Hylarious

T.R. Reid's "The Healing of America"

2009-08-25T00:14:00.000-07:00

[Hello 2009! Insert obligatory apologia, complete with excuse and avowed resolution to recommence, here. But seriously, I'm posting the following mostly so that I don't look too lame on Xtal and Ben's blogroll. Come back for more next — uh, well, sometime maybe.]

I spoke last week with T.R. Reid, who's coming to town in September to discuss his new book, "The Healing of America: a Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care."

Reid joked that he knew exactly what Obama's first major domestic policy fight would be.

And he told me he's a year late coming out with the book: tardiness for which his publisher has probably forgiven him. Health care reform — but mostly, the acrimony over it — is kind of, just sort of, in the news now.

Reid's book would be just an exercise in comparative policy studies but for having busted his shoulder while in the U.S. Navy. A military surgeon had bolted the joint back together, but that was way back in 1972. "By the first decade of the 21st century," writes Reid, "I could no longer swing a golf club. I could barely reach up to replace a lightbulb overhead or get the wine glasses from the top shelf." And so, "hoping for surcease from sorrow," Reid takes his shoulder on the road.

While I seldom get to read a book from cover to cover before I have to interview the author — it's the price of timeliness — what I've read is pretty great. Even though I'll be done with editing the interview around 5 o'clock tomorrow, its storytelling virtue is kind of encouraging.

Did you know, for example, that the Canadian system was invented by the Scots governor of Saskatchewan, a radical maimed in a boyhood rugby match but whose recovery at the hands of an experimental knee surgeon left him worrying over the fact that some of the sick got healthy because they had money and some stayed sick because they didn't? Me neither.

Reid comes to Seattle to share from the book on Tues., Sept. 8. While in town, he's also being interviewed by the folks at Amazon — a sign that it'll figure prominently on the big A's web site.

Posse Bacheloratus: A Great Idea at the Time

2008-12-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

Finally concluded my review of Alex Beam's book on highbrow flim-flammery and the classics on campus, and it's here. It's a bit longer than the usual book review, but I used the opportunity to tease out my initial reasons for requesting the book from the publisher: class-based anxiety.

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. By Alex Beam. PublicAffairs Books, 2008, 245 pages, $24.95.

Are the liberal arts a con job?

Was the four years I spent earning a bachelor’s degree, exhausting an inheritance and leaving the class of my birth, was it a waste?

Should I have spent my money — my mother’s money, left in trust to her minor son when she died; money, I see now as a member of the chronically insecure middle class, that doesn’t come around again — more wisely? Started a business, bought a home, gone into a more remunerative field?

I picked up A Great Idea at the Time looking forward to Alex Beam’s picaresque history of college education and bourgeois aspiration, and I got that. But I was also looking for someone to blame. If ever we broke and dismayed liberal-arts graduates form a posse (posse, hell, we’ve got the numbers for an army), if we ever ride out and round up the culprits who gamed us into thinking a degree in literature, history, the arts, or philosophy was a worthwhile expenditure of sweat and treasure, we might posthumously indict Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins.

Adler and Hutchins were what Beam calls an intellectual Mutt n’ Jeff routine, a trollish philosopher and his boy-wonder leader whose friendship spanned the better part of the 20th century and who made their names shaking up the University of Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s. Hutchins, as university president, did the unthinkable: he abolished the football team. And he and Adler began a freshman elective class dubbed the Great Men’s Fat Book Class, in which the students got, not textbooks or lectures, but heaping helpings of the Greeks and Romans. This week the Iliad, next week the Odyssey. This week Plato, next week Pliny. In small group discussions, students were subject to the enlightenment and mental bullying of the Socratic dialogue, and forced to mount rhetorical counteroffensives. Their fusillades were at least amusing.

Socratic dialogue made an indelible smear on my early adulthood. I will never forget my legendary prof Marvin Levich leading me from Homer to St. Augustine in Humanities 110; Levich, who college lore was said to have bested William F. Buckley Jr. in debate, covertly smoked in his office, violating college rules, and would gesture with a phantom cigarette at our conference table. Marv and his gravelly voice and his blue eyes, his Greco-Roman beard, his dispassionate demeanor; he was formidable. He was also about to retire. I remember the silences.

But the discourse caught on at the University of Chicago, and Adler and Hutchins knew you didn’t have to matriculate to benefit from a close read. They took the fat books downtown, putting the hog butcher scions and their wives to work on questions of truth, beauty, justice, and appetite. In 1943 there were 165 Great Books students in Illinois, and by 1946 5,000 people in the Prairie State were puzzling over Aristotle or marveling at Rabelais’ expert scatology. Circuit riders for the Great Books Foundation passed the torch around the nation. Then Hutchins and Adler assembled a disputatious committee of tenured experts to render the canon for mass consumption.

What they came up with, and Encyclopedia Brittanica printed was this: 54 volumes of the Greeks, Romans, and their spawn rendered in poor off-the-shelf translations and printed in two columns of nine-point type. From Descartes to Darwin, there were no explanatory notes, only the Syntopicon, a neologism of Adler's invention ("index" was too common a word) that guided users through the Great Ideas contained within the Great Books. The edition's financier budgeted fifty grand to compile the Syntopicon; Adler devoted an entire floor of the university's Social Sciences building and blew through nearly a million, and was still, his peers complained, pretty much useless.

“The Syntopicon emanated a distinct odor of flummery,” writes Beam, quoting a fellow prof, “It was ‘neither a scholarly nor interpretive aid, simply Mortimer getting his staff to blow up to a monster his own bogus tricks of research, scissors and paste mixed with his today's current position in philosophy…. People will be disgusted and angry, if they ever look at it.’”

