A Restaurant Ruined My Life

Seven years ago, I was an analyst for Telefilm Canada, earning a paycheque by sitting in a grey cube and shuffling box office stats. At the end of each day, I would rush home to my wife, two daughters and truest passion: making dinner. The sights and smells of my kitchen were balms to my soul.

Cooking would have remained a hobby if I hadn’t stumbled across old footage of Michelin chef Marco Pierre White preparing a stuffed pig’s trotter on YouTube. It was an audacious dish and maybe even a bit sinister. It looked a little like a stubby, sun-baked human hand on a platter. I loved how the deft skill of an unlikely genius and a few choice ingredients transformed a cheap cut of meat into a beautiful plate. The dish was transcendent to me, and in a rough kind of way, so was its creator. White smoked. White sneered. White swore. He was handsome. I could envision him swaggering around his Hampshire restaurant, the Yew Tree Inn, dropping exquisite plates of food in front of wealthy customers with all the bombast of a star footballer. As he got older and no longer cooked in the kitchen, he was known to hang about the bar and drink cider with customers, at times with a .22 rifle close by in case he had the sudden urge to go rabbit hunting. To me, Marco Pierre White was inspirational. I wanted to be him. And I wanted my own Yew Tree.

I soon joined the burgeoning ranks of the know-it-all gourmand. I owned fancy knives. I photographed my food. I had a subscription to Lucky Peach. I had a well-thumbed copy of Kitchen Confidential and a demi-glace-spattered copy of The French Laundry Cookbook. At work, I had trouble concentrating on spreadsheets and instead found myself scribbling menus on graph paper. I could picture a quaint dining room with wooden tables, scalloped plates and plaid napkins. I even came up with the perfect name: the Beech Tree, inspired by the Yew Tree. I naïvely figured I could do it as well as the restaurant lifers, the tattooed dude-chefs and the nut-busting empire builders. What I lacked in experience I could make up for in enthusiasm.

In 2011, I applied to operate a booth at the Toronto Underground Food Market, a short-lived festival, known as TUM, where home cooks could sell their culinary creations to the public. I served mini-panko-crusted codfish cakes with green pea pesto, gourmet pork belly sandwiches, and wild mushroom and black pudding hash. I slogged through each step of thrice-cooked English chips, my fingers cramping so severely from peeling 100 pounds of potatoes that I almost called 911. In the end, I fed 400 people, and they liked my food. Several local bloggers wrote about my dishes. It was an adrenalin rush like no other. I lost money, but I didn’t care. My dream was gnawing at my insides.

Eighty per cent of first-time restaurateurs fail. I knew this. Opening a restaurant was the least sensible, dumbest thing I could do. My wife, Dorothy, a daycare worker, was coasting toward the end of a maternity leave, and we had two kids to feed. I was in no position to take a risk. But if it succeeded, I could make more money than any office job had ever paid me. We could enjoy a better lifestyle and maybe buy a nicer house. Plus, I’d be doing what I loved.

I pitched the concept to Dorothy, explaining that I would be front of house, designing the menu, signing cheques and glad-handing customers. I told her about a guy I had met at TUM who had launched a successful restaurant and still made it home in time to tuck in the kids every night. I proposed that she work alongside me, hosting the lunch service while our girls were at school, and I would look after the dinner service. We could run errands in the mornings, maybe sneak away for breakfast at the competition and write it off as research. Eventually, she embraced my dream, too. Now I just needed to find the money.

Six months later, an opportunity arose. My position at Telefilm, a Crown corporation, was eliminated. I was offered a lateral step, but if I walked away, I would be able to cash out $60,000 from my $130,000 pension. I could already see the tufted banquettes, the Victorian wallpaper, the brass beer taps—and me, a rifle slung over my shoulder, a pint of cider in hand. As my last day approached, I brought up my idea over drinks with a friend named Jameson, who owned a popular west-end bar. After some talk about which craft beers I should offer, he turned serious. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into.” I smiled, drained my pint glass. “You pulled it off,” I said. “Why can’t I?”

by Robert Maxwell, Toronto Life |  Read more:

Image: Dave Gillespie

Are Facebook, Twitter, and Google American Companies?

On Tuesday’s technology-executive hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a key tension at the heart of the internet emerged: Do American tech companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operate as American companies? Or are they in some other global realm, maybe in some place called cyberspace?

In response to a tough line of questions from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, gave two conflicting answers within a couple of minutes. Cotton pressed Edgett on Twitter’s decision to cut off the CIA’s access to alerts derived from the Twitter-data fire hose, which is provided through a company it partially owns, Dataminr, while the companies reportedly still allowed the Russian media outlet RT to continue using the service for some time.

“Do you see an equivalency between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Russian intelligence services?,” Cotton asked.

“We’re not offering our service for surveillance to any government,” Edgett responded.

“So you will apply the same policy to our intelligence community that you’d apply to an adversary’s intelligence services?,” Cotton asked again.

“As a global company, we have to apply our policies consistently,” Edgett replied.

Cotton then turned to WikiLeaks, which the Intelligence Committee has designated as a nonstate hostile intelligence agency, asking why it had been operating “uninhibited” on Twitter.

“Is it bias to side with America over our adversaries?,” Cotton demanded.

“We’re trying to be unbiased around the world,” Edgett said. “We’re obviously an American company and care deeply about the issues we’re talking about today, but as it relates to WikiLeaks or other accounts like it, we make sure they are in compliance with our policies just like every other account.”

I’ve added the emphases within Edgett’s foregoing responses because they highlight the contradiction at the heart of these global communication services, which happen to be headquartered in the state of California. Twitter is both a global company and an American company, and the way it has resolved this contradiction is to declare its allegiance to ... its own policies.

There are reasons for this. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, social-media users became aware that the data-collection machines that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others had created to target advertising could just as easily be used to target surveillance. They’d created perfect surveillance services, which, as Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and others noted on Tuesday, “know more about Americans than the U.S. government.” (...)

Across the board, the companies resisted attempts by various Senators to get them to say that action by state actors should be placed in a different category from other misuses of their social-networking and advertising systems. Though it’s obvious that the companies don’t want to create new rules or have new rules imposed upon them, these deflections seemed to make clear that what Senators on both sides of the aisle find themselves objecting to is not the specific Russian revelations, but what the companies’ responses expose about the very nature of the internet business: It amasses data about people—American citizens—that anyone can use to sell them stuff. It’s effective, automated, and has only a coincidental relationship with the goals of nations.

by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Jacquelyn Martin / AP
[ed. See also: The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here's How]

via:

Rina Aizawa
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Joan Miró, Woman in front of the shooting star (1974)
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He’s So Fined

George Harrison v. The Chiffons. (Opinion: Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music Ltd.)

