INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Fred Klonsky and the Chicago Teachers' Strike

Chicago teachers on strike. Photo by Fred Klonsky / The Rag Blog.
An interview with Fred Klonsky:
Chicago teachers in red and on strike

If the city of Chicago wins this strike it will very likely give the green light to big cities such as Los Angeles and New York to go after teachers’ unions there.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2012

Fred Klonsky, 64, retired in June 2012 after 30 years of working as an art teacher in grades k-5 in the public school system in Illinois.

He doesn’t go into the classroom to teach kids anymore, but he hasn’t retired from political activism and from protesting 101. A long-time president of his local union, he’s as politically active now as he’s ever been. With Chicago teachers on strike, he’s out in the streets with tens of thousands of other teachers and like them wears a red shirt. He also writes about the strike almost daily on his blog, FredKlonsky.com.

If the name Fred Klonsky rings a bell it might be because he’s a former SDS member and because his older brother Michael was national secretary of SDS in the late 1960s. Twenty years old in 1968, Fred participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Vietnam War era. He attended Los Angeles City College and the University of Illinois at Chicago where he graduated in 1984. “Solidarity Forever,” the old union slogan, still lights a fire in his belly.

Fred Klonsky. Photo by Anne Klonsky / The Rag Blog. Inset photo below by Fred Klonsky / The Rag Blog..
Jonah Raskin: What’s at stake in the teachers’ strike that’s going on in Chicago now and that has been getting national media attention?

Fred Klonsky: Everything! The city is attacking the unions and collective bargaining rights. The Democratic Party administration wants to make it difficult if not impossible for teachers to go on strike. They want to break the back of the teachers’ union and they want school principals to have total control of the hiring and the firing of teachers.

It sounds like they’d like to put the old patronage system in place.

Chicago is famous for people getting jobs based on who they know not what they know or what they can do. They want to apply the same principle to education.

It seems to me to be an intense power struggle.

If the city of Chicago wins it will very likely give the green light to cities such as Los Angeles and New York to go after teachers’ unions.

Are you an observer or a participant in this strike?

I’m some of both. I’ve been on picket lines. Two days ago I was on the line from 6:30 a.m. to noon. I’m also writing about the strike.

What’s it like out there on the street?

I’ve been at a lot of demonstrations over the years, but there is nothing like what’s happening here. It’s beautiful. The striking teachers are wearing red shirts and at the rallies there’s a sea of red. The picket lines are spirited and lively. I’ve seen former students out there, too, and that’s gratifying.

What’s the ethnic make up of the striking teachers?

In 1987, which is when the last teachers’ strike took place in Chicago, over 50% of the teachers were African American. Today it’s about 19%. If the mayor wins and we lose I think that the number of African-American teachers will plummet even more. Moreover, the goal will be to serve wealthier kids not the most needy kids.

Does the city want to gentrify the schools?

Chicago is following the European model in which the wealthy live in the center of the city and the poor and the working classes in suburban enclaves.

What is the big demographic picture in Chicago?

Once upon a time there was white flight. That pattern has reversed since the 1970s. The 2010 census shows that the African-American population has declined sharply. Young white professionals have settled in the center of the city, but they leave when their kids are of school age.

So the city wants the public school system in Chicago to reflect demographic changes and bring the wealthier kids back into the school district?

Yes, the city wants to do that and to privatize schools and educational services which are a multi-billion-dollar a year business.

Why are teachers demonized and made the scapegoats in our society? Are they in the way of the corporations?

To a large extent the union movement in the private sector has been destroyed. The powers-that-be are aiming to destroy unions in the public sector. The National Education Association (NEA) with three- and-one-half-million members is the largest union in the United States. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has one million members. That’s a combined total of four million organized workers. They’re the last union men (and women) standing.

In this strike the city is depicting teachers as greedy folks who are against change and who want to keep the status quo. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Are Chicago schools typical of schools elsewhere?

They are like urban schools everywhere. There are 360,000 students in the Chicago public school system that now mainly serves the poorest of the kids from the poorest of families. Eighty-five percent of the students qualify for free lunches. That means they’re very poor. Those who can afford to have taken their kids out of the public schools and put them in charter or private schools. The public schools have very few supplies and very few books. They do not have adequate resources.

Is Chicago different?

The union leadership here is taking a real stand. There is real backbone among union members. Moreover, the unions for the police and for firemen are supporting the strike. There’s real solidarity here.

What grade would you give Mayor Rahm Emanuel so far in the strike?

A failing grade and not only because of what he’s done during the strike. He has said that no matter what, 25% of students will fail. That’s unacceptable to teachers and their union. Emanuel has only been in office for a year, but violence in the city has skyrocketed. There have been more murders here in the last year than in Afghanistan. He’s turned my city into crap. Harold Washington, who was the mayor in the 1980s, was far better. He actually paid attention to the needs of the most needy. Rahm Emanuel doesn’t.

Will the strike affect the presidential election?

I can’t imagine that Obama is happy about the strike. So far he has had no comment. Of course, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have offered their support to Mayor Emanuel. We have a Democratic mayor putting Republican educational policies into practice. It’s a sad day for the city of Chicago.

[Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of biographies of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack London, is a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jay D. Jurie : Gotham and the Real World

Aurora, Colorado:
Gotham and the real world

Particularly when the economy is in decline and the political environment is in disarray, these suburbs lend themselves to what Thoreau called 'lives of quiet desperation.'

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2012

"Violence is as American as Cherry Pie" -- Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown)

Violence has come to be understood by many, implicitly or explicitly, as the answer to a number of other individual and social problems. To say that violence is celebrated in the United States is no exaggeration.

From the Battle of Bunker Hill onwards, this nation was forged by violence. Manifest Destiny and westward expansion were integral to the purposes of national elites from the inception. Not only were natural resources to be exploited and investments to be made, but population increase and settlement pressure could be relieved by continual advancement of the frontier. Territory that couldn't be taken by treaty was often taken by force of arms.

Even today, Daniel Boone, an early participant in the suppression of Native Americans, remains a celebrated figure in U.S. history. Though he was zealously involved with efforts to eliminate and remove the Seminoles and the Cherokees, President Andrew Jackson's visage adorns the $20 bill. Dying in a blaze of gunfire to wrest control of Texas from Mexico and preserve slavery, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and the other defenders of the Alamo are regarded as heroic martyrs.

