Heartening statistics on reading in the US

This is an article from a few years ago that shows that Americans seem to be reading more books, not less.  An increasing share of that reading comes via electronic devices, but there is still a lot of reading of physical books, too.  Other interesting stats--blacks as a demographic group seem to have higher rates of readership than whites or Latinos, Latinos own tablets at higher rates, and rural people read at higher rates than suburbanites.

Extradition of Colombian paramilitaries

This is an in-depth and infuriating look at how US actions undercut the Colombian process of bringing paramilitary death squad leaders to justice.

Third World Green Daddy 75: Joys of fatherhood

For a few weeks now I've been really focused on fatherhood.  Of course there were the last weeks of my wife's pregnancy, then the birth of my newborn.  All this time I was in full baby-prep mode, including spending even more time than usual with my older boys to make sure they got their dose of love and attention.  Added to this is that I'll soon be leaving my current job, so I have been sort of checking out of work and focusing on my family.  But I like to think the most important factor is that I'm evolving as a person and as a father, and really putting a priority on the latter.  I've had a rush of creativity, both in my work and my personal writings like blogs, stories, and my diary.  This is despite my present mindset that writing and any other personal projects are a lot less interesting and important than focusing on my kids and my family.

One of the things I am sometimes shocked at and marvel at is the physical contact.  When I put my boys to bed I lie down between them while we say our prayers, read, sing, or maybe just talk about life's mysteries.  Depending on their mood, the two boys will be hugged up on me, or grabbing my arm or hand, or kissing me while I'm lying down like this.  Beyond this I often find myself throughout the day hugging or kissing or playing drums on their back or just squeezing them.  It's a level of physical contact and intimacy you don't really find most places except between parents and children.  Even lovers (hopefully) aren't just randomly squeezing each other all the time--that would be a bit weird and intense.  But with your kids it's within the realm of normal, even in public places where you wouldn't be expected to be playing kissyface with your significant other.

I wonder how this might be different if I was the father of girls and not boys.  Obviously pedophilia is a very different thing from normal sexual orientation, but even so, I think we are collectively conditioned to find it suspect when a heterosexual male is too physically close and affectionate with a little girl, even (or especially?) if it's his daughter.  I am lucky then in that I can be this close with my boys, admire their physical beauty, without setting off alarm bells (for myself or for others) as to whether there might be some inappropriate sexual sentiment there.  It's actually a whole new experience for me--most of my life I have been able to find physical beauty mainly in the female form, which means it was always a mix of honest-to-goodness aesthetic appreciation, with a lot of sexual attraction mixed in.  There's nothing wrong with this, it's just that it meant I wasn't very good at appreciating the physical beauty of at least half of the population around me (and I was conditioned not to do so lest I be labeled gay or effeminate).  Admiring my boys' beauty has opened me to a type of physical admiration that I hadn't really felt before, and now I find myself better able to admire the beauty in their little friends, male and female, and even in adults of both sexes, without the sexual or romantic component so mixed in.

This reminds me of a blog I read recently from a dad trying to cultivate his son's more sensitive side.  I have to admit that, while I try to fight gender and other norms that make life worse for everyone, I also tend to be a personally conservative, no-nonsense kind of guy.  So I'm not too crazy about nail painting and long hair, in my boys or anyone else.  Some of my tensest moments in my stepdaughter's upbringing have revolved around the pervasive stench of acetone when she was bored and would paint and repaint her nails ad nauseum.  All this is to say that, while I will grudgingly and conditionally accept when my kids (or more often, my family members or the kids' teachers) want to paint their nails or let their hair grow out a bit between our regularly-scheduled buzz cuts, I prefer more active, constructive ways of challenging toxic male stereotypes.  My boys have become crusaders to speak out whenever someone makes a stupid comment about what boys or girls should or shouldn't do, what colors they can wear, what emotions they can have.  Both of my boys have been in ballet class for years now, and it seems like something they might want to really pursue as a calling.  My older guy was the star of his school's end-of-year ballet show, and multiple people at their schools have thanked us and them for opening their minds about who could and should do ballet, what options are appropriate for boys, etc.  That seems much more worthwhile to me than painting your nails, but I recognize that there's a place for both the trivial and the transcendent in our lives.

As you can see, I've been very centered on my two older boys.  We're playing more board games now, watching classic movies like Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal.  They've also been spending lots of time with their grandmother, who is in town for a month to help us with everything.  The end of the school year has brought some wonderful shows in areas like folkloric dance, ballet, and a Mother's Day rendition of Marvin and Tammy's Ain't No Mountain High Enough.  It just makes my heart melt to see my boys and all their classmates intoning such sweet notes.

