Steve Jobs

A few years ago I read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, after having it sit on a shelf for a long while. I'm not much of a biography person, and I'm certainly not into biographies on modern, pop-culture people. But at some point this book piqued my curiosity, and so I slogged through it. It is well-researched and well-written, a very good read; it held my attention throughout, even though I never had much particular interest in Steve Jobs before reading it.

The book touched on a lot of themes that I think about often, relating to technology, mass consumerism, personal behavior vs. professional impact.  Jobs's life ends up being a case study for me of a way of living life and shaping the world that I profoundly disagree with.

In the initial chapters, the young Jobs comes off as an irritating twit, focused on superficial, consumerized forms of intellect and spirituality.  He's into weird diets, weird New Age religions, everything is extreme, nothing moderated, and most extreme of all is his rejection of past ways of doing this or that in favor of constant (often futile) novelty.  He is not concerned with the social issues around him, evinces little interest in other parts of the world, and doesn't seem to care much about morality.  In short, Jobs in this biography seems to think he’s above it all, which is pretty much how a paramilitary warlord operates in Colombia.

I wasn't so stricken by his disagreeable personality though, but rather by this superficiality, this almost willful obliviousness to anything pertaining to real life and death issues. Jobs seems to ease off of many of his silly fads and caprices by mid-life, but he is still focused on finding transcendence through distracting gizmos and pretty plastic shapes.  I understand that not everyone has to be nor should be Malcolm X or some other valiant fighter against social injustice, but Jobs as presented in the biography comes off as exceptionally apathetic socially, at the same time that he elevates what are ultimately trivial issues of product design into an almost holy, noble pursuit.  The righteous indignation that is totally dormant when faced by the world's problems around him, becomes awakened and even despotic when faced by a question of rounded vs. squared edges or plexiglass vs. real glass screens.

Jobs constantly describes himself as being at the interface of art and technology, and I respect his impulses and achievements in this vein; Pixar movies have been a real contribution to our cultural canon, and the original visual Macintosh interface set the paradigm for computing thereafter, all the way up to the smart phones and tablets of today.  But at the same time, Jobs is neither much of an artist nor a tech guy as such.  He does not seem to have been an exceptional intellect either, and initially not a good businessman, driving Apple from almost 100% market share in personal computing in the early 80s to being a bit player in the 90s (though his business acumen seems to have sharpened fabulously in his second stint at Apple). 

No, Steve Jobs's gift seems to have been to synthesize ideas, to know what might play well in the consumer world, and to pitch things well.  This is no small accomplishment.  His genius was somewhere between design and showmanship.  I think a lot of people I know might have been able to do what he did, if they found themselves in his place and time.  But at any rate, Jobs was a man who knew how to live in his time and identify and push the things that would define the era.

I don’t like Jobs's dictatorial approach to electronics, and that’s why I’ve never liked using Apple computers ever since the first time I tried a non-Apple computer.  From early on, Apple produced "closed-box" products, meaning things that you couldn't modify as a user.  Jobs believed in the right of an elite to have special privileges and to dictate terms for everyone else, and he was against people's deciding for themselves how to do things.  This last point is illustrated well and made explicit by the author of the biography, who contrasts Jobs's self-image as a swashbuckler fighting against a stultified system, with the overdesigned, inflexible, non-modifiable products he created.  

I understand and even respect Jobs's vision of an integrated system between computer, software, and devices, and I appreciate his striving for friendly, intuitive interfaces.  In fact, Apple's business model is a bit like the artisanal, hand-crafted vision I often advocate for in the sectors of food, crafts, and industry in general.  But Apple's vision doesn’t leave room for tinkerers, free-thinkers, anyone who doesn’t think that Jobs’s cute, integrated, “intuitive” way of doing things is the way they want to do things.  The author captures this very well, and points out the tension between the reality of a mammoth, somewhat dictatorial company and the rebellious, free-thinking image Jobs wanted to project.   If you don’t like how Jobs wants you to do something, you won’t be happy using an Apple product.   And that’s why I don’t use them.  It is once again a case of researchers and the market trying to force their way on the rest of us. 

An insidious legacy of Apple's integrated-content model is the proliferation of apps and closed networks on the internet, a la Facebook.  I have written on a number of occasions about the danger of closing ourselves off from the fully-open Internet.  I don’t want tobuy apps to filter the world for me and entertain me. I want to roam the Internet freely and investigate the things that interest me, without anyone pre-selecting content for me. 