This tradition receives favorable treatment in popular culture, with Western movies and leading actors such as the widely-venerated John Wayne pounding home the message again and again that the fist and the gun are ultimately the solution for most problems. Contemporary action movies have replaced the slower-paced Wayne with ultra-cool figures such as Batman, and his six-shooters with high-tech gadgetry, but the message remains the same.

Glorified depictions of violence can be seen in the military recruitment advertising frequently shown in theaters before the start of action movies, pitched to young males as the primary audience of both. Such images play an important role in recruiting the forces necessary to carry forward the same resource exploitation, investment, and subjugation and control of indigenous population goals that were inherent to the founding of the United States.

Ultimately, reliance upon violence results from a unique for-profit version of Social Darwinism and the pecking order it has created. Those at the top of the hierarchy rely upon violence to feed their insatiable appetites for money and power. In order to serve these purposes, violence must not only be threatened or used, when deemed necessary, but must be widely viewed as an acceptable means of resolving conflicts, as an acceptable part of daily life.

From this outlook, "might makes right," and that boils down to who has the most firepower. Violence becomes not only a means to an end, but the necessary counterpart to the famous Calvinist doctrine of those who are predestined through material success. For those on the lower rungs of the ladder, a "warm gun" becomes not just the poor man's equalizer, but a means of social advancement: "winners" and "losers" are not defined by moral virtue, but by force. Note that I say "man" deliberately, as this rarely involves women.

Bullying and hazing are expressions of this "love affair" with violence, and its ingrained nature in the core values of society explains why these practices are virtually impossible to root out. While certain figures in the social order, such as school principals and police chiefs, are charged with maintaining "domestic tranquility," at best, their role is analogous to the Dutch kid with his finger in the dike. Their admonitions are not only overshadowed by the overarching cultural dog-eat-dog backdrop of violence, they are often schizophrenic.

Lecturing on the need for peaceful conflict resolution, these same authority figures not only overlook, but often encourage pecking orders and other forms of competition that create "winners" and "losers" and forms of behavior that lend themselves to violence. Some years ago, when shootings began to occur at U.S. Mail facilities around the country, this phenomenon even gained a name: "going postal."

As always, there are those eager to make a profit from every opportunity, and as Michael Moore and others have pointed out, fear-mongering has long been understood as such an opportunity. Trayvon Martin's unfortunate death showed how industry can prey on fear to turn a profit. At the behest of the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) and the National Rifle Association (NRA), a number of states loosened their firearms laws. This happened through a combination of manipulating compliant legislators and instilling the belief that guns are the answer to personal protection.

For those near the bottom of the pecking order, or for socially isolated or marginalized individuals, it's only a short step from translating fear, frustration, or resentment into a perception that guns are a means to enhance one's status. Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver becomes George Zimmerman in real life.

For all intents and purposes, Zimmerman was a nobody who lived in a nondescript suburban neighborhood in Sanford, Florida, itself a suburb of Orlando. According to Sanford Police Detective Chris Serino, Zimmerman exhibited a "little hero complex." Similarly, in Littleton, Colorado, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were outcasts at Columbine High, snubbed by their peers and ignored by authority figures and their own parents, who decided "to go out with a bang."

James Holmes, the accused killer at The Dark Knight Rises movie in Aurora, fits a similar profile. Holmes was a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado in Denver who lived in nearby Aurora. Apparently he was failing in his graduate program, and like Jared Lee Loughner, who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, he may have mental issues but ready access to firearms and ammunition.

According to movie critic Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, the movie The Dark Knight Arises is grim, dark, and apparently apocalyptic. Not that this or any similar movie "causes" any real world violence to occur, but in this instance it may have provided the right sort of mood, or lent itself to the sort of climate Holmes was seeking. When apprehended, Holmes reportedly compared himself to the "Joker" in an earlier Batman movie.

It's also curious that both Columbine and this present shooting in Aurora occurred in Denver suburbs. Littleton at one time had some unique identity, before it was swallowed up as a Denver satellite. Aurora grew as an adjunct to military and aviation facilities, including Stapleton International Airport, later succeeded by Denver International Airport, that served the Denver metropolitan area. These two suburbs are representative of many that tend to foster a sense of atomized individualism, anonymity, and that lack identity or independent character.

As metropolitan locations grew, facilitated by the expansion of the interstate highway system and "white flight," populations became dispersed in ever-expanding concentric rings around urban cores. No real sense of community ever came to characterize these developments; residents often commuted elsewhere to work, or school, drove to supermarkets and shopping centers, and, isolated from one another, lived atomized lifestyles. Social observers ranging from William Whyte and Paul and Percival Goodman to Andres Duany and James Howard Kunstler have aptly described these circumstances.

Particularly when the economy is in decline and the political environment is in disarray, these suburbs lend themselves to what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation." They are perfect breeding grounds for those individuals left behind or harboring a grudge, unable to meaningfully connect their personal crises with others, inoculated with the belief that violence is a solution to their problems, and thanks to the weapons and ammunition makers and dealers, armed to the teeth.

[Jay D. Jurie, who attended the University of Colorado at Denver, is a resident of Sanford, Florida. He researches, writes, and teaches in the areas of public policy, public administration, and urban planning. Read articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : David Harvey's 'Rebel Cities'

Living for the city:
David Harvey's 'Rebel Cities'

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / May 21, 2012

[Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey (2112: Verso); Hardcover; 206 pp.; $19.95.]

I live in the small city of Burlington, Vermont, in the United States. Most every day I walk through the city's main public square known by its street name, Church Street.

A public street that has been semi-privatized, the street is often the center of a struggle between citizens and private interests over the nature of the public square. Battles over the rights of street performers, political activists, panhandlers, and regular citizens who want to hang out without shopping are frequent.

Thanks to quick public reaction from these groups and others, most efforts by merchants and politicians to further privatize the street have been beaten back. Yet, the space is more tightly controlled than downtowns in other similar sized cities that I have visited. In what might seem a contradiction, it is also more vibrant than many cities both larger and smaller.

One might attribute this latter fact to the so-called nature of Vermont itself; a nature that considers democratic engagement a valued part of human existence. Alternatively, one could attribute the lesser vibrancy of other downtowns to the lack of such a democratic consciousness.

Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements, and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine.

Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why it needs to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland, for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism.

Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned.

Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, these people are determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism.

They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anti-capitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community.

Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people.

Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle.

With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements, and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality.

He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements is proof of these movements' success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Corey Hill : A Cultural Revolution in Struggling Detroit?

