Dog food

This is an article from the New York Times about gourmet dog food. It is of course mildly offensive, which makes me wonder if the paper publishes this sort of article precisely to piss people off, to up readership by inspiring righteous indignation at the excesses of those vaguely Jewish or ethnic liberals, those decadent, super-wealthy East Coast elite straw men that right-wing pundits conjure up whenever they want to make urban or progressive ideas seem ridiculous. A little passive-aggressive contribution to the culture wars, courtesy of the NYT.

But beyond the ugly gut feeling this article inspired in me, it made me concerned that presumably upper-class, food-conscious people could fathom something so unsustainable and immoral as gourmet pet food. The article quotes a food manufacturer who proudly affirms that she includes no grains in her dog food ingredients. I'm sure this appeals to a certain type of foodie, but in the end it's wasteful and stupid. Dogs are omnivores, just like people, so the most sustainable option for feeding your dog is to keep it low on the food chain, with grains and veggies comprising the bulk of its diet (assuming to begin with that your moral compass can bear the idea of diverting any part of the world's food supply, basic grains or otherwise, to canine instead of human mouths). Ideally our dogs would just eat food scraps from our meals, a possibility that seems viable given the inordinate amount of food wasted by a typical US household (this National Geographic visual shows that the average person in the US wastes something like 230 pounds of food per year--enough for 7.5 months or so of a Golden Retriever's food intake from each person in a household). But if you are going to buy dog food, the greenest option is probably plain old industrial dog food, produced from the animal scraps that aren't fit for human consumption and the basic grains that our country grows in abundance. Yeah, stay away from melamine-tinged Chinese generics, but I would think there's an intermediate option between toxic pet food and gourmet salmon. It's questionable logic already for humans to be eating apex predators like tuna fish. To give this food to a dog is immoral.

A final, more personal note on the issue relates to my family's dog here in Colombia (a dog which came to our home through tragic circumstance and not through my free choice). My nephew had been feeding the dog Purina brand imported dog food, which cost something like $60US for a 30lb sack in Colombia. My wife and I quickly decided that no dog in our house was going to eat imported, expensive food, and we switched to a local brand bought more or less directly from the factory. We're now not only saving over half on our dog food, but the dog seems to be healthier with the new, proletarian food choice!

Third World Green Daddy 28: A Lonely Normalcy

The morning after my wife got back from her work trip, thus ending my stint alone with Sam, I had to get back to our small town for a new work week. It's always difficult leaving my wife and my son, especially at that awful early hour to catch the bus in time for a 3-hour trip and a 9am meeting. But this time was even worse than normal. I'd gotten used to spending all day with Sam over the past five days. Playing, reading, changing his diaper, sitting him on his pot to piss and poop, congratulating him when his diaper was still dry, fighting with him, feeding him, putting him to bed, preparing his bottles. And now I was to have no contact with my son for five days, save abortive phone conversations in which he shrieks a bit and then hangs up.

So I left Bogota with a heavy heart, though I was soon enough jolted into the work routine. I had my morning meeting, then work in the office, and this began a week of work, meetings, supervising the house rehab. I was back in the routine I'd established before Christmas. Since December I'd interrupted this basic pattern, what with holidays, family visits, Sam's baptism, the trip to Peru, and finally my week in Bogota as Mr. Mom. Now I was back in the swing of things. I think it helped me to not dwell so much on my being apart from my family. I also enjoyed what have come to be my comfort foods when I'm here working. Every evening I dine on saltines accompanied with either canned tuna, cream cheese, or something like that. Eating so much packaged stuff is hard on my body, but it's something I look forward to now at day's end.

There was one thing that kept me a bit on edge though, not entirely settled into my normal work life. For the past few weeks my computer had been in and out of the shop. First the battery conked out, so I took it to a guy in our town that fixes computers. I liked this guy because he was willing and able to fix things that other technicians wouldn't have bothered with. Instead of throwing away a finicky plug adapter and telling you to buy a new one, he would replace a few transistors or something in the adapter box and have it working again. Instead of recommending a new keyboard, he had in the past fixed damaged keyboards with some sort of conductive sand. Anyway, he'd told me there was nothing to do but get a new battery, but he did do me the service of cleaning the inside of my laptop. However, he somehow messed up the keyboard such that my space bar, m key, and back arrow didn't work. It's amazing how three little keys can render a computer practically useless by their absence. Hence during the following week in Bogota, I'd taken the computer to Unilago, an amazing computer mall of small stalls, each specializing in one type of part or component or service. There in the mall, they sold me a new battery (of course throwing away the old one), and put a replacement second-hand keyboard in my computer. I was happy, but then the battery went crazy again. It was't charging, and the computer wasn't recognizing the full charge that the battery had.

So my first normal week back in our town again, I took the computer back to the repair whiz. Despite his technical capacity, he is not a well-organized man, and my computer remained, untouched, in his workshop the entire week. This meant that I had no personal laptop to work on. During the day I could work at the office, but in the evenings I couldn't advance on anything. Also, any documents or links I found at work for research on the maravilla root (Tigridia pavonia, an amazing plant I'll write about sometime soon) stayed at work, and I couldn't add them to the final document I'd been working on on my laptop.

This meant that my first week back on the job was still not quite the normal, satisfying routine it might have been. I was constantly tense, and felt like despite my long hours at the office, I didn't accomplish much. Worse than my work troubles was my profound loneliness. In the big, usually-empty house that my mother-in-law has been generous enough to let me stay in while we're finishing work on our future home, my only lifeline to the outside world is my internet connection. The house isn't even in the main part of our town, so there's nowhere to walk to, to buy groceries, nothing. Aside from my frequent phone calls to my wife, I had no contact with family or friends except at work, where I was reluctant to spend too much time online.

I watched a fair number of movies from my father-in-law's excellent collection. The first night back I'd been tempted to watch Brokeback Mountain, which is one of my favorite films, but that movie always makes me want to cry in a fit of existential loneliness. I didn't want to see its effect on me when I was already weepy and missing my two loves. So instead I watched The Wind that Shakes the Barley, about the Irish Civil War. Bad choice. It is a well-done, well-acted film, but the scenes of lovers separated by war and circumstance had me depressed just as much as Brokeback Mountain would have done me. The next night I tried for something without too much character development or attachment, an action or suspense film. I went with Ripley's Game, but it too ended with death and loss and sadness! Finally I watched the first hour of The Aviator, which was an interesting depiction of an age and a person I knew little about. It was entertaining, but I think I did well by just working quietly my final night of the week instead of watching that or another movie. I just watched the rest of The Aviator tonight, and it's probably best that last week, in my fragile emotional state, I hadn't watched the scenes of Howard Hughes freaking out with attacks of obsessive anxiety.

