In Praise(ish) of Dollar Stores

The Dollar General I've grown reliant on, in a Nebraska town of only 1000 people

We’ve all heard the ubiquitous complaints about Dollar General and similar “dollar stores,” though that name is increasingly anachronistic. They keep prices low by paying workers poorly, running perpetually short-staffed, and excluding local artisans. Their modular architecture is deaf to local culture and design. They distort our ideas of what commercial goods actually cost. Even John Oliver dedicated a block of valuable HBO time to disparaging how Dollar General hurts workers and the local community.

Like a good economic progressive, I internalized these arguments for years. I prided myself on avoiding dollar stores like plague pits. I aggressively disparaged when a treasured local business got flattened to build a Family Dollar store. Even on an extended Missouri holiday, fifteen minutes from the nearest grocery store, I finally gave in and entered the Dollar General, only two minutes away, I still rationalized myself by saying I remained dedicated to local businesses.

Through the last year, though, I’ve found my perspective shifting. I find dollar stores, and Dollar General specifically, more necessary than I previously realized. Dollar General is like audiobooks, or a Slanket. These products, invented to streamline disabled people’s lives, have gotten derided by able-bodied elites, who don’t realize how privileged their taunts really are. Likewise, Manhattan-based John Oliver, and writers in coastal California, might not realize how dollar stores improve life in rural America.

In the year I’ve spent caring for an aged relative in rural Nebraska, I’ve become deeply reliant on Dollar General. It keeps longer hours than the local grocery store, auto parts retailer, or pharmacy. This has made it absolutely essential for buying convenience foods, over-the-counter meds, and motor oil. That’s saying nothing of other products that nobody else sells locally, like home décor, kitchen supplies, and paperback books. Without Dollar General, these commodities would disappear.

Not that semi-luxury commodities don’t exist in rural areas. But without Dollar General, the nearest big-box retailer selling these products would be over an hour’s drive away, or else Amazon, which delivers to rural areas only sluggishly. The stereotyped image of rural America, with its drab houses, faded curtains, and faded clothes bespeaks the ways retailers don’t bother investing outside already-lucrative markets. Dollar General, by contrast, arguably creates lucrative markets in marginal or abandoned areas.

The small but diverse produce section in my local Dollar General

City slickers might not realize how inaccessible food is in rural areas. The term “food deserts” often describes urban cores, especially non-White neighborhoods, where Dr. King realized that fruits and vegetables were unaffordable, if available. But rural America is also heavily food desertified. Because economic forces, especially banks, force farmers to abandon diverse agriculture for industrial monocropping, farmers seldom eat their produce. In the northern Great Plains, farms mostly grow livestock feed, not human food.

These conditions didn’t just happen. Macroeconomics isn’t inevitable, like rain. Top-level American economic policy flooded America’s central corridor with population after the Civil War, via the Homestead Act. But into the Twentieth Century, that same economic policy largely abandoned the homesteader population in favor of urban industrialization. America still needs its rural agricultural population; it just doesn’t provide that population with meaningful support anymore, since they aren’t lucrative donors. Nobody ever got rich hoeing corn.

Dollar stores are the logical market-driven response to this abandonment. Rural communities have some money, and they want—and deserve—nice things, like attractive curtains, affordable art supplies, and small electronics. Dollar General recognized an unmet market, and met it. Sure, they manipulate wholesalers and use just-in-time restocking to keep prices artificially cheap, in ways unsupported local businesses just can’t. But they aren’t culpable for economic policies that made Pop’s old-timey general store fiscally unviable.

Even their notoriously impersonal architecture reflects America’s top-level economic policy. Sure, I’d love if dollar stores hired local architects to conform their buildings to regional aesthetics. But Walmart and Target already priced architects out of small markets, and America’s rural economic abandonment means the dominant design style is often “decay.” Dollar General’s warehouse-like design and modular construction let them move into marginal markets quickly without incurring high amortized overhead, which just makes good business sense.

Don’t misunderstand me: dollar chains’ low pay, homogenous product, and deafness to local industry aren’t sustainable. I’ve grown fond of Dollar General, but at best, they’re a transitional response to larger forces. But John Oliver’s implicit expectation of shoving a Whole Foods into every small market is equally unrealistic. If we use the market access which dollar stores provide to build toward something better, then these chains have helped America through its current economic malaise.