As I've been taking care of the two older guys, I've made a point not just to cover the practical things like feeding and bathing them, but to really enjoy the moment for myself, and to make life fun for them.  I've been trying to goof around and play more with them, which doesn't always come natural to me.  I've even gone so far as to obtain a parenting book called Playful Parenting.  Reading any sort of how-to book, especially for parenting, goes against my very nature, but I really want to do the best I can for these kids.  My newborn helped me to think of this; I had been melancholy before his arrival, thinking that I wasn't going to have any more babies in my life, and when we found out he was coming I committed myself to making the most of this last infancy.  Now I'm also applying this carpe diem attitude to my older kids.  As we've spent more time together and they've gotten more comfortable and confident with me, the two older guys are now inured to my occasional scolding and barking, which are incidentally becoming less  frequent.

So that's sort of the natural division of labor my wife and I have adopted around the arrival of our newborn.  My wife is obviously a natural choice for taking care of the baby since she is the exclusive source of his nourishment, so I take care of the two big guys.  It's gotten to the point that I'm not even that aware of all the things my wife has to do around breastfeeding, breast pumping, sterilizing and using bottles when she leaves the baby with a babysitter, etc.  It's like we inhabit two different worlds sometimes, or at least there are parts of our lives right now that the other spouse isn't very involved in.  This contrasts a bit with our prior babies, when I was on top of bottle detail.  But of course back then we didn't have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old to take care of!  I am proud to say though that I have maintained my role as the go-to diaper washer.

This isn't to say I haven't been paying attention to my little guy.  Granted, hanging out with a newborn is like learning a new language.  Tiny babies are like little aliens.  They can't talk, or even see or hear or process information the same way we do.  My baby boy can't exactly respond or reciprocate, or think of others.  We just care for him, like a weird podling.  And we can't ever know what his world, what his unique way of thinking is.  It's like an extension of the mysterious place he was at in the womb, and even before conception.  We gradually force him to conform to our language, our way of doing things, even our way of counting numbers, such that by the time he can communicate with us in our terms, he's lost the ability to remember or evoke that other way of being that was, that is right now, in this moment of his life.

But I have fun goofing around with him, roughhousing, having one-sided conversations with him.  His face is usually locked in an expression that mixes inborn dignity with perplexity at being this little helpless baby, in thrall to his gases and poops and bodily functions.  He kind of squints at the world, as if concentrating really hard to understand it.  I play records for him; I'm learning to finally distinguish between the Duke Ellington pieces Prelude to a Kiss and Solitude, which I always listened to as a kid on an album that played them in quick succession. I frantically step with my baby to Caravan, then slowly, romantically swerve with him to Prelude to a Kiss. I read him the Aeneid, and sadly muse that its vision of cataclysmic destruction of a city followed by aimless, indefinite wandering through hostile wastelands is likely a fitting allegory for how the world may be during poor Frankie's lifetime.

Underutilized Andean crops

Here is a very general article on native Andean crops, and their differing fates.  Some, like potatoes, have taken the world by storm, while others, like mashua (cubio or nabo in Colombia) seem to be decreasing in cultivation.  This is a topic that is near to my heart, since I worked for quite some time on a project researching and promoting Andean crops in central Colombia.  I set up an agronomic experiment comparing different varieties of achira or Canna indica.  We even published an article about it.

I have sort of rediscovered my passion for indigenous Andean cultures and agriculture recently.  I finally got to go to the exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian on the Inca road system.  That's partially why I'm digging up this old stuff from my past life investigating these Andean crops.

Preventing coffee rust in Colombia

Here is an interesting series of blogs from Catholic Relief Services about their efforts (and Colombia's larger efforts) to replace a common, rust-susceptible variety with the Castillo coffee variety that is resistant to the coffee rust disease.  They obviously put a lot of thought and effort into this work, and there is a wealth of information here that follows, almost in real time, the process of trying to effect systemic change in development work.

Abbie Hoffman

A few years ago I ran across a seminal book from Abbie Hoffman, called Steal this Book!  The book is interesting as an artifact of the zeitgeist of 1970s revolution.  It lays out some still-valid advice on how to survive with little to no money.  I don't vouch for the ethics of everything in there, since it mixes salvaging of resources (think dumpster diving for groceries) with outright stealing them.

The second part of the book is about means of waging a revolution.  Again, some of what is here would probably be accepted as legitimate by a large swath of the population (think printing your own publications or preparing for public demonstrations), though a lot of it, like bombmaking instructions, would not be.