Finally after a somewhat rocky readjustment to my old routine, I got back to Bogota late Friday night. My wife, son, and I spent an amazing weekend together. We visited a park with a playground, which was Sam's first real, conscious experience with playing on that equipment. He loved crawling through a short fiberglass tube. He would look at the curved ceiling above him and just marvel at it. I'd never seen him so delighted and intrigued by something before in that way.

Being at the park with my wife and kid made me realize that up to now, Sam hasn't had certain standard experiences of a stable, middle-class life. Before my wife moved to Bogota, we were always in the house doing little projects and working from home. Now that she's in Bogota we're constantly running back and forth between our town and the capital. I think once we get our house in our small hometown finished, and Caro and Sam are back here with me, we'll have a more normal, bourgeois life. Mom and Dad will go to work every day, Sam will go to his nursery school, and in our free time we can do things like go to the park together. It's as if after passing through a home-based, peasant cottage industry economy, then a migrant-to-the-big-city scenario, we can settle down to a more stable situation. Before the age of two Sam will have lived through all the steps of a developing country in rapid social transition! I guess it's good he's exposed to so many different experiences, and I'm sure we'll look back at this time in our lives with nostalgia someday, but I'll be glad to have a more sane, stable living arrangement, and to be able to provide the same for Sammy.

This weekend we also took Sam for his one-year vaccinations (a month late, which earned us a rather useless, superfluous scolding from the nurse). He was really pissed off for maybe 20 seconds after each of the three shots, but he showed no bad reactions or signs of discomfort thereafter. I was impressed, but I guess it makes sense that once you get to a certain size and age you don't get too sick from vaccinations. I just didn't expect that moment to be so early.

My wife and I also went to the movies on Saturday night. It was our first time in a movie theater since before Sam was born! We discretely snuck out of the house while the baby was distracted, leaving him with his grandmother, and saw The Descendants, a new (for Colombia) George Clooney film. It wasn't a huge production or anything, but I think the movie did a good job depicting many real human experiences and emotions. The death of a loved one, relationships with your kids, family decisions about inheritance. In this it was much like a European film, quiet and simple, centered on conversations and relationships instead of obnoxious, obvious jokes or big, loud action. It was at once difficult and reaffirming to watch, because some of the themes touched on in the movie were things we'd gone through as a family in the past year. The life-supported coma and inevitable death of a loved one, a rebellious teenager who turns the corner when she takes responsibility for a younger sibling. Caro and I have lived a lot this year.

After a wonderful weekend with my family, and before another heart-wrenching departure, I almost lost my marbles Sunday. I was working on something urgent on my laptop, and guess what? The m, space, and back arrow keys stopped working! I felt defeated by the universe. I constantly was struggling to do things right, but it sometimes seemed as if I were doomed to problems, obstacles, frustrations. Caro remarked to me that perhaps technology these days was not made to be fixed but simply replaced, despite the attempts of enterprising Third World technicians like my small town computer repair guy. That might be the case, but aside from my moral objection to throwing things away that still can be made to work, I don't have the money to be buying a new computer every year or two.

I looked forward glumly to yet another week of feeling unproductive and separated from the world as my computer sat in the shop. Furthermore, I no longer was keen on taking my computer back to my typical guy. On Friday when I'd picked up my laptop, another disgruntled customer whose monitor had been sitting unattended for three weeks got in an argument with the repair guy. They almost came to blows, with the repair guy grabbing and cocking back a hammer to hit his friend in the head. In the end they settled with a nonchalant, "Okay, come by tomorrow and we'll square up accounts for the monitor and the hard drive," but I didn't want to be involved with that computer guy anymore.

So after a near nervous breakdown, I concluded that the best thing would be to repair the keyboard myself. It was obviously some contact problem, since it affected only some keys, and the same ones every time. I removed the keyboard, jiggled around the ribbon with the wire connections, and got the thing working again! I quickly went from the deepest despair to the most exultant, self-congratulatory joy. Still though, I felt something I've often experienced before--a mix of pride at my own resourcefulness, and exasperation that I should be the one to fix the problem and not the expert. I mean, I don't even like computers. Why am I the only one who ends up definitively fixing the problem?

Furthermore, I realized that I'd spent $25 on the replacement keyboard, when I could have just jiggled my first keyboard and gotten it working again. The laziness and lack of imagination of both computer technicians I'd consulted had led me to spend money I shouldn't have. I was especially let down by the small town computer guy (he of the hammer-weapon), because it had always seemed to me that, unlike the spoiled Bogota technicians, who were accustomed to having replacement parts readily available, he was always resourceful because he had to be in a small town with few or expensive replacement parts. I think it was really his poor time management that had led him to hurriedly tell me he couldn't fix my keyboard. Likewise, his advice had led me to get a new battery in Bogota, when in the end it turned out that the problem was an internal control, and not the battery. Again, I'd spent $90US on a new battery when all I'd needed was a decent, well-considered repair job (which the small town guy gave me after his initial hurried neglect).

Now I'm back in my town, functioning computer in hand, doing pretty well with my work obligations. I'm still lonely without my family here, but I'm getting along fine. And I'm finally catching up on blog posts like this one, which I'd been hindered from writing by the hectic circumstances I've been dealing with lately.

Third World Green Daddy 27: Mr. Mom

A few weeks ago my wife Caro had to go to Medellin for work, so I stayed in our Bogota apartment for a week taking care of Sam. I wasn't exactly on my own--I had our babysitter Clemencia, my stepdaughter, my nephew, the dog, and my mother-in-law and her husband to help me out. Furthermore, normally if I'm in Bogota on a weekday, Caro doesn't get home until the late afternoon, so her being away all day wasn't entirely new for Sam or me.

Nevertheless, my week "alone" with Sam was a challenging new adventure. I spent more time with him on a daily basis than I ever had, or at least than I had since he was a newborn, when I also often stayed home with him much of the day.

I was most surprised at Sam's seeming nonchalance at Caro's absence. Sometimes he would wake up during a nap or even at night (which is atypical now--he normally sleeps the night through) wailing desperately. I don't know if he's at the phase where he really comprehends the continued existence of things that are out of the room, or if he explicitly recalls that Mom should be there when she isn't, but he was clearly a bit unbalanced by Caro's absence. He knew that something was off, and I'm sure that unease manifested itself in nightmares and such. That said, most of the time he was just fine, happy to be doing whatever he was doing. I surmised that he's used to Caro's being gone all day, so her absence for a few more hours every day might not be so jarring. Plus Sam must be quite accustomed by now to people's coming and going. He's got grandparents, relatives, the babysitter, and even his dad regularly disappearing and then appearing again a few days or months later. I don't know if this is good for his emotional development, but it's the reality of his life right now (and perhaps will continue to be so in the future), so I guess it's good he get used to it. Of course it's flattering when your kid is simply disconsolate without you (indeed, for the first time ever I was the main attachment figure, and he'd cry when I left the room, and I felt needed), but ultimately it's good that Sam develop a degree of independence and even indifference to our presence. That's what we're raising him for, right?