My final take after reading Jobs's biography, and then reflecting a great deal on the implications of his vision of technology and Apple's role in the world, is that I'm glad that Apple exists, and I'm also glad that it holds only a minority share in most markets (especially over time).  Apple can design new, innovative ways of doing things, and the image they promote keeps some people using their products despite many shortcomings.  In turn, these good innovations get swept up (pirated, if you will) by other companies to incorporate in their designs, and consumers can decide if they like these features or not, thus removing them from Apple’s dictatorial, all-or-nothing design.  So I like that Apple keeps innovating, though I don’t want to use their products.  I prefer a freer model where their innovations get stolen and passed to the rest of us in a more flexible form!

I will close with a short reflection on the role of technology in art and meaningful human experience.

We don’t get better art from new technology per se.  Technological change can open new areas of media, like film or digital performance pieces, and can open new horizons within existing art forms, but it can’t improve the basic process of writing or creating.  The art that speaks to us does so because it touches on timeless human themes like love, loss, war, nature.  

Here’s a quote from a New Yorker article on Amazon that I discussed in a blog some time ago:

“Book publishing always has a rhetoric of the fallen age,” a senior editor at a major house told me. “It was always better before you got here. The tech guys—it’s always better if you just get out of my way and give me what I want. It’s always future-perfect.” He went on, “Their whole thing is ‘Let’s take somebody’s face and innovate on it. There’s an old lady—we don’t know we’re innovating unless she’s screaming.’ A lot of it is thoughtless innovation.”

I think “future-perfect”’ is a very apt term to describe how Jobs and many others in Silicon Valley see the world.  They have a [borderline sociopathic] urge to tear down the existing, established world, and a similarly fanatical, blind faith that the future will be better, that innovation of any type is better than stasis.  If objective quality or measures of human wellbeing are negatively impacted by innovation, then either those measures must be wrong, or they weren't worth paying attention to anyway.

This is the irony of the tech-worshippers, who look ever forward.  They are almost willfully blind to the fact that the things that define humans, that bring us true joy, are timeless and haven’t changed much over human existence.  Family, work well done, sex, good food--if a technology can tangibly affect and improve our enjoyment of these things, then it is a real accomplishment.  Examples are the communication technology and transport that bring us closer to family, refrigerators to preserve our food and bring us food from afar, condoms to make sex safer, wash machines to free up time to spend with family.  Health technology has brought perhaps the most clear improvement of our basic wellbeing and the things that matter.

However, many of the major breakthroughs in life-improving technology came 50-100 years ago, and subsequent technology is often a lot of white noise with just a few gems (the Internet among them).  New movie special effects, new iPhone apps, new car optional features, do not in my eyes markedly improve the human condition or bring us more contact with the true meaningful things.  In this degree such innovation is so much wasted endeavor.

Urban booms for the rich

On a recent trip to Washington, DC, I was fascinated to see the cranes and skyscrapers going up in Crystal City, Arlington.  I was envious of DC, with its long-lasting real estate boom, high property values, and general status as "place to be" for the go-getters of US society.  At the same time, I am critical of many of these trends, since they point to larger themes in our society that are not so good:  concentration of wealth and power in a few urban centers populated by young professionals yet unaffordable to most families; the earning of vast amounts of wealth through rent-seeking connections to public funds as opposed to honest market competition and provision of goods and services to the masses; real estate bubbles that are destined to burst at some point.

But on this particular trip, I was simply awed by the shiny boomtimes in this corner (and many corners) of the DC area, and I wondered if my criticisms and concerns were just sour grapes from a Rust Belt dweller.  I have since gotten over that insecurity, in part because my trip to Chicago shortly thereafter took me through boom areas that dwarfed Crystal City or any other DC development hub.  I was amazed in Chicago to see skyscrapers still springing up at a rapid clip in the South Loop, and even in Streeterville, which I wouldn't have imagined could get any more densely populated.  At the same time, I appreciate that Chicago, unlike DC, still has enough low- and middle-income neighborhoods and vacant land that property values and rents can't go quite so astronomically high; you're always just a short El ride away from $1000/month apartments that are on the edge of, but not submerged in, dangerous blighted areas.  I feel that this will ensure some buffer for years to come to families who want to be near all the benefits of central Chicago but can't afford the elite-area rents.

