I am writing from San Martin, Meta, on the exotic Eastern Plains of Colombia. This is my first time in this region, though all I have gotten to see of it thus far is the cool but sticky night (a la Central Wisconsin summer evenings) here in my humble yet expensive hotel. The place is not a dump by any means, but in any other region of the country a hotel this pricy would have a lot more amenities and style. As is, I'm paying over $50US a night for little more than a one-story motel with a pool in the center. I guess the easy money flowing through the Eastern Plains (from drugs, from other contraband, from oil wells) drives up prices for everything, even in a small, remote town like this.
From the bus window I also got to see a bit of the expansive landscape. Broad grassy plains are punctuated by wide rivers with more white rocks than rushing brown water, and frequent gallery forest (the tropical forest that crops up along the edges of small waterways, like a little strip of Amazon rainforest running in a gash through the plains), mirrored by an equally flat sky with low, lumpy clouds like the tussocks of grass and clumps of forest below. To the east there is no limit to the vista, unlike the rest of Colombia with its constant frame of mountains surrounding anywhere you go, while to the west the mountains descend into hills delimiting the geography. It may be a cliche, but the sunsets here are really amazing, with the sun disappeared behind the mountains, lighting up the western face of the clouds with pink and gray O'Keefe-strokes. This is a departure from the highland tropics, where the sun's quick descent from a high angle leaves little room for plays of light, and is furthermore blocked by the horizon of mountains.
Beholding this alien and novel beauty from my bus seat was a surreal experience. Outside I descended from flat highlands down steep green-and-stony valleys into the verdant plains, while inside I was treated to five hours or so of ultraviolent, mean-spirited, poorly-conceived films. First was "Hitman", which treated me to scenes of mutilation, torture, and lots of execution-style killings. Next up was "Orphan", which not only rehashes the old prejudice of adoptees as maladjusted and unlovable demons, but is full of extreme violence such as hammer bludgeoning and stabbing. Finally was Stephen King's "Cat's Eye", which while less extremely violent than the other movies, was full of cruelty (and the plot moved along at a snail's pace). The movies left me tense and stressed, and they seemed especially inappropriate to me as Colombia is trying to get away from a culture of callous violence.
Other recent cultural consumption:
The movie Closer, which I watched with my wife after not having seen it for a few years. The dialogue is sharp and witty, though I can't say it's realistic since no one actually talks like that. Director Mike Nichols is not able in this movie to paint a convincing picture of functioning relationships. I realize the movie is mainly about the messy breakups and explicitly skips over the interim of relative harmony, but frankly there's little there to make me understand why any of the characters are sad about breaking up anyway. The only positive, working aspect we see of any relationship is coy nonsense-talk when they first meet, and then a lot of references thereafter to a hot sex life. No one ever actually shares with each other, takes care of each other, has fun together. We never see anyone looking beyond the tip of their dick or their clitoris. Oh yeah, and with the exception of Clive Owen, all the actors are gaunt and bony and morose. Who would even want to be with Jude Law, or Julia Roberts, or Natalie Portman? It's good they don't show any graphic sex scenes--those three are so skinny and androgenous that I wouldn't know who was who! That said, the breakups are depicted with shocking accuracy, from begging to anger to name-calling. Perhaps the best line is when Clive Owen is grilling Julia Roberts about what sex acts she engaged in with her lover, and after getting her to tell him, he says something like, "Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die, you fucked-up slag." Ouch. And my final praise for the film is that it shows each character being dishonest or disagreeable in a different way. Those who come off best are Clive Owen, who is very sincere in his desires but also selfish and brutish, and Natalie Portman, who is clearly sincere in her love for Jude Law, but turns out to be completely lying about the facts of her identity.
Another movie we saw was "Malena", an Italian movie (though US-produced, it seems) starring Monica Bellucci. I am unfairly prejudiced about modern Italian cultural creations, which seem to me naively self-centered and frivolous, but this movie had a good mix of Italian frivolity, honest male coming-of-age, and the complex moral issues and desperations that arise in wartime.
I also recently saw two TV shows, the first US sitcoms I'd seen in a long time. One was Modern Family. It is well-written and funny, and in an innovative format. In that respect I liked it. But on the other hand, and without getting all blustery and self-righteous, I do have to say that its offhanded depiction of Colombia through the character of Sofia Vergara is not accurate, and is even borderline offensive. As a gimmick to get laughs from a generic representation of a clueless foreigner, I guess it works, but there are a lot of inaccuracies there. I want to clear up a few for anyone who's interested.
First off, Colombians generally don't eat a lot of spicy food. There's always a bowl of spicy sauce in restaurants, and a lot of people like to drip some on their food, but Colombian cooking usually doesn't even use hot pepper in the actual recipes. I assume Modern Family's creators are looking to insert an exotic quirk when they have their character love spicy food, and they are probably mixing up Colombia with Mexico and Peru, which do have very spicy cuisines. But in fact, in my limited travels to different parts of the world, the country I know well where people eat the spiciest food is in the US. My wife and I believe other Colombians that visit are often surprised at how much we like hot peppers in the US, in both our homegrown and our immigrant cuisines.
Secondly, Colombia is not now the murder capital of the world. While it was far ahead of most countries in official homicide rate for most of the 1980s and 1990s (though I wonder how much of this is due to worse reporting and statistics in other countries, as well as whether Colombia's war deaths were for some reason counted as homicides), for the past ten years or more it has been moving down the list, and depending on the methodology used, right now Colombia's murder rate is far outpaced by a number of Central American and African countries.
Lastly, many of the linguistic errors Sofia Vergara made for laughs in the episode I saw are not very realistic. For instance, she didn't know the English word for helicopter, though it's basically the same in Spanish. Again, maybe it works for comedy, but it's really just a silly trope to get cheap laughs from someone who's different.
The other show I saw was the Big Bang Theory. It was my second episode I'd ever seen, or actually the second partial episode I've ever seen. A year and a half ago a friend was visiting me in Colombia and I saw some of the show as he watched it. And this time I selected the show to watch on my personal seatback TV screen on a short flight between Barranquilla and Bogotá, but the flight ended before the episode did. The show seemed well-written and sharp (I believe some of its creators were also involved with the excellent show Roseanne), and in my own odd way I felt like my life had certain things in common with the interface of academic endeavor and social relations depicted in the series. It also made me feel good because I reflected on the difference between the single guys presumably my age or older, who are generally self-absorbed and still searching for romance, and my married life with its obligations, joys, and trials. I am very happy to be where I am--I'm the type of guy who wouldn't find much meaning in my life if I were just on my own, and not responsible for other people in my family. I respect individuals who whether by choice or circumstance don't have children or a spouse, I understand that even entire societies may opt for the single, professional lifestyle as a standard model, and in fact I wonder if childless singledom is in fact a more socially and ecologically sustainable lifestyle than others. But being ensconced in a personal situation and a culture where big families are the norm, it was a surprising reminder of other ways of living to see The Big Bang Theory and the lifestyle it depicts.
On a slightly related note, I was reflecting recently on the nobility of family life. I've mentioned before in my blog that as a twenty-something in the US I felt that middle-class life there was bereft of much meaning, because the pursuit and generalized presence of physical comfort robbed life of much drama. In the past two months, as I've traveled Colombia giving my sustainability lecture, I have often mused on what I would do if I were kidnapped, a very unlikely but still real possibility. My conclusion is always that I'd do whatever it took to get back to my family, just as I'd do anything to keep them safe. And this has led me to the realization that even in the relative calm and comfort of the middle-class US lifestyle, love and family imbue life with meaning and drama. Thankfully, many people in the US don't have to make extreme choices or do extreme things for their loved ones, as they might in other countries and cultures where violence and desperation are an integral part of everyday life. But the fact that many people in the US or elsewhere will never be faced with a life-or-death situation doesn't mean that they don't bear a bravery within, the capacity to do great things for the people they love. I think of my love for my wife and child, and the lengths I would go to (though will probably never have to) to keep them well, and I think of the people in my family who have loved and raised and stood by me in my life, and I see an inner strength that puts the lie to my youthful conception of life in the US as void of drama or nobility. And many of the people who have most cared about and for me are single and childless, but they have sacrificed or would sacrifice just as much for their extended family (including for me) as I would for my wife or kid or mother or whoever.
