A repentant fake science journalist

This is a very reflective, frank article from a science writer that was too eager to draw larger extrapolations of the import of certain research.  Specifically, it is from Peter Gwynne, who wrote in 1975 on the global cooling trend that was apparent at that time.  This article has often been trotted out by climate change deniers, either to show the supposed diversity of opinion within the scientific community regarding global warning, or to show how capricious and ever-changing scientists are.  The author correctly points out that such use of a 40-year-old article to prove a point today ignores all the advances in research that have occurred since then.  But he also acknowledges his overzealousness in the original article.  He points to a common trend in science writing that:  "a reticence on the part of scientists to fill in the big picture, and over-enthusiasm on the part of journalists to say what does it all mean, means that the journalists don’t get it quite right".  I have written before on the poor quality of much science journalism, and it basically amounts to this--either journalists (or the researchers themselves) trying to draw overambitious conclusions about the larger implications of their work, in their eagerness to demonstrate its relevance.

Totalitarian logic in food systems

Following up on Bittman's piece I discussed in my last post, I want to call out something that you see a lot in reporting (especially "science" reporting) about feeding the world. You'll often see a headline like "Can organic agriculture feed the world?" Or local agriculture, or non-GM agriculture, or peasant agriculture, or sustainable agriculture, or vegetarian diets, or whatever more or less progressive philosophy that contradicts the prevailing status quo. Such articles range from partisan hackjobs penned or commissioned by big ag companies whose business model relies on current models of conventional agriculture, to fairly rigorous metastudies that are making an honest effort to answer what they see as relevant questions.
 
What almost all such articles have in common is that they are framing the question in a totalizing, even totalitarian, fashion. That is to say that they are implicitly or explicitly putting on trial the absolute validity of certain ways of organizing farms and the food system in general. They are asking if, over the entire diversity of biomes and human societies, the model in question (organic agriculture, local food systems, etc.) can be universally applied and found to outperform prevailing practice. At first glance, this seems fair if we're talking about feeding the entire world.

But the fact is that the entire world isn't fed just one way, nor will it ever be. Would you ask, "Can fishing feed the world?" Of course not--wild-caught fish are just one part of the world's total food supply. Some communities are very dependent on fishing for their food and livelihoods, but not all are, and no one would propose that any community (much less the entire world) subsist on fish alone. It would not only be unhealthy for the people, but physically impossible. There just isn't enough fish to feed us all, all the time. But does this mean that fishing is invalid? That it is not worthwhile to pursue as a part of current and future food systems? Of course not. You would never even think to pose the question in a serious study. The same can be said of mechanized agriculture (which obviously can't work everywhere in the world, for instance in mountainous areas), or tropical crops like cassava (which can't be grown in temperate zones), or even farming in general (which you just can't do in the unirrigated Sahara desert). Why don't we see articles about "Can mechanized agriculture feed the world?" or "Can cassava feed the world?" or "Is farming feasible on all land types and climates in the entire world?" Because we implicitly realize that tractors, or tropical crops, or even farming itself don't need to work everywhere, but rather just in the few or many places where they can be a viable option.

So why do we see so much written about about "Can organic agriculture feed the world?", usually explored in such a way as to provide an all-or-nothing absolute adoption or total dismissal of the practice? I would guess that part of the totalitizing nature of the question is a reaction to some organic agriculture advocates' tendency to speak in just such terms of a blanket acceptance or rejection of one farming paradigm or another. But I think this way of framing questions about novel, progressive farming methods and ways of organizing the food system is more due to powerful status quo interests' desire to discredit anything that might weaken their way of conceiving the world and running their business. For companies who sell synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and even improved seed, the capital-intensive, industrial model of agriculture is their lifeblood. The same applies to the farmers who practice this model, the researchers who explore it, the trade groups that promote it. All these actors not only depend on this model for their income, but even for the meaning in their lives, almost like a religion. As long as this model is held up as the gold standard, as the desireable, modern, absolute best way of doing this, both their profits and their worldview will hold firm. But if other ways of farming and running a food system are explored and validated and even found to be often preferable to the status quo, it shakes the foundation of the current winners, both in economic and in moral terms. This being the case, it behooves such status quo interests to demonstrate the supposed inferiority of any other approach to farming by pointing out that said approach (like any approach) cannot be universally and seamlessly applied across the globe.

But as with my exploration of some studies comparing organic and conventional dairying, framing the debate in this way is not objective or honest. First off, the framing of "status quo vs. contender farming systems" questions almost always extends inaccurate assumptions that all the worst parts of the current system will hold constant in the comparison system. For instance, right now the world wastes somewhere from 30-40% of all food produced. There are complex reasons behind this, but quite a few are due to some inherent qualities of the mass-produced industrial agriculture model. By producing a lot of each thing in one place, then transporting it far away from there, the current food system has lots of waste built into it. So if you were comparing local food systems to the current system, you would have to factor in not just the logistical problems that surely arise in a local food system, but also the effective productivity gains you'd get from reducing waste. On the other hand, in many parts of the world today food waste occurs precisely in local food systems that have poor roads, refrigeration infrastructure, storage facilities, and income stability. Is this a condemnation of local food systems? No, it is a condemnation of any food system operating under poor technical and socioeconomic conditions. The point here is that, if we are going to do some all-or-nothing comparison contest between different food or farming systems, we should neither assume that current shortcomings of one system will extend to the other, nor on the other hand that the current shortcomings in one context are inherently linked to the broader type of food or farming system prevalent in that context. In this example, not all local food systems suffer from the shortcomings of an underdeveloped country (though many such countries employ local food systems), nor would all the inherent shortcomings of a non-local food system (excessive production, long transport time, etc.) be carried over to its contending local food system.

Most of all though, if we are asking in this way if organic agriculture, or peasant agriculture, or any other type of agriculture can feed the world, it is important to remember that the current status quo fails this test too. Somewhere from 10 to 20% of the world's population is food insecure right now, depending on how you cut it. So it is unfair to judge one model of farming, or one particular technology, in opposition to the status quo, on whether the new approach can totally eliminate hunger. Even the control treatment of business as usual isn't accomplishing that job!

Feeding 9 billion

Here is a very well-reasoned op-ed from Mark Bittman (whom I have sometimes considered to be a bit pat and trite) about the real roots of malnutrition. He rails against the incessant refrain we hear in the ag development world, that chorus of "By 2050, we will need to feed nine billion people...", which is usually followed by whatever pet technology/approach/innovation/fascist regime the particular presenter is trying to promote or justify. Discourses that focus on huge numbers like 9 billion people, or however many trillions of calories they will need frame the discussion about hunger in terms of sheer magnitude, and naturally draw our attention to the yield improvement imperative. Increasing yields is an imperative, for the simple reason that there are ever-more people demanding ever-more resource-intensive diets. But Bittman is right that simply increasing total food production in the world will not eliminate hunger or malnutrition; hungry people are hungry not because there just isn't enough food to go around, but because they do not have the resources (money or land or ag inputs) to access the cornucopia of food that does exist. To say it in a more radical way, hunger exists because the current model of society in most places denies food to certain people, deeming it more sensible or desireable to throw food away or feed it to pigs than to give these people access to it.

Food in the news

Quite a few longer-format news sources have covered food lately.  There's been National Geographic with its series on feeding the world all this year, and recently a [rather weak] Time magazine that had home cooking as its cover story.  Now I see that the NYT magazine devoted an issue to food.  From that issue, I only got to see this photo essay on what kids eat for breakfast in different parts of the world.  I am proud of my sons for their relatively grown-up eating habits.  They aren't quite as adventurous as the Japanese girl eating pickled fish and fermented sludge for breakfast, but we don't do a whole lot of processed starches or sugars.  Certainly none of the squeeze-suck organic astronaut mush that is the latest craze among a particular demographic of well-to-do parents, which reminds my wife of low-grade jam sold in the same type of plastic envelope in Colombia.  Our breakfast routine is ever-changing, but usually involves some bread, eggs mixed with rice and/or vegetables, apples and grapes, orange juice, and a homemade but admittedly sweet hot chocolate.  Sort of a middle ground between the European diets shown in the essay with lots of jam and animal products, and the more starchy, fiber-y breakfasts from other parts of the world.  Which about describes Colombia culturally.

Work ethic in the US ghetto

This essay by a former Baltimore drug-dealer discusses the relentless work ethic of the black poor living in our country's ghettos.  He describes a childhood spent around people working multiple jobs, both formal and informal, paid and unpaid, legal and sometimes illegal, to get by and often to look out for the rest of the community, too. 

His description squares with my observations living and working in different poor black neighborhoods in Chicago.  I was often surprised at seeing this constant, tireless activity, in part because it was so different from the more leisurely pace of street life in other neighborhoods I'd known, and also because it goes so counter to the popular image of the supposed laziness of the marginalized urban poor.  I see a similar resourcefulness and a high regard for work among many of the poor in developing countries.  In the US and abroad, the poor are innate hustlers, creative entrepreneurs, and committed laborers, not necessarily because their character is better than other people's, but because circumstances demand they be so in order to take care of themselves and of the people they care about. 

Quite frankly, today's economy in the US and the world at large is such that we would all do well to learn from the hustling poor.  Steady jobs are hard to come by, and often you need to work side gigs even if you are lucky enough to have a decent job.  The secure, assured prosperity of the 20th-century US middle class is firmly a thing of the past, if it ever really did exist that much to begin with.  Today, we've all got to be hustlers, working hard, keeping an eye out for opportunity, and perhaps even skirting what society considers respectable.  The inner-city has a lot to teach us about the 21st century, if we'd just pay attention.