My cousin recently sent me an article though that has me wondering if all cities, from Chicago to DC, are in fact steadily pricing out normal people and becoming bastions only of the rich.  I'd encourage you to read it.  The basic thesis is that there is a perverse incentive for cities to try to attract childless high-wage singles and couples, because they pay taxes but don't use services like schools, and to push out poorer people with kids, who don't pay as much into the system and do require more public services.  Ideally a city would strive to keep both types of households; the childless rich can contribute economic resources to the city, but rooted families are the ones that give it identity and culture and preservation and meaning.  I can see how this balance might be difficult in cities with a smaller geographical footprint like San Francisco or Washington, DC, or even a densely-populated megacity like New York City, where there just aren't that many places to build up more and thus relieve some of the pressure on the housing market.  But big Rust Belt cities like Chicago may be well-placed to strike a balance, since land and housing-stock aren't so scarce as to drive up prices and drive out the poor.  Here's to hoping.

Social scene for young black professionals in Chicago

This is a short article about a few different people trying to nourish the social options for young black professionals in Chicago.  One person interviewed is the younger brother of one of my best friends.  It appears that promoters of mainly-black social events in Chicago really face an uphill battle, because many venues see an black crowd and balk. 

I really applaud the young entrepreneurs profiled in the article.  While parties and happy hours may on the surface seem frivolous, these things are key to attracting and retaining young black professionals to Chicago.  If talented, upwardly mobile people in Chicago are excluded from social spaces of their own, and treated like second-class citizens, they will continue to flock to places like Atlanta or DC that, despite perhaps lacking in the sophistication and history that Chicago offers, seem to appreciate their young black folk more and offer them venues to have a good time.  The guys arranging parties and theme nights at clubs are probably doing more than most of us experts in social justice and community development in terms of stemming the exodus of black talent from Chicago, and keeping it as a viable, thriving city.

Peace agreement with FARC

Peace has finally been signed between the Colombian government and the FARC!  Today is the first day in my wife's and children's lives that their country's government is not in active civil war with the FARC.  It's big news, and we're all very happy.  The path forward is still a long one--the government is still in the process of signing peace with the ELN, Colombia's other major guerrilla group.  And civilians and ex-combatants from all sides will need to learn how to live with one another, and deal with perceived injustices in terms of how they or their former enemies are treated.  There will be a national referendum to approve the government's agreement.  I hope people don't let the warmongers convince them to annul the peace.


For complete coverage, you can read news from El Espectador at this link.

The liberating power of books

This is a sweet little reflection from Charles Blow of the New York Times about the importance of books in his family and his childhood.  I especially like this quote from James Baldwin that he includes:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I surely grew up in a setting and circumstances very different from Charles Blow or James Baldwin, but I can certainly relate to feeling like your life, your situation is totally aberrant from the norm promoted by pop culture.  But as you read and think and learn, you find connections, not only with others like you, but also with people, ideas, writers, stories that are very different from you on the surface, but that bear some fundamental commonality with your experience.  That for me is a great summary of the magic of reading.

Third World Green Daddy 64: Nostalgia for my dad

Some years ago I wrote about various ways that I was becoming like my father.  As I continue my slow journey into the depths of adulthood, I've dug up a lot of my dad's old things.  Reading books that haven't been touched in decades, and that were last touched by his hands, makes me feel closer to my departed father, and specifically to a younger version of him that I didn't get to know as well, since I was just a little oblivious baby back then. 

Along these lines I'm finishing a book with a 1983 copyright called How to take great trips with your kids.  I don't know if my dad ever even read this one, or if he simply bought it because it looked cool, and never had time to get to it.  In any case, he and I took a lot of good trips together, but I think things went so well less thanks to the advice of the book and more due to my dad's having a good sense of what could be interesting for me, as well as my own being a pretty taciturn kid, capable of sitting long stretches just looking out the car window at the countryside going by.  That said, I am enjoying reading the book.  It has a lot of advice that is really just common sense, but that I am always surprised to see few people following.  Things like planning a trip together as a family and always thinking of whether kids will be entertained or bored by proposed activities, scaling daily driving time to match what the kids can handle instead of what the adults can, putting the kids in charge of little things like packing the books and toys they want to bring along.  I feel validated to read in the book a lot of tricks that Caro and I have figured out by experimenting and trial and error.  And it's fun to see certain dated references, like lots of discussion of travel agents and traveler checks, and even a plug for this new invention called the box juice.  It appears that this book is now out of print, which makes sense, since a lot of cumbersome things travelers used to have to take care of themselves (looking up hotels, calling ahead to reserve and confirm, etc.) are now greatly aided by the Internet, so traveling doesn't require as much forethought.  Still though, I think it would behoove many of us to reach such a book, just to help us think things through despite the technology that allows us to be at times thoughtless in our planning.

