Sight seeing

We're taking Spring Break -- my academic partner gets a week holiday so we're in New York City getting our minds expanded by art.

Yesterday's highlight was Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Met.

Not surprisingly, those billion Chinese have a lot going on.

What appears a fairly traditional landscape ....

... turned out on closer inspection to hide a forest of people and buildings. (Click any of these images to enlarge.)

This industrial scene was one of several hanging sets of scrolls titled "Crying Landscapes." It reminded me vividly of the oil refinery I would drive past as a child along with my mother on the main route between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Towers burned off gases night and day. The place both sparkled and stank. Just a few miles further on was the Hooker Chemical Company, years later made notorious by its poisoning of the Love Canal neighborhood.

What I remember about seeing the refinery and Hooker was that these facilities were sources of pride to my mother. Hadn't such scientific and modern facilities won the war against Hitler? She looked at them with delight and satisfaction. They were not yet emblematic of ugliness, of blight.

US compounding past wrongs in Ukraine?

It seems to be nearly impossible for people in the United States to say much sensible about the upheavals in Ukraine. We tend to begin from bottomless, ahistorical ignorance. Ceaseless peace advocate David McReynolds offers one thoughtful analysis. Here's an important section:

The context of the Ukrainian Crisis:
... I want to step back away from the immediate crisis of Ukraine, for a look at the history which dictates much Russian policy - under Putin as it did under Stalin.

Russia has no natural barrier - no river, no mountain range - to guard it on its Western border. It has suffered invasion from the West three times in recent memory - under Napoleon and then twice under the Germans. In the last invasion, under Hitler, between 25 and 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. All the factories, dams, railroads. towns and cities West of a line from Leningrad in the North to Moscow to Stalingrad in the South were destroyed. Americans make much of 9.11 (and I don't make light of it) but for Russia it was not just a handful of buildings in one city which were destroyed - it was entire cities, leveled. And then with the wounded to care for, the orphans, the widows.

Americans have never understood what the war meant to Russia and why, after the war, the Soviets sought to build a "protective band" of territory between itself and Germany. This was Eastern Europe, which under the iron boot of Stalin became "people's democracies" or "presently existing socialism".

Something Americans (perhaps including our President and the Secretary of State) have forgotten was that Russia wanted to make a deal with the West. It had made peace with Finland, which (again, memories are short and we have forgotten this) fought on the side of the Nazis. The Soviets withdrew from Austria after the West agreed that Austria, like Finland, would be neutral.The Soviets very much wanted a Germany united, disarmed, and neutral. Stalin did not integrate the East Germany into the Eastern European economic plans for some time, hoping he could strike that deal. But the West wanted West Germany as part of NATO, and so the division of Germany lasted until Gorbachev came to power.

I would have urged radical actions by the West in 1956 when the Hungarian Revolution broke out - it was obvious that if the Soviets could not rule Eastern Europe without sending in tanks (as they had already had to do in East Germany in 1953), they posed no real threat of a military strike at the West.

What if we had said to Moscow, withdraw your tanks from Hungary, and we will dissolve NATO, while you dissolve the Warsaw Pact.

But of course the West didn't do that. The US in particular (but I would not exempt the Europeans from a share of the blame) wanted to edge their military bases to the East. When the USSR gave up control of Eastern Europe, the US pressed for pushing NATO farther East, into Poland and up to the borders of Ukraine.

Pause for a moment and assume that revolutionary events in Canada had meant Canada was about to withdraw from NATO and invite in Russian military advisers.

What do you think US response would be?

Why are we surprised that Putin has said, very clearly, "no closer - back off".

In this case Moscow holds the high cards. Europe is not going to war over Crimea. And it needs Russian gas. Sanctions will cut both ways - Europe is very cautious and, irony of ironies, it is Germany which is behaving with the greatest diplomacy.

If, out of all this, US planners accept the fact that there are real limits to how far East NATO can push, then the crisis will have helped us come to terms with reality. It may even lead us to consider dissolving NATO!

Read it all here.

Men working

The monthly employment report came out Friday. 175,000 jobs created (unless they adjust the numbers which they almost always do) and 6.7 percent unemployment. Not terrible, but not good.

Somehow, I don't think these men are counted as "working" by the statisticians.







This activity sure looks arduous to me.

Once upon a time, this might have been "work," according to an excerpt from The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers that Rule Our World.