More grain, less destruction

This is a new research article about agricultural yield potential in China based on a wide, very rigorous range of data.  Essentially it says that by using a judicious mix of modern inputs and locally-adapted agronomic management practices, China's current farmland could produce enough rice, wheat, and corn to meet its projected 2030 food needs.  The article argues that, even in an intensive, high-yielding agricultural setting like China, farmers are currently far short of obtaining the maximum yields possible from their local growing conditions.  Agronomic research is rightly criticized for naively assuming that the high yields obtained under ideal research site conditions could be fully replicated in real farmers' fields.  The lack of similarity between research field conditions and farmer conditions is always a danger with any ag research, but what fascinates me about this article is the sheer number of sites and years the researchers looked at.  The widely varying conditions of their experimental sites, and their explicit consideration of four different types of management regime, make their conclusions much more robust.  If they're right, it looks like the future may be a little less grim than it could have been.

Fair free trade?

Here is an article about the creation of free-trade zones by Nicaragua's left-wing, anti-neoliberal government.  I think the article does a good job in a limited space of exploring the conundrums and trade-offs faced by any small, poor country trying to balance the opportunities for economic growth offered by the global economy, with the necessity of ensuring social justice for the poor.  Some may see Nicaragua's policies as a sell-out, but I am intrigued by the possibility of harnessing the obvious power of free trade while insisting on certain basic protections and dignity for workers.  And NIcaragua's tripartite collaboration between government, businesses, and labor reminds me of the similar agreements that fueled the USA's unprecedented, well-distributed prosperity in the post-War years.

Jihad as new international anti-establishment cause?

Here is an article that posits that young Western men who go to join the ranks of ISIS are perhaps following the same impulse that led an earlier generation of Westerners to join international leftist movements.  It follows the same line of thought I've begun to trace out, linking the fall of global socialist revolutionary movements to the rise of political Islamist terror.  The author of the article summarizes some of the reasons and passions that may at least in part explain the seeming need for certain young men to join such radical anti-establishment movements:  "abject suffering in the world or examples of injustice... [also the] impulse for escape, radical purity and justice of an often disfigured sort".  The author ventures that a "radical ideological [sic] of opposition" responds to or arises from some profound, inherent human trait.  This might be true--I for one have often felt disgust at the state of the world, and dreamed of acting decisively to fight against injustice.  Though I don't know if the ideology of opposition, which seems to be a natural part of any human, must always be radical or violent.  I myself have an almost innate drive to oppose, probably because I agree with the author of the article that it is not a viable situation to have just one dominant, unopposed ideology driving the world.  But at the same time, I personally have come to appreciate the importance of a steady, concerted, uncompromising, but nonviolent fight against injustice. 

Somehow, though I can't sympathize with their means or even agree with much of their philosophy, I can better understand the international Leftist terrorists of the past than I can understand or relate to ISIS and their ilk.  International Marxist groups were fighting for something that was at least in theory inclusive and constructive.  The cause of fundamentalist political Islam is inherently exclusionary, and often destructive.  That said, let's be clear about the similarities.  Groups like the PLO or Bader-Meinhof explicitly advocated on behalf of the disenfranchised; ISIS doesn't explicitly seem to do that, but effectively they are feeding into feelings of disenfranchisement and an urge to resist the hegemon.  At the same time, while ISIS seems to glory in barbarity, Leftist groups often were wantonly destructive of human life, regardless of their humanist rhetoric.  So in terms of both their effective constituencies and their immoral, violent methods, 1970s international leftist terror and 2010s international jihadist terror don't seem that far apart.  But still, to me there is a difference between a group that sees its end-game as the betterment of humanity's lot (even if they are often incoherent in pursuing that goal), and a group that has no such long-term aspirations, and seeks only to utterly destroy those it regards as "other" (which ends up being most of humanity).  There is a difference between strident militancy in favor of a viewpoint, and total destruction of any opposing viewpoints and their bearers.

My cousin sent me this article precisely when I happen to be in El Salvador for work.  It's a very interesting country, and I've enjoyed getting to know it a bit these past few days.  But what strikes me as an odd coincidence is that in this country, and in many other places in Latin America, the apparent drive toward radicalism, the drive for puritanical solutions to injustice, seems not to be at play right now.  It can be argued that Latin America is the part of the world where violent ideological struggle has had its most prolonged, savage, and ecstatic expression, even long after the Cold War had supposedly ended.  But in El Salvador, site of massacres and torture and disappearances and radical puritanism for the better part of two decades, right now social injustice is being addressed (with varying degrees of success) through the mainstream state bureaucracy.  The party in power right now is the former left-wing guerrilla movement, now looking more like a mainstream social democrat party than fiery radicals.

Of course El Salvador is still home to bitter political discourse and differing opinions on how to address society's problems.  But I think that here, as in Colombia and the Southern Cone and Nicaragua and surely other places, the leftist voice is becoming a staid part of the establishment, and there is not much of a popular support base anymore for the ferocity and savagery that have so long defined the region--people are sick of it. 

The scars and the new wounds of violence still plague us, but it is a different violence from the puritan political terror of years past.  In fact, in some ways today's violence is more fearsome, since it has no cause to advance, no collective it pretends to represent and advocate for.  There's no reasoning with a criminal commercial gang, at least not in the same way as with a right- or left-wing armed movement. 

Admittedly my musing on the end of political, militarized radicalism in Latin America has its limits; the Latin American insurgent Left never attracted non-Latin recruits the way that ISIS does today, or even the way that the PLO or Bader-Meinhoff-type groups did back in the day.  And leftist guerrilla groups in Latin America were never as wantonly violent as ISIS or the PLO in its 1970s heyday.  Statistically, most of the bloody massacres and the torture in Latin American history have come from right-aligned governments or shady paramilitary operators, and even the criminal groups plaguing the region today often have their roots in these right-wing berserkers.

But the example of Latin America should at least give pause to those who think that a cause or an ideology can die so rapidly or so completely.  Hopefully this is a good thing, because it means that any valid aspects of yesterday's radical ideology might be rescued to inform today's debates, or even to replace or override the more destructive ideologies that might have arisen since.  For much of the 90s and 2000s many people thought that socialism in its many guises had definitively lost the war of ideas, that the loud, oblivious chant of neoliberalism had won the day.  But look at the political map of Latin America today, and you will see that leftist ideas and even the actual people leading leftist movements twenty years ago or more, are very relevant to daily life and the political discourse.  I don't know what this says about al Qaeda (another ideology we'd thought had been consigned to the dustbin), or ISIS, or Baathism, or Pan-Arabism, or any other political line of thinking in the Middle East.  But if the author of the article I cited is correct, there will always be people looking to fundamentally oppose the uglier aspects of the current status quo.  Let's hope that they can find an ideological framework that isn't even uglier than the status quo it pretends to oppose.

Mesh wireless networks

This is an article about mesh wifi internet networks.  If I understand correctly, a mesh network consists of one connection to the larger internet, and then that access is bounced from wireless transmitter to wireless transmitter, such that many households can access the internet, but using just one connection between them.  Or households can forego the internet connection, and just mesh amongst themselves to communicate with one another.

I had heard about this technology as a potential way to bring internet access to remote rural areas in poor countries.  In places like India, there are certain bandwidths of electromagnetic signal (like the MHz numbers on your radio dial) that are in the public domain, and so different community groups set up wireless transmitter towers that connect to the internet and then bounce that signal to other users and other transmitter towers, such that areas without fiber optic cable or other commercial connections can use the internet. 

But this article is discussing use of mesh technology in populated, developed areas as an alternative to commercial internet connections.  I like this idea--it diversifies the options for accessing the internet, and allows individual citizens to be less dependent on commercial companies.  As the article points out, it also grants some anonymity to users, since one IP address is now serving a lot of people, and some of their activity even occurs off-line but within the mesh.  I don't know enough about technology, or have enough social connections in the area where I currently live, to try to set up such a mesh.  But maybe someday...

A few links from Facebook

For the past two months my wife and kids have been back in Colombia, so I've been spending a lot of time alone.  Despite my best intentions to make productive use of my time, I do often find myself too tired or simply not in the mood to embark on some new, thoughtful undertaking in my free time.  So instead of catching up on blog posts or other writing that I've been neglecting for months or even years, I often find myself browsing what my facebook friends have posted.  I guess it says something [positive] about my circle of friends that few of them post anything, and for those that do, it's mainly articles, political commentaries, or petitions for a cause (other than the Ice Bucket Challenge).

Here are three things that sparked my interest from my Facebook friends' recent posting:

This is an article about meaningful commitment to a cause, beyond dumping a bucket of ice on your head.  The author is the creator of the old, silly website, "Stuff White People Like".  He has long been a critic of "awareness-raising", because it usually doesn't entail much actual effort or action on the part of those who do it, and more importantly because we are already aware of most of society's major ills.  In this latest essay, he argues that one of the few pressing issues that many of us are not yet aware of (at least not in a visceral, empathetic way) is the profound injustice felt by black citizens who are constantly hounded and sometimes even killed by the police and the neighbors that are supposed to be looking out for them and protecting them.  He proposes a silly ice-bucket-challenge variant that could ramp up awareness of this cause.  I've been thinking about the same thing.  What about throwing an ice bucket on a militarized, overagressive cop that's about to shoot an unarmed civilian?

