The “left-handed commencement address” Ursula LeGuin gave to the class of 1983 at Mills College is worth reading in its entirety—it’s pretty short—but this part in particular stood out to me:
Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.
This is essentially why I hate the “win the future” slogan so much—because America winning the future implicitly means that India and China and whoever else we’re scared of coming up from under us will be losing. (That, and it just sounds stupid.) This is perhaps ridiculously obvious but I don’t think many Americans understand just how poor most Indians and Chinese are, or how much of the American dream as it currently stands depends on them staying that way.
Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke puts it well:
The number and density of feelings of this kind in my life lately has a lot to do with why I found President Obama’s “Win the Future” slogan to be one of the more repellant political visions of the past three decades. I wish it were merely an empty marketing slogan. I wish it were merely a cynical toss-off. I wish it were merely as silly and irrelevant as “Whip Inflation Now”. But it’s not. “Win the Future” is the central credo of the people who are steadily losing us any hope of a future that improves upon the past. It is the slogan of misdirection and humbug, a motto whose best translation is, “Nothing up my sleeves, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.
Behind the slogan was the 21st Century version of dark satanic mills: we must be ever more dire and invasive in the way we ratchet competitive pressures into education and work, ever more aggressive in how we extract productivity at every stage of social and economic life. The speed setting on the treadmill must go up each week without fail. The usual range of boogeymen was trotted out: in China they are prepared to eat their own young, so we must as well! In India they chain their elementary-school students to a slave barge fueled by the study of calculus and SQL, and so must we!
Baratunde Thurston on the birth certificate.
See also Adam Serwer on asking for papers and Justin Elliott on Trump’s history of racial discrimination.
Stanford history prof Richard White criticizes California’s plans to build a high-speed rail system, comparing it to the 19th century railroads which he excoriates for “encouraging dumb growth” and “sacrific[ing] public good for private gain.” The California railway, he argues, “will begin with a line from Borden to Corcoran in California’s Central Valley. It is already being derided as the train to nowhere.” Fair points all around. But I wish that instead of throwing high speed rail subsidies out the window altogether, he would have made a case for smart, well-planned high speed rail subsidies, preferably in conjunction with increased taxes on intrastate flights, dense, walkable development near rail stations, and other policies that would boost demand for rail services while promoting smart, green growth in service of the public good. It’s understandable that being at a university founded by a railroading robber baron has inculcated a distrust of railways, and it’s good that White’s pointing out the flaws in existing plans, but it’s also important to acknowledge that the way an equivalent technology was developed and implemented in the 19th century is not the way it has to be implemented now, and to resist the implication that our only choice is between building a high-speed rail system according to the flawed plans that exist or not building it at all.
In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf famously illustrated the difference in opportunities available to women and men by imagining what Shakespeare’s sister’s life might have been like:
Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably–his mother was an heiress–to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin–Ovid, Virgil, and Horace–and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.
Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.
Judith eventually runs away from home to escape an unwanted marriage and commits suicide when she becomes pregnant with the child of the manager of a theatre where she hoped to work; Shakespeare–well, you know.
Jill Lepore takes the idea behind Woolf’s thought experiment and gets the facts on Ben Franklin and his sister Jane:
While at the Tate I was also struck by this piece by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, called “Tree of 12 meters.” From the Tate’s description:
At a time when many artists were abandoning traditional sculpture techniques, Penone began to use perhaps the most ancient method–carving. He took industrially sawn units of timber and, using chisels, followed the knots in the planks to remove rings of wood and expose the shape of a tree. His work looks at the relationship of industry and nature, suggesting that a sensitive approach to materials is still possible in an industrialized world.
Penone’s trees contain both the hope of carving a more natural world out of our industrialized one, and the sober knowledge that it will still be a construction, a thinner imitation of the original whose scope is limited by the initial change.
Last weekend I went to the Tate Modern, where I saw Ai Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds” in the massive space of the Turbine Hall. The work at first blends into the gray concrete of the floor, but on closer examination turns out to be a vast bed of ceramic sunflower seeds—a reported 100 million, though I’d believe it if told there were ten times or half that many—ostensibly identical yet each made and painted by hand. The hugeness of scale combined with the detail of each object are, as many have noted, symbolic of individuality and uniqueness amidst collectivity; the sunflower seeds themselves also evoke—for those who know enough about both—Mao-era propaganda and everyday life in China. It’s a stunning piece, particularly as you get closer–it’s a shame the museum had to prohibit touching and walking on the seeds for “health and safety” reasons1–and as the Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle describes it, it’s “generous in spirit, everyone can get it.” Indeed, it’s immediately “gettable,” yet it’s also elusive enough that I’ve thought about it frequently since leaving—and even more than the work itself, about the “behind the scenes” video accompanying the piece, detailing the long, painstaking, labor-intensive process by which rock became porcelain sludge became 100 million sunflower seeds on the floor of London’s most illustrious modern art museum.
Scratch what I said about people in developed countries being buffered against environmental shocks:
But in the last few years, coffee yields have plummeted here and in many of Latin America’s other premier coffee regions as a result of rising temperatures and more intense and unpredictable rains, phenomena that many scientists link partly to global warming….The shortage of high-end Arabica coffee beans is also being felt in New York supermarkets and Paris cafes, as customers blink at escalating prices. Purveyors fear that the Arabica coffee supply from Colombia may never rebound — that the world might, in effect, hit “peak coffee.”
Maybe now we’ll do something about climate change.
Suze Rotolo, known to most people as “that girl on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” died a few days ago at the age of 67. Most obits note that she was a “muse” for Dylan love songs like ”Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” and “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” but it’s less well-known that she was also a formative influence in his shift from old folk music to more political, topical songwriting–growing up a “red-diaper baby” in a family of lefties, she worked with the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE) on civil rights, told Dylan about the murder of Emmett Till, and generally got him into what he termed “this equality-freedom thing.” And she was an artist in her own right, who made “book art” and taught at the Parsons School of Design later in her life. So here’s to Suze, and to all the other women who’ve been not just beautiful “muses” but active parts of the creative processes of the men whose names we remember.
The smart thing for us to do right now is to impose a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax, to be phased in at 5 cents a month beginning in 2012, with all the money going to pay down the deficit. Legislating a higher energy price today that takes effect in the future, notes the Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would trigger a shift in buying and investment well before the tax kicks in. With one little gasoline tax, we can make ourselves more economically and strategically secure, help sell more Chevy Volts and free ourselves to openly push for democratic values in the Middle East without worrying anymore that it will harm our oil interests. Yes, it will mean higher gas prices, but prices are going up anyway, folks. Let’s capture some it for ourselves.
