Marketing hype instead of health

This is an article about the drive of healthcare providers to focus more on "customer service" rather than good medicine.  Though the ostensible trigger to this shameful trickery are stipulations in US public health law that reward providers for patient satisfaction with their health care experience, only the private sector could come up with something so twisted as to try to pamper and smooth-talk patients into giving a good satisfaction score, as opposed to providing patients with actual high-quality healthcare.  This is what happens when you give the profit motive too central of a place in your healthcare system.

The Economics Anti-Textbook

A few months ago I stumbled across this textbook online, called the Economics Anti-Textbook.  It purports to teach the fundamentals of economics, but with a critical eye that draws readers' attention to the implicit and explicit biases in different frames of reference.  If I get time, I'd love to read it.

Quote from Einstein:  ‘Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.’

Quote from Economics anti-textbook:  "Our point is not so much to claim that the ideology of the textbooks is wrong, although admittedly we do not share it. Rather, we want to remind readers that it [the ideology] exists. Students should be consciously aware of it – and that there are alternatives on offer."

On Ferguson

For many months now, the news has been intermittently ablaze with the happenings in Ferguson.  I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said on the immediate issue, the murder by police of an unarmed young man.  I don't think there is much to say--as in the Trayvon Martin case years ago, I feel there is no justification for anyone to take the life of an unarmed boy, whether or not he was "a good kid".  I don't understand how this affirmation could be controversial; no one would want their child to be murdered by the police or by anyone else.  And if we believe in a shared humanity with the rest of the world, or at least with our fellow Americans, or in my case even just with my fellow Midwesterners, then we must see clearly that when any child is murdered, it's everyone's child.  My own biological children's skin color may make them more or less likely to suffer the same fate as poor Michael Brown, but I'd have to be crazy to think that any child's murder is somehow not my problem, not of concern to me and my family.

So again, my thoughts on the Michael Brown shooting are pretty straightforward.  I recognize the role that race played in his death, and in the Ferguson police department's use of excessive force to respond to demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights.  If you want to read more about the very clear racial issues that enter into and that have been brought to the fore by what's going on in Ferguson, here is a decent breakdown of that.

But as I argued in a post in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin's murder, I feel that sometimes we in the US fixate so much on race that we are blinded to some other, parallel threads, or even to some trends and issues that are larger than race.  For instance, the above-cited article by Janee Woods seems to be implicitly arguing that racism is not only an evil affecting US society, but in fact the prime evil that trumps all others.  See for example her seeming advice to ditch any racist friends (point 10).  I can understand her focus on racism as a non-negotiable dealbreaker for a friendship, because her work and her passion is in the field of dismantling racism.  But if I or anyone else are to be consistent, we can't stick just to racism; no, we have to judge all wrong thinking, all intolerance, all oppression as invalid.  I am theoretically willing to commit to that.  However, if I am to cut off contact with all racists, and for that matter anyone who advocates directly or indirectly the oppressive status quo, I would have to cease interacting with just about everyone I know.  Woods rightly argues that, "you can be the popular person who stands with the oppressor or you can be the (maybe) unpopular person who stands for equality and dignity for all people".  But this is a false dichotomy, and for me it is almost as bad to stand with the oppressor as to be someone who adheres to all the right causes but isolates himself from the very humans he needs to join those causes (and whom he is ultimately advocating in favor of).  I have learned the hard way that I need to accept and work with the flawed humanity I'm surrounded by and a part of (just as others will hopefully accept my imperfections), not to insist on an impossible moral purity.  I've known corrupt people and alcoholics who were fierce enemies of institutionalized racism, and racists who were allies in the cause of economic justice.  You've got to work with the people around you, not the angels above.

On a historical and society-wide level, I'd actually agree with the assertion that racism is the fundamental sin that has been the primary shaper of problems in the US, if that is indeed the argument Woods is making.  Slavery and its aftermath of personal and institutionalized racism have defined yesterday's and today's US like no other force I can think of.  And Woods's 12 tips for white folks that want to dismantle entrenched racism are all spot-on.  My only gripe with her is that, while understandable, her couching her advice for dismantling a racist system in the context of Michael Brown's death risks missing all the other issues raised around this tragic event, issues that I would argue certainly include race but also extend far beyond it.

In short, I feel that the protests in Ferguson are highlighting many realities about race in the United States, but there are also lots of other things going on that can both inform and be informed by the current situation.  The two major trends I see other than race that have come to the fore are the militarization of the police and our society in general, and the interface of suburbanization and social problems in the US.

