The Path to The Modern World: Go back to the farms!

So skimming those few, those blessed few, who have logged on to read the Continuum ("The J Continuum: Now with Reader(s)!"), I saw one of the hits was someone looking for podcasts from Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Wondering myself what other bits pop up in a websearch for the distinguished fellow, I ended up finding this, the Capital Press Agriculture News page. This is significant because from there I saw the article "Bill Pan asked growers to get the word out that there's going to be 'an unfathomable number of new jobs' in agriculture in the next 10 years'". I only skimmed the article, but what's interesting is (among other things) it harkens to something said by J-Mentor JV, that I heartily agree with: "No serious futurist can deny that a major re-ruralization of society is going to be necessary in the coming years." That is, although the number of people in agriculture and the number of farms has been dwindling for decades, that's not any kind of path to sustainability. We must go back to agriculture, from urban gardens to periurban agriculture to actual agriculture -- the methods we've used to provide the plenty (that those of us with money get to enjoy) are unsustainably subsidized by fossil fuels. We'll have to replace a lot of that with organic agriculture and people power -- but don't mistake this for a backwards step. With the necessary amount of vision, mass transportation (i.e. fast rail), increased number and subsidizing of widespread institutions of higher learning, and the Internet and modern telecommunications, there's no reason that a future of this type will be a step backwards to a backwater past, real or imagined. And anecdotal evidence implies that those who have willingly gone back to farming in recent years, especially organic farming, report increased happiness and sense of well-being from it (and of course, properly supported family farmers who don't have to use poisonous or degrading agricultural technology also often report high satisfaction, or so I think I've read). There's no reason this can't be a fun and exciting future -- I hope you'll join me in supporting it.

Now, if I heard Obama say something like this, then he might be talking about change I believe in. Meanwhile, this NAFTA bullshit recently does little to endear me to him -- I'm still waiting for him to mention how Free Trade has been an excuse to foster unsustainable and unjust trade policies between partner countries treated as "equals" under trade law yet existing in a very unequal world. As was said in something I read yesterday but now can't find, a system treating everyone "equal" when the groups in the system come to the table with an unequal distribution of power is not fairness, it is a recipe for continuing and worsening inequality. Whether Obama thinks NAFTA needs to tweaked, or is lying out of expediency as his economic advisor Austan Goolsbee allegedly implied, he's once again far wrong on this one to me. NAFTA has impoverished farmers in Mexico, broadened inequality, increased immigration pressure from Mexico, and directly hurt American workers as well. But it's been great for the large companies -- a la Obama, are the companies the ones they've been waiting for?

The Clinton Family Fun-Time Minstrel Show

This is my fawning response to a great Slate article here by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton. The title is "The Clinton Fallacy: Black Americans' love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy -- Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s?" (The answer is not really.)

A money quote:

In many ways, the scandal-marred, deeply partisan years of the Clinton administration proved disappointing in the face of such early optimism. Welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier are some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years... But there is evidence that Clinton's unmatched popularity among blacks confused many about the true economic impact of his presidency. In a 2005 article I co-authored in the Journal of Black Studies, I analyzed five national surveys from 1984 through 2000. The data show that nearly a third of black Americans held false understandings of black economic conditions during the Clinton years. By the time Clinton left office, many African-Americans incorrectly believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. In the '80s, barely 5 percent of blacks believed blacks were economically better off than whites. By 2000, nearly 30 percent of African-American respondents believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. This belief is simply wrong. There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic position than whites at any time in American history, including during Clinton's presidency.

Damn straight. I was young during the Clinton presidency -- but even when I liked him, I never got why he was "the first black president" -- other than that he possibly did the best job of pretending/showing that he cared about black people than any other president. JFK's "Boston Brahminism" was never the personal touch that Clinton brought, plus his sax-playing and modest beginnings showed a president a little less... Upper-class white (despite that being what he is now) than we'd seen in a while.

