Internet Censors and Real Speech

The cover art from Sharon Van Etten’s
Remind Me Tomorrow

I had no idea, until this week, that Sharon Van Etten’s folk-pop electronic album Remind Me Tomorrow might be off-color. Specifically, the cover art. I’ve linked to my review of the album several times on several platforms without incident. But this week, I had a link yanked from Instagram by the parent company, Meta, on the grounds of “child nudity.”

As you can see, the cover image is a childhood snapshot of Van Etten and her brother. That’s Van Etten half-folded into a laundry basket, partially unclothed. Small children often hate clothes, and have to be conditioned to wear them in time to start school. Because of this, most people recognize a categorical difference between innocent small-kid nakedness, and smut. I suspect any impartial judge would consider this the former.

This isn’t my first collision between Meta and nudity. I’ve repeatedly needed to appeal them blocking links because my essays included Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, a panel from the Sistene Chapel ceiling. It depicts Adam, not yet alive, lolling naked in Eden, including his visible genitals. Nearly every blog essay I’ve written that included this image, I’ve had to appeal against lewdness regulations.

Any reasonable person would agree that social media needs basic standards of appropriate behavior. Without a clear, defined threshold, one or a few bad-faith actors could deluge the algorithm with garbage and destroy the common space. Consider the decline of public spaces like Times Square in the 1970s: if nobody defends common spaces, they become dumping grounds for the collective id.

But those standards are necessarily arbitrary. What constitutes offensive behavior? We get different answers if we ask people of different ages, regions, and backgrounds. My grandmother and I have different expectations; likewise, Inglewood, California, and Doddsville, Mississippi, have wildly divergent community standards. But because Facetube and InstaTwit don’t have geographic boundaries, they flatten distinctions of place, race, age, and economic standing.

TikTok perhaps embodies this best. Cutsie-poo euphemisms like “unalived,” “pew-pew,” and “grape” gained currency on TikTok, and have made it vitally difficult to discuss tender topics. YouTube restricts and demonetizes videos for even mentioning crime, death, and the Holocaust. Words like “fascism” and “murder” are the kiss of death. In an American society filthy with violence, the requirement to speak with baby talk circumspection means that we can’t communicate.

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, from the Sistene Chapel ceiling

Watching the contortions content creators have to perform whenever called upon to address the latest school shooting or overseas drone strike, would be hilarious, if it weren't heartbreaking. Americans have to contend with legislative inertia, lobbyist cash, and morally absolute thinking when these catastrophes occur. But then the media behemoths that carry the message have the ability, reminiscent of William Randolph Hearst, to kill stories by burying them.

I’m not the first to complain about this. I’ve read other critics who recommend just ignoring the restrictions, and writing forthrightly. Which sounds great, in theory. If censorious corporations punish writers for mentioning death and crime too directly, the response is to refuse to comply. Like any mass labor action, large numbers and persistence should amend the injustice.

In theory.

Practically speaking, media can throttle the message. In the heyday of labor struggles, the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain, unions could circumvent media bottlenecks by printing their own newspapers and writing their own folk songs. But most internet content creators lack the necessary skills to program their own social media platforms. Even if they could, they certainly can't afford valuable server space.

Thus, a few companies have immediate power to choke even slightly controversial messages, power that creators cannot resist. Which elicits the next question: if journalists, commentators, and bloggers cover a story, but Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk stifle the distribution, has the coverage actually happened? Who knows what crises currently fester unresolved because we can’t talk about them?

This isn’t a call to permit everything. Zuckerberg and Musk can’t permit smut on their platforms, or even link to it, because it coarsens and undercuts their business model. But current standards are so censoriously narrow that they kill important stories on the vine. If we can’t describe controversial issues using dictionary terms, our media renders us virtually mute.

Given how platforms screen even slightly dangerous topics and strangle stories in their beds, I’m curious whether anyone will even see this essay. I know I lack enough reach to start a movement. But if we can start speaking straightforwardly, without relying on juvenile euphemisms, that represents a step forward from where we stand right now.

Some Stray Thoughts on the Futility of Language

I think I was in seventh grade when I realized that I would probably never understand my peers. In church youth group, a young man approximately my age, but who attended another middle school, talked about meeting his school’s new Egyptian exchange student. “I could tell right away,” this boy—a specimen of handsome, square-jawed Caucasity who looked suspiciously adult, so I already distrusted him—said, “that he was gonna be cool.”

“How could you tell?” the adult facilitator asked.

“Because he knew the right answer when I asked, ‘What’s up?’”

Okay, tripping my alarm bells already. There’s a correct answer to an open-ended question?

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who found that fishy, because the adult facilitator and another youth simultaneously asked, “What’s the correct answer then?”

“He said, ‘What’s up?’” my peer said, accompanied by a theatrically macho chin thrust.

(The student being Egyptian also mattered, in 1987, because this kid evidently knew how to “Walk Like an Egyptian.”)

This peer, and apparently most other preteens in the room, understood something that I, the group facilitator, and maybe two other classmates didn’t understand: people don’t ask “What’s up?” because they want to know what’s up. They ask because it’s a prescribed social ritual with existing correct responses. This interaction, which I perceived as a request for information, is actually a ritual, about as methodical and prescriptive as a Masonic handshake.

My adult self, someone who reads religious theory and social science for fun, recognizes something twelve-year-old Kevin didn’t know. This prefixed social interaction resembles what Émile Durkheim called “liturgy,” the prescriptive language religious people use in ceremonial circumstances. Religious liturgy permits fellow believers to state the same moral principles in unison, thus reinforcing their shared values. It also inculcates their common identity as a people.

The shared linguistic enterprise, which looks stiff, meaningless, and inflexible to outsiders, is purposive to those familiar with the liturgy. Speaking the same words together, whether the Apostle’s Creed or the Kaddish or the Five Pillars of Islam, serves to transform the speakers. Same with secular liturgy: America’s Pledge of Allegiance comes to mind. Durkheim cited his native France’s covenants of Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité.

This confused me, a nerdy and socially inept kid who understood life mainly through books, because I thought language existed to convey information. Because “What’s up?” is structured as a question, I perceived it as a question, meaning I perceived it as a request for clarifying information. I thought the “correct” answer was either a sarcastic rejoinder (“Oh, the sky, a few clouds…”) or an actual narrative of significant recent events.

No, I wasn’t that inept, I understood that when most people ask “How are you today,” it was a linguistic contrivance, and the correct answer is “fine.” I understood that people didn’t really want to know how you’re doing, especially if you’re doing poorly. But even then, the language was primarily informative: I’m here, the answer says, and I’m actively listening to you speak.

However, the “What’s up?” conundrum continues to nag me, nearly forty years later, because it reveals that most people don’t want information, at least not in spoken form. Oral language exists mainly to build group bonds, and therefore consists of ritual calls and responses. We love paying homage to language as communication, through formats like broadcast news, political speeches, and deep conversations. But these mostly consist of rituals.

Consider: when was the last time you changed your mind because of a spoken debate? This may mean the occasional staged contacts between, say, liberals and conservatives, or between atheists and Christians. Every four years, we endure the tedium of televised Presidential debates, but apart from standout moments like “They’re eating the pets,” we remember little of them, and we’re changed by less.

For someone like me, who enjoys unearthing deeper questions, that’s profoundly frustrating. When I talk to friends, I want to talk about things, not just talk at one another. Perhaps that’s why I continue writing this blog, instead of moving to YouTube or TikTok, where I’d receive a larger audience and more feedback. Spoken language, in short, is for building bonds; written language is for information.

Put another way, the question “What’s up?” isn’t about the individuals speaking, it’s about the unit they become together. Bar chats, water cooler conversations, and Passing the Peace at church contain no information, they define the group. Only when we sit down, alone, to read silently, do we really seek to truly discover what’s up.