One night I heard an excellent radio program about the militarization of police forces in the US.  Apparently municipal PDs can request used military-grade equipment for free from the Pentagon, as well as applying for federal funds to stock up on additional high-powered assault rifles, armored vehicles, and the like.  Much of these requests bypass the normal civilian control of the police department, and all this in a nationwide context of far less crime than there was decades ago.  According to the radio program, many police departments are now laden with this war machinery, and they put it to zealous overuse, using SWAT teams to serve warrants on suspects of nonviolent offenses, or placing snipers on buildings in response to protests like we are seeing in Ferguson, MO.  The radio host made the point that the mere possession of this heavy weaponry influences and shapes the mentality that the police force brings to its job.  It is the bizarre inverted machismo warrior culture gone haywire, where men-boys looking to prove themselves join a police force instead of (or after) the armed forces.  Valor on the battlefield consists in the annihilation of enemies, but this impulse is totally out of place for police in a democracy, whose job is to serve and protect fellow citizens, to keep the peace instead of waging war.

Apologists for this militarization of our police forces cite increasing, omnipresent danger from raging criminals.  This is patently false, since US society is by almost all measures safer today than at any point in its recorded history.  Beyond the flawed facts though, the more we as a society (and the police that form an important part of our society) succumb to this sort of paranoid, order-at-all-costs thinking, the more we chisel away at the foundations of our democracy, of a sense of shared purpose, shared values, shared humanity.  Totalitarianism could be said to be the quest for an absolutely perfect order.  Our democracy does not aspire to perfect order, but rather seeks a more perfect union, a direction to aspire in yet with the recognition that you will never get there.  Indeed, moving towards unity and harmony often goes hand in hand with a society that looks less quiet and orderly.  Democracy is messy and chaotic, not polished and clean.

In any case, if a recent study is to be believed, our polis is increasingly looking like a state run by the few at the expense of the many.  In this light, it makes sense that the powers that be (and even the rest of us) resort to increasing force, firepower, and secrecy to maintain order.

The second theme that really jumped out at me in the news coverage of Ferguson was the dynamics of race, class, and migration to the suburbs.  As this article and this article point out, Ferguson presents a case that doesn't conform to our typical mental scheme of black inner-cities juxtaposed with white suburbs, because Ferguson itself is a suburb, and a mainly black suburb.  To me this status of Ferguson as a marginalized black suburb speaks to a larger theme of how we in the US define our own wellbeing and prosperity, in short our human development.

The inner city came to be synonymous with decay and social dysfunction because of a long-standing custom in the US to define our own wellbeing and social status not positively in terms of the good things we have, but rather negatively in terms of who is below us on the social ladder.  This relative social position is composed by a shifting interplay of race and class.  In most Northern US cities, whites seem to have defined their own satisfaction in life by how much they could exclude and spit on nonwhites.  Newly-arrived immigrants were initially treated as nonwhites, but their economic and social advancement went hand-in-hand with their transitioning from oppressed to oppressors, as they physically moved away from the fellow immigrants, and especially the black migrants, they now considered inferior to themselves.  For a long time economically ascendent blacks in the Northern ghettoes were forced to live side-by-side with their poorer brethren, but as soon as changing legal and social mores allowed them to, black professionals left the inner city in droves, leaving behind the archetypal depressed black inner cities that pop to most people's heads when they think of Detroit or Cleveland or Oakland.

The common thread here is that the drive to feel like you are above some other slice of humanity has led to a recurring, never-ending cycle of migration to farther and farther suburbs.  First Anglo whites, then ethnic whites, then professional blacks, instead of identifying themselves with their neighbors, have sought to distance themselves from those neighbors that they believe to be inferior to them.  What else could explain the massive migration to suburbs that offer objectively lower living standards than most urban centers (more floods, longer commuting time, poorer infrastructure, less access to commerce and other community amenities, physical conditions that favor obesity and feelings of isolation)? 

This trend continues today, on large and small scales.  The inner city of today becomes less and less appealing for people to live in, thus making real what had been a silly conceit of those arrogant professionals who thought their neighborhoods to be beneath them.  Now many neighborhoods really are beneath the dignity of any human being.  There are few businesses, lots of violence, social dysfunction.  Hell, just mowing the lawn takes up all the time of anyone trying to keep up appearances, since each resident now has to take care of upwards of six vacant lots, none of which belong to them.  You'd be amazed at how much time the few remaining middle-class people in the ghetto spend on a rider mower!  Anyone remotely advantaged or motivated to live in objectively better conditions leaves these blighted areas as soon as they can, hence deepening their desolation.

It even happens in relatively decent areas, as I've seen occurring in my mixed-income area in Arlington, VA.  Our neighborhood has lots of amenities like a library, parks, playgrounds, restaurants, supermarkets, schools, and churches, all within walking distance.  It is a perfectly fine place to live.  But many white parents, perhaps nervous about their kids' interacting too much with brown people, move to farther suburbs when their kids reach school age.  They obssessively check websites that grade schools based on how many dirty blacks and immigrants how they score on standardized tests or something, and these websites tell them that they must move to whiter suburbs with better schools.  This is of course bullshit, because most of these parents spend their time checking their iPhone or shushing their kids instead of developing their intellect and their capacity for critical thought, so I don't believe they're that concerned about real education (they are, of course, concerned about the type of exclusive credentials that will allow their kids to continue the cycle of finding personal satisfaction by stepping on others).