Following on this same topic, here is an article whose author tries to illuminate the meaning of white privilege through biking.  As a white biker myself (that also has a lot of non-white friends and family that I don't like to see getting trampled on by others), this little essay struck a chord with me.  In many spheres of life, what hurts us most is not when others are outright aggressive towards us, but rather oblivious of the harm they do us.  When society is set up such that some can be constantly damaging to others through their oblivious actions, then you have a situation of privilege and its correlary, marginalization.  And that's not good for a society.

On an unrelated note (or maybe not), here is a TED talk by a well-spoken, thoughtful young man who is in a nontraditional schooling setup.  He describes his experience of learning through internships, outdoor living, and a loose alternative para-school institution that organizes some of his education.  It sounds like a great way to learn in most respects. 

However, one of the major concerns I have in bringing up my own children is finding a balance between maximizing their opportunities and self-fulfillment, while instilling in them a sense of belonging to, and duty to, the larger collective of people around them.  It is a delicate balance.  A person (and a society) is not in good shape if they unthinkingly follow orders and prevailing cultural norms.  But without some sense of commitment to others, self-sacrifice, and yes, subsuming your own absolute liberty to other people and ideas, I think that not only is a society doomed to failure, but even the individual is sure to feel incomplete, not fully realized.  Ironically, in seeking self-fulfillment as an ends in itself, we feel profoundly unfulfilled. 

I don't mean to pick on this young man.  He and the adults educating him are obviously acting in good faith, and they may very well be right in their model for the ideal education.  What I am questioning here though is that model.  Does such a free-form, alternative learning model serve kids better than the traditional, mainstream mass-schooling model?  More importantly, is it better for our society as a whole, for the resolution of our most pressing problems?

First off is the question about the individual utility of the alternative schooling model.  As a white, presumably middle-class kid, the speaker will probably be okay economically whatever his schooling model (though the borderline-middle-class kids I've seen in alternative schools in Colombia have had lots of problems adapting to college and the adult labor market afterwards).  With the alternative education model, it sounds like this young man will avoid the trap of mistaking mere economic security and obedience to pre-established cultural norms as the route to happiness.  But will a young person brought up in this way be more or less of a boon to society than one who's passed through the traditional, oppressive school system? 

I worry that some of what is laid out in this TED talk does not bode well for this last question.  When you are ensconced in a system that is explicitly outside of and even contrary to the rest of society, there is a great danger that you will live a life apart from, and not in contribution to, the mass of your fellow people.  You may be enlightened, but everyone else isn't, so how do you deal with those lesser thinkers spawned by the standard educational system?  Do you spurn them?  Help them?  Ignore them?  Raise them up?  Understand them?

Furthermore, despite the apparent heterodoxy of an alternative school system, its organizers are usually firmly embedded in the prevailing model of economic advancement of certain social classes at the expense of others.  If you are already isolated from much of society by your economic class, and now think yourself superior to them due to your better model of schooling, you risk becoming an oppressor, even if unconsciously.  Will you be committed to social justice, to fighting society's ills, if you don't see yourself as part of that society?

Most importantly, I see a drive to self-fulfillment as the ultimate metric and goal of the alternative education that is presented in the TED talk, and this worries me.  Of the eight principles for happiness enumerated in the video (exercise, diet and nutrition, time in nature, contribution and service, relationships, recreation, relaxation and stress management, religious and spiritual), all but two or three are self-centered.  And even the three non-self-centered pursuits (relationships, contribution and service, religious and spiritual) are valued here because of their potential contribution to self-fulfillment.  This of course sort of defeats the purpose; if you enter into relationships, or perform acts of service, or become religiously affiliated, expressly in order to become happier, you will have crappy relationships, unproductive service, and insincere religion.  Plus you won't be any happier, if you're honest with yourself.  It's precisely in denying our own pursuit of happiness, in forgetting for a moment about self-fulfillment, that these things, and that life in general, fulfill us.

My interpretation of the alternative schooling model being presented as a fundamentally self-centered one (and thus ultimately a superficial one) is bolstered by the allusions to "hacking" life (ie finding more "efficient" shortcuts).  I certainly value the ideal of life-hacking in many respects; often the existing societal or physical infrastructure is not set up for what one wants or needs to do, and so you must figure out innovative ways to get around existing limits to be able to do what you want.  I try to live this value when I salvage good groceries from dumpsters, or when I take a more efficient route to work, or even when I line-dry my clothes instead of paying money to burn natural gas to dry them.  But I try to be circumspect with this attitude of "hacking" life, of using individual ingenuity or simply might to circumvent the rules.  For what happens when you run up against something that you can't hack, and you just have to buckle down and get it done through honest hard work?  Will you know how to do this if you've been educated only in an individualized, iconoclastic pursuit of your own path?  I have seen this in coworkers at many jobs who spend more time trying to figure out an "easier" way of doing something than it would take to just go ahead and do it.  In this context, it's called laziness, and is less efficient, not more.  If everything in your education is left to your [still-developing] criteria, how will you ever obtain the wisdom gained by things you didn't want to do initially but were forced to do, and whose value you only saw afterwards?  Finally, what happens when your hacker shortcut as a privileged member of society ends up harming others weaker than you?

My misgivings that alternative education can easily lend itself to a privileged, self-centered way of thinking are also confirmed by other incidentals of the talk.  First off, that it transpires in the TED forum, that self-congratulatory ritual for bourgeois, ahistorical, quick-fix techno-kleptocrats.  Second, the references to things like Starbucks and skiing place the talk firmly within the realm of the high-income pursuit of consumption and entertainment.  In this same line, highly-personalized outdoor living classes or private schools are not within the economic or social reach of most of our compatriots, so how viable is this education model for any but a select elite?  Lastly, the presenter gives as "hacker" role models such megalomaniac techno-hucksters like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who have probably done more to undermine solidarity, human interaction, and general work productivity than just about anyone.

Again, I want to stress that I don't intend to tear apart this young man who presented.  I think he spoke for all the things that can be good about an alternative education model.  I just want to consider some of the downsides to such a model.  Which begs the question of what I would advocate as an ideal educational model.

My thinking is that the ideal would be a middle ground between the absolute free-form philosophy that I've seen in the alternative schools I've come into contact with, and the stifling conformity pushed by many mainstream schools.  I feel that my own basic education, in a special program within the larger framework of a [somewhat militarized] inner-city school system, was a great combination of the two extremes.  We had to pledge allegiance to the flag every day and form quiet lines to go anywhere, but we were also free to explore the bounds of our intellect and of the great thinkers that lived before us.  Furthermore, the aspects of conservatism and conformity that were forced on us gave us something to fight back against.  See for example a collective test-flunk coordinated by some fellow CPS students of my generation.  Without some adversity, you can't learn how to exist in a world that usually isn't tailored to your desires and idiosyncracies.  Fighting against force also gives kids an idea of how to be strategic, how to pick and choose their battles.  Again, this must be moderated, lest in the face of an overwhelming oppression, kids just learn to be docile and not to fight back.

My grammar school program was billed as one for "gifted" children, so as such it would seem inherently elitist and wouldn't be an option for everyone.  But frankly, I feel that most kids, "gifted" or not, would have thrived in such a setting with the right mix of clear boundaries and free intellectual inquiry.  I think most of us in my class weren't so much intellectually gifted as gifted in having parents with the means and the motivation to get us into that program.  If all of Chicago Public Schools were organized along the lines of promoting real intellectual inquiry among students, of giving them the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they're just looking to cause trouble--in short, if schools treated children as the inquisitive, wondrous, sincere people they are (and their parents collaborated by getting rid of the damn TV), then I think we could vastly improve our mainstream school system, without devolving into a disorganized free-for-all.

Back into the fray?

On the evening of September 11, 2001, President George W Bush gave a speech in which he treated the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as a criminal act, meriting "the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice".  By his address the next day, he was saying, "They were acts of war".  And thus began the morasse of the early 21st century in the US, with two brutal wars, a lot of human rights violations, and a lot of money burned.  I qualified it as a lost decade in a past post.

Anyway, I hope that our current President can hold onto his seemingly cool, rational, evolving evaluation of the real threat ISIS poses (for now, a regional insurgency without much reach beyond Iraq and Syria).  I worry that others' language calling the group "an imminent threat to every interest we have" could gradually turn into treating this relatively small, localized threat as a worldwide enemy warranting a return to increased US military involvement in the Middle East.

More nuance from Perez Molina

Here is an op-ed by the President of Guatemala offering a very knowledgeable local perspective on the roots of the child migration crisis, and some initial ideas for policies that might end it (namely, freer legal short-term migration, not stricter border controls).

Robert Gates and lasting, rippling consequences

This is a long-form book review/historical-political analysis about Robert Gates and more generally the long-lasting, far-reaching aftereffects that ripple out whenever the US intervenes abroad for some current political purpose.  The article links the US-backed coup in Iran in 1953 with the Iranian revolution in 1979, and this with the Afghan insurgency of the 1980s, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of international Islamist insurgent movements, the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, and finally 2014's complicated Middle Eastern web of ISIS insurgencies and the international reaction to them (which has thrust the US and Iran into the uncomfortable position of de facto allies on certain issues).  The message I take away from the article is that, though no one in 1953 could possibly have guessed that deposing Mossadegh would contribute to the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014, we in the US (and any country with wide-ranging foreign policy ambitions) should be more humble in our direct interventions abroad.  Not just because our interventions can lead to the death and suffering of other people, and that's not good, but because in fact these interventions that seem to make sense in the short term inevitably have long-term consequences that end up harming our own country.  It's a point that's been made before in many places and in many ways, but it always bears repeating, and I think that author Mark Danner does a great job here by making this case through the analysis of Robert Gates's political life, as told by Gates himself in two memoirs.  I first became aware of Mark Danner for his writing on Haiti, and recently he has started this series on the Long War in Afghanistan and Iraq, profiling figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.  I think he offers much more critical thought and analysis than much of the journalism out there right now.

