolution.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn1" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[1]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Laboratory advancements in the fields of hybrid seeds, chemicals, and fertilizers complemented the earlier move towards farm mechanization through the use of combines and tractors, resulting in a major increase in farm productivity. Government transfer payments in the form of price supports for agricultural commodities and crop reduction programs provided farmers with the necessary capital to utilize these technological and scientific advancements. As capital investments supplanted previously labor-intensive methods, the demand for farm laborers significantly decreased. Simultaneously, agricultural surpluses brought on by increasing productivity resulted in falling crop prices, leading large productive farms to expand their operations so as to make up for smaller profits per unit with increased volume. Suboptimal farms, unable to compete with heavily capitalized large landholders, looked to profit from rising property values by selling out to their more competitive and politically well-connected neighbors. Essentially, farms became larger and larger with fewer and fewer farmers.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn2" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[2]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The overall result of these developments was to push both wage laborers and smaller independent farmers out of the agricultural sector. Rural Iowans were painfully aware of these circumstances, as one small-town newspaper described the situation in 1950, “Today one person in five lives on a farm. Forty years ago one person in three lived on a farm…The modern farmer is a much better producer than his counterpart of 40 years ago….One might think that this…fact would inspire a movement back to the farm among town and city folk. It has not done this, for the farm population continues to grow smaller and smaller and at a progressively increasing speed.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn3" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[3]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Transformations within American agriculture wrecked havoc on rural and small-town social systems. Traditionally, rural small-towns had served as the center of economic life for the surrounding agricultural countryside. Iowa’s small towns often functioned as transportation depots along the nation’s railroad network where farmers traveled to ship their crops to far off markets and purchase needed consumer goods from local merchants. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">However, with fewer economic opportunities in the farming economy, rural communities experienced a massive outmigration of inhabitants. These displaced former farmers took with them the resources that sustained rural and small-town life. Small-town businesses and retailers suffered as consumer purchases dwindled along with local populations. Rural institutions, including churches, schools, and social clubs, were forced to either consolidate to make up for smaller memberships or close their doors. With fewer residents, property taxes rose in rural areas as the cost for public services was spread out over a smaller group of people. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The town of Centerville, Iowa, located in the rural county of Appanoose, was hard hit by these developments. The Centerville Iowegian, the town’s newspaper, explained how the “downward pressures” of “farm consolidation” and the evaporation of coal mining operations resulted in “population out-migration since there were not enough job opportunities to hold the people here.” According to the newspaper, “Appanoose county had a net out-migration of 21.0 per cent between 1950 and 1960.” Appanoose’s population stood at 19,683 in 1950, and despite an “excess of births over deaths,” the population declined by 4,211 people during the 1950s for a grand total of 16,015 inhabitants in 1960. The social ramifications of this tremendous loss in population were overwhelming. Since many of those leaving rural Appanoose were younger inhabitants, Appanoose lost “the people working most productively, rearing families, starting new homes and providing the necessary community leadership.” The loss of people and jobs in the farming sector rippled outward as retail sales in Centerville slowed throughout the 1950s and then declined by 2.2 per cent between 1958 and 1960. </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn4" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[4]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In response to the rapid disappearance of farming jobs, rural small-town elites began pursuing industrial firms to locate their operations in Iowa’s smaller communities. These local leaders—consisting primarily of bankers, real estate agents, newspaper editors, insurance brokers, construction contractors, and utilities managers—proposed to reconstruct rural and small-town economies around a new industrial base. To carry out this project, rural elites organized “industrial development corporations” as a vehicle for contacting and negotiating with manufacturing prospects; bulldozed nonproductive farm land to lay the groundwork for industrial sites; constructed industrial buildings and plants “on spec” for lease to manufacturing firms; and sold bonds for the purpose of modernizing their communities’ electric, sewage, and water utilities. Starting in 1963 in Mount Pleasant, Iowa (a town of 7,339 at the time) rural areas also began using industrial revenue bonds as a tool for subsidizing the costs of new business locations. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">At the same time, these rural small-town elites formed an alliance with the Iowa Development Commission (IDC), which actively solicited their participation in the state campaign for industrial development. The IDC pitched industrialization as a comprehensive solution for stabilizing rural communities in decline. As the <i>Lenox Time Table</i> reported, Rodney Q. Selby, the commission director, explained how “a small factory added to a community could mean an annual increase of $312,875 to retail business.” Even when “employing as little as 150 people” a new factory “produces $91,000 worth of grocery business,” “$39,600 in retail apparel,” $24,200 in furniture and household goods” and “$17,500 in lumber and building sundries.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn5" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[5]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Many Iowa communities bought into the program of industrial development out of a belief that it offered the only solution for avoiding the fate of becoming a depopulated rural area or a dying small town. “Every community needs industry,” the <i>Lenox Time Table</i> argued. “Without industry the community fails to be useful to itself. When a community fails to be useful it goes into a state of decadence. All that is necessary is to take a look at some of the small communities that are without industry, and that alone will speak for itself…There is no better means of getting activity and action than through industry and employment. Farm population has declined and there is no prospect in the future that it will increase.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn6" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[6]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Despite the positive picture painted by local elites and the IDC, rural industrialization was far from a politically neutral project. The IDC, along with its primary backer the Iowa Manufacturers Association (the IMA was a state branch of the National Association of Manufacturers), linked rural industrial development with an anti-New Deal, conservative economic agenda. The IDC and the IMA argued that New Deal politics, primarily in the form of powerful labor unions, expansive social welfare programs, and high corporate tax rates, were antithetical to the overall program of rural industrialization. These liberal institutions and policies, according to business conservatives, created a negative “business climate” for the state of Iowa and scared off corporate investment that rural communities were actively soliciting. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Conservative business interests looked to incorporate rural small-town elites, and by proxy their local constituencies, within their struggle to beat back gains made by organized labor. Much of this political inculcation took place in IDC sponsored industrial development clinics, where rural small-town elites were taught tools for luring manufacturing firms along with a heavy dose of conservative economic ideology. At one such clinic held in 1965, David H. Jacquith, the president of Vega industries—a metal fabricating company that had relocated to Mount Pleasant, Iowa in 1965— “urged Iowans to protect their business climate and said one of the best ways was to preserve the state’s right-to-work laws as it now stands on the books.” Jacquith, who had visited numerous small-towns in rural southern Iowa, argued that, “small and medium-sized manufacturers…look first to the presence of a right to work law as an indication of the business climate.” Jacquith linked this conservative economic agenda to agricultural consolidation when he suggested that if rural small-towns desired to “maintain an accelerating industrial growth to make up for a decline in farm jobs,” they “need to take special care of their business climate.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn7" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[7]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the realm of partisan politics, the state’s traditionally dominant Republican party looked to use industrial development as a way to keep rural and small-town Iowans within the party fold. Despite having controlled state politics since the civil war, Iowa’s Republicans faced a resurgent Democratic Party in the postwar era. Since the emergence of the New Deal in the 1930s, Iowa’s Democrats had been making major inroads within the state by mimicking the national party’s policies and coalitions.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn8" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[8]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> In order to maintain control of political power, the Republican Party looked to cultivate rural and small-town communities as a bulwark against the growing strength of the New Deal Democratic establishment.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn9" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[9]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> The Republican Party did so by tapping into the economic program constructed by business conservatives in the IDC and IMA. In an article titled, “Industrial Expansion is a No.1 Campaign Topic,” William G. Murray, a candidate for the 1958 Republican gubernatorial nomination, argued that he was “opposed to any change in the ‘right to work’ laws” since to “develop industry in Iowa; it takes good tax and labor laws.” </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn10" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[10]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Republican politicians argued that rural industrialization would be undermined by the growth of powerful labor unions and the expansion of New Deal social welfare programs. Expensive government programs, party strategists stated, would result in high corporate tax rates that would lead manufacturing firms to invest elsewhere. Similarly, powerful labor organization, such as the state’s recently united AFL-CIO, would push for exorbitant wage rates which would price Iowa’s rural laborers out of the competition for new industrial jobs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The combined efforts of Iowa’s business conservatives and Republican strategists made rural and small-town areas a hotbed of anti-New Deal political activity. Rural and small-town communities, grappling with the rapid loss of jobs within the farming sector and the concomitant effects this process had on rural institutions, turned to industrial development as the solution for stabilizing their declining economies. With few alternatives available for stemming their downward slide, rural and small-town Iowans adopted a conservative economic program based on stringent anti-labor laws, low corporate tax rates, deregulation, and minimal social welfare programs. The widespread success of this conservative political project has been noted by political scientists analyzing Iowa’s voting data who have argued that rural small-towns under 10,000 represent the most stable voting bloc for Iowa’s modern Republican party.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftn11" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[11]</a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Within the context of rural Iowa’s postwar transformations, Rick Santorum’s success in the 2012 Iowa Caucuses seems hardly surprising. Santorum’s economic vision for bringing manufacturing jobs to Iowa’s rural areas by lowering corporate taxation, limiting government regulation, and weakening the power of organized labor was anything but visionary. Santorum’s platform, which he had been consistently pitching in Republican debates since he entered the field, found a suitable audience in Iowa’s rural and small-town communities that had been attempting to achieve industrial development through conservative economic policies for over sixty years. The groundwork for Santorum’s come-from-behind political victory was laid not by Republican’s lukewarm feelings about Mitt Romney or the failings of his conservative counterparts in the primary field, but rather by large-scale transformations within the postwar political economy and the efforts of conservative business interests allied with rural and small-town elites. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Keith Orejel</span></i></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref1" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[1]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> David B. Danbom, <i>Born in the Country: A History of Rural America, Second Edition</i> (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), Chapter 11. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref2" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[2]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Pete Daniel, <i>Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880</i> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); <i>Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960</i> (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), Epilogue; Daniel Nelson, <i>Farm and Factory: Workers in the Midwest, 1880-1990 </i>(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref3" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[3]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> <i>The Lenox Time Table</i>, 5 January, 1950, 4. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref4" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[4]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> “Our Decline Forced Us to Attract Industries: Not Always Zoom, Boom,” <i>Centerville Iowegian</i>, 26 February 1965, 10. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref5" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[5]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> “How A Factory Boosts Towns Retail Sales,” <i>Lenox Time Table</i>, 26 February, 1953, 1. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref6" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[6]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> “Invest in Your Community,” <i>Lenox Time Table</i>, 9 August 1962, 1. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref7" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[7]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> “Iowa Industrial Potential High: Creston Group at Development Clinic,” <i>Creston News Advertiser</i>, 10 May 1965, 1. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref8" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[8]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> James C. Larew, <i>A Party Reborn: The Democrats of Iowa, 1950-1974</i> (Iowa State Historical Department, Division of the State Historical Society, 1980). </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref9" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[9]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Thomas Dale Unga, <i>The Republican Party in Iowa: 1946-1956</i>, (PhD. Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1957). </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref10" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[10]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> “Industrial Expansion is a No.1 Campaign Topic,” <i>Creston News Advertiser</i>, 30 October, 1958, 5. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5911464913331967955#_ftnref11" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[11]</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Harlan Hahn, <i>Urban-Rural Conflict: The Politics of Change</i> (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1971), 84-85.</span>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-90660849271328064872012-01-02T13:50:00.000-08:002012-01-02T13:50:01.721-08:00Whither the US Welfare Regime?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://afrocityblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/welfarequeen.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="http://afrocityblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/welfarequeen.gif" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the throes of the second greatest economic crisis in the country’s history, the U.S. welfare regime is under systematic attack from those purportedly aiming to put the United States’ fiscal house in order. As poverty rates and unemployment rise and the country’s infrastructure and education system are slowly decaying, the limited social safety nets the United States provides—particularly compared with its peers in Western Europe—are being dismantled at an ever quickening, seemingly quotidian, pace. Political leaders from both parties frequently pillory anyone who calls for expanding welfare benefits and propose privatization or draconian reforms of entitlement programs that keep many Americans afloat. Even before the 2008 financial crisis, the level of welfare provided by the U.S. was severely lower than that of most of the developed industrialized world. However, even in the United States there have been important historical moments, generally during periods of great economic calamity, in which substantial expansions of the social safety net or welfare benefits have been provided. As such, is there the possibility, given the current economic climate, for the U.S. to become more aligned with the rest of the developed world and develop a more redistributive welfare regime? </span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is an important question given the state of the American economy and the situation of the average American. A recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study on social justice, which took into account various welfare policies, ranked the United States 27 out of 31 countries. A recent study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget office noted that income growth between 1979 and 2007 for the top one percent of the population has grown by over 275 percent, while growing only 65 percent for those in the top 20 percent and only 18 percent for those in the bottom fifth quintile during the same period. All the while, poverty rates continue to rise. With this economic picture as background, will the United States do anything to alter its welfare regime to protect more of its citizens and redistribute wealth in a more equitable fashion?</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I will utilize a collection of works from Esping-Andersen (1990), Hall and Soskice (2001), Pierson (1995), Estevez-Abe (2008), and Alesina and Glaeser (2004) to address this question. It is my contention that due to a host of historical, institutional, and societal independent variables, the U.S. is unlikely to construct a more expansive welfare regime (the dependent variable) and indeed, given the current state of the global economy, may begin to engage in further retrenchment. </span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Each of the readings from this unit elucidates issues related to welfare regimes, state coordination (or lack thereof) in the national economy, differing types of welfare, and variables that can assist in the explanation of the development of various welfare regimes. Esping-Anderson examines the three types of welfare regimes and discusses the variables that can help to explain their development. His analysis provides a framework for understanding why the United States developed a limited liberal welfare regime. Similarly, Alesina and Glaeser employ a comparative institutional approach, examining electoral systems, federalism, separation of powers, and the power of socialist parties in the United States and Europe, in order to explain the differences in welfare regimes. Pierson’s work provides two important contributions to this essay. First, Pierson’s approach to institutional analysis, grounded in an historical, path-dependent methodology, will provide a framework for my argument regarding the trajectory of the American welfare state. Secondly, Pierson’s discussion of the concept of “systemic retrenchment” provides an exposition of the historical institutional conditions that have cultivated the current state of welfare in the United States. From a normative perspective, I will use Hall and Soskice’s work on coordination among firms and institutional arrangements and their role in coordinated and liberal market economies and Estevez-Abe’s discussion of the welfare state in Japan. Both of these works examine state coordination in the economy and welfare regimes and, given their emphasis on private sector and/or public-private coordination, provide plausible and positive examples of policies the United States could implement to improve its welfare system.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In capitalist societies, workers, lacking ownership over the means of production, are forced to sell their labor. This commodification of labor necessarily binds the wellbeing of workers to the market. In his cross-sectional analysis of the “three worlds of welfare capitalism,” Esping-Anderson asserts that welfare regimes can be defined by what extent they de-commodify workers. He avers, “De-commodification occurs when a service is rendered as a matter of right, and when a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market.” Whereas in social-democratic welfare regimes workers experience the most de-commodification, in liberal regimes they are most commodified. Social democratic regimes can be defined by their principles of universality and de-commodification, expressed through efforts to promote equality at the highest standards. Alternatively, in liberal welfare regimes, most assistance is means tested and modest. Since workers in the US are more dependent on the private job market and for basic sustenance, they are less likely to undertake strikes and other forms of solidarity based protest against capital-induced inequalities. Furthermore, the attenuating power of unions and the total absence of left-party power have contributed to the development and maintenance of the asthenic U.S. welfare system.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">One of the primary independent variables that Esping-Andersen utilizes to explain the development of welfare regimes is left-party power. Perhaps obviously, he suggests that states with more powerful left wing parties, or socialist parties, are more likely to develop more expansive welfare regimes, such as those that are seen in the social democratic welfare regimes and to a lesser extent in the conservative-corporatist regimes. For Esping-Andersen, “the single most forceful explanation of liberal ‘regimeness’ is the negative impact” of left-power mobilization, that is, the presence or paucity of influential leftist parties. Alesina and Glaeser suggest, “the presence of socialist political parties in government explains the adoption of a more generous welfare state.” In the United States, there has never been a socialist party with any salient political power. Moreover, unions have generally viewed the state as an ally of capital and business interests, much to the detriment of the working class. Essentially, “unions were ‘anti-government’ in the sense that they focused on receiving ‘private’ concessions from employers with no hope for government intervention in their favor.”</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.fau.edu/library/images/brody44.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="258" src="http://www.fau.edu/library/images/brody44.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">We want more</span></div><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Alesina and Glaeser also discuss several institutional arrangements that played a critical role in the development of the liberal welfare regime in the U.S. The electoral system in the U.S., with its first-past-the-post method and electoral districts with a magnitude of one, produce parliamentarians that work to secure benefits—also known as pork—targeted to their specific district and constituents. In contrast, systems that utilize proportional representation, particularly those that have a single national district, tend to result in universal programs. Unlike most of Western Europe, the United States has a highly decentralized, federal system. Utilizing the Tiebout model, the authors suggest that localities compete for businesses and people and thus militate to keep taxes low in order to attract those that vote with their feet. Even the U.S. system of checks and balances has been an important foundational element in its liberal welfare regime. The frequent occurrence of divided government often leads to policy moderation. Furthermore, the judiciary branch has often served as a protector of capital interests. “The involvement of the courts in social legislation in the United States has been a constant feature of the U.S. experience.” The aforementioned dearth of left-party power and institutional arrangements in the United States have led to the development of the liberal welfare regime of the United States.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">While I find both Alesina and Glaeser and Esping-Andersen’s analysis useful for explaining the development of the U.S. welfare regime, there is one variable that is notably absent. Neither works speak to the role of social homogeneity as an independent variable. The countries that are frequently lauded, or derided depending on your ideological inclinations, for their expansive welfare regimes and more equitable societies are generally homogeneous. The Scandinavian countries, which score high on their levels of social justice, income and wealth distribution, and de-commodification, have ethnically homogeneous societies. In contrast, the United States is an incredibly fragmented, heterogeneous country with a variety of ethnic and religious groups. People are generally less willing to vote for or support redistributive policies that will benefit those outside of their own particular group or identity. The example of the stigmatized “black, welfare queens” speaks to this phenomenon. This is an important variable that is missing from Esping-Andersen and Alesina and Glaeser’s works.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Pierson discusses the role of the Reagan administration’s efforts to dismantle the welfare state. While Reagan is frequently given credit for his battle to reduce the size of government, Pierson asserts that Reagan was not particularly successful at programmatic retrenchment—cutting funding for specific programs or ending them altogether—rather, Reagan’s legacy resides in systemic retrenchment. Tax reforms implemented by Reagan in 1981 and 1986 “weakened the federal government’s ability to finance social programs.” Reagan’s fiscal policy, particularly his willingness to reduce taxes and run deficits, has manifested in the current political debate. Politicians have a myopic obsession with reducing the deficit and frequently target reductions in social programs as the main mechanism for doing so. The decisions that the Reagan administration made decades ago to defund welfare programs will continue to have monumental implications for the welfare system in the United States. While Pierson aimed to demonstrate that social welfare policies retain resiliency because of path-dependency, he also recognized the role of critical junctures in history. Pierson notes, “policymakers must operate in an environment fundamentally conditioned by policies inherited from the past.” Today’s policymakers are forced to operate in an environment conditioned by the systemic retrenchment of the Reagan administration. As such, given the structural, institutional, and historical variables that have affected U.S. welfare policy are there any plausible alternatives to the current system?</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAuxxXWO8cTkYAMKjdVelO_0bgQK8LKbuOEaa9SmTg9_Smon0Ng6AOOeW0Lsd8CHmIKoqhtHkpkocF09RpmdTz90zLGAF2gem1WmJ5iC3OupeqWszhpDxXvYm6Wc9KowWrzJPqenGlu8Lf/s1600/Bottom+of+the+Heap.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAuxxXWO8cTkYAMKjdVelO_0bgQK8LKbuOEaa9SmTg9_Smon0Ng6AOOeW0Lsd8CHmIKoqhtHkpkocF09RpmdTz90zLGAF2gem1WmJ5iC3OupeqWszhpDxXvYm6Wc9KowWrzJPqenGlu8Lf/s400/Bottom+of+the+Heap.png" width="357" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Two works from this unit provide feasible examples of alternative policies. Hall and Soskice provide a spectrum paradigm to explain the varieties of capitalism based on the coordination between firms in a national economy. In liberal market economies (LME), such as in the United States, there is limited coordination between firms. Indeed, the coercive laws of competition discourage coordination. Alternatively, in coordinated market economies (CME), coordination depends on non-market relationships and networks. Hall and Soskice demonstrate that unemployment in CMEs is usually lower, despite attendant lower growth rates. As the unemployment rate in the United States continues to hover near nine percent, coordination among firms to determine a more effective labor policy could reduce the unemployment and help to mitigate the macro demand problem the United States faces. One example of a CME that implements such policies is Japan.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Estevez-Abe asserts that despite Japan’s low level of direct income transfers, it has an extensive welfare state. Much like the United States, Japanese society has an aversion to direct income transfers. Japan’s welfare state utilizes a system of functional equivalents, where, in many cases, industrial policy is a substitute for social policy. For example, the state will provide tax incentives to firms if they provide housing complexes for their workers. Japan also employs worker-based protection and savings-oriented programs to provide social safety nets. The system is “highly fragmented on occupational lines.” (20) Estevez-Abe adds, “Japan socialized capital by means of state control over welfare funds. The vast reserves of long-term capital under the state’s control…have provided each Japanese government with a far greater financial capacity than its small tax revenue otherwise would have allowed.” The broad discussion of CMEs provided by Hall and Soskice and the specific example of the Japanese welfare state provide examples of policies that United States could implement to reorient its welfare state and extend social safety nets in an uncertain economic climate.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I have suggested that the United States could benefit from the policies of CMEs, specifically Japan, in part, because of the above-discussed institutional and historical variables. With the aversion to direct income transfers, the absence of left-party power, the institutional arrangements, and the historical legacy of the Reagan administration as context, there is seemingly little hope for a transition to a more social democratic regime. However, coordination among firms, specifically, coordination that is not market-driven, and between firms and the state could produce an economy that is better able to weather the current financial crisis. Germany, one of the archetypal CMEs, has been able to keep unemployment rates low during the global recession because of coordination between firms, labor, and the state. The United States, with its proportionately small level of tax revenue, could at the very least begin to provide succor to the many unemployed and underemployed by facilitating coordination between firms and between firms and the state to reduce unemployment and concomitantly increase demand. As Esping-Andersen, Pierson, and Estevez-Abe all assert, welfare regimes cannot simply be measured by their social expenditures. There are a variety of mechanisms for the United States to utilize that could expand its welfare state without direct income transfers. Path-dependency arguments would posit that unless the exit costs of discarding our current welfare regime are low enough to supersede the increasing returns the current system provides there is unlikely to be any fundamental change. Surveying the current political climate, with the Occupy Wall Street movement in mind, I am dubious that the United States will adopt even limited functional equivalency policies or adopt the policies of CMEs.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Estevez-Abe’s analysis of the welfare regime in Japan provides specific examples of successful CME policy that could help the United States’ lethargic economy and perhaps militate for the de-commodification process of American workers. In conclusion, I would argue that despite the seemingly evident benefits some of these policies would bring, they are unlikely to be adopted. With Pierson’s path-dependency in mind, the U.S. will need an even deeper economic crisis for there to be any sort of fundamental reorientation of welfare policy. In the meantime, the structural, historical, and institutional variables point to a continued attenuation of the U.S. welfare regime.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>Adam Gallagher</i> </span></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-40134429453415337232011-12-25T09:17:00.000-08:002011-12-29T13:01:54.087-08:00Christmas Clipse: Spending Your Holiday Trill with Virginia Beach's Most Notorious Rap Duo<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_eWqD_BsU9hCiDzU5ZCaAmg33Hpu4m43QC6LbbDpXCpMMJG8-U82DeFfMmBqZP9qEL7_7rIhxKHGSoMTvzAMJiPrdpedw-lBwozTRxbpqq62r0Ch8g11oLpD9oe0kmQKtVaFQKV45eL8/s1600/clipse-300x300-2009-11-19.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_eWqD_BsU9hCiDzU5ZCaAmg33Hpu4m43QC6LbbDpXCpMMJG8-U82DeFfMmBqZP9qEL7_7rIhxKHGSoMTvzAMJiPrdpedw-lBwozTRxbpqq62r0Ch8g11oLpD9oe0kmQKtVaFQKV45eL8/s1600/clipse-300x300-2009-11-19.jpg" /></a></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
All that get over shit, all that super stupid shit, that shit is done .. we’ve been consistent from day one whether its Clipse or Re-Up Gang you always know what you’re getting, it is what it is. For example, some Tree huggin ass bitch the other day came up the on some “yo, you all nice and stuff but how come you always rhyming about street shit.” I was like, "Tree huggin’ ass bitch please. I rhyme for my niggas on the corner all 20,000 of them. Twenty thousand money making brothers on the corner." <br />