Anyway, the problem is that then the schools in my neighborhood do suffer somewhat, because the parents and kids with the most social capital and the highest disposable incomes (read investments in extracurricular enrichment) end up leaving.  Seeing this, and aspiring themselves to the lifestyle of excluding and stepping on others, the relatively upwardly-mobile Latino neighbors in our area then follow the whites to farther suburbs.  Many people close to us have succumbed to this logic.  Often they too are trying to get away from all the dirty brown people (which of course doesn't describe them--they're special, clean brown people).  We even had a Colombian-American friend who was lamenting the racism her kid encountered at his all-white school.  We asked her why she didn't move to a neighborhood with more Colombians, and she said, "No, they're disgusting.  Their dogs are always shitting on the sidewalk!"

At this point the schools really do start suffering, because all the middle-class people have pulled their kids out, and those who are left behind are the proletarian immigrant masses who don't have much time or resources to invest in their kids' formal schooling.  They, self-loathing and looking to get away from people who look and act like them, also move farther out as soon as they can.  At this point, the poor rich white folks have to move again, because the brown people they were trying to get away from ended up following them.  I imagine this is the same thing that happened in Chicago neighborhoods like South Shore that went from white mixed-class to black mixed-class to black underclass.  At each step of the way, the upwardly mobile subset of the socially "inferior" group moved closer to people they thought of as more in line with their station, but those people didn't want to be near these inferior souls, and so moved elsewhere.

One way to get around this silly game that has caused so much oppression and angst and suffering (and environmental destruction and needless construction and pathological moving from house to house!) would be if no one thought themselves superior to anyone else.  Such an attitude could give rise to a general solidarity among people, a recognition that the problems of MY COMMUNITY are problems I have a part in, and whose solutions I must have a part in, instead of our current attitude of running away from problems we blame on the other people around us.  If white Anglos had thought this way of ethnic white and black migrants, if immigrants thought this way of their fellow immigrants, if professionals and wealthy people thought this way of their less-fortunate neighbors, we would be able to develop the communities we live in, instead of a fleeting "development of ourselves" by moving elsewhere.  We wouldn't have so many problems of the concentrated poor (addiction, violence, deprivation, antisocial tendencies) or of the concentrated rich (also addiction, violence, deprivation, and antisocial tendencies).

Christians on immigration reform

This article describes the Evangelical Christian block that is at the vanguard of immigration reform.  This is one of the few times since the Civil Rights movement when I am aware of self-identified Christians actually acting as such in a meaningful way.  One of the central tenets of Libration Theology is Matthew 25:35, where Christ insists that whatever we to do help or harm our fellow humans, we in fact do to Him.  Apparently these Evangelicals also took that verse to heart.

Manual everything

Here is an article my cousin sent me recently about how people can hack a car's keyless entry system.  While the thieves' technological route of doing so is novel and creative, I wasn't surprised by it.  To me it has never seemed like a good idea to entrust the basic functions of your car, or any other important system you rely on, to remote-operation devices.  Keyless ignitions in particular have always seemed like a horrible idea to me.  As often happens, you're gaining some supposed convenience by sacrificing control over your own affairs.  On the other hand, if you opt to do more things for yourself, you will feel and in fact be more empowered, and leave fewer things open to outside tampering.  That's why, when given a choice, I will always opt for manual transmissions, real physical key-operated locks, even roll-down windows.  Such stripped-down features also drive down gas consumption and often car price.  The problem is that, in the US at least, these options are often no longer available to us.  Anyone who has gone to a car dealership and asked for a car with the theoretically available manual transmission option will understand what I'm talking about.  When the new "normal" is power-everything, TV screens in every seat, and a bunch of other flashy, needless features, it can be next to impossible to get something more simple--it can even end up costing more, since they need to special order it.  As I mentioned in a recent post, when you're living in a crazy society, it can be lonely, even impossible, to be normal yourself!

Excellent article on what Ferguson means

This is another in the NYT series of interviews with philosophers about race.  I think it is the strongest of the series.  Professor Naomi Zack gives a clear, non-polemical explanation of what is at stake with Ferguson, North Charleston, and the countless other instances in which black lives, American lives, have been wasted and desecrated.

Here is Professor Zack's adroit redefinition of "white privilege", a term I personally have never been very satisfied with:

"The term 'white privilege' is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right.  But I think that is what 'white privilege' is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do. I was talking to a white friend of mine earlier today. He has always lived in the New York City area. He couldn’t see how the Michael Brown case had anything to do with him. I guess that would be an example of white privilege."

