The (other) book of mike

Mythologies

2010-07-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

I was reading a handout from a National Military Park around here where they pointed out the myth that the injuries of a general could be deciphered by how the horse in his monument was depicted. This pamphlet claimed this was a myth, meaning that it was untrue. This is the common usage of the term myth - we use it to say that a thing is not true, even though people may think it is.

I find this to be a completely unsatisfactory usage of the term myth, and an unsatisfactory understanding of myths and mythologies. First of all, the term comes from religions, and I would argue that it is folly to walk into the Myth of Jesus Christ, or the Myth of Moses, or the Myth of Zeus as a digital True/False kind of question. Such stories arise from within cultures, and help those cultures understand their world in much more subtle, fundamental ways.

Even if the people living in these cultures believe these myths to be factual, the more interesting story is going on beneath the surface. Whatever Jesus is religiously and truthfully, mythologically he is a story of resurrection, salvation, redemption before God. Once you recognize this, one can see instances throughout our culture. One of my favorite examples is Independence Day, where the failure of a father redeems himself to his children and the world by self-sacrifice - he dies so the world is saved. And that Bruce Willis asteroid one too.

These mythologies act at a much deeper level than simply True or False. They inform the way we understand the world and cultural products such as film and advertising play into them as well. Marketers know this all too well, even if they would have different terminologies for it. They would call it "emotional drivers of decision making," but they want to know how to tap emotionally into the stories people tell themselves, in the hopes of inserting a sale into that story. Think of the Jeep commercial with Johnny Cash in the background "We are Americans, We make things. We do well when we make good things." This should play strongly into the mythology behind much of Jeep's demographic. Or the Miller Beer commercial from a few years ago "Let the OPECs keep their gasoline" says a fat guy riding his bike home from the market in the snow, with a six pack of miller in the basket. I'm an average white guy, and these stories play directly into my vision of an ideal America. We don't whine, we're not entitled. We get shit done. And when it gets hard, we do it harder or find a different way. (I figure I'm these guys' perfect demographic).

These mythologies sound like stereotypes, but I would argue they are larger. More like the stereotypes linked together. EG. Middle aged white guys like Jeeps and beer - that's a stereotype. That stereotype seems true enough, but won't sell nearly as many cars as something that taps into their culturally deepest perceptions about America (We Make Things), their views about their role in the world (Let the OPECs keep their gasoline), and their instrmentality in the world (meaning they're not helpless victims) (I'll buy american made, and I'll ride my bike to get the damn beer). All with a Johnny Cash laydown in the background. Now that sells beer!

There are a few mythologies we work with in our culture on a regular basis. Think of how cultural Reds depict the Blues in Left Behind book series. How the cultural Blues depict the suburbs in American Beauty. Think of how easy it is to write a local TV news story of "Helpful government protects little guy from evil capitalists" or "Unusual activity endangers children," or "handicapped person does something totally average (with tinkly feel good music in the background)".

Now, look at contemporary problems such as oil and you will see how our mythologies make understanding the problems at a deep level very difficult. Partly because they make understanding the problems at a superficial level so dang easy.

Take the Protestant Ethic I mentioned earlier. One look at any environmental problem, and we can immediately start hanging the appropriate bits in the appropriate places on the framework provided by this particular myth. There's a lazy and indulgent general population, there is a solution to the problem, there is appropriate sacrifice and hard work utilizing that solution and voila, we've "saved" the earth.

Two others that are particularly important in thinking about oil are the Doomer mythology and the Cornucopian mythology. These two mythologies make it very difficult to discuss these problems with regular people. I spent a whole semester trying to get students to recognize these mythologies, so that they could better understand the problem and better envision potential futures. On the last day's discussion, it was clear I had not done a very good job. The problem is that when we start thinking of the problem, say oil scarcity, we use our preexisting cognitive schemas to understand it. If one tends toward the cynical, then DOOM follows shortly on the heels of any discussion. If one tends toward faith in the free market and human progress, then TECHNO-SALVATION will solve it all.

Now either of these might be true. However, there are also a zillion other ways that this could work out, a zillion other possibilities for the (T)ruth of the situation to exist. And being locked by faith into these this dichotmous pair of mythologies means that we are missing the vast majority of possibilities. And hence we are vastly limiting our understanding and imagination regarding this particular (or in truth any other) problem.

Hogs

2010-07-11T05:56:00.002-05:00

Walked in to downtown yesterday to see the parade for "Bike Week." Because of this there has been an unusually large number of bikers (not the lycra kind) rolling around town, and traffic has been a pain in the ass. We bought some ice cream, sat down on the curb, and waited for the show.

I'm not sure what to think of these guys. Either they are kind of cool, or they're kind of morons. On the one hand, I like bikes, and I like bikes with motors. I like the wind in my hair, I like Gadsden flags. I sometimes like skull art. This lifestyle and community are important to the people who participate in it, and I can understand that. If I didn't like it, then I didn't necessarily have to come and watch it.

But alas, that's also where the problem lies. As my house is a scant two blocks from the town square, I was going to hear their parade whether or not I went to go see it. Living in a town that seems to be a destination for Harley afficiandos, every day, all summer long, I get to hear them rev their engines and roll down my street. Front porch conversations just stop, until the noisemaker rumbles out of sight. For each individual rider, this is not a big deal. But for me living here, it ends up being all summer long.

This is not a personal freedom issue as they sometimes claim it is. Their right to swing their fist ends before it hits my nose, as does their right to an annoying loud bike. There is no way for me not to hear them without actually moving away. They're swinging their pipes and hitting my ears all summer. There is no possibility of "don't like it? then don't listen."

And with that in my head, then the real annoyance starts. These guys are petty conformists just like grown up high school goth kids. They think they're cool because they're different. But in fact, they go out and drop untold thousands of dollars (the naked small sportster only starts at 6000 and the cool ones hit 20 real quick) to look and sound cool just like everyone else. Even the stuff they do to customize puts them more squarely into the "followers" camp. Custom paint? Skulls and Flames! Wow, that is rebellion. Chrome, I never woulda thought of that. Rev it up! Who knew it would sound just like every other Harley out there?