Indeed, I think Caro and I suffered much more than Sam did during her business trip. My wife had not slept away from Sam in 22 months, including the time he was in her womb. It was really hard for her to be away from him. And I was despondently lonely without her. Of course I'm used to sleeping without her when I'm in our small town during the week, staying at my in-law's place. But sleeping in the Bogota apartment without Caro felt cold and sad, even with my beloved son a few meters away from me. I was often tempted to grab Sam from his crib at night and bring him to the bed with me, but I resisted that temptation, knowing the importance of his learning to sleep alone.

We read a lot. I'd brought Sam back a Tintin book from Peru, which we got through over the course of a few days. I didn't grow up with Tintin, and when I first learned about the comic book series it seemed like a pretentious European affectation to me (this is an unfortunate kneejerk reaction I and many of my fellow countrymen have to anything vaguely European). But when I was in my 20s, a businessman I was teaching English to in Spain loaned me a Tintin book, and since then I've thought that it would be cool to get into the series with a kid of my own, perhaps buying him a new installment every year. This particular episode we read was set in Peru, and the version I got was in Spanish. I don't normally read or speak to Sammy in Spanish, but I wanted to read the book with him, so I subjected him to my awful, stumbling accent.

We also read the first chapter of Malcolm X's autobiography, and got a good part of the way through a poem anthology called The Llama who had no Pijamas. Lately Sam seems to prefer reading on his own. He loves leafing through books, and even at night in the dark sometimes he examines the books on his bed before lying down to sleep. But when I read to him, he often either walks away and gets involved in something else, or he freaks out trying to grab and manipulate the book himself. Perhaps he'll end up like me--I've always loved reading, ever since I could do it on my own, but I never much cared for being read aloud to.

In my week at the Bogota apartment, I returned to my habit of whirlwind housekeeping, which I hadn't practiced since we had our old apartment in our hometown. I subjected Sam's diapers to an intensive stripping treatment, consisting in soaking them overnight in a hydrogen peroxide-based detergent before rinsing them multiple times with hot water and no soap the next day. The theory is that over time cloth diapers get clogged up with soap residue and the like, so you've got to strip them every now and again to retain their absorbency. When I reported this and other activities to Caro over the phone, she laughed and remarked that it was like living in the same apartment with me again. I always try to whip things into shape where we live, and I think she appreciates that (especially when she doesn't have to be around while I'm doing it).

Sam and I ran a lot of errands together too. We stocked up on a bomb-shelter quantity of groceries, both fresh produce from the massive Paloquemao market, and dry goods from the overpriced Carulla supermarket near us. Of course what used to last us a month now lasts one or two weeks, as there are seven of us staying at the Bogota apartment! I tried to coordinate our errands such that I sat Sam on his potty before and after each major outing so he could do his business. Many days we got into a good routine such that his diaper remained dry, because he always sat on the potty on time.

The week was not without its fecal mishaps, however. Sometimes Sam would refuse to sit on the potty, straightening himself out and screaming if I tried to sit him down. One day he kept doing this, only to squat and shit in his diaper as soon as I put it on (which putting on also involved much screaming and twisting about madly). I could see he had a bit of the runs, but it still pissed me off the way he would refuse to sit down on his potty, then squat down to shit when he wasn't supposed to! After the second or third time of taking him to the sink to wash his shit-caked butt off (with a few times where I splattered shit on the floor and stepped in it for good measure) we exchanged some very harsh words. I told him I loved him very much, but that I didn't understand why he insisted on pissing and shitting everywhere (this after a few similar incidents in which he'd also refused to pee on the potty, then proceeded to urinate all over my bedsheets while his diaper was off). Eventually I figured out he had diaper rash, which somehow kept him from wanting to sit on the potty, and after I put cream on his bottom and dressed him up, we were both calm, exhausted, remorseful. I felt bad for yelling at my baby, while Sam seemed like a man coming out of an epileptic fit or a demon possession, bewildered, sleepy, just wanting to be held.

In general Sam taught me some profound lessons on love and patience. Changing a bedsheet for the second time after it's been pissed on reminds you that as a parent you have to cede a certain degree of hubris, of haughty, impatient independence. Parenthood is a prayer of sorts. It's like in the garden of Gethsemane--you implicitly say to your baby time and again, "Not my will, but thy will be done." The baby does the same. When Sam collapses in my arms, and just wants to lay his head against my chest, he's teaching me about absolute love and surrender.

Adventures in Peru 2: Lima from the ground and the Huaca Pucllana

Upon arriving in the Lima airport, my coworker and I were greeted by a driver from the hostel we'd reserved our rooms in. He would be taking us and two Australians to the hostel, so we had to wait while they took out dollars from a cash machine and then changed them into Peruvian soles. The ATMs in Peru give you the option of taking out in dollars or local currency, though I don't understand why you wouldn't just take out soles and avoid another conversion loss. At any rate, the prevalence of money changers in Lima was really striking for me, coming from Colombia. In Colombia it's very hard to find money changers, and the rate they give you is always bad. Everything in Colombia is managed in pesos, unlike in Peru, where many things are also quoted in dollars, and many places accept dollars. I assume this is due to Peru's long history as a tourism destination. Colombia is now becoming hot on the tourism circuit, too, but we've reached an age where most smart tourists avoid travelers' checks and money changers altogether, relying entirely on ATMs. In this particular aspect I think I prefer Colombia. It is clearly an economy where people are used to dealing with other locals, as opposed to catering to foreigners. Money is made and spent locally, and what development there is, is for Colombians.

Another aspect in which Peru comes out losing compared to my adopted homeland is in the general streetscape. Despite Lima's oddly cool climate (its proximity to the cold Pacific Ocean makes it feel as if you were at 4000 feet altitude or so), the city looks shabby, like the sweltering, grimy, tropical sprawl you might see in documentaries about the explosion of Latin American cities in the late 20th century. Buildings are lowrise, made of ugly block with ugly, soot-covered cement plaster. There are cars everywhere, and no one walks on the sidewalk.




I later figured out that this is because the city is so sprawling that it's impossible to get from one place to another on foot. There was evidently no urban planning involved in Lima's growth to its present size of 8 million people; it feels more like Skokie, Illinois ballooned to that size.

Look at this hodgepodge of highrises, lowrises, and everything in between:



It's like a wealthier version of Port-au-Prince. I guess in that respect it would seem like a model city to guys like Joel Kotkin and residents of Las Vegas, but I wonder what Lima will look like when gas is scarce. Speaking of gas, stations here sell not only gasoline and diesel, as in the States, and not only those two plus natural gas, as in Colombia, but also liquid propane. Cars can be retrofitted for either natural gas or propane complements to their gasoline.