By Ms. Zack's rendering, whites do not so much enjoy special privileges as they are simply treated the way people are supposed to be treated.  (Actually white folks do benefit from a number of outright privileges beyond their just due, like having people overlook typos when they make them, overlook their inadequacies in the workplace, etc., but let's not get into that for now).  It's like the old Chris Rock routine.  Not being falsely imprisoned isn't a privilege, it's what's supposed to happen in a civilized society.  Not getting shot for no reason isn't a privilege; no one should get shot for no reason.  If it were up to me, we'd stop talking about "white privilege" and use a term like "oppression of nonwhites", which I believe rightly removes the focus from the positive normal situation and directs it to the denial of normalcy to certain groups, which is after all the problem we're trying to resolve.  I'm not attempting to tiptoe around white sensibilities, but rather call things out for what they are.  If you tell white folks (or anyone, for that matter), that what they know they are entitled to (in this case, common decency) is an undeserved privilege, you are first of all wrong, but you furthermore will lose the ear and the sympathy of these people.  If on the other hand you make it clear that decent treatment is a right for everyone, and you point out the tangible ways in which the present state of affairs denies certain groups these rights, you may make allies of these whites, who are after all the ones you want to listen up and stop being oppressive.

A side note to bolster my case.  Once you start defining privilege not as an extra goodie that people get above and beyond what they're entitled to (which is the real definition), but rather as the relative well-being of one group as compared to another (which is how "privilege" is misused in the term "white privilege"), then you spiral into unproductive cycles of accusation, guilt, and dismissal of valid concerns.  This is because almost any group in today's hyper-connected world, and certainly any group in the most powerful country in this world, can be shown to be "above" some other group on the ladder of [usually unwitting] exploitation and oppression.  The white citizen in the US is much less likely to get shot by police than a black man.  That unarmed black man's choices in clothes, food, and political candidates have effects on workers in the many countries in the world that are under the cultural, economic, and political sway of the US.  Those workers in Vietnam or Honduras benefit from (and vote for) national policies in their countries that keep food prices low in the city, and thus immiserate their peasant brethren that are trying to make a living by selling these food crops.  Those peasants cut down rainforest and plant coca, thus completing the cycle as they contribute to pollution and addiction in the community where the white citizen is trying to raise his kids.  We're all connected in relations of oppressor and oppressed, or simply "privileged" and unprivileged, so if you condemn one group for the "privileges" it enjoys as compared to another group, you'd have to invalidate every group's claims for justice for itself too, because every victim is also in some other way an oppressor.  Such reasoning is a paralyzing way to think; it was the same reasoning that led apartheid-era whites in South Africa to argue that blacks there had no right to complain of the very real oppression they suffered, because their objective living standards were in fact higher than the black populace of any other African country at the time.  Those people lucky enough to live lives relatively free from oppression should not be scolded or told to ignore the aspects in which they do suffer; there is no such thing as "excessive" rights. 

If, on the other hand, you focus not on what legitimate rights the dominant group in a society holds, but rather on the legitimate rights denied to oppressed groups in the society, you begin to get somewhere.  In this logic, you are no longer paralyzed by your supposed privilege.  Your claims and causes are not invalidated by the other aspects in which you are comfortable and your rights respected.  No, when we truly seek out oppression and attempt to stamp it out at its root, we are all empowered.  The white citizen can work to fight pollution and addiction in his neighborhood.  The black US citizen can demand that police respect black lives.  The black South African can demand an end to apartheid.  And in the meanwhile, to the degree that our enjoyment of decent treatment in society is at the expense of another group, we must also fight that, or at least accept the validity of that group's fighting the oppression we cause.  If the white citizen working to curb pollution in his community also happens to be a cop who harasses and threatens blacks, he's got to change, or at least understand when those he hurts fight back.  The Honduran citydweller has a right to demand better pay from the clothing factories that cater to US tastes and budgets, but she also must stop benefiting from unjust laws that give her cheap food at the expense of farmer income and dignity.

Anyway, getting back to Professor Zack, I liked this quote from her too:

"In the normal course of events, in the fullness of time, these differences will even out. But the sudden killings of innocent, unarmed youth bring it all to a head."

She shows a calm and magnanimity that is rare in the heated discussions about race in the US.  I find that often people who work and think on issues of racial injustice in the US get so [justifiably] worked up, and so zealously pursue a guilty party, that they lose the sympathy and the complicity (if there was any to begin with) of the very people whose ear and collaboration they need.  Pointing out white folks' share of guilt for the injustices in our society is the right thing to do.  But again, if you focus too much on white guilt, you lose the attention and sympathy of the most important audience, the very white people whom you need to stop oppressing others.  This then means that they can continue to act as if our society's disrespect for black lives is simply someone else's problem.  Such a sentiment is of course fundamentally wrong, because these black lives are not the lives of some "other", but rather the lives of our neighbors, our coworkers, our compatriots, our fellow voters and taxpayers and creators that all of us rely on to keep the society working.

