Third World Green Daddy 66: Sustainable Halloween

For a while now I've been meaning to share my experiences celebrating Halloween with my kids in what I try to make a sustainable way.

Halloween used to be one of my favorite holidays as a kid.  Obviously the dressing-up and the trick-or-treating were fun, but more than anything I liked the lead-up, the stories of ghouls and goblins, the decorations, the haunted houses.  And Halloween parties, at my house, at school, and elsewhere.  My favorite Halloween memory is of when I was five.



My mom's friend made me a bat costume, and we went to a Halloween party in a local town hall in rural Wisconsin, where my family has a summer house.  There were strawbales, bobbing for apples, and the like.  Like something out of a book or a movie on old-time, wholesome US customs.  There was one guy in Chicago who decorated his house with probably hundreds of elaborately-carved Jack o Lanterns, and my mom and I would go by to see it.  I loved learning about "real" ghost stories, historical haunted mansions, witches in medieval Europe and colonial America, and the like. 

When I grew up, I retained my interest in these , but I never got into dressing up for Halloween as sexy vampires or whatever.  It always seemed absurd to me.

When I had my first kid, we didn't celebrate Halloween, because we were living in Colombia, where it isn't really a thing.  The only Halloween in a lot of countries outside the US is mainly the decorations at stores, and young singles going to dress-up parties; precisely what doesn't interest me.
But I did want Sam to get a taste of what I considered the authentic Halloween traditions.  So when he was about to turn two, we made a Jack-o-Lantern as a family.

And of course for the sustainable touch, we saved all the seeds for roasting, and after a few days, we cut up the pumpkin to make a soup.

The following year, as we waited for my younger son to be born, we were in the Washington, DC area, so we got our first taste of a real US-style Halloween.  My older son's school did Jack-o-Lanterns with his, and my mom came to visit and do fun things like making Halloween cookies with Sam, and making little Jack-o-Lantern fruit bowls out of an orange.

We were still pretty lackluster on trick-or-treating that year; we'd just had a baby, and trick-or-treating was a last-minute idea of mine on the way to pick up Sam from school that afternoon.  I took a few plastic bags, stuck Sam in a costume for a school assembly in Colombia from a few months before, and that was it.

So our first few Halloweens as a family we hardly even celebrated, sustainably or otherwise.  Since then my wife has been a real driver to not only celebrate, but to do so in the handmade, simple fashion we believe in.  She got a second-hand sewing maching, and has run with costume-making from there.  She sewed a Spider-man costume from scratch, which we then embellished with black puffy-paint.

Last year she was more expeditious, since she had to make two costumes.  We repurposed two pijamas that no longer fit very well, turning black vehicles into marker stripes on an orange background, and covering a Chicago Bears logo with a little image of a puppy.  A bit of face-paint, and we had a tiger and a grey dog.

This year, with our sewing maching broken, Caro just got grey and black clothes for Paulo's wolf costume, and orange/tan clothes for Sam's wildcat, and then made masks with Happy Meal boxes and felt.  She even hand-sewed a princess outfit for our neighbor!

Another fun aspect of this Halloween was that a cultural center near our house led a workshop to make Halloween baskets out of old powdered milk tins.

As for what to do with all the candy, we are probably a lot like most families.  Caro and I pick out the Snickers bars and chocolates for ourselves, and the boys eat lollipops from their Halloween bags in the fridge over the course of a few months.  I guess the only sustainable point there is that, for the sake of our own waistlines, I'll usually take most of the candy to my office, for others to gorge on.  Come to think of it, this is anti-sustainable, like big companies that leak pollution into the community for others to deal with.

We still have yet to ever decorate our house seriously for Halloween.  It is a lot of effort, and we just don't seem to have the time.  Maybe next year we can do a project with the kids to make decorations out of recycled materials like egg cartons and toilet paper tubes.

Concerts of Chicago stars

I recently read about what sound like two amazing concerts organized by Common and Chance the Rapper.  I wish I could have gone.  It's nice to hear about Chicago as a happening place to be, and not just gripes about state finances or violence.

One other thing--has anyone else noted the irony in R. Kelly's title as the Pied Piper, given his proclivity for underage romantic partners?