As a matter of fact, at least in the Harley crowd, it seems that every single thing they do to customize their bikes makes them more annoying and less actually useful. Big old monkey bars increasing drag and worsening rider position. Choppered out front ends that means you can't even turn the bike around in less space then is required by a Chevy Suburban.

So instead of being go-your-own way rebels, these guys and their bikes start to look like primping primadonnas. The whole point is to look cool, not actually go faster. A ballet of aural bullies. There's a certain costume. The bike gets trailered in and can't get dirty. This is ok because it's not really good for more than rolling around town blasting its exhaust at every other bike just like it.

And then a walk through town reveals to me the funniest part of all. I'm walking past them as they're stuck in traffic! Take the best part of riding a real bike (being able to shimmy through traffic and go essentially where you want) and throw it out the window. Replace it with the worst part of riding in cars, except remove the air conditioning and filtration so you actually have to breathe everyone else's exhaust. I love it.

From a critical perspective, these folks are spending many thousands of dollars to be different in exactly the same way. They real winners are the banks and the bike shop owners. All the freedom, all the rebellion, just another way to be a serf to the banks. A different flavor of commodotized consumer stuck in traffic.

And why are these guys allowed to run straight pipes anyway? Think it'd be a problem if I set up my truck that way? Vroom baby.

The 4th

2010-07-07T08:00:00.003-05:00

A few years ago I bought a book called The American Songbook by Carl Sandburg. This is a book of songs, mostly regional, collected around the country. I would guess the period is 1900-1930ish. Many of them are work songs, poverty songs, love songs, you name it. Most are also gone from the public discourse now, thanks I guess to progress such as Clear Channel and the ipod. Carl Sandburg himself had about a hundred different kinds of jobs and roamed the country himself, and recognizes that these songs tell stories and have meaning to the people singing them.

Incidentally, this is the country I really dig, and the country I celebrate on the 4th. It is a country of people, and a country of many smaller communities. Sometimes I will quip that it is not one big country at all.

So who are these people and where are these places?

A Glen Beck conservative living in the back of his civil war relic shop trying to make it through this depression.

Eddy the mover with whom I worked in 1990 in Omaha, who can pack a moving van waaaaay overweight.

The schoolteacher/racing deckhand, living in a tent on an island all summer, when she's not crewing.

The Blues-loving harmonica-playing college professor.

Cornucopia - crazy tiny granola town on Lake Superior, WI.

The surprisingly hot 50+ triathlete in Indiana.

The couple trying to get themselves completely off the grid by raising cows, sheep, chickens, rented corn, and vacation log cabins on their tiny hobby farm.

The raw dairy creamery with the Amish girl wo-manning the register.

The CSA lady sifting manure in her Keen sandals.

Folks living in Jackson, Wyoming with no career and little vision for the future, simply because they love the mountains.

Green Corn, an agoraphobic blue sky, and a stripe of asphalt off to the horizon.

MANHATTAN!

Old men and their hot rods.

Old women and their knitting.

Contrarians on single speed mountain bikes.

Philadelphia.

Minneapolis.

San Francisco.

Delta Blues, Harlem Jazz, Bluegrass.

We live in a great spot on the world with lots of great folks. Get out and see them. Get out and see it. Let's not let the crisis cloud our vision about the good things.

Experts making the situation worse or causing the situation in the first place

2010-06-18T06:51:00.000-05:00

From Mark Sisson's MarksDailyApple blog:

Westerner's feet

Tribalist's feet

And this research is something like a hundred years old.

Flat Feet Treatment - How to Strengthen Flat Feet | Mark's Daily Apple

The Archdruid Report

2010-06-11T06:44:00.000-05:00

JMG rocks. This week he mentions that his whole purpose with this blog was to look at the competing mythologies of the cornucopians and the doomers with regard to industrial society. Turns out, this is what I really like about his writing. There are at least two layers to any problem, and oil/resources are one of them.

1) The underlying Reality. Kant's pneumena, God's truth. Whatever that is. For oil, there is a number of barrels underground. For water in the Ogalalla, there is a number of gallons. How fat and sugar are metabolized.

2) The way a culture understands the problem. How knowledge is socially constructed. The mythologies they use to understand it. For us it is the doomers' apocalypse, the cornucopian's progress, Americans' protestant ethic as a thought framework.

Dealing with any problem effectively means pulling apart these two layers and dealing with each one separately. BUT, it is tremendously difficult to do this because every investigator has his/her own mythologies, politics, moralities, social constructions of knowledge. And each one of us needs to be relentlessly self-critical to strip our own mythology from any underlying reality. This is what people mean when they say reality is anything you want it to be. When you strip all that stuff away, reality turns out to be pretty slippery.

Marketers learned a long time ago to ignore the reality and focus on the second part. The mythology, the emotion, the social construction matters FAR MORE than any underlying (T)ruth. That is why Sears is a credit card company, Buck knives, Schwinn bikes, and everything else is manufactured overseas. Because focusing on the branding is culture work, social psychological construction and alteration of the entire culture. The products are afterthoughts.

Nevertheless, we the buying public have a tremendously difficult time recognizing our own emotional and social psychological manipulation. Try getting a hippy or college professor to recognize that their Subaru is every bit as emotional purchase as Sara Palin's Hummer. Or a doctor who likes his Mercedes. Hell, it's hard to get people to realize that the colors in advertisements are market tested to get the perfect emotional response. So getting a deeply rational physician recognizing his Merc and his Rolex as status symbols is hard. Physicians think their rational. They think Mercs and Rolexes are built well. Hippies think Subarus are awesome. Sara Palin thinks her Hummer is 'safe.'

And every market research sales meeting I ever sat in, the client wanted to know "How can we dig deep into the emotional drivers of behavior? The psychology of it?"

So to bring the cow round back to the barn, trying to understand the (T)ruth of our resource situation, as per oil or water is tremendously difficult because it means cutting through the mythology in which people's perception of the truth of those situations are. And how do I know when my own mythology regarding the truth is clouding my reading the (T)ruth?

The Archdruid Report

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Biggest Loser

2010-06-08T11:38:00.001-05:00

Weber gave us The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and in so doing pointed out that religious Calvinism provided a knowledge structure, a life structure which its adherents were to follow. It included a belief that we are all fallen sinners, ascetic self denial, extremely (almost penitential) hard work, especially at your vocation, and tremendous devotion.

