Myths to live by

I recently read a book called Myths to Live by, a collection of speeches and essays by Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religion and mythology.

I first became aware of Campbell in college, when I watched a cassette my parents had of his PBS interview special with Bill Moyers.  I liked this show very much, and I wanted ever since to read some more of his work, but I never had the chance to until this year.

Myths to Live by is easy to read, in that it's split up into relatively short stand-alone essays, each on a distinct topic (though various themes overlap and repeat themselves between essays).  Most of the essays, especially the ones later in the book, match Campbell's style in the Moyers video of the 1980s.  This makes sense, as the essays later in the book tend to be from the late 1960s, and evince a tone that is at once enthusiastic about myth and religion, but also conciliatory in seeking commonalities and lessons from the broad range of human culture and mythology.  The first essays, on the other hand, hail largely from the earlier 1960s and even a few from the 50s, and seem to have a more confrontational tone, making broad generalizations and often deriding certain aspects of a given culture or mythology.  In this sense the later essays were more pleasant to read and more familiar to my conception of Campbell's work, while the first few essays were less pleasant but more interesting, insofar as they showed me a new side of the scholar that I hadn't known before.  In particular I am referring to an essay called The Separation of East and West, and another called The Confrontation of East and West in Religion.

However, the cultural and even logical framework in which Campbell develops these more confrontational ideas seems to me to have a few fundamental flaws, namely that Campbell exaggerates the differences between Western and Eastern culture (which he separates roughly at Iran).  He is clearly a man of his modernist time insofar as he heralds the steady forward march of Western progress (and implicitly supremacy), space exploration, and the like, while totally discounting the role in world history and human progress of most of the world that doesn't have a great Classical literary production (which is to say Africa, Australia, and the Americas figure very little in his survey of human thought and culture).  In this sense, Campbell unwittingly demonstrates his central thesis of the power of myth, by himself adhering to quite a few modern myths of his own creation.

Campbell's first intellectual myth relates to conceptions of the individual and the general idea of human progress in the West vs. the East.  He starts off an essay with the bombastic claim that "It is not easy for Westerners to realize that the ideas developed in the West of the individual, his selfhood, his rights, and his freedom, have no meaning whatsoever in the Orient. ...  They are, in fact, repugnant to the ideals, the aims and orders of life, of most of the peoples of this earth. ...And yet ... they are the truly great 'new thing' that we do indeed represent to the world and that constitutes our Occidental revelation of a properly human spiritual ideal, true to the highest potentiality of our species."  As I mentioned above, Campbell draws the line between East and West around Iran.  I'm not the first to remark on the difficulty of separating East and West--my latest understanding is that such a separation is not very tenable in any sense, except for an arbitrary, subjective sense of certain people in Europe and the US that they constitute the West, and everyone else doesn't.  What Campbell goes on to cite as the great achievements of Western civilization and character end up indeed being centered on Europe and the US in a brief historical window from the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century.

But this brings up a slew of problems of definition.  Africa is West of Campbell's line, and for most of the window he considers has practiced mainly "Western" religions (Christianity and Islam) but clearly is not what he's talking about when he refers to Western individualism.  Ditto for Latin America.  At the same time, much of the "East" is also Christian or Muslim in this timeframe, so how is Campbell claiming that the individualism inherent to the West (including its religions) somehow didn't bleed over into the East?  Black slaves in the Americas (and later their oppressed descendants), by both their very existence and by their thoughts and actions, forced their countries and the world in general to reconsider how we define humanity.  In other words they too pushed our conception of the individual, of rights, of the citizen, of the rightful aim of society and its relationship to individuals.  Was this a Western contribution to civilization?  It happened partially in the geographic West, but came from peoples not of Campbell's West.  What about Gandhi's and a whole slew of African leaders' fight to end colonialism and then racial and religious sectarianism?  Were these people Western because they had contact with Western colonial institutions?  I think not.

Lastly, from the mid-20th century to the present, many of the scientific, intellectual, technological, and artistic achievements that Campbell (I think rightly) claims are fruits of a new perception of the individual, are coming out of China, India, Africa, and Latin America.  Are these places then part of the West now?  Some might say so, but in this case the notion of West vs. East loses all explanatory power.  Are people from the East who live in the West Eastern or Western?  What about Westerners living in the East?  What about people of Asian descent living in colonial Africa and the Americas?

Again, I think Campbell is right when he says that people like Newton or Thomas Paine or Verdi or Ataturk or the citizens of the modern-day USA thought and think in a fundamentally different way from people in other eras and other regions.  But so did Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, Garcia Marquez, Steven Biko, and the bustling, urbanizing, questioning masses of most countries today.  To me the only resolution for this impasse is to accept that East and West have very little explanatory power.  I would propose to classify the sea change in conception of the individual vis a vis society as a result of modernity vs. pre-modernity.  This would explain the difference between most of the world's thinking in the 10th century, vs. its thinking today, while allowing for the fact that European peasants well into the 20th century still held very communal ideals that subsumed the role of the individual, while many Indian political leaders, migrants to other regions, and colonial citydwellers in the 19th century were clearly thinking in terms of modern citizenship, modern statehood, and modern economy, in other words of a modern role for the individual in society.