Hilliard Homes public housing project

This is a fascinating article on the Hilliard Homes, a distinctive set of buildings in the skyline of Chicago's near South Side that I've often wondered about.  They seem to be an example of high-rise low-income housing done well.

Harry Potter does not support voluntourism

This is an article about JK Rowling's stance against orphanage voluntourism, which in her words posits poor children as a potential resume-builder for wealthy Westerners.

Hopefully good news on early education

I was not aware of this, but there has been a push over the past few years of public funding for early childhood education in the US.  This is really a good thing, at least insofar as it is funding play-based education that can actually help kids learn and grow, and not just sitting four-year-olds in a chair to take tests.

Another glimmer of hope is that the tides may be turning on the mercantilized charter school model of education.  Apparently it has become too clear to too many people that privatized education a la charter schools just doesn't work for achieving better learning among poor students, and does a lot of harm in the meanwhile.  Civil society and even government is pushing back against the charter school paradigm, and that's a very good thing.

Magical Negroes everywhere you look

My wife and I recently watched the movie The Way Way Back.  It was a great coming-of-age story set amid the modern reality of divorced and dating parents.  It struggles a bit with the logistics of trying to imbue a 1970s feel to something set in 2013.  For instance, the protagonist at one point is listening to REO Speedwagon (?) on his iPhone.  But people in the movie aren't constantly fidgeting with electronics, which is decidedly not 2013.  And when the kid disappears for hours on end, his mother is worried and doesn't know where he is, instead of just calling him on his cellphone or checking his most recent Facebook status update.  I don't fault the movie for this though.  Lots of recent art and other cultural production strives for a throwback aesthetic in a modern setting, and it's hard to do.

The one really weak point of the movie for me was its monolithic whiteness.  I don't know much about the Cape Cod area, but I imagine you'd be hard-pressed to find many places in the Northeast today that are full of just white people.  I mean, have none of the people of color in Massachussetts heard about this water park?  Even this though I'd be willing to forgive, if it really is the case that the film is set in an area of the country that happens to be pretty white.

But then the Magical Negroes arrived, and that disappointed me.  I'll get into this term later, but in short it describes a literary trope whereby the only black characters in a work are thinly developed, and exist only to further the self-discovery of white protagonists, or otherwise move the plot along without existing as complex human beings in their own right.  In The Way Way Back, the Magical Negroes are a group of black young adults who are causing a scene in the park.  Of course black young adults can't just enjoy the waterpark like everyone else.  They have to make a ruckus.  Specifically, they are listening to loud music on a boombox and breakdancing.  Yeah, that's like the major leisure activity for black youth in 2013.  Anyway, in the end the Magical Negroes help the young protagonist to loosen up and break out of his shell, and then they disappear.

So I was left with a funny feeling.  Here was a movie that skillfully explored a lot of very relevant human themes like adolescence, relationships with your parents and their romantic partners, self-confidence, etc.  It rendered these issues in what I felt was a realistic way.  But on the other hand, it was set in an all-white 21st century that I don't think actually exists, and the few black folks in the film have little to do with any of the complex human beings I've ever met in my life.  It's as if there were a really insightful novel set in Nigeria that makes frequent reference to the snows and the autumn forest color there.  Or a film about the Victorian English aristocracy that had them all speaking English with California surfer accents.  Its inaccuracy would totally detract from whatever artistic merits it has.

I think people of color experience this a lot.  Much of the canon of US literature and cinema, despite its many merits, doesn't have any place for people of color, or if it does, characters of color are shallow, token figures whose depiction differs drastically from the real populations they're supposed to represent.  So as a black or brown reader in the US, how am I supposed to take this odd juxtaposition of a work that in so many ways accurately reflects and meaningfully comments on the reality around me, but that is at the same time totally off-base and irrelevant when it comes to depicting my little idiosyncratic slice within that reality?  Does it ring true for me, or totally hollow?  I think the answer is both, and that is part of the bizarre, schizophrenic experience of living as a minority culture within a society whose people, including your group, are otherwise homogenous in many respects.