Said another way: Clinton was probably the President least like Richard Pryor's impersonations of white people, which can't but have helped his popularity.

This is my slightly less informal response to the article on Slate's Fray:

It was over-time to start discussing Clinton's honorary "blackness" and what he did to deserve it. Identity politics are misunderstood, misused, and unjustly maligned in today's United States, where there are real and profound racial disparities stemming from past and present circumstances. Beyond the inherited disadvantages of lesser wealth and savings from the African-American slave and then underclass, blacks in the US suffer from a system that's convinced itself it's fair when Jim Crow is still in living memory. Many people are alive today who lived under segregation, yet we pretend that it's a past and best-forgotten phase in the US at that.

All this is to say that there are real disparities between races, and adoration of Clinton, who did nothing real to change this, and abandoned black progressives like Gunier and Elders, is as misplaced as the belief that blacks are equal to or better off than whites -- a perception too common among whites, as well, breeding some of the dissatisfaction with affirmative action and related programs. (After all, if black people are equal or better off, why should they get the breaks?) Eric Alterman rightly pointed this out as, in part, a failing of the media to accurately portray reality in the US, dividing blacks on TV news into criminals and stars. Clinton's stardom is part of this syndrome, and he of course has done nothing to correct it.

One can argue about Clinton v. Obama v. abstention or a third party, but one must do it from the knowledge that neither Clinton can lay claim to honorary blackness outside a bubble of hype and misperception -- they stood for business as usual. Indeed, sadly, these misperceptions are what led people like JFK to be revered, when Nixon and Ford did more substantively for civil rights. They were forced to do it politically, but did it all the same -- while people like the Clintons and JFK and perhaps even Obama get a free pass.

Clinton wasn't the first black president. He was the first BLACKFACE president.

I'm so funny!

Apropos of nothing, I had this conversation today and was dazzled by my own smrtniss, er, smartness, er CLEVERNESS:

Me: If Molly punks out, she'll be punking out on herself, and that's not cool.
Andrew: Yeah, that's true, it's not. But we've all done it.
Me (abashedly): Yeah, that's true.
Andrew: But that doesn't mean we can't still make fun of her for it. We can be hypocrites. (laughs)
Me: Yeah! Hypocrisy is AWESOME! (Pause) As long as I'm the one doing it.

Completely unrelatedly, and apropos to nothing especially that last thing, I've been meaning to write down a sort of declaration of principle that's been rattling around in my head for a while and I just wanted to "get it on paper," as it were. In this case, my paper is a self-aggrandizing blog, and I don't really want to get it down just to remember it, but also to be self-congratulatory. Disclaimers aside:

"It is not the purpose of government to require someone be extraordinary in order to survive. Rather, the true purpose of government is to help create and maintain a society where average people have what they need to live extraordinary lives."

I've been working on the exact phrasing for a while for my own edification, but I impressed myself with the sentiment. It's based largely on Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen and his analysis of "equalities," such as in "Inequality Reexamined." And of course, I use government here in a context of strengthened/a Strong "small-d" democracy, sensu Prugh, Constanza and Daly's "The Local Politics of Global Sustainability," the book that helped set my entire research agenda and career (such as it is right now) in place.

US' falls further behind in Gender Equality

Hello, faithful readers, and people who googled this page by mistake.

So, there are numerous ways one could imagine in which the US falls further behind in gender equality. In this case, it's in our running series, "Countries that already have had elected female heads of state." This includes places from Ireland to Liberia to Pakistan to the UK to Jamaica. It does not, sadly, include us, the US.

Today, India has joined the august body of people with female heads of state before the so-called leaders of the free world. (That's us again.)

That still doesn't mean I'm for Hillary Clinton. J-Friend APVS recently pointed out that, despite not having terribly strong identification with Hillary politically, she thought that having a woman as prez of the US (or a black man, an equality concern for a different day) behind the podium every day for 4 or 8 years, standing, sitting, signing there as the so-called leader of the blahdyblah blah would be an extremely potent visual. (I took some liberties with APVS's exact phrasing).