Building New Houses Isn’t the Solution

This is what it usually looks like when Americans just “build houses.”

Supposedly, many Americans voted Donald Trump back into the presidency, in part, to protest the continuing rise in housing costs. Despite promises from both parties, housing prices continue outpacing household incomes, and the ratio of price to income is now worse than it was before the 2008 market collapse. Several pundits, including many I respect, have emerged to repeat the same mantra: let’s build more housing units.

The logic seems facially robust. Presumably, most readers learned the “supply and demand” principle in high school, that price emerges from an equilibrium of how much buyers want something, and how many units sellers have available. Therefore, if prices rise, it follows that supply is scarce—and it is. But this overlooks what forces rendered housing scarce, and what measures markets can take to counteract this scarcity.

Consider, for instance: hedge funds and other financial instruments have purchased private housing as investments. These homes nominally exist, and nominally have value. However, to work as investments, their value must constantly increase faster than the overall market, which, as we’ve seen, they do. If these funds sold their holdings, they’d flood the market, driving prices down. Therefore they must continue hoarding housing off the market.

This interpretation, however, is stacked. Many cities which create significant employment exist with ready-made limits to physical growth. New York is built mostly on a series of islands; Chicago is built on reclaimed swampland; San Francisco is built on a rocky peninsula. Even if BlackRock and other funds divested their holdings, these cities can only grow so big before hitting physical boundaries that choke their growth.

Other cities have policy-based growth limits. Many cities built on abundant flat land, like Omaha, near where I live, have urban design based on R1 zoning, the principle of favoring freestanding, detached houses on separate lots. Fully eighty percent of Omaha’s land area—and comparable amounts in similar cities like Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Tulsa—are legally restricted from building mixed-use developments or multifamily housing.

Therefore, building more houses in America’s heartland will require either changing the law, or building more urban sprawl. Despite cities having a reputation for car dependence, as Jeff Speck writes, most cars driven in the cities commute in from suburbs and R1 neighborhoods. And that’s saying nothing about the virgin prairie, swamp, or other ecologically valuable land that developers must destroy to accommodate R1 construction.

And where geography or policy don’t limit development, there’s economics. Eastern Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Gary, and Cleveland grew rapidly, infused with Marshall Plan money, following World War II. But when government money retreated, and precious supply lines moved to Asia, the cities dwindled again. These cities actually have plentiful housing, most of it rotting, because there’s no employment or other development to generate demand.

Different conditions in different cities reflect the diverss influences that cause cities to develop, or shrink. I’m reminded of James C. Scott, who analyzed means by which centralized development plans have created inequality, environmental devastation, and social collapse. These redevelopment schemes have shared an imposed quality: scholars, bureaucrats, or well-meaning but purblind revolutionaries thought they knew better than local communities, and simply issued demands.

Scott contrasts centralized planning with “local knowledge.” Old, unplanned cities, like central Bruges, Belgium, or Manhattan south of Houston Street, are so intricate and winding that only lifelong locals understand their street layouts. Yet these unplanned developments reflect regional geography, community, and economics. What seems sloppy and chaotic to the government planner, actually serves local needs to a T.

America’s federal government has a history of funding dystopian development projects. Rapid expansion in the Rust Belt, for instance, led directly to the same cities’ abandonment. Levittown-style suburban sprawl has always required transfusions of government money, only to create joyless “communities” that young residents aspire to leave. Now advocates call for “building more houses,” heedless of local need, planning regulations, or regional economy.

Well-meaning advocates, and their government allies, want to offset harsh economic conditions. But they impose one-size-fits-all policy recommendations that don’t reflect local needs. In some cities, there’s no more land for construction, while in others, new construction will create sprawl that leaves residents isolated and strands the aged or disabled. And aggressive construction, fueled by diesel, will inevitably create environmental devastation.

Creating decentralized, regionally specific solutions is time-consuming, expensive, and difficult. But cleaning up the devastation created by mass-produced central policies has already created messes we aren’t prepared to repair. We won’t fix the consequences by doubling down on the underlying problem.

Further Thoughts on Community Arts

This post is a follow-up to In Praise of Community Arts

My promo photo from the
local community theatre

“Hey, Kevin,” Brad said, sticking his head in the door of my office. “I saw you in the show on Friday. I didn’t know you were an actor!”

“Thanks,” I said back with a smile, leaning back in my chair. “I thought you knew that was why I couldn’t have a beer that afternoon.”

“I guess I just didn’t put two and two together until I saw your name in the program. We go to the community theatre from time to time, but we usually don’t know anybody in the show.”

When I worked in the field, my coworkers often knew I was an amateur actor. They understood that I couldn’t stay late or pull overtime because I had a rehearsal or show tonight, and had people depending on me to be there. But they also never attended the show; they begged off, saying they couldn’t afford tickets (theatre is admittedly not cheap) or that they had family responsibilities. They knew I acted, they just never saw me do it.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was my first performance since I got promoted to office work earlier this year. It also marks the first time any co-workers have recognized me onstage. It makes me conscious of my own relationship with actors and performances. Somebody who knows me from work, knows that I frequently cuss, have a precarious relationship with deadlines, and put my feet on the desk while I think. How do they respond to me acting?

Dr. Djoymi Baker, professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, has written that actors who become associated with a particular role, become a sort of “intertext,” an external commentary upon their own work. She specifically cites actors from Star Trek appearing in non-franchise roles: Bill Shatner in Boston Legal, or George Takei and Nichelle Nichols in Heroes. On some level, Dr. Baker writes, actors never cease their most famous roles.

What happens, though, when an actor’s most famous “role” isn’t performance? In Our Town, our central characters, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, were played by a married couple, a dispatch operator for a local haulage company and his stay-at-home wife. Most actors are students or skilled professionals, including local doctors and technicians. As you’d expect, the local university is overrepresented, including both students and faculty.

Jeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey, and me as Clarence Odbody, in
Kearney Community Theatre's 2017 production of It's a Wonderful Life

Everyone involved in community theatre, both onstage and backstage, has another local profile. When a famous TV actor appears in a play or movie—when, say Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart appeared together in Hamlet—they carry other acting roles into their current position. But when we amateurs appear onstage, the roles we carry reflect our outside responsibilities: doctor, lawyer, student, carpenter.

Further, as anybody who’s ever done community theatre knows, the companies are often in-groupish and clubby. A small handful of participants generally get lead roles and artistic direction credits. They might become locally famous, but they never stop being, say, a highly respected philosophy professor or radiologist. (Let’s just say.) They always have this duality, this contrast between their daily selves and their current onstage performance.

Experience tells me this goes both ways. Almost four years ago, when I still worked in the field, my company had a frequently contentious relationship with a client, a local dentistry firm. The company and the client argued frequently, and lawyers got involved. Then, late in the contract, I got assigned to the job. Tensions diminished almost immediately as several members of the client group recognized me from a recent performance of It’s a Wonderful Life.

I’d become a genuine local celebrity.

The term parasocial relationship has become common in internet parlance when audiences have deep personal affinity for public figures—YouTube celebrities and Instagram “influencers,” for instance. But community arts brings this home. We have parasocial relationships with community actors and directors, local gallery artists, pub musicians. And we have literal social relationships with these people through their day jobs and community involvements.

We local celebrities (ahem) also become what Dr. Baker calls “intertexts.” Except, rather than commenting on other acting roles, we comment upon social roles: jobs, families, congregations, and spending habits. When Brad stuck his head into my office, he was speaking to Kevin Nenstiel, apprentice proposal writer. But he was also talking to Simon Stimson, the passionate but drunken choir director at Grovers Corners Congregational Church.

When people see me on stage, they see my character, but they also see me. They’re conscious that the events portrayed are scripted, controlled, directed. Yes, they’ve looked at me and seen Simon Stimson, Clarence Odbody, Captain Lesgate, or Nathan Radley. But they’ve also seen me, and because of that, they’ve seen themselves. The relationship is difficult, nuanced, and strange. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But by golly, I love learning about it.