This is an action in which it is claimed that a successful song, “My Sweet Lord,” listing George Harrison as the composer, is plagiarized from an earlier successful song, “He’s So Fine,” composed by Ronald Mack, recorded by a singing group called The Chiffons, the copyright of which is owned by plaintiff, Bright Tunes Music Corp.

“He’s So Fine,” recorded in 1962, is a catchy tune consisting essentially of four repetitions of a very short basic musical phrase, sol-mi-re (hereinafter motif A), altered as necessary to fit the words, followed by four repetitions of another short basic musical phrase, sol-la-do-la-do (hereinafter motif B). While neither motif is novel, the four repetitions of A, followed by four repetitions of B, is a highly unique pattern. In addition, in the second use of the motif B series, there is a grace note inserted making the phrase go sol-la-do-la-re-do.

“My Sweet Lord,” recorded first in 1970, also uses the same motif A (modified to suit the words) four times, followed by motif B, repeated three times, not four. In place of the fourth repetition of motif B in “He’s So Fine,” “My Sweet Lord” has a transitional passage of musical attractiveness of the same approximate length, with the identical grace note in the identical second repetition. The harmonies of both songs are identical.

George Harrison, a former member of The Beatles, was aware of “He’s So Fine.” In the United States, it was No. 1 on the Billboard charts for five weeks; in England, Harrison’s home country, it was No. 12 on the charts on June 1, 1963, a date upon which one of the Beatles songs was, in fact, in first position. For seven weeks in 1963, “He’s So Fine” was one of the top hits in England.

According to Harrison, the circumstances of the composition of “My Sweet Lord” were as follows. Harrison and his group, which includes an American black gospel singer named Billy Preston, were in Copenhagen on a singing engagement. There was a press conference involving the group going on backstage. Harrison slipped away from the press conference and went to a room upstairs and began “vamping” some guitar chords, fitting on to the chords he was playing the words hallelujah and Hare Krishna in various ways. During the course of this vamping, he was alternating between what musicians call a Minor II chord and a Major V chord.

At some point, germinating started and he went down to meet with others of the group, asking them to listen, which they did, and everyone began to join in, taking first hallelujah and then Hare Krishna and putting them into four-part harmony. Harrison obviously started using the hallelujah, etc., as repeated sounds, and from there developed the lyrics, to wit, “My sweet Lord,” “Dear, dear Lord,” etc. In any event, from this very free-flowing exchange of ideas, with Harrison playing his two chords and everybody singing “Hallelujah” and “Hare Krishna,” there began to emerge the “My Sweet Lord” text idea, which Harrison sought to develop a little bit further during the following week as he was playing it on his guitar. Thus developed motif A and its words interspersed with “Hallelujah” and “Hare Krishna.”

Approximately one week after the idea first began to germinate, the entire group flew back to London because they had earlier booked time to go to a recording studio with Billy Preston to make an album. In the studio, Preston was the principal musician. Harrison did not play in the session. He had given Preston his basic motif A with the idea that it be turned into a song, and was back and forth from the studio to the engineer’s recording booth, supervising the recording “takes.” Under circumstances that Harrison was utterly unable to recall, while everybody was working toward a finished song, in the recording studio, somehow or other the essential three notes of motif A reached polished form.

Similarly, it appears that motif B emerged in some fashion at the recording session as did motif A. This is also true of the unique grace note in the second repetition of motif B.

The Billy Preston recording, listing George Harrison as the composer, was thereafter issued by Apple Records. The music was then reduced to paper by someone who prepared a “lead sheet” containing the melody, the words, and the harmony for the United States copyright application.

Seeking the wellsprings of musical composition—why a composer chooses the succession of notes and the harmonies he does—whether it be George Harrison or Richard Wagner—is a fascinating inquiry. It is apparent from the extensive colloquy between the court and Harrison covering forty pages in the transcript that neither Harrison nor Preston was conscious of the fact that they were using the “He’s So Fine” theme. However, they in fact were, for it is perfectly obvious to the listener that in musical terms, the two songs are virtually identical except for one phrase. There is motif A used four times, followed by motif B, four times in one case, and three times in the other, with the same grace note in the second repetition of motif B.

What happened? I conclude that the composer, in seeking musical materials to clothe his thoughts, was working with various possibilities. As he tried this possibility and that, there came to the surface of his mind a particular combination that pleased him as being one he felt would be appealing to a prospective listener; in other words, that this combination of sounds would work. Why? Because his subconscious knew it already had worked in a song his conscious mind did not remember. Having arrived at this pleasing combination of sounds, the recording was made, the lead sheet prepared for copyright, and the song became an enormous success. Did Harrison deliberately use the music of “He’s So Fine”? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless, it is clear that “My Sweet Lord” is the very same song as “He’s So Fine” with different words, and Harrison had access to “He’s So Fine.” This is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.





3. All the experts agreed on this.



5. This grace note, as will be seen infra, has a substantial significance in assessing the claims of the parties hereto.

6. Expert witnesses for the defendants asserted crucial differences in the two songs. These claimed differences essentially stem, however, from the fact that different words and number of syllables were involved. This necessitated modest alterations in the repetitions or the places of beginning of a phrase, which, however, has nothing to do whatsoever with the essential musical kernel that is involved.

7. Preston recorded the first Harrison copyrighted recording of “My Sweet Lord,” of which more infra, and from his musical background was necessarily equally aware of “He’s So Fine.”

8. These words ended up being a “responsive” interjection between the eventually copyrighted words of “My Sweet Lord.” In “He’s So Fine,” The Chiffons used the sound dulang in the same places to fill in and give rhythmic impetus to what would otherwise be somewhat dead spots in the music.