I finish this blog as I watch some stupid sitcoms on the hotel room TV, on a channel seemingly devoted to run all the big-name sitcoms from the past ten years or so. First up I caught an insipid bit of Two and a Half Men, with its predictable jokes and mean spirit, and then some of vapid, milquetoast Friends, which I still can't understand how it became such a phenomenon in the US and in the world at large. It seems to me that Big Bang Theory and Modern Family (despite the latter's cheap ethnic jokes) are a real cut above these other two shows in their writing and relevance. I mean, the latter two are still silly and limited by their predictable sitcom format, but they do try to speak to real life.
At least that's my two cents from the Eastern Plains of Colombia.
Economic development, current events, travel, sustainable living, and fatherhood, all from an agrarian perspective
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Social justice per FDR
My cousin sent me this inaugural address from 1937, delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt. I especially like his point that social justice is not just the right thing to do, but also the sensible thing to do, for if too many of our neighbors and countrymen are poor, their poverty also denies the rest of us the possibility of working, selling, and prospering. It is a point I have tried to make clear in my sustainability workshops. We should take care of our fellow man, or of the environment, not because we are particularly good or conscientious or charitable people, but because without taking care of the people and things that surround us, we will also damage our own well bein.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Articles on commodities markets and sustainable farming
Here is a discussion of a recent study that finds that simple four-year crop rotations (with livestock included as well) could drastically decrease pesticide use in Midwestern farming as compared to our current corn-soy or corn-corn-corn practices, while maintaining the same profit margin.
For more ambitious readers, here's a long bit on the intervention of financial actors in agricultural commodities markets screws up those very markets and the lives of those who depend on them (read, all farmers and consumers!)
For more ambitious readers, here's a long bit on the intervention of financial actors in agricultural commodities markets screws up those very markets and the lives of those who depend on them (read, all farmers and consumers!)
Thursday, October 25, 2012
An alternative grain reserve proposal
This is an interesting proposal for an alternative farm policy for the US based not on the current model of direct payments to farmers to supplement income, nor on the government grain reserves I have advocated for on this blog. Instead, it proposes a system of farmer-owned grain reserves that would serve the purpose of price stabilization that government reserves would also satisfy, but without saddling the government with huge grain reserves to manage. The article analyzes what government expenditures and farm income would have been in the period from 1998-2010 had the farmer-owned reserve been in place, and discusses separately the effects of such an alternative policy on different stakeholders. The government would have spent about a third of what it actually did over the period, and farmer income would have improved slightly. The system would have better met the needs of everyone involved, with the exception of input vendors and market speculators.
The article also contains a historical overview of US farm and grain reserve policy, as well as a good explanation of why the agricultural economy functions differently than other sectors.
I recommend this article for a good idea of where US farm policy should be headed. Also, I think one of the co-authors received a prize in the same agricultural development essay competition as I did a few years ago.
The article also contains a historical overview of US farm and grain reserve policy, as well as a good explanation of why the agricultural economy functions differently than other sectors.
I recommend this article for a good idea of where US farm policy should be headed. Also, I think one of the co-authors received a prize in the same agricultural development essay competition as I did a few years ago.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Agronomy reports
Following my recent links to articles on plant breeding, I also just read this one on how plant breeders can respond better to environmental priorities in their work.
On another note, I have long wanted to write a blog post comparing different visions for where agriculture needs to go in the next decades. Namely, I wanted to compare very industry-focused visions with more agroecological sensibilities. But many of the reports I would like to compare are hundreds of pages long, so if I'm going to wait until I've read them all, I'll probably never write the damn post. Instead, I'm opting for sharing these different reports one by one as I read them. The first report then that I'll be sharing discusses integrated crop and livestock systems, and the role they have to play in feeding the world in the future. "Integrated crop and livestock" is a fancy way of describing what farmers the world over have done for generations; combine both plants and animals on their farms. The industrialization of agriculture tends to lead farmers away from this practice, such that instead of stable, diversified economic systems, they focus only on the one or two most immediately profitable elements of their farms, to the exclusion of all other activities. This often makes sense in the short term, but it makes the farmer (and the world as a whole) more vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks, in addition to producing less total food in a given area. So the conference proceedings I've linked to here are basically a first attempt to figure out how to return to integrated crop and livestock systems, but with modifications that can make them even more productive and more adapted to the 21st century.
On another note, I have long wanted to write a blog post comparing different visions for where agriculture needs to go in the next decades. Namely, I wanted to compare very industry-focused visions with more agroecological sensibilities. But many of the reports I would like to compare are hundreds of pages long, so if I'm going to wait until I've read them all, I'll probably never write the damn post. Instead, I'm opting for sharing these different reports one by one as I read them. The first report then that I'll be sharing discusses integrated crop and livestock systems, and the role they have to play in feeding the world in the future. "Integrated crop and livestock" is a fancy way of describing what farmers the world over have done for generations; combine both plants and animals on their farms. The industrialization of agriculture tends to lead farmers away from this practice, such that instead of stable, diversified economic systems, they focus only on the one or two most immediately profitable elements of their farms, to the exclusion of all other activities. This often makes sense in the short term, but it makes the farmer (and the world as a whole) more vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks, in addition to producing less total food in a given area. So the conference proceedings I've linked to here are basically a first attempt to figure out how to return to integrated crop and livestock systems, but with modifications that can make them even more productive and more adapted to the 21st century.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Third World Green Daddy 37: Fake food, real reality
When I was younger, and up until relatively recently, I wondered how I could ever be satisfied by a typical middle-class adulthood in the US. My interests tended toward subsistence farming and working with the agrarian poor, so professionally the US didn't have much to offer me. Plus I often felt that the way many things are set up in the US (from interstate highways to TV to air conditioning to narrow interest groups) so as to limit your exposure to elements of the real world, to anything beyond your own navel. I like challenges and adventure, so this aspect of the culture didn't suit me at all. Even things I love about the US, like the avid consumption and discussion of film, are to some extent escapes from reality. And thus reality devolves into a predictable, comfortable, sterile routine with little room for adventure and imagination and novelty.
I now know that my perception was only partially true. There are indeed many people in the US who insulate themselves from reality, but there are also very many who lead rich, varied lives thanks to their work, their surroundings, or their values. More importantly, as a husband and father I now believe that the greatest passion, the greatest drama in life tends to come not from big Indiana Jones-style adventures but precisely from the small family relations, the story that we weave in our everyday lives, all those things that I'd previously written off as bourgeois and boring in my youthful rashness. Hell, right now I'm writing from what until very recently was an action-packed warzone, and in fact I'm a scant few miles from what continues to be a conflict area, and all I can think about or get a thrill from or look forward to is getting back home to see if my kid is pronouncing "car" better, or what my wife has been thinking about her job plans. What I'd first thought to be most meaningful and transcendent is mere background noise, and what I'd dismissed as petty routine is what is most profound and amazing.
This isn't to say that I no longer believe in or care about my work. I am thankful and thrilled and honored to work in a fascinating, exciting job, and I would surely be bored or feel inadequate if I weren't working as an agronomist on interesting projects. But I do have more of a sense now that I should devote less thought to work and more to my family.
One of my favorite movies is Parenthood, with Steve Martin. I've always enjoyed the silly comedy of it, but since becoming a father I experience the film in a more firsthand way. I have been through long nights when a teenage daughter doesn't show up, I have been through kids in trouble, drug scares, ear infections, social maladaptation, worries about height percentiles and IQ. And in this respect I appreciate the film ever more. It is an odd film in that it shuns the typical cinematic preference for the outrageous and the eye-catching, in favor of a contemplation of little, authentic moments. Again, it shows that the bourgeois, boring outward trappings of life are just window-dressing, and that what matters, what defines people from Burundi to Buffalo Grove, is living and growing in a family. I realize this all the more so because in the past year I've spent my weekdays away from my family, ostensibly working in something exotic and fascinating. But as I've said, what seems most riveting for me these days is the thought of just having a normal, domestic life, with its infinite variations on a few central routines.
Another area in which I've started to shun artifice and embrace sincerity is in junk food. I eat very healthy normally. I like balance, fruits, veggies, beans, grains, not too much animal stuff. But I also enjoy binging on chocolate or other sugary shit from time to time. I guess I inherited this from my mother, a wispy woman who eats like a bird, except when she's downing a whole bag of bite-size Halloween Mars bars, then feeling Catholic guilt and self-loathing about it for days.