Again quoth Ms. Zack:  "In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread 'broken windows' policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first. All of that surplus military gear now stands behind such actions, and should offend members of the public who protest."

How can anyone in their right mind believe that the militarization of our police, the mutation of "to serve and protect" into aggressive pursuit of civilians as targets, is somehow a problem that doesn't affect us all?

I don't know if the ultimate goal is or should be to enter a post-racial moment.  I'm not naive enough to insist on a colorblind society, and certainly not to believe that we already live in one.  As Ms. Zack says, "We cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right."  That said, I aspire to a day when the racial differences between different people are simply not as important to those people as their common investment a shared society.  In such a society, blacks and whites would remain different and conscious of that difference, but they would also recognize the fundamental importance and humanity and right to decency of the other group.

I once again love Ms. Zack's very practical, matter-of-fact treatment of this.  "If America is going to become post-racial, it will be important to get the police on board with that. But it’s not that difficult to do. A number of minority communities have peaceful and respectful relations with their local police. Usually it requires negotiation, bargaining, dialogue — all of which can be set up at very little cost. In addition, police departments could use intelligent camera-equipped robots or drones to question suspects before human police officers approach them. It’s the human contact that is deadly here, because it lacks humanity. Indeed, the whole American system of race has always lacked humanity because it’s based on fantastic biological speculations that scientists have now discarded, for all empirical purposes."

Losing eye contact

This is a disturbing article on the possible connection between excessive use of screen technology by kids and the loss of their capacity to interact normally with other people.  Anecdotally, I feel like I've noticed that kids who use a lot of iPads and iPhones and general iShit are less socially graceful.  They don't talk as naturally to adults or even to other kids.  Indeed, there are many youngsters (and their parents!) who think nothing of a kid's busting out some handheld device and playing a game in the middle of a social occasion like a meal at a restaurant.  There could be nothing more socially inappropriate than this.

Both of my kids are still pretty young for electronic devices, especially given their parents' relatively hardline stance on the issue.  I'd say that most of their friends still don't seem to get much screen time at this tender age, either.  But a few do spend a lot of time hooked up to an entertainment machine, and you can often see that they just don't seem to value or understand human interaction the same way as the screen-free kids do. 

I'm not as worried about my kids' becoming more or less normal, well-adjusted social beings--Caro and I make that a priority in our parenting.  By normal I mean people with a sense of their place in a larger society, both what they are entitled to and what they owe to the collective.  By normal I mean people who exercise their minds and bodies instead of passively ingesting consumer products and experiences.  By normal I mean people who understand that sometimes you should tirelessly go after what you want, and sometimes you need to just accept and deal with the present situation.  By normal I mean people that find wonder and terror and joy and sadness in life, that create and believe in things and sometimes sink into despair; this is in contrast to people who consciously or unconsciously flatten out all of life's majesty and drama by devoting themselves to pursuits that ultimately don't matter at all beyond the fleeting "buzz" they may provide.  

What I'm very worried about is that my kids will be among the few normal ones in a sea of other people who've been acculturated to a totally insane way of living--watching TV, playing violent games, looking at a screen all the time, eating poorly, never having a quiet moment, consuming constantly (from food to toys to paid experiences).  Thus far I've felt that our definition of normal, well-adjusted kids coincides with the values of a lot of people in Colombia, while in the US it's hard to find people and kids that aren't caught up in a whole slew of things we just consider bizarre.  But the onslaught of electronic devices, consumerist parenting and childhood, pathological individualism and a quest for total control, junk food, and so many other things that I blame for the generalized social maladjustment in the US, are now advancing to all corners of the world.  You can even find peasant kids in Colombia these days who sit and watch TV or play with their phones instead of helping their parents on the farm.  What will it serve my kids to be normal if everyone else has gone crazy?  Who will they hang out with and relate to?

Walking the Revolution in San Salvador

                San Salvador is a city designed for cars.  Perhaps for this reason it is best experienced on foot.  To get to know it, to get a taste of everyday life for most of its inhabitants, you have to walk the streets.  This is true of most cities; indeed the best, most vibrant cities, Paris or Manhattan, Venice or Cartagena, are eminently walkable cities, cities defined by the people and places you run into when you’re on foot.