9. It is of interest, but not of legal significance, in my opinion, that when Harrison later recorded the song himself, he chose to omit the little grace note, not only in his musical recording but in the printed sheet music that was issued following that particular recording. The genesis of the song remains the same, however modestly Harrison may have later altered it. Harrison, it should be noted, regards his song as that which he sings at the particular moment he is singing it and not something that is written on a piece of paper.

by (Judge) Richard Owen, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. He's So Fine vs. My Sweet Lord. YT]

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Dockless Bikes and the Tragedy of the Commons

If there is one sad fact that technology has taught us, it’s maybe that we just can’t have nice things. Now Washington DC has become the latest testing ground for what happens when technology and good intentions meet the real world.

Brightly coloured bikes began popping up around the US capital in September like little adverts for a better world. On a recent trip two lemon yellow bikes were propped up in the autumn sun by the carousel on the Mall. A pair of lime green bikes added a splash of colour to a grey corner of DuPont Circle. An orange and silver bike waited excitedly for its rider outside the George Washington University Hospital.

The untethered bikes all belong to a new generation of “dockless” bike share companies. To pick one up users download an app that shows where the bikes have been left. Scan a QR code on your phone, the bike unlocks and you are off for a $1 30-minute carbon-free ride. Unlike docking rental services, which require bikes to be returned to a fixed docking station, you can leave your ride wherever your journey ends, practically. And therein lies the problem.

Behind this bucolic scene is a multibillion-dollar cutthroat battle that is pitching two of China’s most successful tech companies against Silicon Valley-backed rivals and a system that has proved, shall we say, problematic, in other cities.

DC’s dockless bike experiment is a beta test designed to run through April next year. It seems to be working beautifully. The city already has close to 4,000 docked bikes serving two million-plus riders a year with its Capital Bikeshare system. So far the companies offering dockless bikes – China’s Mobike and Ofo and the US-backed LimeBike, Spin and Jump – have only been allowed to put up to 400 bikes each on the streets. That’s six bike companies for a city of just over 680,000 people – not all of them bike riders.

At current levels the bikes are fairly inconspicuous but all the companies are keen to expand. LimeBike’s founder Toby Sun has said he’d like to see 20,000 dockless bikes in the city.

Sadly in other cities this green – and taxpayer-free – solution to urban transport issues has turned into a surreal nightmare.

In China, where there are some 16 million shared bikes on the street and MoBike alone now has over a million, the authorities have been forced to clear up ziggurats of discarded bikes. Residents of Hangzhou became so irritated by bikes lazily dumped by riders, and reportedly sabotaged by angry cab drivers, that the authorities were forced to round up 23,000 bikes and dump them in 16 corrals around the city.

“There’s no sense of decency any more,” one Beijing resident recently told the New York Times after finding a bike ditched in a bush outside his home. “We treat each other like enemies.”

In the UK bikes have been hacked, vandalized and thrown on railway tracks. In Australia dumped bikes have been mangled into pavement blocking sculptures – perhaps in a homage to technology’s promise of “creative destruction”.

Utteeyo Dasgupta, assistant economics professor at Wagner College in New York, said the bike dilemma had some similarities to the “tragedy of the commons” – the economic theory that individuals using a shared resource often act according to their own interests and to the detriment of the shared resource.

by Dominic Rushe, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Duke Ellington

Secret Music: On Duke Ellington’s The Queen’s Suite.

[ed. The entire Queen's Suite can be heard here (and it's exquisite).]

Review: iPhone X

The iPhone X is not the phone of the future. It could be, someday, if Apple’s right about augmented reality and the power of a great camera. But for now, the iPhone X represents Apple’s most ambitious attempt ever at making a phone absolutely seamless. A phone that never forces you to think about the object itself, but disappears quietly while you pay attention to whatever you’re doing.

Face ID, Apple’s new facial-recognition system, illustrates the point perfectly. Apple’s explained with uncharacteristic clarity that Face ID was not the result of a design decision, and getting rid of the fingerprint reader was not some late-breaking development in the process. Apple ditched your fingerprint because it believes facial recognition works better. And when it does work, you instantly understand what Apple sees in the technology.

When I first got the iPhone X, Face ID felt like an annoying extra step. You have to turn on the phone, wait for the lock icon to swing to the unlocked position, then swipe up from the bottom of the screen. But that’s me trying to re-learn a bad habit. If, instead, I pick up the phone and the screen automatically turns on as I lift it, all I have to do is swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Face ID has likely already recognized me, and just like that I’m in. I don’t have to turn my phone on, or do anything to unlock it. I just have to tell the iPhone X I’m finished with notifications and want to go to the homescreen, and I’m there.

When Face ID works, it’s like not having a passcode. Tap on a notification on the lockscreen, and you just go straight there; open a sensitive app, and you’ll only be stopped if you’re not allowed to be there. Think about all the time you’ve spent over the years entering your password, and imagine never having to do it again. That’s what Face ID promises.

Here’s the hard part, though: the tech’s not quite there yet. I’ve been using the iPhone X for a week, and found Face ID a study in compromise. For every tap it removes, the X makes your life harder by forcing you to lean in a little just to unlock it. For every feeling of focus that comes with the big, bezel-less screen, there’s a shock back to reality from a hideously unoptimized app.

When everything works right, though, the whole iPhone X experience is brilliant. Even though the camera’s not meaningfully better than the 8 Plus or even 7 Plus, the processor’s no faster, and the software’s no different, I still enjoy the X more than any iPhone ever. Do I like it enough to tell you to fork over $1,000 for the privilege? That’s a bit harder.

by David Pierce, Wired | Read more:
Image: Apple

Celadon, The Unseen Green

There was once a color so beautiful that only royalty were allowed to see it. The common folk didn’t know it, but this green was (rather fittingly) one of those “ish” colors with no clear descriptive word. It was an imprecise color, a murky color, found only on special ceramics and created by a thinly applied glaze that transformed iron oxide from ferric to ferrous iron as it fired in the kiln. The green-ish, gray-ish pottery emerged from the fire with a hint of brown and a fine crackle that supposedly reminded those early worshipers of imprecise beauty of jade. Later, this green would go by the name “celadon” (named, supposedly, for a fictional French lothario who wore pale green ribbons) but for centuries in China it was known only as mi se meaning “mysterious color.”