Until the nineteenth century, the concept of unemployment was alien. Most people didn’t earn a wage; they did not have “jobs.” They farmed, or traded, or served, or fought. Some were artisans or blacksmiths or stevedores, but most worked the land to nurse food out of stubborn soil. Factories were small, with a few dozen workers. There were mines here and there, and, of course, servants. But there was no framework of employment versus unemployment, only of want versus plenty, hard work versus idleness, good times versus bad.

... In the United States, the birth of economic statistics was part of an overall movement toward social and political reform. The drive to create these statistics was fueled in part by a rising national suspicion that large companies, monopolies, railroads, and banks were reaping disproportionate rewards and thereby robbing the common man of his hard-earned gains. ...

That meaning is still implicit in the statistics that frame our lives.

Saturday scenes and scenery: San Francisco women

In honor of International Women's Day, I give you some of the women I've glimpsed when walking precincts for my photography blog. Click on any of these to enlarge.

We come in all kinds.

How could Europe have fallen into barbarism in 1914?

Can a book be called "delightful" whose subject is how European states blundered into a war that took about 37 million lives and set the stage for another 20 years later that killed 60 million more people? Delightful is an adjective I'd use for Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. "Accessible," "arch," and "wry" would also apply.

MacMillan's subject is one of the great conundrums of 20th century history, chewed over ever since the Great War of 1914-18 began. As she points out, disputes about how the war happened and who was at fault that already raged during the fighting have never abated. Vast troves of memoirs and archives have become available. As the hundredth anniversary of the war begins, we should see a bumper crop of additional offerings.

MacMillan sets the scene for her story with this not-at-all-novel description of the context:

The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time of progress, in science, industry, and education, much of it centered on an increasingly prosperous and powerful Europe. Its peoples were linked to each other and to the world through speedier communications, trade, investment, migration, and the spread of official and unofficial empires. The globalization of the world before 1914 has been matched only by our own times since the end of the Cold War. Surely, it was widely believed, this new interdependent world would build new international institutions and see the growing acceptance of universal standards of behavior for nations.

... War, it was hoped, would become obsolete. It was an inefficient way of settling disputes. Moreover, war was becoming too costly, both in terms of the drain on the resources of the combatants and the scale of the damage that new weapons and technology could inflict. ... Why did the forces pushing towards peace -- and they were strong ones -- not prevail? They had done so before, after all. Why did the system fail this time?

Essentially, MacMillan plumps down for a "great man" theory of this history. In her telling, particular rulers, politicians and generals in the great European states made successive calculations and miscalculations that destroyed the long 19th century European peace. She convincingly asserts that whatever impression we may have of that "peace" floats in an illusory afterglow of delusion. (She neglects to mention that for many resident's of Europe's colonies in the 19th century, there was never any meaningful "peace".) She's not much for economic or demographic explanations. As she points out, the data barely exists to measure what "public opinion" might have been in these countries at the time.

Instead, MacMillan gives us vivid portraits of her cast of historical actors. I think it is fair to say that she subjects the great men of the time to the sort of dismissive gossip that is usually only accorded to famous women. The result is enjoyable. The German Kaiser Wilhelm has been a comic-opera figure in many histories, but MacMillan is downright vicious:

He was naturally restless and fidgety, his features animated and his expressions changing rapidly. ... He was handsome, with fair hair, soft fresh skin and gray eyes. In public he played the part of ruler quite well, in his variety of military uniforms and his flashy rings and bracelets and with his erect soldier's bearing. ... Wilhelm II was vain, bombastic, and neurotic. ... insecurity ... lurked behind the bristling mustache, which his barber carefully waxed every morning. ...Wilhelm was an actor and one who secretly suspected that he was not up to the demanding role he had to play.

She doesn't confine her ridicule to Kaiser Willie; here she describes a German politician who served as Chancellor in the pre-war decade:

[Bernhard von] Bulow, the man who was supposed to solve Germany's international problems, was an amusing, charming, cultivated, and clever career diplomat. He was also intensely ambitious and, like his new master, Wilhelm, lazy. ... Over the years, Bulow had gained a deserved reputation among his colleagues for being devious, untrustworthy and slippery as an eel, said [Frederick von] Holstein who initially considered him a friend. "Bernhard von Bulow," wrote Holstein in his diary, "is clean-shaven and pasty, with a shifty look and an almost perpetual smile. Intellectually plausible rather than penetrating. He has no ideas in reserve with which to meet all contingencies, but appropriates other people's ideas and skillfully retails them without acknowledging the source."