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-- Re-Up Gang, "20 K Intro," <i>We Got it For Cheap Vol. 3</i>, 2008 </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When brothers Pusha T and Malice (legally known as Terrance and Gene Thorton, respectively), waited out a bitter label dispute with Jive Records, they used the four year hiatus to perfect their vision of the drug trade and modern music industry. Their effort culminated in the late November pre-Christmas 2006 release of the now seminal <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i>. Through <i>HHNF</i> and a trilogy of mixtapes (<i>We Got it For Cheap Vols</i> <i>1</i>, <i>2</i>, and <i>3</i>), Clipse reshaped rap. Rather than sit motionless for nearly a half decade, the Clipse formed the Re-Up Gang with Philly based rappers Sandman and Ab-liva, releasing the aforementioned <i>We Got it For Cheap</i> series. Certainly, mix tapes were not new, as Pusha T admitted in an </span><a href="http://allhiphop.com/2005/02/01/the-clipse-times-up-part-1/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">interview</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">. “These days I’m getting mix tapes with a whole bunch of records, but ain’t nobody really saying anything,” lamented one half of the Clipse. “There’s a whole lot of quantity, but I mean there’s no language on it.”</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Clipse didn’t invent the mixtape so much as perfect it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In some ways, Clipse’s experience reflects that of Chicago alt country band Wilco. During Wilco’s major label debacle a</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">round the same period the Jeff Tweedy led outfit streamed its now classic <i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot</i> online, building anticipation and embedding the album within its fan base. When it finally did see the light of day, the album proved to be the band’s biggest seller. Likewise, the Clipse saw mixtapes as the best means to promote themselves and maintain their mental health. “We just knew we weren't getting anywhere fast," Malice admitted in a 2006 <i>Virginian Pilot</i> article, "so we decided to put out the mixtapes to stay relevant." Added Pusha, "they helped us keep our sanity . . . Mixtapes will be dropped up until the album comes out.” When Pittsburgh rapper </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Miller" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mac Miller</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> debuted his album <i>Blue Slide Park</i> in October 2011, it shot to number one immediately on the back of Miller’s own series of mixtapes.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTB4u964CiY92ucoWN0ICn2PLCTmqndNnydq3N0evWKAPiv2pj4xzI9Enzr55N1Sw0peffklO8Ozrhwudmx7xw-1pI15ozvavb7JOtEt4EKHzxg1NT2oxkxTosfVNoxpFLbDDSR9QJ4JA/s1600/mac-miller-25.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTB4u964CiY92ucoWN0ICn2PLCTmqndNnydq3N0evWKAPiv2pj4xzI9Enzr55N1Sw0peffklO8Ozrhwudmx7xw-1pI15ozvavb7JOtEt4EKHzxg1NT2oxkxTosfVNoxpFLbDDSR9QJ4JA/s320/mac-miller-25.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"Ride Around Shining" - Miller follows the Clipse model to #1 </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[Editor's note: Scoring a number #1 album today does not mean nearly as much in terms of sales as it did ten years ago largely due to changes in the industry and the way listeners now consume music.] </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Unlike, floppy haired NPR favorites, Wilco, from 2002 to 2008, the Clipse inhabited a universe constructed on images of Wire-like violence and drug sales replayed on the shores of Virginia Beach and Norfolk, VA. Or as they point out in “Virginia,” off their Neptunes-produced 2002 album </span><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Willin-Clipse/dp/B0000665WR" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Lord Willin’</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I'm from Virginia, where ain't shit to do but cook (Talk about, what?)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Pack it up, sell it triple-price, fuck the books (Talk about, what?)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Where we re-up, re-locate, re-off them brooks (Talk about, what?)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> So when we pull up, it ain't shit to do but look</span></blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It Ain’t Miami Vice </span></b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Open the Frigidaire, 25 to life in here</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So much white you might think ya Holy Christ is near</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Throw on your Louis V millionaires to kill the glare</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Ice trays? Nada! All you see is pigeons paired</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">-- Clipse, “Keys Open Doors,” <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i> </span></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Have we talked drugs yet? That's what they do here; talk the art of the deal and their mastery of such. It sounds simplistic, but Clipse have been the premier drug-dealing soliloquists for some time. Unflinching and unforgiving, Re-Up re-imagine hustler as hero with lyrical ingenuity and deft wordplay. Some may struggle with the joy these boys get from moving weight; it's an indefensible stance-- we all have our faults, and we all have to eat-- but the revelry is also what makes it enjoyable. Otherwise, Clipse could just move West and write for scripts for Michael Mann.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> --</span><a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11708-we-got-it-4-cheap-vol-1-vol-2/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Sean Fennessay, Pitchfork, October 10, 2005</a></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Sure, the analogy between the music industry and the drug game has been played out countless times. Still, the reality of twenty first century economic life continues to be increasing specialization. Cable channels devoted to narrower and narrower interests, a fractured viewing public that increasingly pursues its own idiosyncratic favorites, and the rise of a highly segmented internet marketplace all mean that specialization provides the key for success. One must hone the one thing they do well, and do it magnificently. As Sean Fennessay acknowledges in his 2002 review of <i>We Got if 4 Cheap Vol. 1</i>, no rapper or group rivaled the drug flows of the Clipse. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">While one can never be sure the extent of their involvement or knowledge, the 2009 arrest of former manager Anthony “Geezy” Gonzalez for the operation of a 10 million dollar plus drug ring suggests Clipse knew something about “the game.” In fact, from 2001 to 2011, law enforcement authorities busted “at least nine drug rings in Hampton Roads worth $20 million or more,” reported a recent <i>Virginian Pilot</i> article. “A 10th was worth almost $10 million,” noted journalist Tim McGlone (Tim McGlone, <i>Virginian Pilot</i>, “20 Million Drug Rings," October 2, 2011). Granted the Clipse may be overly fascinated with the drug trade, but, as DEA officials admitted this fall, during this past decade Mid-Atlantic urban areas have been inundated with narcotics. Thus, the Clipse simply found itself within a narrative that essentially wrote itself. Moreover, they represented a burgeoning set of urban circumstances as drug trafficking concentrated itself in the cities of Baltimore, Hampton Roads, and D.C. among others. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3mvRS_nn3K5zPGSGrfG5CvTYqjKChUo2Jbu-V4fhw76drodkti7PNjCOW4XrnQb8D0OcH7Wr929IApGPAOaRaPNiL1Jdf275GcfceeVYGBfuub2GC4HD3UgWFAfTVqNOK7SSGN11-6yo/s1600/the-wire-poster-20101-560x420.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3mvRS_nn3K5zPGSGrfG5CvTYqjKChUo2Jbu-V4fhw76drodkti7PNjCOW4XrnQb8D0OcH7Wr929IApGPAOaRaPNiL1Jdf275GcfceeVYGBfuub2GC4HD3UgWFAfTVqNOK7SSGN11-6yo/s320/the-wire-poster-20101-560x420.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inspiring the Clipse</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now it needs to be noted that in terms of drug epidemics, crack (or as the Clipse opine, “The News call it crack, I call it diet Coke”) and cocaine really haven’t been the point of focus in recent years. As evidenced by cultural productions like television’s Breaking Bad or the critically acclaimed novel American Rust, meth addiction and the pervasive reach of prescription drugs serve as the new American drug threat. Rural and suburban areas now occupy top spots among drug interdiction and law enforcement agencies. Predictably, poverty remains a primary factor as 90% of the counties with “persistent poverty” are rural. In April of 2011, the Obama administration announced a new initiative to fight prescription drug addiction, pointing out that deaths from this more recent affliction and crystal meth exceeded that of crack in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.” Though rural locales differ greatly from inner city neighborhoods, the</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/us/20drugs.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> <i>New York Times</i></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> described the dysfunction caused by prescription drug addiction squarely within the urban paradigm:</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The pattern playing out here bears an eerie resemblance to some blighted cities of the 1980s: a generation of young people who were raised by their grandparents because their parents were addicts, and now they are addicts themselves.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Politicians have confronted this epidemic much differently than in the 1980s and 1990s, when the prison system exploded or, as one commentator noted, “we couldn't lock crack dealers and users up fast enough and keep them locked up long enough.” Drug legislation passed during the same period and the sentences doled out to offenders have taken decades to unwind. Moreover, the argument could be made that this legislation and enforcement caused more problems than it solved. Instead, in response to prescription drugs and meth, politicians in several states have created </span><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18233647?story_id=18233647" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">drug courts (Georgia for example)</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> in an effort to bring users to treatment rather than incarceration. In general, the tenor has been of </span><a href="http://www.rightoncrime.com/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">criminal justice reform (even among some conservatives)</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> not wholesale imprisonment. </span> <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOPA3KiQ2E9PVbwTz4-sM9jnD6CJYyjReUDPOjUl2E3vtsF-pjX9z-DOkT0qp13t0E9NvenkoI1OkmRoUGhzwl-HH5AzeROW7pkzE7SOZM9F0LYoQCDZAg6R-ipNUS7Zv-Qs2plxSjrIk/s1600/frontline_meth_t614.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOPA3KiQ2E9PVbwTz4-sM9jnD6CJYyjReUDPOjUl2E3vtsF-pjX9z-DOkT0qp13t0E9NvenkoI1OkmRoUGhzwl-HH5AzeROW7pkzE7SOZM9F0LYoQCDZAg6R-ipNUS7Zv-Qs2plxSjrIk/s320/frontline_meth_t614.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The new crack</span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Certainly, race must play some role here, right? Suburban white voters from the 1970s on viewed the inner city as a darkened space, a dystopia inhabited by drug users and angry minorities. When crack exploded in the 1980s, legislating over the top anti-drug laws that disproportionately affected blacks and Latinos seemed painfully predictable. Yet, writers like senior <i>Atlantic</i> editor </span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/drug-addiction-beyond-the-cities/237587/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ta-Nehisi Coates</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> suggest that this response isn’t only racial in nature. “The problems of big inner-cities are visible in a way that the problems of the suburbs, exurbs, and rurals are not,” Coates pointed out. “Moreover, big media tends to make its home in cities like Washington and New York where large numbers of African-Americans live.” Others, like the </span><a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/drugs_race_and_cities" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>Economist </i>blog on American politics</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> conceded Coates’ points regarding media attention but differ on the issue of race:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I wonder, if we were in the midst of a second crack epidemic affecting poor blacks and Latinos in inner cities rather than a meth and prescription-drug problem in white, rural America, whether quite so many politicians would be lining up to keep users and small-time dealers out of jail. And of course, it's an American tradition to see the rural heartland and its residents as "real America," and cities as dens of iniquity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">One does wonder. After all, though the effects of meth have been devastating, the moral panic that accompanied 1980s crack use seems at best muted. While county Sheriff’s and police forces like those in American Rust struggle to address these concerns, the media as Coates noted, seems asleep at the wheel. Did violent urban crack episodes of the 1980s fit media stereotypes in ways that the crank epidemic doesn’t? Is the idea of freshly scrubbed white teens binging on prescription drugs too boring or insidious for network news? If these were Black and Latino kids, wouldn’t unscrupulous “civic” and political leaders be banging on about decency and the need to “clean up our streets”?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Do albums like <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i> obscure this more complex reality? Perhaps, but the fact of the matter seems to be that while rural and suburban areas have struggled with crystal meth and prescription drugs, smaller mid-size cities like Virginia Beach have served as hubs in a crack/cocaine that has shifted its distribution. For each the results prove brutal, but so far, no one has come forward with an album depicting the life of a rural meth dealer. In contrast, the Clipse represent the finest bottle of a fairly large wine collection of drug rap. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Making Adam Smith Proud</span></b><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“When you see millions, there are many chamillions</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> You’re not a gunna, for real, you’re just a runna</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Haters I spot you from a far, and I'm the deer hunter</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> They be thinking nice car, nice crib</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> I be thinking, how long will these niggaz let me live</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> I understand, cause people need things</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> And they will take it from you, and take you from your seedlings”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">-- Clipse, “Nightmares," <i>Hell Hath No Fury </i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Let me tell you about chicken McNuggets kids</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In season two of <i>The Wire</i>, Stringer Bell, right hand man of incarcerated Baltimore drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, attempts to impart shards of economic wisdom culled from his business class at the local community college. In an attempt to disguise a long inferior product, Bell employs branding, changing the product’s name in hopes of renewing “market” interest. He even goes so far as to explain the economic theory supporting his new initiative to his cohort of street soldiers. Needless to say, the lecture provides mixed results. Still, few businesses appear to be as friendly to neoliberal corporate governance as the drug trade. Sudhir Venkatesh and others have documented the increasingly corporate structure of street gangs. Of course, this does not mean all the workers are happy. When D'Angelo Barksdale, nephew of the aforementioned Avon, overhears his underlings debating who invented chicken McNuggets and how rich he must be, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvq3Pf3j61c" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Barksdale unleashes a bitter sermon</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> on labor relations in a corporate structure:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down to the basement and say, "Hey Mr. Nugget - you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowney ass name on this fat-ass check for you." Shit. Man, the nigga who invented them things? Still working in the basement for regular wage, thinking of some shit to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Likewise, in <i>Freakonomics</i>, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner illustrate how the drug business depends heavily on a lumpen proletariat of lower income employees, mostly male, who live with their mothers and make what amounts to minimum wage—the very workers DeAngelo Barksdale and Stringer Bell attempt to educate on the nuances of capitalist economics. The </span><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/11057088" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>Economist</i> </a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">in recent years has reiterated these findings. Peter Moskos, a sociologist who also served one year as a Baltimore police officer in its notorious Eastern District concurs but also notes it continues to draw new employees. “Apart from the low pay and the high risk of getting murdered, drug-dealing is not a bad job,” notes Moskos. “You hang out with your friends. People ‘respect’ (ie, fear) you. You project glamour. You get laid.” Unfortunately, as Moskos also points out, it tends to make drug dealers unemployable. “To survive on the street, you learn to react violently and pre-emptively to the slightest challenge,” argues the <i>Economist</i>. “This is a useful trait for a drug-dealer, but, oddly, managers at Starbucks do not value it.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Clipse, at least on album, never lament their profession. Instead they flash its accoutrements. Songs like “Ride Around Shining” and “Hello New World” serve as only two prominent examples. The above quoted “Nightmares” and “Momma I’m So Sorry” are the only songs with any real remorse and even in “Nightmares,” Clipse clearly understands the human desire for stuff: “I understand, people need things.” Sure, on “We Got if for Cheap” (off of <i>Hell</i>, not the mixtapes) Malice raps to his brother “If ever I had millions, never would you push blow, never.” Still, that may simply mean Pusha would get a job in management but not necessarily sever from the trade itself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When the subject turns to gender, one can imagine where Clipse land. Predictably, the role of women on <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i> proves anemic. Even when Pusha does apologize to his mother for “airing family business” and failing to fully respect the mother of his child, his contributions to their lives remains purely economic:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Even my baby mama, I can't look you in the face</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">'Cause I can't do enough, you a symbol of God's grace</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So I place you in the flower bed, porcelain shower heads</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Throughout the house and keep the younguns' mouths fed</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And when I'm gone, I hope it is said</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I gave structure to the youth by the example I lead</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> -- “Momma I’m So Sorry,” <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Pusha and Malice’s misogynistic rhymes spill into nearly every track, but in moments Clipse also admits in some ways everyone is in on the game, especially the ladies:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The glitter chill got ya mind seein’ milli mill’s</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I’m seven figga, the bigger you thought the little real</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">See I don’t blame ya, cashmere’s what you feel</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Picturing the fortune, you just tryna spin the wheel</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">-- “Dirty Money,” <i>Hell Hath No Fury </i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Nonetheless, one might argue expecting a drug rap album to feature nuanced female characters capable of displaying agency is akin to being upset over racist jokes in <i>Pulp Fiction</i>: these people are criminals, expecting them to be moral paragons is foolish. None of this excuses the Clipse for their sexism, but if one plays the part, one plays the part. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Today, though certainly regrettable, misogyny must still not be all that offensive. Clipse’s fan base or at least that identified by media sources and the band itself, consists of a diverse set of sub culture archetypes. A Hampton Roads entertainment writer described a 2006 Clipse crowd as “quirky” and “diverse” pointing out every sub groups present, “one saw teenage skaters, buppie girls in chic baby doll dresses, emo-band types, model-worthy blondes and hip-hop youths in expensive sneakers and chains.” (Malcolm Venable, <i>Virginian Pilot</i>, “VA Beach’s Clipse Hypes Crowd at NorVa after a Late Start”, December 24, 2006) They were even asked to play the Playboy Mansion’s 2010 NYE party, which even seemed to take Pusha by surprise. “When I heard about it,” he said, “I was like, ‘Wow, what do the people at the Playboy Mansion know about the Clipse?’” Yet, he also acknowledged their wide appeal: “But I’m never shocked by how vast and diverse our audience is.” (Malcolm Venable, <i>Virginian Pilot</i>, “Duo Leaves Controversy in Rear View,” Dec 8, 2009) Wilco probably couldn’t say the same. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In 2010, the Clipse broke up (at the very least put themselves on a long hiatus as Pusha pursued solo plans). Sales of their third album <i>Till the Casket Drops</i> (2009) failed to capture the same level of Clipse that <i>Lord Willin’</i> hinted at, and <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i> enthusiastically confirmed. Unlike their previous efforts, the Clipse failed to employ the Neptunes production squad. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I remember getting <i>Hell Hath No Fury</i> for Christmas in 2006 from my dad who still bought CD’s. The first time I listened to it, I knew it was socially irredeemable, but also really really great. The record emerged simultaneously with real shifts in drug use and trafficking. It tells us nothing about the Walter Whites and Jesse Pinkmans of the meth world, but it does capture a different if well travelled milieu, one familiar enough to draw a diverse fan base. Unlike Biggie and Tupac, Clipse expressed little remorse for their actions; they knew karmically they were screwed but that was part of the game. Is it great holiday music? Only in the sense that every faith would denounce it. Happy Holidays to your and yours—put a little Clipse in your cheer, but only after the kids are in bed. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ryan Reft </span></i></div>less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-89207627391535451042011-12-20T05:57:00.000-08:002012-03-11T18:33:50.195-07:00Gizmo: The Model Minority<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Gremlins</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> is not often thought of as a Christmas movie, even though it takes place in a snowy small town that could double as the set of <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>, and the entire plot revolves around the unintended consequences of holiday gift-giving. It is funny to think back and remember that unscrupulous advertisers led the public to believe that </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Gremlins</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> was a family picture about cute, fuzzy creatures. After parents marched out of theaters with children traumatized by the blood-spattered, if cartoonish horror-film aspects of the film, the </span><a href="http://www.seattlepi.com/ae/movies/article/PG-13-remade-Hollywood-ratings-system-1152332.php" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">ensuing controversy</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> led to the creation of the first-ever PG-13 rating. (The old system skipped directly from PG to R.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Gremlins</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, then, we not only have one of the most popular examples of a Christmas film that dares to deviate from Christmas cliches; we also have a case study of a classic moral panic from the 1980s, the decade of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">satanic ritual abuse</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> and </span><a href="http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/best/site/halloween.html" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">razorblades</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> in Halloween candy. <i> Gremlins</i> was one of the top films of 1984, along with venerable hits <i>Beverly Hills Cop</i> and <i>Ghostbusters</i>, and its box office far surpassed other Christmas films with a dark streak, like </span><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_santa" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Bad Santa</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the 1980s, a new breed of filmmakers (Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, John Landis) raided a storehouse of genres and cliches to give a grateful public popcorn entertainment of the first order. In the previous decade, a film industry long afflicted by the rise of television let a handful of eccentrics like Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman make dark, difficult films that eschewed happy endings and challenged American mores, but Steven Spielberg and George Lucas soon paved the way for a new era of crowd-pleasing kitsch by reviving monster movies (</span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Jaws</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">), Westerns (</span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Star Wars</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">), and adventure films (</span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Raiders of the Lost Ark</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">). Legend has it that filmmakers like Spielberg learned the vocabulary of genre film by watching reruns of old Hollywood schlock on TV as kids. This experience led them to regurgitate the tales of vampires, zombies and adventurers on the big screen. (Interestingly enough, more or less the same story has been told of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk in the 1990s, as a generation who stitched together their supposedly postmodern pastiche from the videos they watched in the 1970s and 1980s. When have artists not been reconstituting the last generation's culture in the new?) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><a href="http://www.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/79/MPW-39786" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://www.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/79/MPW-39786" width="285" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> I, for one, welcome our Asian overlords</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But <i>Gremlins</i> is more than a genre redo like </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Raiders of the Lost Ark</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> or forerunner of postmodern kitsch. It is also a film that captures some genuine anxieties about race, immigration and globalization that appear in more recognizable form in other Eighties hits, like </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Gung Ho</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (1986). It is also keyed into a longing for innocence that is characteristic of the Reagan Era, a period of venality and class war and family values and Fifties nostalgia. Critic Noël Carroll sees a narrative arc in </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Gremlins</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> and other Eighties films that tracks the experience of adolescence: </span><br />
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This kind of plot seems to appeal to young audiences because it is a kind of parable about growing up. It highlights the discovery of hidden knowledge, while also dramatizing a moment when adults are finally forced to listen seriously to the young. And many horror films stress biological deformity and Otherness, thus broaching adolescent anxieties about the body. </blockquote>
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<i>Gremlins</i> mostly follows this storyline, most baldly when the hero, Billy, has to explain to the local authorities that the mischievous critters are real. ("I know it sounds crazy!") And the gremlins certainly express fears about changing bodies and reproduction in gooey, graphic detail. <br />
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But the small, furry/reptilian little monsters must symbolize something else. As Carroll notes, Eighties films were also filled with zombies, vampires, aliens, and so forth. Each classic monster exemplifies one abiding fear or another. Crudely speaking, zombies symbolize mindless conformity and a ravenous mass consumerism; vampires, doubts about sexual boundaries. Some critics have alleged that gremlins portray a grotesque caricature of African Americans, which would not be surprising in the viciously racist era of the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen">welfare queen</a>” and the crack epidemic, which was beginning to capture the nation’s attention in 1984. In <i>Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies</i>, Patricia Turner has criticized the film for imbuing the riotous ne’er-do-wells with the equivalent of blackface, as they feast on fried chicken and breakdance while wreaking havoc. <br />
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Turner’s theory is plausible enough—in a racist society, there’s a good chance that any tale of an impish, troublemaking Other may very well stand in for a racial minority in the minds of filmmakers and viewers. Coming at a time when politicians increasingly demonized the black poor as violent and irresponsible, the gremlins exhibited familiar qualities: poor impulse control, insatiable appetites, loud and reckless behavior. They are pure id, driven by desires not unlike the desperate drug addict, whose only pursuit is more pleasure. <br />
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However, one salient difference distinguishes the gremlins from the disparaged African American deviant: their foreign (indeed, Asian) origin. Mr. Peltzer buys the mogwai as a pet for his son Billy on a business trip. The film opens in Chinatown, where the traveling inventor and salesman purchases the peculiar species from a mysterious old Chinese man of the most stereotypical kind. The pet comes with several odd rules: do not get the animal wet (do not even give it water to drink), and never feed it after midnight. What will happen if one does of any of these things is not clear, though the instructions carry the implicit logic of the fairy tale, which telegraphs to viewers that the forbidden thing will, of course, be done later in the story. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Do you promise to not feed it and not walk it?</span></div>
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Despite its foreignness, the little creature (named “Gizmo”) appears good-natured. An animal that cannot even come into contact with water makes him even stranger, but his cuteness quickly wins the family over. When things do go wrong, though, Gizmo becomes the unwilling vehicle of uncontrollable forces: a splash of water causes him to enter a spasm of crazed reproduction, with little hairball babies sprouting out of his back. Even more disturbing is the metamorphosis that the little mogwais undergo when fed after midnight—they turn into slimy, scaly monsters, marked by gluttony and a desire to harm and torment the local townspeople. Liquid may connote sexuality, since Gizmo’s exposure to water results in his helpless virgin birth. <br />
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However innocent or well-meaning Gizmo may be, he still embodies a racist stereotype: that of the immigrant minority coming to this country and having too many kids, immortalized in liberal form by <i>The Simpsons</i>’ Apu and his eight children. The gremlins are a foreign menace that invades the Norman Rockwell-esque town and wantonly consumes its resources. They are also from Asia, home of the Japanese industrial juggernaut that threatened to sap American strength in films such as <i>Gung Ho</i> (1986) and <i>Back to the Future II</i> (1989). The gremlins foolishly try to imitate the ways of white, middle-class America (such as caroling) in their own inescapably demented fashion, like minorities who are ridiculed for failing to adopt American mannerisms or speak English perfectly. More to the point, Japan and other Asian countries were often accused of copying/stealing American art, science, and technology to get ahead in the race for economic advantage during this period. (For example, in the early 1980s Jack Valenti, the notorious Hollywood spokesman, decried Sony’s videocassette recorder as a violent foreign parasite that would destroy American industry by allowing consumers to copy movies: “We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine. ... I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) <br />
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Although <i>Gremlins</i> has been viewed as an anti-technology film, it tentatively suggests that technological ingenuity is the key to saving America from its decline. Since the 1920s, when British pilots blamed mythical critters for mechanical failure, a gremlin has been understood to be a small, mysterious being that causes some piece of machinery to fail. The monsters in this film attempt to use technology (like a tennis ball machine) against the human characters, or at least fiddle with it so it does not work correctly. (One hilarious example includes miserly Mrs. Deagle's chairlift, which the gremlins hotwire to send her sailing up the stairs and flying out the second floor window.) </div>
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Ultimately, though, humans are not threatened by technology per se. The furry hero, after all, is named Gizmo. Mrs. Peltzer fights off the invading gremlins in her kitchen with several modern appliances, including the microwave. And, early in the film, Billy's sweet duet with Gizmo, who trills along with a tiny electronic keyboard, suggests a potential for rapprochement and harmony with the East, through the medium of cheap consumer electronics. <br />
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Indeed, Gizmo may be a foreign Other, but he is ultimately trustworthy and responsible—a model minority. He resists the urge to eat after midnight, unlike his rapacious brethren. In the end, he helps to save the day. If the transformation of the small, furry mogwai into the scary, scaly gremlins is meant to represent the horrors of adolescence (which seems likely enough), then Gizmo remains pure because he is in a state of perpetual innocence. He is not that threatening because he is still a child. In this way, he resembles other infantilized minorities of the 1980s—notably, the cliché of the black child taken in by white, upper class paternalists. In both <i>Webster</i> and <i>Diff’rent Strokes</i>, black characters are played by actors whose growth is stunted, keeping them in a state of nonthreatening childhood. </div>
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This safe, childlike condition may seem to apply only to Gizmo, as a symbol of an Asian outsider stripped of any dangerous power, but it also says something about the politics of the film’s small-town Americana. Main character Billy is also a man-child—even though he has a “nice job” at the local bank, according to the film <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h24CFZqSEAA">trailer</a>, he still lives with his parents and gets a cute little pet from his dad, as if he were an eight year old getting a puppy. Like Gizmo, he is noble and pure, immune to the adult hedonism that consumes the amoral gremlins. These heroic moppets makes a perfect pair for the age of Nancy Reagan and “Just Say to No to Drugs,” globalization and foreign competition. If we can simply go back to the small town virtue of an earlier age (like a later man-child, Forrest Gump), we can beat back the cancerous growth of greed, immorality and irresponsibility and meet the challenge of a changing world with enough strength to save the nation. In the sequel, when Gizmo has to fight off yet another batch of gremlin hooligans, he mimics a great icon of the Eighties in adorable-hilarious fashion: Rambo, the avatar of American revivalism who avenges the country’s hurt ego after Vietnam. “They pushed him too far,” Billy <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuNbwB19Z1E">deadpans</a> in the second film, noting a more aggressive Gizmo. Middle America, too, felt like it was pushed too far, but fortunately it could count on a foreign friend to help it through.<br />
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<i>Alex Sayf Cummings</i> </div>
</div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-21110959591050742542011-12-12T06:57:00.000-08:002011-12-12T13:01:01.395-08:00Our Day of Social Engineering: A Middle Class Experiment Arrives in Reynoldstown<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">On Saturday, several friends and I got to witness the birth of a new community amid the fanfare of what was basically a very expensive raffle. The </span><a href="http://www.loftsatreynoldstowncrossing.com/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Lofts at Reynoldstown Crossing</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> were making their units available to pre-qualified buyers, offering $60,000 of downpayment assistance to Atlantans who made less than $68,000/year. The idea was to rehabilitate a failed condo project in the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynoldstown" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Reynoldstown</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> neighborhood, an old industrial, working-class community, as an anchor for the ambitious new </span><a href="http://www.beltline.org/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Beltline</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> project, which ultimately aims to encircle Atlanta’s in-town neighborhoods in a network of light rail, parks, and bike and walking trails. </span><br />
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My friend Jeena applied to get this subsidy from the Atlanta Beltline Partnership and bid on one of the condos. Each person who qualified would have his or her card pulled at an official drawing on December 10th, with the opportunity to pick among whatever units remained available. The first pulled got the best of the units, and a small number were set aside for teachers and first responders, such as police officers, EMT and firefighters. The lucky winners bawled and their friends cheered, and dozens of new neighbors were created in the matter of an hour and a half. We came along to provide moral support for Jeena—and, to a lesser extent, to observe the festive atmosphere that accompanied the execution of this strange model of public-private, government-corporate, affordable-housing-cum-public-transit development. (Also, to get free food—they were giving away delicious sliders the first time we visited.) <br />
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As a historian, one of my favorite things to study is the way that people consciously create new environments for themselves, with particular goals in mind. Whether it is European settlers setting the ground rules for a new society in North America, or modernist planners laying out the self-image of a nation in the streets of “invented” cities like Islamabad or Brasilia, it is always intriguing to see a people’s values explicitly articulated in the landscape. <br />
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All landscapes, of course, are invented. All are artificial, no matter how much we are told that the suburbs or shopping malls are the result of the “natural,” spontaneous, unplanned workings of the market. Historically, American tax policies helped businesses write off the depreciation of their assets at an accelerated rate, incentivizing the production of cheap, disposable architecture; meanwhile, government plowed money into roads and sewer lines, pushing the outer limits of sprawl, while the Federal Housing Administration subsidizes homeownership for working class and middle class people who might not otherwise afford it. Nothing about suburbia is natural, but the inner workings of this style of urban planning are largely concealed from view. As a result, those benefiting from it don’t feel like they are getting a handout or participating in some grand project of social engineering. (For more in this vein, see Ira Katznelson’s <i>When Affirmative Action Was White</i>, or Elizabeth Blackmar’s “<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=WoEJR2huVRsC&lpg=PA81&dq=elizabeth%20blackmar%20REITS&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q&f=false">Of REITs and Rights</a>.”) <br />
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Some projects, though, announce their goals much more clearly. I am personally interested in North Carolina’s <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2011/01/looking-for-city-of-knowledge.html">Research Triangle</a> as a model of how academics, businesspeople, planners and politicians deliberately created a new kind of economy and a new social mix in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, designed with certain people and a particular (post-industrial, high-tech) vision of the future in mind. These kinds of efforts continue to emerge across the United States, as various government, commercial, and public-private projects try to promote denser development in America’s cities. Oregon’s <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/oregonplanning">urban growth boundary system</a> has, since the early 1970s, attempted to promote infill and high-density development by setting a limit beyond which suburban sprawl cannot extend. Advocates of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism">New Urbanism</a> have seen their message at least partly embraced by developers who pursue “live-work-play” projects with condos, shopping, dining and office space in one mixed-use package. Atlanta’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Station">Atlantic Station</a> project appears to pursue such goals in a creepy, corporate, Stepford version of New Urbanism, rehabilitating a brownfield site in midtown where a defunct steel mill once stood as a consumer destination and yuppie living space. <br />
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The Beltline, thus, provides an opportunity to see how a Southern city, riven by the politics of suburbs vs. the city, the Republican hinterland vs. the diverse, Democratic core, the middle class vs. the poor, tries to remedy the problems of sprawl and build a walkable urban landscape. The old cures of urban renewal and public housing have been tried and mostly failed. “Slum clearance” in the 1960s wiped out African American and working class white neighborhoods to make way for freeways; purely state-supported interventions into the housing market have also faltered and suffered lasting stigma. The Beltline is a public-private hybrid that draws money from the City of Atlanta and the federal government along with Bank of America, which is not bashful about trumpeting its commitment to affordable housing and “neighborhood revitalization” (not to mention confronting the “foreclosure crisis” that it played a huge part in creating and sustains every single day). The Beltline relies on the idealism of volunteers who believe in its goals of greater density, better public transit, and affordable housing, as well as corporate and political patronage. <br />