Phenomenal hubris? Maybe. But the “colorful furniture” also furnished a kind of map into postwar Pax Americana. The Great Books of the Western World implicitly made this kind of eponymous offer: So, you’re a great power now. Well then, you might want to read us.

At first, people didn’t, not until publisher Encyclopedia Britannica realized the ideal demographic: America’s newly affluent professionals afflicted by status anxiety. One typical ad read: “The ability to Discuss and Clarify Basic Ideas is vital to success. Doors open to the man who possesses this talent.” Door-to-door salesmen used deceptive tactics, posing as university professors or declaring that some household's youngster had been shortlisted for a scholarship, and if they wanted to get ahead, why, they'd need these.

In sum, Mammon came along and ruined things for Clio, as he’s wont to do. Base commerce didn't ruin the sound principles underlying the Great Books of the Western World. I may be a member of the overextended and anxious middle class, and of course I'd like more money, but by the time I finished A Great Idea at the Time I felt I could throw away my posse’s rope. I happen to believe that great books, lowercase, belong in everyone's hands, that works of art, history and philosophy can enlighten and enthrall without the use of explanatory notes, and that an attentive reading by anyone, high, low, or middlebrow, is a wonder-working thing. While the vast libraries of a globalizing society necessitate anthologizers, editors, and well-informed guides, they have nothing if they don't have an ardent audience.

Beam's book features a few intellectual everymen eternally grateful for Adler's evangelism. Britannica sponsored an essay contest for the children of families who'd bought the great books; after his working-class parents got a $400 set in the 1960s, Michael Dirda and his three sisters, writes Beam, "racked up $2,500 in essay prize money, and won four complete sets of the Great Books for their high school." Dirda, now a Washington Post book critic, “lost interest in the set, which ‘invited worship rather than discussion…. Not the sort of books one reads under the covers with a flashlight.’”

The Britannica series combined the optimism and cant of the middle of the 20th century; like a TV dinner in a foil tray, it looked nourishing, and looks were the main point. The sets, writes Beam, collect “potentially awe-inspiring work mummified in cheapo-depot, public domain translations. To have them on one’s shelf, as I do, is to experience their serried, sepia-toned reproach: Why haven’t you finished Plato’s Symposium? they ask. Lord knows I tried, but I had no idea who the characters were, and furthermore, why is Alcibiades hitting on Socrates? Dear Mr. Hutchins: Enquiring minds require explanatory introductions, and footnotes.”

So the books are still around, compact and durable as books are, less inviting than they should be, only a doorway, not a destination. I finished Beam's book with that sense more firmly in mind, and I haven’t since regretted the lifelong path my liberal education plunked me down, penniless, on. And, let’s be honest, a bachelor’s degree is the entry card into the middle class; bypass it and you’d better be rich or in a really, really strong union.

Cheers to Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins for having the guts to say the best education for the best is the best education for all. The two friends died believing they were failures. Seeing the cost of college tuition, in a sense they were. But Mr. Beam, and I, would like to think a little of Adler and Hutchins live on, showing up for Oprah’s group reads, in the classics on tape, with the 1,001 Books you Must Read Before You Die, anytime three or more people gather in a public library with the same texts in hand. They may not be reading a Great Book, but heck, they’re discussing an abstraction in an orderly manner, and that’s always a great idea.

Blogger, I must confess

2008-12-03T22:43:00.001-08:00

...that I've been using Twitter. It's kind of fun, I can post pithy little messages about what I'm up to (in case you wanted to know). I use Twitthat to share articles w/ people (similar to Google's reader interface that's posted on this page, but a little more sleek), and I follow a few friends.

And, just now, I wrote a series of posts that amount to a kind of book review of Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, a fun little story about the salesmen of an encyclopedic "Great Books of the Western World."

Writing long-form but episodically on Twitter is sort of fun to keep the thread going, and I hope the posts, read as I put them there, provided some sense of suspense. Dunno. When I amalgamate them into a real book review I'll post it here.

More advice for Barack Obama

2008-11-07T16:54:00.000-08:00

I wrote a better version of the review post on Kuttner's book. Here it is:

Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. By Robert Kuttner. Chelsea Green, 2008. Paperback, 200 pages, $14.95.

One of the most popular pastimes in the history of politics has got to be counseling a winner. After all, what do you say to the loser? Except: Go home. With a respectful nod to my main influence here, progressive economist Robert Kuttner’s ballsy new book, here’s counsel for president-elect Barack Obama.

First: You know that thing Bill Clinton did for eight years, that “triangulation” thing? Forget it. It doesn’t work. You’ll just validate conservatives and alienate progressives. Republicans “have been clear and unequivocal in having a core set of principles, and in taking political risks to advance it,” writes Kuttner. Copy them.

Second: Educate. FDR described the financial crisis in one of his most famous fireside chats: where government regulation had gone wrong, how new laws would help, and what ordinary people could do. Leaders’ jobs consist of “staking out a position not held by a majority of voters, and bringing the people around,” writes Kuttner, describing how Lydon B. Johnson in his finest moments framed the civil rights movement as quintessentially American. When told early in his term that he ought not waste political capital on the divisive issue, he replied, “Hell, what's the presidency for?”

You might start by telling us what you know: that the economy isn’t working. If the hundreds of millions of private financial crises going on in households across America can’t be described as a public crisis, “a national disgrace amenable to national remediation,” then we’re getting somewhere.