                San Salvador is not such a city.  It is a car-centered city par excellence, with smooth blacktop streets to draw the envy of any California low-rider, bordered by pocked, cracked, chasm-ridden sidewalks to rival the decadence of Port-au-Prince.  Everything in the city is an aggressive proclamation of scorn for pedestrians, and since no more than 10 or 20 percent of people here have cars, the contrast between street and sidewalk is perhaps a fitting allegory for Salvadoran society overall.  The ubiquitous catering to the tastes and lifestyle of a razor-thin elite stratum of the people, the neglect and even active humiliation of the proletarian majority.

                This is why you must walk San Salvador to really know it, to identify with the popular majority and understand the dynamic of scorn and exclusion that has long defined life for them.  You can feel something similar by walking the inner suburban fringes of many major US cities, where the low-income workers that keep the economy running either in exurban malls farther out or chic urban centers farther in must walk long distances along unshaded, intermittent sidewalks next to raging rivers of deadly vehicles, or wait in the nighttime cold for buses that rarely come.  In such contexts most people, even those marginalized by this car-based culture, understandably opt to ride in these deadly vehicles, either private or collective.  In the process they of course add further to the danger of the streets and the desolation of the sidewalks.  But if you do choose to join the meager trickle of those few who brave the landscape on foot, you can learn a lot about life in these places, learn about the larger society from a vantage point alien to most in that society.

                Many people will tell you that San Salvador is too dangerous to walk in, that crime is so rampant you’ll get mugged or worse.  Almost by definition, these tend to be people that have never themselves walked in the city, some of them despite having lived there their entire lives.  Their fear may be genuine, though inaccurate, or it may simply be a more socially acceptable way of saying that they don’t want to interact with any humans outside of their own social or racial group.  Either way, if you do walk the city despite their advice, you’ll find that the major threat is from careless, arrogant drivers, which is to say from some of the very people warning you of the dangers of the streets.  You will most likely not be accosted by roving marauders.  The busy streets with infrequent crosswalks and even fewer traffic lights, the underpasses and overpasses that allow drivers on two intersecting busy streets to continue at full speed, while pedestrians must come to a full stop and engineer a way to continue beyond sidewalks that dead-end; these are the true dangers of San Salvador.

                You can test this for yourself walking some of the grittiest-looking sectors of central San Salvador.  Do not walk in Soyapango, a slum sister city to the east of San Salvador that concentrates much of the homicide in the area.  But you can walk from the soccer stadium through lonely streets of walled and fenced buildings, to Parque Cuzcatlan full of living of all ages, (on the soccer fields, under tree-lined esplanades, walking their dogs), and dead of all ages too, memorialized on the black granite wall etched with the names of victims of forced disappearances, massacres, and assassinations over decades of grueling civil war.  From there you can continue towards the center of town, one of the few areas with what might be called a streetscape, as graffitied walls topped with concertina wire and broken glass give way to businesses and offices that open directly onto the sidewalk.  You start to see more and more people and fewer cars, culminating when you get to a few square blocks in the true center of town, where pedestrians and merchants have totally overrun the streets.  The market stalls selling socks, fruit, CDs, toys, gradually move from the fringes of the roadway into the very middle, eventually with cement-and-tile floors raised from the street surface that show just how long ago the cars were chased away.

                There is no rampant violence here, no terrifying gangland massacres, just hordes of people buying and selling, sitting or strolling, eating or heading to church, and a constant song of “el mango la cora la cora la cora”, “cuadernos la cora la cora la cora”, “medias veladas la cora la cora la cora”, “cora” of course being the Salvadoran rendering of the US 25 cent piece that seems to represent the standard price for everything in this dollarized economy.  If you buy anything, don’t be dismayed at the yellow Chuck-e-Cheese tokens that you get for change.  They’re not pawning off counterfeit money on the foreigner; it’s just the failed Sacagawea and presidential gold dollar coins that the US Mint has been trying to push for decades now.

                Go to Mass in the cathedral.  Its original vibrant façade created by Fernando Llort, El Salvador’s leading artist, has been removed, but the spirit of solidarity and revolutionary love has not been whitewashed from the preaching within the church.  Thirty-five years after the death of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Catholic Church in El Salvador continues to exhibit an inspiring commitment to social justice.  From the bishop’s homilies in the Cathedral to the sermons in nondescript parish churches, there is no let-up in the call for Catholics to fight injustice, to work with and for the poor, to tear down the prejudice and exclusion that still plague Salvadoran society.  After Mass you must go down to pay your respects to Monsenor Romero, whose crypt bedecked with homemade posters from the faithful is both a site of pilgrimage and devotion as well as a primer on the progressive Church today in Latin America.  You can wait in an unmoving line for half an hour with peasants come in from their villages, waiting to get their religious and civil documents ratified, before you realize that Romero’s tomb is not hidden behind the door at the end of the line, but right behind you, open to all with a bronze statue of the Archbishop in repose.  If you look foreign and simple and hauntedly pious (which looks remarkably similar to just being sweaty after a long walk), your peasant linemates may ask if you are with The Company, presumably meaning the Jesuits.  You can wish you were, wish you’d been in the front lines in the 1970s and 1980s with Father Rutilio and the many other Jesuits who stood by the poor and paid for it with their lives, back when the root of injustice was held within a regime with a name, and not dispersed confusingly throughout a nominally free society.