Now that Sam is closely watching whatever I do and imitating it, I have become more careful about not eating lots of Oreo cookies (at least not in his sight) or other junk food. I actually don't mind if he eats a cookie now and again, especially if he's eating well otherwise. But I have begun to notice that Sam is picking up some bad food habits. He mainly likes bread and rice, though he is a good bean and lentil and egg eater, too. Actually, he's good with fruit and has even been known to down broccoli chunks like an Apatosaurus. What I worry about is that he eats mainly Western-style food. My full-time job consists mainly in promoting Andean roots and tubers so that people recuperate the custom of eating them and planting them. I like these foods, but my hectic traveling lifestyle has not allowed me to be judicious in their purchase and preparation this year. As a result, Sam is eating the same non-Andean foods that peasant kids all over Boyaca are adopting in place of rubas, cubios, arracacha, and ibias. So I feel bad about that. I hope that once we're all under one roof again, we can get Sam back on track with his Andean food.
What most concerns me about Sam's eating habits though is his newfound affinity for shitty cereal. I blame this entirely on his teenage sister and cousin, who are addicted to generic choco-krispie-type things and fake Froot Loops (I am proud of them though in that they've shunned brand names with no qualms). Sam used to be content to eat unseasoned corn flakes (which I actually like the flavor of, since I long ago lowered my need for constant sugar stimulation), but now he always goes to the cupboard to grab these other junk food cereals, and not everyone in the house is as strict as I am about saying no. Again, I'd have no problem if Sam ate a handful of Cookie Crisps or some such shit now and then--I'm a big fan myself. But I don't want him to think that eating synthetic, sugar-laden junk counts as a real meal.
This brings me to the question of sincerity in processed food. I have no problem that Nabisco makes cookies that aren't good for you, or that El Corral hamburgers in Colombia are selling fatty food, because it is clear to anyone with half a brain that this is a once-in-a-while treat, and not the basis of a healthy diet. As such, it's easy to tell your kids that they can eat this stuff sometimes, but not all the time. What I have a problem with is a cereal company that tells you it is normal to eat the equivalent of a frosted sugar cake every morning. When I was a kid, cereal ads always had a sort of disclaimer that said their brand could be a part of a balanced breakfast (thus implying that it in itself and alone would not be a balanced breakfast). They would show a plate of eggs, bacon, orange juice, toast, pancakes, and then a bowl of Cap'n Crunch on the side. Shit, you could claim that a can of diesel fuel is a part of a balanced breakfast if you drank it with milk, OJ, and hand-made biscuits and gravy. Everyone knows though that cereals are not a part of a balanced breakfast for most kids, but rather the entire breakfast. With or without a disclaimer, junk breakfast cereals make an effort to place a toxic product on your kid's plate, and to rob you of the common sense to insist otherwise. Likewise McDonald's, with its incessant pandering to kids, aims to create addiction to their slop. It is not honest to push a once-in-a-while treat as something you should consume every day.
So in the end, I have a big problem with companies that sell shit food but are not honest about its being shit. I can accept and respect a good cookie company. I can't respect someone who's trying to get my kid hooked on those cookies or anything else.
I now know that my perception was only partially true. There are indeed many people in the US who insulate themselves from reality, but there are also very many who lead rich, varied lives thanks to their work, their surroundings, or their values. More importantly, as a husband and father I now believe that the greatest passion, the greatest drama in life tends to come not from big Indiana Jones-style adventures but precisely from the small family relations, the story that we weave in our everyday lives, all those things that I'd previously written off as bourgeois and boring in my youthful rashness. Hell, right now I'm writing from what until very recently was an action-packed warzone, and in fact I'm a scant few miles from what continues to be a conflict area, and all I can think about or get a thrill from or look forward to is getting back home to see if my kid is pronouncing "car" better, or what my wife has been thinking about her job plans. What I'd first thought to be most meaningful and transcendent is mere background noise, and what I'd dismissed as petty routine is what is most profound and amazing.
This isn't to say that I no longer believe in or care about my work. I am thankful and thrilled and honored to work in a fascinating, exciting job, and I would surely be bored or feel inadequate if I weren't working as an agronomist on interesting projects. But I do have more of a sense now that I should devote less thought to work and more to my family.
One of my favorite movies is Parenthood, with Steve Martin. I've always enjoyed the silly comedy of it, but since becoming a father I experience the film in a more firsthand way. I have been through long nights when a teenage daughter doesn't show up, I have been through kids in trouble, drug scares, ear infections, social maladaptation, worries about height percentiles and IQ. And in this respect I appreciate the film ever more. It is an odd film in that it shuns the typical cinematic preference for the outrageous and the eye-catching, in favor of a contemplation of little, authentic moments. Again, it shows that the bourgeois, boring outward trappings of life are just window-dressing, and that what matters, what defines people from Burundi to Buffalo Grove, is living and growing in a family. I realize this all the more so because in the past year I've spent my weekdays away from my family, ostensibly working in something exotic and fascinating. But as I've said, what seems most riveting for me these days is the thought of just having a normal, domestic life, with its infinite variations on a few central routines.
Another area in which I've started to shun artifice and embrace sincerity is in junk food. I eat very healthy normally. I like balance, fruits, veggies, beans, grains, not too much animal stuff. But I also enjoy binging on chocolate or other sugary shit from time to time. I guess I inherited this from my mother, a wispy woman who eats like a bird, except when she's downing a whole bag of bite-size Halloween Mars bars, then feeling Catholic guilt and self-loathing about it for days.
Now that Sam is closely watching whatever I do and imitating it, I have become more careful about not eating lots of Oreo cookies (at least not in his sight) or other junk food. I actually don't mind if he eats a cookie now and again, especially if he's eating well otherwise. But I have begun to notice that Sam is picking up some bad food habits. He mainly likes bread and rice, though he is a good bean and lentil and egg eater, too. Actually, he's good with fruit and has even been known to down broccoli chunks like an Apatosaurus. What I worry about is that he eats mainly Western-style food. My full-time job consists mainly in promoting Andean roots and tubers so that people recuperate the custom of eating them and planting them. I like these foods, but my hectic traveling lifestyle has not allowed me to be judicious in their purchase and preparation this year. As a result, Sam is eating the same non-Andean foods that peasant kids all over Boyaca are adopting in place of rubas, cubios, arracacha, and ibias. So I feel bad about that. I hope that once we're all under one roof again, we can get Sam back on track with his Andean food.
What most concerns me about Sam's eating habits though is his newfound affinity for shitty cereal. I blame this entirely on his teenage sister and cousin, who are addicted to generic choco-krispie-type things and fake Froot Loops (I am proud of them though in that they've shunned brand names with no qualms). Sam used to be content to eat unseasoned corn flakes (which I actually like the flavor of, since I long ago lowered my need for constant sugar stimulation), but now he always goes to the cupboard to grab these other junk food cereals, and not everyone in the house is as strict as I am about saying no. Again, I'd have no problem if Sam ate a handful of Cookie Crisps or some such shit now and then--I'm a big fan myself. But I don't want him to think that eating synthetic, sugar-laden junk counts as a real meal.
This brings me to the question of sincerity in processed food. I have no problem that Nabisco makes cookies that aren't good for you, or that El Corral hamburgers in Colombia are selling fatty food, because it is clear to anyone with half a brain that this is a once-in-a-while treat, and not the basis of a healthy diet. As such, it's easy to tell your kids that they can eat this stuff sometimes, but not all the time. What I have a problem with is a cereal company that tells you it is normal to eat the equivalent of a frosted sugar cake every morning. When I was a kid, cereal ads always had a sort of disclaimer that said their brand could be a part of a balanced breakfast (thus implying that it in itself and alone would not be a balanced breakfast). They would show a plate of eggs, bacon, orange juice, toast, pancakes, and then a bowl of Cap'n Crunch on the side. Shit, you could claim that a can of diesel fuel is a part of a balanced breakfast if you drank it with milk, OJ, and hand-made biscuits and gravy. Everyone knows though that cereals are not a part of a balanced breakfast for most kids, but rather the entire breakfast. With or without a disclaimer, junk breakfast cereals make an effort to place a toxic product on your kid's plate, and to rob you of the common sense to insist otherwise. Likewise McDonald's, with its incessant pandering to kids, aims to create addiction to their slop. It is not honest to push a once-in-a-while treat as something you should consume every day.