From the ninth century to the late twentieth century, people could only speculate about the true hue of mi se porcelain. They knew it was green, but whether it was an emerald or a sage, they had no idea. Then, in 1987, archeologists discovered a secret chamber of treasures in the ruins of a collapsed temple outside Xi’an. Inside, they found true mi se ceramics. (A brief but important distinction: The word “celadon” is used to describe both the ceramics, which vary in tone, ranging from yellow greens to more gray-greens, and celadon the color, which, thanks to web designers and their exacting taxonomy of colors, is precise, defined, and does not vary. In digital design, it has the hex code #ace1af and is composed of 67.5% red, 88.2% green, and 68.6% blue—or in the CMYK color space, it uses 23.6% cyan, 0% magenta, 22.2% yellow, and 11.8% black. According to the Pantone naming convention, celadon is filed under 13-6108 TPX.)

So, mi se had been unveiled and a myth had been pinned down. It’s hard not to imagine that in that process, something was lost. (Few could argue that #ACE1AF is as a beguiling a hue as the “mysterious color,” even though they are the same damn thing.) In her book Color: A Natural History of the Palate, journalist Victoria Finlay records a profound disappointment upon seeing the color. “It looked dirty, olive brown, nothing special at all,” she wrote. Later, after visiting the birthplace of the color, she adds, “What did I know about celadon? I knew when I first arrived in Hong Kong and seen it—in museums and antiques shops and people’s homes—I hadn’t really understood it at all. It had seemed to be about the colors I hadn’t been attracted to: the non-colors, which can best be described conceptually or meteorically, with words like misty, dreamy, ghostly, pale, foggy.” She claims she comes to love mi se and celadon both—she comes to see how delicate and rarified it is, how poetic, representing “a state of exquisite elemental tension”—but I don’t quite believe her. I think her first response was the truest: nothing special at all.

Or maybe I’m projecting, because I don’t know whether or not I find celadon all that appealing myself, though I, like Finlay, am predictably seduced by the mysticism and secrecy of this unseen green. I want to like it, but I wouldn’t wear it, nor would I paint my bedroom with that turbid Clinique green. Sometimes, when I try to describe celadon, I compare it to the silvery gray underside of spring maple leaves, turned belly-up before a storm. Then, it is beautiful. But sometimes I recognize it as the color of a sinus infection—not so pretty now. (...)

For much of history, “ish” colors were considered undesirable, since it was generally more costly and difficult to produce true jewel tones or highly saturated hues.

Not so today. Like hand-carved rustic furniture or Maine-caught crustaceans, “ish” colors have gone from being a symbol of poverty to one of wealth. In a New Yorker profile of color consultant Leslie Harrington (who has worked with companies like Crayola, Pottery Barn, and Avon to guide their color choices), Harrington tells writer Eric Konigsberg over lunch that house paints that are difficult to describe tend to be more pricey (or as she puts it, “upscale” or “sophisticated”). “The more high-end the color, the more colors have gone into it and the more words you use to describe it,” she said. As an example, if you hear “it’s kind of a taupey beige with a bit of green in it,” that color probably costs a pretty penny. But “when it’s a lower-end neutral, people just say ‘tan’.”

by Katy Kelleher, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Clinique
[ed. I painted my house a color somewhat like this and it turned out great. White window frames with blue trim.]

Time Passing

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Greta Christina, Greta's Blog |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]

Lava Faces

photos: markk
[ed. I was just going through the archives today looking for something and found these. I need to get back there more often.]

Liberalism is Dead

Silicon Valley’s techtopian libertarianism points to a disruptive left fascism for the 21st century.

Libreralism is dead. Like other dead historical forms, for example Christianity or cinema, liberalism lumbers around zombie-like, continuing to define lives and wield material power. But its place in the dustbin of history is already assured. It has no future; it is just a question of its long, slow slide into irrelevancy.

Liberalism, and its preferred governmental form liberal democracy, is collapsing because the nation-state—the concept that animated liberalism and gave it historical force through the European wars and revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries—has transformed from a necessary tool for capitalist development to a hindrance to growth. Capitalism won an epochal victory in the Cold War and has spread to all but the most distant reaches of the world. But it has done so amid a long crisis of profitability, beginning in the 1970s, that leaves the world system teetering atop elaborate debt and logistics structures. This increasingly brittle system relies on instantaneous modes of global transmission and constant access to world markets to keep money circulating. As a result, borders and nations have become most profitable through their absence. And so capitalism, to stave off its demise, has begun eating its favorite children.

Contra anti-materialist “leftists” who claim that the far right has risen in response to online identity politics, the resurgent ethnonationalist right has emerged in response to these dual collapses of nation and capital. This right looks to fill the political and libidinal void left by zombie liberalism and to reinvigorate and reorganize a “nation” capable of surviving the slow-burning capitalist crisis. As with all far-right projects, it seeks to achieve this by restricting the concept of the citizen and those favored with political and social rights solely to the straight white male property owner, as it was in the good old days of naked settler colonialism. Once sufficiently organized and empowered, such a nation of propertied men could happily flourish under a corporatocratic police state, a dictatorship of capital stripped of protections for the workers who produce their wealth and openly genocidal toward those not deemed true members of the nation.

This genocidal attitude toward “unnecessary” populations, a constant feature of American statecraft, has become increasingly visible of late in mainstream American politics. Republicans have been trying to murder millions of Americans via health-care “reform” in Congress while Trump turns dog whistles into air horns and an ethnonationalist movement sprouts like fungus in his shadow. The American right’s slide from crypto-fascism to out and out fascism nears completion.

This three-decades-long ideological and organizational transformation on the right has not been matched with an equivalent strengthening of American liberalism. Rather the 2016 electoral losses of the presidency, both houses, and most governorships illustrate the inefficacy of the liberal project and its empty vision. The Democratic #resistance, rather than offering a concrete vision of a better world or even a better policy program, instead romanticizes a “center” status quo whose main advantage is that it destroys the environment and kills the poor at a slightly slower rate than the Republicans’ plan. Liberalism isn’t failing because the Democrats have chosen unpopular leaders. It is instead a result of the material limits of the debt-dependent economic policy to which it is devoted. Neoliberal economic policy has produced growth through a series of debt bubbles, but that series is reaching its terminal limits in student and medical debt. Liberalism today has nothing to offer but the symbolic inclusion of a small number of token individuals into the increasingly inaccessible upper classes.

As liberalism collapses, so too does the left-right divide that has marked the past century of domestic politics in the capitalist world. The political conflict of the future will not be between liberalism (or its friendlier European cousin, social democracy) and a conservatism that basically agrees with the principles of liberal democracy but wishes the police would swing their billy clubs a lot harder. Instead, the political dichotomy going forward will be between a “left” and “right” fascism. One is already ascendant, and the other is new but quickly growing.