D-Town Farm in Detroit. Image from Hello Ms.Detroit.
Reimagining Detroit:
Urban gardens and green economy
mark seismic cultural shift

By Corey Hill / AlterNet / March 22, 2011

DETROIT -- On February 16, Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder signed into law a sweeping emergency financial management bill, one that will give him wide powers to appoint financial managers across the state.

Cities in financial distress will be assigned emergency managers, who will have the power to suspend collective bargaining, terminate city employees, even dissolve local governments completely -- whatever is deemed necessary in the pursuit of a "balanced budget."

Critics have called it the most undemocratic legislative measure in recent United States history.

The plan, Gov. Snyder claims, is a response to the very real budget problems facing Michigan. Many cities across the state face default. Add to that high unemployment, cities in disrepair, and the collapse of vital industries, and the situation can rightly be deemed an emergency.

Perhaps no city is more emblematic of the challenges facing the state than Detroit. The city has an annual budget deficit of $155 million, and long-term debt totaling $5.7 billion. Fewer than half of its students graduate high school. There are parts of the city where streetlights don’t come on at night and trash goes uncollected.

Detroit is hurting, for sure. All the statistics about lagging graduation rates and economic stagnation can be implied in a single photograph of an empty street, the cinders of an abandoned home that has been burnt to the ground peeking through the snow.

But Detroit has another story, fighting to be noticed against the widespread perception of decay and downturn. It’s a narrative about an urban gardening mecca and a cultural cornerstone, a city where solar panel installation classes also teach demand side economics and relaxation techniques. Look closely at Detroit, and you’ll learn lessons with implications far beyond the asphalt capillaries of the Motor City.

As Detroit social justice activist William Copeland says,

The problems we face in Detroit are being mirrored all around the world: privatization, land grabs, issues of food sovereignty, the struggles for community stability and self-determination.

And the solutions don’t lie in budget cuts or emergency financial managers.

Detroit urban garden. Image from think Detriot = RethinkDetroit.

The alternative solution

It is noon at the D-Town Farm in Detroit, and sunlight muscles through the clouds. Used tires double as flowerpots, multichromatic blooms pushing through the giant rubber rings spaced throughout the garden. Volunteers tend the plants as a staff member leads a group of city students on a guided tour, describing the growing habits of the tomatoes and the workings of the brightly painted compost bins. Everywhere are signs of vibrant renewal.

The two-acre farm in Detroit is a project of the Detroit Black Food Security Network, a national leader among the dozens of urban gardening organizations in the city. Use of reclaimed materials, cooperative purchasing, community gardening -- principles at work in Detroit’s urban gardens -- are found in similar efforts across the country. But Berkeley or Portland this is not. These gardens have different roots.

Ron Williams, founder of Detroit’s alternative weekly Metrotimes, and Dragonfly Media:

What people have to understand is that the urban agriculture, neighborhood economic development and justice work happening in Detroit is not a lifestyle choice, it is dead-on self-determination activity for survival by the residents of this devastated city.

Necessity is a cruel mother, but certainly an efficient one.

The greater Detroit area is the nexus of an entire host of progressive enterprises, notable for both the diversity of its participants and the diversity of its projects: the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Centro Obrero de Detroit, Global Exchange, South East Michigan Jobs with Justice, the Greening of Detroit, and the Sierra Club.

On the energy front, small-scale solar is taking off in the city, fueled by community learning enterprises that provide valuable education to citizens in solar panel installation and maintenance. Weatherization projects led by community members serve multiple markets, youth participants learning a valuable trade while saving their neighbors money and saving the ozone.

Self-examination is part of the process of growth, too. The Nsoroma Institute on Detroit’s East Side works with young people to promote cultural values, self-identity, and political awareness. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration, a Pan-African organization, looks to convey an African-American perspective on immigration issues.

The Detroit Digital Justice Coalition is working with Detroiters to take back the media. Their core programmatic principles are universal access, participation, common ownership, and healthy communities. They want individuals who have traditionally been excluded from the media to have a voice, tell their own stories, and own the means of transmission.


Divergence

Detroit is in the throes of rebirth, but it’s not a lockstep march toward a glorious future. There are challenges, both internal and external. The single greatest source of opposition facing Detroit’s progressive community may be the city and state government.

Adrienne Brown, co-coordinator of the Food Justice Task Force, says,

The mayor's instinct to look outside the city for planners and proposals, as opposed to looking to communities, organizers, and community groups for the ideas and solutions the city needs -- that's the main obstacle right now. Instead of being able to just move forward the solutions the city needs, organizers have to split their time trying to stop the mayor from moving forward on proposals which come from people who don't know and love the city and its people.

Major David Bing’s recent open call for assistance is a prime example of a willingness to look outside city limits for solutions. In response to Mayor Bing’s call, the city has been flooded with answers -- from foundations, outside NGOs, and a glut of city and urban planners, all clamoring to fix Detroit.

A February profile in The Washington Post highlights the mayor sifting through the possibilities, brow furrowed as he mulls the various solutions he has been offered. More art. Closing down neighborhoods. Massive corporate-run urban farms. There are as many proposals to fix Detroit as there are vacant lots collecting Snickers wrappers and Pabst cans.

The interest in making a change is appreciated, but many Detroiters rankle at the mayor’s decision to provide attention and financial support to so many outsiders while valuable community efforts go unnoticed and unused. Why not take the time to listen to the answers from lifelong residents, they ask?

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Ford, please come back

Detroit’s streets are unusually wide. This is usually one of the first comments first-time visitors make. The answer to the mystery of Detroit’s roomy streets is an illuminating lesson of the power dynamics at play here.

In the early 1900s, before the automotive manufacturing industry came on the scene, there was in fact a highly efficient, widely used mass transit system in the city. Widely available cheap mass transit does not a car driver make, so once the automobile industry became powerful enough, they bought out the light rail and dissolved it.

Not many people seemed to mind. The American automotive industry generated tens of thousand of jobs for decades, good union jobs that could provide for an entire family. The automotive industry ran the city, and for the most part, people felt they had it good, even without the streetcars.

And people want that feeling back.

The conflict between city government, the progressive community, and the wider citizenry is perhaps most apparent when it comes to manufacturing.

Mayor David Bing is courting businesses with an eye toward rebuilding the manufacturing sector through tax incentives and rebates. For the mayor’s office, any comers will do. The Bing administration has little concern for the types of industry being courted, and many citizens agree. They want jobs, and they don’t care much what they’re building. It could be cars, it could be cruise missiles.