My wife can watch a movie set in the US or Nigeria or Russia and enjoy the insights it offers on the human condition, while not worrying that it doesn't exactly represent her reality.  Why would a film set in the US or Russia reflect the reality of a Colombian?  She can appreciate it without expecting to be exactly represented in it.  But if a Colombian movie totally differed from her experience, it would strike her as odd.  If almost every Colombian movie ever made essentially ignored or sidelined her specific lived experience, that would start to seem really weird.  For a black or brown or red or yellow person from the US, the total omission of their experience is a lot like this latter scenario.  If they feel American, if they are American, then why aren't they represented in so much of the cultural production of the US?

Similar questions have arisen recently for me with my kids.  They watch this show called Dinosaur Train, which is pretty amazing.  It engages them with relatable characters that talk about being scared to go to sleep at night, or how adopted siblings may look different from each other but they are still part of the same loving family.  And it's all couched in very accurate, very informative paleontology, plus the thrill of riding a train.  You can tell a whole team of scientists and early child learning specialists worked together on this.

But at the same time, the show also presents a world that is largely bereft of ethnic diversity.  The characters speak in a variety of US dialects, but none sounds black.  At the end of every episode, a real-life paleontologist talks with real-life kids about the dinosaur or scientific principle discussed in that episode.  But most of the kids are white.  I've pointed this out to my kids, and so now they yell happily to me whenever there's a black or Latino kid in the group.  It's like an Easter Egg hunt for the diverse breadth of humanity.

I wonder if the show might have received comments about this, because in the later episodes I've noted more children of color in the live-action sections.  The main dinosaur family in the show also went on a world tour, where they encountered people who spoke English with all sorts of foreign accents. I think this is all for the better.  I'm not interested in some sort of quota system just to have certain numbers of people of a given race for the sake of some nominal equality.  But I do want the artistic and other depictions of the world that my kids are exposed to, to more or less reflect the actual world they live in.  This includes having them see kids that look somewhat like them, as well as kids that don't.

One last reflection on this.  My kids have a few toys from the Switch-n-Go Dinosaur line.  These are dinosaurs that transform into vehicles.  And they talk and make sounds.  Each one has its own voice and attitude, but they all tell facts about their respective species.  All, that is, except for MC Roar, the Giganotosaurus.  He is supposed to be a rapper, so much of what he says is in verse.  But little of it is meaningful information about his species, or therapods or carnivores in general.  Mainly he says what I guess white toy designers think black rappers say.  Things like "All the dino lovers in the house say Roar", "Represent", "Keep it real", and "Yo".  He sounds like a catch-phrase spewing idiot instead of a complex, intelligent being with thoughts in complete sentences.  Plus the voice sounds like it's done by a white dude talking "black".  The least they could have done if they wanted a black character in the toy lineup is to hire one black voice actor.  It's like black folks can't even get work anymore to enact their corresponding stereotypical tropes!

To close, I'm linking to authors that have much more to say on the Magical Negro trope than I do.  Here is a satirical guide to teach you how to become a Magical Negro (I love this quote "I still don’t understand why Morpheus wouldn’t just do all the stuff in the Matrix that Neo was struggling to learn").  And here is a very intelligent analysis of a dilemma I've just barely touched on above--how can black readers appreciate the literary merits of great writing while at the same time feeling it totally fails to represent them accurately or respectfully?  Specifically the author is a librarian and author himself, and a great admirer of Stephen King, who nevertheless realizes that King has a "Magial Negro problem", writing very few and very shallow (and occasionally aggressively offensive) black characters.

Jobs for panhandlers

This is an article about an inspiring program in Albuquerque to give day jobs (sometimes leading to more stable work) for panhandlers.  It has apparently been a great success in terms of getting homeless people into productive work and linked to vital services.  It represents a major departure from the approach of far too many cities, which are criminalizing homelessness instead of working to help the homeless.

The crossing of the Rio Grande

This is an interesting article sharing the reflections of someone from the political science think tank the Wilson Center, after his visit to the Rio Grande valley between Mexico and Texas.  He summarizes ten conclusions and questions he has about the deluge of migration from Central America to the US, which does not seem to be waning despite increased persecution and danger on the journey, and despite increasing investment to fight poverty and violence in Central America.  It is not a heartening story, but it is important to hear this kind of nuance as we all try to figure out how best to improve life for Central Americans and dissuade them from embarking on such a dangerous trek.