Another bringer of joy that I forgot to mention in my long piece about our recent surge of materialism is the record of the Three Penny Opera's original first US run, with Lotte Lenya and an actress that was later on Golden Girls or something.  This was father's favorite play, Brecht's Three Penny Opera.  My folks took me to a production of it in a pretty rough part of Wicker Park, Chicago when I was maybe 8 or 10, and my dad often referenced the work, in addition to honoring its dark cynical teachings with much of his day-to-day thinking and commentary.  When I set up my sound system as an adolescent this was one of my favorite records, and indeed it was the major driver of my setting up the sound system again 15 years later when we moved to DC.  I still listen to this record maybe once a month, especially the 2nd act finale where the singers assert that "even saintly folk may act like sinners, unless they've had their customary dinners".  Such lines have stayed with me throughout life, inspiring not just my choice of profession, but also (I like to think) imbuing me with more sympathy and understanding even of people that others roundly condemn as immoral or criminal.

Lastly, I've just dug up a book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, written in 1987 by Paul Kennedy.  The book was written at the height of Reagan-era frets about the waning place of the US on the world stage, as Germany and Japan enjoyed seemingly unstoppable economic growth and China showed hints of a future drive to rapid industrialization and newfound dominance.  My dad would have been reading this book just as he was being laid off from a prestigious law job, his own personal taste of the explosive, precarious wealth of the 80s and the upcoming doldrums of the early 90s.  Most interesting of all is that my dad's copy has a business card from the Japanese consul to Chicago stuck in it as a bookmark.  There is handwriting on the card, with the name of this book and one other about the Japanese industrial machine, and the back of the card is written in Japanese characters.  I can only wonder what the back-story is, what might have taken my dad to the Japanese consulate at that moment, and who exactly gave him these book recommendations, and why.  It's like something out of a spy novel.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading the book, which traces the relative power positions of different countries in terms of military and economic might, from the 1500s to the late 20th century.  I especially want to see what the author's predictions are for the early 21st century that we're now living through.

These books and records and other memories of my dad make me feel, if momentarily, like I'm reliving the 1980s, reliving both my dad's entry into respectable adulthood and my own remembered bits of childhood.  So even as I'm stumbling through this somewhat joyless age of Trump and civilian murders, global warming and refugee crises, I enjoy the luxury of my low-tech virtual reality goggles, whereby I can overlay the past on myself and my kids, pretend that I'm my father as a young father, feeling his way through the late Cold War politics and postindustrial decay of 1980s Chicago, trying to teach my kid that there is still wonder and truth and nobleness in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary.  And we've got to not just seek out the noble and beautiful things, but also to make them ourselves and share them and participate in the suffering and the liberation of others.

Black secession

This is a thoughtful article predicting that, in the near future, black folks in the US will collectively opt out of the rest of society.  I'll let you read it yourselves to do it justice.

Adam Smith on inequality

Here is an analysis of Adam Smith's take on inequality.  Basically Smith worried that extreme inequality created a situation in which the wealthy and their concerns were so much more visible than the poor and their priorities, that society as a whole would identify with and value the rich more than they would feel solidarity with the poor.  I feel that this is an accurate description of the situation in the US and in many developing countries.  The wealthy and their concerns are so dominant in public discourse, and their lifestyles so heralded by the media, that all the rest of us, even the poor themselves, focus much of our concern on things that are really priorities for the rich.  We are all so busy aspiring to be part of the oppressive class that we don't look around and try to make life decent for our peers around us.  An extreme case in point is how people get so worked up about the importance of abolishing the estate tax, even though the estate tax benefits over 95% of society and only takes away from the ultra-rich.  But look around and you'll see this and countless other examples of the non-wealthy advocating for policies, attitudes, and other social arrangements that only benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.

I feel that a huge part of our relentless economic growth today in the US and elsewhere is driven by an equally relentless drive not to be comfortable or satisfied, but precisely to put ourselves above others, and to prevent others from rising above us.  See for example the constant packaging of things as exclusive, the desire to go to exclusive schools, clubs, neighborhoods, etc.  See too how the upwardly mobile seek endlessly to move physically far away from others whose economic status or skin color relegates them to a less prestigious position in society.