All in all, the book articulates a pretty nihilistic vision of revolution.  Maybe this is because it is more a manual of the how, not the why.  Some of this is also due to its tone, which is designed to shock; I'm not sure how much of it to take at its word, and how much with a grain of salt.  In the end though, Hoffman seems so misanthropic and unconcerned with hurting others that one asks what his revolution is for, if not for the wellbeing of people.  I'm sure he would argue that he is only advocating destroying unjust systems or institutions that bring people down, but when you bring down an institution, you need to be aware of all the people who depend on that institution as it is, imperfect and ugly as it may be.  If you are callous about tearing something down, without a regard for the people you'll hurt in the process, it becomes harder and harder to sustain that you are, in fact, working for the good of those people.

Home, travel, and the end of the world

When you work in international development, you inevitably have to move a lot, and that’s where we’re at right now, moving from our longtime home in Central America to a new post.  En route we are spending a few weeks in our house in Colombia, and another few in Chicago.  It all has me thinking about what exactly home is, how we conceive of it. 

Understandably, in our small town in Colombia, where we have a house that I spent years rehabbing and where we return every Christmas, I feel very at home.  I have a similar sensation when we’re in Chicago.  These places are where my past is, with memories on every corner, but they are also where I project my future.  So in that sense it’s understandable that they feel like home to me.  The ironic thing is that I don’t have much of a present in these places, except for a few dreamlike weeks of vacation every year.  Most of my time is spent in my “real”, “normal” life away from either of these places.  My work takes me to exotic places to live for a few years at a time.  I enjoy and come to care very much about these places, but they’re not home.  Better said, they are home while I am there, with my family and our routines and a rented house that we come to feel as our own.  But somehow those 45 or more weeks a year that I spend in my “normal”, workaday life, feel less real than the scant time I spend in Chicago or Colombia.  I think usually people define what we consider to be normal or real life by where we live and work, day to day.  But in my case, my day to day and work life feel less real than my lands of dreams, Chicago and Colombia.  It’s like certain indigenous groups I’ve read about that consider dreams to be the realest world.

I’ve further confirmed this difference in how I conceive of different places on a number of occasions.  When my mom died, we spent a few weeks at her house in Chicago.  I thought it would feel weird and empty without her there, but in fact it still felt like home.  This isn’t to say that I didn’t miss my mom, but the house and the city I grew up in didn’t feel alien without her.  Even when my wife and kids left a few days before I did, I still felt real and at home in my mom’s house, in a way I don’t elsewhere.  In fact, it felt like she was still there, imbuing everything with her spirit.

In contrast, I have spent the last few days in my Central American house, but alone, without my family.  The furniture was still there, but neither were the people nor the personal objects that make a home for me.  In this sense I really identified with Luther Vandross’s quip that a house is not a home if it’s empty.

Leaving my kids and my wife in Colombia reminded me of how my mom would start missing people before they had even left.  In the weeks prior to leaving them, I had a few short trips, and now I’m going to be apart from them for a few more weeks.  I’ve spent our time together feeling a sort of muted pit in my stomach, knowing that soon I’d have to leave and be without them for a while.  I think death is like that, the gloomy knowledge, even as you’re still alive and enjoying your loved ones, that you’ve got this imminent trip you’re going to have to take without them.  It’s like the time alone with your mom or your wife when they drive you to catch an early-AM flight.  It’s a few last moments with your loved ones while the rest of the world sleeps.

All these reflections coincide with what can seem to be a pretty apocalyptic time in US politics.  The imposition of indefinitedetention for children as an “improvement” on separating them from their parents, followed by Supreme Court decisions dismantling unions, validating voter discrimination, and institutionalizing both discrimination against Muslim travelers and gay consumers.  And I don’t just mean apocalyptic in a bad way.  For as much as these new political milestones seem to me to be major steps on the path to weakening democracy by and for the people, I imagine there is a huge swath of the American population that regards this as a sort of Rapture, the culmination of decades of ultra-conservative dreams and practical organizing.  From the Right’s embrace of the culture wars in the 1970s, to passage of ever-more-regressive tax laws and dismantling of market regulations in the 1980s and 90s, to consolidating the Evangelical vote in the 90s and 2000s, to winning local races in a big way in the 2000s and 2010s and enabling State legislatures to redraw US Congressional districts, to the radicalization of the Supreme Court by Republican-held Senates, to the opening of elections to corporate campaign finance, and finally to the election of a far-Right president with two chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court on his side.  It’s really a legacy of decades of impressive organizing work and a fair number of lucky breaks for the Right.

In any case, these weeks alone, apart from my family, and the ugly turn in US politics, have had me feeling down.  This feeling reminds me of a series of conversations a few years ago between my wife and my mother.  When we had been living in the US for a few months, my wife commented to my mother that she often felt unsafe in the US given the climate of anti-Latino sentiment and rising fascism.  My mother was surprised and didn’t really understand what she was talking about.  But a few months later, as candidate Trump’s campaign became more explicitly ethnonationalistic, and after a few high-profile hate crimes, my mom told my wife, “Oh my God, when I think that my grandchildren are Latino, I really worry about if someone’s going to try to do something bad to them!”  Reflection on the reality around her had led my mother to understand something she hadn’t really considered before as directly affecting her.  That’s how I feel these days—the increasingly narrow definition of who deserves to fully partake in the rights and prosperity of the nation has started to brush up against my reality and my loved ones.  As an economically-secure white male citizen I’m still going to be okay personally in a lot of respects, whatever damage is done by new laws and new Supreme Court decisions.  But it is becoming clear to me that we are in very trying times.