From this structure, some New England Protestants became very wealthy. Work hard, deny yourself, reinvest turns out to be a great way to make money. Around Ben Franklin's time, this cultural structure, this meme, jumped from a religious venue, to a capitalist one. And the Calvinist Work Ethic, became the American Capitalist Ethic. And it's still going strong.

American culture is sometimes called "puritanical" and it is true we can be weirdly prude sometimes. But in my mind, the proper use of "Puritanical" focuses more on that cultural structure developed by the Protestants and documented by Weber. Along with capitalism, this structure has become the skeleton for other knowledges/lifestyles as well.

Look at Environmentalism. It begins with a belief in a flawed humanity (everybody must use some resources), is driven by a penitential self-denial and ascetism (I won't enjoy air conditioning even if it's 95 degrees and humid out), shares a disgust in hedonism (a hummer and a 4000 sq ft McMansion are the problem), but also shares a belief that if we all work really hard together we can achieve salvation (Ecotopia). This working really hard includes paying more for hybrids, recycling, green products, basically everything.

So that environmentalism as a knowledge base and lifestyle has itself been hung on that structure provided by the Calvinists and the Capitalists.

But, the food and diet knowledge/lifestyles fit this structure as well. According to conventional wisdom people are fat because they are indulgent and lazy (gluttonous and slothful in Calvinist language). They eat rich foods and won't exercise. In order to improve, we/they need to practice self-denial and discipline by eating low fat, high fiber wholegrain (ascetic) foods while NOT eating fatty salty (indulgent) foods. We need to work extremely hard at exercise. The congregation is so fallen, that some improvement will be had with just 15 minutes of exercise (prayer) a couple times a week. But true results will come only with an hour or more of exercise almost daily. Talk about devotion.

The Anti-Pleasure Principle - Reason Magazine

The revolution will not be motorized

2010-06-05T19:40:00.003-05:00

There are some interesting things going on right about now. There are a lot of folks going in a lot of directions, but there are a number of things going on that seem to be happening from the bottom-up. They are united in a distrust of expert advice, and a willingness to tackle a problem with something of a fundamentalist, or old fashioned, ways of doing things. These movements are across a wide variety of disciplines, but that might mean that there is something deeper going on in the culture.

Crossfit: In the workout world, there is a group of folks who are trying to adopt an approach to fitness with a broad, functional, balanced approach. And the basics are free. Instead of scientifically training to be super-triathletes, these guys are weightlifting, balancing, sprinting, exploding their way to a balanced fitness. The kind of fitness that is useful in daily life, and which prepares one for the vagaries of life. It can be done with old fashioned barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, pullups, and running shoes. It focuses on compound lifts and movements, to create useful strength, rather than isolation movements to create big muscles. This movement is "go" over "show" which is way different than most gyms I have been to. Further it echoes earlier full-body natural movement fitness ideas. Like LeCarr's (sp?) MovNat, which he built off and older french model. Like those that got the running paths/exercise stations put up all over the country which are now molding in decay. And the basic workouts are put up for free at Crossfit.com. I take it most of the money is made in certifying people to open franchises or something.

Primal/Paleo: Nutrition is full of fad diets and sucker books. But amid the fuzzy science and quasi-religious there is something of an interesting contrarian movement here as well. The Primal (Mark'sDailyApple.com) approach tries to emulate caveman eating -lots of meat, fat, wide variety of veggies - and importantly - no grain, as agriculture is only 10,000 years old. These characters posit that our bodies have not had time to evolve to the grain based agricultural diet we westerners live on, and especially not the industrial-agribusiness diet of the last 75 years or so. Thing is, they have a fair bit of science to back it up, and it goes back quite a ways. From Anthropological studies illustrating the decay in health when a population goes from hunter gatherer to agricultural, to Westin Price's dental studies of aboriginal cultures around the world, to Vilhelmjur Steffanson's (sp?) extended blubber eating stays with the Eskimo, and on and on and on. The contrarian point of view accepts none of the conventional wisdom and starts deconstructing the basic science facts we take for granted. We know cholesterol is bad for you? Where did we get that information, on which studies does this rely, how were they designed, what were the politics of the scientific community at the time, what were the politics outside of the scientific community? See the metabolic discussion in Protein Power, and basically the whole book Good Calories, Bad Calories for a suggestion. As it turns out the science might not be as good as we think, and a chunk of public health is based on doing something rather than nothing, even if we are only sort of sure what we're doing.

And I've read plenty of these things. Most (the Paleo Diet book and a favorite for it's kitchy awfulness Gutbusters from the 80s or 90s, and even the macrobiotics book my friend lent me) diet and nutrition books simply state what they mean to state with little explanation as to the underlying mechanisms or science. 'Eating fat will make you fat, so stay under 20grams a day,' versus "Eating fat has no metabolic effect (citation), but eating carbohydrates triggers your insulin system (cite), which is itself implicated in diabetes (whole chapter cite)." This ends up being a deep rabbit hole where not only do you find out conventional wisdom doesn't have the whole story, but that there are whole battling ideologies. Hell, it might as well be religions duking it out. Anyway it's a lot of fun to read, but the takeaway for this is that the people here have given up hope on the experts giving them solid advice, or even the whole truth as to the available science. The grassroots part is trying to figure out how what non-westerners everywhere and cavemen ate and how that's different than what our diabetes riddled, obesity epidemic culture is eating. There's a fair amount of wierdness there, don't get me wrong, but there are a lot of success stories as well, and most importantly, this anti-expert bottom up solve-it-yourself approach that I'm talking about today.

These are two lengthy examples, but there are other examples as well:

Agriculture: Monsanto and Agri-industry vs. permaculture, CSAs, farmer's markets and backyard gardens. People figuring out to do it themselves and with their networks

Finance: Too Big To Fail vs. Dave Ramsey cash financing, browncycling, curb shopping

Barefoot/VFFs: Barefoot Ted and Vibram Five Fingers vs. Nike et al.

There's a theme to all of these: Maybe the experts aren't helping the situation at best, and maybe they're making it worse at worst. Chronic running might not be making me healthier. Healthy whole grain lowfat products might not be helping me lose weight and live longer. Family farms, the depopulation of the countryside, and turning us all into feedlot cattle for pioneer corn is not in my best interest. The real estate agent will sell me more home than I want and the bank will write me waaaaaaay more loan than is really financially smart for me. And finally, maybe it is the expensive injury-preventing shoes that are causing me injuries!