Lone Ranger Christians and Community Dreams

Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Donald Trump: the unholy union of religion and power

Salted generously throughout his book One Nation Under God, Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse repeatedly states one important phrase: “Christian Libertarianism.” The form of highly public Christianity Americans embraced, beginning around 1940, didn’t derive from St. Paul, Augustine, Luther, or Wesley. It came specifically, Kruse writes, from corporate salesmen and PR agencies, and it existed explicitly to reject the collectivism of FDR’s New Deal, and later, big-C Communism.

This creates a paradox, which Kruse doesn’t explicate (he’s an historian, not a philosopher), but which this Christian cannot ignore: millions of American Christians linking hands, in organized unity, to demand individualism and self-reliance. The massive groundswell of solidarity needed to espouse this kind of libertarianism makes my temporal lobe burn. “We’re stronger together,” such Christians insist, “even if what we’re doing together is demanding complete separation and egocentricity!”

Dressing such borderline narcissism in Christian vestments strikes me as weird, initially. Christian scripture is festooned with references to believers as a unified collective. “I will walk among you and be your God,” says Leviticus 26:12, “and you will be my people.” Likewise, in Hebrews 8:10 we find: “I will be their God, and they will be my people.” As Black slaves sang in America: “When Israel was in Egypt Land, Let my people go.”

Perhaps it’s because we’ve lost much original Biblical language. As Hebraicist Lois Tverberg writes, standard English lacks a second-person plural pronoun, a feature in both Hebrew and Greek. Both Moses and Jesus repeatedly address believers with a plural “you,” a term perhaps best translated with the American regionalism “y’all.” Very seldom did either leader address believers with a singular “you,” unless speaking directly and specifically with an individual.

The version of Christianity peddled aggressively in contemporary America endorses the idea that faith gives Christians complete license to act individually. We’ve witnessed this phenomenon with self-proclaimed Christians who use Christianity to justify rapacious capitalism. Recently, public Christians like Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Franklin Graham (son of Billy, whom Kevin M. Kruse cites extensively) have thrown their religious bona fides behind that notorious sinner, Donald Trump.

Historian Kevin M. Kruse

Fact is, the Bible comprehensively rejects Lone Ranger religion. The Hebrew prophets almost never condemn, or even address, individuals; they stress the entire people’s need to get right with YHWH. Jesus separates “his people” from the political state, even placing his movement in opposition to priesthoods and aristocracies, but he still requires the apostles to feed the multitudes collectively. We cannot save ourselves, Christianity avers; we must act in common.

Let me stress, I’m no advocate of big-C Communism. History and sociology stand robustly against Communist precepts, which actively attempt to abolish local knowledge and adaptability. Perhaps the greatest reason I distrust Communism, though, is its reliance on bigness. Mass movements which seek to establish or accrue power, from revolutions to political parties to PR operations, inevitably oppose the common humanity of individuals. They reduce us all to interchangeable parts.

This includes, ironically enough, libertarianism. Though big-L Libertarianism was founded by nudists, pot farmers, and Star Trek fans, the inevitable outcome of mass deregulation is almost inevitably the sweatshop factory. Christian libertarians generally believe that, if human laws are rescinded, God’s law will elevate the faithful, both spiritually and economically. But the actual denouement of soft regulation has historically been the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Therefore my position pits me between extremes. Neither Soviet-style authoritarian collectivism, nor cowboy libertarianism, actually elevates most people, because both encourage selfish, violent narcissists to hoard wealth and authority. Both of these positions deny the human soul, and thus both deny God. Where, then, must the faithful, Bible-believing Christian land on the curve? Is there any available solution?

Certainly. Many Christians, from historic heroes like Dietrich Bonhoeffer to living innovators like Shane Claiborne, have bequeathed us the blueprints they used to build, or co-build, models of Christian community. These communities are bound together by shared values, a sense of mission—including political mission—and the belief that we’re in this struggle together. Most importantly for our purposes, though, these communities are small, and therefore don’t require either leadership or anarchy.

I cannot read Christian scripture without it reminding me how innately countercultural the faith initially is. Christ embraced lepers, prostitutes, and foreigners, while directing legendary wrath upon priests and potentates. But the only time he acted alone, was when he allowed himself to be arrested and dragged before Pilate. If we call ourselves Christ’s followers, we’d do well to remind ourselves: we may die alone, but we only live together.

What Are Friends Even For?

“Drop toxic friends before they drag you down.” We’ve seen the message repeated hundreds of times recently, especially if we follow social media: some people have personalities so poisonous, we must jettison their influence immediately. If you’re anything like me, your mind immediately flashed on that “friend” we all have, the friend who foments quarrels for kicks, or encourages you to drink past your limits, or spreads conspiracy theories, or is just an insufferable jerk.

In an article that isn’t recent, but nevertheless recently crossed my desk, political journalist Ephrat Livni complains that this reasonable goal, of removing influences which dirty our spirits, has become itself toxic. Livni cites multiple articles, from top-drawer newspapers and journals, encouraging readers to disaffiliate themselves from friends with glim personalities, negative traits, or poor personal habits. She protests, not unreasonably, that this reduces friendships to capitalist exchanges, and relationships to long term personal interest.

I find myself torn. Like many suburban White kids, I grew up encouraged to be endlessly accommodating, to keep making friends, and never surrender on existing friendships. “Make new friends, but keep the old,” the campfire song we learned in Cub Scouts taught us: “one is silver and the other’s gold.” Even when dealing with schoolyard bullies, my adult influences encouraged me to befriend them: maybe they’re angry, parents and teachers suggested, because they’re lonely.

This encouraged a cycle of enabling dysfunctional personalities and catering to unreasonable demands, a cycle I must consciously resist in adulthood. Not coincidentally, as we witness the violent predations of dysfunctional, unreasonable people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I’ve realized this message of appeasing destructive people isn’t merely misguided or naïve; it serves a sociopolitical order where hoi polloi like me cater to our overlords’ pig-headed demands. It’s political control disguised as common ethics.

Plato and Aristotle argues what makes a good
friend, too. They never found an answer.

However, I’ve also known people whose personality traits deserve ostracism. People who, for instance, seek justification for their self-destructive habits by encouraging me to mimic them, and finding ways to make me feel belittled if I don’t. People who see disagreement as personal disloyalty, and respond with shock-and-awe force. People whose demands for comfort and nurturance become constant, making me into a surrogate parent for a damaged adult. Sometimes you have to draw the line.

One of modern adulthood’s most vexing questions is: how do we make friends once we’re past traditional school age? As we’ve become unrooted from geographic place and erited community, many grown-ups struggle to make meaningful friendships. Which, I suspect, explains why adults need reminded to shun toxic people, because we fear returning to that unmoored state. Bad friends feel better than loneliness, right? In the short term, anyway. And, oops, capitalism is all short term.

Social and economic orders seek rules which bureaucrats can enforce without recourse, because if everybody follows the same rules equally, nobody can claim they’re treated unfairly, right? We know, of course, that this isn’t so. In third grade, Brian Morse clotheslined me from behind for “being a nerd,” and we both got three days’ detention for “fighting.” That’s how I discovered that treating everyone fairly doesn’t mean treating everyone equally. Bureaucratic rules are frequently unfair.

This applies to friendships, too. Both the heedless adherence to rules like “drop every toxic friend now,” and the magical thinking of believing that I can befriend, and thereby detoxify, every schoolyard bully, mean the application of unthinking bureaucratic rules where they often don’t apply. We seek rules because they provide one-size-fits-all coverage, except they don’t. We’re uniquely human, and so are our friends. Put complex individuals together in friendship, and our uniqueness becomes cumulative.