Another light gone

I am really sad about Robin Williams's death.  I found out about it by chance last night from a yahoo news feed, which I normally never see.  It's especially sad because it follows on the heels of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death.  Both were master artists in their way (despite a lot of really bad movies Williams starred in), both apparently were struggling with psychological demons and addiction.  I'm usually not one to follow or care about the lives of celebrities I don't know, but I grew up with these guys' work--they played a part in shaping my surroundings and who I am.

Here is an old video of Robin Williams from Sesame Street:

Caribbean articles

Here are two interesting articles on the Caribbean.  One is on the rich cultural and intellectual history of the region, especially in its writers and political leaders.  The article makes the point that by subscribing to caricatures of places like the Caribbean instead of being alert to their nuance and human wealth, the rest of the world impoverishes itself.  It's an observation I've often shared as I've come to know Colombia or other exotic developing countries.  Far from being monochromatic lands of uninspired poverty or static, idiosyncratic folklore, every place I've gotten to know in my life has surprised me with the unexpected diversity of thought, of attitude, of personalities, and even of values among the people I meet.  You miss out on this if you just assume that an entire population conforms to the two or three most salient stereotypes of a given place or race.

The second article talks about the importance of the Kreyol language in making Haitian society more educated and more inclusive.

Prescriptions from the Wilson Center

This is a brief from the Wilson Center in Washington, DC regarding the child refugee crisis in Central America. While much of the framing of the brief is from a US, migration and border control perspective, the recommendations at the end are spot on. They all point to making northern Central America safer, more stable, and more prosperous in order to stem the flood of people fleeing the area.

More on the child refugee crisis

Here is an opinion piece that gives a more nuanced consideration than I have to whether Central American children surrendering themselves to US Border patrols should be classified as refugees or mere economic migrants.  This other articles fleshes out the story a bit, showing that the titles of "refugee" or "migrant" also overlap in many ways here, as parents and relatives already in the US (some prior economic migrants, and others earlier waves of war refugees) send for and pay money for their children's passage to the country. 

In this article, the president of Honduras discusses the portion of blame that should go to the US for the current crisis.  He focuses on the US demand for drugs that finance and embolden brutal gangs, as opposed to pointing out the US role in the civil wars and coups d'etat that created the conditions for and trained the membership of these gangs.  In this sense I believe he's missing part of the story, but the president of Guatemala is very clear about the Cold War roots of the problem.  And these are by no means radical, critical leftists saying this.  Hernandez of Honduras is from the right-wing party and hails from an oligarch family, and Perez Molina of Guatemala was part of the military's brutal counterinsurgency campaign during the Civil War there.  Both presidents are choosing their words carefully so as not to be confrontational or inflammatory, but even so, they feel it is important and necessary to signal the US role in generating the current crisis.

A documentary about a commune

I just watched a movie called Commune on Netflix.  It is a documentary of life on a late 1960s hippie commune, and the present-day memories and interpretations of those who had lived there.  I really liked the film.  It is nostalgic, it explores a way of life most of us have little direct experience, and it gets at the ambiguities of that life.  People reflect on the difficulties and hurt that arose from widespread and even obligatory promiscuity, and there is even a part where a cult basically takes some people's children away from the commune, with these parents' permission!  On this latter point, no one interviewed in the film seems too willing to accept responsibility or guilt for the awful, immoral decisions they made with the lives of their children. 

Anyway, if you can get a hold of it, I'd highly recommend this film.

Another sage voice calling for recognition of Central American children as refugees

Here is a brief opinion piece that clearly looks at the children arriving at the US border as refugees, and not unscrupulous illegals trying to exploit some loophole.  It also laments the approach being taken by national lawmakers of investing lots of money in tighter border controls and detention of these children, as opposed to more efficient processing of their cases as refugees.  These kids are seeking out law enforcement officers and surrendering themselves to them, not trying to sneak over the border.

The Story of English

This is a fascinating documentary called The Story of English, made in 1986.  I remembered that my dad had rented it from the library in the early 90s, and so I looked for it myself online.  The first episode focuses on the global reach of the English language, while the following 6 episodes focus more on the historical evolution of the language and its different dialects. 

Ironically, the first episode, which when it was made was the most "modern" and "up-to-date" of the series, is perhaps the most outdated.  Obviously this is natural considering that Shakespeare or the Angle barbarian tribes are no more or less dead or relevant today than they were in 1986, while Moonunit Zappa is certainly less hip today than in 1986.  But beyond this, the first episode's idea of English as a universal language for global culture and commerce seems to have changed a bit since then.  The 1986 documentary shows people in ex-colonies like Nigeria and India doing business and education in English, and seeing English fluency as a status symbol.  My obviously limited experience gives me the impression that, while English is still the official language of instruction and business in many countries, and often still the most convenient medium of communication across cultures even in non-colonies, other languages are gaining in prominence as formerly poor countries rise economically and politically.  I imagine that, though most businesspeople in a place like Bangalore or Chennai know English, if you are a foreigner looking to do deals with them, you probably want to learn Telugu or Kannada or whatever they speak.  Ditto for Arabic-speaking countries, and certainly for the Latin American economic juggernaut.  At any rate, the generalizations of episode 1 vis a vis English's importance as a global language still ring true, but there are new nuances that have evolved in the past 30 years.

Neoliberal dogma trumps sound development policy

If I told you that the government of El Salvador has created a program to support and improve the activities of small farmers by providing them with improved crop seed, while simultaneously strengthening a local seed sector to continue offering for direct purchase by farmers once they no longer need government help, you'd probably say it sounds like good development policy.  And you'd be right, especially considering that the nationwide program only costs $30 million a year, and is funded without help from the US. 

But this program drew the ire of the US Trade Representative, a government agency that advances the interests of US businesses.  It claimed that by favoring Salvadoran seed companies, the government was not playing fair.  This is understandable from an agency designed to improve US business conditions abroad.  The problem is that the overall US government apparently used this relatively minor trade issue to hamstring $277 million of non-agricultural aid to El Salvador through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, another US government agency that develops investment plans with host countries to leverage a joint commitment for good development results. 

My reading of the affair is that the pursuit of an neoliberal dogma of absolute free trade admitting no exceptions, even for a small government procurement in a small country, overrode sound development thinking that would have seen the obvious merits of the Salvadoran government's policy.  To put it in numerical terms, an abstract ideological dispute over $30 million spent by El Salvador blocked up $277 million of US aid, and now in part because of a long history of US interventions against Salvadoran development and prosperity, we're in the middle of a refugee crisis that will most likely cost the US government almost $3 billion in emergency funding.  Only in neoliberal dogma can $30 million of someone else's expenditures turn into $3 billion of US tax liability, all for the sake of a few big US seed companies that won't miss El Salvador's business anyway!

Luckily, due to popular pressure in both El Salvador and the US, the US government seems to have backed down from its hardline stance, and the MCC compact will move forward as planned.  As for the emergency US spending to handle underage refugees, that will still be necessary.  But the roots of that crisis go far beyond the seed procurement impasse.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and international leftism

A few months ago my wife and I were saddened to hear of the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Well, not saddened so much at his death--he had lived a long and eventful life, presumably satisfying to him, so I didn't feel that bad for him or for his family.  But Garcia Marquez's death did bring forth a lot of nostalgia for us.

Firstly for me personally.  You see, Garcia Marquez had played a major role in shaping my adult life, which has transpired mainly in Spanish-speaking countries.  I visited a friend in Spain in early 2005, having never myself been to that or really any Spanish-speaking country in my life, beyond a 2-week trip to Mexico with my parents when I was a little kid.  My friend loaned me 100 years of solitude in English, and I devoured it.  By the end of that year, I was living in Spain, learning the Spanish that, unbeknownst to me, would be the first language of my future wife and children.

That first year in Spain, I tried to ensconce myself in Spanish culture, reading short books in Spanish by greats like Lorca, going to bullfights and classic taverns and medieval Castillian cities.  I learned a lot about Spain, and was even able to mimic the country's idiosyncratic accent to the point that I could talk to Spaniards without their realizing that I wasn't one of them.  (I have never been able to do this in Colombia, whose light, smooth natural accent leaves very exposed and obvious my own anglophone sounds).

Cien Anos de Soledad was one of the first long books I tackled in the original Spanish, barely a year after having read it in English and having started to learn Spanish myself.  This book opened up the Spanish language for me in all its expressive possibilities, beyond the more basic, coarser day-to-day needs of going to the supermarket or wooing girls at a bar.  I'd had no idea of the range of commonplace practical questions or the far-out existential ones that this writer in a bizarre corner of the jungle tropics had been playing with and exploring, years before I'd even been born.  I was amazed that the most modern, sophisticated, astute treatment of the human condition, the messy ties of family and tradition and change and conflict that define our species, was being written by someone from the Third World, from a place that was supposed to be backward and unthinking.  In years to come I was to be repeatedly surprised by the critical analysis and thinking, by the complex reality itself, found in Colombia, which never ceases to turn on its head everything I think I know about culture, economic development, wealth, and poverty.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I had known nothing about Colombia before this book, but after reading Cien Anos in the original Spanish, I began to know viscerally a country and a culture that, again unbeknownst to me at the time, would become my home years later.  Now in retrospect, I even fancy that, upon reading Garcia Marquez, I began to see that I would never feel entirely at home in Spain, where I'd avidly lived and imbibed the culture.  On the other hand, it now seems to me that I then began to sense that something about Colombia, about this country I'd never even thought of visiting, spoke to me, my values, who I was, certainly more than the exotic, fascinating, but ultimately alien culture of Spain, and even in some aspects more than the US where I'd grown up.