Or it could be wind turbines. The alternative proposal is to put the region’s skilled labor force to work building the next generation of green technology, turning Detroit into the green manufacturing hub for North America.

Factories that once made Fords and Chevrolets could now make solar panels, electric streetcars, and electric cars. Detroit could once again become the heart of America’s industrial engine, albeit one that pumps significantly greener lifeblood.

City officials are not opposed to green manufacturing. In fact, the mayor has already proposed using federal money in support of a light rail project. But for Detroit to become a green manufacturing center, the effort would require significant subsidies, rebates, and investment incentives.

For some, it’s not enough to change the output. They’re calling for a revolution in the production model, as well.

Detroit has long been a city with a traditional economic model -- worker, employer, work in, paycheck out, with orders coming straight down from the top. This hierarchical model has been dominant since the advent of industrial capitalism.

Frank Joyce, former communications director for United Auto Workers, says,

For some people, they want to go back. Even though they’ve seen all this, they want to say "Okay, how do we put Humpty-Dumpty back together again?" Even if we could go back, can’t we do better anyway? Detroit offers the opportunity to reimagine -- reimagine a city, reimagine work.

Reimagining work, by adopting models like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain -- a confederation of cooperatives from the retail, industry, finance, and knowledge business sectors. Though the model has yet to be applied on a wide scale to heavy manufacture, urban gardening, artists cooperatives, and light manufacture co-ops have flourished in Detroit.

Green manufacturing, in whatever form it eventually takes, will almost certainly provide an economic boon to Detroit. As resources grow scarcer and eco-consciousness blooms, the market potential for green goods, including heavy manufacturing, shoots upward. But the degree to which it will revitalize the city -- that’s a matter for debate.

Critics contend that even a completely revitalized manufacturing sector would not bring things back to the way they were. Thanks to automation, factories use fewer workers. What once required 5,000 people now only requires 500. Even with an industrial output equivalent to the city’s peak, the manufacturing sector would employ far fewer than it once did.

The situation is further complicated by the reticence of some citizens to engage with other sectors of the growing alternative economy in hopes that salvation might someday come in another form. Why waste your time with"bean patches" (as Jesse Jackson referred to urban gardens) when manufacturing jobs might be just around the corner?


[R]evolution

Detroit’s struggle matters.

As the Great Recession drags on and city and state governments across the country propose sweeping budget cuts and various draconian measures, Detroit’s community-led efforts for change offer a vision for a saner alternative.

To those who would propose gutting schools and privatization, more of the same ruinous policies that have created so much devastation, the counterargument is sprouting from abandoned lots in Highland Park, it’s collecting sunlight on rooftops in the East Side.

Detroit matters because the contrasts are so clear, the opportunity for reimagining is greatest where the collapse of the so-called American Dream has resulted in such extremes.

Frank Joyce says,

Here in Detroit you see these shirts, they say revolution, but the R is in brackets -- [R]revolution. Revolution is evolution. And evolution is revolution.

The essence of Detroit’s story is one of growth by necessity, incremental grasping toward a seismic shift in culture, environmental policy, and economics. The efforts of Detroit’s changemakers have been guided primarily by trial and error -- a willingness to step outside the bounds, to fail, and try again. The lesson is simple: change requires a concerted effort, but it doesn’t require a road map.

William Copeland says,

I honestly feel that the work being done in Detroit is setting the stage for a 21st-century tangible socialism, not rooted in the left or in the theoretical critiques of capitalism but from concrete struggles for the necessities of life and engagement with the institutions that have failed tens of thousands in Detroit.

Detroit’s struggle matters, because there isn’t a tidy conclusion. Nothing is certain. There are gaping budget deficits and light rail projects, abandoned lots and beautiful gardens. There are emergency financial managers, and there are community teachers.

And there are Detroiters, hard at work on a revolution in progress.

[Corey Hill is a human rights activist, community arts supporter, and writer who lives in San Francisco, Calif. This article was originally published at and was distributed by AlterNet.]

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David P. Hamilton : On the Road in France

French road sign warns of curves ahead. Photo from photoguide.cz.
On the road in France:
A different approach to getting around

...you will often find yourself passing through villages where the road shrinks to one lane to be shared with pedestrians, bicycles, dogs, restaurant sign boards, and oncoming traffic.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / May 12, 2010

[This article was written in consultation with Chris Dobbs, American expatriate artist living in Lyon, France.]

PARIS -- When making comparisons between France and the United States, I typically favor France, but not always. France has no Grand Canyon or redwoods. No buffalo or buzzards. The French make a virtue out of force feeding geese, love nuclear power, eat horses, smoke cigarettes too much and pot not enough. Other exceptions escape me.

I was first infected with Francophilia thanks to the U.S. Army, which in 1964 very kindly sent me to France rather than Vietnam. Two months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which signaled the beginning of the U.S. assumption of the principal fighting role in Vietnam, I arrived at a major headquarters unit in Orleans, France, to begin my career as an army clerical worker. It was a nice, clean job in a non-combat zone, the very definition of soft duty. Although unaware at the time, I had lucked out beyond my wildest dreams.

Orleans is just upstream from the famed chateau region of the Loire Valley and an hour south of Paris. Although I complained about it for the next two and a half years, it beat being anywhere near Vietnam, or Germany for that matter, by considerably more than a country mile. Only much later did I realize it was a seminal time for me.

Besides our regular army jobs, we were required to do extra duty about once a week, usually struggling to stay awake while "guarding" some empty office building through the night. I volunteered to be a "duty driver" instead. This only meant that I might have to wake up in the middle of the night to drive some drunk lieutenant home from the officer's club. It was my first experience driving in France.

I have since driven through France several times and have concluded that there are several features of the French road system that are clearly superior to that in the U.S. -- and a couple that are not. Although the French are not typically defensive drivers, France has about 40% fewer traffic fatalities per capita than the U.S.

Clearly, they have something positive going for them in this sphere. It is not that they are better drivers or have safer cars. More likely this commendable safety record is due to the traffic system design. American expatriate friends who have lived in France for many years say that it is also due to a cultural undercurrent of patience and civility.

This latter opinion flies in the face of the common American stereotype that the French are rude. I believe this stereotype is pure crap. France is the world's most popular tourist attraction and an important component of that is its citizens being gracious hosts. I've seen Americans in France berating waiters for not speaking English far more often than French waiters being rude to American customers.