I hope I've made a convincing argument that Joseph Campbell's division of East and West insofar as the role they conceive for the individual is not valid, that what he is in fact describing in a change in our perception of the individual as societies become more modern.

Ironically, at the same time as Campbell claims that Eastern peoples are laconic and kept from modern conceptions of humanity by their commitment to collective identity, he uniquely values Eastern religious precepts over Western ones.  Indeed, though he believes that Eastern peoples are uniquely ill-adapted to modernity, he essentially argues that their religious beliefs are more relevant for modernity and postmodernity than are the childish literalist visions of Western religion.

Here again I tend to agree with the larger point Campbell is trying to make, which I render into something like this, "The old ideas of myth-as-fact are patently irrelevant in an age where science explains many of the natural phenomena, and in fact disproves many of the mythological explanations.  But at the same time, myth-as-metaphor becomes more relevant in the modern and postmodern age, because we still need guidance about the essential truths of life, challenge, love, suffering, and joy, which are not apt to be elucidated by scientific inquiry." 

My problem is that, as with his treatment of the role of the individual, Campbell is on shaky ground when he tries to draw grand generalizations about the nature of Eastern vs. Western religions.  While I see a certain anecdotal coherence to his assertions that Western religions (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) tend to focus on scripture as literal, factual truth, and Eastern ones tend to more readily accept contradictions and metaphor, there are too many exceptions for this generalization to hold.  My understanding is that Hinduism is a syncretism of an Aryan warrior religion focused on individual god-heroes (as reflected in many of the foundational texts like the Ramayana) and a more animistic, contemplative Dravidian faith.  At the same time, European-evolved Christianity was at once mystical, Messianic, anti-authoritarian, and hierarchical, not to mention heavily syncretized with pagan Nature-worship.  Modern India has plenty of hardline Hindus who take their scriptures as literal truth (cf. destruction of the Babary Mosque because it was sited on the literal birthplace of the god Ram), while there are boundless examples of syncretism, coexistence, and metaphorical readings in the Messianic religions (cf. Sufism, ecumenical interfaith communities, Liberation Theology).  So again, the East vs. West division doesn't quite hold up to explain who holds doggedly to the literal truth of their religious traditions, vs. who accepts a more tolerant, metaphorical reading.

What I do agree with is that the metaphorical reading (what Campbell ascribes to the East) is the only viable option in the present age.  According to Campbell (and to me), in an age when science is explaining more and more of the physical phenomena that surround us (stars, planets, biological processes, aging, ecology, evolution of living species and soils and rocks), our ancient religions no longer can or should serve that factual narrative role.  Coyote did not literally strew the stars across the sky, God the Father did not literally create the passion flower to reflect different themes of Christ's Passion.  That said, the metaphorical truths of our myths and religion are as relevant now as ever.  For Campbell, this consists chiefly in the quest for eternity as "finding your bliss", which is to say to find what you love to do and to dedicate your heart and soul to it, and in general to fully live whatever moment you happen to be in.  Hence in the modern age Eternity comes down to earth, within the hearts of those who are truly living the moment, and God becomes an impersonal force governing the universe as opposed to the anthropomorphic deity intervening daily in human affairs.  This is for Campbell the rightful place of myth and religion in the 20th (now the 21st) century.

The main problem I have with this conception of correct modern faith is that it is totally self-centered, with no social element.  Where is the impetus for social change, for righting the world's wrongs, dare I say for bringing about the Kingdom of God here on earth?  I imagine that Campbell would respond that A) life is inherently full of suffering, so it is better to accept this than to fight it, and B) that the Messianic impulse to bring about Heaven on Earth has in fact been responsible for much of the wholesale murder and misery propagated in the world, from the Inquisition to the colonization of the New World to the horrors of Hitler and Stalin. 

I can understand and appreciate the value of contemplation, of seeking your bliss, and certainly the danger of a one-sided vision of a rightful world order to be forced on others.  But for me the most resounding part of religion is social communion.  The Godly presence I feel at church comes mainly from the solidarity and conviction and voices raised in unison of the congregation.  Christianity's most powerful contribution to faith and morality is for me the idea that Christ dwells in each of us, so as we help or harm those around us, so we are treating the Godhead itself.  If we are to find our bliss, it must be in losing ourselves in others, in devoting our lives to others, from our children to our neighbors and even strangers.  The modern faith I avow is that of Gandhi, of Malcolm X, of Romero, not that of Osho.  And of course the secular humanist values that have contributed so much to a coherent, universal modern morality also must temper our concept of the good and the desireable, such that any effort to bring about the Kingdom of God must always respect human dignity, the right to freedom of the individual.  Neither a navel-gazer nor a zealot be. 

At the other extreme, Campbell's self-focused religion is socially agnostic, to the point of possible sociopathy.  For Campbell the warrior fully living his vocation of sacking and pillaging is doing the right thing, just as is the untouchable peasant living under the yoke of oppression without protest, or the rich-world consumer devotedly pursuing his Pokemon Go collection.  They are all equally valid as long as they are fully embracing their place in the world--their effects on those around them are not important to a right livelihood.  I can't ever get on board with this.