So in the end, I have a big problem with companies that sell shit food but are not honest about its being shit. I can accept and respect a good cookie company. I can't respect someone who's trying to get my kid hooked on those cookies or anything else.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Third World Green Daddy 36: More on clothes and accessories
In July my wife and I went to Chicago for our yearly visit, and we really went to town at Marshall's. For those who don't know, Marshall's is a somewhat seedy, depressing place where the down-and-out go for cheap clothes. The clothes are cheap because they are passés de la mode, or defective, or excess clearance items. But they are new, and do not usually have mysterious stains as at a thrift store. At any rate, we always stock up on clothes at Marshalls (and now with Sam around we also do a run to an outlet mall in southern Wisconsin to get Oshkosh B'Gosh clothes), though our Marshall's trips are usually limited to underwear for me and my nephew. But this time we got new pants, collared shirts, dresses for my wife--we managed to spend upwards of $400, which at Marshall's buys about a year's worth of clothes for the whole family! I was glad to solve in one fell swoop my perennial problems of holey socks, scarce undershirts, and ripped pants inappropriate for any professional occasion. That said, I am not sure if it really makes sense for me to wait to go to the US to shop for clothes. I mean, people do wear clothes in Colombia, most clothes there are relatively cheap, and they're usually made in Colombia under working conditions I can get on board with. So perhaps the most sustainable thing for me would be to buy Colombian clothes, at least for underwear and such. Socks in Colombia are too small for me, and shirts and pants are I think more pricey than they would be at Marshall's in Chicago.
Our major forays to Marshall's also had me thinking about poverty in the US and in Colombia, and if the rampant consumerist model in the US somehow improves life for the poor. At least for a middle-class family in the US, you can really get stuff cheap and live well if you're willing to do "poor people things" like shopping at Marshall's. That is to say that a median income in the US, plus the wide availability of cheap consumer goods, mean that you can live pretty damn well. On the other hand, a middle-class income in Colombia also allows you to live pretty well, perhaps not in terms of buying lots of manufactured goods, which tend to be relatively more expensive than in the US, but in terms of hiring services for lots of things. You can hire people to clean your house, to fix your plumbing, to repair your car, to babysit your kid, all for very cheap, because there is a huge mass of poor people that will work for very little. At any rate, I then thought about being poor in either place. Being poor in Colombia isn't easy, though the bare necessities like food tend to be pretty cheap. But then again, being poor in the US isn't easy, either. A middle-class family might be able to go crazy at Marshall's, but for a poor person, even this store's heavily discounted prices represent a real stretch for a tight budget. So the jury is out for me as to which country provides a more dignified, healthy life for the poor.
Recently I've also been thinking about bags. For a long time I used plastic grocery bags to tote everything. In college my classmates were often bemused by this habit, though I was just surprised that they noticed. I mean, you always see people carrying plastic bags around. What's the big deal if it's because they just picked up something at the grocery store, or if they're carrying around schoolbooks in there?
But now I use a cloth tote bag I got for being a member at Chicago's Field Museum. It's not because it's more ecologically friendly; in fact, I'm not sure if it's treading lighter on the planet to use a cloth bag (that did, after all, require the tending and harvest of a field of cotton to produce) or to take advantage of the plastic bags that are already circulating everywhere, and whose reuse basically implies a zero investment of new energy. I've heard that grocery bags are rare and much-prized in Cuba--I can definitely feel them on that.
In fact, I've seemed to notice that plastic grocery bags are becoming rarer here in Colombia, too. It used to be that any house or office had some lying around that you could use. Now people are cutting down on them, reusing them, even replacing them with cloth tote bags for their groceries. On top of this, in Colombia a lot of stores use biodegradable plastic bags now (though I have yet to do the experiment to see how well they actually decompose). Anyway, it's a good thing if the world is producing and throwing away fewer plastic bags. Though maybe more people have dogs now, and bags are just scarce because they're using them to pick up shit.
Our major forays to Marshall's also had me thinking about poverty in the US and in Colombia, and if the rampant consumerist model in the US somehow improves life for the poor. At least for a middle-class family in the US, you can really get stuff cheap and live well if you're willing to do "poor people things" like shopping at Marshall's. That is to say that a median income in the US, plus the wide availability of cheap consumer goods, mean that you can live pretty damn well. On the other hand, a middle-class income in Colombia also allows you to live pretty well, perhaps not in terms of buying lots of manufactured goods, which tend to be relatively more expensive than in the US, but in terms of hiring services for lots of things. You can hire people to clean your house, to fix your plumbing, to repair your car, to babysit your kid, all for very cheap, because there is a huge mass of poor people that will work for very little. At any rate, I then thought about being poor in either place. Being poor in Colombia isn't easy, though the bare necessities like food tend to be pretty cheap. But then again, being poor in the US isn't easy, either. A middle-class family might be able to go crazy at Marshall's, but for a poor person, even this store's heavily discounted prices represent a real stretch for a tight budget. So the jury is out for me as to which country provides a more dignified, healthy life for the poor.
Recently I've also been thinking about bags. For a long time I used plastic grocery bags to tote everything. In college my classmates were often bemused by this habit, though I was just surprised that they noticed. I mean, you always see people carrying plastic bags around. What's the big deal if it's because they just picked up something at the grocery store, or if they're carrying around schoolbooks in there?
But now I use a cloth tote bag I got for being a member at Chicago's Field Museum. It's not because it's more ecologically friendly; in fact, I'm not sure if it's treading lighter on the planet to use a cloth bag (that did, after all, require the tending and harvest of a field of cotton to produce) or to take advantage of the plastic bags that are already circulating everywhere, and whose reuse basically implies a zero investment of new energy. I've heard that grocery bags are rare and much-prized in Cuba--I can definitely feel them on that.
In fact, I've seemed to notice that plastic grocery bags are becoming rarer here in Colombia, too. It used to be that any house or office had some lying around that you could use. Now people are cutting down on them, reusing them, even replacing them with cloth tote bags for their groceries. On top of this, in Colombia a lot of stores use biodegradable plastic bags now (though I have yet to do the experiment to see how well they actually decompose). Anyway, it's a good thing if the world is producing and throwing away fewer plastic bags. Though maybe more people have dogs now, and bags are just scarce because they're using them to pick up shit.
Friday, October 12, 2012
On aging and other things
This weekend I shared with my wife an old tape I'd recorded with a rock band I was in my senior year of high school. I was impressed by how solid we were musically, especially my buddy's spot-on drumming, which is usually the weak point of any teenage band. My singing was probably the weakest element of our group.
I marveled that we'd recorded that tape some 13 years ago. I turned 30 a few months ago, but my adolescence doesn't seem that long ago in my mind. I guess in part it was because we were already conscious, already essentially entering adulthood, so in many respects I'm still in the same phase of my life now as I was then. No longer a child, and not yet an elder. That, and the difference in relative aging (a year represents more of your life when you're 4 than when you're thirty), probably accounts for the fact that I don't see my 17-year-old self as such a foreign, different person than I am now. Certainly teenage Greg isn't as different from 30-year-old Greg than teenage Greg was from 4-year-old Greg. When I was 17 I considered my infant experiences as from another lifetime, if I remembered them at all, while now I consider my teenage experiences as more or less understandable and coherent with who I am today.
My singing voice is perhaps less versatile, less flexible now than when I was 17. I have found that out in the past few years as I've dusted off the old vocal chords for my son after a long time locked away somewhere. But my voice now is more solid, a bit lower, more fixed and confident, even in its deficiencies. And listening to my tape from many years ago, I even wonder if I'm not actually more versatile now than I was back then. I think I hit the high notes better now, though I'm more aware of my voice's shortcomings. Perhaps it's that awareness of my comfort zone and my solid base that actually makes me more flexible in the end.
I think life is that way in general. As an adult, you feel more set, less versatile than you did as a teenager. But though you may truly be less capable of change in certain respects, the net result is that your wisdom and experience make you better at what you've always been good at, and you're probably even better at things you feel you're not so good at now. Maybe adolescence is just about being less aware of our weaknesses and incapacities. In language, too, I obviously speak Spanish far better than I did at 24, when I was just starting to learn the language. That said, no one in Colombia mistakes me for a native Spanish speaker, while in Spain I was always taken as a Spaniard until I'd spoken for a while and made some grammatical mistake. Is my pronunciation less pliable, more rigid and foreign-sounding now than it was then? Or is it just an objective difference between the light Colombian non-accent and the heavy Spaniard accent, which is easy to mimic and masks your natural foreign accent?