To Be Young Is To Know Solitude

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 121
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Ponyboy Curtis never wanted to join a street gang and fight with switchblades, but survival made it necessary. The streets are divided between the working-class Greasers, who pride themselves on their swagger and their lustrous hair, and the Socs, who drive flash cars and wear the slickest clothes money can buy. The groups fight, not because they have personal animosity, but because it’s what they do. Existential boredom leaves them with little besides the fight.

S.E. Hinton’s debut novel, written when she was still in high school, is sometimes credited as the beginning of the young adult genre. Other authors had written for teenaged readers before, but Hinton took an unprecedented tack. She wrote a teenager’s story of conflict and incipient adulthood, not for finger-wagging moralistic purposes, but simply because it’s his story. Hinton refuses to pass judgement, even when Ponyboy, her first-person narrator, spirals into self-recrimination.

The Greasers, by definition, have nothing. Ponyboy is an orphan, raised by his eldest brother, who’s forced to become a parent to teens at only twenty. His middle brother dropped out to get a job, basically because that’s what middle kids do. Other greasers dodge drunken parents, or practice fights in city parks, simply to pass the time. Ponyboy admits he doesn’t like most of them, but calls them his friends, because they can rely only upon one another.

Hinton putatively began writing this novel because a high school friend received a vicious beat-down, simply for walking unaccompanied. This event, and the trauma it caused not only him but everyone who loved him, becomes the inciting incident of the novel. Her feuding gangs hate one another without knowing one another, and fight because it gives their otherwise shapeless lives meaning. Hinton implies the battles would stop if participants simply spoke to one another.

One evening at the drive-in, Ponyboy and his friends encounter some well-scrubbed, middle-class girls. These girls rebuff the more aggressive Greasers, but one of them finds Ponyboy, with his big eyes and poetic soul, interesting. She wants to learn how the other half lives. But since Greasers and Socs never talk, this innocent encounter gets quickly misconstrued. An argument turns into a fight, turns into a knifing. Ponyboy flees a manslaughter accusation.

S.E. Hinton

Hinton never gives specific dates, and few places. Her gang of Greasers prefers Elvis, while the Socs favor the Beatles, which gives an approximate time. And her descriptions of dusty city streets, high-school rodeos, and rolling country hills locate the story in the southern Great Plains. Observant readers will recognize Hinton’s native Tulsa, Oklahoma. Which leads to an important question: is being rich in America’s despised hinterland any better than being poor?

The entire novel asks how an innocent, poetic teenager would handle everything that could go wrong in life, going wrong in quick succession. As the youngest Greaser, at only fourteen, Ponyboy is unprepared for battles against older, larger boys. When one battle leaves a Soc dead, he’s unprepared for the fugitive life. Isolation forces him into soul-searching that most boys don’t face until much later. Even soul-searching uncovers some conclusions he can’t yet handle.

Ponyboy and his friends find themselves in a no-win situation. If they flee their crimes, they’ll live as fugitives forever, with nothing to show for lives that have barely begun. But if they take accountability, they’ll face a criminal justice system that, they already understand, is slanted against poor, long-haired teenagers, and they’ll still lose everything. They find themselves forced into a world where choices lack the moral clarity of children’s stories and simple fables they learned in school.

Perhaps more than the story itself, Hinton’s narrative clarity differs from her contemporaries. Other youth narrators, like Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield, aren’t really children, they’re adults remembering childhood from their Olympus-like perch. Ponyboy is a real kid, struggling to come to grips with the adult responsibilities thrust upon him. He lacks mature guidance, only advice from other kids trapped in these circumstances with him. He survives, not because adults give him easy answers, but because he keeps moving when everything around him collapses.

At only 180 pages, written in a conversational tone, this book isn’t difficult reading. Its intended high-school audience will read it quickly, but they’ll also find themselves confronted with questions they can’t put aside nearly so easily. Adult readers will struggle with many of the novel’s themes of existentialism, purpose, and identity. The deep-seated social dislocation which Hinton identified in post-WWII America haven’t been resolved over sixty years later.