African sovereignty against transnational hatred

I've written before about the little US cottage industry of rabidly homophobic religious missionaries spreading their message of hatred in Africa.  I obviously am not cool with this.  Anyway, here is an interesting and heartening news item related to this trend.  Apparently a pastor from a strip-mall church in Arizona planned a multi-country tour of southern Africa to spread hate speech.  In reaction, Botswana and South Africa exercised their sovereign right to deport/deny entry to this undesireable foreigner.  I see it as a principled stand in the name of human rights, and an assertion that African countries are no longer accepting the role assigned to them by many outsiders as a dumping ground for discarded products or ideologies.

Nuance on the Venezuelan crisis

I have been grappling with news coming out of Venezuela over the past few weeks and months.  I want to know what's going on right now, but none of the reporting seems very reliable.

I am not familiar personally with Venezuela.  I've never been there, and only followed its politics and history from afar over the past decade or so.  But there is something about mainstream US media reports of dying babies and shuttered factories that seems too simplistic, an air of reporters parachuted in and fed what their fixer/translator thinks they want to hear.  Again, I can't say if their reporting accurately represents the picture in Venezuela right now, since I'm not there, but I have had many experiences in Colombia or Haiti in which I read foreign news coverage of complex situations that I am directly knowledgeable of, and find the coverage to be totally off the mark.  The Venezuela stories I read from the NYT and other sources of record reek to me of just such slipshod reporting.

But I can't get a nuanced picture elsewhere, since most reporting that departs from this mainstream mold is patently, explicitly partisan, from sources like Venezuela's public news network or different leftist solidarity networks.

Luckily, I recently ran across this article, originally appearing in the Nation, that seemed to me to offer a much more complex, believable, and nonpartisan reading of the current crisis in Venezuela.  I hope you'll enjoy it too.  It is an analysis as of someone really trying to understand a situation, rather than trying to strike a victory for one political agenda or another.

Grit

Recently when talking to a young man attending a pretty prestigious high school, I learned of the book Grit by Angela Duckworth, which had been assigned to him for summer reading.  I asked him if he liked reading it, and he said he didn't like reading in general.  But he was nice enough to explain to me that the book was about the secrets to working hard and succeeding.  My gut reaction was that it was a pretty shitty move of his school to assign what sounded like a glorified self-help/executive management/prosperity gospel book straight out of an airport bookstore.  But then I looked into it a bit more, and was even more appalled.

It turns out that Grit is written by a Harvard professor of the TED Talk type, and the book has received a different, more culturally respectable level of acclaim than the typical Joel Osteen or Tony Robbins bestseller.  I was initially surprised that A) Harvard was engaging in this type of intellect-light, neoliberal dogma-heavy research and publishing, and B) that the general public, and especially academics, seem to be treating this as a serious piece of academic work.  On further thought though, I reflected that Harvard in fact seems to produce a lot of work that, instead of challenging the status quo and pushing society's intellectual horizons, just seems to reinforce and justify the new social order of a hyper-educated, hypo-critical elite earning big bucks while the rest of society festers.  I mean, Harvard's business school wrote the book on academic programs that are more about gaining influential contacts than being exposed to challenging ideas and arguments.  And since everyone is so impressed with the Harvard pedigree, the rest of us continue to accept unambitious work from the university as if it were profound and new.

Anyway, here is a very thoughtful, much less polemical take on the book, from the New Yorker, by David Denby.  Essentially the author's argument is that Duckworth's Grit seems to focus on how people get ahead of others, as opposed to learning how to contribute to and lift up the general society around them.  The values classed under the heading of "grit" are socially agnostic, if not sociopathic.  They do not correspond to the typical profile of a complete human being as envisioned in the humanist tradition of education.  Quoth Denby:

Duckworth [with two school principals] boiled down a long list of character traits—what they called virtues—into a master list of seven that could be quantified and graded in schools. Grit, of course, is one; the others are self-control (both academic and social), zest, optimism, social intelligence, gratitude, and curiosity.