Jürgen Habermas and various other 20th century Marxists used “left fascism” as a generic slander against their ideological opponents, but I am using it to refer to something more specific: the corporatocratic libertarianism that is the counterpart of right fascism’s authoritarian ethnonationalism, forming the two sides of the same coin. When, in the wake of the imminent economic downturn, Mark Zuckerberg runs for president on the promise of universal basic income and a more “global citizen”-style American identity in 2020, he will represent this new “left” fascism: one that, unlike Trump’s, sheds the nation-state as a central concept. A truly innovative and disruptive fascism for the 21st century.

Rather than invoke Herrenvolk principles and citizenship based on blood and soil, these left fascists will build nations of “choice” built around brand loyalty and service use. Rather than citizens, there will be customers and consumers, CEOs and boards instead of presidents and congresses, terms of service instead of social contracts. Workers will be policed by privatized paramilitaries and live in company towns. This is, in fact, how much of early colonialism worked, with its chartered joint-stock companies running plantation microstates on opposite sides of the world. Instead of the crown, however, there will be the global market: no empire, just capital. (...)

In America, the right fascists find their base in agribusiness, the energy industry, and the military-industrial complex, all relying heavily on state subsidies, war, and border controls to produce their wealth. Although they hate taxes and civil rights, they rely on American imperialism, with its more traditional trade imbalances, negotiation of energy “agreements,” and forever wars to make their profits. But the left fascists, based in tech, education, and services, do best through global labor flows and free trade. Their reliance on logistics, global supply chains, and just-in-time manufacturing, combined with their messianic belief in the singularity and technological fixes for social problems, means they see the nation-state mostly as a hindrance and the military as an inefficient solution to global problems.

Both sides agree that the state should be used to cut wages, police the mobs, and eliminate regulatory oversight. The right fascists, the more traditional of the two, want to solve the question of class war once and for all in a final solution of blood and fire, while the left-fash imagine they can disrupt the class war away by creating much smaller and more easily controlled states and providing basic subsistence.

One side sees the people as subjects; the other, customers. The difference between a dictator-subject relationship and a business-customer relationship is that the brutality and exploitation of the latter is masked behind layers of politeness and seduction, and so sometimes can be mistaken for generosity. We’ve already seen this confusion in action. Last February it was a big news story when Apple refused to help the FBI crack the company’s iPhone encryption. Most people understood this as Apple standing up for its customers, protecting their privacy rights. This was an absurd misreading that requires that one willfully forget everything else Apple does with customer data. In fact, it was a play for sovereignty, a move pointed at demonstrating the independence of Apple in particular and Silicon Valley in general from the state, a step toward the left-fascist politics of the future. In understanding the move as a form of protective noblesse oblige, Apple customers revealed nothing so much as their willingness to become customer-subjects of Apple Nation™.

The left fascists, then, will try in the coming years to wrest control of the Democratic Party. Some on the left will inevitably support them in this effort, as they will come bearing such policies as universal basic income, a loosening of border regimes, a multicultural society, and a multipolar world. Many will be bamboozled by these promises coming from the new tech billionaires, and they will provide cover for the left-fascist project of corporatocratic sovereign devolution.

It is a strange time, when fascists see the future more clearly than the revolutionary left. But the left has so long imagined its route to power comes through capturing the nation-state that it can’t see that such a method doesn’t even work for capital anymore. To crush fascism, we’ll have to dramatically reorient our understanding of the future. Revolutionaries have to get over their fetishization of both nation and state, and fast, if they hope to truly destroy this world, let alone having a shot at building a new one.

by Willie Ostersweil, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, 2011

Jack 47, Green Barn Farms (Jack Herer and AK-47 hybrid)
via: Five Strains of Pot for Sale in Seattle That You Should Try Right Now
[ed. Two of my favorite strains.]

Florida: Why Panic?

Once the hysteria sets in, we tend to forget that the real problem is not accounting for the gas or the water, but the booze.

Allow me to share a Florida man's experience in the second person: You try to get out in front of the storm by stocking up a week in advance, but then you have a surfeit of booze in the house and a reduced work schedule, and you’re watching a loop of apocalyptic news reports, so you invite some friends over and start drinking while the storm is still a hundred miles from Martinique; and then you’re getting drunker as the menacing eye-wall batters Barbuda; and then Gov. Rick Scott is wearing a Navy hat during a press conference and he’s telling you to evacuate your house, but first you have to Google whether Scott was actually in the Navy; and then you doze off as the storm cruises into the Caribbean, and two days go by and you wake up to see Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel in a helmet and bulletproof vest and can’t believe you aren’t dreaming, so you keep drinking, and by the time the storm reaches the Florida Straits, you’re being told that it’s coming straight up the gut and you’re already out of booze and Home Depot is out of plywood and the only thing still open is the Circle K, but the Beer Cave has been turned upside down, so you buy the last two jugs of rotgut burgundy, and the clerk tells you he can’t break a 50, so you tell him to keep the change.

We, Floridians, have something of a toxic relationship to hurricanes. They provide a great deal of excitement during what are otherwise the dog days of summer. What else is there in late August, or early September, when we’re in “peak” hurricane season? In the sports world, “nothing but the sun-dazed and inconsequential third fifth of the baseball season,” and the likewise inconsequential first Saturday of college football.

We track hurricanes with perverse pleasure. They turn us into amateur meteorologists. They also turn professional meteorologists into amateur meteorologists. (A hurricane might cut us all down to size, but the moment of impact seems like an unexpected nadir for the weather professionals, who are relegated to standing outside in the wind and the rain to tell us it’s windy and rainy.)

Maybe we are spoiled, because the ideal outcome happens to be common in Florida: That forecast cone from the National Hurricane Center casts a crimson shadow over the state, but the storm gets sheared somewhere in the Caribbean or veers out to sea at the last minute, and you end up receiving a fierce, but brief torrent of rain, some downed tree limbs, and an afternoon power outage. You’ve spent days prepping for what ends up being the perfect excuse to drink rum (assuming you have enough), boil hot dogs on a camp stove, and play candlelight Scrabble without any preoccupation except baseline survival — an atavistic fantasy.