In general you can see that I wasn't too impressed by Lima. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the air wasn't full of lung-clogging desert dust, as I'd dreaded on the plane, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm a pretty close-minded person. I like familiar things, and it takes me a while to adjust to any changes. When I'm traveling I mentally prepare myself to be out of my element, to do without stability and familiarity for a while, but it's difficult for me. Of course I live in a country I wasn't born in, but by now I've adjusted to that country, so any change from Colombia is difficult for me--sometimes even a trip to the US is a real jolt!

Anyway, despite my unspectacular first impressions of outer Lima, our hostel was decent, and the driver seemed really interested in us as people. He wanted to know about Colombia, and tell us about Lima's neighborhoods, its industry, etc. Later that night I strolled with my two colleagues (one of which met us at the hostel) around historic Lima. Apparently this is where all the pedestrians I hadn't seen that morning were. There is a big pedestrian street that runs through central Lima, lined with elegant shops and chain restaurants, and it seems that this is where middle-class families come to walk around at night. Bogota's central historic district is bigger than Lima's, and it's not at all considered a common reference or meeting point (except for winos and dreadlocked students and tourists). I thought it was nice that Lima still maintains the custom of the central stretch of walkways and plazas where everyone goes to see and be seen. It's perhaps a throwback to a time when the city was much smaller.

While walking around that night, I was painfully conscious of my height. I am a moderately tall guy, and I am happy about that. In fact, in public places I always instinctively make a visual sweep to see if anyone is taller than me. If I'm the tallest in the area, I'm happy, and if not, I feel pissed off! But here in Lima I was uncomfortably precisely because of how much I towered over people. Almost everyone was below my shoulder-height; I felt as if I really stuck out. In my town in Colombia people are short too, but maybe since it's so hilly I don't feel as if I'm towering a story over everyone. Anyway, it was an odd sensation, this embarrassment at my height, though in the days since I've gotten used to it.

The next morning, our first full day in Lima, we got up comfortably early and headed to the Huaca Pucllana. "Huaca" is the term used to describe the adobe pyramids erected at different times and places all along the Peruvian coast. My boss had arrived to Peru a few days early and had explored various huacas north of Lima with their respective head archeologists. She saw Lambayeque and Huaca del Sol, with wall paintings and exquisite tombs. The night before she'd shown us photos and guidebooks from the different places she'd seen. Particularly striking for me were the landscape, a huge expanse of cultivated green in the midst of coastal desert, and the layering of the huacas. Apparently each huaca actually consists in different layers built one over the other at distinct moments. One sovereign would die, and the next would build a new pyramid around the old one, such that now there are something like five layers of painted walls, most of which cannot be seen except at points where poachers have knocked down some layers.

Poachers' paths cut into the pyramids actually are useful to the archeologists. They need to get to the interior and the top, but of course they could never ethically cut into the original site. If poachers have done it already, the researchers take advantage to have an access path for themselves.



Anyway, our first professional visit for this trip was a Huaca right in the middle of Lima, in the Miraflores district. Here's the view from atop the pyramid.



Residents had long though it was merely a big hill, and throughout the 20th century it had been used as a garbage dump and as a slum settlement. But starting in the 1980s a team began excavating on this smooth mound,




to reveal the adobe block pyramid underneath the dirt.






The site is now an in situ museum. They receive lots of visitors from Peru and all over the world, so much so that they manage to support themselves mainly from the entry fees. In addition to the ongoing excavations, part of what they show to the public is a small garden with indigenous Peruvian plants and animals. They started it maybe ten years ago, and it's lacking in maintenance and signage since they don't have a dedicated agronomist or archeobotanist taking care of it. But it's a lovely idea, and is in fact what inspired my boss to begin thinking of our own Muisca Garden project, when she saw it almost a decade ago. This is largely why we included Huaca Pucllana on our itinerary for this work trip to Peru, even though it doesn't have many food remains, which was the ostensible point of our visiting Peru (to explore Andean crops in archeological sites and in the present).

The garden had peanuts



quinoa



Lima bean, which is very important in Peru and particularly adapted to its low-altitude but not-so-hot tropical coastal climate








As for animals, there are alpacas



guinea pigs





and Muscovy ducks, a domesticated duck indigenous to the Americas.




The restoration work is really impressive on the pyramid. In some places, after clearing away the dirt on top, the blocks were pretty much as they'd been lain. These areas are conserved as is, with only a sealant applied to protect them from the infrequent rains. In other places, the blocks were intact but the walls had crumbled, especially where they had been infilled over to have other outer walls built (which due to plundering or natural decay then fell down, leaving the crushed walls underneath to be covered later by dirt). In these cases the team removes and organizes the original but disheveled blocks



and then re-lays them, also filling in with new adobe blocks where needed. In this photo you can see above what the wall looked like just after excavation, and below with their restoration:


Nearby you can see the unexcavated portion, next to a relatively intact (perhaps already restored?) wall, and below is a more recent (maybe 700 years old) wall built when later sovereigns tried to build low protective walls to prevent grave-robbing.






Not only does the restoration give a better idea of what the site would have looked like when in use, but it's necessary to protect it from further deterioration. Without restoration, the uncovered blocks would themselves turn to dust.

Here's a cut where you can see unexcavated hill, excavated but not restored pyramid, and restored walls in the foreground.





Here is an example of a section of wall that had part relatively intact, and part that needed to be reconstructed. Again, as part of responsible conservation, the archeologists make it easy to see the new reconstruction (the perfect, straight blocks) as opposed to the original intact stretches (the less straight, more worn blocks).


Where the restoration stops at a flat horizontal surface, they make impressions of where the next course of blocks would go.




Here's a good representation of the process of building one wall over another. The new king would start with the existing platform at the top of the pyramid. He'd build walls at either end, then fill in with rubble.




The next sovereign will then build on top of this new platform, but to resist the outward force of the infill, he has to reinforce outside the lower retaining walls.



The end result is a series of pyramids built one inside the other.



Here is a part where a platform partially deteriorated away, so you can see the prior retaining walls and infill.


The pyramid-top plazas were sacred spaces, open only to the ruling class. But it seems that when they brought in workers to fill in a plaza and build another layer, the workers took advantage to bury small offering in the old plaza. Here's an example:





Over time, later cultures even made some commoner burials in the pyramid:



Sometimes even the original lime plaster that was slathered over the blocks has remained partially intact.



Look at the far wall of this plaza. It's all original yellow plaster.



Here is a plaza where only some yellow original plaster remained, so they filled in with modern plaster to give an idea of what the finished walls would have looked like. Notice the original, 1000-year-old-plus mesquite pillar in the ground.




In other parts the archeology team has made more bold reconstructions, always making clear of course what is a modern intervention and what is original. This is what one of the courts might have looked like, with columns to support a thatched roof.