At every level, confidence is falling out of the big system, and people are trying to figure out how to accomplish these things on their own. This is not a huge movement, it is a few people paying off all their debt on the dave ramsey show. It is a few people sourcing out CSAs, a few growing heirloom varieties for farmer's markets, a few people walking into the gym to bang out four olympic lifts and walking back out. Without the treadmill, the machines, the ipods, the tvs. It is a few people living closer to work and riding their bikes. But they are united by their distrust of experts (we're americans after all!) and their willingness to just do it the old fashioned way. Whatever it is.

And this is where any environmental solution will have to be. We need to cut through whether Priuii are the environment's savior or another vehicle of tremendous embodied energy promoting sprawl and slavery to a financial system, to cut through whether manhattan (David Owen) or boulder (I hope that's obvious) is more environmentally appropriate, to cut through whether we can force people onto public transit, or whether tightening CAFE standards is better than cap and trade.

It's possible that the environmental change needed will not come from the holier than thou greenies, but from individuals who are sick of spending their gas money and their lifetime stuck in traffic will make the change. People who want to spend less money on their home utility bills and stop blowing up mountains in the Appalachians. People who want decent food that is not a factory product.

Real Honest Structural Weaknesses

2010-05-29T07:28:00.004-05:00

So, despite the talk of the turnaround, a jobless recovery does still muchly suck for the remaining unemployed. Putting aside the wishful optimism from those who really really want us all to rush out to buy more flat screens to goose the consumer economy, it would seem there are still reasons to be concerned.

Economically:

There is still talk of tremendous weakness in the housing market. Some are talking about rising home sales, and that is good. But the counterpoint is the very large number of people who are underwater, or who have simply stopped paying their mortgages but whom the banks have not foreclosed on and evicted. The trendlines for housing prices still have not dropped to anything like long-term averages or anything like a respectable multiple of the average wage.
The government debt that was a worry a few years ago has not gotten better. With a focus on old Dr. Keynes getting us out of this particular economic mess, the powers that be have increased government liabilities a million-fold (well, that might be a bit hyperbolic). Those who were concerned before are apoplectic now. According to their more classical approach to economics the only ways out of this are through inflation, and/or default. Those with a more progressive economic view seem not to be as concerned. At any rate, inflation of the money supply or government default are at the very least back-burner concerns to me. Not things that I want to catch me unaware.
Two important industries into which I have some insight include pharma and media. Pharma's era of blockbuster drugs and double digit profits including in the face of recession is gone. They have exhausted the low-hanging fruit that got them through the 90s and into the 2000s, and some say they have exhausted the science at hand. Interesting developments are now happening at the larger, more complex molecule level of biotech. That means more complexity, more money, more risk, more niche-oriented drugs. It may be the pharmaceutical analog to drilling a mile underwater through several miles of rock with the most sophisticated tech we have.
Media is changing and that is obvious. Newspapers have been hammered, the music industry in no way resembles itself from BN (Before Napster). But less obvious unless you know what to look for are the elements of media that have so far fared better. TV has been dethroned by the internet and demographics. Textbooks have changed and are ever moving towards less-textly looking things - e.g. see the ones that look like fat fashion mags. Those publishers will jump on something like the ipad, which delivers that visual flash without ever having to actually make a book. One of the reasons the fashion-mag texts are gaining popularity is that the throwaway magazine paper is so cheap. And now that the Apple-crowd have moved into the ipad, the e-reader will no longer be only for disposable romances for moms on the beach (not that there was anything wrong with that in the first place). So we may get to see slow motion in publishing what we saw happen in music.
Economically in sum, there is still debt, consumers are still stretched, and huge chunks of our most profitable industries are still on the precipice of monumental structural changes. We've only just begun this transition to a post-industrial, post-digital economy, whatever that economy ends up looking like.

Energy:

Nope, still haven't found a replacement for oil. Ethanol was a bust, the tar sands are expensive and an ecologic disaster, and now the gulf. Walkable communities may be the ONLY way out of this, which will provide building opportunies, but that may still be 10 or 15 years down the road. That completely depends on how long we try and muddle through doing exactly what we're doing.

Agriculture:

Pollan gave us the Omnivore's Dilemma and there's an interesting truth there. The tens or hundreds of thousands of choices in the supermarket mostly come down to industrial corn and soy. Including the meat. And industrial corn and soy come down to diesel, which kicks us right back to the previous point. It would be more efficiently certainly if we could just drink the damn oil, but for now we can't.
Those who are concerned about industrial agriculture will point out that we've replaced a tremendous biodiversity of edible food and farming culture with million-acre swaths of mono-crops, proprietarily owned by biotech companies (sometimes the same ones at the cutting edge of pharma too) and dependent upon proprietary chemical usage - the weeds of which are now showing signs of developing resistance in the real world. So monocrop agriculture showing increasing reliance upon petroleum derivatives and now resistant weeds.

These are a few structural challenges our society is facing right now and you will note they are fairly basic. Food, Energy, and an economy that links these elements up with end-users, citizens.

"May you live in interesting times."

At the very least it's an interesting time to be a sociologist.

The Archdruid Report

2010-05-29T07:25:00.000-05:00

The Archdruid Report

There is some quite interesting writing going on at JMG's place here. This weeks discussion is about life after abundance, which is interesting in and of itself, both as your own post-layoff planning as well as in his sense of the era coming after our oil era ends (right now).

But he also has a discussion of "Doomer Porn" vs "BAU" (business as usual) dichotomies that capture people's imaginations. This is I think a fascinating phenomenon and well worth exploring. After spending enough time trying to understand the structural weakness of our system, one ruminates through plenty of people's Doomer disaster stories. It could be the post oil scenarios of PeakOil.com, LATOC, it could be the post attack vision of the Lights Out pdf floating around the internet. It could be the debt collapse vision of Daily Reckoning (whose writing is always entertaining and might not count as doomer porn on its face) and the now defunct Housing Panic blog. It could also be ecocide and environmental collapse that some foresee.