Now, there’s something very odd about this list. There’s nothing in it about honesty or courage; nothing about integrity, kindliness, responsibility for others. The list is innocent of ethics, any notion of moral development, any mention of the behaviors by which character has traditionally been marked. Levin, Randolph, and Duckworth would seem to be preparing children for personal success only—doing well at school, getting into college, getting a job, especially a corporate job where such docility as is suggested by these approved traits (gratitude?) would be much appreciated by managers. Putting it politically, the “character” inculcated in students by Levin, Randolph, and Duckworth is perfectly suited to producing corporate drones in a capitalist economy. Putting it morally and existentially, the list is timid and empty. The creativity and wildness that were once our grace to imagine as part of human existence would be extinguished by strict adherence to these instrumentalist guidelines.

...

Not just Duckworth’s research but the entire process feels tautological: we will decide what elements of “character” are essential to success, and we will inculcate these attributes in children, measuring and grading the children accordingly, and shutting down, as collateral damage, many other attributes of character and many children as well. Among other things, we will give up the sentimental notion that one of the cardinal functions of education is to bring out the individual nature of every child.

Can so narrow an ideal of character flourish in a society as abundantly and variously gifted as our own? Duckworth’s view of life is devoted exclusively to doing, at the expense of being. She seems indifferent to originality or creativity or even simple thoughtfulness.

Secondly, Denby points out that the main factor of success or failure in the US school system, and our overall economic system, is wealth and poverty.  Wealthy kids get a good education, have good opportunities, and get good jobs.  Poor kids get shit on, from pre-school to adulthood, often passing through the penal system on the way.

Denby points out that it is hard for poor children to develop "grit" as defined in the book Grit, because they are subject to a series of stressors that distract and beat them down.  Though the author's criticism is fair, it focuses on the poor as victims.  I would add that kids and adults living in contexts of poverty, violence, pathology, and oppression in fact have much more grit than the rest of us, though it seems not to count on Duckworth's scale.  Just to wake up and go to school every day takes a huge amount of grit if you don't have enough food, your parents can't take care of you because they're out working, the path to your school is beset by feral dogs and human predators, and your school is organized to crush your spirit.  My fear is that, as with all the latest educational fads, young students of color will be the guinea pigs of a new nationwide experiment on "grit" education.  The one constant in the US education system is that, instead of fixing the root problems that make the system unable to provide poor students with a decent, dignified education, we constantly punish these students for the system's failings by subjecting them to whatever draconian, unproven method comes down the pipeline.  It looks like Grit may be the next flavor of the month.

I'll close on a pithy quote from Denby on Grit:  "If we suffer from a grit deficiency in this country, it shows up in our unwillingness to face what is obviously true—that poverty is the real cause of failing schools."

Nuance on the Green Revolution in India

Here is an excellent, succinct article by Raj Patel about the Green Revolution in India.  His thesis is that the impressive increases in Indian grain production in the 1960s and 70s had something to do with increasing yields through better seeds, but a lot more to do with policies and market conditions that encouraged farmers to plant more wheat and farm it more intensively.  The author doesn't aim to discount the importance of plant breeding and new techniques in raising agricultural yields, but simply to remind us that the dumbed-down miracle story we are often fed, of Norman Borlaug breeding a new variety of wheat and thus singlehandedly solving world hunger, is an exaggerated fiction.

Circumstances of food production and hunger are determined by our complex world of politics, social movements, economic changes, and societal values, which are often more important factors than climatic conditions and agronomic innovation are.  When someone tries to sell you a narrative of hunger that hinges only on agricultural productivity and technological [patentable] products, then you can assume they are trying to take advantage of you and push a specific agenda that consciously avoids questions of resource distribution, equity, and justice.

Nuance on working-class white voters

This interview is a really great conversation between two white conservatives that evince a care and solidarity with the poor in the US.  Rarely in the recent past have I seen such an honest, respectable conservatism, one that doesn't dehumanize the poor, that rejects outright racism and xenophobia.