Furthermore, and despite the author's claim that Smith's concern about this sympathy aspect of inequality is very different from modern-day critiques of inequality, I feel that the modern-day concerns he cites are intimately linked with the issue of how inequality affects our sympathies.  The author says, "When people worry about inequality today, they generally worry that it inhibits economic growth, prevents social mobility, impairs democracy, or runs afoul of some standard of fairness."  But I feel that the perpetuation of inequality today, and many impacts like impairment of democracy and fairness, are precisely due to how inequality screws up our sense of sympathy.  If we didn't so identify with the concerns of the rich, we would never allow inequality to continue in its current extreme form, and we wouldn't allow the rich to effectively enjoy a double standard in our democratic and legal systems.

Chance the rapper

I am on my own this summer as my family visits Colombia.  Among other things, I've been thinking a lot about my youth and about Chicago.  This past week I've sort of revisited the rap music that I grew up with, and reflected ruefully that the ultra-violent, claustrophobic world described by Tupac on Me Against the World still seems to describe the present-day situation in large parts of Chicago.

Anyway, listening to Tupac got me thinking about newer artists that I've known existed but never checked out, busy as I was with living an adult life and raising a family.  Since I am currently on a sort of hiatus from my normal adult life and childrearing, I took the opportunity to check out Chance the Rapper's album Acid Rap.  Chance is a big deal.  He is a hot young Chicago rapper, and has gained as much fame for his unorthodox marketing style as for his clever, postmodern lyrics.  You see, Chance releases mix tapes for free, and I guess he makes his money through tours and things.  In so doing, he has turned the recording industry on its head, avoiding any binding commitments to labels and even services like Apple and Amazon.

I was really pleasantly surprised with Acid Rap (you can download it here; I hope I'm not circumventing Chance's control of the music by linking to this site, but Chance himself no longer offers the album on his own website).  Chance is a fast-tempo rapper, with great instrumentation and lyrics by turns silly, hyper-self-conscious, and socially aware.  I don't know enough about rap and trends to explain why, but it definitely has a "Chicago sound" to me, I think from the mix of complex themes, rapid-fire delivery, and lack of pretense.  So I definitely recommend it.

Chance has a new mixtape out called Coloring Book.  I can't say I like the one song I've heard from his new album, called No Problem, an Autotuned, southern-style collaboration with Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz where Chance doesn't really rap at all.  But I guess he deserves to goof around with a song or two (and bask in his success) after the steady stream of well-thought verses on Acid Rap.  Also, No Problem does have an interesting take on battle rap, since it's basically Chance challenging the record companies that he's managed to totally bypass in his rise to success.  I imagine Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz, two old dudes by now, must admire that Chance at less than 25 years of age has managed to do something they never did by redefining success totally free of any record label.  In this sense, he's the not the youngster bolstered by stars, but rather the wise sage in the video, simply giving a guest spot to two lesser beings.

Minister Valentino Achak Deng

This is a brief bit on Valentino Achak Deng, protagonist of the Dave Eggers semi-biographical novel What is the What.  It turns out that Mr. Deng's efforts to support education in his native South Sudan have evolved and deepened, to the point where he is now Education Minister for his home province. 

A historical reminder on direct civic action to achieve civil rights

This article aims to bust six myths about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as a retort to those who would claim that the Black Lives Matter movement has somehow strayed drastically from the values of its more respectable predecessor half a century before.  No, the article reminds us, Dr. King, Mrs. Parks, and their movement were not in fact supported by most citizens, staged highly calculated campaigns that aimed to disrupt the social, legal, and economic life of an unjust society, and were opposed and feared by the federal government.  Relegating the heroes of 50 years ago to some sort of tenderized, mascot status is a disservice to them, and renders them useless as inspiration and teachers in today's conflicts.

Chircales documentary

This is a pretty stark documentary about the brickmaking business in 1960s Colombia.  It goes into themes of land, power, politics, and economics.   A lot has changed since this film was made, but for me it still captures certain timeless aspects of Colombian society--enough wealth and sophistication to go around for everyone, but a suffocating inequality and oppression of some people at the hands of others.  The opening images of central Bogota show what was even then a cosmopolitan, prosperous, modern, beautiful city, and it clashes with the brutal, malicious deprivation and poverty of the brickworks.  And yet the peasants and laborers are such articulate, critical thinkers, with a nascent idea of the rights and services that society should rightfully offer them.  These poor people would be leaders and philosophers in any other context that gave them just a little bit of opportunity.  This consciousness is almost more cruel, since they are so fully aware of the injustice of the situation, but also of their total inability to escape it.  This acute awareness of inescapable injustice fueled the fires of the violent insurgency that has marked the past 50-plus years in the country.

None of this is too far off from today's Colombia, even though now more people have nice electronics, and machines have replaced a lot of the brute human labor.  Let's hope that the peace accords manage to right some of the prevalent injustice and malice in the country, so everyone can have a better tomorrow.