It almost doesn't matter. What does matter is that when you read these stories and listen to people's fears and envisionings, there turns out to be a tremendous amount of imagination for hollywood-style social crashes. What there is NOT is realistic scenario planning. This is in direct contrast to those who simply cannot see life getting much worse ever - the cornucopians. Those who see technology helping us solve the oil problem, the market's invisible hand guiding us benevolently toward more benign yet powerful energy solutions. Perhaps we'll even have Jetson-style floating cars!

There is little thought as to the sorts of middle-run scenarios that are much more likely. For instance, as troublesome as this particular recession has been, if this is the spectacular crash with the survivalists on shortwave, the exerbike-electricity generators, the zombie hordes radiating out from the cities, well then it is a little bit of a letdown. On the cornucopian side, while markets are awesome and scientific development is simply flat out cool, we can see with the gulf that tools of science and the engine of the market can also create gigantic problematic fuckups. 300 foot deep layers of heavy oil suspended in the gulf in areas measured by the square mile is not floating cars. Not even close.

What will happen and the kind of planning that will help as opposed to entertain will be that which identifies the key structural weaknesses most likely to cause trouble. It will include trying to figure out how those structural weaknesses will wobble and weaken before they fail. AND it will require some imagination into how real honest-to-God historical nightmares unfolded. Seriously, we don't need to dream up zombie hordes when right here in the US we had an Indian genocide so that the US could take their land. We had a real civil war, that didn't play out anything like Turner Diaries envisioned. Within living memory Europe had the Holocaust, the Balkans' troubles, Africa had Darfur and Zimbabwe.

This capture the irony that is so critical here. Real Bad Shit has actually happened, and recently enough to learn from it. And none of it much resembles the doomer porn worriers enjoy. And the market sometimes dope-slaps you up side the head when the resources run out. There have been famines because crops failed. We aren't immune to problems either.

In sum, real planning for real bad times is going to include lots of thinking and planning somewhere between the equally unlikely zombie hordes and flying cars. It's going to include honest assessments of which supports are likely to fail and how to deal with that, especially in a dynamic system with 299 million other citizens adapting as well. And for the truly worst case scenarios, don't imagine Hollywood, investigate real history. Insight into a social situation and a broad understanding of the real ways societies fail will guide your "preps" much more effectively.

2010-05-28T09:52:00.001-05:00

Ed Abbey

Why I like Ed Abbey. He's not a naturalist, an outdoorsman, whatever. He's a philosopher, and much of what makes his writings both entertaining and difficult is a particular understanding of human knowledge. Abbey understands that the dead ends of human knowledge and action end in paradoxes and contradictions. Rather than fight them out to a painful and suicidal ending, he accepts these contradictions and plays with them. This is the direct opposite of what Alexander Supertramp did.

He recognized that we humans are the despoilers of wilderness. But he also recognized that he loved the wilderness and loved to spend time 'out there.' So you can either try to go completely feral, as McAndless did or you can retire to the sofa to the playtation. Abbey recognized it, and promptly said that everyone else after him should stay home.

This kind of activity pisses everyone off who doesn't recognize what old Ed's doing. Ed is simply recognizing the problem and being honest. All the REI shoppers in the world know that pushing into the wilderness, driving hours to climb a crag or hike a trail, living atop a mountain in a state forest, all of them know that this behavior is destructive to the wilderness and to the oil base. At least if they're honest with themselves. But they're doing it anyway. Ed is just telling the truth.

The problem with the Southwest is all the people moving out there. Ed is from PA. 'Shut the door behind me' he says. And pisses more people off. Ed complains about immigration, knowing that his scotch-irish hillbilly ancestors did not come from the Sioux or Chippewa. But it's all the same play of paradox and contradiction. In my opinion, that is the key to his writing.

He loves wilderness, and distrusts civilization. Very deeply American. But he is also aware of the problems of dualistic thinking that sets humans apart from and against nature. Because we humans are of nature, civilization for all its good and bad, is part of nature too. Which is why he can write about the towers of Manhattan, the crunch of oyster shells under the boots at the oyster bar. Again, if you think he is a nature writer, this is frustrating. How can you dig the mess and slime and insanity of wintery manhattan while cursing it at the same moment? He is a hypocrite!

Of course he is. He knows that. We all are. He's a philosopher who recognizes that there really are no answers to these paradoxes and contradictions. Instead, he is stepping beyond that rational analysis dead end, and moving beyond into something more existential, if less rational.

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy (Beethoven - according to my sister at least)

Freedom Guerrilla

2010-05-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

I love Tommy's new blog:

Freedom Guerrilla

It makes me think.

It strikes me that Walmart could prove elements of Marx true that I would've thought dead. Marx thought the factories would overproduce ever more efficiently, and more people would become unemployed with every business cycle, until you had the final downturn. At which point you would have piles of product that no one could afford because no one had a job. Those without money would go without resources (ie homeless and hungry) while product wasted. Recall the scene in the Grapes of Wrath where the piles of peaches are burned while the starving family watches on the other side of the fence.

Now, after Mao, Stalin, Che, and Castro, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the embrace of wild-assed capitalism by Mao's progeny, I would've thought Marx's ghost to be a little tired.

And yet. I've heard Walmart called the "Main Street Killer," and we know that to be some extent true. Without getting into whether Walmart is good or bad, friend of the working poor or exploiter of labor, let's explore this a bit. If I know how to build something, why would my neighbor pay me to do it, when it is cheaper to buy said thing at Walmart? When my wife wants to sew something, she cannot do it anywhere near the cost of buying it at Walmart. In fact, she sources most of her material from sheets that are on sale at Walmart. Buying cloth isn't nearly as cost-effective as re-purposing different products for your own uses. So, all these local skills get back-burnered in the local economy when a Walmart comes to town, for all the reasons that hippies hate Walmart.

But where does that leave a rural community of people after Walmart? After those skills are economically unnecessary, and people are hooked on Walmart's economic umbilicus feeding whatever meager consumer crap the mother ship decides? It sounds strange, but it finishes that loop that Marx was talking about. Truly useless economic crap saturating a community of people without enough money to hope for better. And all the resources that could grow a dynamic, robust, and economically diverse withering on the vine.

Weird. I would not expect myself to be posting on Marx in 2010.