Psychologist Ellen Hendrickson answers the question of making friends in adulthood concisely. Our friends, she writes, aren’t the people we share the most values and interests with, but those we share the most time with. That’s why children make friends at school, and adults make friends at work. We can govern our time to ensure we meet, and keep company with, people who suit our values. Perhaps we should. But genuine friendships happen over time.

Ephrat Livni bewails using metrics to determine who constitutes a “positive friend.” Me too, because friendships sustain us through bad times, and give us opportunities to practice empathy. But, sometimes healthy people need to discontinue chronically unhealthy influences. Mindlessly applying rules, whether to keep or snub friends, leads us into unhealthy conclusions. Friendships aren’t passive. We must remain actively committed to making wise, adaptive choices. Stop looking for rules, and get to know your friends.

The Immemorial Memorial

The McCormick memorial, viewed from the street

The Aaron McCormick memorial sits in the 3500 block of Clinton Parkway, in Lawrence, Kansas. Directly behind it sits a bank, while off to one sits a brewpub, but its block is dominated by a massive Hy-Vee grocery store and surrounding strip mall. Half a block from the memorial, one of Lawrence’s major municipal bus stops disgorges students and workers throughout the day, attracted by the location’s proximity to commerce, food, and several suburban-style apartments.

Unfortunately, almost nobody walks past the memorial itself. Though it sits along a sidewalk nearly wide enough to land small aircraft, most people getting off the bus either walk the other way, toward the crosswalks connecting the stop to housing, or cut across the grass toward the grocery store. The sidewalk remains mostly disused, except by occasional cyclists. Clinton Parkway’s wide, straight lanes permit, even encourage, in-town commuters to carom past close to highway speeds.

This precipitates the question: if we construct a memorial, and nobody witnesses it, have we remembered anything? Memorials, like America’s famous memorials on the Mall in Washington, or London’s ubiquitous blue plaques created by English Heritage, encourage passers-by to step outside themselves and connect with their people’s shared past. Yet 20th Century American suburban design ensconces people in climate-controlled cars and encourages them to shoot past communal geography, comfortably secured in an eternal, high-speed present.

Lawrence, Kansas, exists in constant tension. Though Lawrence’s historic downtown attracts tourists, shoppers, and culture seekers statewide, its more far-flung streets reflect modern interpretations of urban design. The post-WWII architect Le Corbusier popularized the belief that humans find traditional, pedestrian-friendly streets intimidating, and encouraged an urbanism based on starkly vertical buildings separated by swaths of green space. My generation grew up on massive lawns abutting sidewalks virtually unused by anybody old enough to legally drive.

But Le Corbusier’s vision of humans frolicking in wide expanses of foliage proved naive. Though tree-lined streets make walking a sensual pleasure, crossing wide expanses of undeveloped greenbelt is boring, and huge lawns push everything far apart, making useful pedestrianship both impractical and unpleasant. Few adults walk anywhere as a daily pursuit. Reliance on automobiles means Le Corbusier’s vaunted greenswards have mostly been buried under concrete and repurposed as parking, perhaps mankind’s most dehumanizing invention.

"A gift to the city of Lawrence
in memory of
AARON McCORMICK
from his family and friends
May 1999

'PARANOID'
by Aaron McCormick
as interpreted by Prof. Elden C. Tefft
site design by Kim T. Tefft"

Aaron McCormick’s memorial includes no information about McCormick himself. Presumably, from the copper sculpture, McCormick was an artist, though his vision has been re-interpreted by somebody else here. Nothing, not even dates, identifies McCormick for passers-by; he could literally be anybody. Presumably, the donors who subsidized this memorial intended it for those who knew McCormick personally, a geographically constant way to retain him within living memory. I initially mistook the memorial for the bus stop.

Apparently, I’m not the only person who cannot connect with this memorial. Despite being surrounded by foliage, from a foreground of low-growing juniper to its backdrop of tall bushes, the site is shamefully littered. Cigarette packs, half-shredded Styrofoam cups, and hardened french fries surround the artwork. The accumulated detritus suggests community members, insofar as they see this memorial at all, consider it a place to congregate for lunches and coffee breaks, then abandon their trash.

Whoever Aaron McCormick was, his memory deserves better than casual litter. Yet whatever organization created this memorial hasn’t sent enough caretakers by to remove the trash. This forces me to wonder whether McCormick’s loved ones ever visit his memorial. Wedged between Hy-Vee’s massive flat parking and Clinton Parkway’s vast, runway-like acreage, its placement seems designed to actively discourage casual visitation. It’s too small, too unobtrusive, and too damn far from anything to attract foot traffic.

Other privately owned public places have better maintenance in Lawrence. Private donors converted a vacant lot along Massachusetts Street into a Japanese-style Zen garden, a tranquil haven amid the street’s constant commerce. (Ignore the spilled bongwater smell.) This space gets used. But Mass Street’s shoulder-to-shoulder design encourages pedestrian traffic. People already present, already walking, visit this park amid their day. Clinton Parkway has no such pedestrian traffic; visiting the memorial requires interrupting one’s existing routines.

The Aaron McCormick memorial encourages viewers to pause, reflecting silently on life’s fleeting nature. Yet placing it amid suburban sprawl designed to discourage introspection contradicts that purpose. In this tiny space, half the area of a typical one-car garage, individualistic ideals of urban design collide with human desires for stillness and transcendence. But the collision goes unnoticed. We who discover this space must wonder: what future exists for communities existing entirely in an all-encompassing present?

The Concrete Grocery Blues

The new Kearney Hy-Vee, and its massive concrete parking lot (Kearney Hub)

Readers familiar with the Iowa-based Hy-Vee supermarket chain may think I’d celebrate its arrival in my jerkwater hometown. Hy-Vee runs a similar luxury grocery model that Wegman’s or Dean & DeLuca bring to larger cities, making healthful, sophisticated food available in prior cultural wastelands. And because Hy-Vee runs an employee-owned model, it spends more on workers than investor-owned chains like WalMart, Safeway, and Kroger. What’s not to love?

Plenty, actually. When Hy-Vee’s newest store opened in Kearney, Nebraska, this month, I arrived on opening day and left carrying six grocery bags and a market tracking card. I also left with a queasy feeling about the faceless, geographically indeterminate building and enormous parking lot. Rather than merging into Kearney’s existing community, Hy-Vee paved a cornfield, dropped an anonymous cube building on it, and lit it with halogen and dreams.

This never previously bothered me. But as my wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, as many prairie locations had record-setting high temperatures this spring, and as Nebraska’s economic growth remains a shadow of American aggregate trends, much bothers me that never did before. While Hy-Vee does nothing other chain retailers don’t, its sudden appearance and aggressive growth make it a new locus for my swelling anti-corporate umbrage.

Rather than building near where working Kearneyites live, Hy-Vee chose to locate within loogie-shooting distance of Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, Menard’s, and the Hilltop Mall. This makes six concrete slab buildings, which could be literally anywhere, surrounded by enough parking to pave Luxembourg, closer together than six lesbians in a Penthouse Forums letter. One starts to wonder what planning genius considered this arrangement beneficial to Kearney’s interests.

Importantly, this strange conglomeration is so isolated that few people could possibly walk there. The nearest housing is a developed region behind the Wal-Mart, dominated by houses on quarter-acre lots, fronting onto looping, Rorschach-inspired streets, which may or may not have sidewalks. Beyond the first street or two, walking anywhere would require massive time investments, besides the extreme aesthetic displeasure of crossing multi-acre parking lots on foot.

That’s if you can walk anywhere. Many real estate developers don’t bother equipping new neighborhoods with sidewalks anymore. Residents drive everywhere, because everywhere is too far to walk; but developers don’t pave sidewalks because nobody uses them. Cause or effect, who can say? Either way, car dependence becomes the norm rather than the exception, walking becomes the refuge of children and the destitute, and responsible driving becomes increasingly impractical.