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The usual debates come up with the Beltline, of course—is this going to gentrify traditionally poor and working class, largely African American neighborhoods, bringing in a horde of new yuppies who raise property values and rents, with Whole Foods and Citarella not far behind? The libertarian wants to know if it is a boondoggle that will benefit a precious few at a disproportionate cost to the whole. The advocate for the working poor wonders what exactly affordable housing means in this context—how will it work and how much “affordable housing” will be offered? <br />
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Painful experience has shown that developers may make big promises about affordable housing to sell their projects to local communities, but the actual outcome might end up having less low-priced housing than expected. (See the ongoing struggle over Bruce Ratner’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/nyregion/18yards.html">Atlantic Yards project</a> in Brooklyn.) Indeed, what counts as affordable? The truly poor are unlikely to have the resources to purchase a home even under the most favorable terms, and such projects are likeliest to benefit the lower-middle class whose weekly or monthly income could support a mortgage but who cannot afford to break into neighborhoods where housing costs make it impossible for the likes of police officers and firefighters to live. Such prospective buyers may also not be able to raise the funds for a down payment that could make the monthly cost of a mortgage manageable, since they lack the inherited advantage of parents or other relatives who have the capital to help subsidize a home purchase. <br />
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For those aspiring homeowners of modest means, Atlanta’s Reynoldstown offers a combination of high crime and failing schools matched with high home prices and a moderate degree of gentrification. It has a coffeeshop with its very own dog park—an indelible signal of gentrifying success—but it does not yet have its own bars, restaurants, or grocery stores. The Beltline project has to sell Atlantans on the idea of living in this rundown neighborhood of old factories and warehouses, which has neither the upper middle-class amenities of nearby <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candler_Park">Candler Park</a> nor the hipster vibe of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbagetown_%28Atlanta%29">Cabbagetown</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Atlanta">East Atlanta</a>, while also making a move to the area financially feasible for potential buyers. To sustain interest in the Beltline and make its vision of dense in-town living a reality, the organization needs residents who are committed to the project’s future. In the early twentieth century, streetcar companies laid out in-town neighborhoods such as East Atlanta just to have customers to patronize their transit lines. The Beltline finds itself in a similar kind of Field of Dreams situation; if you build it (the housing) they will come. And if they come (to buy a loft), you can build it (ultimately, the light rail that will connect the Beltline’s many parks, walking/bike trails, and residences). <br />
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At the day of the drawing, everyone from the Beltline worked double time to sustain a sense of infectious enthusiasm. Buyers showed up eager to wait their turn and have their number called. The heavy feeling that typically accompanies making a major life choice like buying a home had been deftly displaced by a carnival-like mood of being a part of a zesty group project. Potential buyers were invited to revisit the different units one last time, to see the thoroughly redone interiors of the condos and imagine what their view would be like looking at the skyline of downtown Atlanta—or, alternatively, looking out the back window at H. Harper Station, a railway depot located along the tracks of the old rail line that would serve as the backbone of the new Beltline, now rejuvented as an upscale cocktail/dining establishment. <br />
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When the time came for the drawing, various local pols made brief speeches. A city councilwoman praised the idea of “attractive lovely affordable housing for teachers and policemen.” “This is a grassroots project,” the Beltline’s Chief Operating Officer, Lisa Gordon, declared. “As most of you know, we are putting parks, greenspace, and trails in the abandoned freight rail just behind us to reinvest and connect neighborhoods in the city of Atlanta. And it’s important because the community came up with the idea, and was instrumental in some of the projects we are doing. And one of them was affordable housing, so people who are here can enjoy this project and the amenities and the investments that are being made.” Her goal was “permanent affordability on the beltline for the longterm”—making sure that the project, in essence, did not only benefit the privileged or well-heeled who could afford to buy a pricey property in an up-and-coming in-town location (one that could become even more valuable if light rail is eventually built in the the lofts’ literal backyard). <br />
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An executive from the diversity department at Bank of America was also on hand. She noted that she herself lived on the Beltline, and she used the opportunity to burnish the bank’s image by talking about all the wonderful things it was doing to prevent foreclosures. “Our first responders, our teachers, who better than that to stabilize a community?” she said. “And we know how important it is to have role models in the community, and when our police officers are in our community, it gives us a feeling of being safe, and it’s just not a feeling, you do help promote safety, so thank you so much for that.” <br />
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The marketing director who was responsible for publicizing and ultimately moving the units was the master of ceremonies. He was like a mutant cross between a televangelist, an airport lounge lizard, and the futuristically bald, coldly efficient Governor of Florida, Rick Scott. He kept the momentum going in tent-revival fashion as names were called from the raffle, and he praised Bank of America for their stalwart support of the project. He had lived along the Beltline for ten years, he said, and he had been in the real estate business for a while. Never had bankers been easier to deal with. “We’re not going to occupy Bank of America,” he pointedly said. “We’re going to <i>love</i> Bank of America.” <br />
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And the atmosphere was, indeed, a general love-fest. Even as home prices plummet and we have a so-called overabundance of housing with more and more families becoming homeless, Bank of America’s subsidy of the Beltline helps improve its PR while also moving cops, teachers and other lower-to-middle middle class Atlantans into their own homes, thanks to a sizable chunk of financial assistance. The technicalities of the deal ensure that buyers will be compelled to stay in their homes for as long as fifteen years, as a sort of New Urbanist-gentrification era version of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act">Homestead Act</a>; if one sells or tries to rent the unit as an “investment property” in the next decade or so, he or she will have to give back the $60,000 down payment assistance. It is not free money, but it is an advantage to anyone who wants a shot at buying a decent place in an interesting neighborhood and plans on staying put for a while. <br />
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The most striking thing about the experience was that, in the circus/raffle/revival climate of the drawing, almost everyone whose name was called chose a place, even if it was likely not their third, or fourth, or fifth choice. Most seemed enthused to have a chance to buy any place at all, and once they picked a unit—there are a variety of floor plans on three floors, and they were called to the front to make a decision in front of everyone in attendance—they were escorted off into another room to fill out paperwork binding them to their choice. Most people, when making an epic decision about a home and a thirty-year mortgage, may be picky and dawdle and agonize over little details. That was not an option today, as everything in the process was designed to convey a sense of urgency and inevitability to participants. The vast majority of buyers seemed content to pick whatever was left, happy, apparently, to be getting such a deal on any condo in the development—this, in an environment when home prices in the Atlanta metro area continue their seemingly inexorable slide, while the values of condos and townhomes have cratered in particularly devastating fashion. <br />
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Our friend Jeena, however, saw the three units she favored get snapped up in the first couple rounds of selection, and she opted to get on the waitlist for one she really wanted. The enthusiastic bandwagon feeling that came long with downpayment assistance and the dream of joining the Beltline did not necessarily sweep all along its path, no matter how tantalizing the prospect of “free money” (i.e. government and corporate largesse) and urban revitalization might have been for many others. Even in the midst of a continuing real estate meltdown, the Beltline folks achieved the enviable accomplishment of getting almost every unit in a condo development filled in about two hours. The project’s effort to engineer a new middle class enclave along its future light rail managed to turn almost everyone into a willing partner—almost, but not quite. <br />
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What does it all mean, though, in the big picture? The fact is that many of these buyers likely could have found another affordable property somewhere else. Plenty of homes are going unsold in Atlanta, and desperate sellers shave another $5,000 here, $10,000 there for each month that their property remains on the market. This is especially true for the glut of condos in the metro area. Bank of America can claim to be doing something about “the foreclosure crisis” by giving (in effect) an interest-free loan of $60,000 to a handful of buyers in Reynoldstown, but this gesture is not actually stopping any foreclosures or keeping anyone <i>in</i> their homes. <br />
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As for the Beltline and its agenda, the organization has accomplished something good by laying the foundation of a middle class community of homeowners who will likely be committed to the neighborhood—they are all starting there together, at the same time, and they are all tied to it for the foreseeable future. The two police officers and one teacher who had the first three slots reserved for them benefit (though there was certainly a weird sort of tokenism to the special status and attention they received in the process). The Beltline shows that public-private partnerships that unite local, national, corporate, nonprofit, and volunteer energies can do good things for housing and transit. <br />
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I do not want to be the kind of nitpicking naysayer who belittles modest achievements just because they do not solve all the world’s problems, but I do think we should regard such projects with caution—or, at least, we should not let our enthusiasm for them become distracting. Public-private partnerships can do some things well, like getting lower-middle income people into a stylish two bedroom, two bathroom condo in a gentifying community. But they are still people, like my friend, who can keep a roof over their heads one way or another. Like a small number of charter schools that can boast great results with the help of lavish corporate funding, their achievements are difficult to “scale up” because the money is simply not there for anything but a small pilot program that benefits a few people. <br />
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Affordable housing does not just mean homeownership. As far as I know, real public housing is not on the Beltline’s <a href="http://www.beltline.org/AffordableHousing/AffordableHousing/tabid/3716/Default.aspx">agenda</a>, because finding both the financial and the political support for it is probably all too hard. So the people who are most affected by unemployment, foreclosure, and homelessness are not part of the picture, and they will not benefit from the Beltline’s vision (except in a very indirect, long-term sense of benefiting from public transit, oh so many years from now). Again, this is not to detract from the good that the Beltline can and will do. Least of all do I want to belittle the opportunity for working families to gain access to property and build their own assets. But we should also remember that corporate benevolence and “affordable housing” are not going to make shelter a reality for very many people. </div>
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<i>Alex Sayf Cummings</i></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-17100544239494153972011-12-04T19:16:00.001-08:002011-12-05T02:13:59.827-08:00Killing in the Suburbs: The New Suburban Menace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN9hzEq28CWc1cPLwBNZ019oGuLtwD1ZPaJe0NqiGYtb6uLRc6tpf_AS26HrQ7MSMZb3XeBtSf8JnxfrvSrjIBddDd8OE-rlPE_b9B66CYRG_9XK0_w4JOGWOSzrRsEKpcVUI-Be8zYK8/s1600/Arcade-Fire-The-Suburbs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN9hzEq28CWc1cPLwBNZ019oGuLtwD1ZPaJe0NqiGYtb6uLRc6tpf_AS26HrQ7MSMZb3XeBtSf8JnxfrvSrjIBddDd8OE-rlPE_b9B66CYRG_9XK0_w4JOGWOSzrRsEKpcVUI-Be8zYK8/s320/Arcade-Fire-The-Suburbs.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal">You always seemed so sure<br />
That one day we'd be fighting<br />
A suburban war<br />
your part of town against mine<br />
I saw you standing on the opposite shore<br />
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But by the time the first bombs fell<br />
We were already bored<br />
We were already, already bored</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">--- Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs”</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the Spike Jonze directed video for the Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” a group of white adolescent teens bike around their local planned suburban community engaging in the kind of teenage horseplay so commonly associated with bored middle class kids. Despite the stereotypical banality of this suburban existence, Jonze imbues a sense of menace; military units conduct sweeps of various houses placing the suburb’s residents under the watchful eye of government authorities. Shrouded in bright lights and shadows, a tension between two of the boys emerges, ending in one brutally assaulting the other while locked inside a closed fast food restaurant. No one dies, but the spectacle of their three mutual friends watching the beating from outside the glass encased restaurant remains troubling and discomforting. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The odd discomfort of suburban life, as epitomized by the aforementioned Arcade Fire’s 2010 album (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Suburbs</i>), seems to dominate cultural productions. Movies like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Donnie Darko</i> (perhaps more existentialist than most and with a catchy ’80s soundtrack) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Beauty</i> assailed the suburbs for their conformity and underlying hypocrisy. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Better Luck Tomorrow</i> explored the lives of middle class Asian Americans in Southern California, several of whom describe their rather comfortable lives as “hell.” In each, the culmination of the character’s actions results in acts of lethal violence. If movies about inner city life like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Menace to Society</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boyz N the Hood,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Juice</i> portray Black working class existence as a constant maneuvering of potentially life threatening circumstances, suburban dramas like those already mentioned lull viewers to sleep, shocking them to attention with sudden unexpected bursts of white hot violence. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHONxf9jE6ChuTdEkem-ec-t84a-T_wZdVNms8Gx8TcDHPLYsSRfPdtdzKoh-76__v9Tviyo4Yb2XELb05X97PdkcQWhIXJ37lhEBfuMHCsSBda2zIU851PZdOmJZLVHodjPOa5rcQDm0/s1600/donnie_darko_2001_685x385.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHONxf9jE6ChuTdEkem-ec-t84a-T_wZdVNms8Gx8TcDHPLYsSRfPdtdzKoh-76__v9Tviyo4Yb2XELb05X97PdkcQWhIXJ37lhEBfuMHCsSBda2zIU851PZdOmJZLVHodjPOa5rcQDm0/s320/donnie_darko_2001_685x385.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There's violence in them there pages young Donnie</td></tr>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yet, the stereotype of suburban life as the economic “good life”; an ultimately safe if boring homogeneous existence no longer rings true. These examples and others point to a growing unease about suburban existence much different from previous decades. Writers like David Riesman (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lonely Crowd</i>) and William Whyte (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Organization Man</i>) feared the growth of the suburbs not for flashpoints of violence but because of social alienation and the further privatization of American life. Instead today, middle class economic pressures, ranging from steady unemployment to rising health costs to increased college tuition – pervade suburban life. The fall from middle class respectability to a harder scrabble working class reality feels all too real for many suburbanites. Economic insecurities form only part of the broad anxiety afflicting suburbs. Fears over gunplay and like violence – driven by media images like the Columbine Massacre and federal government policies like HOPE VI housing reforms --appear to be rather new considerations that when juxtaposed with traditional conceits about suburbia provide a striking contrast. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">High School Ain’t High School Anymore </b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Walter</b>: I have made a series of very bad decisions and I cannot make another one.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gus</b>: Why did you make these decisions?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Walter</b>: For the good of my family.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gus</b>: Then they weren't bad decisions. What does a man do, Walter? A man provides for his family.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Walter</b>: This cost me my family.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gus</b>: When you have children, you always have family. They will always be your priority, your responsibility. And a man, a man provides. And he does it even when he's not appreciated or respected or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he's a man.</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In a recent <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions">piece</a> for Grantland, writer Chuck Klosterman argued that the A&E drama <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breaking Bad</i> outpaced rivals <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mad Men</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sopranos</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wire</i> for best television show of the last twenty years. For Klosterman, the evolution of the show’s main character Walter White -- from an unassuming and decent but frustrated science teacher to an aggressive and corrupt violent meth cooking prodigy -- stemmed from White’s own decisions. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breaking Bad</i> is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame,” writes Klosterman. “Instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice.” Sure, initially White believed he was dying of cancer so in order to provide for his family, he turned to cooking. However, with the cancer in remission, White never really retreated, instead continuing haltingly, crossing one moral hazard after another. White’s moral corruption, buried beneath the placidness of suburban Albuquerque, proves invisible in this context. His employer Gus, a man as efficiently brutal as he is fastidious, cuts an even more innocuous figure: the proprietor of a chain of fast food chicken restaurants and local philanthropist. Hannah Arendt’s observation regarding the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil">banality of evil</a>” may not be totally analogous here, but it sounds right. Yet, White’s action and those of his boss, in part, stem from the spine of traditional suburban life: the patriarchal household. That White turns to more violent means than observers have grown accustomed to suggests that perhaps the context of suburbia for an increasingly pressured middle class has changed. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeT7_4bOdFNmzQPNQxIf64X0QqFdIUCGj-sVLUzuUcVlECL5rN293H1jyfR8hR99wtBnMzqHgV9NuyEVZCof6uYu7hrlsfwz8Bgl0Z2VFk1pELc4R-7LhG6tOa1Jt2WunjQmWK_IUe3rg/s1600/cropbreaking_bad_lj_242.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeT7_4bOdFNmzQPNQxIf64X0QqFdIUCGj-sVLUzuUcVlECL5rN293H1jyfR8hR99wtBnMzqHgV9NuyEVZCof6uYu7hrlsfwz8Bgl0Z2VFk1pELc4R-7LhG6tOa1Jt2WunjQmWK_IUe3rg/s320/cropbreaking_bad_lj_242.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inside beats the heart of a killer </td></tr>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">White’s meth production serves as the new boogeyman for more than suburbanites. Authors like Philipp Meyer in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Rust</i>, noted the proliferation of meth production and use in small town America and the economic and social consequences cascading from crank. Still, among the decay of steel mill PA, meth seems almost appropriate. Scattered within planned New Mexico suburbs, well that seems less likely. Obviously, the sharp lack of congruity between the image of the suburbs as a boring but safe haven from drugs and violence serves as the main reason that these kinds of stories draw our gaze. However, in recent years, one wonders if suburban realities have changed. To be fair, <i>Breaking Bad’s</i> White embodies the very pressures afflicting middle class families. If not for profits from his meth production, White never gets the cancer treatment he desperately needed and his family would have been bankrupt as he careened toward death. Moreover, White repeats the need for building upon his ill gotten gains to pay for his children’s college tuition. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Unfortunately, <i>Breaking Bad</i>, as far as television goes, remains rather exceptional. It finds ways to address these issues with nuance and style, avoiding pedantics, while still provoking real thought. However, one event in particular, prior to all of the movies, television shows, and songs mentioned here, seems to have impacted how we see suburban life and how it’s conveyed to us. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Colorado Tragedy </b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In his 1992 work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940</i>, (<a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/magicallands">http://videri.wikidot.com/magicallands</a>) John Findlay attempts to unpack the design, layout, and meaning of postwar Western metropolises. Findlay focuses on “magic lands” like Disneyland, Stanford Industrial Park, and the Space Needle, employing them as windows into the larger working of Western suburbanized urbanization. “Magic lands,” like Disneyland or the Seattle Center, provided residents and cities with identifiable landmarks and personalities. Since Western cityscapes often lacked a central business district, residents had to form their own personal social world and cognitive maps “in terms of individual’s particular orbits rather than in terms of fixed places or a single political entity.” (283) As one can imagine, outside of these “magic lands,” this left fewer sites of overlap for fellow residents, meaning how one envisioned their city and the people within it often depended on their particular use of the city. Few spaces provided a common site from which all residents would have a relationship, meaning institutions like schools gained greater social and political currency. In the case of one high school near Littleton, Colorado, its significance ballooned to national proportions. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In 1973, Jeffco county Colorado constructed three high schools. Though few people lived there at the time, officials and local developers expected an influx of newcomers, largely a result of integration policies which led to what journalist Dave Cullen labels an “avalanche of white flight out of Denver.” To be fair, for some the suburbs association with segregation undermined its moral foundation. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier</i>, Joel Garreau addresses this very issue noting that environmentally and racially suburban growth proved problematic, “cars were inherently Evil and our attachment to them Inexplicable; that suburbia was morally wrong – primarily a product of White Flight.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaIKIKzP3CfokLQPfzjFWH-KBBAJbRB25nlmuMC5OlM_4Onp_6oLlJyl2fVj113mA_ErS2uTlhxq8UkO5teDTnbgXyFFf-8QsmmLZFD5qW79nGQyNM7U3djYhQG4wXmfIzcx87M_Thum4/s1600/1101990503_400.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaIKIKzP3CfokLQPfzjFWH-KBBAJbRB25nlmuMC5OlM_4Onp_6oLlJyl2fVj113mA_ErS2uTlhxq8UkO5teDTnbgXyFFf-8QsmmLZFD5qW79nGQyNM7U3djYhQG4wXmfIzcx87M_Thum4/s320/1101990503_400.jpg" width="242" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Outside of Denver, Subdivisions popped up everywhere. The area known as Littleton, a nebulous title applied to a tract of land of 700 square miles, filled up quickly, topping 100,000 by 1995. Fearing government regulation and interference, the 100,000 residents refused incorporation. While the suburb of Littleton sat several miles away “across the South Platte River, in a different county with separate schools and law enforcement,” this new development to the West lacked any real designation or identifying characteristics. “The 100,000 new arrivals filled one continuous suburb with no town center,” writes Cullen, “no main street, no town hall, town library, or town name. No one knew what to call it.” (21) The post office may have slapped Littleton on mailing addresses but few residents identified their town this way. Instead, people tended to gravitate toward the “hub of suburban school life,” high school. This meant that newly refurbished Columbine High School served as the de facto identity and namesake for the 30,000 residents living near it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Columbine’s emergence and the growth of these related neighboring communities also proves illustrative of processes of urbanization that the aforementioned Garreau argues encapsulates America’s late 20<sup>th</sup> century. Garreau dubs places like Irvine, CA and Tyson Corners, VA “Edge Cities”. Multinodal, car oriented, white collar, and decentralized, “Edge Cities”, according to Garreau, serve as the new reality: both suburban and urban. However, despite their technological sophistication, upper income employment, and impenetrable optimism these places lacked history and in turn struggled to build community. Often in places like Irvine, CA, local institutions such as evangelical churches and schools provided a means to create belonging. Though not technically an edge city, Columbine shared many of these characteristics, perhaps increasing its symbolic value in the eyes of horrified observers. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Though for some, the events that unfolded on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School may have receded in personal memory or been overshadowed by the trauma of 9/11, the Columbine Massacre reshaped suburban narratives. Yet, even our public understanding of events there fail to match up to reality. According to media reports, two members of a persecuted goth clique referred to as “the Trench Coat” mafia, tired of being bullied and perhaps ashamed over their closeted homosexuality, targeted jocks, homosexuals (one can assume this motivation was chalked up to self loathing had the two boys been gay), and minorities in a ruthless shooting spree. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCAQqii1bh29-kNVQN582hJAiRuovDhlUjYCAUT-1cKxrn0qyx3DheKflXAAl64QxaAPyQislkNk7cbtoB3doeR9_dA6kHSjy8W4ufC7At81KVEwGNCMp1a2Dckkk0ms2jzTUwa8ivpQ4/s1600/emvideo-youtube-AIyrd6G2790.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCAQqii1bh29-kNVQN582hJAiRuovDhlUjYCAUT-1cKxrn0qyx3DheKflXAAl64QxaAPyQislkNk7cbtoB3doeR9_dA6kHSjy8W4ufC7At81KVEwGNCMp1a2Dckkk0ms2jzTUwa8ivpQ4/s320/emvideo-youtube-AIyrd6G2790.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Elephant</i></td></tr>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In his 2008 work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Columbine</i>, David Cullen blows up this media crafted story, arguing that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were anything but bullied homosexual outcasts. According to Cullen, the two boys enjoyed reasonable popularity, frequently bullied others, and gave no signs of homosexuality. Instead, Cullen found a psychopath (Harris) and depressive (Klebold). The two boys formed what researchers refer to as a dyad, defined as “murderous pairs who feed off one another.” (244) Far from targeting specific groups, Harris and Klebold had hoped to emulate the domestic terrorism of Timothy McVeigh. Fortunately, most of the bombs they had planted failed to ignite, thus, what had originally been designed as a mop up job following detonation, turned in to Harris and Klebold’s sole act of violence: firing on unarmed, terrified high school students. Even when detectives connected the dots and ditched the “targeting theory,” the media refused to let go. “[The Media] saw what happened at Columbine as a shooting and the killers as outcasts targeting jocks,” argued Cullen. “They filtered every new development through that lens.” (124) In fact, generally, when it comes to school shooters, there is no typical attacker. They hail from all “ethnic, economic, and social classes,” notes Cullen. Very few had criminal records or any documented history of violence. What about family dysfunction? Most came from reliable two parent households. The idea of loners suddenly snapping due to emotional instability also proves a myth. “A staggering 93 percent planned their attack in advance,” argues Cullen, who cites a FBI report that suggests “the move toward violence is an evolutionary one with signposts along the way.” (323)</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To be fair, other institutions besides the media failed. Cullen notes the ineptitude of Jeffco Sheriff John Stone who continually made inaccurate pronouncements that media reports magnified, increasing the ignorance and misinformation surrounding the massacre. With this in mind, one might forgive famed filmmaker Gus Van Zant for his 2003 movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Elephant</i>. The film served as Van Zant’s interpretation of Columbine in a leafy Portland setting. Bordering on cinema verite, <i>Elephant</i> eschews professional actors or any real script. The interior lives of characters remain blank slates, though through brief flashbacks, the movie suggests the shooters – Eric and Alex – were bullied by the school’s jocks, enjoyed watching Nazi movies, played violent video games and practiced their marksmanship in the garage. Moreover, just before embarking on their massacre, the two boys shower together, sharing a kiss before dying if you will. When they do execute their Columbine like strike, the shooting itself serves as their main activity, here Van Zant lifts dialogue straight from news reports and the writings of the Columbine pair as Alex instructs Eric “to remember to have fun.” When Eric corners school administrator John Lewis in a hallway, letting him go only to execute Lewis moments later, he leaves the administrator with the following warning, “You know there are others out there like us too, and they will get you if you fuck with them like you did with me and Alex.” An odd warning given to a man that Eric murders in the moment. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYduFhFf_pb98WId0I2y6h0Y9rzYpFyg0AH_a7GFzBcUQdBBuWzYis5qOh6kDnD-TtV8KjTfbvseKqCKzS7Tv3R0rVtwt0X4yHDTOS-fvaYxRsfSO3q-g7SxbmSESzu6jCz34DvEULNKM/s1600/elephant-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYduFhFf_pb98WId0I2y6h0Y9rzYpFyg0AH_a7GFzBcUQdBBuWzYis5qOh6kDnD-TtV8KjTfbvseKqCKzS7Tv3R0rVtwt0X4yHDTOS-fvaYxRsfSO3q-g7SxbmSESzu6jCz34DvEULNKM/s320/elephant-1.jpg" width="224" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Van Zant deserves credit for attempting to deconstruct the events of Columbine. Yet though <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Elephant</i> displays an elegiac beauty and won critical acclaim, the movie gets many of the facts wrong. Eric and Dylan did not purchase their guns over the internet; rather, they convinced a third party, a young girl interested in Dylan to purchase the weapons at a gun show. What about the affect of bullying on the two boys? Hard to say, since neither suffered from it. If anything, the two boys bullied other kids. Moreover, in their private diaries and writings, both expressed sexualities typical of heterosexual teenage boys with few if any signs or even interest in experimentation. For Eric, whom Cullen labels a sociopath, relationships appear to me more about power than actual sex anyway, while Dylan, the depressive, constantly prattled on about girls and “true love.” Perhaps most crucially, as Cullen notes, the shooters never intended Columbine to be a targeted shooting gallery as portrayed in the film, but as noted previously, a terrorist act inspired by Timothy McVeigh and OKC. The broader public’s ignorance of this fact, facilitated by media distortions and misinformation from local law enforcement officials, distorts the meanings attached to the tragedy and established a fundamental misunderstanding of the “new suburban menace.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Some Suburbs do Struggle </b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20 percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.</blockquote></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">-- Hanna Rosin, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/6872/%20%20%20">“American Murder Mystery,”</a> <i>The Atlantic</i>, July/August 2008</div></blockquote><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the July/August 2008 issue of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Atlantic</i>, Hanna Rosin explored the disturbing dynamic of inner ring suburban violence that had emerged in mid-sized metropolitan regions like Memphis, Tennessee, Orlando, Florida, and Reading, Pennsylvania. Increasingly, inner ring suburbs and the mid-sized cities they orbit, reported increasing crime rates and social dysfunction. However, unlike the image of Columbine or the violence offered in movies like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Donnie Darko</i>, crime in these places emerged from the pressures of poverty, new public housing policies, and overwhelmed municipalities. Violent outbursts occurred not because of bullying but the stress of demographics. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjiOjuufG7nlI4GX14iuZif2noM3MKWv8je1Z7GFAM7fqtaszRpf38LcE0HJT5s-k2Fubgrr8cE-8IpxFbU-RurUi-uoXDk4XsyJmb2RUPLp_M5TkpHw7QNurQIN6J58avCFaNfuXQW4o/s1600/memphis1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjiOjuufG7nlI4GX14iuZif2noM3MKWv8je1Z7GFAM7fqtaszRpf38LcE0HJT5s-k2Fubgrr8cE-8IpxFbU-RurUi-uoXDk4XsyJmb2RUPLp_M5TkpHw7QNurQIN6J58avCFaNfuXQW4o/s320/memphis1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">North Memphis Troubles </td></tr>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As has been widely documented by now, federal <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2010/09/hoping-for-housing-hope-vis-ambivalent.html">HOPE VI </a>public housing policies have simply shifted the very crime and poverty that had savaged many inner city communities to “inner ring suburbs.” In cities like Memphis and other mid-size metropolises, poverty reconcentrated itself in these outlying suburbs, resulting in spiking crime rates and unprepared police forces. This proves especially true in urban areas with tight housing markets such as Washington D.C., where crime has bulged into adjacent suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. While HOPE VI succeeded in deconcentrating poverty in many of these inner city neighborhoods, it failed to account for new developments in surrounding suburbs. Now smaller municipalities, never designed or funded to meet the needs of most public housing residents found themselves overwhelmed by their new obligations. Rosin summarized these effects succinctly, “What began as an ‘I Have a Dream’ social crusade has turned into an urban-redevelopment project. Cities fell so hard for the idea of a new, spiffed-up, gentrified downtown that this vision came to crowd out other goals.” Much like Alexander Von Hoffman’s observations several years earlier, (“High Ambitions: The Past and Future of Low Income Housing”, 1996 – it can be googled and downloaded) deconcentrating these pockets of agglomerated poverty sounded good but even under earlier less ambitious programs like Section 8 or the Moving to Opportunity Program, the results proved less convincing. Alienation, lack of transportation, and competition with more qualified suburban workers meant many of these new suburbanites suffered economically, socially, and emotionally. Moreover, for all the evils of inner city public housing, residents formed support networks for child-care, transportation, and sociability; their suburban environs lacked these very necessities. Employment proved no easier as transportation issues, low wages, and even competition with higher income, better educated suburban workers combined to limit opportunity. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">How does this relate to Columbine and the cultural productions that followed in its wake? Columbine continues to overshadow very real developments in America’s suburbs that demand the attention of local and national governments alike. Focusing on Columbine, especially through the myopic lens provided by the media and others, leads observers to think of suburban violence in a very racialized and almost uncontrollable manner. Sure, campaigns against bullying remain noteworthy and undoubtedly deserve to be promoted, but they fail to get at the actual cause of either Columbine or the struggles of inner ring metropolitan suburbs. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The realization that suburban existence by itself will not solve poverty, crime, or violence, regardless of income levels, serves as a useful reminder of the limits of planning. Even in “law abiding” places like Columbine, violence can emerge from the most unlikeliest of sources. The privileging of suburbia for suburbia’s sake no doubt has absorbed some hits. Additionally, as the riots in the French suburbs illustrated, American ideas of suburban life and the growing untidy reality seem to have more in common with European metropolitan regions. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTcVdVKFZt3VvQCbp8WdD_VMrsPQBmAPp6jv8E272gVkGsAGXsWNSZ8VoluPrdXdbIiPvJzleA-OnNTPt7IrFgXdmPfLCj7mC4HxyEa1J9ASC51LyGXla7j8b11fEAXtHkgSKiBlcDf6k/s1600/american_beauty_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTcVdVKFZt3VvQCbp8WdD_VMrsPQBmAPp6jv8E272gVkGsAGXsWNSZ8VoluPrdXdbIiPvJzleA-OnNTPt7IrFgXdmPfLCj7mC4HxyEa1J9ASC51LyGXla7j8b11fEAXtHkgSKiBlcDf6k/s1600/american_beauty_2.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In his 2003 work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire Falls</i>, acclaimed writer of New Hampshire mill town life, Richard Russo employed the very Columbine like trope discussed here in his novel’s conclusion. The daughter of main character Miles Roby, finds herself amidst a violent high school outburst by an emotionally disturbed student she had attempted to befriend. Of course, Russo frames the violence much in the vein of Columbine, a twisted deranged white kid from a dysfunctional family snaps, plunging into a school-shooting spree. In this way, Russo suggests that the kind of suburban violence of bullying and alienation proves pervasive, oozing into the lives of more rural populations. Though school shootings had long been in decline, including at the time of the Columbine Massacre, the violent, mentally ill adolescent male shooter remains the primary avatar of suburban violence. This kind of dominant image does very little to solve the very issues that drive real and increasing violence and social dysfunction in inner ring suburbs. Instead, we focus on the neurosis of white male angry suburbanites, thus marginalizing communities that have found themselves actual victims of the new suburban menace. It also obscures very real economic and social pressures buffeting middle class suburbanites of all colors and ethnicities. Sure, the Columbine Tragedy, much like 9/11, led to significant changes in how we monitor or police high schools and their students. This has been on the whole positive, but one day we all graduate and whose to say where these social and economic pressures take us then.<br />