On listening to my band's demo tape, I reflected fondly on the times we lived that last year of high school. I could finally have some fun and enjoy adolescence, run around with different girls, sing in my band during our weekly, poorly-attended concerts where we subjected elderly grandmothers from the Cabrini Green projects to our dissonant rock music as they waited to hear their charges' poetry. I miss those times in many respects, and I miss the relationships that I've been neglectful of keeping up. That said, I'd never return to those times. I wasn't getting laid, I was working shit hours as a grocery bagger at Jewel (which is, incidentally, a pretty decent place for long-term employment, complete with union benefits and regular raises), I was chafing at being an adult living as a child in my parents' house. No, much of the joy and appeal of those times was precisely in the anticipation of the future, a future I now have the luck to be living.
Recently my wife and I have been watching movies via Netflix. That's right, the service has finally arrived to Colombia, though only through poor-quality streaming over poor-quality internet connections. And the selection of films is as yet skewed toward low-end shit like computerized cartoons and straight-to-video romantic comedies with no-account actors that wish they could match the vim and acumen of such leading lights as Ryan Reynolds and Owen Wilson.
I chose Harold and Maude to watch recently, for the first time in years. It is a cute movie, but aside from Cat Stevens's masterful singing, most of it is really trite. The characters are one-dimensional tropes, and the message amounts to a sort of indifferent, solipsistic nihilism towards life. "Do whatever you feel" is the name of the game, which we have seen in action in the forty years since as it leads to Enron, Goldman Sachs, the Iraq war, and global warming. At any rate, I like the movie's aesthetic and its music. Like a precursor to Wes Anderson.
We also watched Swingers, a real favorite of mine during my early adolescence. I was surprised at many things by the movie. First off, all those 90s trends that I saw as so disparate and separated by so much water under the bridge, were really occurring at the same time, or separated by a year or two at most. Hair metal, grunge, neon fannypacks, early hiphop, gangsta rap, the swing revival, the No Limit shitty Southern rap scene, all these things were crunched into a few years' time. As I lived them though, I thought that Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in 1996 was about as different and distant as you could get from Soundgarden in 1994 or Tupac in 1995. Now I see there was a lot going on in a little bit of time in that whole era.
Aside from that reflection on time and styles, it was interesting for me to think that when I first saw Swingers I was much younger than the actors and their characters, while now I'm a bit older than them. I've had the same funny sensation in the past as I passed the age of Ralphie in A Christmas Story, or the age of the Breakfast Club gang. When I'm older than the 1981 Indiana Jones, it will be a real mind-bender.
Swingers is a well-done movie. It captures the minutiae and tedium of that early-20s phase. The characters, as my real-life early-20s crew, are looking for love, cheap thrills, fun, and above all to kill time. They still aren't assuming real adult responsibilities, and they haven't been able to get satisfying, meaningful jobs. There is a character who's a real mope, another who's the life of the party--I don't think there's usually just one of each type in each group of friends, but rather that each person is sometimes wild, sometimes introspective, sometimes bored and pissy, etc. I've certainly been both a Mikey and a Trent in my early 20s, and perhaps even today to some extent.
Caro wasn't crazy about Swingers. On the one hand, it is a very male point of view, and frankly I was surprised at times by the latent or outright misogyny. But also it speaks to a US-style, middle-class life phase that my wife didn't exactly pass through, perhaps above all because in her 20s she was a professional woman taking care of a little daughter. In this sense, Caro also commented on something she's been reading about in her work to decrease violence and lawlessness in Colombia. One source of hers discussed the role of television and film in constructing a common, shared identity in a country like the US. In Colombia in the past the TV selection was so limited and people weren't glued to the set anyway, that there wasn't that type of collective identity strengthening. Perhaps today's US, with its 200 channels, is also not very conducive to shared viewing experiences. At any rate, my Colombian wife certainly wasn't going to get or identify with the pop culture references that give Swingers most of its interest. It is a movie driven by details and quirks, not by plot or even character.
I have noticed, as has my wife, that US comedy is particularly good at showing awkward, uncomfortable situations to extract a type of humor where you're squirming and laughing at the same time. Swingers has a lot of these moments, where the main character is making obsessive phone calls or striking out at making small talk. Other such films include What about Bob or Cyrus, both of which just make you squirm in your seat.
A final comment on Swingers is that I recently found out that Vince Vaughn is a die-hard Libertarian political activist. This is disappointing, because he's sort of a hometown hero for us Chicagoans (though he grew up in the suburbs). Anyway, the Libertarian idea that each individual exists more or less independently of his society and his government is a silly conceit, only possible for those spoiled products of a stable government that provides them with such a comfortable life that they can afford the luxury to spurn it. People in the US often quip that if you want to see what small or non-existent government looks like, you should go to Somalia and see how you enjoy it. In Colombia, you don't even need to look that far afield. For all the problems of life in places like Boyaca or Bogota, things are immeasurably better than in the remote outposts of Putumayo or Arauca, where government is totally absent, and armed thugs run everything in town. I don't think you can be a Libertarian if you've lived through mass rapes, massacres, tortures, and forced recruitment into illegal groups. Those poor people are clamoring for a responsible government presence, not railing against it.
If Libertarianism is in itself laughable and incoherent, the idea of a fortunate son like Vince Vaughn, the product of a family of economic elites, espousing bootstraps-style self-reliance is all the more so. I mean, the guy plays make-believe dress-up for a living. He wears makeup to work! How can he seriously think that he is working substantially harder or in a more worthy endeavor than a lawyer or a janitor or an agronomist who makes a mere fraction of the money he does? I'm not saying the arts are less worthy than other pursuits; they're just not any more worthy, either. Furthermore, to be a coherent Libertarian you can't just admire any profitable work. I don't think any Libertarian would say that a drug dealer or a con artist is worthy and self-sufficient thanks to his hard work, no matter how hard that criminal really does work or how much money he has to show for it. Libertarianism must insist that success is only valid if it comes about honestly. In that case Vince Vaughn should return whatever money he got from stinkers like Couples Retreat, because that movie was at its core a cheat to anyone who paid to see it. I'm picking on Vince Vaughn, but what I mean to say applies to any big-time actor. Actors are lucky to be getting paid a lot of money for doing work they enjoy and that is no more demanding than most other jobs. They should be thankful for that stroke of luck, not self-righteous. And if an actor or anyone else is going to get on his high horse about how noble his pursuit and achievement of economic success has been, that person had better make sure to always put forward his best and do only quality work. If they happen to cut corners and put out something mediocre just to make a buck, they lose all their legitimacy, because now they are mere conmen, scammers, and not honest professionals.
To celebrate Halloween, I am reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to my son Sam. I am very impressed by the short story, mainly in its evocation of a pastoral time and place. You really wish you could live in peaceful Sleepy Hollow. It's a skill in scenery and story-telling that I'd never before noticed in the book, even as I read it last year with Sam.
There are two other, unrelated things I wanted to comment on that I've noticed recently. One is the honor code in Bogotá public buses. I'm not talking the sleek new Transmilenio bus rapid transit system, but rather the packed, junky minibuses that ply the intermediate streets of the city. In these buses you pay the driver directly as you get on at the front of the bus. But when the bus is really full, the driver will sometimes just open the back (exit) door, where there's more room. When this happens, the recent arrival passes his money up the line of passengers in front of him, all the way to the driver. Then the driver passes the change back to flow person to person until it reaches the passenger. Everyone dutifully passes money back and forth when they have to, and I've never seen anyone pocket any change, even when it's a ten-dollar bill paying for a 50 cent ride. And the back-riding passengers never skimp on paying, even if the driver can't see them. For a country that is supposedly one of the world's most dangerous, this all takes a lot of civic honor and responsibility.
The other thing I wanted to mention is Colombia's pro-life atmosphere. I have seen women and girls from all walks of life faced with unexpected pregnancies, and I have yet to see someone who opts for abortion. Obviously they struggle with the decision, and they consider abortion, but something has driven all the women I have run across to choose life for their child. Legal abortion is restricted to certain medical cases in Colombia, though it seems you can readily have a doctor claim that you qualify for one of those conditions. But again I'm surprised that from well-off families to destitute single women, people seem to prefer having the baby, and many women lead successful, motivated lives afterwards. There is not a very publicized or spirited debate on the issue, for instance along the lines of the US argument where one side likens abortion to concentration-camp murder and the other treats a fetus or an embryo as if it had all the humanity of a sack of potatoes. But it seems that something in Colombian culture or society pushes people away from abortion. In any case, if we are interested in creating a society and a world in which there is an ethic of life, in which women can have children with some confidence that the child can count on opportunities and love and joy in its life, then perhaps we should look more closely at Colombia, where a pro-life sentiment seems to flourish without grand discourses or political posing.