Crime News is Bad News

Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

I’d bet you a ham sandwich that, if you surveyed a reasonable sample of Americans, most would agree that we expect too much of the police. We expect them to investigate violent crimes, enforce traffic laws, provide crisis intervention, control wild animals, protect the environment, and safeguard private property. It’s unreasonable. Yet after the 2020 George Floyd protests and “Defund the Police,” most metropolitan police departments are even more overfunded and expected to perform miracles.

American police critics often say “copaganda” to describe mass media entertainment, particularly police dramas, that make law enforcement look both more necessary and more effective than they are. Defense attorney Alec Karakatsanis shifts focus onto mainstream journalism, which he accuses of papering over not only the police, but also any reasonable alternative suggestions. Our news media have the ability to decide what facts their audiences know, and what ideas the public considers “acceptable” or “mainstream.”

Why, Karakatsanis asks, do news outlets consistently lead with murder, sexual assault, and robbery? Police spend less than five percent of their time and budget on these crimes. Journalists regularly omit reporting on tax evasion, wage theft, or environmental degradation, which are crimes. But scary stories of violence sell precious ad space and keep audiences glued. Police know this, too; many PDs, hungry for voters and resources, have vastly increased public relations budgets since 2020.

Growing police budgets direct resources away from tools to address the root causes of crime. Attempts to redress poverty, housing scarcity, structural racism, and collapsing communities, seem abstract and squishy when crime leads the headlines. Indeed, many news consumers don’t know such attempts to redress even exist, because journalists cover them superficially, compared to the in-depth analysis that street crime regularly receives. What journalists bother to cover, winds up being what lives in audiences’ minds.

Karakatsanis sees three fundamental problems with crime reporting. First, journalists report words from politicians, police spokespeople, property owners, and other defenders of the status quo without meaningful analysis. Second, use of weasel words and deflections conceal the writers’ opinions behind seemingly neutral language. Third, news consumers lack critical reading background necessary to spot the first two problems. This leaves a voting populace frequently unaware that alternatives to the status quo exist, and have been tried.

Alec Karakatsanis

Scholars write extensively about law enforcement, and its alternatives. Karakatsanis describes many approaches to addressing crime without involving what he calls the “punishment bureaucracy.” (He finds the phrase “criminal justice system” falsely anodyne.) Some alternatives are strictly hypothetical, while others have been applied, mostly with success. But newspaper readers or basic cable watchers seldom see them. As Karakatsanis writes, “The news consistently fails to explain the substance of legitimate critiques of police, prosecutors, and prisons.”

Some readers might expect Karakatsanis’ analysis to have a partisan bent. Republicans have persistently made bank with “tough on crime” posturing. But journalistic defense of police has a bipartisan history. Nominally progressive politicians, and the reporters who support them, often use police to bolster their legislative bona fides. At least on “law and order” matters, there’s little daylight between the two major parties. Despite this, journalists frequently present any alternative as a Mad Max hellscape.

Worst, the problem is circular. Journalists lead with crime reportage, even now, when crime statistics are at near-record lows. Which crimes reporters consider worth covering, become the crimes politicians campaign and legislate on. The public’s perception of crime, irrespective of real-world conditions, justifies draconian police interventions, which wind up contributing to further crime. The statistically meaningless incident becomes the justification for crackdowns. Or, as Karakatsanis puts it, “Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy.”

These outcomes aren’t inevitable. Karakatsanis makes suggestions for how journalists could better handle volatile stories, though he admits that’s unlikely to happen under the current system of perverse incentives. Until then, Karakatsanis describes a more engaged, critical approach to news consumption. That includes a better understanding of the language, sourcing, and references which journalists use, and a willingness to seek what the current story omits. It also means asking who’s helped by the current framing.

The situation is indeed bleak. Karakatsanis makes a persuasive case that we have an incomplete, blinkered understanding of our justice landscape. The stories which define our knowledge and explain our opinions, are frequently slanted or poorly representative. But beneath it, he maintains an optimism that conditions could change, if we, the masses, consume our news more critically. We aren’t beholden to the news industrialists who distribute our stories. We can take control, if we want.