The poet and critic (and honorary Floridian) Michael Hofmann believes this perversion is a ritual of American theatrics and spectatorship: Wars, hurricanes, and national championships all “begin as an expensive orgy of logistics and end as a pretext for snacking,” when they should give us pause for other, more existential concerns.

In hurricane season, we can also count on the large base of residents who cannot be made to leave their homes, no matter how perilous the forecast. (And they won’t soon forget the preposterous, sensationalist news coverage Irma received.) Locals don’t leave; leaving is capitulation. They’ll just as soon go down swinging (or shooting, in this case). Holding down one’s fort is a point of pride — a metric of advanced stewardship. “Old Florida hands … measure out their lives in hurricane names,” Hofmann writes. “They remember particular angles of attack, depths of flooding, wind velocities and force measurements, destructiveness in dollar amounts … a form of higher geekishness, each man (and of course they’re usually men) his own survivalist.”

Such folks could not be stirred to evacuate, but their panic and dread were heightened to an exceptional degree this time. Harvey, no doubt, stoked their fears: He wasn't even finished dumping rain on Houston when this giant matzo ball called Irma showed up in the Atlantic. Our memory of these storms and their power seems to reset every few years, but Harvey’s impact was attendant and grimly illustrative.

The Atlantic coast had a week to prepare, and then, after the track suddenly shifted into the Gulf of Mexico, it seemed like the entire state had been boarded up and emptied. The evacuations that were ordered in Miami earlier in the week were now directed at Naples and Ft. Myers — all told, 6.5 million people, one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history. Folks from the Atlantic side had fled to areas that ended up being more dangerous than whence they came.

All eyes were rightly fixed on Southwest Florida and the Keys, which would suffer the brunt. But by dint of counterclockwise rotations, favorable tides, and a storm surge that had apparently been lost at sea, much of the Gulf Coast was spared.

It was Northeast Florida, nearly 400 miles from Irma’s landfall, that left everyone scratching their heads. (...)

The morning after Irma eclipsed the state, I woke up to a video in my inbox of a dude riding a Jet Ski through his front yard. The yard was in Middleburg, on Black Creek, south of downtown Jacksonville. The creek had flooded overnight, up to 30 feet above its normal level in some areas. The water was up to the rafters on his house; the roof of his car breached like a turtle shell.

A few days later, once the water had receded, I drove to Middleburg and found a diner that was starting to fill up around lunchtime. Vaulted ceilings and heart-pine joists held small, lacquered replicas of tugs and ferries. Anatomy diagrams on the walls illustrated the freshwater fish varieties you’d find in the surrounding lakes and tributaries. The only thing that seemed out of place was the flat-screen TV mounted to the ceiling. CMT was playing pop-country music videos. I followed along, then looked out the window at the landscape — soft, inert hills, and meandering country roads bisecting forests of slash and longleaf pine. I thought about how North Florida resembles South Georgia, South Georgia resembles Southeast Alabama and so forth, then looked back at the TV. Those starchy, cloying Blake Shelton videos look nothing like the world they claim to inhabit.

by Jordan Blumetti, The Bitter Southerner | Read more:
Image:Jordan Blumetti

Edmund Lewandowski, Dynamo, 1948.

via:

Mark Morrisroe, Untitled (Embrace) 1985.
via:

Desperately Seeking Cities

A half-century after the urban crisis, it appeared that the American city was becoming a source of national hope. In the 2016 presidential election, there were few indicators of how one would vote more salient than whether one lived in a city or far outside one. This result has given rise to the idea that cities would increasingly form the nucleus of the soi-disant “resistance” to right-wing nationalism and Donald Trump. Since last November, marches have repeatedly converged on urban cores; against the threats of the Attorney General, mayors touted their cities’ “sanctuary” status; and environmental standards retired federally have been upheld municipally. If the US had any chance to build a progressive, cosmopolitan future, the path lay through the cities.

Then came the contest to locate Amazon’s second headquarters. It turned out that the unifying power of hating Trump was nothing compared to the overwhelming national ardor for Amazon. Over the last two months, cities of every size and in every part of the country fell over themselves in a lurid, nauseating pageant of suitors. To whom would Amazon give the rose? The solidarity supposedly endemic to urban life was revealed to be the narcissism of minor differences, an inveterate competitive streak, a zeal to scrap every public plan in a fever of tax breaks. Faced with a corporation with monopoly power as great as the old railroads, cities genuflected. Millenarian apocalyptic rhetoric over Trump gave way to salvific paeans to Amazon. The company took on the form of a 21st-century Christ, offering its living water to the thirsty urban samaritans. Only San Antonio—appropriately, the city that once housed stolid, reliable, tedious pleasures like Tim Duncan—distinguished itself, refusing to enter a bid. “Sure, we have a competitive toolkit of incentives,” the city’s mayor wrote, at once inhabiting and parodying the language of the corporate brochure, “but blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style.”

I live in Philadelphia, where every day, the prospect of Amazon HQ2 competed with the corruption of our most powerful local congressman for the top story. The city unveiled a website dedicated to its bid—more attractive and user-friendly than any other municipal page—that gloried in Philadelphia being the “biggest small city in America.” “A lot of people don’t know this,” Randy LoBasso, the head of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia says in a video dedicated to “Livability,” “but Philadelphia is the most ‘biked’ per capita big city in the United States”—a sentence so thick with the jargon of urbanism that it is virtually indecipherable. In an emblematic piece, Jon Geeting, a former journalist who is currently the engagement director for Philadelphia 3.0—a “dark money” political group trying to put more business-friendly candidates into office—wrote that the city “could potentially have a real shot at this,” because of its “strength of legacy assets (elite universities, extensive regional rail system, tons of park land, walkable street grid and narrow streets for biking) that we’ve inherited from previous generations.” In comment sections, in conversation, in social media, Philadelphians turned overnight from citizens into urban branding experts. Years of reading Curbed and thinking about “smart cities” had had their effect. Person after person blandly laid out the humble virtues of Philadelphia as a case for Amazon’s noblesse oblige.