We here at the Continuum agree, but strongly disagreeing with Hillary on matters of policy (or, more precisely, not trusting her to do the few liberal things she's mentioned and trusting the loopholes she's left herself in the rest will get well-used) we're not ready to vote for her. On Iraq, we find her very disappointing, and on everything else, mediocre at best. We -- er, I, sorry for the affectation -- don't trust Obama, for his part, because his resolve hasn't been significantly tested, and I'm still very very disappointed/frightened by his noises during his Senate campaign about rethinking the wisdom of legalizing gay marriage and the possibility of attacking Iran. It's not just that he said these things that I disagree with, but that he said them in a race he almost couldn't possibly lose. NO ONE likes Alan Keyes. Illinois voters seemed more likely to ask Dick "Dick" Cheney out for a drink than Alan "I hate Carpetbaggers like Hillary Clinton" Keyes "Carpetbagger for Senate '04." The man was not popular, and not just because his voice sounds like Jon Stewart doing an impersonation of the doctor guy from the Simpsons after having had his nose broken. If you can't stand up for liberal positions when your insane-oh "my gay child is going to hell, ha ha" conservative opponent is so thoroughly disliked by everyone and has no chance of winning ("Hmm, we can choose a black man or a black man brought in by the Republicans for the sole reason that he's a black man to compete with the other black man"), then I have nooooo faith that you'll make the hard, correct progressive calls I'm looking for when your gonads are really on the line.

So. Yes. India: Woman President. First one. Beat us, by at least a year and a half if not more. (They did already have precisely one woman prime minister -- they're one of those countries with both a PM and a prez -- which is good and all, though Indira Gandhi was not, from all accounts, a nice person -- in the forced sterilization, authoritarian head of state meaning of the phrase "not a nice person".)

A Warning to the Future Mrs. J-Continuum-Hyphen-Her-Name-Here

I find this article on diamonds/diamond engagement rings pretty convincing (and in line with what I already thought, more or less).

Not that this is a concern of the highest priority for the presently-single J Continuum, but it's an article that resonates personally, and represents an interesting challenge to the present gender status quo. What I've called 3rd Wave Feminism (and I have no idea if it's the academically correct use of the phrase) is the "Right to Be a Sex Object" feminism that seems to have reached its zenith a couple years ago. You know, the Girls Gone Wild version, where (it seems) my generation (or actually, the one a couple years younger than me) have reacted to the perceived anti-male anti-sex anti-sexy bent of feminism/radical feminism and the more real attempt of Baby Boom feminism to achieve equality by becoming like an "Ideal Male Worker" (see again Joan Williams' Unbending Gender) and the concomitant attempts to achieve in the work world through androgyny (see: shoulder pads). Reacting against this, "anything goes" sexuality seems to be the watchword, to be "liberated" by trying to emulate and best media portrayals of sexiness and promiscuity. This is based on the real point of the double standard -- guys sleeping around and flashing are just "boys being boys" and women doing so are sluts -- and, apparently, a serious marketing opportunity -- so there's a logic to it, for sure. But it isn't a very wholistic view of feminism, I'd say, neh?

So anyway, the question of a diamond engagement ring plays into this; is equality worth "giving up" the princess ideal (not in the general sense, but on an individual level)? Can you modify the princess ideal, where a woman partner is made to feel special, to generate equality and still have that specialness? (Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, as long as making both people feel special and both getting gifts, taking care of each other, and taking turns pampering each other doesn't ruin the specialness). Of course, this all goes sideways when talking about non-hetero relationships, but I'd not know to speak on that.

Of course, besides the equality considerations of the diamond ring, there's all those blood diamond, not to mention that, in the long term, digging up gems and being buried with them can't be sustainable (unless we start digging up gems that have been buried with people and putting them back on the market). And the whole conspicuous consumption angle. And the shady origins of engagement diamonds in the first place:

Even then, the real blingfest didn't get going until the 1930s, when—dim the lights, strike up the violins, and cue entrance—the De Beers diamond company decided it was time to take action against the American public.