I marveled that we'd recorded that tape some 13 years ago. I turned 30 a few months ago, but my adolescence doesn't seem that long ago in my mind. I guess in part it was because we were already conscious, already essentially entering adulthood, so in many respects I'm still in the same phase of my life now as I was then. No longer a child, and not yet an elder. That, and the difference in relative aging (a year represents more of your life when you're 4 than when you're thirty), probably accounts for the fact that I don't see my 17-year-old self as such a foreign, different person than I am now. Certainly teenage Greg isn't as different from 30-year-old Greg than teenage Greg was from 4-year-old Greg. When I was 17 I considered my infant experiences as from another lifetime, if I remembered them at all, while now I consider my teenage experiences as more or less understandable and coherent with who I am today.
My singing voice is perhaps less versatile, less flexible now than when I was 17. I have found that out in the past few years as I've dusted off the old vocal chords for my son after a long time locked away somewhere. But my voice now is more solid, a bit lower, more fixed and confident, even in its deficiencies. And listening to my tape from many years ago, I even wonder if I'm not actually more versatile now than I was back then. I think I hit the high notes better now, though I'm more aware of my voice's shortcomings. Perhaps it's that awareness of my comfort zone and my solid base that actually makes me more flexible in the end.
I think life is that way in general. As an adult, you feel more set, less versatile than you did as a teenager. But though you may truly be less capable of change in certain respects, the net result is that your wisdom and experience make you better at what you've always been good at, and you're probably even better at things you feel you're not so good at now. Maybe adolescence is just about being less aware of our weaknesses and incapacities. In language, too, I obviously speak Spanish far better than I did at 24, when I was just starting to learn the language. That said, no one in Colombia mistakes me for a native Spanish speaker, while in Spain I was always taken as a Spaniard until I'd spoken for a while and made some grammatical mistake. Is my pronunciation less pliable, more rigid and foreign-sounding now than it was then? Or is it just an objective difference between the light Colombian non-accent and the heavy Spaniard accent, which is easy to mimic and masks your natural foreign accent?
On listening to my band's demo tape, I reflected fondly on the times we lived that last year of high school. I could finally have some fun and enjoy adolescence, run around with different girls, sing in my band during our weekly, poorly-attended concerts where we subjected elderly grandmothers from the Cabrini Green projects to our dissonant rock music as they waited to hear their charges' poetry. I miss those times in many respects, and I miss the relationships that I've been neglectful of keeping up. That said, I'd never return to those times. I wasn't getting laid, I was working shit hours as a grocery bagger at Jewel (which is, incidentally, a pretty decent place for long-term employment, complete with union benefits and regular raises), I was chafing at being an adult living as a child in my parents' house. No, much of the joy and appeal of those times was precisely in the anticipation of the future, a future I now have the luck to be living.
Recently my wife and I have been watching movies via Netflix. That's right, the service has finally arrived to Colombia, though only through poor-quality streaming over poor-quality internet connections. And the selection of films is as yet skewed toward low-end shit like computerized cartoons and straight-to-video romantic comedies with no-account actors that wish they could match the vim and acumen of such leading lights as Ryan Reynolds and Owen Wilson.
I chose Harold and Maude to watch recently, for the first time in years. It is a cute movie, but aside from Cat Stevens's masterful singing, most of it is really trite. The characters are one-dimensional tropes, and the message amounts to a sort of indifferent, solipsistic nihilism towards life. "Do whatever you feel" is the name of the game, which we have seen in action in the forty years since as it leads to Enron, Goldman Sachs, the Iraq war, and global warming. At any rate, I like the movie's aesthetic and its music. Like a precursor to Wes Anderson.
We also watched Swingers, a real favorite of mine during my early adolescence. I was surprised at many things by the movie. First off, all those 90s trends that I saw as so disparate and separated by so much water under the bridge, were really occurring at the same time, or separated by a year or two at most. Hair metal, grunge, neon fannypacks, early hiphop, gangsta rap, the swing revival, the No Limit shitty Southern rap scene, all these things were crunched into a few years' time. As I lived them though, I thought that Big Bad Voodoo Daddy in 1996 was about as different and distant as you could get from Soundgarden in 1994 or Tupac in 1995. Now I see there was a lot going on in a little bit of time in that whole era.
Aside from that reflection on time and styles, it was interesting for me to think that when I first saw Swingers I was much younger than the actors and their characters, while now I'm a bit older than them. I've had the same funny sensation in the past as I passed the age of Ralphie in A Christmas Story, or the age of the Breakfast Club gang. When I'm older than the 1981 Indiana Jones, it will be a real mind-bender.
Swingers is a well-done movie. It captures the minutiae and tedium of that early-20s phase. The characters, as my real-life early-20s crew, are looking for love, cheap thrills, fun, and above all to kill time. They still aren't assuming real adult responsibilities, and they haven't been able to get satisfying, meaningful jobs. There is a character who's a real mope, another who's the life of the party--I don't think there's usually just one of each type in each group of friends, but rather that each person is sometimes wild, sometimes introspective, sometimes bored and pissy, etc. I've certainly been both a Mikey and a Trent in my early 20s, and perhaps even today to some extent.
Caro wasn't crazy about Swingers. On the one hand, it is a very male point of view, and frankly I was surprised at times by the latent or outright misogyny. But also it speaks to a US-style, middle-class life phase that my wife didn't exactly pass through, perhaps above all because in her 20s she was a professional woman taking care of a little daughter. In this sense, Caro also commented on something she's been reading about in her work to decrease violence and lawlessness in Colombia. One source of hers discussed the role of television and film in constructing a common, shared identity in a country like the US. In Colombia in the past the TV selection was so limited and people weren't glued to the set anyway, that there wasn't that type of collective identity strengthening. Perhaps today's US, with its 200 channels, is also not very conducive to shared viewing experiences. At any rate, my Colombian wife certainly wasn't going to get or identify with the pop culture references that give Swingers most of its interest. It is a movie driven by details and quirks, not by plot or even character.
I have noticed, as has my wife, that US comedy is particularly good at showing awkward, uncomfortable situations to extract a type of humor where you're squirming and laughing at the same time. Swingers has a lot of these moments, where the main character is making obsessive phone calls or striking out at making small talk. Other such films include What about Bob or Cyrus, both of which just make you squirm in your seat.
A final comment on Swingers is that I recently found out that Vince Vaughn is a die-hard Libertarian political activist. This is disappointing, because he's sort of a hometown hero for us Chicagoans (though he grew up in the suburbs). Anyway, the Libertarian idea that each individual exists more or less independently of his society and his government is a silly conceit, only possible for those spoiled products of a stable government that provides them with such a comfortable life that they can afford the luxury to spurn it. People in the US often quip that if you want to see what small or non-existent government looks like, you should go to Somalia and see how you enjoy it. In Colombia, you don't even need to look that far afield. For all the problems of life in places like Boyaca or Bogota, things are immeasurably better than in the remote outposts of Putumayo or Arauca, where government is totally absent, and armed thugs run everything in town. I don't think you can be a Libertarian if you've lived through mass rapes, massacres, tortures, and forced recruitment into illegal groups. Those poor people are clamoring for a responsible government presence, not railing against it.