The interviewer and interviewee both make me think of a past conservatism, closer to the center.  Really these men seem to understand, care about, and want to understand further the reality and the people of their country (of all colors and classes), and they happen to fall slightly to the right in their conception of the role of personal accountability in determining human wellbeing.  But this by no means implies that they are blind to the need for a welfare state and structural solutions to problems of poverty, social pathologies, and inequality.  This is the type of person that could dialogue honestly and come up with joint solutions with an honest progressive, who likewise would have a realistic, compassionate understanding of our society, but happen to fall a bit the left of center on their conception of the role of the state in ensuring wellbeing.

The interview was really refreshing to read, and I'd highly recommend you go through it.  It's not very long; there are a lot of comments at the end, which is why the page seems like it goes on forever, but the interview itself is less than half of the webpage length.

Colombia still in a crucible

If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, you'll know that Colombia held its vote to approve the government-FARC peace agreement on Sunday, and the "no"s won narrowly (like with 50.2% or something).  In other words, a slight majority of those who voted thought the best tack to take is to continue the same war that's been grinding on for 50 years.  My family and I were very sad initially, though we've come to accept it after a day of mourning and thinking and discussion.

Through no intent of my own, I was engaged on the subject by an ignorant Spanish stranger that just happened to be in a public space near me.  His impressions enlightened me though on how the anti-peace coalition thinks.  Basically he felt that the Colombian government was making all the concessions, pulling their pants down so FARC could give it to them up the ass (his words, not mine).  This has been the timbre of most of the discourse of Colombia's far right against the peace process, that the FARC (bad guys) were getting the best of the government (whom the far right doesn't like either, but in this case they were presenting as the putative good guys).

I'm not interested in getting into the factual merits or lack thereof of such an argument, but I'll give them a very brief treatment.  First off, the FARC surely did feel like it was making concessions by laying down its arms, especially since the last time they tried to enter legitimate politics in the 1990s basically their entire party (the Union Patriotica) was hunted down and executed by death squads.  We're talking a few thousand people here, from small-town mayoral candidates to national politicians--an entire party eliminated.  So I assume that by the very act of negotiating, the FARC was giving up on its stated goal of a revolutionary takeover of the government, and certainly making a leap of faith given their prior documented history of suffering genocide.  Secondly, the negotiations themselves were a constant give and take, like any real negotiations.  The FARC brought a suite of points to the table and had to give way on all of them to arrive at points of agreement with the Colombian government.

The only real point on which it could be somewhat coherently said that the government conceded "too much" to the FARC was in what many have deemed the impunity or amnesty offered to ex-combatants.  But this is pretty standard practice in any post-conflict agreement.  Truth and reconciliation processes are what works to end drawn-out civil wars.  From South Africa to Rwanda to Guatemala, you have to recognize the rights of the victims to justice, while also recognizing that no armed actors will give up arms or power if their recompense will be vengeful persecution.  Even in Germany and Japan's resounding, unambiguous defeat in the Second World War, no one seriously proposed executing or imprisoning the entirety of those country's populations, even though they by and large supported the genocidal war effort.  You punish the key high-level offenders, and try to find a workable solution to deal with everyone else. 

Beyond this, the truth and reconciliation process proposed for the FARC was similar to that used for ex-combatants of the paramilitaries, with whom the government led peace talks and demobilization from 2003-2006.  This process was much less organized and transparent, offered more impunity to ex-combatants than the current FARC deal, and was not approved by any plebiscite to my knowledge.  But the people protesting the current FARC peace agreement were the very ones in charge of the "peace" process with the paramilitaries.  (I put "peace" in quotation marks, since paramilitaries were essentially aligned with the government at the time, and many of them "demobilized" from the AUC political grouping only to reconstitute themselves as apolitical criminal organizations like the Black Eagles or the Rastrojos).  Just for context, it is estimated that paramilitaries have accounted for about 60% of massacres in the six-decade conflict.