Anyway, when I recently picked up Campbell again after a few years without much contact, I dug around on the Internet and learned that there has in fact been a lot of criticism of him from varied corners of academia.  Most of the criticisms seem to focus on Campbell's "wishy-washy" intellectual style, wherein his assertions are often unfalsifiable and border on tautologies.  (Critics also assert that Campbell's self-centered religion is too cozily aligned with 1980s-style thoughtless consumerism).  In this sense he is painted as a Paulo Coelho self-help type, conveying only platitudes.  But while I can't stand Coelho, I do appreciate and enjoy reading Campbell.  As for his spiritual, non-falsifiable assertions, I don't have a problem with them.  Positivism is one way of describing things and understanding the world, but it's not the only valid way.  In this sense I feel that both Campbell's arguments and the myths that were his subject matter confound positivist academic discourse; while it's impossible to assert the factual veracity of the animist beliefs of a remote Amazonian tribe like those studied by Mark Plotkin and Richard Evans Shultes, no one can deny the potency of their medicine, or the sustainability of their lifestyle.  In other words, it may not make perfect sense, but it works.  I feel the same way about some of Campbell's admittedly lightweight psychology and anthropology.  Nevertheless, here is a very coherent criticism of both that I feel in fact rescues Campbell's work by giving us the grain of salt with which we should read Campbell.

Other criticisms of Campbell focus on his apparent racism and Fascism.  I can't speak to that, since I haven't read anything by him that explicitly avows such beliefs.  However, he does seem to relish at times the amoral glorification of war and battle, without any condemnation of oppression.  Campbell's philosophy of boldly following your own desires (and to hell with everyone else) is easy to twist into a justification or even a celebration of the strong conquering the weak.

Lastly, I wanted to touch briefly on Campbell's relationship to the Star Wars franchise.  Both Campbell and George Lucas himself have been explicit about the mythological inspiration of Star Wars, and its intent to be a great Hero story in the Campbell mold.  I have long appreciated and enjoyed the original three Star Wars movies, in part thanks to this mythological reading that made them more for me than just a pop phenomenon (for this same reason I have consciously avoided the subsequent films, which clearly seem to follow a commercial logic more than any noble artistic impulse).  My older son Sam had heard a lot about Star Wars from the kids and adults around him, but had never actually seen the movies.  I finally got to show the original film to my family, which I was really excited about.  My wife Caro had never had any interest in seeing it, but she was nice enough to humor me.

Nevertheless, Caro was not too impressed after actually seeing the film.  I'd assumed she wouldn't have much use for the science-fiction angle of spaceships and laser beams, but that she would appreciate the underlying story and mythical allusions.  But it happened the other way around!  Caro liked the fantasy aspect of different planets and peoples and space travel, but had little use for the story.  All too conscious of the foggy morality of the long Colombian civil war and many others like it, my wife is offended at the way Star Wars divides good vs. bad with no apparent reason.  As she puts it, you know the bad guys are bad because they wear the bad guy uniform, and the good guys are good because they don't wear the bad uniform.  But the underlying cause of the conflict, the justice of the claims of one side or another, are nowhere to be found.  And Caro just can't bring herself to root for one side and wish for the demise of the other simply because that's what she's expected to do.

On this latest watching, I was impressed by the revolutionary rhetoric of the Rebel Alliance, and surprised that a widespread insurgency against a stable government would find such resonance with audiences at the height of the Cold War, when we in the US were suppressing insurgencies throughout our Hemisphere.  But after hearing my wife, I was forced to admit that the Rebels' cause is so unclear that it's sheep-like of me to root for them just because.

Later on, I read this excellent article from the Jacobin magazine, which asserts that the Rebels are really proto-Fascists driven by the sinister religion of obsolete feudal warlords.  The article even ties this back to Joseph Campbell's own Fascist sympathies.  It's all pretty damning of the Force, and it totally reinforces my wife's misgivings with Star Wars.

Charter schools and teacher shortages

Here is another gem from John Oliver, this one about charter schools:



On the general topic of education, here too is an article describing a looming nationwide teacher shortage in the US.  This is distressing, though I can't say I'm surprised.  For the past decade or two I feel like there has been a general disparagement and distrust of teachers, at least collectively.  Everyone is always blaming teachers for poor student performance, when it seems apparent (as this other article argues) that the US school system just doesn't know how to educate poor kids well, and US society generally doesn't know how to get people out of poverty.  Schools get underfunded and shit on to the point where teachers have to pay a lot out of pocket just to provide students with sufficient classroom supplies, and students are painted by society at large as dangerous miscreants more than pliable minds to whom we should all give our best.  So after decades of being dogpiled on, and ridiculed any time they try to take collective action to improve teacher working conditions and student outcomes, it makes sense to me that current teachers are dropping out of the field, and young people aren't eager to enter the field of teaching.

On top of this, the above-cited Washington Post article points out that teachers are not very well paid, so that is one more strike against people entering this field as a second career.  If you listen to the talking heads who complain when Chicago Public School teachers go on strike, you would think they're highly overpaid (in addition to being grossly incompetent), but if you check the official pay schedules, you'll see that starting salaries for CPS teachers are in the low $50k range (low $60s if you have a PhD).  This may be decent for someone fresh out of college, but for most other educated professionals, entering teaching would represent a major pay cut.  And this is in what is reportedly the best-paid school district in the US.