If Libertarianism is in itself laughable and incoherent, the idea of a fortunate son like Vince Vaughn, the product of a family of economic elites, espousing bootstraps-style self-reliance is all the more so. I mean, the guy plays make-believe dress-up for a living. He wears makeup to work! How can he seriously think that he is working substantially harder or in a more worthy endeavor than a lawyer or a janitor or an agronomist who makes a mere fraction of the money he does? I'm not saying the arts are less worthy than other pursuits; they're just not any more worthy, either. Furthermore, to be a coherent Libertarian you can't just admire any profitable work. I don't think any Libertarian would say that a drug dealer or a con artist is worthy and self-sufficient thanks to his hard work, no matter how hard that criminal really does work or how much money he has to show for it. Libertarianism must insist that success is only valid if it comes about honestly. In that case Vince Vaughn should return whatever money he got from stinkers like Couples Retreat, because that movie was at its core a cheat to anyone who paid to see it. I'm picking on Vince Vaughn, but what I mean to say applies to any big-time actor. Actors are lucky to be getting paid a lot of money for doing work they enjoy and that is no more demanding than most other jobs. They should be thankful for that stroke of luck, not self-righteous. And if an actor or anyone else is going to get on his high horse about how noble his pursuit and achievement of economic success has been, that person had better make sure to always put forward his best and do only quality work. If they happen to cut corners and put out something mediocre just to make a buck, they lose all their legitimacy, because now they are mere conmen, scammers, and not honest professionals.
To celebrate Halloween, I am reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to my son Sam. I am very impressed by the short story, mainly in its evocation of a pastoral time and place. You really wish you could live in peaceful Sleepy Hollow. It's a skill in scenery and story-telling that I'd never before noticed in the book, even as I read it last year with Sam.
There are two other, unrelated things I wanted to comment on that I've noticed recently. One is the honor code in Bogotá public buses. I'm not talking the sleek new Transmilenio bus rapid transit system, but rather the packed, junky minibuses that ply the intermediate streets of the city. In these buses you pay the driver directly as you get on at the front of the bus. But when the bus is really full, the driver will sometimes just open the back (exit) door, where there's more room. When this happens, the recent arrival passes his money up the line of passengers in front of him, all the way to the driver. Then the driver passes the change back to flow person to person until it reaches the passenger. Everyone dutifully passes money back and forth when they have to, and I've never seen anyone pocket any change, even when it's a ten-dollar bill paying for a 50 cent ride. And the back-riding passengers never skimp on paying, even if the driver can't see them. For a country that is supposedly one of the world's most dangerous, this all takes a lot of civic honor and responsibility.
The other thing I wanted to mention is Colombia's pro-life atmosphere. I have seen women and girls from all walks of life faced with unexpected pregnancies, and I have yet to see someone who opts for abortion. Obviously they struggle with the decision, and they consider abortion, but something has driven all the women I have run across to choose life for their child. Legal abortion is restricted to certain medical cases in Colombia, though it seems you can readily have a doctor claim that you qualify for one of those conditions. But again I'm surprised that from well-off families to destitute single women, people seem to prefer having the baby, and many women lead successful, motivated lives afterwards. There is not a very publicized or spirited debate on the issue, for instance along the lines of the US argument where one side likens abortion to concentration-camp murder and the other treats a fetus or an embryo as if it had all the humanity of a sack of potatoes. But it seems that something in Colombian culture or society pushes people away from abortion. In any case, if we are interested in creating a society and a world in which there is an ethic of life, in which women can have children with some confidence that the child can count on opportunities and love and joy in its life, then perhaps we should look more closely at Colombia, where a pro-life sentiment seems to flourish without grand discourses or political posing.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Rumbo a Aguachica
Bucaramanga has a reputation for being a perfect, manicured, plastic tropical paradise. Some of this seems fair--the road from the airport is indeed lined by pleasant but soulless landscaping, the people all dress immaculately, and women tend to be heavily operated. However, the city as seen from the airport on the other side of its deep valley is a harmonious, naturally elegant sight. Houses perch on flat planes nested into (and dwarfed by) the forested mountainside, and there is an air of wild majesty about it all. The dinky airport, thought typical of what I'm coming to know of Colombian provincial airports, does not live up to the city's stylish pretenses, but the bus terminal is big and orderly and complex. Everything in Bucaramanga costs even more than in Bogotá, from cab rides to toilet service.
If you're headed for Cesar, the lowland department that commences the Caribbean plain zone, the culture switches to Afro-coastal as soon as you get in the bus. Fellow passengers, from the guys on leave from oilrig work in the Eastern Plains, to the driver who doesn't respond to his 8-year-old son's questions and curiosity but does lovingly tolerate the boy's playing with his right (transmission) hand or feeling his stubble, don't look very African. More like very tan southern Europeans or Pakistanis. But the cadence of their speech, their inelegant clothes, the humble houses with ample front sitting areas that they get off at during the four-hour ride, all speak to Afro-Colombian influence more than the Andean culture of Santander.
The ride is mainly descent, sometimes down twisting switchbacks. The houses starting around El Playón are surrounded by cacao groves, citrus trees, and plantain, a warmer-climate twist on the small peasant gardens I know from Boyacá. After a short and subtle rise, during which we go parallel and upstream to a river flowing southward, we descend a bit more, over a hump past which all rivers will flow north (though in both cases the final destination of the water is the Magdalena river and eventually the Caribbean sea). The land here is rolling hills, but essentially flat. We're out of the Andes now.
With my sustainable grazing advocate's eye I scan the pasture on either side of the road. Judging by the short grass and infrequent fences, I believe the cattle are left to graze free many days in each lot, instead of being moved every day or two to a small new patch of grass. This means the livestock system is inefficient and damaging to the soil.
Sometimes we pass huge oil palm plantations, all long, endless alleys of mossy, fern-draped shade and low undergrowth on the ground. This production system is usually demonized because it impoverishes native forest and drives people off the land. But these cool, quiet groves seem like a big improvement on mismanaged pastures.
Roadside villages follow an African model. Venerable big mango and ceiba trees dotted about the town, ugly concrete houses shaded by backyard fruit groves, packed dirt yards and congregation spots, ramshackle unpaved roads leading off the main asphalt thoroughfare. There is even a kind of sacred wood in the middle of Aguachica, a very African touch. Atop the poultry truck in front of us there is a man sleeping soundly inside a cage he has fashioned perched amid the squawking chicken crates.
Then all of a sudden we're at a chaotic crossroads, the outskirts of Aguachica. The driver shoos me off the bus in his unintelligible drawl, and a taxi spirits me to a massive concrete hotel in the city center. My toilet there flushes weakly, the internet signal doesn't reach my room well. I make a reserved fuss, but eventually decline the cavernous 5-bed room they offer me for the night, which doesn't get internet either. I think my keeping my cool has won the sympathy of a hotel administrator, who promises to take care of my case and get me a better room tomorrow.
I take a walk in the neighborhood, and am a bit spooked by a guy waiting alone on a landing of the pedestrian bridge over the main avenue. Is he going to rob me? Recruit me into a paramilitary group? But then I see a father and daughter on the bridge taking photos of the traffic below, then a pair of pre-teen girls sitting and talking in a corner where a tree overhangs the bridge. All these people are just enjoying the moist, black, private cool, high above nighttime's urban bustle. A respite before facing a new, sweltering tomorrow.
If you're headed for Cesar, the lowland department that commences the Caribbean plain zone, the culture switches to Afro-coastal as soon as you get in the bus. Fellow passengers, from the guys on leave from oilrig work in the Eastern Plains, to the driver who doesn't respond to his 8-year-old son's questions and curiosity but does lovingly tolerate the boy's playing with his right (transmission) hand or feeling his stubble, don't look very African. More like very tan southern Europeans or Pakistanis. But the cadence of their speech, their inelegant clothes, the humble houses with ample front sitting areas that they get off at during the four-hour ride, all speak to Afro-Colombian influence more than the Andean culture of Santander.
The ride is mainly descent, sometimes down twisting switchbacks. The houses starting around El Playón are surrounded by cacao groves, citrus trees, and plantain, a warmer-climate twist on the small peasant gardens I know from Boyacá. After a short and subtle rise, during which we go parallel and upstream to a river flowing southward, we descend a bit more, over a hump past which all rivers will flow north (though in both cases the final destination of the water is the Magdalena river and eventually the Caribbean sea). The land here is rolling hills, but essentially flat. We're out of the Andes now.
With my sustainable grazing advocate's eye I scan the pasture on either side of the road. Judging by the short grass and infrequent fences, I believe the cattle are left to graze free many days in each lot, instead of being moved every day or two to a small new patch of grass. This means the livestock system is inefficient and damaging to the soil.
Sometimes we pass huge oil palm plantations, all long, endless alleys of mossy, fern-draped shade and low undergrowth on the ground. This production system is usually demonized because it impoverishes native forest and drives people off the land. But these cool, quiet groves seem like a big improvement on mismanaged pastures.