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<div style="text-align: right;"><i>Ryan Reft</i> </div></div>less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-83604919414795215332011-11-28T05:31:00.000-08:002011-11-28T09:24:56.642-08:00Bergman on Mars: Lars von Trier's Melancholia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://anagitationofmind.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/kirsten-dunst-in-melancholia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="146" src="http://anagitationofmind.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/kirsten-dunst-in-melancholia.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">On the way out of Lars von Trier’s new film <i>Melancholia</i>, a slightly dazed patron asked me and my friends what the whole thing was about. “It was about a director who’s a depressed asshole and wanted to make a movie about himself,” I said. Well, I got that, the man replied. But what else was it about?<br />
<br />
“Everything and nothing” is a tempting answer. One can see it as an expression of von Trier’s own crippling depression, embodied in the spectacle of a limp, lifeless Kirsten Dunst being dragged to and draped on the bathtub by her patient sibling (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The director’s wife has said that such scenes were based on her own experience of dealing with her husband’s debilitating angst. It could be seen as an ode to the films of Ingmar Bergman, such as <i>Persona</i> and <i>The Silence</i>, along with other bright/dark sibling binaries throughout film and literature (more on this later). It could also be seen as an allegory of ecological catastrophe, as it depicts humanity blindly fumbling, despite its best science, into an event that destroys life on Earth. Although von Trier does not seem like the kind of director to bonk audiences over the head with a climate change message movie, it is easy to interpret the film in this light.<br />
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What we do have is an ambitious, rigidly despondent, self-consciously and overbearingly important film about the end of the world. I have avoided von Trier’s movies ever since Breaking the Waves first set critics’ hearts alight, as the director’s well-known penchant for grinding fatalism and human degradation never seemed like my idea of time well spent. Yet the von Trier embargo met its match in <i>Melancholia</i>’s audacious premise—a mysterious planet is discovered that was “hiding behind the sun” and is now somehow hurtling toward Earth, leaving various depressed humans to contemplate the possibility of their absolute annihilation. I have a weakness for tales of the apocalypse, and Melancholia promised to go all-in in a way most other films and novels did not—not simply by ending the world with a nuclear holocaust or disease or some other calamity that makes the world uninhabitable for human life, but actually destroying the Earth by smashing it into another planet—sundering the ground rules that seem the most unalterable, like the orbits of planets. Go big or go home.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="http://cdn.buzznet.com/media-cdn/jj1/headlines/2011/04/alexander-skarsgard-kirsten-dunst-melancholia-trailer.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://cdn.buzznet.com/media-cdn/jj1/headlines/2011/04/alexander-skarsgard-kirsten-dunst-melancholia-trailer.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The first part of the film consists of a wedding party a la <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2010/07/benetton-dreams-multicultural-world-of.html"><i>Rachel Getting Married</i></a>—all awkwardness and simmering resentments and dynamics of dysfunction, with John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, and Charlotte Rampling turning in excellent performances as the self-interested atoms that orbit the sisters Dunst and Gainsbourg. Throughout, Dunst tries to disguise the fact that she regards her new husband as a good-natured dunce and the rest of her family and friends as conceited hobbits who refuse to recognize that she is staring into the abyss. No one comprehends her deep fear and dread, and few can even cope with it. In the second part of the film, Dunst is divorced, unemployed, and completely incapable of basic day-to-day function, coming to the country estate of her sister’s rich husband (Keifer Sutherland) to convalesce from severe depression. But the arrival of the mysterious “fly-by” planet is slated for a few days from then; know-it-all aristocrat Sutherland assures everyone that the best scientists are convinced the planet will come close to Earth but not collide with it.<br />
<br />
It is a bit of a flip of the climate change script, then, since the scientific community today is certain that ecological crisis is likely to make human life much more difficult to sustain but most of us go about our business as if this is not the case. In <i>Melancholia</i>, the scientists (according to Sutherland, the voice of masculine science and rationality, anyway) expect that humanity will dodge the bullet. That astronomy and physics and the Pentagon and NASA could be not-quite-sure whether a gigantic planet headed our direction would simply graze the Earth or destroy it is hard to believe—part of the suspension of disbelief, perhaps, includes accepting that an evil nemesis of the Earth had been floating around our very own solar system yet somehow eluded detection. The isolation of the family in their rural manor seems to make the absurdity of this unpredicted demise more believable. The viewer senses that the family has little contact with a world that should have been girding itself for a possible apocalypse.<br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.trisickle.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/melancholia-movie3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://www.trisickle.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/melancholia-movie3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As a result, von Trier is able to let the film unfold as the characters’ unique, idiosyncratic responses not just to their own mortality but the entire erasure of human existence. Dunst goes from being a dysfunctional depressive to a kind of calm prophet of the meaningless void—once a bride who was terrified of life, she becomes enchanted with the fast-approaching planet that promises total destruction, the cessation of life. “We are alone,” she declares in her new role as Cassandra—a character who is somehow endowed with supernatural powers of awareness and insight but who also expresses total certainty that there is no God, no meaning, no consciousness anywhere else in the universe. “Life on earth is evil,” she says, and it needs to be destroyed. As the sensible sister and responsible mother, Gainsbourg is unmoved by the assertion that all life ought to be destroyed, yet the filmmaker gives every indication that Dunst the nihlist has the better part of the argument.<br />
<br />
Most end-of-the-world movies are about mortality writ large. They force characters to rethink the value of every moment, as in the familiar hypothetical, “What would you do you would do if you knew you only had a day to live?” Often, the prospect of the end prompts characters to strike out in daring ways, getting ordinary people to do extraordinary things that everyday life otherwise would not allow (<i>Armageddon</i>, <i>Deep Impact</i>, <i>2012</i>).</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In this case, Dunst’s character takes to lying naked in the forest at night, bathed in the glow of her bewitching suitor, the only thing in the universe that seems to understand her. Her love for the planet Melancholia appears to be the perfect synthesis of death and sex, an exclamation point on von Trier’s message that death is preferable to life. Death is honest and certain, but life is full of deception and contingency. Another film that tapped into a similar sense of dread was Alfonso Cuarón’s <i>Children of Men</i> (2006), yet that movie buzzed with a reverence for life, arguably espousing a kind of pro-life, pro-family message—a world without the sound of children playing was a dreary and destructive one indeed, and any prospect that life may go on was a cause for cheer.<br />
<br />
Not so in <i>Melancholia</i>. The whole idea of introducing more lives and consciousnesses into this ecologically, socially, politically, morally fucked world seems to be a fool’s errand at best, a malicious deceit at worst. The script’s near-total disregard for the only child in the film, who blankly stumbles from one seriously disturbing family/ontological crisis to the next, underscores this general indifference toward the future. (“The future,” of course, is a bourgeois conceit.)<br />
<br />
Other apocalyptic films have also handled the prospect of species-wide mortality differently. Don McKellar’s <i>Last Night</i> (1998), for instance, refused to engage the question of why the world was ending at all, in much the same way as <i>Melancholia</i> eschews specifics; it was known and accepted by all that the world was going to end at midnight on a certain night, with no need to explain to viewers why this was happening. Yet the characters in the film sought to make the most of life while it lasted, each in his or her different ways, with sex or drugs or music or family. <br />
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In contrast, Dunst’s character does not hesitate to tell her sister, who has tirelessly cared for her despite nonstop intransigence and total disregard, that her wish to drink wine and await the end in the courtyard is “shit.” In the face of annihilation, it’s not only art and religion and science that lose their relevance—so do compassion, reciprocity, and basic human decency. Such qualities mattered little to Dunst earlier in the film, before the end of humanity became apparent, and they count for nothing at all once the end is near. Mortality provides a pretext for regarding all humane considerations as meaningless piffle—a take that might look like a good bargain for a fatally depressed narcissicist like the director.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://i721.photobucket.com/albums/ww215/magicworksofib/Films/Persona%201966/persona-30.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="http://i721.photobucket.com/albums/ww215/magicworksofib/Films/Persona%201966/persona-30.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Von Trier, of course, is dipping deep into the well of Bergmania for the film, which gradually transposes Dunst and Gainsbourg’s blonde/brunette/destructive/responsible binary over the course of the story, as Dunst’s melodramatic depression mutates into an embrace of the apocalypse, even as Gainsbourg’s composure starts to fray. The transformation evokes Bergman’s 1966 avant-garde classic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28film%29"><i>Persona</i></a>, in which a similar light/dark duo morph into each other in the course of sexual psychodrama. Bergman’s hallmarks of dread, bitterness, family dysfunction, oppressive close-up shots of brooding and agonized faces, clear contrasts of dark and light (clothes, hair, décor), all are present here, in a kind of sci-fi marriage of <i>Persona</i> and contemporary ecological anxieties.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3295/3150737459_f011b3ff6c.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="290" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3295/3150737459_f011b3ff6c.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/images/05/cteq/winter_light.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Curiously, <i>Melancholia</i> seems to recall an altogether more grounded Bergman picture at least as much as <i>Persona</i>. <i>Winter Light</i> was the second in the faith trilogy that included <i>Through a Glass Darkly</i> and <i>The Silence</i>, and Bergman considered it the best of his films. This understated, 1963 character study followed Tomas, a Swedish minister who could not shake his own doubts about the existence of God and the prospect of nuclear annihilation. When a congregant comes to Tomas to discuss his worries of an atomic war, the pastor could not help but admit that he had no answers—he could not really believe in God, because people’s cruelty to one another was impossible to explain otherwise. <br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/images/05/cteq/winter_light.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/images/05/cteq/winter_light.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The same cold, godless, unfeeling world may appear in both <i>Winter Light</i> and <i>Melancholia</i>, yet the protagonist in the former struggles to square his gut feeling with the beliefs he wishes to have about the world, and his own desire to help others. In <i>Melancholia</i>, Dunst’s character thinks only of herself—her own lack of nurturing or attention from her mother and father, her fear, her dread, her superior knowledge of the meaninglessness of life, which she is all too happy to dispense to her suffering sister, because the consequences just don’t matter. Characters do not need to be likable, and they certainly do not need to be responsible or considerate—but von Trier fails by giving his characters only the agenda of reinforcing his sackcloth pessimism. He may be aping Bergman in many ways, but he does not seem to feel a need to pause long enough to give his characters any sense of responsibility, guilt, or moral depth that would force them to contemplate the meaning of their actions, even in the face of the ultimate extinction of Earth and the human race. Meaning, ultimately, is just a luxury—superfluous, fleeting, and not worth making Really Important Films™ about.<br />
<br />
All that said, <i>Melancholia</i> still means something. Its creator may insist that the abyss is the only thing worth staring into, but at least he offers the viewer a lovely abyss to look at. Early on, when Dunst’s simple-minded groom tries to cheer her up on their wedding night by talking about an orchard he had just bought, where they can sit under an apple tree whenever she’s “feeling sad,” it’s clear that he just doesn’t get it. Sitting beneath a tree in a pastoral landscape and watching the sun set is not the sort of thing that does much for Dunst or the director. The beauty of the natural world cannot not provide a happiness, even a fleeting one, in the face of unremitting misery and inevitable destruction. The world von Trier creates on the screen suits this morbid attitude beautifully—the film’s ominous tone is unrelenting, towering, intimidating, and sticks with the viewer long after viewing. His Earth is creepy and sinister, where everything from the horses to the forest to the palatial estate where the characters live (Sweden’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjol%C3%B6holm_Castle">Tjolöholm Castle</a>) feels imbued with a malevolent spirit. <br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZzVyU_TBj1GmENP90NZcx4_xJqKyh_WwNws-RlJZHKxvDfjALuWxDbx6CI9euDo2kGx4EKgkjMN3uAAc7uwp8Ti9DIGlmsjBTUIodDpiletqOxb1-7nBSFuhhTLbhPK5f8VI6dGHcwU38/s1600/melancholia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZzVyU_TBj1GmENP90NZcx4_xJqKyh_WwNws-RlJZHKxvDfjALuWxDbx6CI9euDo2kGx4EKgkjMN3uAAc7uwp8Ti9DIGlmsjBTUIodDpiletqOxb1-7nBSFuhhTLbhPK5f8VI6dGHcwU38/s400/melancholia.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The evilness of this world is hard to shake. Though Dunst insists that “life is only on Earth, and not for long,” with no other consciousness anywhere else to redeem it, some other kind of dark force is palpable in the film. There appears to be something else there, even though the characters reject any transcendent beauty or purpose in a lonely, empty universe. It is a haunted world, without anything to haunt it. Along with Dunst and Gainsbourg’s carefully observed performances, this unsettling vision of the Earth nearly offsets the film’s leaden pace and the burden of its own self-importance. Almost.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: right;"> <i>Alex Sayf Cummings</i></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-87316225942902129402011-11-22T06:45:00.000-08:002011-11-22T06:58:25.582-08:00Nazis, Boxers and Fish Dicks: Ned Beauman's Noir<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wRoxO3mZUGM/Tb717idibyI/AAAAAAAAAFs/R409191RURc/s1600/boxer-beetle-ned-beauman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wRoxO3mZUGM/Tb717idibyI/AAAAAAAAAFs/R409191RURc/s320/boxer-beetle-ned-beauman.jpg" width="199" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I am a bit of a sucker for “first” novels. There is something about the unbridled sense of possibility that a “new” author brings to the reading experience: a new voice, a new pair of eyes to slide behind and view the world. There is no “sophomore slump” to consider, no depressing self-parodying nonsense that so many bloated and self-important literary masters sadly descend into after years of unabashed praise and excess. It is a sublime comfort to me to know that at this moment, there are thousands of angry young men and women pecking away at their laptops, pouring their rage and frustration and romance out onto the screen, one hard-earned word at a time. Out of these thousands, a few talented handful will produce something new and beautiful, and I, as a reader, will get to be a part of this creation a few years and months down the line. Just like that, I am forever changed in the tiniest of ways, as the lens of my perception is altered and widened ever so slightly. It is experiences like these that make wading through acres of interminable fluff and derivative nonsense worth the effort. When one finds a gem spun by a new voice, it’s like discovering a part of you that has been color blind, and the spectrum has suddenly been widened. So it was due to my “First Timer” fetish that I stumbled upon a corker of a debut novel entitled <i>Boxer, Beetle</i> by Ned Beauman. This is Beauman’s debut work (he was born in 1985, friends; pardon me while I bang my head against the wall) and has attracted quite a bit of attention among critics.<br />
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The structure of <i>Boxer, Beetle</i> is common enough. It is essentially a mystery told from the first person perspective of Kevin “Fishy” Broom, a modern day private detective who gets sucked into the circumstances surrounding his employer’s murder. As Fishy unravels the mystery, the reader is treated to his discovery in the form of a flashback narrative involving a WWII era expert in eugenics named Philip Erskine and his muse- (both scientifically and romantically) a five-foot tall, nine toed East London boxer named Seth “Sinner” Roach.<br />
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<i>Boxer, Beetle</i> has been labeled a “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7975606/Boxer-Beetle-by-Ned-Beauman-review.html">politically</a> <a href="http://brodartvibe.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/boxer-beetle-by-ned-beauman/">incorrect</a>” novel, which is simply a marketing gimmick that does the book and all of its moral complexities no justice. The modern day protagonist, Fishy, is a collector of Nazi memorabilia. Dr. Erskine is an unapologetic anti-Semite, and his pursuit of the practice of Eugenics is deeply rooted in both racism and classism so deeply ingrained in his character that he is barely aware of it. Seth “Sinner” Roach is a Jew who uncomfortably (at least to a twenty first century reader) embodies many of the unfortunate stereotypes perpetuated by the Fascists of his era. As the reader makes his way through the first quarter of the novel, there may be a certain amount of squirming as this ugliness begins to play itself out. It is at this point that Beauman begins to lay out a deeper and more complex study of what is exactly going on in these lives.<br />
<span style="color: white;">..</span><br />
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Dr. Erskine’s obsession with Eugenics, for example, is merely a manifestation of his own sense of self-loathing. His urge to “purify” the human race by selective breeding is merely an extension of his own sense of shame at his own perceived short-comings. Sinner, who is perceived as a genetic anomaly (he has nine toes, and despite being only five feet tall, is a viciously accomplished boxer) is a crude and foul-mouthed degenerate among a cast of “upper crust” socialites, and yet he is remarked upon by more than one character as being a creature of extraordinary beauty. He is also a homosexual, a fact which causes him no amount of confusion in self-recrimination. This is in direct contrast to Erskine, who’s fascination with Sinner (and desire to weed out ‘undesirable’ traits in the human condition) can be traced back to the very simple fact that he is himself gay, and deeply infatuated with Sinner. The modern day hero, “Fishy,” is called so because he suffers from a condition called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylaminuria">trimethylaminuria</a>, a condition that causes him to smell like rotten fish. The connection to his unfortunate genetic condition and Dr. Erskine’s obsession with genetic purity is interesting only in the sense that Fishy seems wholly at ease with who he is, as opposed to Erskine’s general cluelessness about his own motivations.<br />
<br />
The murder-mystery plot that binds the whole novel together is interesting and well planned, but like all great stories, it only serves as a device of illumination. Through it, the author shines a light on the weirdest corners and back alleys of the human condition wherein desires and self-loathing push to and fro towards awful and ludicrous enterprises. It is then that we can really see what Fishy has known since the novel’s first few pages: “You can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away.”</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Highly recommended.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: right;"><i>Amy Heishman</i></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-78796436797146809412011-11-10T11:37:00.000-08:002011-11-13T23:03:20.666-08:00Steel Dreams and Rusted Nightmares: Remembering Small Town Industrial America<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB37Xkz89i20RdVDNt5CmRSj45A9TnzH4spqsXIMHIzKsljG-ODfa-ThQ3Kd_Kt9kEk8OSZUJuwMcRaH-Qz81gtT5EM7IvpkkgNRr9BWOw0TKcBCWdCv27ljA2tCepBXBgU4OOiBc5Cdg/s1600/benton-steel-1928-530x353.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB37Xkz89i20RdVDNt5CmRSj45A9TnzH4spqsXIMHIzKsljG-ODfa-ThQ3Kd_Kt9kEk8OSZUJuwMcRaH-Qz81gtT5EM7IvpkkgNRr9BWOw0TKcBCWdCv27ljA2tCepBXBgU4OOiBc5Cdg/s320/benton-steel-1928-530x353.jpg" /></a></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ralph went out lookin' for a job but he couldn't find none </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">He came home too drunk from mixin' Tanqueray and wine </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call him Johnny 99 </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Down in the part of town where when you hit a red light you don't stop </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Johnny's wavin' his gun around and threatenin' to blow his top </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When an off-duty cop snuck up on him from behind </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Out in front of the Club Tip Top they slapped the cuffs on Johnny 99</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> - </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9VZFyLQzok" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Johnny 99”</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Released in 1982, Bruce Springsteen’s <i>Nebraska</i> remains one of his singular works. Even hipsters, many of whom dismiss Springsteen as maudlin, overly earnest and devoid of irony, lay claim to the ascetic, dark album it embodied. Stripped down to its basic essentials, <i>Nebraska</i> deconstructs the American dream, portraying a rusting American economy suffering deindustrialization and rising social dysfunction. The album’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS28SrKEL68&feature=related">title song</a></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> relates the tale of a small town American couple gone on a Bonnie and Clyde killing spree (inspired by Terrance Malick’s movie </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069762/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>Badlands</i>).</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> The violence of their acts explained succinctly to the presiding judge by the male killer: “I guess there is just a meanness in this world.” The above quoted “Johnny 99” recounted the actions of a laid off mill worker, drunk on “Tanqueray and wine.” Facing sentencing, Johnny 99 appeals for a special brutal mercy: execution. Why? Johnny lays out his reasoning fairly simply "judge I had debts no honest man could pay/The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away." None of this made Johnny innocent, but as the distraught former plant worker lamented, "it was more `n all this that put that gun in my hand." </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Without a doubt, the protagonists of <i>Nebraska</i> express a stark despair. In </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3eu1gW-bQ8&ob=av3e" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Atlantic City,”</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> the speaker once again alludes to crushing debt (again, "I got debts no honest man can pay.") and the kind of desperation that results in acts of illegality.</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now, I been lookin' for a job, but it's hard to find </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Down here it's just winners and losers and don't </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">get caught on the wrong side of that line </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Well, I'm tired of comin' out on the losin' end </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So, honey, last night I met this guy and I'm gonna </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">do a little favor for him</span></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-lFBJw9takYdnA_jP9EhllMyMicadqsajPuiXWJXZ28Wxx7bNvxc4l1QjeHfvtpNYKaqMf798DNRsvMkyBlX3Wg_fCBn68HKBLYwdAfvktADkG2LOSZ_elLa5znIMMqgeoaAiuvXqOmo/s1600/bruce_springsteen_-_nebraska-front.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-lFBJw9takYdnA_jP9EhllMyMicadqsajPuiXWJXZ28Wxx7bNvxc4l1QjeHfvtpNYKaqMf798DNRsvMkyBlX3Wg_fCBn68HKBLYwdAfvktADkG2LOSZ_elLa5znIMMqgeoaAiuvXqOmo/s320/bruce_springsteen_-_nebraska-front.jpg" /></a> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Darker than a hipster's heart </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Beginning with <i>Darkness on the Edge of Town</i> (1978), continuing through <i>Nebraska</i> (1982) and <i>Born in the USA</i> (1984), Springsteen tracked the decline of working class American life, simultaneously damning the industrial labor that forced his father and his father’s father into mills and steel factories while also lamenting the disappearance of this kind of employment. The emergence of violence in rural areas and Pennsylvania.- Ohio –New Jersey mill towns served as subject matter for Springsteen and movies like </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085154/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>All the Right Moves</i></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (1983) . So if deindustrial decline seemed novel in 1982, why do new fictional works like </span><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Rust-Novel-Philipp-Meyer/dp/0385527519" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">American Rust</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (2009) and </span><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Falls-Richard-Russo/dp/0375726403" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Empire Falls</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (2002) receive critical acclaim for essentially covering similar territory? What makes these novels exceptional given that they were both written twenty years after the decline of American steel and mill towns had already served as backdrop for a tom cruise high school football movie? </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI6cWhIRXME5sgd3Jv47XMDWxuwobgT-kZMPztluN_nIwrMBI2ceHaRdc3p2Vg0H7G5Ky-vRruoPiSPN3rYo4aorURe_A4hXkScgxFezKpBepMVKkB2dlG2Y_brHnlvZEsdEAxU1SYrKA/s1600/BethlehemSteel.png" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI6cWhIRXME5sgd3Jv47XMDWxuwobgT-kZMPztluN_nIwrMBI2ceHaRdc3p2Vg0H7G5Ky-vRruoPiSPN3rYo4aorURe_A4hXkScgxFezKpBepMVKkB2dlG2Y_brHnlvZEsdEAxU1SYrKA/s1600/BethlehemSteel.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Mill Town Life</b> </span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Well, I'm living here in Allentown</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And it's hard to keep a good man down</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But I won't be getting up today</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> -- Billy Joel, “Allentown” (1982)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Few cities remain tragically fixed in popular memory like Pittsburgh, PA. Though Pittsburgh adjusted to industrial decline by engaging universities, hospitals, and tech firms as means to rebuild the City of Champions’ economy, many people retain the sad pollution filled images of struggling steel workers amid 1970s stagflation and deindustrialization. This kind of historical memory did not confine itself to large metropolises like Pittsburgh but included smaller towns ringing metropolitan areas like Detroit and the aforementioned capital of Western Pennsylvania. The fate of countless steel towns dotting the Pittsburgh regional landscape drew plenty of negative attention. In addition to movies like All the Right Moves, noted former boxer turned 1980s crooner, Billy Joel also took a stand. Joel reflected bitterly on the fate of these industrial nodes in the song </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Allentown”</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (1982). </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">(Editor’s note: you have to check out the </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">video</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">. Favorite scene? The workers showering after a hard day, obviously. When one worker exits the shower, his boss immediately presents him with his pink slip. Leading to nude discontent among his still showering peers. It defies logic but it tastes like pure 80's.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> The song opens with a matter of fact statement of struggle: </span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Well we're living here in Allentown</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And they're closing all the factories down</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Out in Bethlehem they're killing time</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Filling out forms</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Standing in line.</span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">For their parents, life had been different. Their fathers had come back from the war, vacationed on the Jersey Shore, and danced with their future wives at USO events. However, the steady pay of steel mills and coal mines faded in late 1970s America, such that the narrator concludes that the Allentown described by their parents existed in a Pennsylvania “we never found.” Joel’s attempt at social commentary won him a top twenty hit in 1982. Apparently, depressing stories about unemployed miners and steel workers set to a catchy mid tempo melody stirs something in the American soul. Even Allentown’s own residents eventually greeted Joel warmly. Allentown’s mayor registered her opinion simply, “Allen town is a gritty song about a gritty city.” In a 1983 appearance Joel returned the favor when he told the audience, “</span><a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20084021,00.html" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Don’t take any shit from anybody.</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">” Inspiring words from one of Long Island’s finest performers. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrdHx503j1rmGA_aIzhRGhBitwq6JggyDHdwJStuBc2KhRI2p7wHvoRcQx_5cZOK51rXrSRoWvnxNWAAxC4kd1TcrinfjVjW6Z3wy5SxsvSwQ0GOrxoEdbnYVJITJbz3wHdXTr2HKAXIo/s1600/9780385527521.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrdHx503j1rmGA_aIzhRGhBitwq6JggyDHdwJStuBc2KhRI2p7wHvoRcQx_5cZOK51rXrSRoWvnxNWAAxC4kd1TcrinfjVjW6Z3wy5SxsvSwQ0GOrxoEdbnYVJITJbz3wHdXTr2HKAXIo/s320/9780385527521.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Much like Allentown, Buell Pennsylvania, the setting for Philipp Meyer’s <i>American Rust</i>, struggles to keep its bearings amid debilitating economic decline. Meyer’s protagonists (the story has several as its told from six different viewpoints) must deal with the reverberations of the kind of violence that has come to grip Buell and other neighboring towns. The unlikely young duo of failed high school football hero Billy Poe and the town’s intellectual bright light but social misfit Isaac English stumble into an act of violence facilitated by the very failure of the local steel mill. Sheriff Bud Harris, on again off again paramour of Billy’s mother Grace Poe, represents the only force left in Buell not driven narrowly by economics. Yet, Harris saw Buell and the surrounding valley for what it was, a shadow of its former self.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Valley’s population was growing again but incomes were still going down, budgets still getting smaller, and no money had been put into infrastructure in for decades. They had small town budgets and big town problems … The week before a man had been shot in the face in broad daylight in Monessen. It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, they way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night. (<i>AR</i>, 120)</span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In general critics hailed Meyer as an exciting new writer in vein of Richard Russo or Russel Banks capturing “the emotional verisimultude” of declining rural towns in Upstate New York (Russo's <i>Empire Falls</i>) and downstate New Hampshire (Banks). <i>New York Times</i> literary critic </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/books/27book.html" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Michiko Kakutani</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> summarized Buell much like <i>American Rust</i>’s aforementioned Harris. Kakutani described Buell as “a place where the jobs have disappeared, and foreclosures and meth use are on the rise, a town that makes longtime residents feel trapped and young people eager to flee, the sort of town profiled in newspaper and magazine articles about the fallout of the economic downturn on middle America and the tarnishing of the American Dream.” </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Within this matrix of economic depression, unsurprisingly no force divides Buell like class. Throughout the novel, characters reflect on their hardscrabble lives, denigrating those they believe have experienced social mobility in ways they disapprove. Some in town blame its dysfunction on the “HUD people”, an allusion to Buell’s public housing. Still, most have come to see the town for what it has become. Harris discusses the local economic and social decline with fellow residents at the town bar. Some locals seem internally divided personally and collectively. Initially, Chester, an acquaintance of Harris argues there is more than public housing to blame. “We could walk three blocks in any direction and score whatever we wanted,” commented Chester, “No offense to Johnny Law, he’d need about three hundred guys to get this place under control. So you can’t expect kids to grow up here and not do dumbass shit.” (<i>AR</i>, 276) Yet, a few moments later government owned housing serves as an easy scapegoat, “Aside from all the HUD people … this is still a good place to live.” (<i>AR</i>, 276) </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWdMWLDjatWMms1CU8QDkaL1BswZSrnxFl_qF105Ly_wmhneGFKD-jRTYYtCtJs_EDMUy7zpZXpPKYanRpK4GGIiXrDNTd02ok8U220-fKkJUIgCoepMIM47hvoqstZOGOaEKIvcHKnFY/s1600/Darkow_Mon_Edit-1000_5-16_t300.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWdMWLDjatWMms1CU8QDkaL1BswZSrnxFl_qF105Ly_wmhneGFKD-jRTYYtCtJs_EDMUy7zpZXpPKYanRpK4GGIiXrDNTd02ok8U220-fKkJUIgCoepMIM47hvoqstZOGOaEKIvcHKnFY/s1600/Darkow_Mon_Edit-1000_5-16_t300.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">What about America’s long storied tradition of local kid doing right, scraping through university to emerge the other side a solid middle class citizen? In the semi coherent words of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Spicoli" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Jeff Spicoli</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, “No Shirt, No Shoes, No dice.” College won’t save Buell townies. Those who completed college find their jobs outsourced. Frank, another Harris acquaintance reflected on this dynamic noting that “those people didn’t have much sympathy for us twenty years ago, I can remember it was asshole after asshole going on TV and saying it was our faults for not going to college.” (<i>AR</i>, 274) </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To be honest, this reader found <i>American Rust</i> a bit pedantic. Granted, T of M’s founders admit to being horrible writers of fiction. Organizing a work as complex as <i>American Rust</i> demands a skill set that many, including this reviewer lack. Yet, while Meyer deserves praise for his attempt, there are moments where whole passages sound less like honest discussions then political statements. When former football star, Billy Poe reflects on the American economy circa 2000 one wonders where he drew such insight. “There would be no record, nothing left standing , to show that anything had ever been built in America,” reflected Poe, “It was going to cause big problems he didn’t know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, even this big, that didn’t make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually” (<i>AR</i>, 289) Philosophical words from a character defined by impulsive rage, self-loathing and resentment, but not really intelligence. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In fact, the novel’s most arresting passages don’t occur in Buell. Instead, many of <i>American Rust</i>’s most insightful moments occur during Poe’s stay in jail. Though Meyer refracts prison through the experience of the white Poe, an atypical approach considering the disproportionate numbers of black and brown inmates, he effectively illustrates the between a rock and a hard place existence of incarceration. Throughout his ordeal, which ends in his stabbing, Poe’s experiences effectively convey the severe racism of prison. When told he must attack a correction’s officer that has run afoul of the prison’s white supremacist group in order to stay under their protection, Poe hesitates, but eventually agrees. Fellow inmate Dwayne lays it out simply:</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Alright,” he said to Dwayne, “I’m in.