When she's not mocking her actors, MacMillan describes the long series of late 19th and early 20th century "crises" over trade, colonies, and military alliances through which European states maneuvered. She quotes one of her actors, the English Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, about this sequence of nearly-missed conflicts:

"The consequences of such a foreign crisis do not end with it. They seem to end, but they go underground and reappear later on." The powers had fresh reasons to mistrust each other, and key decision-makers and their publics were closer to accepting the likelihood of war. ...

In 1914, according to MacMillan, accumulated humiliations, misunderstandings and some real conflicts of imperial interests turned the assassination of an Austrian Crown Prince who nobody much liked by a Bosnia anarchist in Sarajevo into the proximate cause of the Great War. She is caustic about this causes belli.

That gave Austria-Hungary, as happens surprisingly often in international relations, power over its stronger partner. By 1914 Germany's leaders felt that they had little choice but to support their ally even as it pursued dangerous policies, much as the United States continues to support Israel or Pakistan today.

In the end she gently blames the men who went to war and suggests we should do better:

We must remember, as the decision makers did, what had happened before that last crisis of 1914 and what they had learned from the Moroccan crises, the Bosnian one, or the events of the First Balkan Wars. Europe's very success in surviving those earlier crises paradoxically led to a dangerous complacency in the summer of 1914 that, yet again, solutions would be found at the last moment and the peace would be maintained.

And if we want to point fingers from the twenty-first century we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices.

I'm not, ultimately, an enthusiast for "great man" history. But this is a wonderful telling, much deeper than my summary, without the dry heaviness of many historical recitations. This is, after all, a terrible saga of human folly. MacMillan's volume probably shouldn't be anyone's sole source for the origins of World War I, but it certainly deserves to be a major source. And reading it is delightful.

Friday critter blogging: waiting, eagerly

Their person said they liked to be photographed.

This may make you puke ...

The publication pictured seems to be the "newsletter" of the military forces that work at the US prisoncamp at Guantanamo Bay.

H/t: tweet from @carolrosenberg who has reported on Gitmo for years for the Miami Herald.

Further along in her twitter stream, she points out:

Russia leases Sevastopol from Ukraine like U.S. leases Guantanamo Bay from Cuba.

Sigh.

Why was it again that CCSF should lose its accreditation?

It turns out that City College of San Francisco is actually better than average among California's two-year colleges at graduating its students and getting them into the UC system. So reports demographer Hans Johnson, Co-Director of Research for the Public Policy Institute of California.

By most measures, City College fares well relative to other community colleges in the state. The share of students who complete college by earning a degree or certificate, or by transferring to a four-year college, is higher at CCSF than in the rest of the state. This advantage holds even when we limit our analysis to students who are initially unprepared for college-level work, which suggests that it is not simply the mix of students drawn to City College that drives its outcomes.

CCSF apparently ranks below average in math remediation -- I assume that means teaching math to students who didn't get properly prepared in high school. But given the number of English learners CCSF attracts, another measure is amazing:

... the share of students who successfully complete remediation in English is higher than the statewide average, as is the share of students who successfully complete ESL courses.

Yet the accrediting commission is still threatening to close this San Francisco institution in July. It's got to be that something about an institution with strong unions and strong faculty governance produces revulsion among education bureaucrats.

Ash Wednesday 2014

A cross, drawn by pouring out a water bottle, briefly marks a spot where a young man was murdered in San Francisco's Mission district.

The Christian season of Lent begins with the admonition: "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." I will go tonight to receive ashes drawn on my forehead. This is a ritual that feels right to me. I believe I would do better to live in the consciousness that we all die. But I don't do it, of course. There is something about being alive today that fosters the illusion I'll go on, and on, and on ...

I should note today the passing of Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter, a truly enlightening book. This is science, not mumbo jumbo. To read Dr. Nuland is to appreciate that we will die and that we have a relatively low chance of experiencing a "good death." We're human.

A couple of months back, George Johnson explored how, in the rich world, the usual causes of death are changing. More of us used to die from various manifestations of heart disease, but today's medical practice has advanced to the point that

when difficulties do arise they can often be treated as mechanical problems — clogged piping, worn-out valves — for which there may be a temporary fix.