A small leak

2010-05-27T10:52:00.004-05:00

What really does one have to add to the story on the oil leak in the gulf? The whole thing is a sad mess certainly. One could rail on about BP for instance, but as long as we're setting up our cities a certain way, BP will do what the market (ie us) tells it to do.

One could rail on about the malfeasance and stupidity of the science of drilling at 5000 feet of water. But science is by definition at the edge of what is doable. There is always room for catastrophic failure at the edge of our technological abilities. So, unless we want to see human knowledge stagnate, there will be possibilities for failure. Unless we want to abandon oil, there will be possibilities for catastrophic failure.

One could rail on about the political elements of the mess. The government oversight was insufficient. The regulations were killed. The politicians are buddy buddy with business. Whatever. The whole story there is that the Dems blame the Pubs, the Pubs blame the Dems, The true believers on either side can't be bothered to think outside their cages. It's much like reciprocal masturbation. Without each other, they'd have no erotic tension and no ultimate satisfaction.

One could rail on about the eco-disaster. And while it is alas, whether it is something that is ultimately survivable and fixable or whether it is "Americans Chernobyl" has everything to do with one's political perspective, and reverts to the previous' paragraph's circle jerk.

Further, without inside knowledge of how the oil drilling process works, and of how BP is run, and how the government interacts with BP, we can't really know anything. Certainly, all the intelligence needed to know what is going in is beyond our reach at this point. Follow the discussions at PeakOil.com or TheOilDrum, and a handful of insiders are giving out useful information. But mostly it is average folks like you and me sitting at the computer talking to each other, and guessing at information that is beyond our reach.

The psychology of it all

2009-04-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

John McCain did himself no favors by calling this a "psychological recession" during his failed presidential bid. And as a PR statement, it does not feel like a psychological recession at all.

Of course, that's not what he meant, and we all know that. What he meant was that the recession was in part because of a failure in confidence. And that part is true. Two years ago, things were much the same, but the economy was roaring along happily - even if unsustainably.

Things will not get better until BOTH the psychology of it, AND the underlying fundamentals of it are righted. I expect the fundamentals to be the first to get fixed - that's my vibe. I expect that ppl will hope for a bottom, call for a bottom, get excited on every two days of stock market gains only to be let down, or at best meet with a weak plateau, until they finally give up the hope that this will be taken care of easily. At that point, folks will buckle down, we will be a couple years into folks living with some sense of austerity. Without actually realizing it happening, the foundations for a healthy economy will be laid. So I only expect the psychology of it to turn out well after ppl give up hope, and simply get on with living in this new reality. I don't know how long such a thing might take, but I would be surprised to see things turn around as quickly as the TV people are hoping.

Culture – Top down or bottom up

2009-04-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

One of the great problems of the diversity movement in academe is their model of culture. The fundamental assumed benefit of diversity is that we are all enriched by the exposure to and acceptance of a variety of different cultures and perspectives.

A second fundamental piece that gets pulled into the diversity movement is the need to overcome past and present discriminations. Since for example, African Americans are approximately 13% of the population, it would stand to reason that a fair non-discriminating school would have 13% African American students. If the school's demographics are too far off, then it looks as if they are discriminating.

In working towards diversity, many schools will look at these demographics and recognize that they do not match the country as a whole. This may not be a result of conscious or institutional discrimination, but it might at least be perceived as such. The next steps are to try and get diversity numbers up through applications and ultimately enrollment. Whether or not this is the correct way to proceed is not my concern here.

What does concern me here is the top-down model of cultural diversity. It is a model of diversity where the demographics are those of the nation's. 65-20-15 White-Other-Black. And this is the split that most colleges are aiming for. If it were successful, then every college in the country would be split 65-20-15, just like every other college in the country.

This would not be diversity at all. Individuals get their culture from their groups. The 2% American Indians would not maintain any unique culture if their 4.5 million (in all the groups together) were spread thinly and evenly across the land. As it is now, you can go to north Minnesota and meet some Chippewa, and their ethnic flavor makes the place a little more interesting – because there is a critical mass of them there.

Cultural diversity is a bottom up phenomena. The various cultures of the United States are a result of historically uneven settlement, distribution, and economic patterns. This should seem to be obvious to the point of not needing to be stated. The Delta Blues did not come from Norwegian Lutheran Farmers – but Garrison Keillor's dry wit did find purchase there.

The vast majority of institutions of higher learning in this country are not national – they are local, no matter what their recruiting brochures say. And this is a good thing for those who appreciate cultural diversity. It means that the kids at University of Southern Indiana have an almost southern accent and a religious perspective informed by the nearby bible belt. It means that the kids of University of Minnesota Duluth are the progeny of past and present miners and Great Lakes sailors. It means that Howard University is the proud result of the reconstruction, and that the French Notre Dame du Lac somehow filled up with working class Irish-American boys.

Does this mean that everything is hunky-dory for all the groups that diversity proponents would like to help? Not necessarily. There are still pockets of unmentionable ignorance and poverty around our country. What I am saying here is that colleges and universities need to take a good hard look at who they are, who their target constituency is, and who they are serving. It may be that in order to promote the better good, they need to focus on the farm kids in their areas, or perhaps the American Indians in their state, rather than diversity in general. It may mean that we need more and reinvigorated ethnic institutions to serve the under-served.

I do know however that true diversity happens at the macro level because cultures are built from the ground up, and that diversity within a school is not the same as real cultural variation. St. John's University in Minnesota is special because it is a Catholic college, attached to a Benedictine Abbey, in the heavily German farm-oriented Stearns county. This gives it a very specific cultural flavor, which is different than Norwegian Lutherans at St. Olaf down the road. And neither of them has the right 'numbers.'

2009-04-13T14:19:00.003-05:00

The mainstream media simply cannot stop looking for some good news in all of this. It may be my own observational bias, but every day seems to be another talking head or news article saying "could this be it?" or hoping that the upswing will begin soon.

Can't say I blame them, but my gut suggests that this is not over. First, now that this deleveraging has started, it's going to be difficult for them to stop it, although they are trying mighty hard. Secondly, perhaps deleveraging isn't a bad thing. If it means that regular citizens can live within their means, and that an average wage will buy an average house, then that may be the trendline we will regress to.