In any case, I'm very concerned about education in the US, and I've long desired to become a teacher, but in my research to enter this vocation I've been discouraged by all these factors--underfunding and humiliation, lack of prestige accorded by society, and most of all low pay.  So I have felt firsthand and can vouch for some of the trends that these articles cite.

Living for the City

Here is Stevie Wonder's 1973 song "Living for the City".  I've recently realized that this is one of my favorite songs.  It is so moving, and captures both hope and suffering, perseverance and despondence.



I feel that the song captures a huge part of the 20th century experience in the US, and specifically the trials and tribulations of blacks in the Great Migration.  The song's protagonist leaves oppressive conditions and poverty in the South, only to be thrust into the penal system and homelessness in the North.  It seems that those "other suns" Richard Wright sought in the North weren't always so warm.

Same-sex marriage in Tanzania

This is an article (from Marie Claire, of all places!) about a small region in Tanzania where, like many places in the world, women are generally marginalized and devalued, to the point where wives are treated much like property, and only men can inherit land.  The idiosyncrasy of this particular case though is that there is an odd loophole, in some respects made possible by this very marginalization of women, that allows one woman to "marry" another by paying bride price for her.  These heterosexual women then live together while maintaining romantic relationships with the men of their choice, and the male children of either woman will become the heirs of the "husband" of the same-sex marriage.

Employer abuse of J1 visa program

This is a sad but fascinating article about how some employers take advantage of the J1 visa, meant to bring college students to the US for summer work and cultural exchange.  Instead, some employers use it as a form of indentured servitude.  Luckily, some of the young J1 workers are organizing and speaking out.

What's the matter with kids today (90s redux)

I recently read a book called Renegade Kids, Suburban Outlaws, written by two criminologists/sociologists.  It details the different white teenage subcultures in the late 1990s USA, from punks to skinheads to taggers and a few others.  It was enjoyable and interesting to read, though sometimes the authors lapse into equating lurid outward signifiers, like tattoos or piercings or dyed hair, with criminal behavior.  Despite their repeated caveats that it is normal for teenagers to act out, and that the majority don't cross the line from being mere rebels (which is natural) to outlaws (which is not), they too often discuss aesthetic choices as if they are somehow causal of real problems like drug use, self-injury, or criminality.  Their advice and discussion thus at times centers on how to keep kids away from punk clothes or heavy metal music, which is of course a distraction from what they themselves admit are the real issues, namely parental abuse and neglect leading to self-destructive behaviors in kids. 

I get where they're coming from; all three of our older kids have dallied to varying degrees with these subcultures in Colombia, and also with self-destructive behavior, and we've worried about both things.  But the bad behavior did not always track with how "into" the punk or ska or metal or hiphop scene they happened to be at one time or another.  Often Caro and I would get pissed at the apathetic, nihilistic, antisocial attitude evinced by the punks in our small town, and of course such attitudes must have some influence on promoting antisocial behavior.  But in the end our small, somewhat depressed city is full of people doing antisocial things, and by no means all of them are part of the punk scene.  There is drinking, drugs, violence, promiscuous (sometimes forced) sex, even incipient Fascism that goes on among youth in our town in Colombia (not to mention among adults and politicians), but plenty of those kids engaging in these things are dressing "normal" and listening to Latin pop music, vallenato, or Justin Bieber.  Just as there are plenty of kids who dress in ugly ripped punk styles that are staying out of trouble.  So while aberrant aesthetics like punk or metal may draw more attention to themselves, I think that aesthetics and music styles are less responsible for delinquency in our town than are poverty, a culture of violence (fueled by a 50-year war), misogyny, broken families, etc.  None of these latter factors were invented by Sid Vicious or James Hetfield or Tupac Shakur.

But the biggest kick I got out of this book was to go back in time while I read it.  The book discusses with great concern the seeming anomy of late Generation X and early Generation Y kids, fearing for the future of our nation.  In other words, it was fretting about me as a dangerous element within society.  It was fascinating for me to read this now at the age of 33, since I often grumble similarly about "the kids these days", but in this case the kids the authors are grumbling about are now adults like me that seem to have turned out more or less well.  It was like a time warp to remember Columbine and its aftermath, the heightened security forced on Chicago Public Schools (though seemingly not on the wealthy suburban school districts, whose students looked a lot more like the mass school shooters than did my mainly brown-skinned, urban classmates).  In short, I remembered the frustrating time of adolescence before I'd been fully accepted into respectable white adulthood, and was being lumped in with the rest of the rabble that Middle America is supposed to be afraid of.  Another wild thing about reading this book from the year 2000 was its declaration that my generation's anomy was likely in part due to the lack of a galvanizing, difficult event to define us.  If they'd waited a year or two, the authors would have gotten their galvanizing moment in a massive coordinated terrorist attack, a 15-year-long pair of wars and an almost equally long-lived economic crisis.

Around the same time I read this book I saw two movies from precisely this era.  One was Reality Bites, which again was funny for me to watch at my current age, because its characters are framed as aimless young drifters.  The film came out when I was in grammar school, so the characters were older than I was then, and they rock the styles that I still consider cool, so now when I see the film I have contradictory thoughts, on the one hand thinking of them as grownups like I'd like to be like someday, but at the same time now seeing them as young and unvarnished.  Another weird thing is the film's setting in Houston, which actually comes off looking like a normal big city instead of the sprawling mess we usually think of.