“Debate” Forever, Accomplish Anything Never

Charlie Kirk

Of the numerous encomiums following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, I’ve seen many writers praise his love of “debate.” They’ve extoled his supposed fondness for college speaking tours where the largest feature was his open-mike question sessions, where he used his proven acumen to dismantle undergraduates’ post-adolescent leftist idealism. He died under a banner emblazoned with his speaking slogan: “Prove Me Wrong.”

Recent public-facing conservatives have enjoyed the appearance of “debate.” Like Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have made bank playing college campuses, inviting ill-prepared undergrads to challenge their talking points. Crowder’s notorious “Change My Mind” table banner turned him into one of the most eminently memeable recent public figures. And almost without fail, they mopped the floor with anyone who dared challenge them.

Smarter critics than me have shown how these “debates” are, at best, fatuous. Kirk, Shapiro, and Crowder arrive better prepared, often carrying reams of supporting research that undergraduates just don’t have. Shapiro is an attorney, a graduate of Harvard Law School, while Crowder is a failed stand-up comedian, so they’re simply better trained at extemporaneous speaking. Kirk’s training was informal, but his mentor, advertising exec Bill Montgomery, coached him well.

Myths of Socratic dialog, high school and college debate clubs, and quadrennial Presidential debates, have falsely elevated the ideal of “debate.” The notion that, if we talk long enough, we’ll eventually overcome our differences, underlies the principles of American representative democracy. College freshman comp classes survive on the notion that we can resolve our disputations through language. As a former comp teacher, I somewhat support that position.

However, we’ve seen how that unfolds in real life. As Rampton and Stauber write, defenders of the status quo prevent real change on important issues by sustaining debate indefinitely. As long as reasonable-sounding people keep discussing how to handle racism, war, police violence, global warming, and other issues on basic cable news, they create the illusion that controversies remain unresolved. Conservatives need not win, only keep the debate alive.

Public-facing conservatives on college campuses are the reductio ad absurdum of this reality. When men in their thirties, trained to speak quickly, and notice fiddling verbal inconsistencies, try to tackle wide-eyed undergrads, they look victorious. But that’s an illusion, created by the fact that they control the field. Just because an attorney can conduct cross-examination, or a comedian can do crowd work, doesn’t mean they’re correct.

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Just as importantly, the changing technological landscape means students have less information in reserve for extemporaneous discussion. Back in my teaching days, technological utopians claimed that students having information in reserve was less important than being able to access information on an as-needed basis. But these “debates” prove that, in the marketplace of image, knowing your subject matters when your opponent is stuck Googling on their smartphone.

Since I left teaching, ChatGPT and other “large language models” have diminished students’ need to formulate ideas in any depth. As I told my students, we don’t write only to communicate our ideas to others; writing also crystalizes our vague, ephemeral thoughts into a useful form, via language. But if students delegate that responsibility to artificial “intelligence,” they can’t know their own ideas, much less defend them on the fly.

Higher education, therefore, leaves students ill-prepared not only to participate in Charlie Kirk-style “debates,” but also to judge whether anybody has deeper ideas than supported by street theatre. I don’t blame teachers; I’ve known too many teachers who’ve resisted exactly this outcome. Rather, it’s a combination of bloated administration, regulations handed down by ill-informed legislatures, and a PR campaign that made Kirk look more erudite than he actually was.

Socrates saw his dialectical method, not as an abstract philosophical good, but as an approach to civic governance. In works like Republic and Phaedrus, he declared his belief that deep thinking and verbal acumen trained up worthy, empathetic rulers. But his approach required participants whose approach went beyond mere forms. It required participants sophisticated enough to admit when they were beaten, and turn words into substantive action.

Charlie Kirk was an avatar of a debate structure that prizes fast talking over deep thinking. His ability to steamroll students barely out of high school looks impressive to people who watch debates as spectator sport. But his approach favors form over substance, and winning the debate over testing the superior ideas. He was exactly the kind of rhetorician that Socrates considered an enemy of the Athenian people.