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Whatever else, too. You want me to stab the guy, whatever. Sometimes it just takes me a while to think.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“I was the same way,” Dwayne said. “Took me a while to accept what was happening.” (AR, 252)</span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Poe and Dwayne’s interaction could be simple subtext for the same predicament that Buell and like cities found themselves. To his credit, Meyer does a good job inserting the kind of tragedies these mill towns endured due to structural economic change. Any anti-New Right reader will enjoy passages that skewer the deregulation of the 1980s. The reflections of former steel worker and father of Isaac English, Henry serve as one example. Broken down and disabled by a brutal mill accident years earlier, Henry’s life remains a daily struggle just to get dressed in the morning. The tension between his need for care in an institutionalized home which he resists by tethering Isaac to Buell, and his self dignity provides a clear vision of Meyer’s ability to convey the emotional interiority of his characters. In one memorable scene, Henry thinks back to the bargain he and others struck with his employers:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">At first he hadn't minded being nonunion, like Reagan said, the labor costs were out of control, it was a problem with unions, you voted for him. Except it was not just that. Penn Steel hadn't spent a dime in their factories in fifteen years, most of the other big American mills were the same, the places were all falling apart, plenty of them were single process right up to the day they closed, whereas the Germans and Japs hadn't all been running basic oxygen since the sixties. That was what you didn't hear till later: they -- the Japs and Germans -- were always sinking money into their plants. They were always investing in new infrastructure, they were always investing in themselves. Meanwhile Penn Steel never invested a dime in its mills, guaranteed its own downfall. And all those welfare state, Germany and Sweden, they still made plenty of steel. (<i>AR</i>, 348) </span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Despite the fact that his own accident had been facilitated by shoddy maintenance and clear violations of OSHA standards the company only had to pay a 30,000 dollar penalty. Two men dead and another permanently crippled. Henry’s memories of the incident serve as some of Meyers best writing in the novel. Meyer pounds home the message that America’s recession from an economy with a healthy manufacturing sector has had spiraling social costs. The novel’s strongest and most arresting narrative arcs occur in its latter half. Poe’s incarceration and Henry English’s pained existence illustrate men at opposite ends of the generational spectrum forced into choices with equally dim outcomes. Each makes a decision and each knowingly pays a price. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidfD1xJcQIyrRglH-hfSRauEHGwmp5awL9C3ofleVTVptTdJmfOly5VTt1VjqL7bUV_ltskL5jGw9vbczvbS4qEcs1q35-8i4YtoX-HjhZcU_wl9LXk_6D9dH1tB3bHUlLbXNAdbnwsA0/s1600/Sheeler_American_Landscape.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidfD1xJcQIyrRglH-hfSRauEHGwmp5awL9C3ofleVTVptTdJmfOly5VTt1VjqL7bUV_ltskL5jGw9vbczvbS4qEcs1q35-8i4YtoX-HjhZcU_wl9LXk_6D9dH1tB3bHUlLbXNAdbnwsA0/s320/Sheeler_American_Landscape.jpg" /></a> </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It looks a lot safer than it is </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Typically, steel/mining town life consists of distinct gender divisions: the dutiful wife and the hard working husband. One might wish to include the hell raising/troubled son. Unfortunately, with one or two notable exceptions, daughters get short shrift. Meyer pushes against this tradition employing two prominent female characters: Grace Poe and Lee English, Isaac’s sister. <i>American Rust</i> deserves credit for attempting to give depth to both Grace and Lee and on some level Meyer achieves stronger characterization. The brother sister relationship between Lee and Isaac proves refreshing for a genre that tends to focus on father son and brother – brother bonds. However, Meyer succeeds to a lesser degree with Lee who knowingly abandoned Isaac to care for her father to grab her chance at Yale and a different life. To be fair, one could argue Meyer successfully subverts traditions regarding dutiful female characters by making Lee the one to escape and not Isaac. While at Yale, Lee’s experiences prove predictably riven by class based insights:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But of course they hadn’t done anything. They’d all been born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, had taken all the right tests. There simply was not a chance they would fail. They’d worked hard but always with expectation they would get what they wanted – the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admitted how spoiled they were but underneath, there was always the presumption they deserved it. (<i>AR</i>, 294) </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Lee’s observations do not lack merit, they just seem unsurprising. Middle class kids could have similar moments at places like Yale. Her extra marital affair with Billy Poe seems like a dysfunctional version of <i>Sweet Home Alabama</i>. In contrast, Grace’s character, a single mom burdened by an estranged worthless husband who checks in now and then for sex, merits greater distinction. Her dilemmas ring truer as she resorts to morally questionable methods to spare her son’s life. Yet, even Grace falls into a predictable trope. Grace’s character spends far too long rationalizing her attraction to her estranged husband, which can be summarized in the old adage, “we all want what we can’t have.” Again, not really a new insight, one imagines more could have been done with both characters. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Loving the Mill</span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_olkYudep5QqVwMJzFrD3NmbyYHSig9dSYSNjBmuvOBV6ac08J1q_dcmz1erw-aBFDlTuCQ_optdJPCwRgrSQ_RkmHpOz6d4NdKkxGiwCQUoGh_zkTasMcM2cQFuf_S6WrhKCGkQvbIo/s1600/25548_1215055580271_400_260.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_olkYudep5QqVwMJzFrD3NmbyYHSig9dSYSNjBmuvOBV6ac08J1q_dcmz1erw-aBFDlTuCQ_optdJPCwRgrSQ_RkmHpOz6d4NdKkxGiwCQUoGh_zkTasMcM2cQFuf_S6WrhKCGkQvbIo/s320/25548_1215055580271_400_260.jpg" /></a> <br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I'm sorry I'm so goooooddd looking</span> </span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Derek Zoolander{coughing}: I think I've got the Black Lung, Pop.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mr. Zoolander: You have been working in the mines for one day, son. Try thirty years, then you can be concerned about Black Lung!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Commercial appears on bar TV which shows Derek swimming with a fish tail</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mr. Zoolander: Just swell. I am sure happy my wife is dead now, because she did not have to live to see her son grow up to be a mermaid!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Derek Zoolander: Merman, Father! {wheezing} Mer-man!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The mill/mining town dynamic need not be confined to the tragic. In 2001’s </span><i><a href="http://movieclips.com/p7jTb-zoolander-movie-youre-dead-to-me/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Zoolander</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, disgraced but “really good looking” male model Derek Zoolander attempts to reconnect with his unlikely coal mining roots, returning home to escape the glaring flash of the papparazi. Needless to say, things go poorly. Father Larry Zoolander resorts to angry mea culpas like “Damnit Derek, I'm a coal miner, not a professional film or television actor.” Later, during </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wleJmrlbsMc" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Derek’s brainwashing</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (ordered by a secret cabal of fashion designers worried about rising textile prices) Will Ferrell’s Mugatu complains that “the age old right for children to work is under attack,” demanding the fashion model murder the Prime Minister of Malaysia who recently took positions in opposition to child labor. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Obviously played for laughs, <i>Zoolander</i> still manages to offer a kind of comment on steel/mining town fetishization and the very forces that drove their decline. Others have used mill town life as a means for humor as well. David O. Russell’s </span><i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spqyymC-K7k" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Fighter</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (2010) employed working class white Irish American culture and conflict through the family of main character, boxer “Irish” Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg). Again, The <i>Fighter</i> toyed with gender roles, placing Ward’s mother, Alice (Melissa Leo) , at the head of the family. A lioness in charge of a pride of daughters, Alice runs roughshod over nearly everyone. Only Ward’s relationship with love interest Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams) enables him to loosen Alice’s control on his life and career. The fights between Alice and her daughters and Charlene are wickedly funny and play on the parochialism and tribal nature often ascribed to mill town existence. Ward’s problematic half -brother, the once promising fighter turned crackhead, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale in a performance that justifies his attacks on gaffers and the like) revisits the wildchild archetype. As in <i>American Rust</i>, drugs have pervaded these towns, Eklund serving as only one more example. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsd-cK-BTsmVYM28Tc5HtTbXLy2IGnoQ0yvKok2qhoU6JlfsTEmAJd_tUpb6DcKZi34q6w1gXX3t2k2u3g88KnF1I0jMWJJPHzN6tOEJQJ3-zd9vPpASIpm0J6Gzba5go7thS-ND_1Rvc/s1600/The%252BFighter%252Bmovie%252B%252B%2525287%252529.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsd-cK-BTsmVYM28Tc5HtTbXLy2IGnoQ0yvKok2qhoU6JlfsTEmAJd_tUpb6DcKZi34q6w1gXX3t2k2u3g88KnF1I0jMWJJPHzN6tOEJQJ3-zd9vPpASIpm0J6Gzba5go7thS-ND_1Rvc/s320/The%252BFighter%252Bmovie%252B%252B%2525287%252529.jpg" /></a> </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We are women here us roar </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Critically, one should be careful not to confuse downtrodden mill and mining life with that of shrinking farms. Sean Penn’s </span><i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPjb7rAYXag" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Indian Runner</a></i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (1991) explored the dynamic between two brothers, Joe (David Morse) and Frank Roberts (a young Viggo Mortensen) in small town America. Inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu0HATrhI1k%20" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Highway Patrolman”</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> off of the previously discussed <i>Nebraska</i> (keep in mind the album was inspired to some extent by the movie <i>Badlands</i>, so <i>Nebraska</i> was inspired by one movie while helping to create another), former farmer turned lawman, Joe struggles to save his brother Frank from himself. The <i>New York Times</i> </span><a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D0CEFDE1138F933A1575AC0A967958260" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Janet Maslin</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> acknowledged the fundamental struggle in Joe’s task, “As Mr. Springsteen puts it, narrating desolately from Joe's standpoint: "I got a brother named Frankie and Frankie ain't no good." Director Sean Penn (who one must remember in his youth embodied the earlier quoted Jeff Spicoli) fills the movie with references to Native Americans and the economic struggles of farm towns. Here the bank and the state serve as enemies as Joe’s father comments to his son at dinner “It’s a bitch ain’t it. The same thieves that took your farm now have you work for them.” Furthermore, the violence of <i>American Rust</i> feels omnipresent in <i>Indian Runner</i>. Once again, Maslin captures this tension best noting the movie retained a moodiness and volatility much like Mortensen’s character Frankie. “As moody and volatile as the problematic Frankie, <i>The Indian Runner</i> starts off with a killing and sustains a threat of possible violence throughout even its gentlest episodes,” writes the movie critic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Unlike mining/steel town narratives, the declining agricultural narrative often applies an other worldly spirituality often connected to Native American traditions as in the <i>Indian Runner</i> or a hippy dippy earth mother tone like the now hysterically funny Kevin Costner epic, <i>Field of Dreams</i>. Embracing the problematic father son relationship (Isaac English and Henry English also embody this apparently timeless theme), Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) hears a voice telling him “If you build it, he will come.” So he plows under his crops and builds a baseball field threatening his family’s well being to obey this spirtual quest. Through a cirtuituitous journey, the “he” turns out to be Kinsella’s estranged and now deceased father. The movie seems more appropriate as a drinking game than an actual piece of filmmaking (drink every time Costner seems earnest; drink every time you find something unintentionally funny; drink every time someone mentions the 1960s; really the possibilities are endless and the probability of blood alcohol poisoning high) One exchange with writer Terrance Mann (James Earl Jones) captures this perfectly:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">By the time I was ten, playing baseball got to be like eating vegetables or taking out the garbage. So when I was 14, I started to refuse. Could you believe that? An American boy refusing to play catch with his father. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Actually, yes, it makes sense. Baseball is kind of boring. The movie of course ends with Kinsella tossing around a baseball with the ghost of his father. Cue tears. Anyway, the larger point here is that even when laughable the failed farm narrative features a sort of spirituality that mill/mining town stories lack. Instead, books like <i>American Rust</i> emphasize the loss of common humanity and community. Religion/spirituality may play a role but more as identity than force. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmju83Opki0rqvNOPaDSDB6MXB9H8QSvL36Zd_dy1zdI7EH6cRFKl0pd8P57bdl4A3FL_lwrerLkwTa9rF6LqIFEERmc-EysumWEXIKoSs1WCyUGRBdDNLoWwIXtj4FLSKDalUSAYQhCw/s1600/220px-Field_of_Dreams.jpg" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmju83Opki0rqvNOPaDSDB6MXB9H8QSvL36Zd_dy1zdI7EH6cRFKl0pd8P57bdl4A3FL_lwrerLkwTa9rF6LqIFEERmc-EysumWEXIKoSs1WCyUGRBdDNLoWwIXtj4FLSKDalUSAYQhCw/s320/220px-Field_of_Dreams.jpg" /></a> </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Deadly when mixed with alcohol </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So why do musicians, filmmakers, and authors continue to repeat predictable narratives and why does the public respond so enthusiastically? Perhaps the physical obviousness of mining/mill life proves appealing. The mine/mill provided sustenance and slavery. Owners fed and fed off of workers. From the perspective of twenty first century life, the lines of good and evil appear clearly drawn. Though conditions often proved poor and labor exploited, writers and others look back with certain fondness. The fat cat mill owner seemed a tangible villainy when compared to murky and incomprehensible housing failures, financial bailouts, and Enron like shell games. Moreover, invisible economic forces like outsourcing and transnational capital flows may shape regions, but they do so less transparently. The boom in financial instruments and the myriad and confusing ways of making money on the Stock market and through debt syndication only deepened this invisibility. When the housing bubble exploded, writers like <i>Rolling Stone</i>’s Matthew Taibbi admitted that even journalists covering the field failed to fully understand the process that left millions of America in default. Then again, for some white Americans, maybe these stories harken back to an existence that seems more “authentic” than middle class suburban life. After all, hacking it out amid steel lava and dangerous machinery sounds more impressive than working summers at Baskin Robbins or Subway. Of course, Fordism and the wages it brought to blue collar families, for all its negatives - environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and inadequate safety measures to name a few - at least delivered a middle class existence for millions of Americans. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Could it be tied to ethnicity? Mill/mining life feels more ethnic. In the face of immigration from Mexico, Asia, and Africa, maybe white audiences especially, want to relate to the valued traditions of newcomers; new immigrants spurring thoughts about white native born Americans own passage to the middle class. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Others might suggest the heterosexual and masculine orientation of steel town narratives appeal to older people. Feminism, Gay Liberation, Queer studies, metrosexuality, transsexuality, and so on probably remain threatening ideas to many Americans. The stoic, tragic male bread winner, honorable but doomed, carries a great deal of cultural water. Along with the obedient, resilient wife, these gender roles provide a structure in which observers can place themselves. From <i>All the Right Moves</i> to <i>American Rust</i>, none of the above examples includes a gay character. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Or Maybe It's Simple</span></b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We were tight knit boys</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Brothers in more than name</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">You would kill for me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And knew that I'd do the same</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And it cut me sharp</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Hearing you'd gone away</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> -- "Always Gold," <i>The Family Tree: The Roots</i>, Radical Face</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqc2uOunPdA" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"Always Gold,"</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> Floridian Ben Cooper’s folk project Radical Face explores the dynamics of the troubled brotherly relationship so prevalent in mining/farm/steel town sagas. Though "Always Gold" could be about brothers trapped in suburbia it encapsulates the kind of tensions that emerge in <i>American Rust</i> and elsewhere. “Opposites at birth,” sings Cooper, he was “steady as a hammer” but as for his brother “they said you were the crooked kind/and that you’d never have no worth/But you were always gold to me.” Though Cooper’s speaker has grown to love his surroundings, he knows for his brother, “this place is shame.” They made youthful promises ((“our words would take us half way ‘round the world”) that ultimately went unfulfilled: “But I never left this town/and you never saw New York/And we ain’t ever cross the sea.” The earnestness of the speaker in his plaintive desire for his brother to come home, “But you can blame me when there's no one left to blame/Oh I don't mind”, pulses through the song. When the song ends, it does so in contradiction: </span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And I heard you say</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Right when you left that day</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Does everything go away?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yeah, everything goes away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But I'm going to be here 'til forever</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So just call when you're around.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Maybe everything does go away but not the singer’s love for his sibling. Perhaps, this basic humanity, the dynamics of family, troubled but real, remains the draw of these stories. As a historian, I would never say its primordial, but the repetition of this idea says something about how we become hardwired doesn’t it? In tough economic times, solidarities get boiled down to the most basic of allegiances. The decline of towns like Buell serve as fine backdrops for this kind of drama. For all its flaws, <i>American Rust</i> provides a twenty first century view from the bottom, one that employs tropes from the past but attempts to illustrate the complexities of the present. Then again, when you descend from a great height, it’s a long way down, so maybe it’s all just part of the fall.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ryan Reft </span></i></div>less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-21949076982358345052011-10-31T06:16:00.000-07:002011-10-31T20:05:44.773-07:00The Big Lie of Neoliberalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.universityobserver.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/broken-piggy-bank-small-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://www.universityobserver.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/broken-piggy-bank-small-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If you have received a tuition bill lately, or looked for a job in academia, you are bound to have noticed that higher education in this country is in crisis. Much of this is supposedly the result of the economic recession that began in 2007. Some say it’s the result of the housing bust—the consequence of irresponsible actions by homeowners and banks—or the financial meltdown on Wall Street in 2008. Sometimes immigrants are blamed as a drain on public resources, in order to justify budget cuts and tuition increases and layoffs. <br />
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They say there’s just not enough money in the state coffers to sustain public universities as we have known them. This is a contemporary crisis, we are told, unique to the last two or three years. <br />
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Actually, it’s anything but. The recent attack on public education—on students and teachers and government workers in general—is only the latest and nastiest episode in a long-running movement against all things public. <br />
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Since at least the time of Ronald Reagan, progressives have struggled to define this movement and these policies. It was hard to call it conservative, because both Republican and Democratic, Labour and Conservative parties have embraced parts of this platform over the last thirty years. <br />
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The word that activists and scholars eventually came up with to describe these policies is “neoliberalism,” which refers to a new version of classical economic theories based on the idea of the free market and <i>laissez faire</i>. <br />
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Neoliberalism is often understood as an assault on the state—policies that advocate privatizing schools, Social Security and all kinds of public services, while cutting taxes and deregulating the economy. Its rallying cry has been opposition to “Big Government.” <br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yv7MZr-JkEM?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In some ways, this program looks real and inexorable. The policies have been exported to other countries in the form of the “Washington Consensus,” whereby developing countries have been forced to cut their expenditures on health, education and other public services in order to qualify for loans from the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions that are controlled by the US and Europe. Such polices have, in turn, generated real social turmoil and discontent in countries such as Argentina and Egypt over the last ten years. It is not a popular program. <br />
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At home, we have seen this ideology put into place with the deregulation of Wall Street and the media in the 1990s, with the ending of welfare by Bill Clinton in 1996, and with the Bush tax cuts in the last decade. <br />
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For education, this neoliberal idea has taken the form of steady declines in state support for public universities, which used to depend for much more of their budgets on state subsidy. The original idea was that a public university would be primarily supported by taxpayers, to provide access to education to the broad citizenry who could not afford an expensive private education at Harvard or Duke or Emory. Tuition would be charged in most cases, but the majority of resources would come from the public purse. <br />
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In New York, you even had City College, which was free for all city residents until the late 1970s. Some of our greatest writers, scientists and artists rose up from poverty to attend City before going on to do great things. In 1976, the City University of New York (CUNY) began charging tuition, and the possibility of a free, public higher education disappeared. <br />
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Since then, colleges have increasingly been remodeled to run like businesses. University of Florida President <a href="http://jvlone.com/">John Lombardi</a> proudly said in 1997, “We have taken the great leap forward and said, ‘Let’s pretend we’re a corporation.’” I’m not sure Mao’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward">Great Leap Forward</a> is the best frame of reference, but then again, based on what has happened to our colleges and universities in the last twenty years, maybe Lombardi was right. <br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.nymag.com/news/politics/romney111031_3_560.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="311" src="http://images.nymag.com/news/politics/romney111031_3_560.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mitt Romney: putting your money where his mouth is</span></span></div></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div>Some college presidents have started calling themselves CEOs. Private corporations give millions of dollars to fund research, and expect to get the patent rights for the discoveries that are created by departments where our professors and grad students work on public salaries, often with considerable support from federal funding agencies like the National Science Foundation. <br />
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Meanwhile, state governments tell us that we need to cut back—we have to pull up our socks and pay higher tuition for the ever-rising cost of college, even as the state cuts its share of financial support. Professors have to accept declining wages, and fewer full-time professors are hired. <br />
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Perhaps most shockingly, this education that keeps getting more and more expensive is increasingly farmed out to grad students, adjuncts, and temporary professors who get paid peanuts and often have no benefits. It’s the Wal-Martization of education. <br />
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This means that those grad students will not find decent-paying, secure jobs to apply their knowledge and training when they get out of graduate school, because all the teaching is being done by grad students and adjuncts. The product is getting more expensive, the quality is arguably getting worse, the labor relations are more exploitative, and we are told that that’s just the way things have to be. <br />
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It is not just a reaction to the current fiscal crisis. This is all part of a general movement to undermine public institutions, particularly schools, that has been going on for decades. The budget deficit is just the latest pretext. <br />
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We are told everything that is public is bad. Anything that won’t turn out a patent and profit is viewed as useless. Goodbye English and History and Sociology. Hello corporate-funded research and faculty chairs sponsored by the very same rich businessmen who are buying our elections. </div><br />
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">What do you think a <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/the-koch-brothers-and-the-end-of-state-universities.html">professor whose job is sponsored by the billionaire Koch brothers</a> is going to teach? The party line, parroting the same neoliberal talking points and conventional wisdom that make our institutions so anemic, dysfunctional, and profoundly unfair. <br />
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</div>It does not have to be this way. They say there is not enough money. They say privatization is inevitable, and public education is on the way out. This is nonsense. <br />
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The big lie of neoliberalism is that it’s about reducing the state. It’s not. It’s about using an anti-public rhetoric to stop the government from doing certain things—educating the poor, the working class, the middle class, immigrants; taking care of the sick and indigent and elderly—and directing those resources to projects that serve the rich and powerful and well-connected. <br />
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Politicians who support this idea have done nothing to shrink the size of government overall or cut down the deficit. It is piquant concidence that the godfather of neoliberalism, Ronald Reagan, has his name on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building_and_International_Trade_Center">biggest federal office building</a> in Washington, DC (other than the Pentagon). <br />
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Despite the government’s continuing penchant for lavishing largesse on certain favored interests, they say there’s not enough money for your education. But there’s plenty of money for prisons. We incarcerate more of our people than any country in the world. There’s plenty of money for a fence on the border. No one so much as batted an eyelash about whether there was money for the war in Iraq, though its cost has been immense. <br />
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When Wall Street destroyed itself, there was no trouble finding $800 billion for the banks. But they say you need to learn to live with less, and take on ever more debt to have a chance at some kind of decent life—an increasingly elusive possibility in today’s low-wage, low-price, low-tax society.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is not about numbers or money. It’s about priorities, and we have a choice. I would rather build public schools than private prisons, but they say one’s possible and the other isn’t. Don’t believe the superficial rhetoric of neoliberalism, privatization, and the free market. This is all about picking our pockets and then telling us its our fault that we’re broke. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
It’s not about the size of government or how much government we have, but what we want government to do. The first thing we have to do to save our universities is to reject the false choice between fairness and fiscal responsibility. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: right;"><i>Alex Sayf Cummings</i></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">This talk was part of a panel discussion organized by Georgia Students for Public Higher Education called <i>Crisis in Georgia: Austery, Racism, and Resistance</i>, which dealt with current budget cuts, tuition increases, and anti-immigration measures enacted by the University System of Georgia. To find out more, visit the group's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/106201336088867/">Facebook page</a>.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Recommended Reading</b></div><ul style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><li>Marc Bousquet, <a href="http://marcbousquet.net/publications.html"><i>How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation</i></a> </li>
<li>Noam Chomsky, "<a href="http://www.alternet.org/education/151921/chomsky:_public_education_under_massive_corporate_assault_%E2%80%94_what%27s_next/">Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault—What's Next</a>?" </li>
<li>Juan Cole, "<a href="http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/the-koch-brothers-and-the-end-of-state-universities.html">The Koch Brothers and the End of Public Universities</a>" </li>
<li>Jason Hackworth, <a href="http://tropicsofmeta.blogspot.com/2010/09/hoping-for-housing-hope-vis-ambivalent.html"><i>The Neoliberal City: </i><span style="font-style: italic;">Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism</span></a></li>
<li>David Harvey, <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/briefhistory"><i>A Brief History of Neoliberalism</i></a></li>
<li>Naomi Klein, <a href="http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine"><i>The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism</i></a></li>
</ul>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-44548009032522168542011-10-25T16:37:00.000-07:002011-10-27T19:40:26.208-07:00Our Path-Dependent Future: What Happens When Change and Habit Collide?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjekPKV_D7rY_CIAqvoZqyjVQ8QHgerEhPbdsL82_YFuHZtT5xut1Vfw37eiffWlL-sCC7M8z9k7wMbbo86yfqFDEaqcs6Fx9HvyCUz89_Jw-W4cgWK4MDHALr4b61oHpLOrRmyCJ3ppGX4/s1600/very_gradual_change.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjekPKV_D7rY_CIAqvoZqyjVQ8QHgerEhPbdsL82_YFuHZtT5xut1Vfw37eiffWlL-sCC7M8z9k7wMbbo86yfqFDEaqcs6Fx9HvyCUz89_Jw-W4cgWK4MDHALr4b61oHpLOrRmyCJ3ppGX4/s320/very_gradual_change.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In 2007 and 2008, then Senator Barack Obama ran on a campaign slogan: “Change you can believe in.” Obama’s campaign asserted that his election would rectify the metastasizing wealth gap between the rich and the poor, address the high unemployment rate, and restore America to the “shining city on a hill” that it once was. While one can debate whether or not Obama used cynical sloganeering or if he earnestly intended to implement such change, the study of change in political science could have served President Obama well. Within the political science discipline there are several schools of thought regarding institutional change. Mahoney and Thelen and the broader rational choice school of institutionalism present a starkly different account than the work of Pierson and other historical institutionalists who employ a path-dependency approach. These differing approaches have important consequences for those who desire to initiate or foster institutional or systemic change. Ultimately, the insights of Pierson and historical institutionalism provide more compelling arguments than those proffered by Mahoney and Thelen or the rational choice institutionalists. <br />
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According to Mahoney and Thelen, institutions, once created, tend to change “in subtle and gradual ways over time." Harnessing the example of the British House of Lords, the authors explain how these piecemeal changes can, over time, lead to the fundamental restructuring of institutions, political outcomes, or human behavior. Most of the pre-existing literature on institutional change indicts “exogenous shocks” as the cause (IV) of institutional change. The main institutionalist schools—historical, sociological, and rational choice—all explain continuity well, Mahoney and Thelen suggest, but provide little in the way of understanding how gradual institutional change occurs. Mahoney and Thelen conceive of “institutions as distributional instruments laden with power implications." Institutions are replete with contestation over resource allocation and attendant distributional consequences, both in an inter- and intra-institutional sense. For Mahoney and Thelen, institutions “contain within them possibilities for change." “What animates change is the power-distributional implications of institutions,” they aver. <br />
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Mahoney and Thelen place paramount importance on the role of compliance amongst actors within an institutional context. This power-distributional approach is buttressed by an emphasis on compliance because “institutional ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ have different interests when it comes to interpreting rules or dedicating resources to their enforcement." Mahoney and Thelen posit four types of change that are all initiated by efforts of different actors through their degree of compliance. The four types of institutional changes are: 1) displacement- when existing rules are replaced by new ones; 2) layering- new rules are attached to existing ones; 3) drift- rules remain formally the same but their impact changes; and 4) conversion- rules remain the same but are interpreted and enacted differently. These different types of institutional change are affected by “differences in veto possibilities and the extent of discretion in institutional enforcement and interpretation.” In other words, veto players or veto points affect which type of institutional change may occur. For example, if veto possibilities (strong veto actors and/or numerous veto points) are high, then displacement change is highly unlikely. <br />
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The authors also add four types of change agents to their schema: 1) insurrectionaries- they seek to eliminate existing institutions; 2) symbionts- they thrive on institutions, but not of their own making; 3) subversives- seek to displace an institution but their actions do not break the rules; and 4) opportunists- actors with ambiguous preferences about institutional continuity. Change agents exploit differences in levels of discretion in the interpretation or enforcement of rules in order to meet their goals. Each type of change agent is also likely to pursue different types of change. For example, insurrectionaries are generally linked to efforts at outright displacement. <br />
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If one looks at the interpretation and enforcement of various institutions across different presidential administrations, Mahoney and Thelen’s account appears compelling. One administration more zealous in its enforcement labor laws may staff an organization like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with pro-union officers, while an administration less friendly to labor may appoint pro-business officers. The mandate of the Board remains the same, however, the enforcement and interpretation, or the willingness of the officers of the organization to comply, may change the way the institution operates. Over time, this may lead to any of the several different types of change Mahoney and Thelen describe. <br />
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The rational choice approach to institutionalism utilizes a set of assumptions regarding human behavior and imposes those assumptions on the study of institutions and change. Adherents to rational choice institutionalism view actors as having a “fixed set of costs or tastes” who behave strategically to acquire these preferences. They see politics as collective action dilemmas where the decisions of utility-maximizing individuals produce outcomes that are “collectively suboptimal.” Actors’ behavior is driven by strategic calculations based on expectations of others’ actions. Institutions work to, and in fact originate as, mechanisms for creating stable expectations and structuring interactions. <br />