Virtually every day French people volunteer to speak their limited English to me even though I'm in their country and speak rudimentary French. Americans who say the French are rude are almost invariably bigoted chauvinists who have never been here. If they have, they probably came on a guided tour with preconceived prejudices and lacked the willingness or ability to speak a word of French. Try to imagine a Frenchman at Denny's insisting on a French-speaking waiter. Yet that's the kind of expectation such Americans have.

View of traffic circle below the Arc-de-Triomphe. Photo from travelpod.com.
The most noticeable difference in the road system is traffic circles. They are rare in the U.S. but very common in France, especially outside city centers. They replace stop signs and red lights and keep traffic continuously moving. On entering them, you must yield to cars already on them, but usually everything just keeps flowing. One can pass through even medium sized towns without ever stopping, having gone through several circles in the process.

Each circle has clearly marked directional options, both road numbers and towns to be found in the direction indicated. You just need to know the next major town in the direction you want to go and it will appear on a sign pointing to the correct road. If you are uncertain where you're going, you can keep circling until you decide. French drivers, however, are quick to observe this indecisiveness and may honk, gesture and mouth unintelligible remarks. This is especially true if you have an Avis sticker on your back window.

To the American driver, the main negative feature of these circles is that they have two lanes going around them and often two lanes entering them. This sometimes calls for a certain amount of maneuvering. The maneuver where a car on the inside (left) lane of the circle suddenly realizes it is time to exit right is troublesome to Americans used to precise rules of the road.

To the French, however, it is an event that calls forth the efficacious driving principle in which rigid rules that breed complacency and displace personal responsibility to external institutions are replaced by individual initiative and mutual negotiations. This mix of freedom, caution, and cooperation enables traffic circles to work well.

The French readiness to communicate with other drivers is subtly different from that which typically takes place in the U.S. In the U.S, most people are reticent to express their displeasure with other drivers because the recipient of their remarks may be heavily armed and have an easily offended masculinity. This potential for serious road rage is practically non-existent in France.

For the French -- not having the God-given right to possess deadly force at all times -- expressing such displeasure isn't all that risky, so people feel more free to indulge. But these exchanges are a kind of banter with a core of politeness or at least civility. The French have even been known to apologize. If you think they're saying something nasty, it's probably because you're paranoid and don't understand idiomatic French.

The signage on French roads, unlike that in the U.S., utilizes international symbols. It is in most respects better, at least insofar as telling you where you are going. The signs can, however, be ambiguous, especially for someone unaccustomed to the international signage and who doesn't read French. It helps to have a navigator with a translation dictionary. Another complication is that the numbers used refer to the metric system. Of course, anyone familiar with both the metric system and the confusing jumble of measurements we use in the U.S. will attest to the superiority and greater simplicity of the former. But it does take getting used to.

The directional signs at traffic circles allow you to travel across France, even on back roads, if you know the next major town along the way to your destination, referring to maps only occasionally to determine the towns along your route. If the town you're looking for is not found on the signs, there will be one saying "toutes directions" or "autres directions." Follow those until you arrive at a circle with a sign pointing to the place you want to go. It almost always works

French road signs on the side of a house. Photo from photoguide.cz.
Another feature of French signs that Americans may find bothersome is that they never refer to cardinal directions. There is no highway D15 east and D15 west; only D15. This may be due to D15 winding in several directions as it circumvents some town. We carry a compass.

Another clearly superior feature of the French road system is that large trucks are always obliged to go slower than cars, in some cases much slower. On super highways outside cities cars can go up to130km per hour while trucks are limited to 90. This confines trucks to the right hand lane. It also allows tourists who don't know where they are going to nestle among them until they figure it out.

On smaller departmental roads, the difference is usually 90 and 80. The maximum speed a truck may go is shown by numbers on its back door. Imagine I-35 in Austin with no semis blazing along at 80mph. And due to reliance on a much better developed rail system for the movement of goods, there are many fewer trucks to deal with.

On French roads the speed limits change automatically when it rains. On super highways, it drops from 130kph to 110 for cars and 90 to 80 for trucks. Corresponding changes are required on smaller roads. Although I've never seen it, I have heard that this exists in the U.S., but varies from place to place and is poorly enforced.

However, speed limits are seldom posted on secondary roads except to slow you down when passing through towns. The maximum speeds are uniform for all roads of a certain type and you're supposed to know what they are without being told. On a D (departmental) road, it's 90kph on dry roads, dropping to 80 if it's raining. But no sign will remind you of this.

Traffic scene. Photo by nealiousq1 / webshots.
If you learned to drive in France, you were required to know maximum speeds for different types of roads under different conditions. Tourists have to figure it out by other means and it's best to do so quickly because French police, when they make one of their rare appearances on highways, will give you a ticket for the slightest transgression of the prescribed limit.

Another outstanding feature is the "passage." These are pedestrian cross walks, a series of white rectangles painted across streets in urban areas. They are very common, not only at corners, and vehicles must stop for pedestrians who are in them. They often do so even for pedestrians near one, when they even look like they might be thinking about crossing. This is especially true for anyone using a cane or pushing a baby carriage.

These events must be anticipated. The question often arises as to who got there first, but the pedestrian has the priority in this game. The driver behind a driver who is about to brake for a pedestrian also must be prepared to act suddenly. Strolling tourists not from California are often timorous about exerting this right, but the French seem to feel confident hurling themselves into the "passage " without looking or breaking stride.

Another very positive feature of transportation in France is that there are so many alternatives to cars. Towns are more compact and many people actually walk to do daily errands. This contrasts sharply with the U.S., where the invariable first act upon leaving one's house is to get into one's car. The arrangement of our urban geography is predicated on the
assumption of individual car use.

Imagine no cars. For many French it isn't hard to do. Living in compact towns and cities laid out long before the advent of cars, they can walk to nearby stores for all their needs. This has added benefits in terms of reducing pollution, promoting health, and maintaining small enterprises and social integration.

There are many more bicyclists in France, some doing mundane tasks and others out getting exercise. Many older men seem to be preparing for another run at the Tour de France. Bicycles rarely have special lanes and you are actually expected to defer to them.

A pair of French landmarks.
Besides these alternatives to driving, France has a vastly better developed system of public transportation. The train system, owned by the government, is especially good. Trains go to even very small towns. We stayed in a town of no more than two thousand, but it had frequent train service to the nearest city and from there to the entire country.

Given the paucity of train service in the U.S., killed off early in the 20th century by car manufacturers and oil companies, I would speculate that the French ride trains a thousand times more per capita than Americans. The trains that run between major cities are now all TGV's, high speed trains that run close to 200mph. Paris to Marsailles can be as little as a few hours. As the train stations are near the city centers, trains are typically quicker from home to ultimate destination than if you flew.