The pyramid was ostensibly dedicated to a sea goddess, and looked directly to the sea. There were no intervening buildings between the pyramid and the sea, unlike today, when this is the view westward:




The archeological site has become a real economic boon to the neighborhood. It even has a fancy restaurant right next to the pyramid.


Next to the restaurant are some statues representing workers kneading the mud and making adobe blocks. The footprints and unfinished blocks are actually the originals, excavated in situ! These statues have also inspired some projects we've undertaken at our own museum.



Above all what I learned at the site was that what's now Lima was one of the largest irrigated valleys on the Peruvian coast. What's now unending city would have been verdant valleys when the Spanish arrived, a mosaic of cultivated fields, wetlands, and forest, all watered by the Andean river Rimac. Even today, when it's all paved over, many of the supposed rivers and creeks in Lima are actually prehispanic canals, engineered to spread water to every inch of cultivable land. It's a shame all this is now concrete cityscape, but it helped me to understand why Lima is where it is, and I liked thinking of a green valley stretching all around me.

Third World Green Daddy 26: A year of Sam

In December my son had his first birthday. This was at once an occasion to look back on all the things that we've shared over the past year, as well as to consider the person my son has become, and the upcoming milestones and challenges he'll be facing. One year before, on the night of the full moon and the winter solstice, my son had pushed his way out into the world. He made me a more complete person, reminded Caro of the sweeter moments of motherhood, and brought his teenage sister Gabri back towards a more sane, stable life. He has been a blessing in every sense.

We had a modest party, with my mother, our immediate family (my wife, son, stepdaughter, and nephew), and my wife's sister's family. There weren't too many gifts, which was just fine with me, and seemed not to bother Sam. A few days later, though, Sam's great aunt came by with gifts from that whole side of the family. There were pants,



educational rubber blocks (which have come to be one of Sammy's favorite things to play with),


and a stool that his aunt in Cali made and painted for him.



My mother also brought him a classic book from Chicago, which he proceeded to rip the cover of immediately:


This first birthday marked a lot of big changes in Sam's life as well. For one, he started walking. Maybe two days after his birthday, he became able to stagger up to four or five steps between people, before falling into the arms of the receiving person. He'd long been scooting around on his butt, and he still preferred this method of locomotion up until a week or two ago, but his birthday was when he really started the path to independent walking. Our Christmas season was hectic, with a lot of staying at other people's houses, their staying at our house, and babies and kids running around everywhere. I think this might explain a temporary regression of Sam's, whereby during a few weeks of steady walking progress he decided he wasn't interested in it anymore. But after the holidays he picked up where he left off, and now he runs all over the house on his own.

Since his birthday Sam has advanced on the big boy front in terms of talking and shitting, too. He makes all sorts of sounds now, and sometimes when he says "Da" I think he's actually referring to me. "Mamama" corresponds to about 90% of things he identifies, but I also think he sometimes really means it to refer to his mother. As for pooping, by now he's an old hand at pooping on his potty. He still has accidents, but for the most part our days of washing shit out of his diapers are done for. This is a good thing, as he now eats solid food like a Viking.

Another milestone was his getting off of formula. Since June we'd be supplementing his breastmilk with bought formula, and since October we'd made an on-the-spot logistical decision in Chicago to stop breastfeeding him. But by December he was putting down bottles and bottles of formula every day, costing us something like $50US in formula every week! This coincided with a difficult economic juncture for us, so my wife made the executive decision to start giving him just regular milk. We have relatives that buy formula at a deep discount from Bogota's central street market. Presumably it's smuggled across from Venezuela, or stolen, or adultered, in order to achieve the lower price. I prefer neither to play with my child's health, nor to support the illicit activities that plague our country and fund some of the worst elements of society.

Actually what Sam drinks now isn't straight milk but rather colada, a concoction of boiled whole milk mixed with flour from grains or beans, and a bit of panela molasses (though he doesn't like it too sweet). The amount of flour you throw in is so little that I don't think it adds much nutrition, but it does make the milk thicker. If it were up to me he'd just drink straight milk, as I find it a bit cumbersome to make the colada mix, but colada is a typical thing that Colombians give to their weaned babies, and usually I'm not the one that has to mix it up. I'm actually warming to the colada thing, despite the extra labor involved. On my recent trip to Peru I bought a special Andean mix of quinoa, kiwicha (amaranth), maca (a radish-like root with virile strengthening properties), soy, corn, sesame, and wheat, and we mix this with another flour mix of barley, wheat, corn, rice, and oats. So Sam is now consuming 10 different grains from 6 different botanical families every time he drinks his bottle. I like the diversity of it.

The last big milestone, which we haven't totally embarked on yet, is sending Sam to day care. We've had a full-time babysitter for the past year now, but we think it's time for Sam to get out there and be with other kids (and for us to save some money!). As far as I've been able to understand, Colombia's public education system doesn't really extend to preschool and nurseries. There are nursery schools set up by parents or other groups that get funding and oversight from the Colombian Institute for Family Well-being (like DCFS in the US), which are usually set up for and required to give priority to the lowest-income tiers of society. There is also a plethora of private nursery schools, some of them pretty straightforward, and others with pretentious claims of self-actualizing pedagogy, so your 6-month-old can learn from an early age to believe that his shit doesn't stink.

I've always been an advocate of public schooling, because I think it's a good value, you learn what you need to, and you don't get as much of the superfluous classist bullshit that differentiates private schools. On top of that, public schools expose kids to a wide range of people, from different economic and social backgrounds. Even in the notoriously poor, predominantly black Chicago Public School system, I met wealthy kids, destitute kids, people from broken families, well-adjusted people, Hindus, Jews, Baptists, Muslims, blacks, whites, Pakistanis, and everyone in between. Try getting that kind of social exposure in an East Coast boarding school!

In my experience in Chicago and now in Colombia, it's often seemed to me that private schools are no better than public schools in terms of learning (in fact, many private schools are where parents send their mediocre or screw-up kids that no one else will put up with), and that the main difference is an aura of superiority. In Colombia, for instance, there is a flowering of supposedly bilingual schools (often located on the semirural periphery of cities, with names in English like "Country Day School") that any outside observer can see are a total scam, with poorly-qualified teachers and an unimaginative teaching style, but that make their buck by convincing parents that they're really exclusive, that they'll set their children apart from the plebeian masses. Maybe my kid would be better off with the types of elite social connections that a private school education can bring, but I think people should get jobs and recognition based on their own personal merit, not based on the oligarchs they buddy around with. I've seen in Colombia that even private schools that don't explicitly play this elite class card often produce graduates that just aren't quite as aware of their belonging to a larger society, of the same rules applying to them as to everyone else.