Okay, so most of the above paragraphs are probably bullshit musings heavily tinged now in memory by what was to come later in my life.  But what can't be denied is that I had a copy of Cien Anos de Soledad the first time I really talked to my future wife.  I'd lived in Spain for a year plus, and was now studying the first year of a masters program in sustainable agricultural development.  Some of my classmates had set up a group dinner of a chilly autumn night, and we were to meet outside of a certain subway stop.  I had brought along my book to read in case I got there early and had to wait for the others, but as it so happened I got there in the middle of the pack, and among those already waiting was my future wife.  We started talking, something we'd never really done before in class.  Her hands were cold, and I loaned her my bulky, warm mittens.  Remembering she was from Colombia, I also showed her my book.

Now Garcia Marquez is really big in Colombia.  It's not like in other countries where I've been, where everyone knows the name of one or two internationally famous authors from their country, but few have read them, since they're all too busy watching soap operas or soccer or something.  In Colombia people really read Garcia Marquez (they watch soap operas and soccer too, but they read a lot).  I have seen peasant women hired to cook lunch for some local event, and in their off time they bust out a novel of his, often as not Cien Anos de Soledad.  Of his many Colombian fans, my wife and her family are particularly avid readers.  Their bookshelves house most of his works, and at least three generations have read him.

So my future wife and I talked about Garcia Marquez, and Colombia, and the war there.  I mainly asked her a lot of questions, since I'd never understood how there could at once be this brutal war waging in a country, and at the same time middle class people living relatively uneventful, average lives in the cities, making pop music, etc.  She was my first in-person key to knowing and beginning to understand Colombia.  Garcia Marquez was my literary key, and since then he has been a constant companion, almost a third partner, in my wife's and my relationship, marriage, and exploration of Colombia and the world.

That is why we're nostalgic about his death.

Right around the passing of the great Colombian master of letters, I was reading a book that is outside his better-known fictional oeuvre.  It is called Viaje por los paises socialistas, or Journey through the Socialist countries, and consists in compiled long-form journalism stories Garcia Marquez wrote during a trip through Eastern Europe in 1957, more than ten years before Cien Anos rocketed him to fame.  I have not found any English translation of this book, and frankly the only Spanish version I know of is the tiny, worn paperback volume that somehow found its way from my father-in-law's bookshelf in rural Colombia to mine in suburban Northern Virginia.

The book is fascinating, an open-eyed account of life behind the Iron Curtain when it was still closed off to much of the world.  Garcia Marquez has been a leftist for most of his life, as far as I know, but his reporting is clear-eyed and frank as he describes both the comforts and deprivations in the different countries he toured.  He describes dour East Germany as the saddest place and saddest people he's seen, Czechoslovakia as a prosperous, elegant, progressive place to rival Western Europe, Poland as a seething, politically-alert people trying to forge their own model of Socialism.  He tours siege-mentality Budapest barely a year after the Soviet bombardment, and explores the backwards, warm-hearted, suffering peasant character of the Soviets.  It is more nuanced than any account I've ever read about daily life and regular people in the Eastern Bloc--frankly, I haven't seen too many such accounts, and those that I have seen have been strongly colored by one political sympathy or another in the Cold War environment of my youth (and dare I say that continues to the present?).

Come to think of it, recently a whole lot of my reading and other cultural consumption has focused on Cold War-era leftism.  I finally watched on Netflix the "miniseries" (really three two-hour movies) of Carlos the Jackal.  It was entertaining, and it seemed to capture well the feel of a whole era--the 1970s and 1980s of the late Cold War, which of course no one knew was soon to end.  The protagonists are semi-independent international leftist terrorists, taking on the Palestinian cause but using funding from both wealthy Middle Easterners and hardline Communist dictatorships like the USSR and East Germany.  I think the movie depicted well the transition from the Cold-War-era Communism-capitalism dispute to Islamic militancy in the post-Cold War era, as I'd mused it might in a blog post I wrote when the film first came out but before I'd seen it.  Insofar as a biopic and a historical portrait, the movie was very well-done.  The character development was thin though, as one might expect in an action film.  Mainly there's a lot of lofty political rhetoric and unbelievable dialogue, interspersed with lots of free love and hot sex.  1970s Paris is full of horny Latina and Latino Leftist expatriates screwing, drinking, playing guitar, and discoursing.  It must have been pretty fun.  As the film progresses, Carlos becomes more arbitrary politically and strategically, keeps philandering whenever he can, and just seems sort of ridiculous and pompous as he continues to posture as the champion of the oppressed amid his own excesses.  Maybe that was the filmmaker's intent.


I also watched Steven Soderbergh's Che again, at least the first part where he's doing the Sierra Maestra campaign in Cuba.  Like "Carlos", it's an entertaining film, but there really isn't much character development.  There's lots of military strategy, logistics, and action, and it seems to follow pretty closely what actually happened in the guerrilla campaign.  It is interesting to see the guerrilleros set up their camps and really organize a whole community infrastructure of schools, radio, clinics, etc.  But throughout, the character of Che is circumspect, almost inhuman.  He either doesn't speak, preferring instead to observe and analyze, or he is spouting noble discourses about oppression.  I guess in a military campaign there isn't much room for real deep character exploration.  There is adversity, camaraderie, duty.  But not much idle conversation or seeing someone's way of being in normal, mundane contexts.  Still though, I feel that Soderbergh could have delved deeper into Jon Lee Anderson's definitive biography of Guevara (Anderson was an adviser for the film, I believe), and fleshed out his character a bit more.  As it stands, Soderbergh's Che Guevara is just a very noble wooden statue, with no complexity or internal contradictions or inconsistencies.


I also saw the movie Black Sunday.  It's a silly premise, wherein a returned Vietnam POW that feels he's been mistreated by the military and by his loved ones is convinced by an international Leftist Salome to carry out a sinister plot.  Namely, they will hijack the Goodyear Blimp to fly over the Super Bowl and send out a lethal rain of dart shrapnel.  But the film is entertaining, and it again captures a certain aspect of that 1970s international Leftist terror movement, the interface of a multi-ethnic group of people (from Japan and Western Europe, mainly), funded in part by the Communist Bloc, and working for the cause of the Black September Palestinian movement.

I've mentioned a number of times on this blog my now-year-long project of reading John LeCarre's entire opus (I'm through 12 of 23 novels he's written).  Most of them thus far have also dealt with the Cold War, from the more formal end of the British and US official spy agencies working against the East German, Czech, or Soviet agencies.  But the Little Drummer Girl departs a bit from this mold, and is more in line with the other, stateless 1970s Leftism I've been discussing in this post.  The novel follows an ultra-clandestine arm of the Israeli intelligence service that is hunting down a lone operator Palestinian terrorist that targets Western European Jewry in surprise bomb attacks.  They hire a left-leaning British stage actress to infiltrate the bomber's small organization and bring them to him.

You can imagine all the conflicts of good and bad, oppressed and oppressor, that arise among the protagonists of the novel.  There are Israeli-born Jews, old Holocaust survivors, refugee Palestinians, and this British girl who uses her acting talents to undermine a cause she believes in.  Her "runners", the Israeli agents that are masterminding the plot to get to the lead bomber, are weary of war and manipulation and amorality, but they feel a duty to protect their country from people who are clearly doing bad things.  However, these bad people are also vulnerably human once they're captured, drugged, and imprisoned.  In this sense the novel explores many of the same themes as Spielberg's film "Munich" (which I also watched recently), but much more richly and deeply.

As with the films I've cited above, but again in a much more nuanced and expert manner, the Little Drummer Girl also captures the romance and intrigue of the international Leftist terrorist lifestyle--breathless conspiring with comrades of many different nations, paramilitary training in remote desert camps, free movement through some of the most dangerous places on earth, and exhilarating direct contact with some of the most dangerous people.  And free love too--lots of fucking and sucking to fight against the oppressive bonds of middle-class mores.

But there is also a coldness, a triumph of anomy and misanthropy as noble anger bleeds over into blind, generalized hatred, and the use of violence for justifiable ends sometimes becomes a base lust for force and power over others.  The Leftists in these stories (especially in the case of Carlos the Jackal) are at times collaborating with oppressive, morally bankrupt states or agencies (like the Stasi or the KGB) that don't even enjoy the support of their own citizens, all in the name of promoting freedom and fighting oppression.

What I've seen of the international Leftist cause of the 1970s and 1980s (chiefly adopting the banner of Palestinian rights) didn't seem to have much overlap with insurgent movements in Latin America or Africa.  I don't know if this is just a decision of the works that I've seen and read to focus on a different area of the world, or if perhaps the international Leftists operating mainly in Europe and the Middle East were really of a different thread from the rural guerrilla movements in the Third World.  I'd like to know more about that, about the links or lack thereof between international Leftists in the Old World, Communist governments, and Third World insurgents.

On a more intellectually serious note, I've also been reading an old book from my father's college days, called Socialist Thought:  A Documentary History.  As its title implies, it is a compilation of selections from original documents showing the development of socialist thought from the French liberals to British planned communities, through to Marx and beyond.  I really don't know much about socialism or Marxism, or at least I haven't read many original documents.  So this is fascinating reading for me, if a bit heavy and slow.