The most striking thing for me though about Reality Bites is how infused it is with the tacky, throwaway pop culture that so defines our collective identity in the US.  The characters reminisce about old sitcoms from the 1970s, they watch a lot of TV, they eat mass-produced junk food, they watch Home Shopping Network at night.  I feel them on this, and the references they make resonate for me.  I too sometimes delight in talking with my friends about stupid episodes of Family Matters or Suddenly Susan, or silly Vince Vaughn movies, or 1980s wrestling feuds. 

An even more extreme manifestation of this came when I re-watched the movie Clerks recently.  This film perfectly captures the zeitgeist of cynical, bored young adults reared on tacky pop culture.  The filmmaker and all his characters seem to actively eschew deep consideration of meaningful things, opting instead on the one hand to ignore important issues like world events, local politics, or social injustice, and on the other to celebrate and over-analyze trivial ephemera like Star Wars movies and local gossip.  I don't fault them for this; in fact, the movie spoke to me in a very special way when I first saw it at the age of 16, and continues to do so now.  In my recent viewing I even waxed nostalgic about living in this setting of pop culture references, cynicism and wit, and youthful aimlessness.  Growing up in the States I often bemoaned people's fixation on the shallow aspects of life, and I have since opted for what I consider to be a deeper way of living and being aware of the world.  But I can't deny the pull and resonance for me of the zeitgeist in which I grew up.

At the same time I realize that these things are a huge waste, and they ate up large swathes of my free time and intellect growing up.  So at once they are things that I repudiate rationally, but without which I would be less able to relate to my compatriots and find common ground.  I don't know what to think about that.  I mean, for me it's fine because I now have that accumulated cultural baggage, so I can avoid TV (as I have since I started college) and still relate to the people I want to.  But I wonder if my kids, who are already growing up outside of the US for the most part, will be at a loss when trying to relate to other kids from the US, because they simply don't consume as much of the throwaway commercial culture that serves as a validating membership card for so many social interactions in the States.  I don't want to deprive them of social graces, but my conscience can't brook actively exposing them to the toxic sludge of most pop culture.

Of course maybe now in the internet age it's not such a big deal anyway.  My impression is that most kids (and maybe adults too) these days get a lot of their media exposure through custom-tailored content, ie the Internet, Netflix, videos, etc.  If this is true, then there is no longer that shared experience of everyone watching the same two or three programs on TV, seeing the same commercials, etc., so in this sense my kids would be little different from other kids watching Netflix and Youtube.

Which brings me to another point.  A lot of Reality Bites shows (I think quite accurately) people alone, killing time by getting high or reading or writing or watching TV.  It made me remember long afternoons and sometimes even late nights of just being on my own, either before my folks got home from work or after they'd gone to bed.  I watched a lot of TV in these times (just network, since we didn't have cable), but also did my fair share of reading, writing, piano playing, and the like.  Such times were often lonely, achingly, existentially so (the worst was knowing when MASH or Night Court aired after the news that this meant a long succession of bad late-night syndicated programming), but they were also good for thinking about who you were, building your character, being at ease with yourself.  I would have loved to have had Internet back then, because I could connect with others, and read about or watch things that interested me, instead of settling for Home Shopping Network or watching Tha Crossroads for the 50th time on the Box music video network.  But if I had had the Internet, I wouldn't have been forced to face my own boredom, my own demons.  I wonder if today in the age of Internet and smartphones we may lose some little degree of our own character and fortitude, because there are no longer these silent, lonely moments without custom-tailored distractions.

A radical re-reading of Disney movies

Chicago Olympics

This is a funny, very genuinely Chicago-style article and associated video about Chicago's failed bid for the 2016 Olympics.  Given the problems that Rio had getting ready for the event, and the huge costs inevitably associated with staging the Olympics in your city, it seems in retrospect that it was better in the long-run for Chicago to have lost.  I remember in 2009 when I heard that Chicago would not host the Olympics.  I was really sad, but I can understand what this article is saying, and they're probably right.

Segregation and Portland and Socialists, Oh My!

I have been reading long-form articles in the Atlantic Monthly lately, because they tend to be such good, in-depth explorations of very important themes.

Of these, I particularly enjoyed an article that looks at the brief dismantling of segregation under Brown vs. Board, and the resurgence of segregation since the 80s, using the city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama as a case study.  The impression one gets from the article is that most states (both Southern and Northern) had long put up legal, social, economic, and other barriers to school integration, were forced by Brown vs. Board to integrate, dragged their feet on this for a few decades, finding new ways to segregate without outright Jim Crow laws, and are now dismantling the legal obligations set out by Brown vs. Board in the first place, since it's been 60 years already and the Justice Department should just give them a break.  This amounts to states' and municipalities' finding every possible way to maintain and even deepen segregation before, during, and after the 1954 decision, and then claiming two marginally contradictory things to finally effectively overturn the decision, namely that A) ending segregation is difficult because it's an intractable problem, and B) segregation isn't that big of a deal anyway, and should be allowed to stand now that there are no explicit pro-segregation laws on the books.  But this all misses the point of Justice Warren's reasoning in the Brown decision, which was that segregation is inherently damaging to education, and if states are to ensure quality education for all, they must do what is necessary to make it an integrated education.  If people really believed this or cared about it, it wouldn't matter if segregation is or is not sanctioned by law; if it exists de facto, then it must be combatted.  Of course [white] people pretty clearly do not care about or believe in this, since they have not only simply allowed resegregation to happen, but have actively promulgated laws to speed resegregation along.  It's all a pretty depressing story, but I'd highly recommend you read the article.