Third: Spend lots and lots of money. Think trillions. As credit dries up and pink slips arrive, a significant federal outlay can keep us from another Great Depression. You’re said to have pledged to blue-dog Democrats that you’d be a pay-as-you-go kind of president, offseting a spending program here with a budget cut there. A Republican president can spend eight years battering the treasury with warfare and tax cuts, but a Democrat must approach this crisis weighed down with a conservative fiscal tenet? Break that promise.

From professionalizing the human service sector to managing the labor market, Kuttner’s proposals are forcefully argued and often persuasive. Finished this summer, this little book’s gutsy timing is its greatest asset. Now that its subject is certain to take office, it’s supremely relevant. And if the outcome had been different? At least the publisher used recycled paper.

"Hell, what's the presidency for?"

2008-11-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

A book review:

Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. By Robert Kuttner. Chelsea Green, 2008. Paperback, 200 pages, $14.95.

The book was issued in September; if McCain had won, well, at least Chelsea Green printed its gamble on recycled paper.

From professionalizing the human service industry to centrally planning the labor market, the details of Kuttner’s policy proposals can be minute, but they don’t detract from his thesis: that Barack Obama may follow Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ in their most celebrated moments by renewing people’s faith in government as a force for good and uniting Americans behind a vision of a post-bubble economy we can all live with.

One large factor in whether a president is “transformative,” whether he can speak to people’s concerns and change public opinion and, in this case, renew people’s faith in government’s ability to help them protect themselves and fulfill their dreams, is a president’s ability to educate. Obama needs to make a public issue of the million private financial problems of American households. Then he needs to propose solutions that walk all over the fiscal restraints laid down by conservatives and centrists. Solutions that cost money, lots and lots of taxpayer money.

Name a policy initiative Obama has proposed and Kuttner would double, triple, or times by 10 the public outlay. Alternative energy, for example: Obama promises to support research and development with $150 billion over 10 years. A typo in his initial press release said $150 billion annually — more like it, says Kuttner, who might have added that that’s slightly less than the amount Congress may soon give to the dinosaurs of Detroit.

How to pay for it all? Roll back the Bush tax cuts, get out of Iraq; reduce military spending; close loopholes; tax Wall Street; and still spend more than we take in, with the rationale that a deficit is better than a Great Depression.

Obama’s Challenge is fresh reading to anyone who’s not steeped in policy minutia; it offers some plain discussion of how much moderate Democrats have conceded to a conservative low-tax agenda (“a race to a bottom that we never can reach,” in the words of Kuttner’s colleauge, Miles Rappaport) and hints at how Obama comes to the land’s highest office with the strength of character and independence of mind that might allow him to do what true leaders do: “staking out a position not held by a majority of voters, and bringing the people around… It is never simply a case of seeing where the country is, and going there.” Lincoln did this well with bringing the people around slowly to the idea of emancipation; LBJ did too, vowing from day one to enact civil rights legislation. When his aides told him he ought not spend his good reputation so early in his term, he replied, "Hell, what's the presidency for?"

Politics being what it is, a game of focus groups and strategists in which the liars guard the locks, Kuttner looks at Obama’s life history and sees a progressive to the core. Here’s hoping he’s right. More than that: Another factor in making a transformative president, perhaps the most important, is what the times demand. And what the times demand is often defined by what the people say. That’s where we come in.

Ralph Nader calls Obama a Uncle Tom

2008-11-05T22:15:00.001-08:00

Obama gets an election-night slur not from the right, but the left.

There was a time I could have seen Ralph Nader leading thousands in pushing Obama leftward. No longer. If I had just one vote in my lifetime I could take back, it would be the one he got in ’96.

The next morning

2008-11-05T09:49:00.001-08:00

It's morning in America, to coin a phrase, and I'm doing something I should do more often: listening to KEXP's live feed. At home this morning John played songs in honor of the election results: Bowie's "Changes," Public Enemy's "Brothers Gonna Work It Out." Now there's the joy of "Good Fortune" from PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and an iconic song I've known, I realize now, that I've known and loved half my life, "Teenage Rocket." Now, "Big Day Coming" from Yo La Tengo. They're framing my ebullience very well.

We've got a few months left of an administration apparently bent on national destruction, and the remnants of his damage for years and decades to come, but the mending of a broken world has never seemed so doable to me than it does this morning.

Nike and the UW

2008-09-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for tomorrow's issue of Real Change, having reported on the breakdown of a University of Washington committee dealing with labor abuses at factories licensed to make sportswear with its logo. One such factory has taken heat for illegally firing Guatemalan workers -- a revelation discovered by UW International Studies students on a fact-finding trip this spring.

UW has pledged to have Huskies licensed apparel made in a humane environment. How will it back up that promise?

Nike and the University

By ADAM HYLA, Editor

When the UW Board of Regents meets Oct. 16, one item of business will be a new contract with one of the university's largest business partners, Nike, which since 2000 has supplied the school with most athletic gear and all the athletes' apparel.

The Regents will be looking at a 10-year contract worth $39 million — a remarkable amount of money, offered up in a fashion that's remarkably disappointing to people on campus who have worked hard to prevent the making of Huskies gear in intolerable conditions.

Consider two datelines.

Aug. 1, 2008: an Australian television reporter breaks the news of a Nike subcontractor in Malaysia keeping indentured workers in conditions of modern-day slavery: 350 men from Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other poor nations sharing a small dormitory and a trickling faucet; working off a year’s pay to those who provided them passage and then, after they signed a contract in a language not their own, took their passports. These conditions had been extant for more than a decade.

Aug. 8: A press release from the university announcing the tentative $39 million contract, representing, said athletics director Scott Woodward " a resounding endorsement of the future of Husky Athletics from the world's leading sports brand."