I have read a number of essays over the years, especially from black authors, to the effect that all the things that so shock and offend the general public are not news to the black community.  To feel like you are being marginalized, to have to fight back against discriminatory laws, to be the unheeded voice of reason before a majority you can never win against—these have all been defining features of black American life, in different times and places, under Republican or Democratic presidents.  This is not to say that the present juncture is no big deal—to the contrary, it gives me strength to know that, even when I feel that the world has gone mad and I am futilely insisting on what is right and decent, others have been in that same situation and worse situations, and have persevered and even sometimes prevailed.  Surely many people at many times in history have felt despair and felt that the world was indeed ending.  Imagine being a European Jew in the early days of the Holocaust, or a progressive peasant during the worst years of dirty wars and disappearances in Latin America, or a scapegoated professor in the throes of the Cultural Revolution.  Any of these people would be right to feel that the world was ending—it was, for them.  But fast-forward a few decades, and the world is still here, things have somehow persisted and progressed.  (The book The Three Body Problem does a great job of exploring this theme as it follows a professor that has lived through apocalyptic times in China and is now still alive and somehow going about things like a normal person).

Of course lest I get too optimistic about how the world continues, I can’t forget my wife’s quip, “But for the person who’s been separated from their children, their world has ended.  Can you imagine if they took away our kids?  That would be it.  That would be the end.”

Summer Fest West in Chicago

Hey all, I wanted to share a lesser-known neighborhood festival that will be happening in Chicago this summer, August 25th, to be exact.  It's called Summer Fest West, and will take place at Marshall High School at Kedzie and Jackson.

One thing I think is really cool is that Do or Die will be performing.  They were a local sensation very briefly in Chicago when I was a teenager.  Check out their video in this hyperlink.  It just oozes mid-90s West Side attitude, right down to the tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that the group has no money.  This goes against the flaunting of riches prevalent in a lot of rap music of the era.

Agricultural history of the US

This is a really cool series of multimedia lessons on the history of US agriculture, called Growing a Nation.  I thought I had linked to this a long time ago, but I wanted to make sure to share it with my readers.  It's aimed at a high school audience, but I sure learned a lot.

Gasifying agricultural wastes

This is a cool article from a farm near my father-in-law's farm in Colombia.  This farm, called Tosoly, has a closed-cycle system wherein it feeds hogs with cane juice and malanga leaves, the hogs produce poop that turns into biogas for the household and fertilizer for the fields, and the sugar cane bagasse (the woody leftover stem after you take out the sweet juice) is gasified to produce electricity for car and household.  There's also a bunch of forage trees to feed goats on the farm. 

Anyway, the article calculates how much electricity can be produced from the 2.5 ha used for hog and goat forage, as well as the carbon-storing valued of the biochar left over after gasification.  All pretty cool stuff.

The American Soul on July 4th

I spent my Independence Day on a plane headed to Washington, DC.  It was delayed a number of times, but I was pleasantly surprised to see everyone, passengers and flight staff, in a pretty good mood during all of our mechanical and weather delays, and even an emergency landing for refueling in Pittsburgh.  It counterbalanced much of my recent impressions of a general attitude of ugliness taking hold among my countrymen.

I've been reading a book called The American Soul, by Jacob Needleman.  Basically he is a philosopher seeking to "re-mythologize" our American history and sense of national identity.  This means reclaiming our great philosophical, moral, and spiritual figures like Washington, Lincoln, Douglass, and Dr King, as well as teachings from our Native American traditions.  Reclaiming them in a way that both recognizes their human flaws (without going to the postmodern extreme of deconstructing and disregarding the ideas and positions they stood for) and admires their transcendent achievements (without resorting to the infantilizing hagiography presented to schoolchildren).

Needleman maintains an informal, subjective tone throughout, light on citations and heavy on the idiosyncratic specifics of his childhood.  He often makes pronouncements about recent changes [for the worse] in our national character that, A) I don't think bear a basis in objective fact and I often don't agree with, and B) that have a distinctly conservative bent.  He describes things like "the generally prevailing view that we are, on the whole, victims--psychologically, economically, biologically, sociologically, historically--even cosmically," which sounds like a Right-wing bogeyman of the lazy urban masses waiting for their welfare check.  In general the author sees a Fallen humanity in lots of places when I'm not sure we are so bad after all, and certainly not much worse than we were when he was a kid.