So I would like Sam to go to one of the semi-public preschools. I don't really believe that there is going to be much difference in terms of educational outcomes between one place and another, as long as they all meet some basic guidelines of a qualified, patient staff, some toys and stuff to play with, and other kids to interact with. I don't aspire for Sam to begin a heavy academic indoctrination from this tender age anyway, and frankly I think that even later on, most of his learning (book-learning and otherwise) will occur outside the classroom. If I'm right, then basically school, and especially preschool, is a time to learn how to interact with other people, to live in society. I want Sam to be around normal kids, not the children of the economic or intellectual elite, and certainly not the children of normal mooks who want to put on airs as if they were elite.

This may not be possible in our case, as simple as a desire as it seems. The semi-public nursery schools have limited space and are in high demand, and give preference to people from economic strata 1 or 2. Colombia has a system of economic strata going from an indigent 0 to a super-wealthy 6. You pay different rates for electricity, water, health, etc. depending on your strata. Depending on how our work contracts are panning out, and how many dependents we're supporting at a given time, my wife and I oscillate between maybe a low 3 to a low 4. We're not a priority for any social services, but we don't have enough money to pay for the privatized version of everything! We missed the first registration period, so in the next week we'll have to drop by the two public schools in our neighborhood and see if anyone who had registered didn't ante up the first tuition installment, in which case we'd have an in.

In the worst case we'll just send Sam to one of these private preschools in our zone. Though I'd prefer he do his schooling in the public system, I'm not too dogmatic about it for preschool. I went to a private Jewish preschool in my neighborhood in Chicago before heading on to a K-12 to masters degree path entirely in the public system, and I turned out okay. Furthermore, Sam will only be in Bogota for a month or two more, so what I should really be working on is finding a place for him in our real hometown. Even once he gets to grammar school, who knows if the limited space in the public system will allow us to send him to a public school? In Colombia, the public schools seem not to have room for everyone. They are designed with the understanding that a sizeable percentage of kids will go to private institutions. Nevertheless, we're really going to try to go public with Sam as he moves up the educational ladder. We pay our taxes, and we should be able to reap their benefits!

One last funny thing that we dug up right around Sam's birthday was the OLPC computer. OLPC stands for One Laptop Per Child, a project started a few years ago to provide cheap laptops to schoolchildren in the Third World. It is a really inspiring idea, bringing together engineers, designers, teachers, and learning experts to make a tool that actually helps foster sound, critical thinking. My father and I thought the idea was cool, and one Christmas they had this special deal whereby you could pay for a computer of your own in addition to a donation to one of their programs. Anyway, the computer is petite, kid-sized, and very durable. It has a sealed rubber keyboard, a swiveling screen readable even in bright African savannah conditions, and a powerful pair of Wifi pickups. There are no internal moving parts--no hard drive, no motors--and just two cables within the entire thing. So it's made to last.

Anyway, for years I've had the laptop my dad and I got in our apartment here in Colombia, though it never saw the light of day. A few months ago I thought to bring it out for Sam to play with, but I had a big surprise--the thing didn't turn on! I don't know if Sam was rough on it, or it just wore out with time, or what, but I thought it was pretty funny that my deprived little Third World son was capable of busting the indestructible computer! He even ripped off one of the rubberized keys. So now the OLPC computer is really just a simulation of a computer. It looks and feels like a computer, but it doesn't compute. Nevertheless, Sammy enjoys playing with it, mimicking the hours his folks are on their laptops working.

Bad English

I posted a while ago about my cultural consumption of late. I was also intending to write about odd cultural things I'd directly experienced lately, but I've forgotten most of them.

One really weird thing I did recently though was to take an English proficiency test. You see, Colombia is trying to compile a database of people who speak English fluently. That way, if foreign investors come to check out the landscape, or companies need to hire English speakers, they can go right to the database and find a bunch of qualified people. I figured I'd take the test, ace it (it was, after all, in my native language), and maybe have some professional opportunities result from it.

I walked to the test location, which was in a big hotel and convention center oddly situated amidst seedy lowrises and a highway under construction cutting through the city center. There was a long line stretching from the basement entrance, up a double staircase to a spiritless corporate plaza, where we the line-keepers snaked ourselves back and forth in an impromptu way, trying to maintain order without taking the risk of losing our place in line. After maybe a half hour they started letting us into the building, and there we were subjected to a very efficient process of registration and finding a seat in the testing room.

For the next four hours we were in this room. We filled out a written test with grammar school-esque text analysis. That went well for me, except for a few questions where I believe they had made an editorial error by including multiple correct answers. There were also a series of listening sections. I had to choose from a list of three more or less non-sequitur responses to initial sentences. "I've got a terrible migraine". "A--No problem, let's go for a walk" "B--Did you want to go to the pharmacy?". I'd go for the walk, but I assumed that B was the correct answer. The worst was a part where you'd listen to some mook blather on about a new product launch or other boring corporate nonsense, then compare it to a writeup on the same new product, and analyze the different angle that the speaker took as opposed to the writeup. I had a hard time keeping track of if they were market-testing the preliminary version 2.3, or market-releasing the definitive version 3.2, or testing in the Philippines and releasing in Britain, or vice versa. It was a real bore.

At any rate, it was a surreal experience to be tested on my comprehension of my own native language. But once I'd left the obligatory 4 hour session (you couldn't leave early because you had to listen to all the recordings with everyone else), I didn't think about it much more.

Until a few weeks ago, when I received an email giving my results on the test. I got an 89 out of 100, which would give me a level of C1 in the European language rating system. C2 is the highest rating, for people who have almost a native level of speech. I couldn't believe it! I edit English writing for style, grammar, punctuation, syntax. I am one of the most deliberate, conscious, fluent speakers and readers of the language that I know. I read Robert Frost, Charles Dickens, even translated Dostoyevsky! How could I get that score? I'd have been disappointed to get that score in Spanish, which is not my native tongue but which I also write and edit for style and grammar.

Anyway, after a depressive, heartbroken night in which I despaired of my ability to ever get a legitimate, outside-hire job, I felt better about the whole thing. Sort of Zen-like. Apparently the official channels for getting credentials and jobs are not working. Any test, any world in which I might be considered a non-fluent speaker of the language I love and celebrate, is not valid for me. In other past occasions of rejection, on a job application to perhaps the World Bank or Catholic Relief Services, I had sincerely doubted as to my own capacity. But with this English test (administered by none other than Berlitz!) I knew I was in the right. I am a fluent speaker of my own language, so if the test says I'm not, it's the test that's wrong, and not me.

By the same token, I reflected that if the official development establishment seems not to want any part of me, it must be their flaw, and not my own. My case is bolstered by the ineffectiveness of many large development agencies and other large institutions (corporations, government bureaucracies, etc.), and by the fact that in the rare occasions I get to meet directly with knowledgeable people "within the establishment" (as I did on numerous occasions on my recent work trip to Peru), they treat me as a capable, knowledgeable person, the type of person they might like to hire if hiring weren't tied up in a horrendous, corrupt, inefficient bureaucracy.