This announcement shocked and dismayed activists in the UW Student Labor Action Project. Some of them sat on the Licensing Advisory Committee, the student-faculty-staff body charged with upholding the university code of conduct with apparel contractors.

Formed by president Mark Emmert last year, the LAC never gained the full trust of the students, who, regarding the president as the real decisionmaker, continued to bring sweatshop issues up with him. They also looked askance at the committee’s staff members from the Athletics and Trademarks and Licensing departments — staff paid to negotiate, renew, and extend apparel makers’ contracts. Without investigative or managerial powers, or a clearer mandate from Emmert himself, the committee dissolved in September after a season of breakdown and mistrust. The Nike contract — which Athletics staffers on the committee, confirming students’ suspicions, never disclosed was being hashed out — was the last straw.

It’s a vast understatement to say that Nike workplace abuses are old news. It’s been 14 years since a Portland-based group of justice activists started the Justice Do It campaign to get their corporate neighbor to own up to labor abuses, and those years have yielded little more than empty corporate avowals of improved in-house monitoring, which does little good. A cycle of scandals and pledges ensues, each revelation, to those paying attention, producing less of a shock.

Activists and scholars know that this won’t change unless the global apparel system does.
Brands exist to recruit loyal customers; they're not interested in owning factories or putting people to work. They buy low and sell high, issuing bids for work that factories, like the one in Malaysia, respond to. The Champion label right now may be asking those companies: Can you make 40,000 commemmorative Apple Cup t-shirts shipped out by Nov. 17? Whoever will do it cheapest, wins.

This setup gives the brands a fall guy, and it makes their buy-in vital in pressuring any factory to change its ways. This summer, in a rare case of high-level negotiation, a corporate oversight group has been instrumental in arranging compensation for wronged Guatemalan workers [“Seniors find problems with Husky apparel,” Sept. 10-16]. The UW alone could not have applied enough pressure to make the factory’s Singapore owners pay.

The Justice Do It campaign eventually gave Nike a royal case of the victim complex, with CEO Phil Knight complaining that he was being unfairly picked on. Perhaps he was; activists knew then, as they know now, that changing how one apparel giant does business could very well improve the lot of all garment workers.

The same logic applies on campus, only not so impressively. A large Pac-10 school's instituting a fair-trade certification system is not going to alter the garment industry, which makes only 2 percent of its products for the collegiate market. What the UW can do is simply what’s right, regardless, by leading other schools forthrightly toward a real system of monitoring and sweat-free certification.

When the $39 million contract is delivered to the Regents Oct. 16, it will be worth asking what form of oversight Nike would accept after it’s signed. Probably none; Athletics Dept. officials who negotiated the deal respond defensively to critics that Nike has a long record of corporate responsibility.

Among big schools who have faced the sweatshops question, the UW is uniquely capable of setting a new course for conscientious contracting. With the former members of the LAC and the commitment of the student activists in SLAP, it has the expertise. It has already declared its intention to implement one model for this system. The next steps must proceed from president Mark Emmert’s office. The question is: Will he take them?

The Night of the Gun: A lapse of memory

2008-09-24T09:45:00.001-07:00

I recently finished and wrote this review for The Night of the Gun, journalist David Carr's backtracking into his own hazy days of addiction and its consequences. I enjoyed the book a whole bunch, and am posting an expanded version of the review here, which appears in today's issue of Real Change. I get help at work with things like not using the same word twice in a sentence, like "smell," as in "smell the electrical-fire smell," for which I am much indebted. I love writing these reviews but often wish I'd started writing by page 50, since that's when I find I'm in the throes of a readerly response. After, it's more a summing-up.

An interview with Carr appears on the Powell's web site -- a native Oregon institution, just like me -- here. And I'm going to post the quotes I liked well enough to copy down, but couldn't make it past the papers 750-word count.

Smokable cocaine initially taps into a childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. Nothing compares to the first hit of your life, the first hit of the night, the first hit of a new batch. The ensuing chase, the endless pursuit of that first time, provides a riddle that cannot be solved.

One principle he kept in mind while he worked on this was: “If I am truthful, no real harm can come to me.” A reference to James Frey, perhaps, or to the toxic taint of his prior acts. To buttress that principle: “I am a good man who did bad things, but I’m better now.”

Others remark that it's amazing he's alive at all. So what saved Carr? The director of the county’s treatment programs, the guy who got him into treatment (several times) says this:

You were a man of good intent. You had a sense of remorse of what you had done to the people around you. It is a soft piece of the statistical end of the business, but you had the ability to be hopeful.

He was right, apparently. Carr writes:

Somewhere in those days [after he stopped, one Christmas Day, for 14 years], I developed a belief that if I could make it through a given day sober, no matter what, there might be other days to follow. Hope, in other words. The chronicity of addiction is really a kind of fatalism writ large. If an addict knows in his heart that he is going to use someday, why not today? But if a thin reed of hope appears, the possibility that it will not always be thus, things change. You live another day and then get up and do it again. Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.

Ironic, in a book about revealing you to your self:

Excelling in the rat race, whether it is hunting down the biggest boar or getting the biggest piece while others do the killing, is an act of self-deception. To begin with, the striver must believe that the world is a fundamentally meritocratic place, that hard work will out, that winning is a matter of effort. And if the goals are accomplished, that person will believe he lives in a just, beautiful world. And if things don’t go well, he will be down at the bar muttering bitter oaths into cheap whiskey about what might have been.

I note, too, how the most successful are always likely to believe they won on a level playing field.