Needleman is vague on what exactly our American values are, but they initially seem heavy on individual values like liberty and hard work and rule of law, which many on the Right emphasize at the expense of the general welfare or providing for community needs.  Later on though he is much more explicit that what made our great figures great was precisely their dedication to the good of the community, to providing for neighbors and sacrificing narrow self-interests, and he is clear that the excess or the perversion of these American qualities is at the root of many of today's problems.  He offers almost as a universally-accepted truism that government is punitive and "society" is beneficent.  Try telling that to folks that society tried to lynch or sic dogs on, while only government ensured them the right to vote.  You don't even need to go as far as Jim Crow to see how easily and how often Needleman's American ideals of strong willed pursuit of your "conscience" (plus a rejection of authority) have resulted in things like local school districts that institutionalize lies in textbooks, or anti-vaxxers who insist on the nobility of their cause despite all evidence to the contrary.  I'm also a bit wary of his appeal to add emotion and subjective feeling into the mix of scientific inquiry in order to give it a more profound human meaning.  Sounds a lot to me like medieval Aristotelians insisting on revealed authority as opposed to direct, objective observation.  In short, there are lots of little things the author lets slip (which sometimes even contradict one another) that seem to betray a more conservative bent.  However, this is "conservative" with a lower-case "C", not an upper-case partisan position.

Indeed, I checked Needleman out a bit online, and haven't found anything to indicate any real partisan leanings--his good points are good points, and some points may not be so solid, but in no case is he just trolling or fronting a smoke screen argument to bring you on board unknowingly with some larger hidden agenda.  What he says seems to be sincere and coherent; he really believes and means it.  And some of the subjectivity and my disagreement with his claims aren't entirely his fault.  He draws on a Hellenic, Platonic framework that insists that objective reality and human morality somehow mimic one another, that the natural world somehow conforms to human values and vice versa.  I just don't know if I believe that.  There is plenty in the natural world that isn't just or coherent or "good" per se, it just is.  Likewise, often doing the right thing in terms of human values isn't natural or normal.  It's often when we disobey the indifference or violence of nature that we are doing good.  In short, the laws of nature are internally coherent, but don't necessarily jibe with the workings of a decent human society.

One last nitpicky point I have.  In one passage Needleman claims (again as a truism that he can't even conceive anyone disagreeing with) that you can't legislate the good, but rather that a more just society must come from a change of heart in each person.  This may be true in a metaphysical sense, but we know that having clear laws can reduce the ill that people do to one another, with or without a change of heart.  In the absence of ethics regulations, people can commit petty acts of corruption or nepotism without even realizing that it's wrong (see the self-dealing of many Third World, and now First Family, politicians that feel like they're just moving progress along with big projects that they know just the guy for).  Likewise, anti-discrimination laws in the US probably haven't changed lots of hearts and minds, but they do lead to a much more just and less harmful existence for protected classes of people (and there are even studies showing that, in fact, changing outward rules of what it is acceptable to do or say often do change people's perceptions of what is acceptable).

I harp on this point because often people use this argument of changing hearts as an excuse for inaction in the face of racism or other forms of systemic injustice.  People facilely claim that, since changing a law or prosecuting violators of existing laws won't lead to a systemic change of heart for the violator or the society writ large, we might as well go lax on that stuff.  But if I'm unfairly fired, or passed over for a promotion, or sentenced to a longer jail term than someone of a different race, I don't give a damn what's in the heart of the person who's hurting me.  I just want to limit their ability to do so, with or without changing their mind.

Much of Needleman's thesis speaks of God and the divine, though he is refreshingly flexible about what and who God is, somehow reconciling that God may be both a personalized deity and a more faceless force or principle.  I identify myself as a believer in what he characterizes (quoting Franklin) as the religion of the Founding Fathers:

• That there is one God who made all things
• That he governs the World by his Providence 
• That he ought to be worshipped by Adoration, Prayer and Thanksgiving
• But that the most acceptable Service of God is doing Good to Man
• That the Soul is immortal
• And that God will certainly reward Virtue and punish Vice either here or hereafter

So in the end my differences with Needleman tend to be more cosmetic than anything.  I think we are on the same page on a lot of things, and he is teaching me a lot.  In short I like his book.

I like his calling-out of how boring and stiff the common received representation is of figures like Washington or Jefferson.  In fact, until reading this book, I've never been able to get too excited about these wig-wearing old white men making noble pronouncements.  At the same time, Needleman relates how he (and many of us), even as cynical schoolchildren turned off by much of this "official" US history, still bear an almost religious reverence for the symbols of our country, the "idea" of a Lincoln or the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance.