Most city dwellers, it turns out, live lives of quiet desperation for Amazon. What was happening to Philadelphia disclosed the emptiness not just of this city, but of what people all over the country had learned to think cities were good for. The value of the Amazon contest is that it has laid bare a fundamental contradiction of contemporary urban life. Amazon appealed to cities—cannily, it must be said—to narrate themselves: what makes them unique, such that Amazon should locate there? The result was that all cities ended up putting forward the same, boring virtues and “legacy assets”: some parks, some universities, some available land, some tax breaks, some restaurants. Each city, it turned out, was indistinguishable from every other city: “thirty-six hours . . . in the same beer garden, museum, music venue, and ‘High Line’-type urban park.” By the same token, all cities were forced to realize their basic inadequacy: that ultimately, all their tireless work to cultivate their urbanity amounted to nothing if they did not have Amazon.

Amazon has bankrupted the ideology it claimed to appeal to: the ideology of “urbanism.” Since the early 20th century at least, critics, reformers, and architects from Daniel Burnham to Ebenezer Howard to Lewis Mumford have tried to solve the “problem” of the city. The solutions that came into being—threading the city with highways and clearing “slums”—lacked their idealism, damaging the city and city planning with it. The upheavals of urban renewal and the cataclysms of the urban crisis gave birth to the idea that cities were on the verge of extinction; the best way to save them was simultaneously to trumpet their inherent virtues and adopt itsy-bitsy policies to improve their basic livability. Against the pummeling, wrecking-ball visions of Robert Moses, Ed Bacon, and Justin Herman, a superficial reading of Jane Jacobs held that the network of urban eyes and the ballet of street life made cities what they were. (Her idea that cities ought to accommodate a diversity of industries and classes did not enter the discussion.) Under the reign of urbanism, cities, effects of a mercantile and then capitalist economy, became fetish objects: one had to love cities, constantly praise them, and find new ways of adoring them. (...)

The most serious academic riposte to the urbanist ideology has been Michael Storper’s Keys to the City (2013), which demonstrates comprehensively what one might always have guessed, and what the Amazon contest has proven: the location of businesses, rather than the walkability, density, and diversity of a city, determines its economic health. A statistically insignificant portion of the country will up and move to Dallas because they are fiending for breakfast tacos that they can sort of walk to, near a private-public partnership-funded park that caps a freeway where they can sort of enjoy them. Most people, however, move to a place in search of jobs, not “urbanism.” “Even though London, New York, and Paris have central-city neighborhoods that are consumption playgrounds for the rich of the world,” Storper writes, “they are above all major productive hubs in the global economy. The vast majority of their people come to these cities in order to work. The world urban system—from its richest to poorest cities—is not a set of playgrounds or amenity parks but instead a vast system of interlinked workshops.” That this even needs to be argued suggests the level of delusion that persists about what metropolitan regions actually do, and why people live in them. It is a delusion that has taken hold not only on the lecture circuit and PowerPoint presentations and websites that lend their names to “ideas festivals,” but among ordinary city-dwellers.

Urbanism has helped to obscure how implicated cities are in the broader changes of our time. The city we have today is, like everything, characterized by a spectacular level of inequality. To look at a standard city map is to miss an invisible overlay of policies and business incentives that pit one part of the city against the other, much as Amazon pitted all cities against one another. Private-public partnerships make some parks better than others; tax abatements create high-end residential and commercial construction in the urban core, while the poor in the urban periphery enjoy the indignity of under-regulated “enterprise zones” or having to compete for federal “promise zones”; property values spike in the vicinity of a “good” school and dive in the neighborhood of a “bad” one; closely related are the policies that entice cavalcades of police to one area and not to others, ensuring that the carceral state weighs in some neighborhoods like an unshakable stone. The determining center remains, as it has for generations, and as it will in the age of Amazon, the wide floor plates in the heavily air-conditioned offices of the country’s major corporations, which pay proportionally less in taxes to the city and state where they reside than your average middle-class family. As a substitute for more concerted city planning, urbanism has had little success in encouraging the diversity it claims to seek. As a cover for the true nature of the neoliberal city, it has been a triumph.

by Nikil Saval, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: philadelphiadelivers.com

Kathy Mattea

[ed. I like Michele Shocked's version the best but can't seem to find it on YT. Here's the original by Jean Ritchie.]

How Big Coal Created a Culture of Dependence

We are, one hears, spending too much time on Appalachia. There are too many dispatches from woebegone towns, coastal reporters parachuting in to ascertain that, yes, the hard-bitten locals are still with their man Donald Trump. There are too many odes to the beleaguered coal miner, even though that entire industry now employs fewer people than Arby’s. Enough already, says the exasperated urban liberal. Frank Rich captured this sentiment in March in a New York magazine piece entitled “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly.” “Maybe,” he mused, “they’ll keep voting against their own interests until the industrial poisons left unregulated by their favored politicians finish them off altogether. Either way, the best course for Democrats may be to respect their right to choose.”

The superficial “downtrodden Trump voter” story has indeed become an unproductive cliché. And upheavals in industries with larger, more diverse workforces than coal, such as retail, deserve close attention as well.

But our decades-long fixation with Appalachia is still justified. For starters, the political transformation of the region is genuinely stunning. West Virginia was one of just six states that voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980; last year, it gave Trump his second-largest margin of victory, forty-two points.

More importantly, the region’s afflictions cannot simply be cordoned off and left to burn out. The opioid epidemic that now grips whole swaths of the Northeast and Midwest got its start around the turn of the century in central Appalachia, with the shameless targeting of a vulnerable customer base by pharmaceutical companies hawking their potent painkillers. The epidemic spread outward from there, sure as an inkblot on a map. People like Frank Rich may be callous enough to want to consign Appalachians to their “poisons,” but the quarantine is not that easy.

We should be thankful, then, for what Steven Stoll, a historian at Fordham University, has delivered in Ramp Hollow: not just another account of Appalachia’s current plight, but a journey deeper in time to help us understand how the region came to be the way it is. For while much has been written about the region of late, the historical roots of its troubles have received relatively little recent scrutiny. Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance’s best-selling memoir of growing up in an Appalachian family transplanted from eastern Kentucky to the flatlands of southwestern Ohio, cast his people’s afflictions largely as a matter of a culture gone awry, of ornery self-reliance turned to resentful self-destruction. In White Trash, the historian Nancy Isenberg traced the history of the country’s white underclass to the nation’s earliest days, but she focused more on how that underclass was depicted and scorned than on the material particulars of its existence.

Stoll offers the ideal complement. He has set out to tell the story of how the people of a sprawling region of our country—one of its most physically captivating and ecologically bountiful—went from enjoying a modest but self-sufficient existence as small-scale agrarians for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a dreary dependency on the indulgence of coal barons or the alms of the government. (...)