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The work of Anthony Downs on political parties epitomizes the rational choice model. He constructs a model where rational citizens seek to maximize their self-interest and rational politicians aim to acquire and maintain power. The calculations of rational, utility-maximizing individuals determine institutional changes. Changes in party systems or specifically to the party in power are driven by strategic calculations to attain one’s preferences. Another influential rational choice theorist, Douglass North, couches the discussion of institutional change in economic terms. North asserts, “ a change in relative prices leads one or both parties to an exchange, whether it is political or economic, to perceive that either or both could be better with a negotiated contract.” The successful re-negotiation of the contract results in institutional change. Conversely, institutional stability “derives from the fact that there are a large number of specific constraints that affect a particular choice.” These myriad constraints impinge on the type of actions that an actor can undertake. Therefore, “only when it is in the interest of those with sufficient bargaining power to alter formal rules will there be major changes in the formal institutional framework.” In other words, North asserts that those with the greatest leverage will only work to modify, supplant, or create new institutions if there is a rational calculation on the part of the hegemonic actors that they can form new, more beneficial institutions. <br />
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In his essay “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” Pierson argues for the concept of path dependence and adds an important concept, that of “increasing returns,” to the study of change and institutions. According to Pierson, path dependence is rooted in several particular claims. In sum, history and temporal sequence matter; “large consequences may result from relatively ‘small’ contingent events;” particular courses of action can be irreversible; and as a result “political development is often punctuated by critical moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life.” To these traditional tenets of path dependence, Pierson adds the concept of “increasing returns” which contains “two key elements central to…path dependence.” First, increasing returns helps to explain how the cost of switching from one institution to another can be very high. Moreover, the longer an institution operates the higher the transaction costs of the exit option will be. Secondly, issues of temporality and sequence are important: “it is not only a question of what happens but also of when it happens.” Increasing returns assumes that the further down an institutional path the more likely it is that that path will continue to be used. This cultivates a self-enforcing, positive feedback process. Critical junctures and initial decisions have a much larger impact on the trajectory of an institution. The farther along the trajectory, the less likely decisions or events are to have impact. <br />
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Pierson’s argument has several important implications regarding the nature and study of change in institutions. For Pierson, “public policies and (especially) formal institutions are change-resistant” because both are “generally designed to be difficult to overturn.” This is because those who design the institutions wish to enshrine certain immutable features that will handcuff their successors. Secondly, “political actors may wish to bind themselves” because they may perform better “if they remove certain options from their future menu.” <br />
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The path dependent, increasing returns approach that Pierson utilizes is both historical and institutional. Institutional change is a difficult process that, depending on the timing and sequence, can have nearly insuperably high exit costs. Such costs can often lead to inertia as the positive feedback processes reinforce equilibrium and militate against the possibility of change. Moreover, relatively small events prove to be critical junctures that shape institutions for years to come. Pierson provides the example of comparative political economy and the varieties of capitalism to illustrate his point. He asserts that the literature in this field positively identifies the manifold distinctions between capitalist economies but does not address how these equilibria emerge. National economies are embedded in their social context, varying modes of production, “formal and informal arrangements (both public and private) that help structure their interactions,” and particular national institutional matrices. Thus capitalism in different states, and national economies in general, are “highly path dependent. They are likely to exhibit substantial resilience, even in the context of major exogenous shocks…”<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75F3WXCltowEcH1_p6vbkij6PQJfIrSBVdI5ygRUyBEVq0hRHW519n5b6cG59GWDNnRoCXANr27RM8v2P-ZSqyp6zTFkroqAonWSEIvUiH44Jai5Wcr76_tTJ9NCuplnI6MAKbj0o1HOM/s1600/Herman+Cain+-+They+Think+Youre+Stupid.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj75F3WXCltowEcH1_p6vbkij6PQJfIrSBVdI5ygRUyBEVq0hRHW519n5b6cG59GWDNnRoCXANr27RM8v2P-ZSqyp6zTFkroqAonWSEIvUiH44Jai5Wcr76_tTJ9NCuplnI6MAKbj0o1HOM/s1600/Herman+Cain+-+They+Think+Youre+Stupid.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In a more specific contemporary context, Herman Cain, an aspiring Republican presidential nominee, has tabled a new tax reform plan called “9-9-9” (it calls for a 9 percent sales, income, and corporate tax across the board). This plan would obliterate the current tax code. The problem with the plan is that it would not provide enough revenue that the federal government requires. Current federal government outlays for entitlements, defense, and discretionary spending require far more revenue than this plan could generate. Therefore, Cain would not only need to restructure the tax code to implement his plan, but fundamentally alter how the federal government operates. Say what you will about the current byzantine tax code, but the exit costs of dismantling the current institution, from a path dependent standpoint, strongly work to produce policy inertia in this regard. <br />
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Mahoney and Thelen and rational choice institutionalists provide a starkly distinct account of institutional change from that of Pierson and others who employ historical institutionalism. Whereas Mahoney, Thelen and North suggest that change is incremental, historical institutionalists tend to see periods of punctuated equilibrium where “change takes place thereby creating a ‘branching point’ from which historical development moves onto a new path.” I find the path dependent approach most compelling and useful. A particularly pertinent example of the convincing nature of path dependency is US tax policy. The United States was founded in part as a country opposed to “taxation without representation” that was imposed by King George III. This aversion to taxes still resonates with the citizenry today as politicians appeal to American history in order to garner support for particular policy outcomes. Efforts to create fundamentally new institutions, such as a single-payer healthcare system, are often disrupted by existing institutions that would experience high transaction costs (such as the pharmaceutical or health insurance industries) from exiting the current system. New institutions, such as the emergence of social security in the United States, have frequently emerged in response to or during critical junctures. Moreover, the debate as to what to do with social security, as it may potentially run insolvent in the decades to come, is colored with the language of increasing returns. Advocates for the current system essentially appeal to the argument that the exit costs to senior citizens and the national economy are simply too high to change the institution. <br />
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It seems to me that Mahoney and Thelen and the rational choice school in general have a tendency to overemphasize the role of individuals in affecting, producing or initiating change. There are larger historical and structural factors from war to international trade to ideology that can prevent individuals from not only acting strategically or rationally, but also render them incapable of fostering institutional change. Individuals, even powerful individuals like Presidents and Senators, frequently have their agendas or policy prescriptions thwarted by institutions whose perpetuation is a far simpler course of action to take. While I sympathize with Mahoney and Thelen’s argument and see its utility in regards to smaller institutional issues of enforcement and interpretation, I do not think that it can adequately account for fundamental institutional change. Institutional change may be piecemeal, but that does not necessarily mean it is because of the compliance of change agents. External historical and structural factors play a role in institutional change as well. Presidential candidates would be well served by understanding this model of institutional change. Such understanding could potentially prevent candidates from promising transformational change in a four-year term. <br />
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I would like to end by referring back to Pierson’s cursory discussion of varieties of capitalism and national economies. Capitalism is an historical institution that is highly path dependent; despite its manifold negative consequences (economic exploitation, rampant consumerism, environmental degradation, etc.) it remains the dominant political economic force in the world. How does a change in such a world-system occur? The path dependency argument would postulate that only through change implemented during a critical juncture, such as continued environmental catastrophes or a people’s revolution, could change occur that would cultivate new economic institutions. Perhaps, this is what we are beginning to see with the proliferation of the “occupy” movements. </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: right;"><i>Adam Gallagher</i> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>Further Reading</b></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
Hall, Peter A. and Rosemary C.R. Taylor. “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms.” <i>Political Studies</i> 44 (1996): 952-73. <br />
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Katznelson, Ira. “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” in <i>The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order</i>, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. <br />
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James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, "A Gradual Theory of Institutional Change," in <i>Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power</i>, eds. Mahoney and Thelen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.</div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
North, Douglass. <i>Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. <br />
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Pierson, Paul. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” <i> American Political Science Review</i> 94: 2 (2000): 251-67. </div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-33542846591047846692011-10-20T02:44:00.000-07:002011-10-20T08:21:19.998-07:00A Shot in the Arm: The 21st Century Evolution of Wilco<blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
Tweedy’s being pissy because he doesn’t want to play any Black Eyed Peas songs. What the fuck? People love that shit. <br />
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Not saying they’re a good band – they’re fucking terrible – but if you want people with money to give that shit away, play the Black Eyed Peas. <br />
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But no Tweedy’s pulling this fucking “I’m in Wilco, so I’m going to play Wilco songs” bullshit, like he knows anything about fundraising. <br />
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So it goes without fucking saying that he’s going out there and playing “I Gotta Feeling” right fucking now. <br />
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Also, would it fucking kill this motherfucker to smile every now and then? Cheer up, Tweedy! <br />
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-- from Dan Sinker, <i>The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel</i>, p. 135 </div>
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When Dan Sinker incorporated Rahm Emanuel’s favorite band into a faux-twitter feed he had set up for the future mayor, few observers would have expected Jeff Tweedy to actually perform the cheesy pop songs mentioned in the tweets. At a release party for Sinker’s Twitter opus (and TofM can’t recommend the book highly enough as a satire of both politics and the power of media to shape political narratives), Tweedy arrived guitar in hand and performed his rendition of “I Gotta Feeling,” as well as a spoken word version of “My Humps.” </div>
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That Tweedy could poke fun at himself might seem surprising to those who attended pre-2003 Wilco shows or saw the excellent documentary, <i>I Am Trying to Break Your Heart</i>. At a late 1999 show at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom, Tweedy appeared disaffected, selecting Wilco’s best dirges for the occasion, casting a dark pall over the show. In the documentary, infighting with former bandmate Jay Bennett left Tweedy irritable and anxious. He seemed a man beset by industry intrigue and battling over the direction of the band. When, after a brief creative skirmish with Bennett, Tweedy announces, “I think I’m going to go throw up,” the viewer simply thinks he’s being hyperbolic. Of course, then he actually throws up, telling the camera that he was hospitalized several times for this kind of thing as a child. Long story short, Tweedy and his bandmates seemed far from happy. <br />
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Yet, in many ways, Wilco’s evolution from 1995’s <i>A.M.</i> to the recently released <i>The Whole Love</i> seem to parallel American consciousness in pre and post 9/11 period. Wilco themselves matured from their early status as minor-league spinoff of the legendary alt-country group Uncle Tupelo. Though gifted with a tangy-sweet voice and a knack for catchy songs, Tweedy generally played a spry sort of sub-McCartney to the brooding genius of his Tupelo bandmate Jay Farrar. Soon enough, Farrar’s post-Tupelo band Son Volt blew up with the grungy-country hit “<a href="http://www.metacafe.com/watch/wm-A10302B0000065010E/son_volt_drown_official_music_video/">Drowned</a>,” and few expected that great things lay ahead for Tweedy’s own project, Wilco. <i>A.M.</i>’s charms were little appreciated at the time, though the sprawling follow-up project, Being There, a double album that stretched to encompass white noise, bluegrass, classic country balladry, and crunchy power pop, prompted critics to take a second measure of Tweedy’s abilities. <br />
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Wilco continued to expand its range with the Beatlesque orchestral pop of <i>Summerteeth</i> and the gauzey, ramshackle brilliance of <i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot</i>, both of which seemed not only to move forward musically but also emotionally. Each new album combined the band’s keen melodic instinct to a widening repertoire of textures and instrumentation, even as their lyrics increasingly centered on themes of despair, violence, and self-loathing. Yet by Wilco’s last album, the formerly depressive Tweedy seemed downright jubilant. The title track of the self-titled Wilco even meditated on the darker parts of the band’s catalog, albeit with a knowing smile: </div>
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Are you under the impression this isn't your life?<br />
Do you dabble in depression?<br />
Is someone twisting a knife in your back?<br />
Are you being attacked?<br />
Oh, this is a fact that you need to know<br />
Oh, oh, oh, oh<br />
Wilco, Wilco, Wilco will you love you baby </blockquote>
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So how did Wilco become so cheerful and reliable? How does a band once seemingly consumed by the darker sides of life emerge in a post 9/11 America as a beacon of good cheer? After all, at their New Year's Eve show in 2004 at Madison Square Garden, Tweedy came on stage in pajamas, taking their encore to cover songs like “Breaking the Law” by Judas Priest. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">"The new Wilco is so good it's like fucking a thousand puppies in the mouth"</span></div>
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Tracking the meaning of Wilco’s career means more than chronicling the many moods of its lead singer. In fact, the band provide a valuable window into the vast number of technological and political changes that unfolded over the past decade. Technologically, Wilco embraced the Internet, even streaming its controversial Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album months before its release. Politically, Wilco seemed to draw strength from its opposition to Bush. At a October 2004 show at Radio City Music Hall, Wilco ended the concert with a plea to the crowd, as Tweedy begged the NYC audience, “Don’t be controlled by fear” – followed by the band ripping into “<a href="http://vimeo.com/5516718">Shouldn’t Be Ashamed</a>,” a none too subtle dig at the administration at the time. <br />
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<b>First, the Music </b><br />
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Released two years prior to 9/11, <i>Summerteeth</i> served as “Jeff Tweedy's statement of purpose,” according to one <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8677-summer-teeth/">critic</a>. Though the characterization seems laughable today, the album did strike observers at the time as a major artistic leap for the still-unproven band. Drenched in pop that many likened to <i>Pet Sounds</i> and <i>Revolver</i>, the pop leanings of <i>Summerteeth</i> masked a dark interior. As <i>Pitchfork</i> reviewer Neil Liebermann noted, “Undermining this sticky-sweet pop party in a delicious irony, and ultimately supplying <i>Summerteeth</i> with its depth and success, is Tweedy's dark contemplation.” The album’s narrator proves unreliable as he struggles to deal with a failed relationship, balancing images of domestic violence, jealously, and anger with moments of elation and optimism. Much like pre-9/11 America, the surface layers appeared perfectly healthy, but dig a bit deeper and trouble was brewing. Perhaps no two songs best represent this dichotomy than the tracks “Via Chicago” and “ELT.” Lieberman says it best: </div>
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The album's confusion climaxes during its keystone, the majestic "Via Chicago", and its counterpart "ELT". On the former, a scorned lover stews, "I dreamed about killing you again last night/ And it felt alright with me." Then, a couplet of unsettling stream-of-consciousness lyrics give way to Tweedy as he tears into a disturbingly deliberate, off-key guitar riff that might very well be the musical moment of 1999. Interestingly, the celebratory "ELT" finds our sad psychopath repented and healed: "Oh, what have I been missing/ Wishing, wishing that you were dead." Taken on its merits, the song is almost unimaginatively sincere, but in context, it becomes enigmatic. As the narrator shuffles his story for our approval, which spin are we to believe? Brilliantly, the album leaves such questions unanswered. </blockquote>
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The contrasts between such radically different emotions laid the groundwork for <i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot</i> soon after, an album that’s far removed from the orchestral pop of Summerteeth. Shrouded in ambient clicks, beeps, and hisses, <i>YHF</i> seemed the perfect post 9/11 album: hazy, anxious, and reflective. When Tweedy sings “I would like to salute/The ashes of American flags/And all the fallen leaves/Filling up shopping bags” at the conclusion of “The Ashes of American Flags,” it felt like a remorseful summation of our lives: patriotic consumerism in the face of terrorism. The fact that Wilco recorded <i>YHF</i> before 9/11 made the album that much more eerie. On “Poor Places,” Tweedy describes a recent beating that has left at least one man in poor shape, bandaged and emasculated, “His jaw's been broken/His bandage is wrapped too tight/His fangs have been pulled” and yet a sense of hope seems to filter through, as he follows this bleak portrayal with “And I really want to see you tonight.” Yet, Wilco saved perhaps the most resonant lyrics for “Jesus, Etc.,” where “Tall buildings shake/Voices escape singing sad sad songs/ Tuned to chords /Strung down your cheeks/Bitter melodies turning your orbit around.” <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot</i> (2001-2)</span></div>
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The reception of <i>YHF</i> might have been quite different if not for the controversy and hoopla that surrounded its release. Major label Reprise refused to release the album, claiming that its ambient textures were too weird and experimental to sell in the pop marketplace. Such claims perplexed many fans once the album was released by label Nonesuch (ironically, a smaller subsidiary of the same company that owned Reprise); apart from a brief period when “Outta Mind Outta Site” played on modern rock radio in 1996, Wilco had never been a radio band, and <i>YHF</i> actually contained some of the poppiest and most melodic songs in the band’s catalog, such as “Jesus, Etc.” and “Heavy Metal Drummer.” The kerfuffle over the album, though, postponed its release until April 2002, even though the songs had been written and recorded in late 2000 and early 2001. When Americans finally heard about the tall buildings shaking, the ashes of the flags, the wounds of 9/11 were still raw and very fresh in their memories. It was comforting to reminisce about “the innocence I’ve known, playing Kiss covers, beautiful and stoned” as the war party dragged America into its catastrophic response to the terror attacks during the Spring of 2002. <br />
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As the band pushed forward, they released <i>A Ghost is Born</i>, <i>Sky Blue Sky</i>, and <i>Wilco (the Album)</i>, each on Nonesuch. Though on <i>A Ghost is Born</i>, the haze of YHF remains, the album offers glimpses of youthful hope in songs like “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” and the self parody of “Late Greats” (The best band will never get signed/K-Settes starring Butcher's Blind/Are so good, you won't ever know/They never even played a show/You can't hear 'em on the radio). With many observers looking to see how the band would expand the experimental gestures of <i>YHF</i>, these albums seemed to indicate a contentment with their existing sonic palette – or at least a steady scaling back of any arty ambitions. Ghost contained the widest divergence between poppy singalongs and epic, extended song structures, while <i>Sky Blue Sky</i> – Tweedy’s first release after his battle with painkillers – was scorned by some critics for its easy-going, 70s rock vibe. The subsequent self-titled album included country-rock stompers of the <i>Being There</i> variety, like “You Never Know,” although “Bull Black Nova” offered an intriguing excursion into dense, oppressive dissonance. <br />
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Mostly, the band seemed content to enjoy its new independence from major labels and drug addiction, pursuing a reliable middle path of country-inflected indie rock. At the same time, though, the depression and anxiety that haunted <i>Ghost Is Born</i> melted away over time – a result of Tweedy’s overcoming addiction, no doubt, but also of the changing mood of American life. Ghost was recorded in late 2003 and early 2004, when the US was definitively enmeshed in its Iraq disaster and the nation was heading toward a grinding election battle between irreconcilable political forces. By 2007, when Sky Blue Sky was released, the darkest depths of the Bush years seemed behind us, although the collapse of the subprime market that undermined the entire economy was just beginning. The sunnier Wilco came out in 2009, reflecting both the sorrows of the recent past ( “Country Disappeared”) as well as a flinty determination to survive in the face of continual crisis (“You and I,” “Wilco (the Song)”). “Every generation thinks it’s the worst,” Tweedy sang, “thinks it’s the end of the world.” After the war on terror, two endless wars in Asia, and the near-total destruction of the world financial system, Americans could be forgiven for thinking the apocalypse was upon them. <br />
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<b>Learning to Live with the End of the World </b><br />
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Wilco’s discography certainly parallels the changing fortunes of America around the turn of the twentieth century, but it also tells an interesting story about the fall and rise of the music industry during the same period. On one level, they represent a familiar story about major labels picking up subcultural movements and packaging them for broader consumption. Uncle Tupelo won fame for popularizing a return to American roots music in the late 1980s, a conscious reaction of slick Nashville country and the pop mainstream in general that came to be known as “No Depression” (after the 1936 Carter Family tune that the band covered on a 1990 album of the same name). As Tweedy recently admitted, Tupelo “hated everything that wasn’t a field recording from Appalachia, anything that wasn’t raw and amateur-sounding,” and the band refused to seek mainstream success, quitting at the height of its influence, shortly after the release of the 1993 classic <i>Anodyne</i>. Tweedy and Jay Farrar went their separate ways, and Farrar’s Son Volt became an unexpected (albeit short-lived) sensation amid the mid-90s gold rush of alternative, grunge, post-grunge, and indie rock. Wilco had even less success on commercial radio, but the steady rise of its reputation among critics through the late 1990s ensured a devoted following. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Uncle Tupelo (left to right): Farrar, Tweedy, and another guy</span> </div>
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That following was not devoted enough for Reprise Records not to shed the band for its unruly, slightly arty ways in 2001, at a time when the mainstream industry was still lurching to respond to the threat of online file-sharing, and many labels were dropping indie-leaning artists from their rosters that had outlived their usefulness. Bands like Luna and Wilco commanded a tiny but consistent market share; the major labels, though, saw little advantage to keeping them around as record sales continued to slide in the aftermath of Napster, 9/11, and the recession of the early 2000s. AOL’s controversial 2001 takeover of Time Warner resulted in the Internet giant ordering the latter to clean house at its record division, cutting six hundred jobs. Supporters of Wilco were among those cut, though the efforts at shoring up Time Warner’s music business accomplished little in the long-run. And the whole saga offered a preview of the problems that would beset the new megacorporate behemoth; after all, the company gave itself a PR black eye by rejecting and postponing Wilco’s album only to have one of its own subsidiaries, Nonesuch, sign on with the band shortly after. <br />
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The story captures not just the suicidal tendencies of the mainstream record industry – the <i>YHF</i> episode also exemplified the new ways music would be distributed in the years to come. Tweedy had originally hoped to release the album on September 11th, 2001, of all days, but the label confusion set the date back. As leaked versions circulated on the Internet, the band took the nearly unprecedented leap of streaming the entire album on its website, beginning September 18th. (Two years earlier, Tom Petty had run into trouble with his label just for posting an mp3 of his new single, “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_NWnjyGGkg">Free Girl Now</a>,” online, which over a hundred thousand fans promptly downloaded.) As Greg Kot observes in his book <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=MqafHkC81h0C&lpg=PP1&dq=greg%20kot%20ripped&pg=PT102#v=onepage&q&f=false"><i>Ripped</i></a>, the band’s site received huge traffic and, on the subsequent tour, fans were seen singing along to songs from an album that had not even been properly released yet. All of us have witnessed the stony stares of the faces of concertgoers who wait through a new song the band is trying out live for the first time, unable to relate with the music because it was unfamiliar. Wilco’s decision to “give away” the music (in a sense) likely bolstered the success of their tour, which may not have generated as much interest if fans had no access to <i>YHF</i>. <br />
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Wilco has continued to offer new music as streams and downloads on its website, NPR, and other forums, while Tweedy has voiced support for file-sharing. “I look it as a library,” he said in 2005. “I look at it as our version of radio” – an outlet for artists who do not have the marketing or mainstream backing to get on Clear Channel-controlled broadcasting. The band recently took the final leap by setting up its own label, a tactic that artists have favored from the Beatles to Black Flag and Ani Difranco, but which is perhaps more viable than ever with electronic distribution. Indeed, they follow in the footsteps of Radiohead, who famously gave their 2007 album <i>In Rainbows</i> away on an NPR-like donation model (also known as “for free”) and continue to chart their own label-less course. <br />
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Critics have pondered whether such a go-it-alone strategy can work for bands who do not already possess the loyal fan-base and name recognition that Wilco and Radiohead enjoy, and the question remains open. What is beyond question is that Wilco’s path from the highly likable, alt-country non-geniuses of 1995 to the zeitgeist-defining art rockers of 2002 to the beloved independent institution of today encapsulates much of what has happened in American life and music over the last decade or two. Tweedy and his compatriots were there for both the No Depression and alternative music bonanzas of the early 1990s, and they survived the music industry crunch of the early twenty first century by chronicling America’s larger sojourn from disaster to disaster. They came out on the other side with a body of work most recently topped off by <i>The Whole Love</i>, an album that seems to encompass many of the styles and moods that marked their career. Its first single, “I Might,” muses on the frustrations of parenthood (“you won’t set the kids on fire, oh, but I might”). More telling is the b-side – a cover of Nick Lowe’s sardonic 1977 track “I Love My Label” – released, of course, by the band’s very own dBpm.<br />
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So when Dan Sinker incorporated Wilco into his @MayorEmanuel feed, it seemed appropriate. Emanuel’s election as mayor ushered in a new age for a city long dominated by machines, Irish pols, and the indomitable Daleys. Like Wilco, which was rejected by the record industry behemoth, Emanuel found himself and his campaign on the outs when rival candidates challenged his residency status. (The lawsuit was later overturned by the Illinois State Supreme Court -- an entity that, like Chicago’s city government, is beyond reproach). Yet, in part through new media like Sinker’s Twitter feed, and the strength of Emanuel’s personality, the former Obama confidant emerged victorious, much like Wilco several years earlier. That new media like Twitter subsumed a former neo-folkie/alt-country militant like Tweedy no longer seemed so surprising considering Wilco’s own turn to technology – both in terms of distribution and the enigmatic, electronic haze of <i>YHF</i>, <i>Ghost Is Born</i>, and <i>The Whole Love.</i> Sinker’s feed expressed pathos, rage, resistance and humor, the very components that have made Wilco so resonant for the past seventeen years. With <i>The Whole Love</i>, it’s like Wilco’s back in the kitchen again, cooking up something special -- maybe not YHF special but special nonetheless. Or, as @MayorEmanuel put it, “Jeff Tweedy showed up with a giant plate of motherfucking brownies. Game on, bitches.” </div>
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<br /></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-37708940132292058562011-10-12T08:08:00.000-07:002011-10-29T07:50:33.695-07:00Decide Yourself if Radio’s Gonna Stay: A Post-Mortem of R.E.M.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lijcbaAYcj1qac7ryo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lijcbaAYcj1qac7ryo1_500.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfIVJalcCo0uFLhcZruX62wzhvDxv_FdHo_RcPlf-tCUkJiJs3YSCrMzZJeTGkiMtSIAYZLL0lVQ8gGZSoR9Jc6Qh4bgiFulZ1x-cRQaaSZpBRzBBtdZJG_8OjYM7RvEkFPG-F0ND_pA/s1600/REM-Murmur-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> The first and most iconic R.E.M. record of all, “Radio Free Europe,” came at a time when the music industry was in turmoil, in 1981. The long boom of record sales began to flag in the late 1970s, amid grinding recession and the transition of the baby boomer demographic into adulthood. The brief efflorescence of punk proved to be a momentary and luckless fad for the music industry, which soon moved onto smoother and poppier offerings, leaving punk to evolve into the niche subculture it has been more or less ever since. MTV was just emerging on the horizon. Its earliest hit declared, “Video killed the radio star,” but R.E.M. had different thoughts on the matter. “Decide yourself if radio’s gonna stay,” Michael Stipe insisted on the Georgia band’s first single. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The lyrics of “Radio Free Europe” paint an impressionistic view of the world of 1981, when the fate of music remains in question and the Cold War world itself is in transition. It evokes an image of mobility and change – “straight off the boat, where to go?” – familiar to both the immigrant and the Southerner who first goes “abroad,” beyond the bounds of the former Confederacy. Equal parts New Wave spunk and Sixties psychedelic pop, with a touch of jagged punk spirit, the song seemed to be an anthem for the possibilities of independent music and the power of media to open up a new world. The incessant refrain of the song is “Decide yourself.” </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfIVJalcCo0uFLhcZruX62wzhvDxv_FdHo_RcPlf-tCUkJiJs3YSCrMzZJeTGkiMtSIAYZLL0lVQ8gGZSoR9Jc6Qh4bgiFulZ1x-cRQaaSZpBRzBBtdZJG_8OjYM7RvEkFPG-F0ND_pA/s1600/REM-Murmur-cover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfIVJalcCo0uFLhcZruX62wzhvDxv_FdHo_RcPlf-tCUkJiJs3YSCrMzZJeTGkiMtSIAYZLL0lVQ8gGZSoR9Jc6Qh4bgiFulZ1x-cRQaaSZpBRzBBtdZJG_8OjYM7RvEkFPG-F0ND_pA/s320/REM-Murmur-cover.jpg" width="316" /> </a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Kudzu is a social construct</span></span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.laganzua.net/star/prensa/imagenes/rem_yorke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I was reluctant to write anything about the recent demise of R.E.M., despite the fact that they were one of the bands nearest and dearest to my heart since I was thirteen years old. This reluctance derives in part from the flood of glowing encomia that have issued from <i>Salon</i>, <i>Slate</i>, and so many other media outlets in the last few weeks. R.E.M. “</span><a href="http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/09/22/why_rem_matter/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">invented alternative rock</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">.” They led a music revolution. They were, we are told, the greatest American rock band of the last thirty years. In other words, they still find themselves mired in second place after U2 for world’s greatest/most gigantic/longest-lived band of recent decades -- an honor most other big bands were either too self-destructive or idiosyncratic to hold. Long ago, a drunken Edge told an interviewer that if U2 were the Beatles, R.E.M. were the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young of their day. Whatever the merits of CSNY, it is hard to say that is </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">“Judy Blue Eyes" was more influential than</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." I don’t think that backhanded compliment ever stopped stinging. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.laganzua.net/star/prensa/imagenes/rem_yorke.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.laganzua.net/star/prensa/imagenes/rem_yorke.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Cut your hair and get a job, kid</span></span></div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Still, the now exalted status of R.E.M. is jarring. Boomer rock critics gave their work the benefit of the doubt in recent years, with the ever-credulous </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Rolling Stone</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> giving </span><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/reveal-20010501" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">praise</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> to the so-so likes of 2001’s <i>Reveal</i>, while a younger generation of critics at </span><a href="http://www.spin.com/articles/rem-around-sun"><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">SPIN</i></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> and </span><a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6748-reveal/"><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Pitchfork</i></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> have looked at their efforts since the mid-90s with a less forgiving eye. Among people my age and younger, at least, the band was more often mocked for its “Shiny Happy People”/“Everybody Hurts” period than appreciated for setting the template of brainy, independent, college rock in the 1980s. They were technically influential – artists such as Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and Thom Yorke cited them as major influences, and their mark was unmistakable on both the brilliant (Pavement) and the less-than-brilliant (Hootie and the Blowfish) – yet they found it hard to escape the impression of a has-been group incapable of matching the heights of their increasingly remote early days. Even when they put out an album as excellent as <i>Accelerate</i>, which ranks, with <i>Lifes Rich Pageant</i> (1986) and <i>Reckoning</i> (1983), among my favorite R.E.M. records, they still gave the impression of a band well past its prime. The lyrics of </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Accelerate</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">’s first single – “Nobody cares, no one remembers and nobody cares” – always seemed to me a plaintive rumination on a heyday long since past, for a band that could no longer find its audience. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When I first heard the news R.E.M. was breaking up, I was disappointed. They seemed to be in the middle of a late-career renaissance akin to Bob Dylan’s remarkable run from </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Time Out of Mind</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> to </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Modern Times</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, and the declaration seemed to come out of nowhere – ending very much with a whimper. R.E.M. had previously pledged to break up if any member left the band (they didn’t), and rumor had it they would part ways in the year 2000 (ditto). Now they decided to break up for no apparent reason, in the wake of a solid and fairly well-received record, 2011’s </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Collapse into Now</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">. As Louie C.K. says, no one ever gets divorced at just the right time. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Given the outpouring of respect and love for the band since their breakup, though, it seems like a shrewd move. Like an artist whose works shoot up in value after his death, the band’s premeditated demise has prompted people to recognize their immense contribution to music of the indie, college, southern, and general “modern” or “alternative” rock varieties. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The R.E.M. century: dune buggies, pink feather boas, and Jimmy Dean </span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I hope this sudden departure from the scene will lead critics and other listeners to discover the charms of underappreciated albums like </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">New Adventures in Hi-fi</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, the epically dour follow-up to </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Monster</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> that inaugurated the band’s slide into commercial oblivion, thanks in no small part to the near-suicidal choice of stream-of-consciousness ramble “E-Bow the Letter” as a first single. I hope </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Accelerate</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> will get a second look, as well as the handful of terrific songs from </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Reveal</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Collapse into Now</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The R.E.M. story is an invaluable one for the recent cultural history of pop music. With less militance than, say, Fugazi, and less angst than Pearl Jam or Nirvana, they grappled with the problem of translating independent music for a large audience, in an age when big rock bands with near-universal appeal became increasingly scarce, even extinct. It is the story of a band marrying a grab bag of disparate influences – the chiming Byrds guitars, the guttural, ragged baritone that Michael Stipe stole from Patti Smith, the lyrics that blended psychedelia, Southern Gothic and punk poetry – into a uniquely regional variant, plying their craft in the independent circuit for years before managing the transition to the mainstream success and megamillion record deals, and still finding a way to experiment and put out smart, thoughtful, adventurous music even when it meant sacrificing their mainstream popularity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The wonderful mystery and ambiguity of early records like </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Chronic Town</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Murmur</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, and </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Reckoning</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> was never to be recaptured, but that was all thirty years ago. What the band continued to represent, in spite of their missteps and mainstream popularity, was the possibility that the South might have a different face – a few arty guys from Georgia, with a penchant for punk and ambivalent sexuality, a fact that was crucially important for “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DvVYwXqFEE">Southern boys just like you and me</a>,” as Steve Malkmus once put it – and rock could remain open to the eccentric and obscure, while working within a familiar template of melody, harmony, and noise that appealed to a wide range of listeners. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">R.E.M. departs the stage at a moment when the music industry is again in crisis, just as when they arrived. The question of whether radio’s gonna stay – whether it can still “polish up the gray” – is uncertain, between the many competing and uncertain experiments in internet and satellite radio, streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, the revival of vinyl, and so forth. Rather like the Great Depression, when broadcast radio seemed to offer free music to all and poverty threatened the record industry with annihilation, we are in a moment of transit and anxiety – just what R.E.M. captured so aptly with “Radio Free Europe” thirty years ago. We can hope, perhaps, that another band will appear before long to capture the uneasy vicissitudes of this moment and write music that shows yet another way forward. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: right;"><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Alex Sayf Cummings</i></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-89354354548789179722011-10-05T21:40:00.000-07:002011-10-07T05:37:15.662-07:00Erasing Race: Whiteness, California, and the Colorblind Bind<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0KuMWaKHausoaOCZVb2p18_vwQ_WVmcTW-tjzGUcTG2fpZEvvfHx0N1yuXx7tDNHI_hsJvctdTQRgsJSx8oJ1dLtRA6fpit5LhoT0mbtsmj2t7VL0MSfxlaS7PS9CWcX9m90NS_fdIw8/s1600/No_187.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0KuMWaKHausoaOCZVb2p18_vwQ_WVmcTW-tjzGUcTG2fpZEvvfHx0N1yuXx7tDNHI_hsJvctdTQRgsJSx8oJ1dLtRA6fpit5LhoT0mbtsmj2t7VL0MSfxlaS7PS9CWcX9m90NS_fdIw8/s320/No_187.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div><blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Whatever their defects as historical analysis, [multiracial and multicultural] have become obligatory public gestures. Among breaches of propriety, defining race in 'bipolar' terms ranks well ahead of wearing animal fur. During a symposium at a university in southern California, a senior historian of white women rebuked me for emphasizing the historical origin of American racial ideology in the enslavement of Afro-Americans--not, apparently, because she judged the argument invalid, but because she thought it unseemly to make in California. </blockquote><blockquote style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: right;">– Barbara Fields </div></blockquote><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