I like Needleman's idea (taken from Frost's poem The Gift Outright) that [non-Native] Americans are different from other nations in that we, our culture and lifeways and economy and beliefs and our government, didn't arise organically from the land but rather we arrived and imposed our vision (for better or for worse) on a new land.  I like his description of Stoicism as a striving to combine compliance with our outward duties to family and society, with an inward duty to self-discovery.  I like how he turns American exceptionalism on its head, on the one hand acknowledging both the uniquely ugly parts of our legacy while also rescuing the noble parts of our character and makeup that have allowed us to face address our shortcomings like few other nations in history, but more importantly by claiming that what makes the US special in fact speaks to universal philosophical truths, such that the American ideals Needleman profiles are now ideals for everyone.  Needleman highlights America as an idea, which opens the relevance of our lessons and our values beyond just a geographic border.

I do wonder what Mr. Needleman must be thinking these days of the recent junctures in US politics.  First we had in President Obama someone who seemed to subscribe to Needleman's vision, who in almost every public speech made a point to draw a unifying line between the striving and ideals of our earliest forebears, right up to the present day citizenry.  And now we have a President who is callous and crass and doesn't seem to believe in, care about, or even be very familiar with the types of ideals and ideas that Needleman wants to reclaim.  Given my reading of Needleman as leaning conservative, I wonder what he would think of today's Conservative (with a capital "C") cast of characters.

Now that I'm in Washington, I'm enjoying these big ideas and big historical figures and the monuments on the Mall and everything.  But I have to give some advice for the would-be visitor:  don't visit DC just after spending a lot of time in Chicago and observing its architecture.  You will be appalled at DC's tacky building styles.  From the bland red-brick barracks of Arlington slapped together in short order for Pentagon workers in the 40s and 50s, to the modern high-rises with all-tacky finishes that will have to be replaced within 20 years due to poor quality, water infiltration, and mold infestation, none of it compares even to the pedestrian early 20th-century Chicago two-flats and bungalows of solid construction, interesting textures and colors, and even little ornate touches of stonecarving and copper flashing.  The big monumental buildings in DC tend to be utility- and rapid-built in the early- to mid-20th century (think the Pentagon and USDA), with few ornaments, just light grey limestone that looks like cinderblock.  Some (Hoover building, Clinton building) aspire to greater things with NeoClassical facades, statues, fluted columns, and engravings, but this style, while exhibiting more effort and care and craft, still seems pretty tacky to me.  Dare I say that even the Washington Monument, for all the solemn intent of its design, is still a drab, off-color pile of rubble infill?  As a symbol it's great, but the materials still seem tacky.

Even in this though, my architectural snobbery, Professor Needleman has a lot to teach me.  I can acknowledge the inelegance of the materials or the design of the Washington Monument, while still recognizing the nobility of what it stands for as a symbol, as a myth.

Cash transfers vs. comprehensive social protection programs

I recently read an interesting article looking at different approaches to social protection programs.  For the past decade or more, inspired largely by a successful program in Brazil, conditional cash transfers have been all the rage in the development world.  In a conditional cash transfer program, targeted poor families receive a cash or in-kind benefit, sort of a minimum guaranteed income, as long as they fulfill some socially-desireable behavior, usually sending school-age kids to school and vaccinating little kids.  I think many development actors appreciated that these programs were a big improvement on many project-type development interventions, from improving ag productivity to pushing sex education, because instead of trying to do things for the poor in one-off programs that ended when donor funding ran out, conditional cash transfers were often led by poor countries themselves, and looked more like the comprehensive social welfare programs that make life tolerable for the poor in wealthier countries.  But according to this article, conditional cash transfers became a development fad (as microfinance did before them), and something that made sense at the scale it was initially tried (and especially because it was funded by poor countries themselves) became a go-to darling solution for donors to fund.  Anyway, the article contrasts conditional cash transfers with larger, more "boring" social security programs (disability payments, payments to the elderly and poor families with children), which the author prefers.  Not knowing all the nuances myself, it seems that this may be a distinction of scale and degree.  To me, the means-testing and other eligibility requirements for social security programs look a lot like the conditions of a conditional cash transfer program, just done in a more universal and thorough way.  My understanding from the article is that the main difference is a reframing of the cash benefit as a right as opposed to a lucky gift from a donor, and more protagonism placed on the government offering the benefit to its citizens, as opposed to donors funding the program.  Anyway, it makes for good reading for us development-heads.

Short memoir of a gay diplomat

This is a fascinating article following the professional life of a gay diplomat, starting with his Peace Corps service in 1960s Ethiopia, and ending with a recognition from the Secretary of State of his pioneering role for all gay diplomats, who were long at risk of having their security clearance revoked and losing their jobs just because of their sexual orientation.