Since my failure-turned-revelation, I've felt better about never being considered seriously by big companies or organizations in my job search attempts. It seems these institutions are destined for mediocrity, the kind of officialized mediocrity that can classify a fluent speaker of a language as a subpar speaker. Once again, God or the economic crisis is telling me (perhaps telling the world) that the official, big-company economy we grew accustomed to in the 20th century is on its way out the door. Most of us would probably be better off peddling ice cream in the streets or raising milk goats on vacant city lots as opposed to trying to get some corrupt, immoral corporate "person" to hire us and pay a living wage. Selling ice cream may not get you the prestige and respect of a big company job, but then again neither will being unemployed, waiting on your couch for the big company job to call you while ice cream selling opportunities pass you by right outside your window!

Matthew Yglesias's flawed anti-agrarian logic

Philosopher-cum-economics writer Matthew Iglesias wouldn't agree with my last post about the sadness of people leaving the land for the city. For him, agriculture is a "scourge", while the service sector is the way to go. Like many economic thinkers, he seems to be dazzled by the sheer volume of the service economy (I sell you a shoe, it's a service, I buy a cigarette, it's a service, I get an operation for lung cancer, it's a service!) while neglecting the fact that, despite its ostensibly small share of the value created in any given economy, agriculture underlies everything. Without agriculture, there are no services. We just starve.

Yglesias has posted some random photo of a Cambodian rice farmer so as to illustrate how objectively, qualitatively awful farmwork is. The problem is that the woman in the photo is smiling! Look for that in a US supermarket!

Anyway, the writer uses Marx's term of "the idiocy of rural life". This turn of phrase in uncritical, modernist language comes from the same paragraph as a discussion of "barbarian and semi-barbarian countries". As far as I know, Marx never lived in a rural area, but rather spent his entire life among self-centered, decadent academic types in the various cities of Europe. I've been to Trier, the town where Marx is from. Not much rural life to be experienced or accurately judged, not even 150 years ago, I imagine. Perhaps it makes sense that there are so many economists out there bemoaning the drudgery of rural life (Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Collier, etc.)--they wouldn't have become desk-sitting academics if they actually liked physical work. Their invective against agrarian culture should then strike us not so much as insightful truth but rather as the personal prejudices of a certain type of person. This is not an ad hominem attack, just a recognition that if someone who doesn't know a particular reality comments on that reality, we must regard his affirmations more as a reflection of the person than of the topic he's commenting on. In the same way, my advocacy for agrarian lifestyles could be written off as a subjective personal preference, if I didn't show any evidence to back up my arguments.

Yglesias makes his sweeping pronouncements on rural life with no evidence whatsoever. He does not cite any study supporting his affirmation that farming "is not much fun". I, on the other hand, am trained and experienced in studying farming systems. Talking to farmers about farming is what I do for a living. I don't believe anyone I've ever spoken to in the countryside, in Benin, Haiti, Colombia, the US, or France, has ever cited the lack of fun in farming as a prime difficulty or a reason for getting out of farming. In fact, something I see and hear time and again is that people desperately want to maintain their life of farming, of living in rural areas, of keeping old traditions, and that they are even willing to take a slight economic hit to do so. That is to say that people are willing to make some economic sacrifices to continue farming, but there comes a point when it is so difficult economically that they have no other choice but to leave the land. The prime difficulty in farming most everywhere I've worked is that it does not pay enough to make a dignified living.

I really hate it when economists dump on farming and rural life with a bunch of subjective, biased, unfounded affirmations. If we're going to go into subjective qualities, then to be honest, anyone mentioning the physical difficulty of some aspects of farm labor should also mention the deeply satisfying sensations derived from ties to the land and to one's traditions and roots. Better yet, they should try measuring both the positive and the negative qualitative traits of rural life so as to make an honest assessment. Even better yet, economists should just keep away from emotive language and subjective personal evaluations altogether, and stick to hard, economic numbers. If they were to do so, they might learn some interesting things, as I have and as Alexander Chayanov did almost a century ago.

For one, an honest economic appraisal of agriculture often reveals that a day of work in subsistence agriculture pays a lot better than a day of paid wage labor. Of course the "pay" of subsistence agriculture is in kind, not in cash. A Colombian farmer may generate $50US or more worth of cassava and plantain for every day he works in his small plot. The problem is that he can only consume so much of this production, and poor markets (given that everyone else is also producing the same things for their own consumption) remove the possibility to produce more for sale. So often the problem of "rural life as practiced in pre-industrial societies" isn't that it is "horrible", as Yglesias contends, but rather that it's pretty good and easy-going, but there is a low ceiling to the amount of value you can create from your work. For relatively little work you can provide food and a bit more for you and your family, but beyond that point there's no economically productive way to spend the rest of your time. People aren't overworked or even underfed in many agrarian societies, but rather the opposite; they don't work as much as they might, because there's no profitable work to be had beyond a certain point. Thus they have basic food needs met but have little access to cash money to buy other things, like computers, internet service, etc. (rural people in many places I've studied actually do pretty well as far as access to TV and sometimes electricity).

As for Yglesias's claims about the economic repercussions of people getting out of farming, they are also sloppy. He claims that land is the prime (actually, he implies it's the only) determinant of value creation (he sloppily talks about "earning") in agriculture. This is of course nonsense. My family owns untended secondary forest land in Wisconsin. It is nine acres or so, and produces no economic value. If I were to plant an apple tree (an investment of seeds and labor), it would start producing a few dollars for nine acres. If I were to plant thousands of apple trees, manage them with knowledge (human capital) and hard work, apply fertilizers (a manufactured input), and market the apples through an ingenious sales mechanism, I would be making a comfortable, First-World living from that land. If I grazed goats and pigs underneath those trees, or stocked trout in the ponds, or organized agritourism visits on my land (which is, granted, a detour into services), I'd be making even more money. The bottom line is that in all of these considerations, the amount of land I do or don't have is only one factor, along with use of labor and capital, that determines what I earn from it. So Yglesias's assertion totally ignores the question of intensity of land use, be it through investments of capital, water, manure, labor, or any other number of things you can apply to that land.

Furthermore, Yglesias claims that one person's leaving the land means that his neighbor's income "leaps upward" if he can farm that land. Again, this is a simple and silly assertion from someone who should've done his homework better. Usually when one person leaves the land, it is because prices are falling, and a production level that was formerly enough to get by on is no longer so. For instance, if you sell an amount of wheat that earns enough to live on for a year, but the next year wheat's price falls by 10% (and/or your operation costs go up due to higher fertilizer prices, for example), your yearly production will now fall 10% short of what you need to live on. You will probably get out of farming, sooner or later. If you move, your neighbor might farm your land and thus earn 90% of what he earned last year plus 90% of what you earned last year. But prices inevitably keep falling, leading more people to leave the land, and just a few people now farming broad tracts just to earn enough to get by.