Cancer, however, still cuts us down despite all the good efforts of the doctors; we all accumulate pre-cancerous mutations and, if we aren't run over by a truck or afflicted with Alzheimers, one of them is likely to get us.

Reading about how we die makes me wonder: are old people in our society frequently scorned and ignored simply because they remind us we're all going where they are -- unless we're unlucky enough to encounter the grim reaper before we get there? Seems likely.

Warming Wednesdays: a rebuke to the rule of the market

Cyclones, blizzards, drought, fire and flood -- scientists can't say any particular weather event is a direct result of global warming, but they are quite ready to say that "extreme weather" will be one of the consequences of our heating up the planet.

Writing in February as the south of England was engulfed by flood waters, Seumas Milne sought to explain how climate change denial could be on the rise as the evidence of our senses points to massive disruptions.

What lies behind the political right's growing refusal to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus? There's certainly a strong tendency, especially in the US, for conservative white men to refuse to accept climate change is caused by human beings. But there shouldn't be any inherent reason why people who believe in social hierarchies, individualism and inequality should care less about the threat of floods, drought,  starvation and mass migrations than anyone else. After all, rightwing people have children too.

Part of the answer is in the influence of some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world: the oil, gas and mining companies that have strained every nerve to head off the threat of effective action to halt the growth of carbon emissions, buying legislators, government ministers, scientists and thinktanks in the process. ...

But climate change denial is also about ideology. Many deniers have come to the conclusion that climate change is some kind of leftwing conspiracy – because the scale of the international public intervention necessary to cut carbon emissions in the time demanded by the science simply cannot be accommodated within the market-first, private enterprise framework they revere. ... In the words of Nicholas Stern's 2006 report, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".

My emphasis.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

Mission morsels

San Francisco is not like the rest of the country. While the national unemployment rate is 6.6 percent, we're enjoying 4.8 percent here in the midst of the tech boom. That means many employers are looking to hire.

They resort to some odd stratagems. This "Joe" may not be the most articulate writer of "help wanted" notices, but he's demonstrating enterprise by putting a sandwich board on a wide boulevard.


I have to wonder how the "busser" -- when they find one -- will be able to afford to live in a town where a fixer-upper house just sold for $1.4 million, over $500 thousand over the asking price. I also have never stopped thinking of the squat building where this Zagat Rated restaurant is located as the Kentucky Fried Chicken it was for many years.

Month reviewed; much afoot!

Over the weekend, I found myself drafted by my comrades in WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras to quickly turn out about 2000 words about events around the world over the last month. We post one of these "Month in Review" essays at the beginning of each month. So I wrote vigorously.

After the post went up, folks said to me something I've said to other authors: "You sure had a tough month; so much was happening. ..."

I think, if driven to review world affairs regularly, most of us would say that about any month.

I will say February was dramatic. If interested, you can read Uprisings in Venezuela and Ukraine: a Challenge to the US Left at the WarTimes site. While there, you can sign up to receive infrequent emails about peace, justice and what some people are trying to do to make those happy aspirations real.

Surprising facts that straight people don't know about gay people

It's a good time to be gay in the USA. (Not so good in Uganda or Russia, but that's not my topic today.) A new Public Religion Research Institute survey reports rapidly increasing support for gay marriage among Democrats and independents -- only Republicans hold out against this novelty. Support has reached new highs in several religious and non-religious sectors:

Religiously unaffiliated Americans (73%), white mainline Protestants (62%), white Catholics (58%), and Hispanic Catholics (56%) all favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. A majority (83%) of Jewish Americans also favor legalizing same-sex marriage.

As Harvey Milk told us decades ago, LGBT people coming out in our daily lives has made all the difference:

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans report having a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian, nearly three times the number (22%) who reported having such a relationship in 1993. Americans who have a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian are 27 points more likely than those who do not to favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry (63% vs. 36%). This “family and friends” effect is present across all major demographic, religious and political groups.

The survey includes nuanced breakdowns of these general findings.

Click to enlarge.

I found some of the findings about untrue beliefs about gay people and our lives to be quite fascinating. We're clearly the object of a lot of beneficent good will, but also of some major misconceptions. Some examples:

• Even though most polls since 2012 have shown a majority of Americans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry, only about one-third (34%) of the public believe that most Americans favor same-sex marriage. Nearly half (49%) of the public incorrectly believe that most Americans oppose same-sex marriage, and roughly 1-in-10 (9%) believe the country is divided on the issue.