Find your way without a car. I dare you.

Hy-Vee built amid five enormous parking lots which are almost never full. The parking around big-box retailers and malls generally only gets used on one day, Black Friday; every other day, it sits unoccupied, putting physical distance between people and businesses, and encouraging irresponsible motoring. Yet rather than pooling with this already extant but substantially unused parking, Hy-Vee paved even more parking. Because it needs to be theirs, or something.

Lay aside how parking makes residents more car-dependent. Disregard how big-box stores building on towns’ fringes undercuts community ties. Forget how corporations, to construct essentially interchangeable buildings, must flatten the loess hills that my Nebraska ancestors, and the Indians before them, successfully farmed for ten thousand years. Even without that, these vast concrete tombstones, by their very existence, do manifest harm to the people and the land.

Though poured concrete sets solidly enough to walk on after six or eight hours, the chemical reaction that makes concrete hard continues for fifty years or more. Because that reaction runs on calcium carbonate, it exudes carbon dioxide as a by-product. Thus concrete creates greenhouse gases even without cars. It also doesn’t absorb precipitation or grow trees, so concrete is unbelievably cold in winter, sweltering in summer, and ugly year-round.

So, to reiterate: this new Hy-Vee, by its location, stands aloof from existing commerce. It forces me to burn carbon if I want better groceries. It makes locals even more dependent on cars, which, in a predominantly blue-collar town, isn’t small beer; transportation costs now outweigh housing costs for most Americans. And even without cars, this added concrete does added harm to global climate, just by dint of its existence.

To reach the Kearney Hy-Vee, I must drive four miles, past three supermarkets, two locally owned. (That’s besides groceries from Wal-Mart, Target, and elsewhere.) Though Hy-Vee has Kearney’s best grocery selection, it’s like eating the whole Cracker Jack box to reach the prize: by the time I get there, I feel sick and don’t want the reward anymore. Therefore, good groceries notwithstanding, I cannot return to Hy-Vee.

Democracy of Culture, or, Saving the Old Hometown

A young man with Asian features and 1990s-ish heavy metal swagger sets his guitar case down before a wooden bench. That’s all it takes to claim a spot on the moderately crowded sidewalk. The guitar that emerges has a matte black finish and uncut string ends waving from the tuning pegs. When he sings a mix of originals and covers, perhaps inappropriately loud, his voice has distinct Liam Gallagher qualities.

I’m on Massachusetts Street (“Mass Street”), the heart of downtown Lawrence, Kansas, a college town in the classic sense. Locally owned businesses do admirably selling locally made and major-label clothes, small book and music stores attract customers partly by the cat sleeping on the counters, and aggressive international chains like Starbucks rub shoulders with upstart hometown competitors. A department store sells bespoke suits catty-corner from a head shop selling crystals.

Across from the Oasis wannabe, a pretty woman in mime makeup, with a remarkable ability to stand stock still between sets, makes balloon animals for children who put tips in her jar. Mormon missionaries have occupied all four corners of Mass and Eighth, distributing pamphlets to passersby; yesterday it was the Kansas Green Party. Every Sunday, a scruffy guy with a knit cap waves a “Honk For Hemp” sign nearby.

A popular local bumper sticker proclaims: “Lawrence. 27 square miles of reality surrounded by Kansas.” I know what they mean. The Kansas legislature has recently passed numerous retrogressive measures, including a “Don’t Say Gay” bill and an attempt to regionally nullify the Endangered Species Act. The state’s Tea Party-dominated administration consistently makes attempts to inhibit progress, reject modernity, and willfully engineer a Koch Brothers-friendly libertarian paradise.

But Lawrence feels different. People walk Mass Street, window shopping and tipping street performers, chatting amiably, sipping homemade root beer floats from biodegradable plastic cups. Women in hijabs and men in kippahs stroll graciously, smiling around, completely ordinary in this street scene. Sitting with a book and coffee, I watch an attractive young couple walking hand in hand. They’re mixed race, but same sex.

And everywhere, people make or consume culture. Some, like Liam Lite over here, do it guerilla-style, grabbing his place and belting out Clinton-era classics. Others partner with fixed establishments. One bookstore features a grand piano, encouraging local artists to reserve time. A local venue hosts live music, poetry slams, and occasional eloquent speakers. Many restaurants have designated spaces, intermittently used, absolutely perfect for poets and one-(wo)man bands.

Lawrence zoning laws shape how businesses interact. Many stores that normally anchor enclosed shopping malls, like JC Penney and Kohl’s, instead occupy freestanding buildings. Businesses accustomed to attracting large crowds generally build on Iowa Street, an imposing miles-long stretch of concrete parking and prefab steel structures. Customers who prefer vetted commerce in standardized chains keep safe by doing business along Iowa’s impersonal but familiar storefronts.

Mass Street attracts businesses that enjoy rubbing shoulders. Restaurants encourage sidewalk seating, permitting customer service in proprietary space directly melding into public trafficways. Chain stores and local shops overlap; Mrs. Fields shares a back wall with a hometown t-shirt screen printer, while Starbucks and locally owned La Prima Tazza stare down across the street from each other. The heart of Mass Street resembles a pedestrian mall, and remains busy year-round.

This public companionability encourages buskers, street theatre, and other democratic culture. People don’t need street performers: Mass Street’s business district is bounded by Liberty Hall on the north and the Granada on the south, sizeable theatres that attract national-grade performers, from Gordon Lightfoot and Patty Griffin to Haim and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Yet this shared public space apparently reminds locals that they can create culture, not just buy it.

Many Midwestern cities and states lament the “brain drain,” outward migration of ambitious young residents. How, they wonder, to keep potential innovators and entrepreneurs from fleeing to lucrative coastal cities to find better jobs? Repeatedly, these communities respond by authorizing newer malls and big-box chain retailers. But while these actions arguably advance communities’ commercial prospects, they privatize formerly public space and reduce opportunity for resourceful guerilla innovation.

Like Austin, Texas, or Greenwich Village, Lawrence has taken the opposite tack. Commerce happens openly, not in hermetically sealed, climate-controlled boxes. Any company can buy into Lawrence’s economy, but they must honor Lawrence culture. And as Lawrence proves, money and culture travel together. Street guitarists encourage commerce, and commerce attracts street performers. Money and art serve the people, not vice versa. And Lawrence feels like someplace real life happens naturally.


See Also:
One Possible Cure For Small Town Malaise

The Omnivert's Dilemma

One of my most confounding teenage moments happened when I made a church youth leader cry. I didn’t mean to make her cry. She’d simply chosen, as her leadership mission, the goal of making me extroverted. When I didn’t choose to participate in every moment of spontaneous group silliness, like singing madrigal versions of Top-40 songs or re-enacting scenes from Pauly Shore movies, she took it as a judgment on her leadership.

It didn’t help that this “adult” leader only had about seven years on her oldest youth charge. But her entire leadership model hinged on keeping everybody active, vocal, and engaged in everything, no matter how flippant or how far outside particular group members’ wheelhouse. The fact that I might dislike small talk, focus on actually exchanging or testing ideas, or prefer to converse in my “indoor voice,” never penetrated this woman’s leadership paradigm.

I recalled that woman when reading PR professional Brigitte Lyons’ essay 5 Myths About Extroverts That Need To Die. I remembered that woman because the “myths” Lyons cites simply didn’t exist fifteen years ago, before the read-write Web 2.0 created an environment where introverts could communicate. And I assert they don’t really exist now, outside Lyons’ head, and perhaps a few other people who feel aggrieved because extroverts no longer monopolize social etiquette.