But also, demographic trends are conspiring to foil attempts to reinflate the economy. For boomers who were hoping to retire soon, but also just saw half their wealth evaporate, fancy new cars, techy toys, and housing renovation are likely to be last on their list of goals for the next 5 years. Especially considering that even without the great depression 2 setting in, we would be expecting that demographic to be downsizing from family houses to retirement houses right about now. That would set forward a devaluation all on its own.

Also, today's news that government receipts are down 25% at exactly the same time government spending is ramping up to combat the current troubles bodes poorly for government solvency. This guy's analysis captures my worries quite well.

There will be an upturn at some point. The question is what will transpire between now and then?

Freedom!

2009-04-10T07:22:00.003-05:00

There is a well-worn joke. When your neighbor loses his job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression. Well now, this recession has officially become a depression. On the up side, that means I am able to once again speak about things.

On the downside, that leaves me fighting with Comcast. We've been customers with them for 3 years while we've lived here. Last year, in acquiring a land-line for the children, we ended up with their largest package including a teaser rate and a contract. Now, a contract is a contract, but there are also times for renegotiating. When I called my other services to minimize services until something new came along (att wireless for instance), they were happy to change the terms of service around.

With Comcast it has been a different story. When I called them, they would not let me drop or minimize service in any wayy without sticking me with the termination fee.

Here's the kicker. I've spent somewhere around 6000$ on comcast since I moved here, and plan on using ISP, cable and phone in the future. Despite that business, and in serious jeopardy of any future business, they are insisting on the termination fee. 150$ despite thousands spent and in lieu of thousands of future dollars.

What the hell just happened?

2008-12-19T10:26:00.002-05:00

This has been an extraordinary fall. For all the prognosticating, for all the deliberation about what appeared to be relevant issues and directions, I would not have guessed we'd be where we are.

First, oil is under 40$ a bbl. While I would have expected volatility at the oil production plateau, this is way more than I would have expected. This financial crisis has apparently created so much demand destruction to push price down into the 30s. Wow.

And the financial crisis. For a long time I've wondered about the structural instability of our system. To the point wher my students I'm sure got sick of it. The debt financing of everything scared me. And with Fourth Turning saecular financial problems in the back of my head, I thought it could be exciting (but not in a good way).

However, it's the response that has been truly shocking. Everybody over a certain age remembers when communism and the ruskies were the bad guys - nay evil even. But, the response to this financial crisis has been one huge governmental intervention after another, each more unaffordable than the last.

I almost don't care what perspective one takes on this, let the socialists and the free marketers argue out their ideologies. I think there is no way to prove this mess one way or another. Our system is mixed enough that both sides will 'prove' they are right and the other wrong no matter what.

But I simply cannot believe how quickly we've handed over everything to Big Government. It was completely economic, not political. For all the talk of Obama's lefty-ness, the change was in the economy.

I simply cannot believe that the country that self-defines as capitalists, and further seeks to export democratic capitalism across the globe, turned so quickly and so thoroughly to the government for everything.

Real capitalists let unprofitable businesses fail. Real capitalists let the owners of bad debts eat those losses. Real capitalists let those who are truly underwater go bankrupt. Those are the risks, and the gains and losses associated with those risks. But no, here we are putting 700 billion into the banking system (hint - maybe those house prices should fall), 50 billion into autos, all so these guys don't fail.

If we want to run a more socialized country, I guess that's ok. But I am dubious that we'll see the benefits of that at the citizen level. In a decent system such as that, I would hope for decent schools, daycares, health, pensions, and even college for the citizenry. Funny thing is that here, every time we decide to publicly fund something, we do it so that it only helps those on top.

Take college. The government spends untold amounts on college, but the students who go to college end up deeply in debt. A huge chunk of that govt funding goes to the research profs in the form of grants that never penetrate down to the student level. Take farm policy. Many more billions of dollars, none of it going to the 40-head family farm dairy operation. Where's it going? To multi-million dollar agri-business operations. So neither the college tuitions, nor the survival or extinction of family farms are a result of free markets. But instead of the govt intervention helping the little guy (If we're going to suport anybody I'ld prefer the small entrepeneur and the citizenry), it goes to the top.

So, if we're going to run a more interventionist economy, and a more social-welfare society, fine - but our track record suggests that it will be those who are at the top already who benefit the most.

Private rewards and public losses isn't fair to anyone.

Pretty Buildings

2008-11-28T12:29:00.001-05:00

Starting from my own enjoyment of seeing first generation and working class students succeed in the college environment, I have to wonder not only about diversity as an end in itself, but pretty buildings too. There was a time when college students lived on dining hall food and in dorms that resembled army barracks. A drive through most college campuses today will reveal living suites, apartments, and often a brand new or freshly revitalized student center with wonderful eateries. A lot of this started happening when I was in college, with the new student union opening as soon as I graduated (sour grapes!).

This is no “kids these days” screed however. One has to wonder how kids who, as soon as they graduate are going to be living with their parents or in ratty apartments, can afford to live in such nice digs while in school. The answer is debt and the resulting money flowing through the collegiate system.

At the student level, student credit availability drives up prices. Instead of being a bridge for those students who almost can afford college, most students end up taking on some kind of debt. This means that everyone is approaching the system with more money. This in turn drives up the prices all across the market. The unintended consequence of this is that everyone ends up going to the same schools they could have afforded anyway, everybody just pays more.

At the college level, they are competing for students who have more money to spend. And to remain competitive with each other, they enable their own financial creativity to attract students often including new buildings. Colleges find they must do this to remain competitive, and even thoroughly mediocre colleges often have beautiful facilities. They may only have one weekend to wow a high school senior touring colleges, and the place must 'feel' right to the prospective students.

Then again, walking on campus as faculty, one starts to think about it a little differently. We are not providing the students an education but rather a college experience. But what is a college experience for? I think of the goals of education being twofold 1) teaching the liberal arts and sciences, and the ability to think critically, and 2) make the students more employable. I am not sure that either of these goals is necessarily served by a college experience.

The real sadness is that the goals of education need not be expensive. But a college experience is. And looking at students taking on non-bankruptable college loans to live in luxury for a few years while they are so young is very disheartening.

Goals or Means?