In 1919, De Beers experienced a drop in diamond sales that lasted for two decades. So in the 1930s it turned to the firm N.W. Ayer to devise a national advertising campaign—still relatively rare at the time—to promote its diamonds...

[Legal scholar] Margaret Brinig [notes] crucially, that ring sales began to rise a few years before the De Beers campaign. To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren't just trying to get them into bed. The "Breach of Promise" action had helped prevent what society feared would be rampant seduce-and-abandon scenarios; in its lieu, the pricey engagement ring would do the same. (Implicitly, it would seem, a woman's virginity was worth the price of a ring, and varied according to the status of her groom-to-be.)

--Meghan O'Rourke, Diamonds are a girl's worst friend, in today's Slate.

(*just for general reference, the J Continuum envisions taking the future Mrs. J Continuum's last name, too, though preferably with both partners' names done in a Latin America, non-hyphenated double last name type of way)

Pakistan beats us at the democracy game

What? No, not now, silly people. Before.

That is, they "beat" us in a very specific category of democracy, though particularly in this case, it was admittedly a somewhat symbolic blow for democracy. The specific, powerful but seemingly more symbolic than substantial event was the 1988 election of Benazir Bhutto.

This is not a recent event, true, but Ms. Bhutto has been on NPR frequently in recent days, speaking of Pakistani politics and Our Favorite US-Backed Military Dictator, Pervez Musharraf. (Ok, I'm lying, he's not our favorite dictator -- we have so many favorites, who can choose?)

The pertinence of this to the J Continuum is its commentary on our ongoing series, countries that already have had elected female heads of state. Sure, the usual suspects have already done it -- Ireland, the UK, Canada with their knees-bent-running-about-enlightenment, but so have, too, some less usual suspects -- for example, Jamaica, Liberia, and Chile. (I'm no doubt missing bunches, so feel free to enlighten me.) It also plays into the J Continuum's semi-ongoing series, Reasons Portraying Islam as a Backwards Religion and Culture is Annoying Bullshit (so called for the first time here). One entry linked to Muslims condemning the violence of their co-religionists*, as is so often asked of them, then ignored, though I think the responsibility of Muslims to deal with their most radical elements worldwide is often somewhat rather overplayed. (In large part because it seems far from clear that the shared belief in Islam is the most important factor in understanding Islamic extremists. Brief argument: Any variable where 99% of the sample -- all other of the billion or so Muslims in the world -- is an exception is a stupid explanatory variable. That is, since 99%+ Muslims are not violent radicals, Islam is a poor variable to explain extremism, which is what is done when people allege Islam is inherently backwards or violent. That's not to say it's irrelevant -- it's just waaaaay overplayed imho.)

BE THAT AS IT MAY (boy did I go on a rip there), here we have a Muslim country, Pakistan, that elected a female head of state, in 1988. There are some caveats -- it was parliamentary elections, so she wasn't elected directly (though it doesn't seem like the country came to a stop with protests against her or anything); her record as PM implies (at least from Wikipedia it does) that she didn't do much to advance women's causes, she may have run a corrupt government, and that she aided the rising Taliban in Afghanistan, despite the fact that they did believe she should, as a woman, most certainly NOT be head of state. So this is somewhat like what Brazilians seem to have found to be my astounding ambivalence about prominent African-American officials like Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Colin Powell. Yay that there's enough equality achieved that they're there (in high appointed offices in those last cases), but it's not as if those three represented the political interests or ideas of the vast majority of other African-Americans. And in any event, for now, the US still has never had a female head of state, and that's just goddamned shameful.

Anyway, I digress, and we may have either our first black or first woman president along here shortly, which would be a breath of fresh air -- though I still have my doubts on Obama, and Hillary... yeah, my vote is not so much. A story for another day, though.




*Sadly, both the links in this post are broken... =[