Legendary Marxist and Columbia professor Barbara Fields sounds simultaneously bemused and frustrated by overly politically correct constructions of race that eschewed any kind of binary considerations. Though it remains unclear whether or not Fields would like to take a meat ax to perceived notions of multiculturalism, she clearly holds reservations. For Fields, the move toward the study of “whiteness” and how other groups relate to this concept seemed questionable. What about class? Despite Fields’s caustic protestations, the shift toward the study of “whiteness” unfolded. <br />
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Certainly, while scholars' intentions may be good, Fields has not been the only academic to raise a skeptical eyebrow. Recovering the histories of marginalized groups often emerges from an impulse within a historian toward social justice or even some sense of solidarity. While such intents may be laudable, they do not necessarily make for great history. <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/kilminster">Richard Kilminster</a> cautioned academics that the infection of politics in their work could lead to the establishment of arguments that could not be proven or disproven. <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/whitenessoral">Daniel Wickenburg</a> shares Kilminster’s concern over the shifting of the study of identities to those of social constructions such as masculinity or whiteness. Though some argue that this move toward defining and analyzing whiteness and relations to it enables white people to reinsert themselves into the discussion, Wickenburg’s main reservation revolves around the role of social history practices, especially in regard to “reading the absences.” Wickenburg wishes not to turn back the clock on these recent “historiographical inversions” but he does plead for cultural historians to break from the methodology of their social history predecessors. “My particular claim … is that cultural historians need to be more like intellectual historians and less like social historians,” writes Wickenburg. “They need to take ideas and language a lot more seriously than they have been willing to do.”<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKTDNWZslEVecovD3jwo4Lx1cx3Z6MOse2W265ihbByqOtQli0ATgbzEWeDB4VVNyJLSSTxAyQ5gQhgSZknhkXjogWuAmInkOoHVikIKoT39g3f6GccL6rnsZcneSfVXfwWTUEIdopu3A/s1600/black-panther-and-the-red-book-1969.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKTDNWZslEVecovD3jwo4Lx1cx3Z6MOse2W265ihbByqOtQli0ATgbzEWeDB4VVNyJLSSTxAyQ5gQhgSZknhkXjogWuAmInkOoHVikIKoT39g3f6GccL6rnsZcneSfVXfwWTUEIdopu3A/s320/black-panther-and-the-red-book-1969.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
Undoubtedly, due to discriminatory government policies like segregation and America’s long history of racial hierarchies, many ethnic and racial groups struggled to reconcile their own identities with that of the dominant white one. Numerous historians and sociologists have explored divisions within the nation’s Mexican American population that led older Chicanos to identify more closely with whites rather than with their fellow minorities and in some cases other Latinos. Scholars like <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/immigrantacts">Lisa Lowe</a> point to the impact of the “model minority” construction in shaping Asian American communities and their relationship to Blacks and Latinos. Lowe and others have argued that seen as politically silent and passive, Asian Americans provided conservatives a model that promoted racial liberalism but only for worthy groups that aligned with various American values. This construction framed protesting Blacks and Chicanos of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as unworthy malcontents unwilling to commit themselves to the proper ethics and tenets of American society. Still, the determination of what groups qualified as “model minorities” and what those qualifications consisted of remained defined largely by whites. Thus, it should come as no surprise that segments of numerous ethnic and racial communities have sometimes positioned themselves distantly from Blacks and other minorities while attempting to shore up their own alleged “whiteness”. After all, the benefits of being white in American history, economically, politically, and socially, remain rather obvious. <br />
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Even as American shores become increasingly diverse, whiteness continues to define political discourse. Polyglot states like California promote a sort of “racial liberalism” that argues for tolerance but in actuality masks inequalities. The aforementioned Lisa Lowe castigated multiculturalism for similar faults. For Lowe, it is through contradiction that the systematic inequalities embedded in “cultural institutions, economies, and geographies” are revealed. In many ways the problem arises from how we view difference. Long positioned as a negative, multiculturalism attempted to solve such pejorative views by suggesting a pluralist cultural vision in which all cultures interacted on equal terms. Lowe and others view this as a dodge; multiculturalism levels differences and papers over real inequalities that prevent groups from interacting on equal terms. The subsequent conflict calls attention to pluralist multiculturalism’s role in obscuring such unevenness. In this way, Lowe suggests that culture must be reimagined not in the language of “identity, equivalence, or pluralism but out of contradiction, as a site for alternative histories and memories that provide the grounds to imagine subject, community, and practice in new ways.” (96)<br />
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Whatever one thinks of multiculturalism, no other state in the nation the represents the multicultural vision of twenty first century America more than California. However, despite this apparent diversity, political scientist <a href="http://pages.uoregon.edu/ethnic/hosang.shtml">Daniel Martinez HoSang</a> illustrates how California’s vaunted referendum/proposition system has promoted “political whiteness” at the expense of anti-discrimination and civil rights legislation. In HoSang’s eyes, California presents an intriguing paradox: an avowedly blue state, characterized by wide spread racial and ethnic diversity that clings to a conservative vision of race. In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Racial-Propositions-Initiatives-California-Crossroads/dp/0520266668">Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California</a></i>, HoSang explores how the ballot initiative system proposed and generated “racial meaning [while] forging racialized political communities.” (4) These propositions then contributed to the construction of a larger political framework “about human possibility, which marks some claims, experiences, and harms as legitimate and recognizable while stigmatizing others as specious or irrelevant,” writes HoSang. (4)<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDp86h_3axpVB-o3MbS2zIdlEBd4O0wPvAM8hEJeTgJbhaF3mqW04F0fpxLnsuLTw4Sp491bdH5qzHPNQox-0kEY8OzaMXoJAqNqBtAJ97c3bH-9ysX_E2N8PlMzk_TIvImHJY6ddGEXQ/s1600/racial-propositions-ballot-initiatives-making-postwar-california-daniel-martinez-hosang-paperback-cover-art.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDp86h_3axpVB-o3MbS2zIdlEBd4O0wPvAM8hEJeTgJbhaF3mqW04F0fpxLnsuLTw4Sp491bdH5qzHPNQox-0kEY8OzaMXoJAqNqBtAJ97c3bH-9ysX_E2N8PlMzk_TIvImHJY6ddGEXQ/s1600/racial-propositions-ballot-initiatives-making-postwar-california-daniel-martinez-hosang-paperback-cover-art.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
In <i>Racial Propositions</i>, HoSang charts the trajectory of ballot initiatives from the 1946 defeat of Prop 11 – which sought to create a state Fair Employment Practices Commission that would police racial discrimination by unions and employers - to the first ballot initiative victory by civil rights advocates in 2003 – a rejection of Ward Connerly’s Prop 54 attempt to ban state and local governments from compiling racial data. For much of the book, HoSang recounts how civil rights advocates continually foundered in their attempts to pass ballot initiatives in their favor and reject those to their detriment. Moreover, HoSang reveals the odd discourse that emerged. Paradoxically, ballot initiatives with clear racial impacts were increasingly discussed, promoted, or critiqued in language that avoided nearly all mention of race. In the defeat of 2003’s Prop 54, civil rights advocates and others constructed a successful opposition campaign by focusing on the proposition’s impact on health professionals and services eschewing all mention of race. The larger theme coursing through <i>Racial Propositions</i> relates to this central issue: racial liberalism and the idea of tolerance rested on a foundation of racial logic that reduced racism to a disreputable personal act attached to individuals rather than the institutional variant that remains pervasive today. In this constellation of race, debate regarding discrimination becomes increasingly difficult as civil rights proponents continually found themselves on their heels politically in attempts to appeal to the mythical white suburban voter who no longer saw a society stratified by racial divisions.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCJ_MrGKu8fmCDx6_Gzqrqxfp9Ojxq6xqOQCMlvHLJw7pE6iyRbMoprGM-E9C_E-f14RJTy2Y8Wx2OnjNs6dCFHxoaKRWXF2Bkp6yxB3fRq3L2MMFB3u7X0FbS0RwOea2aYQwuqiRtIkA/s1600/Demonstration_Against_Proposition_14_.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCJ_MrGKu8fmCDx6_Gzqrqxfp9Ojxq6xqOQCMlvHLJw7pE6iyRbMoprGM-E9C_E-f14RJTy2Y8Wx2OnjNs6dCFHxoaKRWXF2Bkp6yxB3fRq3L2MMFB3u7X0FbS0RwOea2aYQwuqiRtIkA/s320/Demonstration_Against_Proposition_14_.jpg" /></a> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Opposition to Prop 14 </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
If many scholars have presented the success of ballot initiatives like Prop 14. which nullified the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act and exempted many real estate transactions from civil rights legislation (1964) as “white backlash” (one might point to Rich Perlstein’s recent <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/B003E7ET0S/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317840240&sr=1-1">Nixonland</a></i> as evidence of this narrative), HoSang suggests another view. HoSang argues that the backlash school, for lack of a better term, treats these developments as accomplished fact because they insist on the “particularity and distinctiveness of ‘nonwhite’ consciousness, interests, and demands, thus ignoring the contingencies of “historically specific events, claims, and struggles.” (18) The problem lay not in the “distinctiveness of ‘non white consciousness,” but rather the instutialized structures of racism that portrayed demands by minorities as selfish or extreme. Paraphrasing the aforementioned Barbara Fields, HoSang points out racial prejudice arises out of historical conditions not genetics. “To posit, then, that ‘race’ or ‘racial prejudice’ functions as a motive force of history does nothing ‘more than repeat the question by way of answer,’” writes HoSang. (18)<br />
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So what exactly does HoSang mean when he employs the term “political whiteness”? HoSang’s definition parallels similar arguments regarding debates about masculinity. For example, many scholars argue that a “heteronormative gaze” has functioned to establish an accepted discourse regarding sexuality, stressing monogamy and male dominated heterosexuality while marginalizing those who inhabit sexualities outside of this public sphere. This results not only in a marginalized identity but a liminal or nearly invisible figure. Historians like <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/publicsphere">George Chauncey</a> have illustrated the complexities of early 20th century sexuality where a burgeoning lexicon attempted to create a public space, admittedly encoded, for what observers today would describe as homosexuality. However, though homosexuals successfully constructed a veiled public life, certain concepts like gay marriage remained not only unspoken, but non-existent. For example, in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/City-Boy-Life-During-1960s/dp/1608192342/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317840212&sr=1-1">City Boy</a></i>, literary critic Edmund White notes that despite the proliferation of gay rights movements, none of White’s peers ever considered matrimony: “Back then we had no notion of ‘gay marriage,’ partly because may of us were equally opposed to marriage for straight people.” (99) <br />
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Perhaps White’s sample group—bohemians and others who fancied themselves avant garde—was a bit skewed. One could also suggest, as White does, that the broader society had begun to question the validity of marriage or at the very least aspects of it. Clearly, as White articulates and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Erotic-City-Sexual-Revolutions-Francisco/dp/0195377818/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317840286&sr=1-1">Josh Sides</a> has illustrated, in its early stages after decades of closeted or encoded behavior, the gay liberation movement saw open sexuality and expressions of this sexuality as a political right to be deployed. Yet, few gays pressed for marriage rights. Perhaps, marriage seemed like a cage to the newly out gay community. Yet, it might also be because the idea itself, squashed by heterosexual norms, could never emerge. The rules and limits of discourse, set by a dominant heteronormative society, would not allow it. Breeders viewed such ideas as so impossible as to elicit comedic disbelief. White admits that this discourse impacted gay men psychologically. “We ourselves still thought it was pretty strange being gay, and half the time we were claiming our gay rights we were really whistling in the dark,” reflects White, “trying to convince ourselves we weren’t really public menaces or monsters either pitiable or frightening.” (99) HoSang’s political whiteness parallels this “heternormative gaze”—each dictates the terms of debate and marginalizes or obscures those who fail to reside within its boundaries.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGYj3tA4_cEteGjzHe088rCernTgsDKDBntLs0NhlhZw1pfJVIdChng98rn4ytr3nQ2xQY7AzyowerGAr1vTQFwwsBi-wNroszAYDoze-Xc8QmDOrBNxOVr_iKyVPVGcISp8I0vlOYI9w/s1600/resist209flyer.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGYj3tA4_cEteGjzHe088rCernTgsDKDBntLs0NhlhZw1pfJVIdChng98rn4ytr3nQ2xQY7AzyowerGAr1vTQFwwsBi-wNroszAYDoze-Xc8QmDOrBNxOVr_iKyVPVGcISp8I0vlOYI9w/s1600/resist209flyer.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
Drawing upon writers like George Lipsitz, Raymond Williams, Cheryl Harris, and W.E.B. DuBois, HoSang’s “political whiteness” operates as identity and a “property interest.” Through norms, “settled expectations” and investments, political whiteness sets the boundaries for “political communities,” the meanings of “political interests” and the “source of political power” for those actors who situate themselves as white. Critically, it does not limit itself to the “interests and politics of ‘white people’”, writes HoSang, “it instead concerns the process by which some political claims and interests come to be defined as white. “ (20) For HoSang, political whiteness acts as an umbrella, drawing in diverse groups under its identity. When discussing the debate over Proposition 187, HoSange argues political whiteness functioned to suture “a range of identities – taxpayer, homeowner, American – which made the distinctions between worthy and unworthy subjects recognizable.” (167) As much of <i>Racial Propositions</i> illustrates, political whiteness is a big tent concept with both liberals and conservatives retreating under its auspices.<br />
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Relatedly, in many ways, political whiteness’ main characteristic is disingenuousness. As HoSang notes, “like whiteness in general, political whiteness is a subjectivity that constantly disavows its own presence and insists on its own innocence.” (21) None of its practitioners admit its existence or even the existence of motivations driven by race. It is as if race does not exist. In the words of Usual Suspects’ Verbal Kint, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Instead, invested political actors employ a language of inclusion as represented by appeals to “our rights”, “our jobs”, “our schools” and so forth. As HoSang points out he is not the first to explore the role of political whiteness. In recent years, writers like <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/krusewhiteflight">Kevin Kruse</a>, M.D. Lassiter, and <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/cityquartz">Mike Davis</a> have examined similar developments even if none them used the term “political whiteness.” In <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/suburbanreview">Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South</a></i>, M.D. Lassiter explores how the role of a white homeowner taxpayer identity employed race neutral rhetoric, which defended “the class privileges and consumer rights of the middle class suburbs.” (122) <br />
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Like HoSang, Lassiter finds the backlash narrative racially reductive. Labels like “Southern Strategy” and “Republican South”, Lassiter argues, downplay “the centrality of class ideology in the outlook of suburban voters and ignores the consistent class divisions among white southerners evident throughout the civil rights era.” (4) Again like HoSang, Lassiter notes that middle class white suburban homeowners recast civil rights debates establishing a national discourse of racial moderation, which advocated a gradual integration (though the degree depended on specific localities) that cast massive resisters and civil rights reformers as equally extreme. “The stance that moderation represented the position of reasonable people under attack by ‘extremists on both sides’ – a formulation that lumped massive resisters and civil rights activists together against the middle,” writes Lassiter, “emerged as a popular viewpoint in the rest of the nation before it became the dominant ideology in the metropolitan South.” (99) <br />
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Moreover, the discourse of racial moderation viewed integration as required by law, but not necessarily morally correct; in this way it failed to address the underlying tensions that created segregation. <a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/alienneighbors">Charlotte Brooks</a> found similar developments in the integration of Los Angeles and San Francisco by Asians and Asian Americans. Brooks points out that many whites “accommodated racial change in ways that preserved their racialized self esteem.” (<i>Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends</i>, 221) Though many white residents viewed the presence of Asians as a drag on property values, they justified integration by commending Japanese and Chinese families for their “values.” “As Asian Americans gained greater access to formerly all white areas,” writes Brooks, “a growing number of white Californians began to speak of them as people who shared the kinds of values that whites usually identified exclusively with themselves and their neighborhoods.” (221) Moreover, whites explained that American treatment of Asians and Asian Americans had Cold War implications as domestic America could provide a transnational example promoting the nation’s tolerance of minorities. According to Brooks, California homeowners viewed integration as a sacrifice they must bear for a larger purpose: Cold War efforts in Asia.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxe6R_xC5LC6psOnRqcrGGZJf7caGnSfaugg3yHRAUQ8lxHxIzYt8tivUtM0gvRSpZUy2lE0t7No5YipzmJ_JiPZ9UlWLSGjPwTZJUctmdvHc2L2Gm8Qp-ix4xW8TWo2mPaR8IEj_OwDs/s1600/NAACPhotel-segregation1.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxe6R_xC5LC6psOnRqcrGGZJf7caGnSfaugg3yHRAUQ8lxHxIzYt8tivUtM0gvRSpZUy2lE0t7No5YipzmJ_JiPZ9UlWLSGjPwTZJUctmdvHc2L2Gm8Qp-ix4xW8TWo2mPaR8IEj_OwDs/s320/NAACPhotel-segregation1.jpg" /></a> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Integrating Atlanta </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
Still this allegiance to whiteness had boundaries. In <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/krusewhiteflight">White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism</a></i>, Kevin Kruse explores the role class played in Atlanta’s white community during mid twentieth century desegregation efforts. When HoSang identifies the language of “political whiteness” as a collective “our [insert noun]”, Kruse illustrates a similar process in Atlanta. “For local Atlanta white communities, the language of community, community protection, and freedom of association,” notes Kruse, “became buzzwords for resistance. Initial resistance focused on constructing an “established white community” then using the language of community protection to prevent integration. Yet, as in Lassiter’s account of suburban school desegregation, class intervened as working class whites watched middle class families move to the suburbs, accelerating black encroachment into their neighborhoods. Of course, even within the Atlanta white middle class, divisions emerged. Local groups such as Help Our Public Education (HOPE) or Metropolitan Association for Segregation Education (MASE) formed to respond to the degrees of difference arising among whites resistant to integration. For many HOPE became “the unofficial voice of official Atlanta on the topic of open schools,” Kruse notes. “The Hartsfield coalition and its allies in the press portrayed HOPE as the voice of the respectable middle class and dismissed segregationists as uncultured rabble rousers.” (138) <br />
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Conversely, MASE represented a more militant strain of this middle class orientation that politely rejected black requests for inclusion. Draped in respectability, their leadership “spoke softly, with reserve and intelligence and in a language that accentuated middle class ideals of family, individual rights, equal opportunity, and upward mobility through hard work.” (140) The division between HOPE and MASE illustrated the fractured nature of middle class identities, but also illustrated the kind of rhetoric of political whiteness that HoSang explores, one that clothed itself in middle class respectability, individualism, and race neutral language. To be fair, one could argue that the “values” Brookes, Lassiter, and Kruse point to relate as much to bourgeois class based sensibilities as much as whiteness or some combination of race/class intervention rather than “political whiteness.” Ultimately, HoSang’s sharpest critics will no doubt raise these complaints. <br />
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As evidenced by these examples, the negation of race through a color blind rhetoric employed during ballot initiatives and school desegregation debates has become a defining characteristic of post war American public discourse. However, HoSang observes California’s ballot initiatives through a different lens. While certainly not a rebuke of works like Kruse’s <i>White Flight</i> and Lassiter’s <i>The Silent Majority</i>, HoSang’s account refuses to accept that the white racial identities ascribed to participants have been fully realized and defined. Nor are they “constructed outside the field of politics,” argues HoSang. Rather, this identity moves. “White political identity, is hardly static; it also becomes renewed and transformed through struggles such as ballot initiatives.” (21) Through ballot initiatives, HoSang cleverly flips the discussion on its heads: initiatives have little to do with the rights of “racialized minorities,” they do however represent “contests over the political authority and ‘settled expectations’ of whiteness itself.” (21) In other words, Why does this identity move? “But white political identity is hardly static; it also becomes transformed and rewnewd thorugh strudgges such as ballot iniative campaigns.” (21) To paraphrase Gramsci and numerous others who invoke his name, because “hegemony takes work.”<br />
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Ballot initiatives also reveal a compelling dynamic about political whiteness: the appropriation of civil rights rhetoric by often conservative forces. For example, in the battle over the passage of Prop 14 (this measure sought to defang the Rumford housing act, which more or less promised open housing), the California Real Estate Association (CREA) painted open housing acts like Rumford as intrusions on long held political freedoms. “Situating Proposition 14 in the spirit of an inclusionary Americanism built upon freedom and opportunity over exclusion and hierarchy,” HoSang points out, “the CREA’s Property Owners Bill of Rights asserted that Proposition 14 was indeed the rightful heir to the nation’s history of pluralist inclusion.” (68) However, the right that such organizations and those that supported them fought for was one couched in racial context. Race may have never been mentioned but as HoSang suggests, Prop 14’s protection gave whites the “right to discriminate against and exclude people of color in general and black peoples in particular.” (70) Even when articulated in terms of individualism and property, these ideas “referenced particular historical constructions and narratives,” writes HoSang. After all, if property rights proved to be the real issue, HoSang astutely points out that racial covenants, corporate agreements, and homeowners associations long circumscribed property rights through their racial restrictions. Instead, opposition to laws like the Rumford Act turned logic on its head, as developers and homeowners claimed its provisions illustrated that racial liberalism had run amok.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZdkYAm33e49R_G9SSX_XMjDDO7pShNUeC5fJNDERCeySn_KrJnqEuO4bNzoNV3hD5XS6EkiWOgBCDSzp_OgEboQ24FqceTl3NqMMpxko1SWTbi9WLuOXMSJ0kzcptngExoHYHNSQMfq4/s1600/busing1.gif"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZdkYAm33e49R_G9SSX_XMjDDO7pShNUeC5fJNDERCeySn_KrJnqEuO4bNzoNV3hD5XS6EkiWOgBCDSzp_OgEboQ24FqceTl3NqMMpxko1SWTbi9WLuOXMSJ0kzcptngExoHYHNSQMfq4/s1600/busing1.gif" /> </a> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Busing in LA </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
In this context, homeownership became a social and political identity fueled by race, class, and gender normatives. This identity did not remain confined to proposition debates; instead as Eric Avila has argued, it pervaded popular culture. In <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/popculturewhiteflight">Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban</a> Los Angeles</i>, Avila pursues a task similar to that of William Deverall in Whitewashed Adobe, exploring the construction of a “privatized, consumer oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness and suburban home ownership.” As government policies attempted to reconstruct American identities along consumerist lines, white suburbanites attempted to build a “classless” ideal that separated them from the “darkened” inner city. For example, the post war decline of neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Watts, a decline due in great part to HOLC/FHA policies, and the rise of suburban enclaves like South Gate meant suburban residents hoped to differentiate themselves from the evils of urban living. Thus, as “the expansion of suburban California provided a mythic space for the construction of a new 'white city',” Bunker Hill, Boyle Heights, and Watts provided convenient straw men for the emerging “cinematic vision of a black and alien Los Angeles.” Here Avila juxtaposes the portrayal of the inner city in Los Angeles film noir with the rise of Disneyland, each representing an idealized/demonized version of metropolitan regions. Undoubtedly, Los Angeles’ role as cultural producer influenced such developments. The suburban, decentralized nature of Southern California, when portrayed in movies, television, and via Disneyland reinforced such conceptions of post war America. <br />
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Throughout <i>Racial Propositions</i>, HoSang acknowledges the mistakes of civil rights advocates. Few organizations could claim experience with direct democracy electoral politics. Repeatedly, organizers made the same mistakes. First, too often, civil rights and related advocates mobilized too late, allowing opponents to dictate the terms of debate. Second, direct contact approaches rather than public events that frequently drew those already in agreement proved more effective in gaining support. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, never mention race. Here HoSang presents a provocative and some might argue polarizing argument: civil rights advocates and others ended up reproducing normatives through their method of opposition. The message opponents of Proposition 187 (1994 - declares undocumented immigrants ineligible for public, social , and health services, public education) and Proposition 209 (1996 – ends affirmative action in public hiring, contracting, and public education) adopted a campaign in which they openly admitted that they agreed that affirmative action and immigration were problems but that the propositions’ solutions would only exacerbate each issue. Thus, though their intentions remained pure, their efforts furthered the underlying message of those who supported the propositions. HoSang points out that in regard to immigration reform, it failed to dominate concerns in California or nationally, but that the passage of Prop 187 and the debate that emerged in connection with it established a discourse around immigrants the served as dress rehearsal for the more polarizing, demonizing immigration controversies of recent years. <br />
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As noted earlier, conservatives do not monopolize the concept of political whiteness. HoSang identifies the left or mainstream left’s role in perpetuating the very political whiteness that conservatives embraced. In relation to Proposition 187, HoSang argues Democrats did as much damage as Republicans. “While leading Democrats did not endorse Proposition 187,” he argues, “they fully participated in constructing unauthorized immigration as a political and economic crisis that required uncompromising action, essentially affirming the rationale that fueled Proposition 187.” (187) Take the example of Senator Diane Feinstein. The California Senator may have had more compassionate reasons for her concern regarding undocumented residents, but her prescriptions, like those of other prominent Democrats including Barbara Boxer and President Clinton, adopted many of the solutions from New Right figures. “Feinstein insisted that she was raising the issue in order ‘to avoid a serious backlash against all immigrants’ and to forestall more extreme proposals emanating from the ‘far right’,” observes HoSang. “But her policy prescriptions were largely taken from these same groups – her solutions mirrored those made by Pat Buchanan just one year earlier – and focused almost entirely on punitive measures.” (172) In the case of both propositions, the debates that unfolded shaped the discourse and understandings attached to each.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj2C2b8ZT_5BYEpOpSb0tU9pb7Mn34ipp2QL1C3wjQgUnLwfjSrWFNK_nEgBnxVBzITLfWvW9geev3e2hNkDYJAqUJD4J7CI1QryR8AWMJbIepDRforf0eaJ2SKWNz3snNzhW2jvj2Rvo/s1600/220px-Ward_Connerly_cropped_photo.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj2C2b8ZT_5BYEpOpSb0tU9pb7Mn34ipp2QL1C3wjQgUnLwfjSrWFNK_nEgBnxVBzITLfWvW9geev3e2hNkDYJAqUJD4J7CI1QryR8AWMJbIepDRforf0eaJ2SKWNz3snNzhW2jvj2Rvo/s1600/220px-Ward_Connerly_cropped_photo.jpg" /></a> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The man, the myth, the magic? </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
While critics may argue that actions matter more than discourse, HoSang’s examination of Prop. 209 illustrates the power of language to shape or influence voters. Proponents of the proposition labeled their movement the California Civil Rights Initiative. They argued that dismissing affirmative action fulfilled the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s provisions regarding gender and racial preferences. According to supporters, affirmative action programs promoted unqualified women and individuals of color while discriminating against hard working, better qualified citizens. Of course, this then stigmatized “any signs of Black advancement in education or employment as undeserved and unwarranted,” notes HoSang. This discourse also functioned to obscure the long history of preferential treatment for white men. The proposition passed rather easily yet exit polls suggested a paradoxical complexity. One exit poll found that 54% of voters supported affirmative action programs meant to help women and minorities find better employment and education. A second poll argued that as much as 80% of those individuals who voted yes on Prop 209 acknowledged that discrimination remained common. Whether these voters professed such opinions as a form of self therapy or had simply been confused by the rhetoric and language surrounding the proposition remains uncertain but clearly discourse helped to shape the final outcome in significant ways.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnPIvDngfovHit4ZDhlpxH30KHaLXOG9SF79m1s060-rDrKiwphkdO8bjbU2KQxGYkpvcaoXMZEfSXcSRMxjGLH3sizShtP69KNRXq3DK7oXfKSdOU03Jx_JgQVV2wwE3-l-rHvX-07Ig/s1600/yessign.03-10-06.240.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnPIvDngfovHit4ZDhlpxH30KHaLXOG9SF79m1s060-rDrKiwphkdO8bjbU2KQxGYkpvcaoXMZEfSXcSRMxjGLH3sizShtP69KNRXq3DK7oXfKSdOU03Jx_JgQVV2wwE3-l-rHvX-07Ig/s1600/yessign.03-10-06.240.jpg" /></a> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">He doesn't see race </span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