Black cops and blue lives

This is a fascinating interview with two black cops.  It explores their simultaneous recognition (as black men) of and concern about the systemic bias in American policing, and their defensiveness (as members of the fraternity of police) vis a vis Black Lives Matter or any other criticism of police as a group.  I learned a lot.  I especially liked an analogy that one of the black cops makes about knowing that police brutality is wrong, but still rooting for the cop to get off the hook.  He compares it to when you're watching a ballgame, and a player on your team clearly fouls someone.  You know it's a foul, but you somehow convince yourself that it wasn't, since you want your team to win.

Marching and migration

Yesterday I went to a big pro-immigrant rally in Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago.  It was a wonderful experience, a great way for me to greet Chicago and the summer.  98 degrees and humid, but people out there without complaint.  A real Chicago mix of stoicism and social commitment.  Actually, it didn't smell as bad as you might expect 15 thousand people sweating to be.  The crowd was a lot whiter and more Asian than I expected.  This may seem like a bad thing if you buy into the caricatures of white big-city Liberals coming out to be seen and to signal their virtue.  But after thinking about it, I was proud of the white folks there.  They had come from all over the metro area, many of them probably from areas with few Latinos, but their conviction that it is wrong to tear up or imprison families seeking asylum led them to make their voice heard.  If the crowd had been mainly Latino, that would have been understandable, but I would have worried that many of us in the US aren't concerned with bad things that target other groups.  A crowd as white or whiter than the overall population of the Chicago metro area says to me that people are concerned with child detention, regardless of whether or not it affects their racial group.

In particular there was a huge turnout from Jewish groups and from Japanese-American groups.  In their banners and their discourse it was clear that dehumanization and detention are themes that touch a still-very-raw chord for these communities.  Though the overall crowd wasn't heavily black, there was great representation from a few organized groups like the Church and some unions.  Father Pfleger of St. Sabina's Church gave a brief but riveting speech.

So I felt good about the event, especially because the organizers reminded us that feeling good and marching isn't enough, that we need to keep following up with actions.  Specifically, they referred us to the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), as well as urging us to call our Senators and Representatives to urge them not to make any deals for legislation that would in any way continue to violate human rights.  It was interesting that the ICIRR, given our location inland, doesn't deal as much with people detained at the border, but rather with immigrants, documented, asylum-seeking, or otherwise, in need of legal, economic, or social support.  In Chicago, separation of families doesn't usually happen through detention, but rather through deportation of one or multiple family members, leaving behind the others that have legal residence or citizenship.

On the train ride to the march, I happened to sit down near a woman with a banner (for the march) who was being lambasted by a stranger.  The banner woman was trying to be polite and engaging and actually have an intelligent conversation, but the other woman was just ranting on and on about how cynical and lazy and rotten Latino immigrants are.  Her diatribe ranged from anchor babies, to comparing people's children to the child bombers used by terrorist groups, to how black youth are unjustly profiled (so why care about a few crying Latino babies), to how Haitians were denied asylum in the 90s (so Latinos should be today).  She even somehow got onto respectability politics and how Bill Cosby was right about sagging pants being the undoing of the black community, and those women who accused him of rape were ugly, washed-up sluts anyway!  It was sort of an illustration of where the Hotep philosophy converges with the white far-right.  Most of her points were invalid, though she did touch on the disturbing lack of sympathy in the US public for the plight of black folks stuck in intolerable situations.  I didn't want to butt into the conversation, but I wish I could have just whispered to the lady with the banner, "Just ask her how any of these points relate to the rightness or wrongness of locking up children."  Ultimately that's what the march was about, and that's the only relevant thing to be debating at this particular juncture.  Just as the question of whether Trayvon or Michael Brown or Laquon or Philando might or might have been swell guys or assholes is totally irrelevant to whether or not it is acceptable for our cops to be shooting unarmed people, it doesn't matter whether the people seeking asylum at our border are nice or cynical or lazy or what.  The question is, "Is it acceptable for the US government to separate refugee families or to imprison them together?"

I think most people understand that there are many flaws in the current legal framework for immigration and asylum-seeking in the US.  Hell, in most countries of the world; various UN agreements and declarations to which the US is party declare that "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution", but, as this Atlantic article points out, the richer countries of the world have never freely accepted unlimited numbers of refugees, instead financing their stay in poorer countries adjacent to the source country.  It's always seemed odd to me that the world demands that lower-income countries like Uganda and Turkey and Bangladesh be more hospitable and accepting of refugees than the wealthier countries, and now it's come to a head because refugees are bypassing these intermediate "holding countries" and going directly to places like Europe or the US.