Carrying capacity of the US for different diet patterns

This is an article about the amount of land needed per person to support different types of diets.  The author summarizes an academic study (and links to the original) exploring how many people could be fed using the US's available crop and forage land, under different diet regimes.  As you'd expect, vegetarians and people who eat less meat require far less land than people eating lots of meat and processed foods--the US could feed about twice as many vegetarians as heavy meat-eaters.  One small surprise (for some) is that, according to the study's authors, vegan diets are actually not the most efficient users of land.  While land can support more people as their diets include less meat, eggs, and dairy, this trend changes as you approach the vegan diet of zero meat, eggs, and dairy (keep in mind that this says nothing about the total carbon emissions, water use, or other environmental impacts associated with animal production).  Hence the most efficient diets for making use of the available land in the US are those that derive some small proportion of their calories from animal products.  This makes sense if you understand farming and ranching--the latter gives a productive use to land that is too dry or otherwise unfit for crop production.  If you eat absolutely no animal products, that eliminates a huge swathe of the US land area from potentially contributing to your diet. 

In any case, most of us in the US are far on the other end of the spectrum from vegans, eating far more meat, eggs, and dairy than is healthy for us or for the planet.  We would do well to drastically reduce the quantity of animal products we consume since, unlike the vegans (who would theoretically leave a large amount of grazing land untapped for human sustenance), our sin consists in using more land than we should to feed animals instead of people.  The current US diet does not just make full use of grazing land unfit for crops, but in fact dedicates much of our prime agricultural land not to producing human food but rather corn and soybeans for feeding to animals.

July 4th as Pan-American holiday

This is a cool article (from the Wall Street Journal, of all places) about how, in the early 19th century, people in the US celebrated July 4th not just to mark their own independence, but to support and celebrate independence of the other American Republics, from Mexico to Argentina.  I've long wondered why we in the US don't identify more with the rest of the Hemisphere in that our anti-colonial struggle followed much the same trajectory (indeed, set the mold for) of the independence of countries in Central and South America.  A book I read recently about how we came to be largely anti-revolutionary goes a long way towards explaining our lack of Pan-American solidarity.  The WSJ article I'm now citing also points to the key role of slavery in making us more reticent about Latin America's independence wars, which quickly gave way to anti-slavery sentiments in a time when the US was still firmly committed to slavery.

Third World Green Daddy 63: Sustainable in DC

Three years ago, as my family readied itself to leave Colombia for a new life in Washington, DC, one of the things I worried about was losing the relatively sustainable, reponsible lifestyle we'd built for ourselves in our mountain home.

As I have noted in a prior blog post, moving itself is inherently unsustainable, entailing lots of waste and consumption and expenditure and emissions.  But once we got to Washington, DC, I was pleasantly surprised at some of the opportunities afforded us for living sustainably, though as we'll see below, on balance our living in DC was much less sustainable than what we'd known in Colombia.

I was proud that we were able to find a place in the DC area and get settled in barely a week.  The $2000 price tag for a two-bedroom apartment gave me a shock, but I later learned that this was actually a pretty good price for the DC metropolitan area.  That said, high prices for rent, childcare, and everything else certainly speak against the sustainability of living in Washingon, DC.  Even though I was earning more money in the States, we probably had less disposable income after accounting for all of our basic costs.  Often I asked myself how people managed to life in DC, since our own accounts just didn't cut it.  We were steadily slipping into debt, and only escaped when we were sent abroad for my job.  How can anything be considered sustainable when it entails sinking ever-deeper into debt?

I also didn't like the fact that we were living in the suburbs.  I grew up in the center of a big city, and I have always regarded suburbs as inherently iniquitous and unsustainable.  I mean, if you want to live near a given place, but for some reason refuse to live in that place, then there's something weird going on.  In the case of the US, it's usually fueled by racism and a perverse model of exclusionary consumerism that gives people an urge to distinguish themselves as being better than others.  In the DC area high rents are often used as an excuse for flight to the suburbs; people insist that DC proper is just too expensive for a family to live in.  While we found this to be partially true, we gradually learned that apartments out in the mainly-white boondocks of northern Virginia cost almost the same as places in the supposedly high-priced inner-city.  There are a few pockets in inner-ring suburbs like ours where you can in fact save money while still living close to the city center, but living in these mixed-race, mixed-income areas demands that people accept that they're no better than others, and I guess only a certain demographic is willing to do this.