It is in an entirely different league from a silly piece of tripe called Comrades!  A History of World Communism by Robert Service.  I tried reading this book a few years ago (for some reason they had an original English version in the Colombian public library system), and I couldn't get much beyond the third chapter or so.  The events depicted were factually correct, and in that sense Comrades is a decent way to get to know what happened when in the history of Communism (though there are probably better books that do just this).  But the author's interpretations of each event are totally off the wall.  Instead of offering coherent historical explanations or possibilities of why a given situation led to a certain action, he is more like a Fox News anchor or a tabloid writer.  From Marx to Lenin to Trotsky (which is about as far as I got), Service paints them as ridiculous and incoherent, and accordingly homes in on their personal foibles.  Who beat his kids, who had a mistress, etc.  His disdain for the historical figures he writes about rings throughout the book.  Apparently Service has made an entire career of writing sensational and absurb depictions of the major figures in Communist thought.  I can't imagine writing anything, much less hundreds of pages, about people whom I thought were so trivial and stupid.  I would still like to take another stab at reading the book, if only to learn more about the factual events and because I don't like leaving things unfinished.  But it certainly is a far cry from reading original texts or incisive, illuminating historical interpretation.

I will close by bringing the Cold War a little closer to home (though in light of recent events in Ukraine and the US response to them, maybe it's close enough to home already).  A few months ago my family and I went to the Smithsonian air and space museum.  I had realized at some point that we were providing young Sam, and to a lesser extent Paulo, with a solid foundation in the humanities, with art, music, and lots of literature, but that we were less strong in the natural sciences.  I of course have been showing him the different types of trees, and so now he is able to identify maples, red oaks, black walnuts, catalpas, sycamores and magnolias, and he picks raspberries, mulberries, and serviceberries with reckless abandon.  I am very proud of this, and I've striven to combine a more primitive recognition and understanding of the natural world with a real foundation in biology and ecology.  So that's good.  But in the "hard" sciences and engineering, which for a 3-year-old consists in learning about planes and stuff, Caro and I have not been so diligent.  In part it's because we're more interested in the natural world and the primitive life than in the engineered, modern world, but in my case it might be an overcompensation.  My formal education is in the hard sciences, so I've always made a more conscious effort not to forget about learning history, literature, the humanities, etc.  Ironically, my father's formal education was in literature and law, so I think he was more deliberate about exposing me to engineering and physics and chemistry and astronomy.

Anyway, it occurred to me that, for one reason or another, I hadn't been exposing Sam as much to airplanes and space travel and the like.  I began to remedy this by taking out lots of books on planes and outer space, and he got to really like the idea of rockets and planets.  In fall of 2013, we would spot the moon and Venus in the dark sky, which he liked a lot, but as Venus has shifted to morning-star status for 2014 and the day is still light anyway when I pick him up from school, we haven't been able to keep up with that.

So in maybe March or April of this year, we all went to the Air and Space Museum.  It was a bit underwhelming.  First off, many of the exhibits haven't been updated much since the 70s or 80s (indicative perhaps of our underfunding space programs since then?), so they aren't that interactive for kids, and often look downright dingy.  Secondly, we hadn't prepared well beforehand, planning out what exhibits might be most interesting for the boys.  But what most struck me was the war focus of the museum.  I guess I expected many of the planes to be military planes, since aviation has long been driven by military concerns.  But I (stupidly) hadn't anticipated the fact that many of the spacecraft, especially the rockets that Sam most wanted to see, were Cold War military apparatus.  Sam would get excited to see a rocket, and I would read that it was a Soviet intercontinental delivery system for nuclear warheads.  I didn't want to go into detail describing to him what the Cold War was--can you imagine talking to a three-year-old about that?  "Well, there was this country that doesn't exist anymore, and we didn't like them, so we created missiles to kill them, but we couldn't use them, because then all of humanity would blow up."  So we walked away rather disappointed and unfulfilled at that, one of our first forays into downtown Washington DC since we'd moved to the area.  I was appalled to see that one of the nation's most popular family museums was basically a paean to mechanized aerial megadeath.  And appalled at myself for not having foreseen that before our visit.

But I didn't want to give up on getting Sam excited about outer space.  So I did a lot of research on the Smithsonian's online museum sites, and figured out what exhibits would most appeal to our son.  I even found a free planetarium show offered every Sunday morning where Big Bird, Elmo, and a character from the Chinese version of Sesame Street show kids the stars.  We tried to go on bike as a family one Sunday, but didn't get there in time for the show, so we opted instead for the Natural History Museum.  But a few weeks later, I spirited Sammy off, sans family, and we took the Metro to the Space museum, arriving in good time for the show.  He loved to see Big Bird, and was particularly impressed by Elmo's trip to the moon, where we learned that kites can't fly without air and soccer balls can go really far if you kick them.  The takeaway message of the show was that, whether we're in China or the US, we all see the same stars (of course, the half-plus of the world's populace that lives below the Tropic of Cancer actually doesn't see the same stars as you'd see in New York or Beijing, but that's okay).

After the planetarium show we looked at different exhibits, learned about Jupiter and Mars, saw the space suits that Apollo and Shuttle astronauts wore, and even revisited the planes and ballistic missiles of our last trip.  Sam now has a clear distinction between "good" rockets for doing research and helping people (though his idea of helping people sort of conflates the rockets with a rescue helicopter we once read about that picks people up who are stranded at sea), and "bad" rockets and planes for shooting people.  From the upper balcony of the museum, you can even see the three separate warheads on the tip of a Soviet rocket, so I could tangibly explain to him what such a thing does to a city.  Following a prior discussion, he knows that it's not good to shoot people--we should only shoot animals, and that only if we're going to eat them.  Sam has now fixated on the idea of shooting an animal and eating it, which is cool with me.

I am trying to learn more about the philosophies and events that drove the Cold War and its aftermath today.  But for my three-year-old I am happy for now if the limit of his understanding is that good rockets help people, bad rockets kill people, and the only time it's okay to kill is if it's an animal you're going to eat.  Hell, if the adults in the world just got this much, we'd probably all be much better off.

On corporate personhood and glaring inequality

Here are some interesting articles I ran across a while back.  One explores the increasingly-entrenched legal view of corporations as people, and the logical flaws in such thinking that become apparent when we see corporations acting with less and less social responsibility.  The second article is from a multimillionaire calling for better wages and living conditions for the masses as a way to avoid an inevitable backlash against the super-rich.  More importantly, he rightly argues that the only way to keep the economy growing and the society thriving is in fact to expand the ranks of wage-earners that have enough disposable income to buy little luxuries like a night at the movies or a nice outfit.  People living from paycheck to paycheck aren't in a position to reward entrepreneurs offering new products and services.

New player on the international development bank block

This is an article from the BBC about the new development bank that the BRICS countries have created.  That's the grouping of middle-income nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) which differ widely amongst themselves--an ag export powerhouse; an energy exporter, the world's service and manufacturing hubs, and a mining titan.  I welcome the news, because it marks an important and symbolic point in the transition of developing countries from net recipients of foreign assistance to net donors.  Also, having another major player in addition to the World Bank, its regional banks, and the International Monetary Fund, seems to me a good thing.  I imagine this BRICS bank will take a very different approach to development and finance than the so-called Bretton Woods institutions.  Surely it will have its strong and its weak points, just as the World Bank does.  And there's no guarantee that these big, powerful middle-income nations' interests will align very harmoniously with those of smaller, poorer countries.  But a more diverse and competitive playing field in international development finance should make for more effective, more creative, and less coercive relationships all around.  More voices and more viewpoints can be taken into account, both from the donor and the recipient ends.  Let's see how this goes.

Latino race

Here is a video of a guy going around a carnival in the Washington, DC area and talking to Latinos about what box they check for "race" in the census.  The person who made the video regards the interviewees' reticence and confusion as evidence that they are denying their indigenous roots.  The disparaging and denial of Native American ancestry is certainly an issue in many Latin American countries.  But to be fair, I think that the way the interviewer frames his queries shaped to a large extent how people responded.  I don't think a lot of Latinos use the term "Native American" in Spanish.  If he had asked outright if people thought they had Indian ancestry, I'm sure many would have said yes.  Or maybe not--maybe a lot of his interviewees would think of Indians as "real" Indians, with parrot feathers and exotic customs living in the rainforest.  At any rate, by using the exact terms of the US census form (white, black, Native American, Asian, with Hispanic as a cultural heritage but not a race), I think the interviewer just confused everyone.  I'm sure this was in the spirit of not biasing responses, but his "neutral" wording ended up doing just that, in my opinion. 

My takeaway is not so much that Latinos in the US are denying their race, but rather the video underlines for me how confused they are by US conceptions of race, and how inappropriate US categories are for describing how many Latinos think of themselves.  In my experience, within a given Latin country people often have different racial designations like black, Indian, and mestizo or criollo (which I think most people are aware of is a mix precisely between indigenous people and Europeans and/or Africans).  When they get to the US, I imagine it can be difficult to transpose this to the new cultural context, since all those distinctions people may have made inside of El Salvador or Peru or whatever, get glossed over as anyone from those countries is lumped together as Latino.  And in this new US classification system, there is a clear difference between blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos, the latter of whom live and effectively self-identify as a race unto themselves, not simply a "cultural heritage", despite the census's best efforts to tell them that "Latino" isn't a race. 

So I saw the video more as comic than as tragic.  People's stumbling answers and nervous laughter betray the complete irrelevance and inadequacy of the census's designations for them.  The last image that the interviewer repeats from a prior interview doesn't look to me like a young woman denying her heritage, but simply affirming that she doesn't fit neatly into the categories of the US census.  "What box do you check for race in the census?"  "I don't know, white I guess."  "Do you consider yourself white?"  "Not really..."