On a related note is this shorter bit on Portland, Oregon's white supremacist history.  I have long caricatured the "new" Portland as a place where nominally progressive, alternative white folks can go to have fun without having to come into contact with the people of color that they at heart don't really like to be around.  It's like Brooklyn, but without the minorities.  And indeed, when I briefly visited Portland last year, I was struck that, outside of its trendy center, it felt like a depressed Great Plains small town of the listless, beaten-down white proletariat, just multiplied into an entire big city.  A friend of mine who was working there in the family law sector confirmed that the pathologies of the oppressed, permanent underclass, things like drug abuse, domestic violence, criminal activity, were all alive and well in Portland, just that this permanent underclass was mainly white, again closer in this sense to the all-white depressed towns of Middle America than the bigger industrial cities where the role of entrenched lumpen class is filled by blacks and other ethnic minorities.

All this is to say that I never understood the craze about Portland.  On the one hand it seemed like a playground for faux-progressive closet racists with money, and on the other like a city with all the problems generated by inequality and hopeless poverty, just with a mainly white cast of characters.  The latter can draw my sympathy, and if I were from there I would do my all to work with the underclass to improve life, just as I try to do in my own hometown of Chicago.  But I would never think of Portland as some amazing destination just calling me to live there.  This Atlantic article confirms my suspicious curiosity about the fact that such a supposedly great place to live and work was not drawing black migrants en masse.  Again, for me segregation doesn't just happen, so when you see de facto segregation somewhere, there must be a more active, malicious racism operating below the surface.

One last thing, only tangentially related to Portland.  A few years ago I watched the 1981 movie Reds.  It follows the life of John Reed, a super-radical socialist journalist of the early 20th century.  (He was originally from Portland).  I would highly recommend this movie.  It's a long slog at 3-plus hours, but it is a fascinating account of people, places, and issues that don't get much play in your typical textbooks about US history.  I also find it amazing that this absurdly long film about an obscure Communist sympathizer born 100 years before would have been made and won quite a few awards at the beginning of the sunny consumerfest Reagan era.  Anyway, check it out.

Straight talk on violence and safety in Chicago

This is a short explanation of violence in Chicago that captures brilliantly a few major points I've often tried to make to others.  Among them:

1. The homicide rate in Chicago is a lot lower today than in the early 1990s
2. That said, gangs today are less organized, more confrontational, and more unpredictable than in the past.  
3. Most homicide occurs in a very few neighborhoods, and mainly affects people caught up in the gang life

In short, most people are not very likely to be a victim of homicide in Chicago.  At the same time, there are real people who do live in these hot zones where most homicide occurs, and we all owe it to them to fight this violence and ensure a healthy living environment and future for these neighbors.

Third World Green Daddy 65: Lose yourself in creation

It's a Sunday night in Washington a fewmonths after my youngest son, Paulo has been born. We've been in DC long enough to establish a nice routine, but between housework and a new baby and a new job, the routine is pretty exhausting. You're never done with the work; no, it's more like constant triage, where you take care of the most urgent things, while everything else continues to pile up.

And yet I'm happy. The routine itself is joyous and satisfying as we build a new life in a new place, and we have enough departures from the routine that it never gets boring. Tonight we all went out for ice cream, but now I'm rushing to take care of more mundane needs. I'm cooking, Caro is breastfeeding Paulo while Sam sings “Twinkle Twinkle” to him. I know I'll be up late that night, because I've still got half an hour until the laundry is done in our building's basement, after which I will have to lug it up the stairs and hang it to dry in our apartment. So it will be a long night followed by an early morning, but I'm happy. I feel exhilarated, like in my college days when I'd do a 2am run to the grocery store just because I could, or my single nights in Spain when I would stay up late getting to know a special woman. On those occasions I knew I'd be tired the next day, but I was living in the moment, thrilling in its specialness. I think many people forego that sense of exhilaration once they settle down and start a family, relegating the feelings of spontaneous fun and the freedom of life to an unattached past in their 20s.

Even in my 30s, rushing to do poopy baby laundry before a long day at work, I'm still thrilling at being alive, staying up late with a special woman and two special guys that I'm just getting to know. In this case the treat of being with my family, being with the people I'd most strongly prefer to pass my time with, is not just a one-off special occasion, a fleeting or doomed night of romance never to be repeated. It's something I get to do and will get to do every night for a long time, God willing.

At the same time, I can't take it for granted, since it won't last forever. It's very possible Paulo will be our last baby, which means that from now on, as we enter new phases and experience new things with the kids, we'll also be leaving each milestone behind, saying goodbye to each prior moment. I guess that's how life is in general, but it's clearer for me right now, as I cherish this special time.