In Paris especially, few people get around by car. It's not practical. There isn't room for them, especially parking places, and municipal authorities look down on their use. This attitude is the opposite of what you find in the U.S, where space for cars is sacrosanct.

In urban France, parking garages are kept out of sight; they are underground and tourists are reluctant to drive down the dark holes leading to them. If you can by some miracle find an above ground parking spot, be ready to spend real money to rent it. There won't be a parking meter for each space, but on the coveted site "payant" will be written. This means you must find the nearby machine dispensing permits, insert the correct change, take the paper permit it gives you indicating how long you have, and put it in a clearly visible place on your dashboard. This may run you a couple of euro an hour with a two hour limit.

If you get a parking ticket and ignore it, you will get a large bill in the mail, even in the US. If you ignore that too, good luck renting a car next time you come to Europe.

Alternatives to using a car in Paris or within other French cities are many. Besides walking and personal bikes, there is an extensive and well organized metro system that is directly connected to a regional train system that takes you far out into the suburbs. There is an even more extensive bus system that uses the same tickets as the metro and provides you with a view, but moves more slowly. For still more leisurely albeit costly transportation there is the "batobus," a large public boat covered with clear plastic canopies that runs up and down the Seine through scenic central Paris.

Public bicycle installation. Photo by Graham Coreil-Allen / GPS.
The latest transportation innovation is the public bicycles that can be found at installations all over Paris. You simply put a credit card into the machine found at each bike station as a deposit to get into the system. Then you can take out a bike for 30 minutes free and for very little thereafter, leaving it at any other bike station in the city. These are three speed bikes, but most of Paris is pretty flat.

By these and other means, such as reducing the number of parking spots and lanes for cars, the municipal government is openly and successfully reducing car use within the city.

The result of all these alternatives is that for urban dwellers cars are secondary transportation, a luxury used for special occasions. In contrast, life in the U.S. has been organized in such a way as to make car ownership an absolute necessity, the primary if not the only form of transportation.

But what about the negative features of driving in France? There are only a couple that seriously bother me. One is that they don't tell you how much to slow down for corners on rural roads. You'll be on a D (departmental) road where the top speed limit is 90kph and approaching a curve. Nothing says to slow down. There may be blue and silver chevrons pointing in the direction of the curve to warn you, but no sign advises you about the safe speed.

This reflects a gymkhana mentality. You clearly can't make that corner at 90kph unless you're a professional race car driver in a formula one vehicle. How fast you can actually do it depends on your car, skill, and nerve. A similar system in the U.S. would produce an epidemic of rollovers. In France, it's a matter of personal responsibility.

Another major problem on French roads is motorcycles. The rules that apply to cars don't seem to apply to them. They totally ignore the speed limits, pass at any time and anywhere, park arbitrarily, and often travel in packs that seem to be racing one another for high stakes. Like on California freeways, they drive down the stripes between car lanes at a very high rate of speed, flying by while you're limited to stop and go.

The difference is that because of high gas prices there are exponentially more of them in France. If you suddenly change lanes without noticing their very rapid approach, bad news. A willingness to constantly risk death seems to be a basic qualification for motorcycle ownership. You would think that the French highway patrol would clamp down on this, but there are very few of them, a fact that has other advantages.

Holiday streetscape. Photo by Graham Coreil-Allen / GP.
The French have a different concept of social space that is much closer and includes the way they drive. Their houses and cars are generally smaller. They stand closer to talk to one another. And they are quite comfortable driving much closer to other cars. If you are a tourist trying to drive leisurely through the countryside, this means that one is very often two feet off your rear bumper and looking impatient. The solution is to merely pull over. On narrow roads, we do it every few kilometers.

This closeness includes the spatial geography of towns and cities. Virtually all of them came into existence centuries before cars and have not been significantly rebuilt to accommodate them. If you choose to get up close and personal with France by driving across it on secondary and tertiary roads, you will often find yourself passing through villages where the road shrinks to one lane to be shared with pedestrians, bicycles, dogs, restaurant sign boards, and oncoming traffic.

Cars belonging to visitors are often not allowed in these villages. You are required to park on the periphery and walk in. Signs confront you saying "interdit sauf riverains," forbidden except for locals. Other signs inform you about who has the right of way when confronting oncoming traffic on a particularly narrow stretch. These places were not designed with cars in mind, and they now seem to make only minimal compromises. This contrasts sharply with the post-car lay out of American urban geography and our exaltation of the rights of these machines.

Vintage shot of Doubs, Miche (ca. 1930). Not built with cars in mind. Photo from photoguide.cz.
Finally, a major difference between driving in France and the U.S. is that it costs significantly more in France. These greater costs are a result of much higher gas prices due to taxes. Gas is now above $7 a gallon and there are also lots of tolls on superhighways outside cities. The French are OK with this because they understand that the money goes into the road system, just as they are OK with higher taxes in general because they get meaningful benefits for their tax money, not just transfer payments to corporations like in the US.

Given the other transportation options, driving long distances is seen as a luxury. Even the argument that you can pack a whole family in one car doesn't hold water. The train guys, government employees, have thought of that and offer family based pricing. You can buy a Carte Enfant + card that gets you 50% off for that child and anyone who travels with him or her. Americans would puke at similar gas prices and tolls because they see "free" roads as a right and don't take into account all the related costs.

If you think that the road system in the U.S. is the best in the world, you're wrong. Having a passport to go with your driver's license might enlighten you. But few American tourists venture out on French roads, especially the back roads. As a result, they miss many of the best sights.

There are many features of European roads that could be easily adopted that would save thousands of lives in the U.S. every year. Requiring large trucks to go significantly slower than cars and automatically reducing speed limits when it rains would cost practically nothing. But, these reforms are so very seldom discussed that few Americans are even aware of them.

The trucking industry and its corporate clients find improving your safety costly and inconvenient. In the U.S. where corporations rule, reducing traffic fatalities has little measurable impact on the only thing that really matters: the bottom line. Such concerns are therefore a very low priority.

Vastly expanding public transportation would shift the whole picture, saving thousands of lives, reducing oil consumption, and improving the environment. But expanding the public sphere is heresy in capitalist America, so don't hold your breath for these obvious reforms to take place.

[David P. Hamilton is an Austin-based activist and writer.]