• About 6-in-10 (59%) white mainline Protestants believe their fellow congregants are mostly opposed to same-sex marriage. However, among white mainline Protestants who attend church regularly, only 36% oppose allowing gay and lesbian people to legally marry while a majority (57%) actually favor this policy.

• Roughly three-quarters (73%) of Catholics believe that most of their fellow congregants are opposed to same-sex marriage. However, Catholics who regularly attend church are in fact divided on the issue (50% favor, 45% oppose).[These folks and the previous lot need to talk more with their fellows in the pews.]

• Three-quarters (75%) of Americans incorrectly believe it is currently illegal under federal law to fire or refuse to hire someone because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Only 15% of Americans correctly say that such discrimination is currently legal under federal law, while nearly 1-in-10 (9%) offer no opinion.

• The current survey, using self-identification, finds 5.1% of the adult population identifies as either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Notably, Americans overestimate the size of the LGBT population by a factor of 4 (20% median estimate).

I guess the need to talk more with each other goes for all of us.

Why does our culture denigrate old people?

1918 Spanish influenza ward at Camp Funston, Kansas

Bear with me. This is a little convoluted, but I think interesting.

A few weeks ago I browsed through a New England Journal of Medicine article by a doctor named Lisa Rosenbaum who recalled asking women who visited a cardiology clinic where she worked: "What do you think is the number-one killer of women?” She was distressed that most answered "breast cancer" instead of the accurate response: "heart disease."

I too would have disappointed Dr. Rosenbaum -- my answer to that query would be "old age."

That's how I grew up -- being told what happened to my older relatives: they aged; their parts wore out; they sometimes sickened and usually shrank and withered; eventually they died. Not a scientific or medical picture, but not a false one either.

I shared what I was reading with my ever-so thoughtful partner and she offered her own slant on it, a passage from the political philosopher Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. My partner likes to throw this out to her young college students to chew on:

The aversion and nervousness that old and disabled people evoke, the sense of their being ugly, arises from the cultural connection of these groups with death. Thomas Cole (1986) shows that prior to the nineteenth century old age was not linked to death; indeed, just the opposite was the case. In a time when death might come to persons at any age, and often took children and young adults, old age represented a triumph over death, a sign of virtue. During this time of patriarchal family domination, old people were highly regarded and venerated. Now, when it has become increasingly likely that people will live to be old, old age has become associated with degeneracy and death.

Intriguing, isn't it? Was there really a time when being old was not so associated with disability and immanent demise -- because disability and death were more evenly spread across all ages?

I was interested enough to dig up the essay Young references in an obscure volume, Old Age in a Bureaucratic Society. Thomas Cole argues that "old age", for the rising 19th century US bourgeoisie class, came to signify a dying social order they were overthrowing and to constitute an assault on the value system they were substituting for the former order.

…old age not only symbolized the eighteenth-century world of patriarchy and hierarchical authority, it also represented an embarrassment to the new morality of self-control. The primary virtues of civilized morality -- independence, health, success -- required constant control over one's body and physical energies. The decaying body in old age, a constant reminder of the limits of physical self-control, came to signify dependence, disease, failure, and sin.

Well, maybe. I instinctively suspect Mr. Cole is stretching his theory a bit beyond his evidence and his short essay does not prove his point to me.

But I do find Young's suggestion that the contemporary shape of agism may well reflect the novel cultural reality that, in well-off countries, most people can expect to live to old age. I'm immediately aware how historically novel this is.

My own grandmother bore five children before 1910; three grew to adulthood and the proportion of survivors was not unusual. When I was in my twenties, I listened to a friend's stories of being a newly graduated nurse working during the influenza pandemic of 1918 which killed 50-100 million people worldwide, 3-5 percent of the world's population. It decimated young adults in particular. My own generation of LGBT folks have seen our male age peers drop in droves in early middle age from HIV related causes; we too don't assume death is only the domain of the old. In the United States we've been spared war's desolation of all ages at home for over a century; not many lands can say that.

As attaining old age has become a reasonable expectation for most US people, do we seek to quarantine most of our fear of decrepitude and death amid elders? This seems likely. Iris Marion Young points to what society loses from agism: old people have (sometimes) accumulated wisdom. Yes, the world changes. But a society that walls off its elders loses the benefit of hard acquired experience.