His relapse, or “my decision to do further empirical research on my relationship with alcohol when the data were already clear still leaves me baffled.” Probably it was

more about some venal, long-brewing urge to take a sledgehammer to things I adore. We, I, you tend to feel unworthy of some of the blessings that come are way, perhaps because, in our darker moments, it is so much more than we think we deserve. If that seems a bit ardent… how else to explain the very common story of relapse among people who have a decade or more of sobriety? Perhaps it has less to do with Freudian imperatives and is more as simple as the fact that human beings have a tendency to forget. You might say I had a lapse of memory.

A matter of forgetting, for which he made amends by writing the book. Tidy? Perhaps. And a little enviable. We can begrudge a man with a sexy job, a beautiful wife, good kids, a support system, a life made whole by his own craft. But if there’s anything to take away from this book, this review, it’s how lucky we, I, you are to be drawing breath, in spite of ourselves.

Then there's some earnest recovery talk:

…the prospect of getting high or drink, unimpeded by obeisance to a higher power or a program of daily living, is rolled around in the mouth absently, surreptitiously, long before it is actually swallowed, to see how it might taste.

Or:

Barring a necessary and opposing force, the obsession that live in an addict is always in the basement, doing push-ups, waiting for an opening.

And best:

That’s why reading all the junkie memoirs that ridicule various programs of recovery makes me laugh. As opposed to what? Free will? Moderation? A flash of self-realization followed by a lifetime of self-control?… Millions of lives have been saved by gathering like minds in a church basement. You don’t like the slogans? Make up some new ones.

Earnestness rings truest when it’s earned in experience. Carr’s earned his.

What good nonfiction is

2008-08-18T21:39:00.001-07:00

What good is nonfiction? Or rather, how good is it?

It's this good.

The NYT comes along every once in awhile — or maybe I should just read the "This Land" series some more — and knocks a homer, doing justice to the tragedy behind the smallest of headlines. Here was just another homicide in a town with thousands in a place I've never been, but so much more.

Quinn dialog

2008-08-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

Quinn’s been trying out some new words lately, “Daddy” being one – “dad-thee.” Another one is “yeah,” only she would pronounce it with an uh or an eh at the beginning: “uhyeah,” “eyeah.”

Walking home from daycare yesterday with her on my back, the bike at my side, we had the following conversation.

“Quinn, you know your mama and daddy love you soooooo much?”

“Eyeah.”

“And do you know that we’re so excited to discover the world with you, and help you discover it?”

“Eyeah.”

“You’re looking forward to that too?”

“Eyeah.”

“Good.”

“Eyeah.”

squirrelman revisited

2008-07-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

I was filmed this morning by Kevin Heutink, who's making a documentary about the man who lost his home — a treehouse that was colloquially but sturdily built — in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle. I'd written this about how David Csaky, or Squirrelman as he was nicknamed, lost his treehouse to the city. More precisely, about the guy who finally called around persistently enough to get it torn down.

I've never met David Csaky, though until other stories of official stupidity and pathos came along, he was this town's most recent contribution to international news. Kevin did -- he worked at a catering company across the street from the tree.

The day Csaky got notice that his treehouse wasn't up to Code -- something about its balcony not having the required railing -- Heutink and his co-workers helped him secure some power tools. The catering company's power outlets became battery docking stations for cordless drills and such. The balcony railing was up in a few days. Then the city came back with another reason why the place had to go. Of course.

Heutink asked me about something I'd observed from my meeting two people who played roles in Csaky's tenure there. One welcomed him -- put up a mailbox and extended a power cord from his neighboring home -- and the other ratted him out, calling different city departments 'til he found out where the buck stopped. What made them act differently? The answer

has to do with what a community looks like to each of us.

Tell me more, invited Kevin.

Here's what I tried to say.

What Csaky had done for a year and a half was to become a part of the Eastlake community, to offer services in his capacity as a homesteader. Eyes on the street, when he left the graffiti went back up. As poor people around the world do, he made use of things his neighbors no longer needed, like a forklift's worth of pallets from the nearby boat company. Other so-called transients had come through; some had made messes, stolen things. They weren't welcome, and sometimes their squats were taken down -- an earlier and probably smarter form or barnraising in reverse.

A community does its own sorting: making up, enforcing, and revising its norms of behavior. Many had met David, visited his treehouse, and come away saying 'This guy's o.k." When the Caviar King called in the City, this Eastlake community's limited autonomy — its ability to support itself and set its course -- was shoved aside.

The network of people who helped Squirrelman will obviously survive. Kevin told me that they're working with a pro-bono attorney to regain some legal form of ID, so he can do elementary things like work above the table and open a bank account. Community has stuck around, despite the authorities.

What I do all day / the Man on the Bridge

2008-07-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

My awesome co-worker Rosette Royale is featured here in a very well done short piece on what we do at Real Change. My left shoulder, and once my left profile — check it, about 0:57-1:02! — is also featured. Rosette speaks about the three-part work of redemptive biography and narrative suspense that he wrote and I was privileged to edit, The Man Who Stood on the Bridge.

About that series: we've never published anything quite so ambitious, and I've never edited anything so formidable, but lucky for me, the writer was capable of making all the truly hard decisions.

You can read the series and see the gorgeous photos, and I recommend you do, starting here and continuing here and here.

I swiped the film clip from Street Roots' blog.

E-Post from Minneapolis

2008-06-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

I approve of Minneapolis. I’ve been here for nearly 48 hours, invited to a panel for the National Conference on Media Reform, and while I spent about half the time in workshops and panels about fighting Big Media and imagining a level landscape for mass communications — the one I spoke at concerned the role of faith-based groups concerned with economic justice — I spent yesterday afternoon and evening wandering the city by bicycle.