In any case, we ended up in Crystal City, Arlington, after our first two choices, both in urban rowhouses, fell through when landlords flaked out at the last minute.  Our apartment in Arlington was in a neighborhood without much charm at first glance, but the building had a quick turnaround to accept our application, and we were later pleasantly surprised to see that the area had plenty of grocery stores, park space, and other walking-distance amenities.  So we really lucked out.

I was also a bit dismayed initially to live in the old Confederacy.  Streets and landmarks were named after figures that, by my Northern reckoning, committed the utmost treason to the Republic by seceding in their implacable desire to keep other human beings as chattel.  Obviously Arlington's sympathies and probably most of its residents tend more northern these days, but I wasn't thrilled to be part of the 21st-century wave of northerners flowing to the New South and to some extent validating the rancors and hatred that still simmered beneath the surface.

But let's get to the real issues of environmental and social responsibility, beyond my own idiosyncratic preferences and prejudices.  I took one of those ecological footprint calculators shortly before we left Colombia.  When I entered in our lifestyle in Colombia, it said that, if everyone in the world lived my lifestyle, we would need 0.8 planets, which is to say that my lifestyle was wthin the limits of the Earth's natural regeneration capacity.  But our lifestyle in the US, frugal as it was, would require 3.08 planets to sustain it for everyone.  Some of the difference was due to the fact that we ate more meat in the States (even on top of what we gleaned from the trash, which really shouldn't count as an extra burden on the Earth), but I think the main difference was that the economic system in the US just uses more fossil fuels and other resources to do everything.  You can eat or use or do similar stuff in the US and in Colombia, but it will often have a larger ecological impact in the US, since we rely on industrial processes (and lots of waste generation) for so much of what we do.  More food is packaged in the US than what you would eat elsewhere, more is flown in from afar, distances are greater so you have to use more motorized transport.  And then of course there's heating and cooling, which you just don't have to do in highland Colombia.

I mentioned above that we ate a lot more meat while living in the US.  Some of this was from my dumpster diving, which allowed us to eat meat without incurring the cash cost, but some was just a result of being around a lot of meat in the stores, and feeling like meat was a more normal part of most meals.  Having meat in the freezer means you can always grab some to add some zip and heft to whatever you're cooking.  We ate more sweets too, just because they were plentiful and cheap.

And the sitting.  I began working my first ever steady office job in DC, and it took a toll on my body.  I'd been accustomed to walking miles every day just to get to and from my work, to and from grocery stores, to and from our city center in Colombia.  In DC I would walk just a few blocks to and from the Metro, and then sit at work all day.  When I started biking to work, I thankfully noticed my waistline getting slimmer and my legs getting bigger again, but life in the US still just didn't afford the constant opportunity (necessity, really) of being mobile in our small town in Colombia.

Disposable diapers were another blip on the way to our sustainable lifestyle in DC.  We'd always used cloth diapers for our older child, so when little Paulo came along it was natural to use them with him, too.  But initially we didn't have our full diaper supply with us, and newborn babies soil a lot of diapers, so we used disposables for a few days before remembering that they really weren't any easier to use than our own well-engineered cloth diapers.  We had store-bought handy-wipes on hand, which are easy and cheap to get in the US, but again we only used them a few days before remembering that it's just easier to sit your baby over the sink and wash his bottom with water.

Washing the cloth diapers did present a new challenge.  Contrary to popular belief, you normally don't need to do anything special to wash cloth diapers.  Just stick them in a wash machine, do a pre-soak the night before, and then a regular wash the next day, and they're all clean.  No hand-scrubbing or ladling out poop with your nails or anything.  But in Washington we didn't have our own wash machine.  We had to share a laundry room with the entire building, which meant not only that we couldn't leave things soaking overnight, but I also didn't want to be washing chunky shit in machines other people would have to use after us.  So in our case we did indeed have to do an elaborate semi-hand-wash for the diapers.  I tried lots of tactics, even at one point sticking shitty diapers in the dishwasher we never used and seeing if that would do a decent pre-wash.  It didn't.  Eventually I settled on soaking a load of diapers in the bathtub with Oxyclean overnight before draining the tub, transferring them to a plastic bucket, and then taking them downstairs to the washing machines for a regular cycle.  It was a bit more labor-intensive and sometimes yucky than I'd desire, but as an agronomist, I'm no stranger to poop, chemicals, and dirt, so it wasn't a big deal.