Despite the prevalence of loss, HoSang ends <i>Racial Propositions</i> with a victory for civil rights advocates, though one tinged by normative limitations. When Ward Connerly attempted to follow up his Prop 209 victory with the 2003 Proposition 54 – an effort to ban race data collection/analysis conducted by state and local governments. By this time, opponents had formulated a game plan. They engaged the proposition early to prevent supporters from controlling the message. Second, they avoided, at all costs, any mention of race, choosing to instead garner the support of medical professionals who opposed Prop 54 because it threatened health care services. Opponents of 54 emerged victorious but like early efforts, they refused to challenge the implicit underlying normatives. “Nor did the measure’s opponents feel they could prominently defend anti-discrimination or civil rights principles to the white electorate,” writes Hosang. “In choosing to emphasize the dangers posed to health care in general and in highlighting the investments of white votes in maintaining the collection of racial data in particular, the [Coalition for an Informed California] concluded that it had little choice but to defer the norms of political whiteness.” (261-262)<br />
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If one accepts HoSang’s conclusions, California’s identity as the American multicultural capitol deserves serious revision. Granted, most observers acknowledge that discourse impacts actions, but to what extent? HoSang impressively charts how discourse can be employed to undergird real political change. Clearly, the language and legacy of civil rights battles no longer belonged to the left. Ward Connerly (Prop 207/Prop 54) and Ron Unz (Prop 227– ended bilingual education in public schools) utilized “claims to fairness, empowerment, and inclusion that justified support for programs like affirmative action and bilingual education could also be used to discredit them,” HoSang points out. (262) Nor was political whiteness property of whites alone. If HoSang illustrates this phenemona with examples so have other writers. The aforementioned M.D. Lassiter recounts the reaction by some middle class black homeowners in Charlotte to the suggestion of busing. Many Blacks openly resisted as one resident explained, “if I wanted my children to attend school with kids from the projects, I’d have moved next to one.” (218) Still, the question remains, is political whiteness really white or actually an amalgamation of class and race based sensibilities? HoSang effectively illustrates the dynamics of discourse and political movements that accompanied ballot initiatives. Undoubtedly, participants on both sides viewed race as a central issue, yet eventually all parties obscured its realities, thus relying on appeals to abstract ideals. Perhaps, the need to draw in wide ranging interests that traversed numerous classes, religions, ethnicities, and in some cases race, required this umbrella of whiteness. Apparently, political whiteness truly is a big tent -- but one constructed by the white majority to house all those willing to abide by its rules.<br />
<span style="color: white;">.</span> </div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: right;"><i>Ryan Reft</i></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />
</div>less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-13872628866111839242011-09-25T19:06:00.000-07:002011-09-27T10:08:43.160-07:00The Ties that Bind: The Transnational Trick of Immobilizing the Mobile<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Pure Distillation</span> </div>
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Few words in historical discourse (outside of the word discourse mind you) elicit cynical responses more than transnationalism. If definitions remain murky for some, others argue transnational connections are falsely constructed via sophisticated argumentation and careful selection of evidence. After all, we can all agree that Kung Fu movies broadcast over superstations in Chicago and New York influenced metropolitan young people of all stripes in the 1980s, such that rap collectives like Wu Tang Clan reimagined Staten Island as Shaolin. The Wu Tang refracted these experiences through the prism of Eastern martial arts (see GZA’s <i>Liquid Swords</i> for a precise example). However, the pervasive effect and meaning of this appropriation remains much harder to determine quantitatively or qualitatively. After all, Wu Tang’s Asian fetish seems to have proven less influential than its internal “rap collective” organization, which appears to have been duplicated in some ways by current Pitchfork darlings Odd Future. <br />
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Regardless, academics have pounced on these kind of Afro Asian connections. In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Was-Kung-Fighting-Connections/dp/0807050113/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316982986&sr=1-1">Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity</a></i>, Vijay Prashad points out that there exists a long history of transnational cultural diffusion. In the book’s final chapter, he discusses how Kung Fu operated to unify Black and Asian communities and led to a further intertwining of cultures culminating in a “third world solidarity” that had been building well before the 1960s:</div>
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That Ho Chi Minh once hung out in Garveyite halls in Harlem should perhaps be part of this story, as should the Maoist inflections in both the National Liberation Front (of Vietnam) and Black Panther politics. In 1965, Ho Chi Minh and the black radical Robert F. Williams spent an evening together during which they “swapped Harlem stories; Ho recounted his visits to Harlem in the 1920s as a merchant seaman and claimed that he had heard Marcus Garvey speak there and had been so inspired that he "emptied his pockets’ into the collection plate." (141)</blockquote>
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Yet, some might suggest the evidence remains interesting but historically flimsy. Despite this criticism, when executed correctly, transnational approaches reveal surprisingly insightful observations regarding perceived nationalisms and identities that often push back against tropes like American exceptionalism. For example, in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Among-Nations-Americas-History/dp/0809095270">Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History</a></i> (2006) noted scholar Thomas Bender explores familiar American historical events, often examined in isolation with little regard to international context, and places them in dialogue with transnational forces of the day. Though the Civil War is often portrayed as uniquely American, Bender connects the language of politicians like Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln and average soldiers to a broader set of transnational ideas regarding nationality and freedom. Lincoln and others employed rhetoric and concepts related to contemporary European nationalists and revolutionaries:</div>
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However particular and central slavery and emancipation were to the Civil War and to American history, part of the cause of this central American event came from outside Ameican history, from larger history of ideas and conflicts over nationalism and freedom and about the proper balance of central and local authority. (Bender, 122) </blockquote>
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In this way, Bender illustrates that the Civil War was not as purely American as it has been portrayed, but part of a larger transnational struggle to define nation, individual, and freedom that had already exerted itself in part during the failed European revolts of 1848.<br />
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Likewise, Andrew Zimmerman looks to reevaluate the relationship between the Tuskegee Institute, German sociology and the burgeoning Chicago School in the age of late nineteenth and early twentieth century empire. In <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Alabama-Africa-Booker-Washington-Globalization/dp/0691123624/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316983026&sr=1-1">Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire and Globalization of the New South</a></i>, Zimmerman uncovers the complex network of ideas and connections that linked Booker T. Washington’s vision of Black America, the Chicago School of sociology, the construction of a new globalized South, and German intellectuals like Max Weber. Zimmerman argues that the transnational triangle connecting the American South, Germany, and Togo helped not only to spread racial ideas about Blacks through colonialism and German sociology, but also contributed to the creation of a capitalist structure that arose between Reconstruction and World War I and prefigured “our own era of globalization.” (12) <br />
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Throughout, Zimmerman clearly delineates the kind of racial logic that afflicted not only Blacks and Africans but also Poles in Central Europe suffering under German rule. German observers including Max Weber, viewed Poles as almost racially distinct. The very capitalism that drove German growth also upset ideas of “racial purity and domestic stability,” as the economic need for migrant Polish labor overcame nationalist reservations regarding Polish settlement. As result, laissez faire capitalism emerged as a dirty word among many a Prussian nationalist and intellectual. Meanwhile, as Germany coalesced into a coherent nation-state, Polish workers proved problematic. “The politics of nationalism in Prussia involved a struggle about proper households, a struggle of what Germans imagined as a dissolute, sexually irregular, and reproductively uncontrollable Polish horde with monogamous, heterosexual, and patriarchal German families,” writes Zimmerman. (88) <br />
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In America, Blacks long endured similar, almost identical stereotypes. The parallels between a labor force of serf-like Poles and newly emancipated African Americans were undeniable to observers, as Zimmerman points out that “aristocratic” authorities in Prussia were forced to “refashion themselves politically and economically [to] cooperate with new bourgeois allies and ideological and scientific experts,” much like Southern plantation owners in the Reconstruction South. (89) Notably, Zimmerman acknowledges that Germans, though discriminatory, never resorted to the type of physical violence and terror that freedmen and women found themselves subject to in the American South. Nonetheless, through the efforts of white Southerners, German intellectuals, and Washington’s Tuskegee Institute among numerous others, American Blacks came to be seen as uniquely qualified for the industrial harvesting of cotton. Though the number of white cotton growers eventually exceeded their African American counterparts in the early years of the twentieth century, Zimmerman argues experts “continued to assert that cotton could only be grown profitably with Black labor.” (21) When Germany looked to colonize Togo, in the hope of establishing a foothold in international cotton production, its leaders looked to Washington for guidance.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Dubois </span></div>
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Of course, this gets at the age old conflict between two of the most famous Black leaders in this period of American history: Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Zimmerman explores the tension between Washington’s public persona, one that downplayed racism and catered to white interests, and his personal, more militant beliefs regarding the future of Black America. In fact, Zimmerman suggests that Washington never meant to condone segregation with his Atlanta Compromise speech, as he related in a private letter, “If anybody understands me as meaning that riding in the same railroad car or sitting in the same room at a railroad is social intercourse they certainly got a wrong idea of my position.” (50) Granted, Washington still accepted society as hierarchical and even went to great lengths to illustrate the superiority of Black American workers to newly arriving European immigrants, but nor was he quite the racial sellout modern observers have sometimes suggested. <br />
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Along similar lines, Zimmerman also discusses the famous rift between W.E.B DuBois and Washington, arguing that in their early years, the two men shared similar visions. Both viewed racial uplift in gendered and elitist terms and each believed, at least in this early period, that African Americans served as a sort of international working elite that Africans and other Blacks should emulate. While DuBois came to reject this belief, he like Washington did promote it for some time. It was as if, to paraphrase the book’s author, the two men’s least radical phases overlapped for a period. For Zimmerman, the true ideological break between the black leaders came due to European colonization of Africa. “The split between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, which has become a canonical feature of narratives of American intellectual history, emerged only in the twentieth century as result of the new political engagements of each thinker with European imperialism,” Zimmerman argues. (58)<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Booker T. </span></div>
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In partnership with the German government, Washington sent four Tuskegee experts to Togo: Nathan Callaway, John Winfrey Robinson, Shepard Lynn Harris, and Allen Lynn Burks. Germany’s plan consisted of establishing an internationally viable cotton industry to compete with American production. Togolese had long harvested and traded cotton internally, but efforts to expand this production into a profitable export industry had failed.<br />
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Germany’s imposition of cotton served to disrupt gender roles and local economies. Traditionally, women harvested cotton in Togo, thus, German plans to employ male Togolese in cotton fields conflicted with ideas regarding the gendered workplace. Moreover, German authorities attempted to reform Togolese sexuality and marriage (which permitted polygamy) along more familiar (to the Germans) Western norms that coincidentally would aid in cotton production. German authorities and Tuskegee experts promoted a patriarchal monogamous domestic structure. In this way, the family became the basic labor unit and the more children each unit could produce the more workers German imperialists could exploit. Unfortunately, these efforts accomplished more to undermine the extended families of Togolese than to create a burgeoning mass of patriarchal monogamous households. (169)<br />
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During Reconstruction, American authorities attempted similar forms of discipline through the Freedmen’s Bureau. In <i><a href="http://videri.wikidot.com/marriagelaw">Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation</a></i> (2000), Nancy Cott explores efforts to shape the intimate relations of African Americans that ultimately undermined women. Other historians have explored the role of the Freedman’s Bureau in regard to marriage and domesticity. Rebecca Edwards (“Domesticity versus Manhood Rights – Republicans, Democrats and Family Values Politics, 1856 – 1896” in <i>The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History</i>) supports much of Cott’s argument, pointing out that Republicans “introduced policies to support husbands and fathers as breadwinners,” she adds that “they used state payments as a substitute for certain absent or incapacitated men. They sought to control male and female sexuality, reflecting their desire to ‘protect’ good Christian women and discipline male irresponsibility.” (Edwards, 176) According to Edwards, the protection and reshaping of the black family occupied the central concerns of officials. The agency issued “’marriage rules’ that listed the ‘duties of husbands’ and the ‘rights of wives and children’.” (Edwards, 179) <br />
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Granted, German leaders based some of their concerns regarding Togolese sexuality on their parallel fears of Polish workers in Prussia. However, the similarity to Reconstruction era American policies points to one of Zimmerman’s central arguments: through Tuskegee Institute organization, German imperialists imposed the economy of the New South onto Togo. Obviously, consequences were not confined to local economies. The construction of an imperial Togolese economy required “a new project of colonial identity formation.” The conflation of cotton production with American blackness and the presence of the Tuskegee Institute (along with the various unspoken connections that came with it) “imposed a ‘Negro’ identity form New South ideology, first on the Ewe and later on Africans throughout Togo,” argues Zimmerman. “New South ideology provided the German government in Togo with a set of practices based on the racial identity ‘Negro’ (the German word is Neger).” (133) By conceiving the Togolese in “starkly racial terms,” Germany implied that any population of Black people anywhere “might easily adopt the agriculture, and assume the subordinate political and economic positions, ascribed to African Americans in the New South.” (133)<br />
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Throughout <i>Alabama in Africa</i>, Zimmerman explores the conflict between mobility and coercion. The emerging cotton markets the Germans hoped to exploit through their nascent cotton industries in Togo required capital mobility but also necessitated coercive labor. German authorities praised the figure of the free small farmer, all the while taxing Togolese who refused or failed to grow cotton. As in the American South, notes Zimmerman, “industrial cotton depended on the economic unfreedom of farmers, for it became profitable only through the extreme exploitation and coercive supervision made possible by sharecropping and other forms of semi-free farming.” (170) Though Tuskegee experts believed they brought uplift to Africans (which of course was based on a racial model in which American blacks remained superior to Africans), in reality, their efforts retarded Togo’s economic growth. While an export based cotton market was established, it forced the Togolese backwards in nearly all areas “from literate office work to agricultural labor, from domesticity to social disintegration, from prosperity to poverty from skilled work to forced labor, and from freedom to domination,” writes Zimmerman. (170). <br />
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Ironically, despite its obvious use of coercion, the German Togo state soon emerged as a symbol of European beneficence. In comparison to the Belgian Congo which had been subject to a widespread human rights campaign, German imperialism came to be held up as a model for future imperialists. Congo critic and Liverpool journalist E.D. Morel savaged King Leopold and his cronies but applauded Germany’s efforts. “For Morel the collaborative work of the Tuskegee Institute and the German Government in Togo represented a humanitarian answer to the humanitarian catastrophe of Leopold’s Congo,” notes Zimmerman. (177) Washington received plaudits for his role and himself praised the German Togo example for its “treatment of Negroes in Africa.” (182) As result, white leaders in the US came to view the New South as the answer to international colonialism. <br />
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While Germany and Tuskegee were busy disrupting the lives of the Togolese, German sociologists imbued their discipline with a racial logic that soon proved pervasive. When Washington held the 1912 “International Conference on the Negro” at Tuskegee, it brought together, among others, American, German, and Black intellectuals in one place. Many German and American observers credited the New South as a vast improvement over European imperialism. While some African attendees credited Washington’s efforts, many questioned the industrial education it promoted. However, their reservations were largely ignored. Instead, as Zimmerman points out, the conference served as a point of intersection combining “racial thought by white colonial elites like Morel and Evans with New South ideology represented by Tuskegee Institute and with the sociology of the University of Chicago.” (187) Ultimately, this interaction reverberated for decades as it shaped the “theories and practices of racial divisions of labor.” (187) <br />
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Within this matrix of beliefs, the Chicago School of sociology grounded much of its teachings. Max Weber continually compared Poles with Blacks, a comparison Robert Park furthered as each group came to occupy urban areas (in the case of Poles this was occurring in both Europe and America). The Polish seasonal worker and the Black sharecropper existed as parallel archetypes. The sociology grew around each archetype as each group escaped the “savage untouched by civilization model” but remained clearly inferior to native born whites. As Zimmerman notes, “this sociological racism was a racism of exploitation and subordination rather than a racism of conquest and annihilation.” (206) After all, nation states like Germany and the US increasingly found themselves with large numbers of internal minorities. If Weber argued the world was organized into a “patchwork of civilizations each with a unique standard of labor,” Park formed similar ideas but on a smaller scale, using Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods as his quilt of imperial racism.<br />
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Weber clearly respected Dubois and Washington intellectually, Weber’s respect for leaders like Washington and DuBois stemmed from what he saw was an incorrect classification as black. Instead, Weber suggested each man was of mixed heritage trapped in America’s rigid racial classification. Thus, Weber suggested that the two men were somehow redeemed by their partial whiteness. Though a student of Weber’s, Dubois differed from the German sociologist on the issue of exploitation and oppression. Dubois pointed out that despite rampant racial discrimination, African Americans had advanced in numerous areas from homeownership to occupational mobility. Racism argued Dubois, not inherent inferiority, whether cultural or biological, explained Black poverty. Weber believed <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Black-Folk-B-Bois/dp/1461180287/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316983099&sr=1-1">The Souls of Black Folk</a> </i>to be a superior work, but for different reasons than Dubois. Weber wanted socioeconomic explanations for his theories regarding race and labor rather than depending on biological ones. He argued cultural factors and social structures accounted for racial differentiation. As result, his conclusions helped to construct an archetype in which Blacks remained inferior in to whites.<br />
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Through German thinkers like Weber and the work of Washington, Robert Park developed many of his theories regarding urban sociology. It goes without saying the Chicago School of sociology remains a foundational influence on the discipline in the United States. Park merged German and southern traditions of sociological thought and brought them to the University of Chicago. Influenced by Weber and especially by Washington and Tuskegee, Park critiqued urban communities, promoting the idea of stable rural areas. Polish immigrants and Black migrants to Chicago, both felt the sting of Park’s conclusions. <br />
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Park’s own interest in African Americans grew out of a desire to ameliorate “colonial atrocities in the Congo,” thus did Park come to focus so extensively on American blacks. Developing a problematic construct of Blacks, Park viewed them in <i>Heart of Darkness</i> terms: clairvoyant, irrational, outside of civilized time. When large scale migration to Chicago by Blacks unfolded, Park sought ways to maintain the city’s vast network of segregated neighborhoods and predictably looked to the rural South. According to Zimmerman, Park favored accommodation, “in which social groups lived separately but in harmony.” Park argued that this “represented the highest social good, and would prove desirable” in a myriad number of ways. (232) Zimmerman points out that “the multiracial structures of empire” supplied Park with normative and empirical models of society. (232) <br />
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Ultimately, Park and many others in the Chicago school, believed each group discrete such that the best structure for society rested in a separated interdependence. While Park and several others rejected hybridity as a positive (to be fair others saw hybridity as superior but only because it imbued some level of whiteness in blacks so it was a circumscribed support), the very forces of capitalism threatened such ideas. Just as German intellectuals eschewed laissez faire because it led to increasing labor mobility by non German ethnic groups, Park and many in the Chicago school believed it disrupted discrete ethnic communities and encouraged hybridity. Of course, not all of Park’s students agreed. E. Franklin Frazier and Charles S. Johnson viewed Park’s conclusions with a great deal of skepticism. Each rejected Park and Weber’s sociology and the “political, economic, and pedagogical projects of Tuskegee Institute.” (236)<br />
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Though T of M lacks expertise in all things transnational, in <i>Alabama in Africa</i>, Zimmerman provides a precise account of how imperialism led to the intersection of three distinct Western institutions and the ideologies each promoted afterward. Zimmerman’s insights on the Chicago School alone seem revelatory. His arguments regarding the split between Dubois and Washington prove provocative. If the book at times relies too much on theory, Zimmerman backs it up with solid social and intellectual history. Perhaps, most importantly, Zimmerman illustrates how today’s globalization looks eerily familiar to that of the post Reconstruction Global South. Though the institutional actors may have changed, the ultimate edifice remains the same. Zimmerman notes that today’s globalized economy continues to depend on “forms of immobility” that still allow capital, commodities, labor, and ideas to “move across a vast landscape of differences and to remain stable across vast geographical distances.” (249) This fixed category of difference enabled various political elites to manage mobile labor pools. Though people moved more and more easily, this movement came attached to a social, economic, and political immobility enforced by difference. All the while, argues Zimmerman, capitalism both fed and challenged this difference, “the dynamism of capitalism simultaneously contradicted, supported and depended upon, static identities and stable commodities.” (250) Global elites had (and have) much to gain and much to lose; balancing a fixed labor force on the knife’s edge of difference, then and now, remains a primary aspect of globalized economies.</div>
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<i>Ryan Reft</i> </div>
less is morehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07374087786818081073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5911464913331967955.post-8731952185916889582011-09-15T06:53:00.000-07:002011-10-13T12:58:42.013-07:00Essence Precedes Existence? The Problem of Identity Politics in Hurewitz's Bohemian LA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What does it mean to “be” white, or black, or gay, or working-class? How might a Jewish Ethiopian-American who grew up in poverty but now has a big bank account define himself? Which identity matters most – the current status of wealth and privilege, the experience of coming from a hardscrabble background, or Jewishness or Africanness or national identity (native or adopted)? Does one dimension of identity actually have to subordinate the others? Our current president is almost always described as being black, despite having one white parent and growing up almost entirely with a white family. His own experience is far more complex than our contemporary framework of race and identity allows, a fact he explored in <i>Dreams from My Father</i> to much praise but little apparent understanding. When it comes to identity politics, as Ani Difranco once <a href="http://www.vh1.com/video/ani-difranco/307591/in-or-out.jhtml#artist=1058">said</a>, “Their eyes are all asking are you in or are you out – and I’m like, what is this about?” </div>
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Daniel Hurewitz’s impressive first book, <i>Bohemian Los Angeles</i>, attempts to provide a historical account of why we even ask these questions today. It shows how identity, particularly sexual identity, became a rigid and essentialized category as it became political over the course of the twentieth century. One’s political Identity has come to be associated with what Hurewitz calls one’s “essence.” Beginning in Los Angeles’s burgeoning Edendale community at the turn of the twentieth century, Hurewitz explores a world where manhood and womanhood were considered certain, consistent, even immutable; given this underlying certainty about gender, men like Julian Eltinge could “impersonate” women with thrilling exactness without compromising their identity as men.<br />
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A reader is right to question this schema, given Eltinge’s own clearly exaggerated self-presentation as a virile “manly man” when he was not (technically) performing. Hurewitz suggests that the star female impersonator’s PR spectacle of strength and manliness off-stage served to reinforce the remarkable quality of his transformation as a prim, demure, completely believable woman – which is no doubt true. Yet evidence suggests that Eltinge did have sex with men, a fact he was no doubt eager to keep secret, and his self conscious display of masculinity can also be read as an effort to dispel any doubts about his personal character (or what later generations would think of as “sexuality”). Other female impersonators had more feminine off-stage personalities, and they may have been suspected as being less manly (or straight) by the public. Hurewitz understandably focuses the most on Eltinge, due to his greater popularity and accessibility as a public figure, but one wonders if his dual identity as macho man and master female impersonator is really typical of or representative of men who performed in such a way (and who may have been more “queeny” than Eltinge). In short, Eltinge’s example may not adequately capture the experience of men who dressed as women or had sex with other men in this period. </div>
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In any case, Hurewitz’s argument is that gender identity was more fixed in the early twentieth century, or at least undisturbed by the possibility of alternative conceptions of sexuality, such that people were more comfortable with a flexible approach to performing gender and sexuality then than in later years. Men could imitate women or have homosexual encounters in clubs and public parks without thinking of themselves as gay, bi, or transgender. Hurewitz is trying to tell a story both about how gay identity itself became conceivable and how such identity (along with others, such as race, ethnicity, and gender) became perceived as political constituencies. <br />
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It’s an ambitious project, and as a result it has many moving parts. Hurewitz attempts to link the emergence of a boho urban hipster milieu (Edendale and the broader Silver Lake area of LA) with the development of Communism as an essential identity, first for the party faithful in their tight-knit communities and then with the onset of post-World War II repression that made “being” Communist an irrevocable condition, an unwashable stain that disqualified one as a legitimate participant in political life or even the workforce. Along the way he discusses the idea of interracialism, the political fortunes of Japanese and Mexican Americans in Depression and wartime LA, and, most importantly, the influential project of the first gay rights movement in the US, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattachine_Society">Mattachine Society</a>. </div>
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This epic skein of interrelated political events does not always hold together. Showing how female impersonators in the 1910s relate to the political status of Mexican Americans and the zoot suit riots of the 1940s, for example, is not easy, but Hurewitz has still accomplished a significant historiographical feat. The Mattachine Society proposed “homophile” as a public identity, not merely a furtive secret or subterranean practice, confined to fleeting encounters in bathrooms and bars. Through the vision of Harry Hay, Mattachine imagined gayness as equivalent to blackness, Mexicanness, or Jewishness – a critical and ultimately persuasive point in Hurewitz’s overall argument.</div>
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But is being gay or Communist really the same as being black, Jewish, or Mexican? Perhaps they are not exactly the same, but are they even of the same order of difference? A Communist could relocate (many did) to a different state and not necessarily be marked as Red, but it was much harder for a black person to stop being black. (Hard, but not impossible for some.) <br />
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This comes to the greatest weakness in Hurewitz’s provocative and thoughtful book – his concept of essence or “inner life.” He aims to show with <i>Bohemian LA</i> how people’s interior worlds came to have political meaning akin to one’s outward identity as a worker or farmer or businessperson, or any other economic or political status. In other words, he seeks to answer the question of why Americans’ cultural, racial or sexual identities came to surpass class as a prime political consideration in the late twentieth century, which is, of course, a widely remarked upon phenomenon. Liberals in particular have bemoaned this shift, exemplified by exit polls that showed <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/3375543">“moral values”</a> to be the top concern of voters in the 2004 presidential election. Surely moral values reflect one’s “inner life” more than the economy as a political issue. (Many Evangelical Christians likely view their faith as the most salient fact about their political identity, not unlike the passionate, one might say obsessed, Communists of 1930s Los Angeles.) <br />
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Yet this argument runs into some trouble. In what is otherwise a lucid and deftly written book, Hurewitz’s language gets notably fuzzier when he starts talking about essence and the inner life. The passive voice creeps in, and the author seems to be on less sure footing. Rightly so. Skin color and race are simply not internal essences in the way being Muslim, or gay, or a postmodernist might be – though blackness or Asianness may have come to be seen as essential, unchanging identities by many Americans in the years since WWII (and not just in the generalizing and universalizing minds of racists, but in the way African or Asian Americans view themselves). Moreover, one can reasonably question whether essence or an interior life became important for American politics only in the twentieth century. Certainly, identities such as white, Irish, black, Northern, Southern, Transcendentalist, abolitionist, woman (think of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_motherhood">republican motherhood</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Domesticity">domestic sphere</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_rights#Suffrage.2C_the_right_to_vote">suffrage movement</a>), Democrat, Republican, or any number of ethnic self-identifications played a major role in the passionate and participatory politics of the nineteenth century. <br />
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Ultimately, the link between a gay or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophile">homophile</a> identity and political or racial identity – the idea that one’s identity as a man with a feminine persona, or a man who has sex with other men is an essence of the same order as being Communist, or Jewish, or Mexican – still feels tenuous and hypothetical. The Mattachine Society sought to articulate such a vision of a common minority political project, but it remains unclear whether they affected the way other groups thought of themselves or were thought of by others. No doubt the author would echo the words of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: </div>
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Race is just as much a political concept as economic class… Neither ethnicity nor skin color determine race; race is determined politically by collective struggle. Some maintain that race is created by racial oppression, as Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, claims that anti-Semitism produces the Jew. This logic should be taken one step further: race arises through the collective resistance to racial oppression. (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=LM2leHxCCiIC&lpg=PP1&dq=multitude%20hardt%20and%20negri&pg=PA104#v=onepage&q&f=false">Multitude, 104</a>) </blockquote>
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In other words, race is not a fact in and of itself – it is created by racism, or, better still, in the struggle against racism that generates a self-concept shared by members of the repressed group. In this sense, it was the struggle of gays, blacks, Mexicans, Jews and Communists against exclusion and injustice that created their identities, and led to their recognition as political interests based on identity. </div>
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That this struggle created a world in which racial and sexual identity is more rigid and essentialized than before is one of the great ironies of this book. People who identify as bisexual, for instance, often feel <a href="http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/27/bisexuality">marginalized</a> by both straight and gay communities, thanks to the widespread belief (reinforced by the debatable view that people are “born gay”) that a person who sleeps with both men and women is simply a gay or straight person who went off the reservation. Similarly, contemporary discussions of race seem to fall into clichés of whiteness, blackness, Mexicanness and so forth – a comic goldmine that has been exploited by the brilliant (Dave Chappelle) as well as the decidedly un-brilliant (Carlos Mencia). The blog <a href="http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/">Stuff White People</a> takes a pre-existing assumption of white racial identity and jumbles it with class and subcultural stereotypes, proposing (only half-kiddingly) that all white people are bourgeois urban hipsters who love Animal Collective and complicated sandwiches. The idea of blackness has at least received a more nuanced and intelligent discussion in recent years, though an observer like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Kennedy">Randall Kennedy</a> – who has been on the wrong side of accusations of selling out and racial betrayal before – still feels compelled to <a href="http://www.theroot.com/views/fallacy-tour-s-post-blackness-theory">argue</a> that the boundaries of blackness ought to be policed for African Americans to retain a distinct and coherent identity. Rich Harvard law professors apparently make the cut; African Americans who do not meet his definition of blackness need not apply. <br />
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Studies estimate that fully a <a href="http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/famsoc4.asp">fifth</a> of the so-called <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-24-millennials24_ST_N.htm">Millennial Generation</a> (Americans born since 1982) have one foreign-born parent. I do not have statistics close at hand for how many young Americans come from mixed-race families. Whatever the numbers may be, a new generation of multiracial, ambisexual Americans may have to find a voice to awaken themselves and the rest of society to the apparent truth that identity is, in fact, fluid, and essences are not always so essential. </div>
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<i>Alex Sayf Cummings</i></div>blackpepperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16889926595548195987noreply@blogger.com0