Roadside villages follow an African model. Venerable big mango and ceiba trees dotted about the town, ugly concrete houses shaded by backyard fruit groves, packed dirt yards and congregation spots, ramshackle unpaved roads leading off the main asphalt thoroughfare. There is even a kind of sacred wood in the middle of Aguachica, a very African touch. Atop the poultry truck in front of us there is a man sleeping soundly inside a cage he has fashioned perched amid the squawking chicken crates.
Then all of a sudden we're at a chaotic crossroads, the outskirts of Aguachica. The driver shoos me off the bus in his unintelligible drawl, and a taxi spirits me to a massive concrete hotel in the city center. My toilet there flushes weakly, the internet signal doesn't reach my room well. I make a reserved fuss, but eventually decline the cavernous 5-bed room they offer me for the night, which doesn't get internet either. I think my keeping my cool has won the sympathy of a hotel administrator, who promises to take care of my case and get me a better room tomorrow.
I take a walk in the neighborhood, and am a bit spooked by a guy waiting alone on a landing of the pedestrian bridge over the main avenue. Is he going to rob me? Recruit me into a paramilitary group? But then I see a father and daughter on the bridge taking photos of the traffic below, then a pair of pre-teen girls sitting and talking in a corner where a tree overhangs the bridge. All these people are just enjoying the moist, black, private cool, high above nighttime's urban bustle. A respite before facing a new, sweltering tomorrow.
Monday, October 8, 2012
Article on extra-therapeutic use of RUTFs
This is a short bit from NPR on the use of Ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs) like Plumpynut or Medika Manba, beyond their original purpose of treating severe child malnutrition. I worked for a month last year for a company in Haiti that is involved in testing this new use, so it was cool to see the issue getting some press.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Role of agronomy and plant breeding in society
Here are two really cool articles. The first is about the role plant breeding has played, for better or for worse, in the economic development of rural areas in the US. It seems to me to be a well-reasoned, non-dogmatic treatment, that signals the future importance of meeting the plant breeding needs of smaller, non-industrial farmers. The second article is a review by the American Society of Agronomy about the past and the future of agriculture and agronomy in the world. It is also fairly objective and comprehensive, though the author at times evinces a suspicion of environmentalists and an unquestioning admiration of new technologies. In particular, the last part of the article looks at a number of gee-whiz, pie-in-the-sky ideas that might influence agriculture, though the author doesn't consider the impact of these technologies on actual human wellbeing. At any rate, both articles are worth a read.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Peace in our time?
Over the past few weeks all of Colombia has been abuzz with the prospects of upcoming peace negotiations between the government and the major armed insurgent groups. I was in Nariño giving my sustainability workshops when I saw an important announcement by President Santos describing the process, and for the next few days the news was almost exclusively dedicated to covering preparations for the peace negotiations. At times I even felt the coverage was too much; in their search for content and differing viewpoints, the media was interviewing any idiot who wanted to undercut the peace process (Uribe chief among them), any victim who felt that his or her personal suffering should be a determining factor in talks between two political factions, any zero-concession pundit who saw no solution to the war other than total erradication of the enemy. I worried that the media might somehow give credence to the morally indefensible position of hindering peace.
According to Santos's first speech that I saw, it seems that the FARC and the Colombian government have agreed on rules for the game of peace negotiations. Unlike the failed peace attempt in the late 90s, this time there will be no military ceasefire during negotiations. This goes hand in hand with the fact that the negotiations will be held outside of Colombia, in Norway, I believe, and with the presence of many third-country observers. This way, within the conflict zone of Colombia, military engagements and strategy will continue from both sides, unaffected by and (most importantly) unaffecting of the political peace dialogue.
Anyway, I am enthusiastic. I really respect President Santos. Despite my referring to him as a cryptoNazi piggy or something like that when he was running for office, he has gradually won my confidence. He is a sincere politician that seems to have it clear that, whatever his own political leanings, he is governing an entire country, and has to try to look out for the interests of everyone, rich and poor, Right and Left. This is a stark departure from his predecessor, Uribe, who seemed to believe that being president of Colombia was all about looking out for your fatcat cattle rancher buddies. For Uribe I think the presidency was a sort of country club where you cater to the rich, and the poor are just there working and obeying. So Santos, despite his mild neoliberal bent, is a breath of fresh air. In his two years in office he has created ambitious policies to address Colombia's interrelated problems of land inequality, of victimhood and forced displacement, and now of the 60-year-old civil war. He is really trying to make Colombia a better place, and not just a better garbage heap for the elite vultures to pick over. I have heard frustration from my Colombian peers that sometimes Santos has such lofty, enlightened plans that he never thinks of the practical angle of how to implement them on the ground, which sometimes leads to even worse screwups or atrocities than Uribe committed, as bureaucrats rush to get things done by any means necessary. But I still give him props.
If I remember correctly, peace talks will center on five points. I don't recall all of them, but alternative development figures prominently. Alternative development is the replacement of illegal crops like coca with legal ones, and improving all the social infrastructure like police, roads, schools, and courts in the isolated zones where the government has traditionally been absent and armed groups have held sway. My wife works in the field of alternative development, and she posits that the Leftist insurgents groups might actually be on board with the idea of fighting illicit crops through economic development. Her reasoning is that, despite the fact that the FARC has long charged a tax on coca production in their zones of influence (and thus profits greatly from that cultivation), by now they have seen the awful effects that drug production brings with it. Wherever cocaine is produced, right-wing mafias and paramilitary squads become interested in the area, and this leads to armed engagements, constant disputes, massacres, and worsened living conditions for the peasants that many in the FARC still believe in serving. So it could be that the FARC and other leftist groups want to get rid of cocaine in Colombia as much as the government does, especially if these groups are looking to end their own existence thanks to the peace process.
According to Santos's first speech that I saw, it seems that the FARC and the Colombian government have agreed on rules for the game of peace negotiations. Unlike the failed peace attempt in the late 90s, this time there will be no military ceasefire during negotiations. This goes hand in hand with the fact that the negotiations will be held outside of Colombia, in Norway, I believe, and with the presence of many third-country observers. This way, within the conflict zone of Colombia, military engagements and strategy will continue from both sides, unaffected by and (most importantly) unaffecting of the political peace dialogue.
Anyway, I am enthusiastic. I really respect President Santos. Despite my referring to him as a cryptoNazi piggy or something like that when he was running for office, he has gradually won my confidence. He is a sincere politician that seems to have it clear that, whatever his own political leanings, he is governing an entire country, and has to try to look out for the interests of everyone, rich and poor, Right and Left. This is a stark departure from his predecessor, Uribe, who seemed to believe that being president of Colombia was all about looking out for your fatcat cattle rancher buddies. For Uribe I think the presidency was a sort of country club where you cater to the rich, and the poor are just there working and obeying. So Santos, despite his mild neoliberal bent, is a breath of fresh air. In his two years in office he has created ambitious policies to address Colombia's interrelated problems of land inequality, of victimhood and forced displacement, and now of the 60-year-old civil war. He is really trying to make Colombia a better place, and not just a better garbage heap for the elite vultures to pick over. I have heard frustration from my Colombian peers that sometimes Santos has such lofty, enlightened plans that he never thinks of the practical angle of how to implement them on the ground, which sometimes leads to even worse screwups or atrocities than Uribe committed, as bureaucrats rush to get things done by any means necessary. But I still give him props.
If I remember correctly, peace talks will center on five points. I don't recall all of them, but alternative development figures prominently. Alternative development is the replacement of illegal crops like coca with legal ones, and improving all the social infrastructure like police, roads, schools, and courts in the isolated zones where the government has traditionally been absent and armed groups have held sway. My wife works in the field of alternative development, and she posits that the Leftist insurgents groups might actually be on board with the idea of fighting illicit crops through economic development. Her reasoning is that, despite the fact that the FARC has long charged a tax on coca production in their zones of influence (and thus profits greatly from that cultivation), by now they have seen the awful effects that drug production brings with it. Wherever cocaine is produced, right-wing mafias and paramilitary squads become interested in the area, and this leads to armed engagements, constant disputes, massacres, and worsened living conditions for the peasants that many in the FARC still believe in serving. So it could be that the FARC and other leftist groups want to get rid of cocaine in Colombia as much as the government does, especially if these groups are looking to end their own existence thanks to the peace process.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Another post on Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like
Here's another contribution I offered to the SEAWL website a few months ago. They published it essentially without edits. Enjoy!