I rented one in Uptown, which isn’t really uptown, as my sister, a Macalester sophomore-to-be, explained to me, and headed west along the lakeside trails: Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, Harriet, along the creek called Minnehaha and the parkway it borders to a road that eventually took me over the Mississippi and into St. Paul. Saw my sister’s college, which she left a few weeks back for summer at home in Oregon, stopped to ask directions back from some friendly guys at an Ace Hardware, then found three dollars in quarters on a St. Paul street. Back west of the river I had a cookie at a panaderia on Lake Street, then made my way to Uptown, where I returned the bike and walked, in a tired daze, back to the hotel. I remembered the quote attributed to Einstein about taking hope in the human race whenever he saw someone on a bicycle, and the other early-20th-century quote, this one I can’t remember who from, about the bike being the only invention that, the more man uses it, the better it makes him. Or her. I got a flat, refused to let it deflate me, and headed down to the crosstown path where, eventually, someone with a pump stopped.

While the conference area and hotel district was like a lot of other urban cores, with the affluence pasted on top of a remnant grittiness, I envy the Minneapolitans their lakes and parkways with trails and public shores, their art, their bookstores, the relative mildness of their segregation, and the friendliness of the citizens who gave me directions, offered me shelter under their gas station roofs in case of rain, and pumped up my flat tire. And I love the layered blush of the midwestern sandstone on the churches and houseposts. Seattle’s my home, but it’s good to get out once in a while.

Sears gets $$$, repair guy gets no sick time

2008-04-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

A repairman came to our house today. He drove a white van and carried a beat-up looking laptop. He was with an outfit called A&E, which sounds small-timey but is actually, he told me, Sears in disguise.

“I’m not supposed to talk about those other companies,” he says of Jenn Air, Maytag and Whirlpool, Sears' Kenmore brand’s compatriots in his repair portfolio. Wouldn't want to drop the small-business facade. Sears bought them out and was then bought out by K-Mart. When the buying was over a lot of repairmen were left with fewer benefits.

“I was,” he says. “I get no sick time. I threw out my back and didn’t get paid for four days.”

He found the problem: burnt out wire, he said, holding it up. Do you see that often? Yes and no, he said. Do you work on these much? Yes and no.

I was sitting with baby at the dining room table; she was finishing up lunch, almond butter all over her hands and face. I wiped her up while he moved the stove back into place.

“That’ll be one thirty-seven thirty-four,” he said, slowly, appreciating the look of amazement on my face. He’d been here less than 15 minutes. “Cash, check, credit card?”

I paid, he packed. “I hope your back stays well,” I said as he left.

“My back?”

“Yeah, you said you threw out your back and had to take time off.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.”

police and prisons: ask why

2008-02-14T22:52:00.000-08:00

I emceed a special event for work tonight: a reading and discussion on the criminal justice system with Norm Stamper and Silja J.A. Talvi.

Norm is the former Seattle chief of police who came out in 2005 with Breaking Rank, his own take on the paramilitary workings of the system he worked in for 34 years. Silja is an advisory board member of Real Change and published this fall Women Behind Bars, which looks at the explosive growth in the number of women being locked up.

It was a small audience, and — my fault — a poorly time-managed event. We went over by about an hour, having very little time for the wine and gnoshables at a nearby art gallery. The clerk at the gallery informed us how its owner was taking a loss on the night, since they weren’t charging us to be there; and Silja, showing tremendous forebearance, thanked her and said, “It’s for a good cause… millions of people in prison.”

The criminal justice system deserves the quote-unquote Rev. David Bloom added to the term at the wine-and-gnosh event. We’re really talking about one of the products, perhaps the most vicious product, of the racism and class inequity that damns generation upon generation to ill health, poor schooling, police monitoring, and a life of violence.

I asked what only later seemed like a dumb question about how police might begin to mend relations in poor or Black communities. Way back in 1971 Norm came up with the concept of “community policing,” a concept that he said has never been properly used. Silja answered with an illustration: a young Black man she’d met who had been stopped and roughly searched 16 times in the course of a six-week visit home during a college break. Repairing relations with residents could happen, she said, “if you stop treating people like animals.”

The police control state force, the only legitimized violence. The consequence of their roles is the culture they work in: one that prohibits fear, said Norm. What are cops allowed to express? “Anger. Hatred. Bravado. Cynicism.”

And this is where I saw an ex-cop acknowledge how good it felt to wield power, and the shame that pleasure would later bring him. I knew by the silence in the room that everyone else saw it too. “I have a cellular memory,” he said, of what it felt to get rough with someone not because he had to but because he wanted to. And he remembers, too, the prosecutor who told him in court that he’d made a false arrest, violating one of the basic laws of the land. He walked out of the courthouse with these words in his ears: “Do you have no respect for the Constitution, Stamper?”

After that, things were different. Norm said he never wholly submerged himself in cop culture. He recognized, he said, that everyone suffers somehow. “Cynicism” — the kind where cops label the homicides of Blacks or prostitutes as “misdemeanor murders” or NHI for “no humans involved” — “is a function of the scar tissue” that’s covering a hell of a lot of hurt.

After a pause, wise Silja looked at the audience and said, “This is not an everyday thing.” A white cop discussing, in front of an audience of Black and white, how scared white cops are of Black men, and acknowledging the pain of his and others’ jobs. This is one of those reasons why police officers suffer among the highest suicide rates in the country, she said.

Comparing the abolitionist movement to the fight against the War on Drugs and the prison-industrial complex is not inappropriate; since they sit so near the rotten heart of American inequality they’ll take a long, long time to change. A small and wholly reasonable thing any of us can do is pay attention:

Ask why the number of women prisoners has skyrocketed in the last decade (Silja says it’s because of prosecutors gone wild using conspiracy charges in drug cases).