Likewise, line drying our clothes was not impossible, but it was certainly not favored by the infrastructure in our building.  In Colombia almost every house, even small apartments, have an extra room where you can hang clothes to dry inside.  In Washington, as in most of the US, there is no such arrangement made, since many people prefer to burn a bunch of gas to speed along a process that nature would have accomplished in a few hours anyway.  In fact, our building expressly prohibited drying clothes on our balcony, so we had to go to elaborate lengths to hang up everything in the apartment without making it look like a bordello.  We always did it, but it wasn't easy.  In the same sense, the building management was constantly scolding us about keeping our bikes on the balcony, though we did it anyway.  They never got tough with us on the bike issue, since they provided no suitable bike parking space, and were probably wary of being labeled a bike-unfriendly building.  The building managers of course didn't think twice about having the majority of their lot occupied by ugly, polluting cars on black asphalt.  That didn't offend their aesthetic sense.

The expense and cramped quarters of our life in Washington did push us to simplify certain aspects of our life, which was nice.  We lived at high population density in an apartment block, which is one of the most sustainable ways to go in the modern world.  We were even able to keep the heat and AC off most of the time, and just mooch off of our neighbors' climate control.  This didn't save us any money, since we all just paid the building's total consumption in equal parts, but I guess we were doing our little bit to lower that overall consumption.  Or maybe we were actually making it less efficient by serving as a heat or cold sink ourselves!  At the same time, I was a bit annoyed at having to pay an equal share of the building's electrical consumption, since I was sure that the apartments with four hyper-connected college students each were consuming more juice than we were, living as we did with no TV or other major always-on electronics.

At least initially, until birthday parties and impulsive purchases replenished their stock, we didn't have as many toys for our kids or books for ourselves in the house.  Not having a car obliged us to take advantage of things close by (and usually free) like the library, the playground, parks, and bike trails.  Living in Washington also afforded me the opportunity (and the economic necessity) to dumpster dive, both for furniture and groceries, so this was a major victory for our DC life in terms of sustainability vis-a-vis our prior life in Colombia, where most people are living so sustainably that there's little waste for us to repurpose for ourselves.  At the same time, and as I've also written about, the wasteful consumerist values of the larger society in the US (and specifically suburban DC) start to infect you if you live there, so we did find ourselves buying junk we didn't need, cluttering our lives and our desires with consumer urges.  Even though in our two years in DC we were able to curb these impulses after a brief initial flirtation, I know that it would become increasingly difficult to shun the urge to buy and consume if we lived long-term there, especially as our children became more aware of and indoctrinated in the consumerist values pushed on them by suburban US society.

To conclude, I was pleasantly surprised at the sustainable living options offered in our little slice of northern Virginia, things like bike-friendly infrastructure and high-density settlement, but even these left us consuming a lot more resources than we did in Colombia.  I don't know how to get past this--even the greenest lifestyles in the US consume more than just normal middle-class living in most other countries.  I think it's a huge challenge to change the infrastructure and pathways that lock everyone in the States into relatively unsustainable patterns of living.

Just after we left our temporary home in DC, Pope Francis came to visit.  He passed right in front of my old office.  My wife and I are normally not ones to partake in big gatherings to see famous people, and especially not to see the Church hierarchy.  But we would have liked to see this Pope.  It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance that we just barely missed, and it would have been a very special end to our time in DC.  Imagine seeing a green Pope to keep us inspired in our quest to live responsibly!  The consolation is that we missed him because we'd already returned to more modest surroundings where, even if we're not in the spotlight of a bustling world capital, we can try to live responsibly in our own quiet corner of the planet.  Just as in Washington even the frugal are compelled to consume more by the larger structures around them, in many parts of Latin America the scarcity and humble conditions that govern life make it easier for everyone to avoid waste and excess consumption.

A new catechism for recalcitrant Indians

I just finished reading a book called "A new catechism for recalcitrant Indians" by Carlos Monsivais, a Mexican author and cultural critic.  It is a collection of very short (1 to 2.5 pages each) stories about the interplay of Conquest, history, popular culture, and especially religion in Mexico, from just before the invasion of Cortes up to the present.  The stories all have a biting, ironic undertone, and usually turn on their heads the traditional roles and relationships between European and Indian, conquered and conqueror, pious and sinful, modern and antiquated.  Despite the dark, cynical tone, I didn't feel dragged down by reading it.  Instead, it seemed to speak very well to my knowledge and experience of religion and culture in the post-Conquest Americas.  In a sense, we are all a mix of conquered and conquerer, Indian and white (and black), secular and mystical, in this great experiment of the Americas over the past 500 years.