This produces a society that’s talked out, but too tired to act.ac

Return to Tim Burton’s Gotham

Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones, Batman ’89

Gotham reels with the Penguin’s recent death and Max Schreck’s disappearance, and a gang of Batmen are ready to step into the gap. But Batman himself doesn’t want the civilian help, especially when the Joker gang uses the crowd to create chaos after an armored car heist. Fortunately, the hero the city really needs emerges: District Attorney Harvey Dent. Sure, Batman offers the city blunt-fisted justice, but Dent offers what the city really needs: justice.

Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie and its 1992 sequel were commercial successes, but their downmarket approach divided comics purists. Warner Brothers especially tarnished the movies’ legacy by replacing Burton with the more pliable Joel Schumacher, turning the franchise into a merchandise factory. Probably the greatest loss was Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose story began in the first movie before vanishing. So DC brought original screenwriter Sam Hamm aboard to complete the unfinished arc.

This version of Harvey Dent is ambitious, hoping to apprehend both Batman and Commissioner Gordon. (Notwithstanding that he’s engaged to Gordon’s daughter Barbara.) He’s also proudly, assertively Black, having worked his way out of Gotham’s chronically impoverished Burnside neighborhood. But Dent isn’t Burnside’s only Black hero. A young martial artist, clad in black and yellow, has begun defending the neighborhood’s streets by night. Just in time, too, because the city has mobilized the National Guard.

Movie and comics fans alike already know Dent is doomed to become Two-Face, a criminal whose morality relies on a literal coin flip. Hamm’s interpretation resembles Aaron Eckhart’s performance from The Dark Knight, in that it’s driven not merely by crime, but by a belief in absolute binary justice. Importantly, in this story, Two-Face isn’t his name; he never stops being Harvey Dent, a local hero who believes in bringing justice to Gotham’s unrepresented side.

Hamm’s story owes a visible debt to Frank Miller’s 1986 revisionist classic The Dark Knight Returns. Not only the Joker and Batman gangs, or a city that requires intervention while resenting those who intervene. Hamm also pilfers Miller’s theme of Batman getting older, questioning his ability to save anyone. Unlike Miller’s Batman, Hamm’s version is introspective enough to question whether he might be making circumstances worse. Especially when his brute-force justice gets poor Gothamites killed.

A splash panel depicting some of artist
Joe Quinones’ preliminary sketches

Hamm’s pacing straddles the difference between movies and comics. His cinematic swoop carries him from talky exposition scenes, straight into choreographed action, never hammocking in just one style. But he also recognizes the importance of maintaining the momentum not only within the story, but between issues. This story originally ran as a six-issue limited series, and Hamm inserts cliffhangers that would’ve carried the story between issues, but which vanish seamlessly in the collected single volume.

Movies differ from comics for one important reason: actors get older. Recent comics-based movies have required Hugh Jackman to have the same body at age 55 that he had at thirty. In movies, characters can’t recur forever; story arcs, once complete, must end. Artist Joe Quinones draws Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne getting grey around the temples, wheezing with exertion, and planning for his legacy as a hero. Time, in this notably timely comic, clearly passes.

Quinones doesn’t just draw Batman as Michael Keaton. He also includes remarkable depictions of franchise actors like Billy Dee Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Gough as they appeared in the middle 1990s. Marlon Wayans and Winona Ryder, who reportedly had handshake deals to appear in further Batman sequels, also appear. Quinones’ attention to detail emphasizes not only who the actors are, but what unique traits they could’ve brought to this story, had it been filmed.

Between them, Hamm and Quinones recapture Tim Burton’s rococo style. They depict Burton’s comedically tall buildings and close-packed streets, the kind of art-deco frippery that gives his earliest work its distinctive style. Hamm’s dialog captures Burton’s trademark lilt, while Quinones draws scenes from Dutch angles that give still images a high-speed dynamic. I can’t quite determine who involve Burton was in creating this story, but it really looks like something he might’ve shot around 1995.

Not that it’s a lifeless time capsule. It addresses politics, economics, and racial dynamics that were implicit in the original movies, but went largely unaddressed. In that regard, it looks like a hybrid of two different stories which might’ve been written twenty-five years apart. I realize not all comics fans like Burton’s movies, or the coarsening effect they had on the comics market. But for his fans, this is the sequel Joel Schumacher should’ve made.