For the first time a long time, I'm not frustrated, or tense, or angry.  Of course I feel these things too at times, but it's not like at certain moments in Colombia, when I was just generally frustrated--at a lack of control, at my allergies, at being broke, at being away from the family (we lived about three hours apart because my wife's work was in Bogota).  Since I got a steady job, I've been sublimely happy in a way that I hadn't been for a long while.  I think it's due to two big factors--economic security, and a greater dedication to parenting.

As for economic security, I've noticed that you just feel sunnier when you don't have so many grinding debts to pay, when you have enough money to spend on an occasional luxury. Granted, living in Washington is expensive, and we're still accumulating some debts. But something about having a steady, decent-paying job makes you worry less about them, convinced that sooner or later you can pay them off. Much of the time we lived in Colombia I was either unemployed or precariously employed, and saw no light at the end of the tunnel as debts and obligations accumulated. When I look at photos of that time now, I remember the many happy moments we shared together as a family. But always being broke and seeing no economic future for yourself takes its toll in the form of a slow-grinding, ever-present bad attitude that keeps you from enjoying some of those beautiful moments that life gives you every day.

Beyond the externally-determined factor of whether or not I have a stable job, I think part of my enjoyment of my family right now stems from a personal assumption of greater responsibility in raising my kids. For a long time I guess I was too caught up in my own projects, or too harried with economic worry, to think of myself as an equal partner in childrearing. In Colombia I didn't live with my son, so even though I might be the full-time parent on weekends when I would visit my wife and kids, I didn't know how to balance both kids and work on a day-to-day basis. When we got to DC, I was now the main breadwinner, and trying to adjust to a whole new work environment, so I guess I still didn't internalize my 50% role in raising the boys. Once Paulo was born and I had to take on more of my fair share of being a parent, it was difficult as I initially tried to do everything I used to do, plus take care of the boys. Eventually though I understood that my main job is to be a dad, and so some of my old projects and pursuits just had to take a back seat. Once I accepted this and lost myself in my parenting and my family, I was much happier in general. Being a dad wasn't taking me away from important things; these things that in the end weren't so important had been keeping me from being a dad.  Some of my personal projects will just have to go on hold.  I hope not forever, but at least for now.  That still leaves me with a lot of projects.  Writing, farming, learning, teaching, studying new degrees. But I'll just have to stretch out my timeframe for getting them done.


So it seems my happiness is due both to having a good job and to accepting the primacy of my job as a father. There have been times that I've mused on the irony of this. Sometimes I'm so into my family that I'm not too motivated at work; I'll be bored during much of the day, but these are moments when I'm generally very happy in life.  In such moments I am less happy at work precisely because I am eager to get back home and be with my family.  But at the same time, I recognize that it's only thanks to the professional validation and economic security provided by my work that I can fully enjoy my family, instead of being frustrated and bitter all the time because I don't have a good job or enough money.

After years of a hectic, transient life, we're all enjoying the novelty of a routine, of Dad dressing in a suit and going to an office.  But we don't let ourselves get stifled by the routine, either.  Often I get to work late, but I don't mind, since I've had so much fun that morning making and eating breakfast with Caro and the kids.  Some mornings I feel like making pancakes or milkshakes or cookies for us, and I go ahead adn do them.  There's a routine, but we can also enjoy each day as a special day.

Sometimes I spend my entire bike ride to work in a sort of reverie about this current phase of my adulthood.  It is supposed to be, and in most ways is, the prime of my life.  Not in terms of being on my own and free and pursuing various random things like I did in my 20s, but rather in terms of having every day filled with care for others and passion about work and the all-encompassing love that infuses our household.  One morning I specifically thought that part of this prime of life is precisely not having free time to read and entertain oneself and do sightseeing and learning. Far from the typical conception of the prime of life as a time for self-centered discovery, where you're exploring the world, the great thinkers and ideas, and your own psyche, I've found that the most intense self-discovery is when I'm taking care of my wife and children.

Nowadays, when we're in a museum I can't stop and read everything like I used to, and frankly I'm not inclined to.  I'm just so amused and overjoyed at my family, that some intellectual pursuits don't hold my interest as firmly anymore.  Luckily, my wife has taken up the slack.  Museums had never held her attention as firmly as they held mine, but now with our kids, Caro is in fact more motivated to read the explanations and share discoveries with the boys.  This helps me to regain my own enthusiasm for museum learning, both for myself and the little guys.

I'm still interested in the things I've always liked, and want my kids to learn about them too.  We've finished reading Homer, are reading some Grimm tales in German, and have now started on Liberation Theology by Gustavo Gutierrez.  I'm drilling Sam on the local trees in our area. Sometimes we'll have spells with the boys where we realize we haven't been exposing them to much art, so we'll concentrate on that for a while. Then we see that in our exploration of art, we've neglected history and mythology, so we'll run with that next. In all our focus on the humanities we haven't done hard sciences, so we pay a visit to their pilot godfather who tells them all about airplanes. Every step is more of a learning experience for us the parents than for the kids themselves, and the most important lesson is that we needn't fret too much about one weak spot or another; everything will balance out in the fullness of time, if you just keep your eyes open to the world about you.