                If you want to see really seedy neighborhoods, there are plenty of those.  They are just as fenced and walled and boarded up as neighborhoods of every other class in San Salvador, but there are fewer attempts to make them look respectable, there are more indigent people living under overpasses, more feces and garbage on the sidewalks.  The seedy, smoggy area around the bus station is vibrant with businesses catering to motorists—auto repair of all types, gas stations, upholsterers.  To the south of the center, however, it’s just like a ghost town, especially of a Sunday morning after Mass.  But no one will bother you, not even the ghosts of people living between cardboard and blankets, vibrant life scooped out of them by poverty and addiction, as you walk through on the way to greener surroundings, namely the excellent zoo with its unfenced Monkey Island, or the quirky, undervisited agro-natural history-Japanese culture-peace park created by a Japanese textile tycoon whose heart belonged to El Salvador. 

If you wander the neighborhoods around these verdant parks, you will suspect that they are upscale, though they might actually be downscale people attempting to look upscale, with well-manicured mini-lawns and hard-to-get-to, winding cul-de-sacs.  In much of San Salvador it is hard to get a fix on which residential neighborhoods are middle-class or better, and which are on the lower end of the class spectrum.  Most residential blocks consist in long, continuous walls lining the sidewalk, broken only by garage doors and changes in paint color.  In other words, they are uniformly ugly, regardless of the income of their denizens.  On the other hand, Salvadorans (as many other peoples of the world) seem to be convinced that living well is less about enjoying what you have and more about making others feel less than you.  Since this ethic informs the architecture and style of neighborhoods rich and poor alike, it reinforces their homogeneity.  Could it be that a collective obsession with excluding others has leveled the class structure in some sense by making everywhere universally ugly and hostile?  Again, this does not seem far from the aesthetic of most of US suburbia, where rich and poor alike are united by pretense and exclusion of others.

You can check out the supposedly hip, fun part of town along the Bulevar de los Heroes, though you will quickly realize that for many people “hip” and “fun” mainly means possessing of many fast food restaurants.  Here as in other neighborhoods, you’ll be surprised at the lack of middle-income dining options.  There are air-conditioned, cordoned-off fast food chains catering to those with money, and iron huts directly on the sidewalk serving bean-filled pupusas to eat standing up or sitting on an iron stool set into the concrete.  But for sit-down places with modest prices for actual complete meals, you’re out of luck in most of San Salvador.  A glaring exception is Los Tacos de Paco, which from outside looks like an auto body shop or a Colombain roadside barbecue joint, but inside is home to delicious tacos, thoughtful, simple paintings, and books of revolutionary poetry, history, and art.  This is all under the care of the eponymous Paco, a Mexican transplant whom you’ll find either sauteeing up your taco meat or working on his latest rendering of the San Salvador cathedral or the city’s skyline.  He will also make detailed book recommendations for you, and ring you up when you buy an armload of puzzles, poetry, and children’s anthologies.

You can pass by the University of El Salvador and see the bright-eyed kids kissing and catching buses and dreaming about the future, or go to the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen and learn from former guerrilleros about the past.  You can visit a ceramic workshop run entirely by deaf artisans, or go to the popular art museum to see miniature figurines made in a village with clay-working roots stretching back before the Spanish arrived.

Are you up for a long, ungratifying walk on busy, smoggy streets, your only human contact the occasional bank or auto shop security guard who’s surprised when you acknowledge his humanity with a nod or a smile?  If so, you can get to some holy places.  Perhaps the holiest place in the Hemisphere.  It’s a chapel called el Hospitalito, and it is where Monsenor Romero was assassinated in 1980 while consecrating the Eucharist.  Assassinated because he spoke for the poor and the oppressed, in a way that few who reach positions of power are brave enough to do.  You can sit and pray in the chapel, which has a calm beauty to it despite its angular 1950s design.  The breeze wafts through open slats in the concrete wall, and ruffles heliconia flowers in brass vases.

Another holy place is way to the south of town, in a comfortable area of gated streets.  Yes, many ostensibly public side streets have gates and guards at either end to protect the residents from outsiders.  You can ask yourself who protects them from themselves as they’re shut in their houses.  Amid these residential side streets and youth-centered commercial drags, there is a serene, expansive college campus.  Show your ID, walk down lanes lined with emerald tropical exuberance.  Enter the nondescript residence hall, then a room within it housing display cases of bloody robes, burnt books, bullet-ridden religious icons.  This is where six Jesuit priests and two women who worked for them were executed, then their dwelling thoroughly sprayed by machine guns and lit afire.  This was not long ago, 1989.  You might have been watching “Muppet Babies” at the exact moment it happened.  