Ask what good the juvenile justice system is (much better at funneling young girls from troubled backgrounds straight into prison than “straightening them out”).

Ask who profits from locking up millions of non-violent drug offenders.

Ask what we owe prisoners and their families.

the kid walked

2008-02-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

We have the footage.

A little ditty about Herman Melville

2008-02-11T21:34:00.000-08:00

By Elizabeth Hardwick, cogent essayist: I wrote this appreciative and very short book review.

Just saw it on the Real Change site, I didn't even know it was published this week.

oh, yeah: camping (not the kind you wanna do, either)

2008-02-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't described anything about the city's operations against homeless people in public property in a while, and the story is well past anything I could write. Apesma is the blogospheric center of that story, while you can read the journalistic side of things in Real Change. I'm going to give a quick rundown of the story as it's unfolded before my eyes, though.

It's a case of the city getting caught doing something they didn't want people to know about; moving swiftly to mount a campaign of misinformation that rewrites stories and gulls reporters; bringing forth, after months of internal vetting, a new procedure for the "abatement" (doesn't that word make you think of asbestos?) of public campsites, and then initiating a public process that everyone watches believes to be ceremonial.

But the big story, the story I could make my infant daughter understand in about two years, can be described this way:

1. Our city doesn't provide enough beds for people who need to sleep

2. Some of those people go sleep in the woods near the highway, or under the freeway overpass, or in the parks

3. Since remaining on this property — public property, as in owned by you and me —
is not allowed, the city scares them off and takes their stuff.

Any three-year-old could then ask: Where are they supposed to go?

To which I'd reply: Good question.

But the last four months of following this story have been incredibly telling. I've seen, through internal documents anyone can get (three cheers for Revised Code of Washington number 23.49, the state's Public Disclosure Act), how my stories, Apesma's blogging, a trickle of media mentions in print and radion, and the networking and moral suasion of the county Coalition on Homelessness got the City Council interested; how, trying to get their own message out, the mayor's office sicced some establishment columnists at the Seattle Times on the subject; and how they released a "draft protocol" on removing homeless people's possessions from public places that is a case of breathtakingly overreach for which, when it's inked, they'll probably lose a lawsuit.

I've learned more in this process about my role than at any other time in the past eight years. I see how vital a skeptical media with time to dig into a story is — and how much we lose when local reporting becomes a kind of sychophantic stenography. And I'll take very little from a government spokesperson at face value, no matter if he's from City Hall or the White House.

A Lone Stand

2008-02-04T23:58:00.000-08:00

She stood up on her own today. Did it at the preschool meeting while other babies sat in their mommas' laps or played on their tummies. That's my girl.

Time slowed the way I remember it doing in fifth-grade soccer the first, OK, the only, time I made a goal. It went like this: Quinn has two balls in her hands, is looking at them, banging them together, straightens up and stands, staring fixedly downward at about 45°. I say woah, woah, woah, my senses rev up, I wait for her to tumble forward or back, and it takes a long moment until I give a little cheer, I start to laugh with joy, wonder if I’m showing off before these moms and their babies and then a half moment more passes and Quinn comes down, soft, on her butt without even a whimper. Yes! Quinn, yes! I hug her close and give her a kiss and am so proud.

Later, she repeats the performance for her similarly astounded mother.

Words from King

2008-01-21T11:38:00.001-08:00

I'm at home today, enjoying some peaceful pursuits, and listened to KUOW broadcast Martin Luther King Jr's April 4 1967 speech this morning. King's rhetorical cadences don't translate into type very well, so there's American Rhetoric, which lists that speech, called sometimes "A Time Comes when Silence is Betrayal," or sometimes "Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam," but here "Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break Silence," fourth among its most popular offerings.

For visual appeal, though, I'm linking to a YouTube find: here are the last minutes of King's final public address on video, in color — a lyrical alternative to the reasoned gravity of "I Have a Dream":

Happy Ninemonthday

2007-12-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

That's what I'd say to the baby if she were awake. I thought of, and said, the same thing in other ways.

"She's nine months old today, actually," I said in response to the elderly woman's kind inquiry on the bus this morning. She admired her looks and the placid stare she directs at each fellow passenger, and averred that her little baby had grown up to become a veterinarian.

"You're nine months old. Oh boy!" — or something to that effect, I said in the course of dinner tonight. I can never recall what I say precisely when I talk in baby, and perhaps this is self-preservation on the brain's part, a little selective forgetting to make sure I can still speak in grownup.

I'd say "Happy Ninemonthday!" to her now that I've thought of a clever phrase, except she's down after a dinner of peach yogurt, spinach, and bits of bread she picked up with her precise little digits, pounding on the table with a flat hand, watching my attempts at sign language: "eat," "more," water."

Happy Ninemonthday, Quinn.

Thanks from a grateful city

2007-11-21T06:12:00.000-08:00

The show went OK. An hour can flow by quickly as you’re waiting your turn to talk and have a long litany of things to say. I should have been a bit more economical about my talking points because hey, you only get a sliver of a chance. KUOW affords a lot more time to finish a thought, or string two together, than a lot of other talk radio, but I could have picked up the pace.

Bill Block, director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, called in from elsewhere. I would have liked to sit across the table in a recording studio from Bill, who we all can agree has a hard job managing the message about our ongoing victories in the war on homelessness.

I would have liked to ask him, directly, whether the Committee would call for a ban on the seizure of homeless people’s possessions by the city until a new policy, one that at minimum respects human rights and the right to property, had been implemented.