When I finished high school, the terms “extrovert” and “introvert” chiefly belonged to mental health professionals and scholarly researchers. In ordinary discourse, we said “outgoing” and “shy,” words that contain moral judgments beyond their dictionary definitions. The schools I attended clearly considered it their mission to break shyness habits, forcing students to spend time milling in noisy, echoing common areas which, considering the large urban schools I attended, often devolved into zoo-like conditions.

(Don’t get me started on what that means for education. My opinions are already well documented.)

This attitude wasn’t exclusive to schools. As Anneli Rufus writes in her book Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto—one of the first on its topic—mass media openly depicted people who enjoyed their own company as masturbating perverts. The medical profession treated introversion as mental illness. Corporate recruiters believed introverts were stupid. And military culture treated (and, to a lesser degree, still treats) introversion as a form of cowardice.

As advancing technology made the Internet a two-way conversation in the late 1990s and into the New Millenium, however, natural introverts found a venue where they flourished. Because introverts prefer to ruminate before they speak, the Web’s asynchronous conversations let us look quick-witted and debonair. We prefer to avoid even accidentally looking ignorant, and Google lets us fact-check our assertions before voicing them, so we don’t shoot our mouths off. And the physical distance lets us speak deeply without the overstimulation of public conversation venues, like bars or city streets.

In this new milieu, people who prefer to pause before speaking suddenly had the upper hand. In offline communications, rules of etiquette have always favored extroverts. Emily Post openly opposed “air in the conversation,” requiring people to keep speaking without regard for what they had to say. And though we teach children to take turns, introverts quickly learn that, in open, unmoderated conversation, primacy goes to whoever speaks first, regardless of whether they actually have anything to contribute.

While introverts quickly found themselves running online conversations, new popular awareness of mental health was changing how we considered ourselves. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), first published in 1947, remained a medical oddity until around 2003, when newly unified introverts online discovered that this approach to psychology proved they weren’t abnormal. (Yes, I actually had an authority figure, a school counselor, tell me, pre-Internet, that preference for solitude was “abnormal.”)

When Brigitte Lyons complains about feeling “hurt,” “burned,” and “at war” with introverts, she’s discussing pop concepts newer than a chihuahua's lifespan. Just in the two decades since I attended high school, I remember classmates who got good grades because they dominated discussions, even when they were flat damn wrong; co-workers who got promotions for which they were unprepared because they’d befriended the managers; and politicians whose skillful gladhanding got them elected to offices for which they proved supremely unqualified. Non-digital life still caters to extroverts.

Online, however, introverts flip the script. And not surprisingly, too. The Web rewards people who pause before they speak, behavior that realtime conversation punishes. And I concede, a few introverts have claimed Introversion as an identity issue, engaging in harmful in-group behavior. But even most introverts don’t want to keep company with those people. In the main, we’ve simply found an atmosphere that honors the way introverts prefer to communicate.

The myths that Lyons purports to demolish sound weird to me. “Extroverts don’t have feelings,” she refutes. “Extroverts aren’t introspective.” “Extroverts are heartless bastards.” I never said any of those things. Importantly, the three articles Lyons links and claims to rebut don’t say those things, either. They simply assert that another way of thinking exists, one which contradicts established modes of etiquette. Considering that the established etiquette was mainly written by extroverts, the other way will naturally incline toward introversion.

We live in a society where one word, “dumb,” connotes two meanings: stupid and unable (or unwilling) to speak. Within living memory, psychologists, educators, and clergy considered introversion an illness that needed curing. That youth leader put me off church so badly that, religious as I am, I still struggle with volunteerism and activities. An acknowledged leader, backed by the administration, told me I had serious personality flaws because I’d rather listen than speak. I can’t shake that like water off a duck.

I don’t kid about these things. A therapist once put me on psychotropic medications that caused severe side effects, impeding my work life and (I contend) pausing my social and educational development for years, because my “social anxiety” was a medical illness. The DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic manual of mental health professionals, sets the bar for “Social Anxiety Disorder” so low that patients, especially children, can still be clinically diagnosed for getting the jitters in crowded rooms.

Again, I’d be ignorant if I pretended a minority of introverts haven’t engaged in petty feuds and other nasty behavior. But no opinion, philosophy, or disposition should ever be defined by its most unpleasant outliers. Most introverts, especially those of us who grew up before the Internet, simply want to ratify that our preference for quiet, occasional solitude, and fewer, more intimate friendships is normal. Because for years extroverts told us we were maladjusted, cold, or deranged.

Introverts, like extroverts, simply want our earned place at society’s table. And if Lyons, and others like her, feel she’s being attacked, that says more about her than it does about introvert subculture.

In Praise of Whining

Working Class Values, Part Four

Good advice... until you consider the implications

I felt bad when I realized Cindy and I had spent over ten minutes of paid workplace time leaning on our brooms, bitching. If the boss caught us, we could’ve gotten reprimanded for nonproductive time use. Even without official action, my conscience plagued me. My parents raised me to disdain complainers, demanding I take ownership and, when aggrieved, act to remedy the problem. Complaining, I’d learned, is wasteful.

Except, Cindy and I have become good friends, bonding over our shared grievances. Studies show that the people who thrive in laborious blue-collar jobs generally have a “best friend” on the line, and Cindy has become my lifeline. Ordinary people use language as social glue, so why should I feel ashamed that the language we share consists of complaints? Is “No Complaining” a solid value, or learned middle-class uniformity?

Like all ethical values, our evaluation of complaining cuts two ways. Moralists see complaining as conceding defeat. Some people use complaints in lieu of productive action, preferring others’ condolences to actual redress. Such grumbling is self-serving and inherently egotistical: “Look at me,” the complainer cries. “I deserve special consideration because I’m so oppressed!” Actual underlying causes never get addressed, and solutions get postponed for future generations.

Yet this cannot describe all complaints, nor all complainers. Just as not everybody who drinks becomes an alcoholic, not every complainer furiously demands everybody’s pity. People complain for diverse reasons, including reasons downright admirable, even useful. Lumping all complaints together, and trying to expunge them altogether, robs our underclass from its one tool of resistance, and consigns people with genuine grievances to silence.

Commiserate. From the Latin: "to feel pity together"

Most obviously, complaining serves organizational purposes. Cindy and I, by voicing our perceived problems with management, reassure each other we’re not alone in our frustrations. The simple act of sharing unites us; now, rather than each suffering alone, we have a network. By combining our misery, we distribute hope, since neither of us must suffer in silence. We’ve become friends, but equally, we’ve become a people together.

For ordinary complaints, our bosses might even thank us for sharing them. By reassuring ourselves that our problems aren’t our own fault, we unburden our spirits, freeing energy we can dedicate to working better and improving our output. If I feel aggrieved, sharing that grievance with a fellow sufferer helps me stop punishing myself. Sure, shopping griefs to strangers multiplies the problem, but sharing griefs with similarly suffering peers divides it.

But not all complaints are ordinary. Can you imagine the Labor Movement of the 19th Century ever redressing the Dickensian misery of early industrial workplaces if workers had agreed not to complain? Just as regular complaining about small slights organizes friends into a network, sharing serious objections to outright injustice permits masses of people, especially the poor and disfranchised, to organize significant protests and seek constructive reform.

American philosopher Eric Hoffer notes that all mass movements organize themselves, at least initially, on oppositional foundations. That is, we band together not by our shared belief in God, but our shared hatred of the Devil. What groups hate motivates them to strive for a better world. Important social movements today, like the Tea Party and the #OCCUPY movement, developed positive values latterly, but organized initially around opposition to some perceived destructive force infiltrating American society.

Indeed, society itself may be essentially oppositional. Humans feared getting eaten by lions, lost in dark forests, or freezing to death, so we banded together to share responsibilities. I’ll make shoes so you don’t lose toes to frostbite; you split shingles so I don’t sleep in the rain. Despite ur-myths of Rugged Individualism, most people wouldn’t live Jeremiah Johnson style, because choosing between keeping warm, or getting this year’s harvest in, is pretty bleak.