As I said above, it seems that some of my personal projects will have to go on hold.  There are certain dreams I've long had that I'm now seeing are not logistically feasible.  There are other careers and pursuits that could have also been fascinating, but that you can't easily start from zero when you're 30 or 40.  And there are certain areas of learning and intellectual endeavor that I'm ignorant of, and probably won't ever learn, at least not in the near future.  I'm turning into my father, with mountains of unread magazines, purchased and borrowed books for a someday that never comes.  Like him, I need to accept that some things will have to go unread, but at the same time I should never stop trying to learn and teach as much as I can about this world, in whatever snatches of free time I can find.  I guess part of growing up is this paring down, this pruning of pursuits and interests to fit your finite time budget, both the time in each day and your overall time on Earth.
 
One personal pursuit I'm careful not to neglect is writing in my diary.  I feel good to give myself fully to my family, but I get tense when I can't write in my diary for too long of a stretch.  Of course the irony is that you always have more time to write when there's not much to write about.  If I had ample time to be writing, it would be because I was single, without the family that inspires me, and I probably wouldn't have much to write about anyway, and certainly not the motivation to get up and write about whatever I was doing.

When I was in college I had two fairly divergent interests for possible future career paths: international agricultural development work on the on hand, and on the other working in the farm economy right in the Midwestern USA.  I wanted to learn how to weld and get a commercial driver license and someday embark on the great annual wheat harvest with a customharvesting company.  These are small family businesses that every year set out across the Great Plains with agricultural harvesting equipment, starting in Texas and often going all the way up to Canada,.  Grain farmers (mainly wheat, but corn, soybean, and sunflower too) hire these companies to harvest all of their fields for them.  Usually the custom harvesting companies consist in a core family, but then hire college-age kids from the US and abroad to drive the trucks and combines for them.  I'd always dreamed of doing this for a summer, but never did, and now with a family and a stable job it's unlikely I'll find 6 free months to go on the road with such an outfit.

My current job in agricultural development consists of administering tangible work, not doing it myself.  I'm not the ag extensionist; I'm the guy who designs an ag extension program and manages the money to fund it.  I'm not sad about this--it's a new, fascinating field, and I enjoy learning and working within the parameters of a new system.  But at the same time, I sometimes mourn the paths not taken in my career.

This was driven home for me in a very real way after a trip to Chicago and Wisconsin.  Talking to my young cousin as he graduated high school and went on to college rekindled my old dreams of work in skilled trades and Midwestern agriculture.  He had studied welding and blacksmithing in high school, and was going on to study metallurgy at college.  I thought this was about the coolest plan ever, and admired that he had had the determination and courage to know what he wanted to do, and to take the necessary steps to pursue it.

I have another cousin who makes it a point when he travels to find a dive bar like the kind he frequents back home.  He wants to get to know the common folk like him in other locales--he's not too interested in the fancy monuments or tourist sights.  Visiting him I was reminded of the value that my entire family places on humility, working with your hands, and not ascending too scandalously high in the class structure.  I think I've generally stayed true to these values in my life, but right now my surroundings are almost antithetical to such an attitude.  In Washington, DC, people at their worst tend to be at once haughty and small-minded, thinking themselves sophisticated, when they are really parochial and not very cosmopolitan.


Anyway, my point isn't to rip on Washington.  I really just want to say that recently I've felt torn between the many lives I've had and can still have--in Colombia a small businessperson or farmer, a roving community developer or agronomist, in the Midwestern US an urban entrepreneur or a rural homesteader.  Not to mention my current job in an international development organization, or my dreams and feeble attempts at writing.  I don't regret the paths I've chosen.  I just wish choosing one didn't imply renouncing another.  So many lives to live! 

So that's my life right now.  Overwhelmed and overjoyed, with less time for cold intellect, yet more for action and love.

As I near my 34^th birthday, I am thrilled to finally feel in control of my life.  That said, looking around me in the culture at large, it seems that too many spend their youth striving to achieve something, often just stability.  Once they get older, whether or not they've achieved their initial goal, people lose that drive and just coast from then on.  People my age often have kids, then stop dreaming for themselves.  My wife summed it up well when she said that many people stop creating at some point.  Though we've found a Zen-like repose in focusing on our family, my wife and I don't ever plan on ceasing to create.  There's too much world, too much life out there to just let it pass by.

Neoliberalism unveiled

This is a great analysis of neoliberalism, from a historical, political, economic, and social point of view.  It is from a US socialist magazine that I only recently discovered called Jacobin.  I'll be linking to Jacobin more from now on.

Black Panther Party overview

This is a quick overview of the Black Panther Party's founding, principles, and historical trajectory.  It seems to draw heavily on the PBS documentary series on the Party, which I haven't seen but would like to.

University music in Colombia

Here is a video from one of our older kids' punk/ska group playing at a university in Colombia.  The sound quality is bad on the video, but their playing is pretty tight.

Closing yourself to the world

This is a good little opinion piece about the risk of our falling into a rut of media custom-tailored to our own pre-established tastes, and thus shielding ourselves from any sort of new idea or experience that may challenge us or expand our horizons.  I think I might have linked to it already, but I wasn't sure, and I wanted to share it with my readers.  Here also is a past blog post of mine on the importance of exploring physical books and other items that may take you out of your comfort zone.