It’s appalling that the question needs to be asked of Bill or of Tom Rasmussen, chair of the City Council’s Human Services Committee. The Mayor’s Office is plainly stonewalling the council in their attempt to get answers about the sweeps. There’s enough evidence that something is wrong with the policy as it’s currently implemented. Their silence on this matter says a lot about where their interests lie.

Bill, on the radio Monday morning, offered what might sound at first like good news. He said was that he learned just recently that the city was revising its encampment procedures and will solicit community input.

A grateful city thanks you, Mayor Nickels.

He failed to say that the mayor ignored homeless advocates’ request to help shape the policy in early September.

Many things went unsaid in the course of our hour. Amid hopeful and technical discourses on coordinated entry, I neglected to talk about what’s happened in L.A., and how two Seattle officers made a sojourn there to learn from the big city how they break up a Skid Road the likes of which Seattle hasn’t seen since its 1920s Hooverville.

And I would have liked to use the phrase “carrots and sticks” in connection with the strategy for ending homelessness. Carrots: multiple reforms to the social service system. Sticks: swift policing of lifestyle crimes (like public drinking) in parks and streets, greater public hostility toward panhandlers, “proactive” seizures of urban campers’ property as their efforts to survive outside are destroyed.

Dead Duck

2007-11-19T21:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was wash day in the Hyla household and on the laundry list was baby's stuffed toys. Into the washer went the pink poodle, Peter Rabbit, Fuzzy Bear, Lola the anime owl. When this yellow duckling came out again with its sprightly feathers all matted down, its push-button quacker couldn't stop quacking.

Eep eep, eep eep, eep eep, eep eep. Repeat ad nauseum. The duck sat next to me in the living room reeling out its dying soliloquy. I wondered whether a cycle in the dryer would do Duck good. I meant to check the time to see how long this would go on. The duck's tone lowered; it dropped to a two-note “du-luh du-luh du-luh.” It stopped.

Now duck sits mute, the hard little electronic voicebox in its chest is immune to my touch. No more shall baby thrill to its discourse. Oh my dear, departed duckling.

Camping, cops, and KUOW

2007-11-18T21:05:00.000-08:00

I’m a guest on KUOW’s Weekday morning talk show tomorrow morning; the subject is how the local attempt at ending homelessness is going.

Little better than before the Ten Year Plan began, I’d have to say.

I was invited because of my recent story about the mayor’s “proactive” sweeps of homeless people’s encampments. More than two weeks after that story broke, a local group is calling for a moratorium on these operations, the city is going through a very extended rewrite of the encampments clearance “protocol,” and the City Council is demanding answers of the Mayor’s office. KUOW did their own story, and the P-I is following up.

It’s nice to break some news.

Among the things I plan to say tomorrow is that the sweeps indicate to me that local government has carrots and sticks to reduce the numbers of people who are obviously homeless — that is, living out of their cars, stringing up tarps in city-owned greenbelts, bedding down under I-5. If you harass those people interminably, the city is hoping, they’ll go away. Problem solved, homelessness is over.

Homelessness is a form of extreme poverty, and poverty is best fought with wage supports, good jobs, affordable housing, and education. These are systemic problems, not tears in an otherwise sound “safety net.” There are many, many cases of missed connections in the social service bureaucracy, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing — little problems that people experiencing homelessness certainly know about, and that people in power also know something about. The Committee to End Homelessness has a lot of work to do in making sure that the safety net is mended and strengthened. But the problem they’re focusing on is one aspect of a larger issue.

Perhaps understanding this, I believe local leadership fears it’s going to lose a war. The sweeps of places where people are camped out certainly helps create the appearance of winning.

The sweeps are not new tactics, but they’re being pursued more aggressively. I have to wonder what the motive is here. Police-led clearances do little to help an urban greenbelt recover its natural splendor; nor does the continual drumbeat about “public health and safety” ring true to me. A half dozen people camping near Aurora Avenue is a public health menace?

Pair the reputed “zero-tolerance” policy of the Mayor’s Office — which no one, on record, would cop to in the course of my interviews, but no one denied either — with the statement by his senior human-services staffer that there are shelters available in the city and you get a colossal case of denial — of official rejection that 2,000 people have needs or, really, any rights. When we all believe that there are plenty of shelter alternatives, officials across the country are becoming adept at framing those left outside as dirty, threatening lawbreakers who deserve no better than losing their possessions.

I’d like to know what expensive policing methods like these have to do with ending homelessness? The question has two parts: how does persistent harassment help anyone? And: how does this make the numbers of visibly homeless go down, as people scatter to Bothell, Federal Way, Issaquah, or other places where no one’s going to be counting them?

And I also plan to talk about L.A.

Seattle police officers have taken notice of efforts in LA and San Diego; two officers went on fact-finding missions to those cities recently. What I’ve seen indicates they reported back on the “outreach” effort of the police there, contacting mentally ill and addicted people.

But let’s not kid ourselves: police are hired and trained primarily to arrest people, not to coax them into getting help.

What’s happened in the LAPD’s Skid Row work is more arrests as well as a dispersal from downtown into outlying areas, like Santa Monica. Beyond the “outreach,” the LAPD offers the SPD insight into the tactics of intimidation and dispersal.

Or maybe not, maybe the trip did nothing more than give these officers a sense of the size of LA’s problem. Even then, the experience would have made the case for more stringent policing efforts. As one of the officers quoted himself in the PowerPoint the duo made on their trip, “I have seen the future, and we don’t want to go there.”

All the more reason, then, to keep up the tactics of dispersal.