Good advice. But nobody ever started a revolution alone

When citizens are powerless to act individually, whether through poverty or disunion or obscurity, shared complaints provide a sense of unity, permitting, even encouraging, groups to organize. While we may romanticize happy people with few gripes, such people have little motivation to try anything new. Seriously aggrieved people, unified by knowledge that they face some shared enemy, have strong motivation to accomplish something together.

Certainly, we cannot reward people who rehearse old resentments for selfish ends. Such people are mere lampreys, thriving by consuming others’ vitality. But sententiously forbidding everybody to complain, ever, as Sunday School pamphlets and well-meaning parents often do, robs society’s most powerless members of their most effective tool. Only when we voice our complaints, together, do we accrue the power to meaningfully redress them. Together.

Working Class Values
Part One: Sharing, Bellyaching, Sloganeering
Part Two: Reading
Part Three: Religiosity and Egalitarianism

America's Clandestine Economy, Part Two

Howard Rahtz, Drugs, Crime and Violence: From Trafficking to Treatment

This review partially follows A Brief Guide to America's Clandestine Economy.

American and international drug policy, like policies on guns and immigration, tends to be driven more by emotion than reason. More than forty years after Richard Nixon declared “war on drugs,” study after study reveals that the majority of Americans consider it a failed effort. Yet elected leaders still craft policy to appease a vocal minority of moralistic outliers. Another alternative must exist.

In a dual career as a methadone counselor and ranking Cincinnati vice cop, Howard Rahtz has seen the drug war from multiple fronts. He knows how drug markets destroy neighborhoods, and how massive, high-profile busts make hardly a crease in the larger field. And he has learned one important truth about America’s underground drug economy: it’s an economy, just like the legitimate one, and needs constant transfusions of money.

Much recent drug debate has focused on what Rahtz calls “the prohibition-legalization continuum,” the attitude that we must either ban drugs or permit a libertarian carnival. Neither position makes sense to him. On the one hand, absolute prohibition has racked up massive costs, not just in money, but in lives sullied and communities divided. Rahtz uses multiple yardsticks to demonstrate that America’s drug war is ineffective, unfair, and costly.

But he doesn’t consider complete legalization the alternative. As he states, America doesn’t have a drug problem; it has a drugs problem, with different drugs having different effects on users and society. We must approach each one, as it is, instead of applying blanket bromides in which everything is good. After all, nobody who has seen a meth-head thinks that filth should be legalized.

Rahtz carefully unpacks the past and present of American drug policy. Working backward, much anti-drug rhetoric has been appallingly racist, and many illegal drugs were first banned because cassandras claimed these substances would make minorities rape white women. Hey, hit Uncle Alarmist, his disc is skipping again. These policies remain in place long after America has excoriated Jim Crow. Peter Andreas covers much of this territory in Smuggler Nation.

While keeping brown people comfortably incarcerated, American drug laws also keep criminal enterprises flush with cash. Forget the Crips and Bloods; America’s appetite for narcotics, and the massive undocumented network necessary to supply it, sustain massive money pipelines for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Afghan Taliban. Our drug habit is also subsidizing Mexico’s ongoing civil violence, and threatens the stability of the European Union.

Rahtz explicates this in great detail, and with thorough documentation, but keeps his writing mercifully free of jargon. The facts he reveals are scary, not just because they exist, but because they exist in plain English. You don’t need a criminology background to understand just how badly the course of the drug war has gone astray, or how we’re paying consequences we should have foreseen.

Instead of doubling down or giving up, Rahtz suggests a third alternative. Though his position is much more complex, unlikely to create the kind of soundbites that fuel talk radio and TV news, he does proffer solid evidence. His suggestions recall what has worked in other nations, and how America has dealt with organized crime in the past. He makes a persuasive case that the past offers valuable lessons to the present impasse.

For starters, we need to stop treating ordinary users as criminals. Our regime based on arrest and incarceration has not produced fewer users, and makes those who want out of the life less likely to seek treatment, or even call an ambulance for an overdose victim. Nations like Portugal and Holland, which treat users as patients in need of medicine, have far fewer users and a much higher recovery rate.

Rahtz’s second, and more intricate, approach involves starving drug networks for cash. Hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, with their long supply chains and smaller markets, rely on marijuana to provide them funds and new customers. Splitting the market would dry up cash reserves, pricing cartels out of the market. Rahtz even spotlights states and nations that have begun this process, and seen street markets dwindle for want of money.

>Rahtz is no romanticist. He acknowledges that drugs exact a heavy toll, including legal drugs like booze, tobacco, and prescriptions. He does not excuse all drugs, or any drugs. But he makes a persuasive case that the cure is worse than the disease, and bolsters that with evidence from two relevant careers. He offers no magic bullets. But if we address our drug problem as it is, we increase our chances of making realistic headway.

Christians as Citizens of Two Nations

Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology

Christians once had an adversarial relationship with the state: many Roman believers went to martyrdom for refusing to recognize the Emperor as God made manifest. As Europe became Christian, however, the church enjoyed power and privilege, built on the belief that all citizens were parishioners, and vice versa. Now the church finds itself in a third arrangement: no longer persecuted, but no longer the peak of earthly power, either.

Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff endeavors, in his newest scholarly book, to address how Christians can frame this third arrangement for life in modern liberal democracy. Instead of longing for the past or fleeing the dilemma, as too many have tried, Wolterstorff proposes embracing the difficulty. Only then, he implies, will we have a meaningful relationship, not only with our God, but also with our state.

As Wolterstorff emphasizes around the middle of this short but remarkably rich book, “political theology” is a species of political science, not theology. That is, rather than dealing with the nature and desires of God, it addresses how people of theological insight should approach the institutions of power in this world. How should the church, and members thereof, conduct themselves toward the state? The answer defies easy summary.

Christians have traditionally struggled with our relationship to the state. In political discussions, some wag inevitably cites Romans 13:1-7. But if we must submit to the state, what of those Christians whom the Empire ordered to renounce Christ? Wolterstorff bookends this essay with the story of Polycarp, who as both a Roman citizen and Christian bishop, died when he could not appease this duality. Remember what Christ says about the servant of two masters.

Many recent theologians have tried to answer this same conundrum by asserting that Christians are under only God’s authority, or that earthly polity cannot extend to Christians or the church. Wolterstorff demonstrates how such views don’t withstand scrutiny. All Christians have the duality of earthly citizen and transcendent disciple, and if we try to smooth over that duality, we blunt the richness of life that both identities provide.

Wolterstorff reconciles the problem by reframing Romans 13. He believes most interpretations, since at least the Renaissance, have treated as central what he demonstrates to be a subsidiary argument. Wolterstorff believes Romans 13 actually specifies the state’s domain, and in so doing, circumscribes its authority. When the state exceeds its authority, as in enforcing racist laws, it has abandoned Romans 13, and Christians are right to resist such false power.

Instead, Wolterstorff proposes a dual interpretation, in which state and church exist in tandem, each placing certain limits on the other. The state cannot, for instance, say who may attend worship, or even require any worship whatsoever. The church is free to practice what it believes right. By its very existence as a separate community within the polity, the church places limits on state authority.

But the state also imposes limits on the church. Christians cannot baptize anyone by force, as they once tried, or impress piety on secular laws. Individual believers may hold earthly power, but the church itself must stay out of power. When the church and state become entwined, each loses its distinct authority: the state has religious justifications for injustice, and the church loses sight of its divinely ordained mission in the vain pursuit of earthly power.

That’s not to say that church and state don’t have coinciding domains. Recent religious jeremiads on poverty and war come to mind. Consider a Venn diagram: two circles may overlap while retaining their unique identities. But when they become so enmeshed that we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, or one swallows the other, we have a new breed, and one or (probably) both circles lose their distinct nature.