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Photographer Roy DeCarava : 'The Sound I Saw'

Photographer Roy DeCarava. Photo by triggahappy76 / Flickr.
Roy DeCarava : 1919-2009

Photographer Roy DeCarava, who died Oct. 27 at age 89, dedicated his 60-year career to capturing images of African Americans. His subjects ranged from daily life in his hometown of Harlem to the Civil Rights movement, but his most noted work featured photographs of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong...

The first black photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, DeCarava was also awarded the National Medal of Arts... In 1996, his work was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

NPR / October 30, 2009

"pepsi," 1964. Photo by Roy DeCarava.
The Sound I Saw:
Photography from a black point of view

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / October 31, 2009

Pictures of a man leaving the subway, of a saxophone, a black woman’s face. John Coltrane. Langston Hughes. The black New York City photographer who captured this Harlem history in its latter heyday was Roy DeCarava.

Educated at Cooper Union, and struggling to survive working as an illustrator, Mr. DeCarava always managed to find time to photograph ordinary life in his neighborhood. Whether it was the murky view out a dirty window from a cheap room, or the iconic image of a (now) Jazz Giant, Roy had a way of ennobling everything he snapped. But not in the usual style of strictly European art based traditions or sentimentality. It was as if the simple objects portrayed were the same as the faces of the people, of the Jazz musicians -- all possessing a story to tell.

What Roy DeCarava accomplished, and what we now take for granted, is a black point of view. What English word do we use to describe this type of vision? Good question. Perhaps it is better that it doesn’t have a name like “Soul” that could be easily turned into advertising copy and lose all meaning. What Roy DeCarava photographed was the tenderness and quiet pride flowing through everyday Harlem life, the smoldering Jazz solo across a smoke filled club, the structural beauty of a black person’s face.

Included in the seminal photo collection The Family of Man (1955), DeCarava was still mostly intolerant of the white art world. Although he received a Guggenheim Grant in 1952, Roy felt no need to acknowledge that art world or participate in the mainstream art scene. Instead he turned his own apartment in Harlem into a gallery for a few years, exhibiting the work of other art photographers. Instead of working for Life Magazine full time like black photo pioneer Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava sponsored a protest against the publication.

Roy was also a great photography teacher (at Hunter College), sending hundreds of student camera eyes out into the streets in search of poetic truth. Roy DeCaravara’s great cultural accomplishment was to equate black street life with black Jazz, seemingly in an effort to ensure that one would not rise without the other. It was all about timing, whether it was Jazz, or Photography, or Life.

Asked what he saw in the Jazz performance that made it like photography he said: "I improvise. Improvisation is all about individual interpretations, individual expression. And that's what I'm doing." He also said: “in between that one-fifteenth of a second, there is a thickness.” That was a poet speaking. Roy DeCarava passed on this week, but his photographs are still telling their simple eloquent stories of black life.

Also see:

• Roy DeCarava, 89: Photographer acclaimed for haunting Harlem images by Matt Schudel / Washington Post / October 30, 2009
• A gallery of Roy DeCarava's photographs.
• An NPR interview with Roy DeCarava from May 1996

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Glenn W. Smith : Coyote Nation

Our wily neighbor. Photo by Scott Stewart / AP.

You know why coyotes do so well? Because they are not ideologues.

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / September 21, 2009

Coyotes have come to the city. I sit here writing in the foreshortened suburban night and listen to them howling and singing out back, hidden in what we used to call a gulch but is now called a green belt. A coyote can hold a note a lot longer than you think.

To many, they are a dangerous nuisance. Pet cats and puppies disappear. Coyotes, or “ghosts of the city” as a recent study calls them, get the blame. That study (pdf), by Ohio State’s Stanley Gehrt, says coyotes “have become the top carnivores in an increasing number of urban areas across North America…”

If pets disappear, though, so do skunks and rats. I think it’s a fair trade.

Years ago I sat on a little rise near the Rio Grande with my father and watched a pair of coyotes tag-team a deer, one resting while the other ran the deer in circles. The next, fully rested, took up the game so the partner could rest. It took four cycles. I’ll spare you the end of the story, except to say the coyotes seemed skilled and well-fed.

It’s almost too easy to paint a romantic metaphor here: wild things persist and thrive, despite human gated communities, speed bumps, stop-lights, WalMarts, chin-pulling urban planners and beleaguered city councilmen who themselves get tag-teamed at churches and Christmas parties by suburban couples who’ve lost cocker spaniels and tabbies.

You know why coyotes do so well? Because they are not ideologues.

They take great advantage of an evolved mammalian trait too often derided by humans as lack of conviction or commitment: mental flexibility, a willingness to live with uncertainty and unpredictability so that more alternative courses of action are opened.

Coyotes, we say, are wily. As regards humans, the English poet John Keats called it “negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Every ideologue in human history has failed. That’s because most ideas are contingent and bound up with current or past circumstances and often unsuited to tomorrow’s risks and opportunities. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized this. It’s why Jefferson said we need a revolution every generation. The U.S. Constitution is not an idea, and it’s a terrible mistake to read it like a list of commandments. The Constitution’s greatest feature is the inbuilt recognition of the need for its own mutability.

Jefferson, however, did hold one truth as immutable or “self-evident”: human equality. Does this contradict the fundamental insight of the Enlightenment, the insight that truth is man-made and fallible?

Maybe, but the recognition of human equality was a truth made necessary by the fact that every other idea for ordering or enforcing human inequality by economic prowess, religion, skin color, geographic origin, I.Q., or arm strength was doomed from the start.

The trouble is, of course, that technology has now empowered ideas with the ability to take us all down with them when they go.

A further trouble is, in politics those of “negative capability” often seem to be at a disadvantage in debate with stubborn ideologues. The former are made to seem weak and uncertain, the latter strong and certain, no matter how demonstrably false the ideas they cling to (the free, unregulated market comes with an invisible hand that blesses all; fossil fuels are infinite in supply and safe for the environment; war is peace, et cetera).

But who is really stronger, the coyote or the domesticated dog?

I think Barack Obama is the first president in my lifetime to possess Keat’s negative capability. The trait was made more politically attractive by its juxtaposition with the many failures of George W. Bush’s stubborn clinging to ideas already bled to death during the world’s most violent century.

I fear Obama’s attraction to Abraham Lincoln is already being trivialized by the press, but it’s a fact that Lincoln might have been the last president to possess this quality.

We should be cautious about judging Obama in the light of our own sticky ideas. It’s not that anyone should quit advocating for what they believe. Democracy depends upon it. It’s simply to put into action the recognition that in America’s gulch or green belt, if we want to survive, we’re going to have to eat a skunk or two.

[Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” This article has also been published at FireDogLake and at Glenn's excellent new blog, DogCanyon.]

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Jonathan Franzen : 'I Just Called to Say I Love You'

Skull-with-cell-phone by Spazmat in downtown New York City. Photo by Ivan Corsa. /Global Graphica
Cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space.
By Jonathan Franzen

This article appears in full in the September/October 2008 issue of Technology Review.

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I'm still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw--this is just the way life is now.

I'm not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late 20th century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs. And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise ("pink noise") that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor's television set: I love them. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinema-goers, so many open-mouthed crunchers of popcorn: yes.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives. And so, although my very favorite gadgets are actively privacy enhancing, I look kindly on pretty much any development that doesn't force me to interact with it. If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don't see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I'm very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

The developments I have a problem with are the insults that keep on insulting, the injuries of yesteryear that keep on giving pain. Airport TV, for example: it seems to be actively watched by about one traveler in ten (unless there's football on) while creating an active nuisance for the other nine. Year after year; in airport after airport; a small but apparently permanent diminution in the quality of the average traveler's life. Or, another example, the planned obsolescence of great software and its replacement by bad software. I'm still unable to accept that the best word-processing program ever written, WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS, won't even run on any computer I can buy now. Oh, sure, in theory you can still run it in Windows' little DOS-emulating window, but the tininess and graphical crudeness of that emulator are like a deliberate insult on Microsoft's part to those of us who would prefer not to use a feature-heavy behemoth. WordPerfect 5.0 was hopelessly primitive for desktop publishing but unsurpassable for writers who wanted only to write. Elegant, bug-free, negligible in size, it was bludgeoned out of existence by the obese, intrusive, monopolistic, crash-prone Word. If I hadn't been collecting old 386s and 486s in my office closet, I wouldn't be able to use WordPerfect at all by now. And already I'm down to my last old 486. And yet people have the nerve to be annoyed with me if I won't send them texts in a format intelligible to all-powerful Word. We live in a Word world now, Grampaw. Time to take your GOI pill.

But these are mere annoyances. The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance--the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today--is the cell phone.

Just 10 years ago, New York City (where I live) still abounded with collectively maintained public spaces in which citizens demonstrated respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it. The world 10 years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late 1990s, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn't you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I'd quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother's hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in icky little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.

Read all of this article here. / Technology Review

Thanks to Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

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Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

'Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops'
By Douglas Haddow

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.

I‘m sipping a scummy pint of cloudy beer in the back of a trendy dive bar turned nightclub in the heart of the city’s heroin district. In front of me stand a gang of hippiesh grunge-punk types, who crowd around each other and collectively scoff at the smoking laws by sneaking puffs of “fuck-you,” reveling in their perceived rebellion as the haggard, staggering staff look on without the slightest concern.

The “DJ” is keystroking a selection of MP3s off his MacBook, making a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat.

“So… this is a hipster party?” I ask the girl sitting next to me. She’s wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.

“Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!”

“Are you a hipster?”

“Fuck no,” she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have recently and wholeheartedly adopted the fixed-gear bike as the only acceptable form of transportation – only to have brakes installed on a piece of machinery that is defined by its lack thereof.

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

“These hipster zombies… are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents,” wrote Christian Lorentzen in a Time Out New York article entitled ‘Why the Hipster Must Die.’ “And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”
With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles.

***

Standing outside an art-party next to a neat row of locked-up fixed-gear bikes, I come across a couple girls who exemplify hipster homogeneity. I ask one of the girls if her being at an art party and wearing fake eyeglasses, leggings and a flannel shirt makes her a hipster.

“I’m not comfortable with that term,” she replies.

Her friend adds, with just a flicker of menace in her eyes, “Yeah, I don’t know, you shouldn’t use that word, it’s just…”

“Offensive?”

“No… it’s just, well… if you don’t know why then you just shouldn’t even use it.”

“Ok, so what are you girls doing tonight after this party?”

“Ummm… We’re going to the after-party.”

***

Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice, who recently left the magazine, is considered to be one of hipsterdom’s primary architects. But, in contrast to the majority of concerned media-types, McInnes, whose “Dos and Don’ts” commentary defined the rules of hipster fashion for over a decade, is more critical of those doing the criticizing.

“I’ve always found that word [“hipster”] is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable,” he says. “I’m dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda.”

Punks wear their tattered threads and studded leather jackets with honor, priding themselves on their innovative and cheap methods of self-expression and rebellion. B-boys and b-girls announce themselves to anyone within earshot with baggy gear and boomboxes. But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it.

***

“He’s 17 and he lives for the scene!” a girl whispers in my ear as I sneak a photo of a young kid dancing up against a wall in a dimly lit corner of the after-party. He’s got a flipped-out, do-it-yourself haircut, skin-tight jeans, leather jacket, a vintage punk tee and some popping high tops.

“Shoot me,” he demands, walking up, cigarette in mouth, striking a pose and exhaling. He hits a few different angles with a firmly unimpressed expression and then gets a bit giddy when I show him the results.

“Rad, thanks,” he says, re-focusing on the music and submerging himself back into the sweaty funk of the crowd where he resumes a jittery head bobble with a little bit of a twitch.

The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion.

***

Perhaps the true motivation behind this deliberate nonchalance is an attempt to attract the attention of the ever-present party photographers, who swim through the crowd like neon sharks, flashing little blasts of phosphorescent ecstasy whenever they spot someone worth momentarily immortalizing.

Noticing a few flickers of light splash out from the club bathroom, I peep in only to find one such photographer taking part in an impromptu soft-core porno shoot. Two girls and a guy are taking off their clothes and striking poses for a set of grimy glamour shots. It’s all grins and smirks until another girl pokes her head inside and screeches, “You’re not some club kid in New York in the nineties. This shit is so hipster!” – which sparks a bit of a catfight, causing me to beat a hasty retreat.

In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.

What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.
***

“If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a fuck!” chants an emcee before his incitements are abruptly cut short when the power plug is pulled and the lights snapped on.

Dawn breaks and the last of the after-after-parties begin to spill into the streets. The hipsters are falling out, rubbing their eyes and scanning the surrounding landscape for the way back from which they came. Some hop on their fixed-gear bikes, some call for cabs, while a few of us hop a fence and cut through the industrial wasteland of a nearby condo development.

The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Source / Adbusters / Posted July 29, 2008

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