Anyway, I'm not interested in debating the facts of the prior three paragraphs, or discussing the relative merits of the FARC or any other actor.  No, to return to my talk with the boorish Spaniard, I realized that he (and by extension those in Colombia whose opinion he was summarizing) was not conceiving the peace talks in terms of a negotiated settlement that is best for a society, but rather as a zero-sum game of "my side versus their side".  If you think this way, it is understandable to vote against peace, to vote against anything but complete annihilation or conversion of the other side.  My Spanish interlocutor said as much when he held up the example of how Spain dealt with ETA through a mix of force and criminal prosecution.  He did get tripped up though when marveling at the close outcome of the Colombian vote, at which I reminded him that a civil war by definition pits a large part of the population against another large part.  You can't annihilate half the population--that's why the Colombian war is going on sixty years with no clear military victory.  It is not very comparable to the Spanish situation, where ETA is a small ethnic sectarian group that neither claims nor aspires to represent anything but a tiny proportion of the country's population.

In contrast to looking out only for "your side", to making sure your guys get the better end of the deal, is to think of what's best for your nation as a whole, which I would characterize as the motivation driving those who voted in favor of peace.  It's pretty clear to me that a vote for peace was not for most people a vote in favor of FARC's principles, nor of the government's (neither of these groups enjoys anywhere near the whole-hearted support of half the population), but rather in favor of a negotiated solution to the conflict and many of its underlying causes.  I seem to be supported in my interpretation here by the fact that the areas most affected by the war, and often with the biggest justifiable axe to grind against the FARC, are those that voted in favor of peace.  In fact, a town called Bojaya that was the site of what's regarded as FARC's worst massacre of civilians, voted 96% in favor of the peace accords.  It was only in the central regions of Colombia, which have been somewhat insulated from the worst of recent fighting, that people clung to an ideologically pure but totally unworkable idea of "we don't negotiate with terrorists" and voted against peace.

Indeed, the five points of the peace agreement deal with agrarian development, political participation for groups excluded from the mainstream system, an end to the conflict, the fight against illicit crops like coca, and the categorization and compensation of victims of the conflict.  These are all good things for the country.  But if you are fixated not on the good of the country but rather sticking it to your sworn enemy, then you don't care so much whether the proposals are good, but simply where they came from.  This is a luxury only available to those who are not suffering the brunt of the violence.  Those stuck in the hot zones recognize that no side's hands are clean in this war, so we must accept good, workable ideas from any quarter.

At any rate, a slight majority of Colombians voted "no" to peace, so that's where we're at now.  I thought President Santos and the FARC negotiators were both politically astute and very brave in their response to the vote.  They basically called on those leading the "no" campaign (namely ex-President Uribe) to meet with them and offer their own proposals for peace, since the claim of the "no" camp was that they do indeed want peace, just not on the terms negotiated over 4 years by the government.  I think this move was astute, because it puts the onus on the naysayers to actually propose something coherent or to risk showing themselves as totally incoherent.  Ideally this would prevent a situation similar to the past few years in the US, where the right wing has been the party of perennial "no"s to any realistic policy proposal, without ever having to propose an alternative of their own.  But Santos is also being brave, because if he is indeed committed to peace at any personal cost (as he seems to be), then he will be open to brokering a peace deal that will not go down in posterity with his name on it.  Such a deal would instead be paraded by the zero-sum "my dick is bigger than yours" crowd precisely as evidence that Santos was ineffective, and that only Uribe was able to achieve peace.  In other words, Santos is willing to lose face and the pissing contest if it will achieve a broadly-accepted peace agreement.  In latest news, Uribe's proposal for peace looks a lot like the negotiated deal.  There's an internet meme circulating that says, "If only he'd read the peace agreement before the vote..."

Here is a bit more context and analysis on the whole affair.

The Baffler and criticism

This is an article from the Baffler about how criticism, and especially class-aware criticism, has become less common in an age where tastes and styles and consumer-created "identities" make people feel more unique even as they are less empowered.  It's a lot to digest, and certainly some of the arguments are over my head, but I appreciated the article.  I had not come into contact before with the Baffler, and I am in fact baffled as to how exactly to describe it.  But the editorial staff seems to consider it a mix of cultural criticism (though it also places itself in opposition to overly academic style), economic and social analysis, and a bit of art.  I think it's an important voice to have out there.