This book epitomizes the bromide “this book isn’t for everyone.” Wolterstorff’s approach, reliant on compressed language, intricate Aristotelian terminology, and numerous footnotes, requires a committed reader willing to take time. The author makes many points through allusion: having written on this topic for decades, Wolterstorff refuses to repeat himself, directing our attention to his prior publications. This book is for scholars and specialists, reflected in its steep price.

Rereading what I’ve written, I fear I’ve made Wolterstorff seem less complex than he is. Not so: he abhors the intellectual passivity with which some prominent theologians have tried to paper over modern polity. This book, though slim, is very, very hard. But it also more than justifies the effort in its ultimate liberating rewards.

New Millennial Economics, Part Three

Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times

Over half of adult Americans live in a different state than their parents. We don’t have the intergenerational links that made village life possible in the past. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild sees this as a distinct loss, though not an unqualified one. The problem is, our needs for connection, aid, and nurturance don’t go away just because we leave the homestead. So we turn to the marketplace to fill the holes in our spirits.

Hochschild follows the arc of how humans form bonds, from courtship and marriage, to starting and raising a family, running a home, nursing the sick, and burying the dead. She combines interviews with a range of people who have paid money for these formerly intimate services, with statistics and social research. Then she clinches the sale with stories of trying to find market help for her maiden aunt in New England, from her home in California.

After all, Hochschild admits, she finds herself part of her own story. She lovingly remembers summers spent on her grandmother’s Maine farm, hoeing weeds and breaking clods, because never felt closer to her family than when they had that shared experience. But like many Americans, she followed the work. What remains of her family lives in New England, but she teaches in California. She’s forced to admit she lives the story on which she now reports.

Nor does Hochschild reflexively assume the commodification of our community needs is a bad thing, as some activists might. Your therapist, for instance, probably keeps abreast of new developments in psychology in a way village elders, witch doctors, or ministers can’t. Your marriage planner can spend time on bouquets and caterers that you, with a full-time job, can’t. Your mother’s nursing home... well. Enough said.

We have to admit, if we’re honest with ourselves, that we couldn’t do what we expect paid professionals to do, even if we wanted to. Our highly specialized economy does not leave us time to care for sick kin, teach our children at home, and grow our own food. The complexity we accept as the price of our quality of life has changed our skill sets. We don’t have the wherewithal to participate in the village commons.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Yet we never did these things for ourselves. We had parents, maiden aunts, cousins, neighbors, friends... The village commons was exactly that: the whole village in common. We knew that we could count on others to step into the gap when we became overwhelmed. Today’s mobile society, where we only see family on holidays, and don’t live where we work, doesn’t permit that kind of intimacy. Money creates a useful working substitute.

And Hochschild declares, some of these people are good at what they do. Take my favorite example, the “love coach” who helps women fine-tune their Match.com profiles for maximum return. This guy doesn’t have another job. He doesn’t have to hoe corn or split rails; he spends forty hours a week on just this. And he’s gotten it down to a science. To hear Hochschild pitch it, the $1500 this guy’s services cost (!) return more than their value to a buyer.

But for all that, we lose something when we trust our inmost secrets and needs to someone who wants to get paid. We depersonalize very powerful moments (Hochschild’s description of surrogacy in India strikes a particularly chilling note). And when we run out of money, or the person we pay moves on, we lose the network they offered us. That’s to say nothing of people who can’t afford to hire professional carers in the first place.

That’s my biggest concern, and one Hochschild approaches only obliquely. She suggests that one of the reasons many poor people postpone marriage, in just one example, because they think their ship will come in and they can have the Princess Diana ceremony she’s always wanted. I seriously fear this could create a two-tiered society, in which the egregiously rich can pay others to care, and the poor pound sand.

Hochschild examines the changes the market has imposed on our lives, not as she thinks they should be—though she doesn’t blush to admit she has an opinion—but as they are. And what she finds should set us to thinking about what we value. If money can buy us everything the old village commons gave us for free, should we care that it lacks any sense of shared heritage? Good question. You’ll have to make up your own mind on the answer.

A Clarion Call to the Buggy Life

Review, Nancy Sleeth, Almost Amish: One Woman's Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life

Many people, within Christianity and without, realize that modern culture has not done right by most of us. And the movie Witness has become a recognized classic not for the workmanlike mystery, but because we recognize the lessons Harrison Ford learns as ones we could pursue ourselves. But most of us remain unwilling to embrace an Amish level of austerity to achieve the spiritual renewal we know we need.

Nancy Sleeth says we need not go that far. If we understand the principles underlying Amish simplicity, we can live in a manner that feeds our spirits and gives us a vision of the future. The Amish, and close relatives like Mennonites and Hutterites, live without certain modern conveniences, not because they reject the world, but because they choose to stick by principles of deliberation, mindfulness, and common bonds that much modern society has lost.

The Amish, Sleeth says, don’t so much reject technology as accept a certain range of questions. They will not adopt new processes or technologies without asking first: how will this help me build up my family? My community? My relationship with God? This results in more diversity than pop culture would admit, as different communities have different attitudes to, say, electricity or cars.

Sleeth and her husband came to what she calls the Almost Amish life by way of Creation Care, a form of evangelical environmentalism. As adult Christian converts, the Sleeths dived into faith from an angle most long-term believers seldom consider. And in seeking ways to steward the earth by reducing their carbon footprint, they discovered a lifestyle notable for simplicity and forethought that corresponds with Amish theology.

In short, anything that numbs the soul, alienates loved ones, or idolizes selfish appetites, the Amish will not accept. Many communities reject centralized electricity because it lets them consume power mindlessly. Many communities permit passive solar power or diesel generators because they require forethought and thrift. The same applies to cars, computers, and mass media.

This simple core principle, rooted in Christian Scripture, informs all aspects of Amish life. While their communities look homogenous to outsiders (and most of us know little except what we see in TV and movies), Sleeth asserts they are actually a rich and thoughtful people. Standardized moral checklists violate their most treasured beliefs, because they preclude thought and prayer.

The benefits of this lifestyle range from obvious to subtle. Divorce and violence, while not unheard of in Amish communities, are rare enough to remain shocking and strange. The vast majority of Amish families own their own businesses, and failure rates remain low enough that most Amish pass the family business to the next generation. Obesity, type II diabetes, depression, and STDs scarcely exist in Amish communities.

Sleeth denies the dreamy sentimentality that colors our perception of the Amish in, for instance, Beverley Lewis’ romance novels. The Almost Amish life, Sleeth asserts, requires hard work and constant vigilance. But that’s part of what makes that lifestyle so appealing for many true believers and earnest seekers. We fear our modern, technological, isolated life has left us both lazy and numb.

The subtitle, mentioning “One Woman’s Quest,” suggests this is a memoir of discovery. Not so. Sleeth uses personal experience to show how she discovered certain ideas, or to bolster the applicability of certain claims. But overall, this is mainly a manifesto for those who, like her, care about the life we live, and the world we’re leaving to posterity.

Though Sleeth writes from a Christian perspective, for Christian audiences, secular readers can benefit from this book as well. Her principles derive from Scripture, but they reflect underlying truths that are not unique to one religion, or indeed to any religion. Many people who lack faith share the realization that modernity, cluttered with technological distractions and awash in unwanted stuff, has become inimical to a well-rounded human psyche.

I have one trepidation. Sleeth repeatedly asserts the importance of close-knit community to live the Almost Amish life, but talks little about how to create and sustain that closeness in today’s constant hurlyburly. I recommend The Sharing Solution, from Nolo Press, to link Sleeth’s principle to practicality. This book discusses how to build community bonds, and back them with amicable contracts for our tragically litigious society.

Almost Amish life offers hope that suffocating modernity doesn’t have to end us. We have the power to reassert control in our lives. Sleeth gives us the principles; now it’s up to us to find strength and make it happen.