As in any other non-monopoly market scenario, farming tends toward a zero-profit asymptote. It is a trend that favors use of less labor and more capital, and makes less productive use of the land (one guy farming 1000 acres of wheat doesn't produce as much value as 50 families, even barefoot, pre-industrial families, each farming 20 acres intensively). Promoting this model of agriculture made sense in the expansion of the US agricultural frontier in the 1800s, when labor was scarce and land plentiful, and in the industrialization of the US economy in the mid-20th century, when labor was in demand in the cities so those in the countryside had to pick up the slack of those who left. It apparently makes economic sense in today's China, as many people go to the cities to find higher-paying work in services. The cases of the industrialization and then service-ization of the US and Chinese economies are ultimately underlain by the use of fossil fuels that has made possible the apparent jump in productivity in all sectors.

But in the 21st century, when land is becoming ever scarcer, and people are a dime a dozen (or a dime per 10 billion by 2050), do we really want to make more "efficient" use of labor (read fewer jobs) and less efficient use of land? I don't think this is sage policy, and chirpy analyses like Yglesias's only serve to send us closer to the edge of a cliff, an edge we'll get to right about when there's no more cheap oil to replace human labor on the farm.

I don't blame the Chinese, or Yglesias, for cheerleading the service sector as a higher-paying alternative to farming. It is right now. But it's very short-sighted to sever all ties to the rural life (qualifying it as a "scourge" and "horrible", for example), especially when it's very possible that the 21st century will demand that many people return to farming as the oil-guzzling manufacturing and service sectors wind down. Anyway, I extend this offer to Yglesias, who is approximately my age:

Matthew, when the shit hits the fan, and you're scrounging for garbage or grass to eat because you've lived your entire life with an inculcated scorn for farming, you can give me a call. Maybe I'll show you how to wield a hoe!

Articles that made me sad

For the past few days my son and I have been without my wife Caro, as she is working in a remote part of rural Colombia evaluating an alternative development project. This is probably the main reason I've been dragging a bit lately on the emotional front. I'll write more about this stint without my wife in another post.

Anyway, aside from feeling lonely, there are a few things I've read lately that made me sad.

The first article touches on a subject I've discussed before: the flight of blacks from Chicago proper to the southern states. This latest article focuses on individual stories of older people who came north decades ago, and their thinking in terms of returning or not to the South. It really puts a human face on the census trend of blacks moving back South. Again, it makes me sad that my city is losing population (almost all of Chicago's population decline in the past decade was accounted for by blacks leaving the city), and especially that it's losing people pertaining to the very culture that in my eyes is the city's most important. Despite Chicago's rich, amazing melting pot of cultures, at least in my lifetime blacks have really been the defining cultural matrix that defines the city's character as a whole. To me, whatever the color of your skin, if you're Chicagoan you're at least a little black.

It's odd that I should feel so sad about the black return to the South, because in many ways it is in line with many other values I hold. I believe in the value of roots, of place, of maintaining an authentic local culture, and for most blacks in the US, the best place to do this is probably in the South. Granted, many new black emigrees (or returnees) will be returning to cities and suburbs like Atlanta and Memphis, as opposed to returning to rural homesteads (though the article discusses that too). But perhaps the US black culture will to some extent return to the rural and small-town roots that have defined the populace for most of their time in the New World. I lament when people migrate from rural areas to urban ones, thus weakening the rich tapestry of local rural cultures that have traditionally existed in any country. In Colombia I'm a big advocate of people's returning to smaller cities and rural areas to make a simpler, more dignified living, as many people we know are indeed doing, sick as they are of Bogota's inhumanity and hassle. So in most respects I should objectively applaud the black exodus to the South.

The problem is that I'm from Chicago, and I can't be totally objective about its disintegration. I happen to have been born well after the Great Migration, so for me the normal or desireable state of things is how my city was after the influx of millions of black folk. As I've said before, I can't blame people for choosing a warmer climate and a sense of family history over the neglected, shitty urban landscape that many of Chicago's black neighborhoods have become. This is especially the case when Chicago no longer seems like a better choice in terms of racism, risk of murder, or job opportunities, as was the situation during the Great Migration. I do wonder what will happen when fossil fuel scarcity makes motor transport and air-conditioning less viable lifestyle options. I'll bet quite a few people will lament having left behind well-planned, walkable cities in the milder Northern climates. But as I've discussed in a past post, that is a colorblind issue that applies to anyone who would move to slapdab, shittily-planned and -built Sun Belt subdivisions, not just to blacks heading south.

My concerns about this article coincide with my reading of Malcolm X's autobiography to my son Sam (as well as Black history month). Rereading this classic has somewhat lifted my spirits in the past few days. It is interesting to read about Malcolm's rural upbringing, which was in the North but nevertheless filled with hatred, persecution, and murder from local white folk. In many ways Malcolm X is the archetypical American (though of course he'd probably hate my identifying him with the US as opposed to Africa). His father was an emigree from the rural South to the rural North, and then Malcolm went from the rural Midwest to the urban East Coast. His life story mimics our path as a nation over that period, and especially our black brothers' trajectory as a people, not just from South to North, but from cringing serfs to proud, modern men and women. I wonder what he'd think of our country and our black culture today, in the post-modern era.

Aside from the representativeness of his migration trajectory, Malcolm X is for me an ideal American because of his moral rectitude. He never backed down or compromised his values, yet at the same time he is one of our only public figures that drastically changed and evolved his viewpoints and his positions on things. Most politicians and leaders are one-trick ponies. They settle on a trope and stick with it the rest of their lives. But when it was necessary to totally reinvent himself in order to remain true to his beliefs, Malcolm did so. I can count at least three times: when he became a street hustler (which was a rational decision based on his belief that the world is not to be trusted), when he became a member of the Nation of Islam, and finally when he began to break away from the Nation and approach a more orthodox version of Islam. This last moral stand cost him his life.

Another news item that made me a bit sad recently was this bit marking the tipping point in China's transition from a rural to an urban society. That's right--according to China's official news service, just over 50% of the country's populace finds itself in cities today. I don't know what this means exactly--depending on the country, sometimes statisticians consider small cities like Urbana or even Dwight, Illinois as "urban", despite the fields that surround them and the traditional culture that permeate them. On the other hand, agrarian-style self-sufficiency and connection to the land can still be found in many big cities in the form of home gardens and backyard hunting and trapping. So this doesn't necessarily mean that agrarian culture is on the way out in China. Still, it saddens me some, because it marks the transition of perhaps our world's most enduring, diverse, and vibrant rural culture one step closer to the ugly, soulless consumerism that seems to be flourishing in China's cities.