The bottom line is that there is certainly room for debate about how best to reform the US's migration laws (though that said, for those who are concerned about an uncontrolled inflow of migrants, they should know that the number of people coming over the southern US border has gone down pretty substantively over the past decade or two, so it's not accurate to act as if the system for keeping out migrants hasn't been effective).  Between the common-sense recognition that all people are equal, so it is incoherent to limit people's movement from one country to another as they desire, and the other common-sense consideration that, coherent or not, every country has a prerogative to manage how many people enter or leave it permanently, there are many nuanced discussions and compromises that can occur.

But spitting out flawed Fox News talking points, false dichotomies, and absurd assertions based on your own anecdotal experience, won't get at any of these nuances.  As with many things, I think it would do us all a lot of good if, whenever we are on a screed about stuff that pisses us off, we try to think of and focus in on, "What exactly am I proposing?  What should be done?  How can I and others contribute to this vision?"  This is just a first step, but it would at least avoid the silly spectacle of so much of our reality-TV-style political "debate", where a conversation about practical measures to separate legitimate asylum-seekers from economic migrants can somehow veer into discussions about Bill Cosby, Sandy Hook, or Hillary's email server.  None of these lead to practical solutions; they only feed an inchoate sense of grievance and resentment.

It's okay to reduce your focus to a very specific facet of a given problem; you don't need to choose between having the grand solution to everything or simply shutting up.  You have a right to decry something that's wrong, as long as you are proposing a course of action that you feel would right the wrong, even if that course of action is as simple as saying, "Just stop doing that thing that's wrong."  The "Yeah, but"s may follow, and that's fair, but not having an answer to every follow-on question doesn't take away your right to point out what's wrong and propose what would be better.

The second step, if you've gotten as far as thinking about a specific, real problem (no, we're not going to talk about the war on Christmas, or how Obama is trying to take away our guns, because those things don't exist) and a specific, real solution you are proposing, is to analyze whether your solution would actually address the problem, without violating any other principles we hold dear.  So that means that you can't propose more prayer as a way of fixing gun violence or racism, because that doesn't actually address the problem, which is the first condition for a solution to be viable.  As for the second condition, you can't propose preemptive incarceration for bad people or something like that, since (aside from the difficulty in distinguishing bad people from good), this would violate a number of principles of the US Constitution, international law, and common human decency and morality.

Let's see how this pans out by analyzing my own thinking around the current migration debate.  The problem I am identifying is that the US government, as of some two-plus months ago, declared out of the blue that it would be separating children from their asylum-seeking parents.  After public outcry, President Trump signed an executive order that would replace separation of families with joint, indefinite incarceration of families with their children.  This is a problem, because in both cases you are denying the right to seek asylum (which is guaranteed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed by the US).  More viscerally as relates specifically to children, you are either denying them their families or denying them their freedom, neither of which is acceptable (and both of which, incidentally, also violate the Universal Declaration).  My proposed solution is that you do away with both of these policies.  This would mean either reverting to the pre-April 2018 status quo of leaving families in freedom as their asylum claims are processed, or eventually thinking of a better way to handle these claims.  But whatever the long-term solution to the larger, more holistic question, which is certainly a valid one, there is a simple, short answer to how to deal with any new policy that violates basic principles of human rights, especially for children.  Get rid of it.

"So you're saying that everything was fine before Trump and Sessions embarked on these new policies?"  No, but even the flawed status quo was much better than the new, post-April situation.

But what about people who try to game the system, for example by seeking asylum when they are really just economic migrants?  What about migrants who want to have their baby in the US so they can get social welfare benefits?  What about that Lebanese guy who runs a liquor store in my neighborhood that sells junk food and addictive substances?  What about my Latino coworkers who don't like to talk to me?

My short answer is that I don't know the answer to any of these questions, and I don't need to have an answer to the larger question of how best to reform a system in order for me to be able to say that something is wrong and needs to be undone.  None of the above questions have to do with the rightness (or wrongness, in this case), of locking up children or separating them from their families.  Some of the points in the prior paragraph are valid (actually, just the first question; the rest are either bogeymen or personal grudges not germane to a migration policy debate), and there are many other questions and issues that have arisen or will arise in any serious debate about how, if at all, we should reform the US migration system.  At the march on Saturday, I saw signs and heard many people proposing a wide array of larger solutions to the shortcomings of the system, everything from abolishing ICE (which seems radical until you consider that ICE is only a 21st-century reordering of immigration enforcement), to impeaching Mr. Trump, to stronger labor unions, to naming Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, to abolishing the bail-bond system, to improving living conditions in origin countries of asylum-seekers.  I may sympathize more or less with any given one of these or other proposed solutions, and there is a time for honest debate about them on their merits.  But everyone at the march, and I would hope a majority of the US population, would agree that it is illegal and inhumane to punish asylum seekers and abuse their children.