Yet it was the area’s very natural bounty that would ultimately spell the end of this self-sufficiency. The Civil War’s incursions into the Shenandoah Valley and westward exposed the region’s riches in exactly the minerals demanded by a growing industrial economy. (By 1880, there were 56,500 steam engines in the country, all voracious for coal.) “Her hills and valleys are full of wealth which only needs development to attract capitalists like a magnet,” declared one joint-stock company. In swarmed said capitalists, often in cahoots with local power brokers from Charleston and Wheeling.

The confused legal property claims offered the aspiring coal barons a window: they could approach longtime inhabitants and say, essentially, “Look, we all know you don’t have full title to this land, but if you sell us the mineral rights, we’ll let you stay.” With population growth starting to crimp the wide-ranging agrarian existence, some extra cash in hand was hard to reject. Not that it was very much: one farmer turned over his 740 acres for a mere $3.58 per acre—around $80 today. By 1889, a single company, Flat Top Land Trust, had amassed rights to 200,000 acres in McDowell County in southern West Virginia; just thirteen years later, McDowell was producing more than five million tons of coal per year.

The coal industry had a positively soft touch in the early going, though, compared to timber. Stoll describes the arrival of the “steam skidder,” which “looks like a locomotive with a ship’s mast.” It “clanks and spits, chugs steam, and sweats grease from its wheels and pistons” as workers use cables extending from the mast to grab fallen trees, “pulling or skidding the logs hundreds of feet to a railroad flatbed.” The steam skidder crews would cut everything they could, “leaving the slopes barren but for the stumps, branches, and bark that burned whenever a spark from a railroad wheel or glowing ash from a tinderbox fell on the detritus.”

The harvest was staggering: “Of the 10 million acres that had never been cut in 1870, only 1.5 million stood in 1910.” Stoll quotes one witness from the time: “One sees these beautiful hills and valleys stripped of nature’s adornment; the hills denuded of their forests, the valleys lighted by the flames of coke-ovens and smelting furnaces; their vegetation seared and blackened . . . and one could wish that such an Arcadia might have been spared such ravishment. But the needs of the race are insatiable and unceasing.” Indeed, they were. As one northern lumberman put it: “All we want here is to get the most we can out of this country, as quick as we can, and then get out.”

Such rapaciousness did not leave much of the commons that had sustained the makeshift agrarian existence. Of course, there was a new life to replace it: mining coal or logging trees. By 1929, 100,000 men, out of a total state population of only 1.7 million, worked in 830 mines across West Virginia alone. But it is in that very shift that Stoll identifies the region’s turn toward immiseration. With the land spoiled and few non-coal jobs available, workers were at the mercy of whichever coal company dominated their corner of the region. They lived in camps and were paid in scrip usable only at the company store; even the small gardens they were allowed in the camps were geared less toward self-reliance than toward cutting the company’s costs to feed them.

Stoll quotes a professor at Berea College in eastern Kentucky who captured the new reality in a 1924 book: The miner “had not realized that he would have to buy all his food. . . He has to pay even for water to drink.” Having moved their families to a shanty in the camp, miners owed rent even when the mine closed in the industry’s cyclical downturns, which served to “bind them as tenants by compulsion . . . under leases by which they can be turned out with their wives and children on the mountainside in midwinter if they strike.” As Stoll sums it up, “Their dependency on company housing and company money spent for food in company-owned stores amounted to a constant threat of eviction and starvation.” Of course, Merle Travis had this dynamic nailed way back in his 1947 classic, “Sixteen Tons”: “You load sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt. / Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go, / I owe my soul to the company store.”

Nor did the industries bring even a modicum of mass prosperity to compensate for this dependency. By 1960, more than half the homes in central Appalachia still lacked central plumbing, helping give rise to all manner of cruel stereotypes and harsh commentary, such as this, from the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “The Appalachians present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.” An extensive 1981 study of eighty Appalachian counties by the Highlander Research and Educational Center in Tennessee confirmed that, in Stoll’s summary, coal company capital had brought “stagnation, not human betterment,” and a “correlation between corporate control and inadequate housing.”

“Banks in coal counties couldn’t invest in home construction or other local improvements because the greater share of their deposits belonged to the companies,” Stoll writes. “No sooner did that capital flow in than it flowed out, depriving banks of funds stable enough for community lending.” Not only had the coal industry, along with timber, supplanted an earlier existence, but it was actively stifling other forms of growth and development.

Stoll recounts a scene from 1988, when a man named Julian Martin got up at a public hearing to oppose a proposed strip-mining project in West Virginia. Martin described the disappearance of Bull Creek along the Coal River, which he had explored as a kid decades earlier. He pointed out that places that had seen the most strip mining had also become the very poorest in the state. “My daddy was a coal miner, and I understand being out of work, okay?” Martin said. “I’ve been down that road myself. And I know you’ve got to provide for your family. But I’m saying they’re only giving us two options. They’re saying, ‘Either starve—or destroy West Virginia.’ And surely to God there must be another option.”

It’s a powerful moment, and it captures the tragic political irony that is one of the most lasting fruits of the region’s dependency: despite all the depredations of resource extraction—all the mine collapses and explosions (twenty-nine killed at Upper Big Branch in 2010) and slurry floods (125 killed in the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972) and chemical spills (thousands without drinking water after the contamination of the Elk River in 2014)—many inhabitants, and their elected representatives, remain fiercely protective of the responsible industries. Even the empathetic Stoll can’t help let his frustration show, as he urges the “white working class of the southern mountains to stop identifying their interests with those of the rich and powerful, a position that leaves them poorer and more powerless than they have ever been.”

Well, yes, but many a book has been written to explain why exactly the opposite trend has been happening, as Appalachia turns ever redder. It shouldn’t be that hard to make sense of the coal-related part of this political turn, and voters’ rightful assessment that coastal Democrats are hostile to the industry. The region has been dominated by mining for so long that coal has become deeply interwoven with its whole sense of self. Just last month, I was speaking with a couple of retired union miners in Fairmont, West Virginia, who are highly critical of both coal companies and Trump, and suffer the typical physical ailments from decades spent underground. Yet both said without hesitation that they missed the work for the camaraderie and sense of purpose it provided. Their ancestors identified as agrarians; they identified as miners.

by Alec MacGillis, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. See also: Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining.]