Musical memories: A racial journey

My life is normally very focused on family, and in a family with small kids, I guess this drives us to think very much in the here and now, in the near-term.  I pick up Sam at school, we need to make dinner, we bathe the kids, maybe this weekend we’ll go on our bikes to such-and-such a park.  Et cetera.  Well for the past two weeks my wife and children are back in Colombia visiting family, re-acculturating, and waiting on some immigration paperwork.  I am accordingly all alone in our apartment, and despite my trying to work late, despite my late-night Le Carre reading sessions and my generally trying to distract myself from loneliness and melancholy, I do have quite a bit of time for idle thought.  Tonight as I ironed shirts and listened to music, my frame of reference in time passed from days (I got four shirts ironed so I won’t have to iron all next week!) to years and even decades.

When we got our stereo system set up, I was expecting mainly to listen to my father’s classic vinyl records, and even some of my own that I accumulated in the later years of high school.  I do this a fair amount, but in these days without my family I have actually been listening mainly to mp3s from my computer.  When I hook it up to the stereo system I can actually hear bass and subtleties and richness that I haven’t heard for years, limited as I’ve been to the dinky computer speakers.  Anyway, the mp3s I’ve been favoring are the CDs from my first year or two of high school.

There’s “Core” by Stone Temple Pilots, the first contemporary white music I ever really listened to.  For some reason the only pop music I really knew until high school was black music.  It’s not that I grew up in a particularly black neighborhood, though I guess all the kids around my age were indeed black, with a smattering of Latinos.  My grammar school wasn’t very black either.  But somehow I guess the kids that were setting the tastes when we started listening to pop music were listening mainly to black music.  I remember the first time I ever listened to the radio on my own, it was at a friend’s house.  I was ten years old or so.  We went in his bathroom and sat under the sink, and he turned a little handheld radio he had to B96, which was Chicago’s sort of urban dance station.  I assume he picked it up from his big brother, two years our senior.  Anyway, it was like a revelation to me, because now I knew at least one station on the radio where I could hear, indeed actively pursue, many of the popular hip-hop and house songs that I’d heard around me for so long on the streets!

I know everyone thinks that the music they listened to growing up was the best music ever, and it usually has more to do with the associations they have from their own life history than with the inherent quality of the music.  Just look at people who grew up listening to shit-rock like Journey and Foreigner who will pump money into a bar jukebox all night and swoon over their musical platitudes.  I’m sure the nostalgia that my music brings to me has a lot to do with that.  But I also think that I have a pretty discerning musical taste.  I am fully aware that the 80s songs of my childhood are mostly god-awful, and that there was a lot of frivolous tripe in the 90s as well.  Likewise, I really appreciate good music that came well before my time, and some of it, like the Doors or Jimi Hendrix, even form part of the lexicon of music that I was listening to in my formative early teen years.

Anyway, I happen to think that the early 90s were a really prime period for black popular music (dare I say on par with the soul and funk of 25 years prior, or the jazz from 30 years before that?).  Commercial hiphop was just getting big, with diverse strands from Snoop Dogg’s amazing debut album of gangsta rap gone bigtime, to more progressive stuff like A Tribe called Quest and De La Soul, to novelty kid acts like Kriss Kross or Another Bad Creation.  What I have later heard referred to as “New Jack Swing” was also big—Boyz 2 Men, Jodeci, even Michael Jackson got in on the sound with Dangerous.  Cross Colours and Karl Kani created entire self-contained fashion universes.  A Different World, The Cosby Show, In Living Colour, these shows presented relatively complex, nuanced, and certainly fun and attractive pictures of black culture.

So I got to experience some of this, at least from my peripheral perch as a white middle-class kid on the North Side of Chicago whose parents didn’t believe in buying the latest Nike or Karl Kani threads unless they were from TJ Maxx or the bootleg Clark Mall. 

I only gradually became aware of the racial implications of the popular music landscape of this my early adolescence.  Initially, I just figured that this music and this style was what were cool, what kids my age did, regardless of race.  The only white music I was familiar with was from my mom’s era in the 1950s.  I still have a soft spot for that stuff too, but in my preteen conception of the world, “Mr. Sandman” was certainly not in the running for cutting-edge and hip.  So the new music I was getting turned on to wasn’t black music to contrast to white music, but rather new music contrasted to old.  It was what I knew.  Likewise, the baggy pants and outlandish outfits of the hiphop era weren’t “black” clothes to me, but rather the appropriate clothes for a preteen becoming increasingly fashion-conscious as he transitioned from the nondescript sweatpants of his younger self.

The first blows to this “colorblind” perception of the world came from two very different angles.  On the one hand, as I started hanging out by myself at the local playground, the black kids there would constantly point out that I was white, and thus deserving of their derision in various ways.  Around the same time this started happening, I went to an almost all white summer camp, where upon seeing what I thought was one of my more “cool” outfits (one of my only cool ones, actually!), some kid told me they were wigger pants.  This neologism refers to a white person who tries to “act black”.  It was a new word to me, and frankly it was shocking and offensive to hear, but I soon came to see myself that way, because I internalized the narrow categories of other people.

So by the time I was twelve or so, I began to think that the world was rigidly divided into white culture and black culture, and ne’er the twain shall meet.  The problem was that I’d somehow happened to get stranded in-between categories.  In the stupid, ultrasimplified scheme of the world that I was forming (influenced largely by the mass popular culture I was consuming), there were “black things” and “white things”.  My tastes were from the “black world”.  I liked black movies, black TV shows, black music, black clothes, black sports.  Even as I developed a taste in women (or girls, at that age), the physical traits that were most attractive to me in a girl aligned more with what my black friends and acquaintances liked than what the white folks around me valued.  To some extent I even emulated how the black kids around me talked, though I was ambivalent about this.  I mean, it was a conscious choice, or at least I was semi-conscious of it, but I was also sort of embarrassed by it.  I knew it sounded ridiculous.  On the other hand, I didn’t want to or entirely know how to “talk white” either.  Many of my white friends incorporated aspects of black Chicago dialect into their speech.  Frankly, I didn’t know too many kids, white or black, that really “talked white”.  At least none that were close to me and that I respected very much.

I gradually became aware of a whole parallel popular culture world of white people.  In brief encounters at summer camps or with the children of my mom’s white suburban friends (or even urban white kids that went to private schools), I caught glimpses of this other universe.  They were dressing grunge, listening to alternative music.  The disparaging caricature of this world, which I received from the black culture I was more familiar with, had it that the white culture was all miserable spoiled rich kids contemplating suicide, disrespecting their parents, dressing in artificially-tattered clothes, and listening to music that glorified an ungrateful malaise amidst material prosperity.  So I wasn’t too keen on delving into white popular culture.  My friends and neighbors weren’t much a part of it, and I didn’t have any desire or need to expand my horizons beyond them.   Especially in the context of the gentrification my neighborhood was undergoing as I grew up, whereby unpleasant, arrogant, bourgeois white people were pushing out the humbler, more established black and Latino neighbors, I was not too well-disposed towards white folks as a group.

A black friend’s sister was really into this music, but she was much older than us, and seemed to me to be an anomaly (like me) in the rigid white/black dichotomy I thought the world consisted in.  I’d be curious to hear her impressions now on growing up black surrounded by that white culture—I think from grammar school onward (a different and rival school to ours) she just happened to be around more white kids doing “white things”.  At the same time, I imagine that my conceptual division of the world into rigid white and black spheres might never have taken root in the head of a black kid in my same situation; I imagine that it would be impossible for a black kid surrounded by diverse black people to imagine blackness as so monolithic and immutable.  There are black folks, just as there are white folks, who listen to all sorts of music, are into all sorts of activities, eat all sorts of food, play all sorts of sports, etc.  Shit, if the recent World Cup is any indication, there was a whole demographic slice of black kids from my generation who were playing soccer in the US, whereas to me soccer was just for the white bourgeoisie.  At any rate, by not being around a lot of white folks (or at least none that I considered “indicative” or “standard” for whiteness), and by being only on the edge of black society, I guess I was able to form a very misled abstraction of who does what according to the color of their skin.  Or maybe lots of kids, of all colors, were and are prone to develop ideas of blackness and whiteness based largely on broad characterizations on TV and in other mass media, despite how little these portrayals have to do with the real human beings around them.  You never know—TV is a powerful thing!

Where were my parents in all of this?  I mean, they were white, right?  Of course they were, but for some reason I didn’t get a firm fix on whiteness vs. blackness from them.  I know that just about every white person on the planet says they’re not racist, but I honestly think that my folks were special when it came to thinking about race.  They went against type for many cultural traits, rejected outright a lot of things that society tried to assign to them, and when they were aware of some misled racial preconception they themselves held, they consciously called it out and worked against it.  The only thing I’d fault them with is not being more explicit in explaining to me their attitudes.  They were in many ways radicals—sharing a radical solidarity with the poor, a radical rejection of classism and racism, a radical lack of ostentation and self-congratulation.  Frankly, a radical seeking to bring about the Kingdom of God through lives well-led, if you cotton to Gustavo Gutierrez and his framework of Liberation Theology.  In time, after 30 years of living and learning, I feel I’ve adopted many of their values. 