If you are on a business trip, you will inevitably end your walk around town at your hotel in the Zona Rosa and Colonia Escalon, the truly opulent part of San Salvador.  Here the walls are older, higher, more elegant than elsewhere, and the junk food restaurants even more abundant and varied.  The vista from your hotel room at night is of gleaming signs for every US fast food chain imaginable.  No one in the history of the US has ever eaten willingly at a Denny’s—it’s usually the only option on a lonely highway, or seems like a great 4am idea to youngsters under the influence of some mind-altering chemical.  But in San Salvador, the grand opening of Denny’s was a huge event, and it still seems to occupy a prominent place in the culinary map of the Zona Rosa. 

This neighborhood does have its gems though.  An excellent museum of anthropology, an artisan market not too dominated by tacky imported junk, a convention center where you can catch an annual exposition by local orchid enthusiasts, an art museum that in two hours will take you through the fascinating and little-known trajectory of Salvadoran painting and sculpture.  In the middle of the posh stores and walled manses rises a towering mosaic dedicated to the Revolution, a sort ofPrometheus breaking free of his chains and reaching skyward.  If you look too much into it, you’ll learnthat it merely commemorates the deposition of one military dictator by anotherin the late 1940s.  But it’s more poetic, and perhaps truer, to think of it as a monument to the revolution that Monsenor Romero wanted, that humble working people wanted, maybe even the one that the FMLN guerrilla wanted—not a strict dictatorship of the proletariat, but a place where the poor could at least live unpersecuted, able to raise a family in peace and dignity.  You can think that this is an unfinished revolution, since it didn’t triumph resoundingly but was rather subsumed into the peace accords in 1992. 

Or you can think that it’s best the Revolution didn’t win resoundingly only to later succumb to abuse or ineptitude.  You can think it profoundly marked the heart of El Salvador, to the point where 20 years later the Catholic hierarchy really preaches and practices solidarity with the marginalized, the people commemorate victims but also try to move on and forgive, the former guerrilla movement wins the presidency for multiple terms by adopting a conciliatory tone while still striving to make society more inclusive.  You are after all in Central America, a region uniformly hostile to US imperialism where half the Spanish language has been replaced by Anglicisms, in San Salvador, where a monument to the Revolution stands watch over the neighborhood of the landed aristocracy.

In a land where stark differences abound yet clean generalizations are impossible to make, perhaps this nuanced sense of the revolution has the most promise.  It is not a revolution to create a perfect society from scratch, but rather to coax a liveable society from deeply flawed raw material.  If realized, even this modest revolution would be such as the world has never seen before.

Wendell Berry on rural life and ecological complexity

Here is an essay by Wendell Berry on the present and the future of the rural US, where fewer and fewer people live from the land and hence act as observers and stewards of the land.  If you've read much Berry, he's not saying anything very new or different here.  But these themes that he keeps returning to just become more and more relevant, the problems he explores becoming more and more extreme.  He also reminds us of the complexity of nature, and how even conservation scientists in the US (where scientists are abundant and very active) are unable to explain much of what is happening in broad swaths of our environment, when they're not totally unaware of what is happening there.  Not a promising prospect.

Race and rational modernity

Here is another selection from the NYT's series on race and philosophy, in which the interviewee touches on a subject dear to my heart, the inevitable reality of subjectivity in academic fields that purport to be objective and removed from the particular identity of their practitioners.  "If we were to acknowledge the relevance of identity to knowledge, the solution would not be simplistic diversity quotas, but a real engagement with the question of how our unspoken epistemic hierarchies have distorted our educational institutions, research projects, academic and scientific fields of inquiry and general public discourse across all of our diverse forms of media."

Flawed thinking on crime prevention

This is an article from a seemingly very knowledgeable commentator who calls into question Rudy Giuliani's crime prevention strategy of harassing people for petty crimes in order to prevent more serious ones like homicide.  This strategy is also known as the "broken window" approach, in reference to the idea that if a house in a neighborhood has a broken window that doesn't get fixed, the house and eventually the neighborhood will spiral downward as fewer people get motivated to keep them up.  This seems to be confirmed by common sense and anecdotal experience.  The larger claim, that such minor cosmetic problems of "disorder" can eventually lead to higher rates of serious crimes like murder, seems a bit silly to me, and is apparently not very solidly supported by the evidence.  In the particular case of Central America's Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala), the heavy-handed approach has already shown itself wanting after the "Mano Dura" policies of a few years ago, and the further harassing and marginalizing of people in impoverished neighborhoods by police doesn't seem to me a very sure route to solving the problems of economic inequality, exclusion, fear, and resentment that define these post-war societies.