But because my parents never sat down and told me, “We do things in such and such a way because we believe X, Y, and Z,” I think it took me a long time to realize how different their values were from the society I was seeing in Steven Spielberg movies and TV shows like Martin.  So for the most part they appeared to me as eminently practical, humble people, but by not singing out their profound rejection and redefinition of most of our society’s categories, racial and otherwise, they left me to edify a whole ridiculous notion of the world before I eventually tore it down and discarded it.  I try to be more explicit in telling my kids what I believe in and how it informs my decisions.  But maybe in the end my parents’ silence will prove to be more educational.  I always have believed that the best learning comes with a very light touch from the teacher, though I’ve never mastered this technique in my own teaching.  (When I teach it’s all, “Greg knows this, Greg knows that, listen to me pontificate!”).  Self-guided learning sure is a doozy though for the student, in my case an 11-year-old kid trying to figure out race in the US!

But getting back to where I started off, “Core” by Stone Temple Pilots, and in particular the song “Plush”, was the first current white pop music I listened to.  I had now entered a working-class, very racially-segmented high school, and I just didn’t fit in anywhere.  I’ve never been great at making new friends; to this day my friends are almost all people I met in 1^st grade or before!  In my new high school I couldn’t go up to the black kids that banded together and said, “Hey, I’m down.  Can I insert myself in your group?”  Actually, I probably could have, because I later found out that a lot of those guys and girls were very open and accepting, and they eventually did become my friends.  But I didn’t know that in September of 1996 as I stood alone and glanced around the halls, looking for a friend.  The white kids were like they were from another planet—wearing funny clothes, dying their hair, listening to who-knows-what kind of music.  I didn’t much want to talk to them.  Actually, I admired how cool and comfortable they seemed in their own skin, not afraid to occupy space and just be, but I didn’t know how to gain entrée to their group, either.  Most of my grammar school friends had gone on to a different high school, but I in my stubbornness had chosen the more blue-collar vocational high school (much to my parents’ initial chagrin, though they’d formed me to value the manual trades and reject pretension!).  One of my best grammar school buddies was on my high school’s football team, so he had a ready-made group to pal around with, and I didn’t make the basketball team that first year.  So I was out of luck.  I continued to hang out with old friends outside of school, but my freshman year in high school was a social zero! 

Part of it was my fault.  What I did know of high school, or thought I knew, came from stupid teen movies and TV shows.  So when I saw that my classmates weren’t congenitally cool Luke Perry or stunningly-beautiful Alicia Silverstone, I thought I had ended up in the wrong place.  There were no John Hughes-esque house parties when rich parents were out of town.  How were there going to be house parties when many of my classmates were the children of work-addicted immigrants living with extended family in cramped apartments?  Everyone was as lame as me, and if you’re operating with that type of “who can I be talking to that’s more important than you?” mindset, you’ve already lost the game.  Especially if you don’t have the guts to go up and talk to the kids you think are cool enough to talk to!

Anyway, much of my freshman year of high school was spent alone.  My memories are of getting to my parents’ house in the early afternoon, and occupying the lonely hours before they got home with a fair amount of TV, and eventually music.   This is where Stone Temple Pilots comes in.

I started getting those CD catalogs in the mail where you could get like 8 slightly outdated CDs for 1 cent apiece, and I began to amass a lot of stuff.  But not too much black music anymore.  By this point Tupac Shakur had died, starting a long downward spiral of popular black music into the likes first of tolerable Puff Daddy, and eventually the downright unlistenable Master P!  I just didn’t like what I was hearing on my old radio stations.  At the same time, my buddies that had gone to another, whiter high school were getting into rock music, influenced by those same white kids from other grammar schools that had been listening to white music before we even knew about it.  They introduced me to the Rock radio station, where I heard good oldies from Hendrix and Queen and Metallica, and newer stuff like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots.  When I first heard Stone Temple Pilots it reminded me of an ad I’d seen on TV for their first album a few years before.  At the time I’d simply thought that it sounded cool for white music, and hadn’t pursued it further.  I wouldn’t have even known how!  Ditto when I heard an STP song on ads for the movie The Crow.  But once the floodgates of white music had opened, Core by Stone Temple Pilots was the first album I got (at least that’s how I remember it now), and I listened the hell out of it.  (Actually, the Doors had been a white music gateway drug for me a bit before that, since I knew them from my mom’s generation, and thought they were pretty cool for white guys, too).  Likewise, I really came to like Soundgarden, and I remembered a few years before when I’d seen the video for Black Hole Sun while flipping through the cable TV at my aunt’s house one Thanksgiving.  This was quite ironic, because again, just one year prior, someone had halfway invited me to a Soundgarden concert, their last I believe in Chicago, and all I could say was, “Who the hell is that?”

Jumping back to 2014, perhaps this time of being apart from my family reminds me of the existential loneliness I felt during much of my first year of high school.  Maybe that’s why hearing Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and STP is so soothing to me right now.  And most of the mp3s I’m listening to are imported to my computer from those CDs I got from the buyer club catalog.

These days I’ve also been listening to a band called Kill Hannah.  This is from a slightly sunnier period in my life, once I’d started to find some fellowship both through new high school friends, through becoming closer once again to old grammar school friends, and especially through the sense of community that music can forge.  By late freshman year I would listen to the radio and feel like I wasn’t alone, like I was a part of a group that listened to similar music.  I was becoming a white person!  Again, my racial acculturation remained at a pretty abstract, silly level, since I still didn’t talk to much of anyone, white or black, except for my friends that I’d known since I was 4 or 6.  Kill Hannah was a local Chicago band that played occasionally at the Metro, a concert hall near my house where my friends and I could go (I sometimes even went alone) to under-18 rock concerts.  It was cool to listen to live music and feel like you were in the know.  I think a lot of adolescence is about this—feeling utterly divorced at times from the larger world of coolness, and then sometimes feeling like where you’re at is the coolest place in the world, surrounded by the coolest people.

I used to think that my sophomore year of high school was equally grey as my first year, but amid my musical memories and other reminiscences, I now think it was really the time my world started to open in many ways.  That year I made my school’s basketball team, and though I can’t say I made many lasting friendships there (nor got much playing time!), it brought me back into contact with black culture, since most of my teammates were black.  The coach wanted us to eat lunch together to promote camaraderie, so for most of sophomore year I sat at one of the all-black tables in the cafeteria.  Looking back on it, it was a weird setup, because I didn’t talk that much.  I mainly just listened to my tablemates, who’d been friends since last year or before, as they goofed around and joked.  I must have cut an odd figure to an outside observer, a lone, silent white kid amid a much larger group of black friends, in a school where white and black didn’t mix very much.

But for me, this year helped to demolish many of the silly racial categories I had set up in my mind.  There were both white and black kids on the basketball team, and contrary to stereotypes, some of the better players were white, and many of our black peers hadn’t even made the team.  I was listening mainly to white music by then, but thanks to my black teammates, I stayed aware of what black music was worth listening to, and much that wasn’t.  And listening to white music didn’t preclude me from hanging out with the black kids, just as playing basketball didn’t obligate me to renounce my white friends.  I still wasn’t very socially active that second year, among other things because I was so busy with basketball games and practices, but it opened my mind so I could be more at ease socially in the future.

I think the real turning point came my junior year of high school, both in terms of redefining how I saw race, and also in terms of just enjoying life.  This is when I met the first girl who’d expressed any interest in me since I’d entered high school.  Love and magic and whimsy brought into full Technicolor a high school world that until then had seemed bland and grey.  And most amazingly, she was from what I’d considered the white group at school.  Thanks to her I not only became much more happy and satisfied in my life, but I also realized that those white kids I’d so been building up were not as monolithic nor as closed nor as cool a group as I’d imagined them to be from afar.  They listened to many different types of music, often including some of the “black” hiphop and dance music that by that time had become mainstream across much of the US.  Some of the white kids were interesting and cool, and some didn’t seem too interesting once I got to know them.  Despite their cigarettes and what I had interpreted as their nonchalance, they weren’t all witty Judd Nelsons from the Breakfast Club.  And they weren’t that white.  Many of the kids in the group, my love interest included, were of other racial backgrounds, or a mix of various races.  At the same time, I (and others) noticed little ways in which I had much more in common with our black classmates than with this new group I’d also begun to associate with.  And that was okay.  I didn’t need to define myself or others within the rigid racial framework I’d conceived when I was younger.

Right now as I pass my evenings in melancholic musical reverie, the one thing I can’t listen to, but that really would provide a nice end to this story, is a tape of my own rock band from senior year of high school.  I can’t listen to it because it’s on a cassette tape, and I don’t yet have a cassette player in my stereo setup.  At any rate, this was perhaps a typical white kid garage rock band, except we were Chicago Public School students playing not in a garage but in urban basements and attics.  The experience of playing music for music’s sake, a music that was of course much-influenced by the white alternative and heavy metal rock we were listening to at the time, but also by the black music we’d grown up with, also helped me to get beyond the racial hangup.  I think our collective racial unease in the US often derives from our obsession with seeing things from outside ourselves as opposed to from a fresh, clear view of our own motivations.  That is to say that, when you’re worrying about how you look to others, you’re more likely to think about categories of white and black, of what you should or shouldn’t be doing based on society’s external classification of you.  Once you can play music or play basketball or do anything based on your own true preferences and convictions, you can start to break free of and challenge those societal categories, and also recognize and accept honest differences that aren’t going to change.  In our case we had a standing biweekly gig before a youth poetry slam.  So we played pretty heavy rock music to a regular audience of largely black parents that probably had no use for us and just wanted to hear their kids’ poetry.  Or maybe they dug us.  In any case, we finally knew who we were, at least as much as anyone can know himself at 17 years of age.