2008-11-21T12:27:00.001-05:00

Some years ago, I attended the swearing in ceremony of the new president at a college where I was teaching. He spoke of his intentions for the school, including broadening its diversity and beefing up its study abroad program.

Some relatives attended with us, sitting in the audience. After the ceremony, I met them, and one of them said something to the effect of 'I didn't hear anything about education or about the students?' Being in software he continued, 'Can you imagine if Bill Gates stood up as president of Microsoft and failed to speak of software or users?'

As much as I hated to admit it, the kid had a point. So either it was assumed to be understood by the audience that this president's spoken activities would further the ultimate goals of the school – or these means had become goals in themselves.

Another school where I taught had a diversity committee that recommended – surprise – a full-time diversity position. The school implemented this recommendation, and posted the head of that diversity committee into that position (in essence she wrote her own position). Then they hired an admin for her, and someone to fill her old slot. In the pursuit of diversity, this college added two full time positions to their overhead. This was a tuition-driven school, so essentially, they committed themselves to four more students every year to cover these two new positions.

This forces the question – Are these new positions furthering the goals of the school?

As a professor, I appreciated helping first generation or working class students get through school. College opens such a broad arena of possibilities to them – how could I not enjoy it? But I also knew that many of these students were taking on unconscionable amounts of debt. In this environment, are those two extra diversity hires helping these students? Is more study abroad helping these students?

It's hard to say. The goals of education are assumed to be furthered with diversity as a means. But break down that big word diversity into its constituent elements on campus, and it is hard to see how it actually is helping those students taking on debt to fund those positions and programs.

Research Companies

2008-11-19T11:38:00.001-05:00

I added a link list of research companies on the right hand side. For those of you who are thinking about an internship, now is the time to start looking. Click through and start cold calling!

Since I just did it, the links may not be perfect. If there is a problem with one of the links, please email me. If there are companies I should put on this list, email that also.

And what a year it has been!

2008-11-18T10:38:00.003-05:00

Who could have guessed?

Holy Moly!

The world is coming apart at the seams. And it seems we hope Mr O can stitch it back together.

We'll see!

Converging structural problems

2008-06-09T08:06:00.002-05:00

A very interesting news cycle this morning.

10 minutes on fuel prices, including Jim Kramer. The gist of the discussion was 'up supply' via opening up more drilling at home, and 'reduce demand' by driving less. While it is debatable exactly how much opening up more drilling at home would help - and it would almost certainly at least help a little, it was was more refreshing to hear it broken down into supply and demand finally. We so deeply wish there was a bad guy here - the mercenary oil companies, the big bad Saudis, the greenie weenies who won't let us disturb the caribou - but none of this seems to be the case. If we are indeed nearing a peak, this is what I would expect it to look like.

How high it can go is anybody's guess, but there must be some point at which demand destruction starts to set in seriously. 150$/brl and 5$ fuel? We'll see.

But that led into a whole discussion of the economic ramifications of such pricey fuel. And this is where it gets truly nerve-wracking. Higher fuel = higher inputs into EVERYTHING, higher shipping, higher production costs. And then there are the food costs which right now are being attributed to ethanol.

So the discussion that followed THAT one was how to save money during tight times. Which is the right thing for individuals to do, but which also will drag this whole thing out even longer.

Meanwhile, the housing crunch is still on, with the credit crises rippling through finance.

Going on Strauss and Howe, we should expect a 4T to feature structural problem reaching a tipping point. And here we seem to have that happening. In tandem with that, we would also expect the public mood to change - and rather suddenly. It seems weeks ago, that this same Kramer was saying there would be no housing crunch and that the economy was fine with all his usual gusto. Further, Obama rocketing through the Democratic party completely catching the old guard completely off guard fits the model too.

Interesting times.

Review of Kunstler's World Made by Hand

2008-04-24T07:58:00.003-05:00

Kunstler's new book is an interesting read in several ways. As a piece of dystopian fiction, it certainly stands on its own two feet. The book opens in an upstate New York town after the collapse of modern society. In its rurality, the slow pace of life almost reads like a Wendell Berry of the future. Through the book we find however that it is neither necessarily peaceful, nor idyllic. Through the story our protagonist is drawn out of the shell of his former life and into a leadership position pulling his reluctant community together. This eventually sets him up for the dominant conflict of the book. The main antagonist is the group of remnant bikers living out by the dump/junkyard, who make their living scavenging useful bits and pieces from the garbage of the 20^th century. The book certainly has a plot line and drive, and takes the reader through some disturbing visions as it wends it way toward the end.

As a piece of peak oil literature (for lack of a better term) it is quite interesting. The peak oil crowd wastes a lot of energy, and sacrifices some credibility, debating when the peak is/was/will be, trumpeting that every drop in production proves their case. Also among the peakers is a concurrent discussion of what the current economic climate portends. These include Kunstler who holds forth on his blog that as oil peaks economic activity also will peak, and the result will be a permanent contraction. Whether this is true or not, only future history will say for sure. Further, Kunstler also made this and all the other associated arguments for what peak will imply as we roll over the top in The Long Emergency. Instead, Kunstler (wisely) sets this piece of fiction far enough into the future, that such speculation surrounding the peak itself isn't really meaningful. It is clearly meant to be a fictional exploration, and I will focus here on some of the deeper implications I read into Kunstler's work.

Of interest is the political organization Kunstler provides. It is positively medieval, made up mostly of small chiefdoms with no official organization left in place, except for the one mad official in Albany who is attempting to hold the government together with his typewriter. Instead we are faced with the biker chiefdom, the capitalized farmer's peasantry, the religious organization of brother Job, and the monopolized mobster trading post down the river in Albany. What is implied that the religious leader is named Job and the last remnant governmental official is both mad and impotent?

Economics and labor in an energy scarce environment are dealt with as well. The protagonist is a carpenter and a musician, who used to be a computer professional. He barters his work to meet his needs, as do others in town. As life gets more difficult, more of the characters join up with the different factions around town. What trade is done with money is done with precious metal coins. These became valuable when the dollar was hyperinflated to oblivion – not surprising if one is familiar with the peak oil and associated literature. Production and trade are intensely local. Long distance trade is by barge shipping only 30 miles down the river. Many/most residents have gardens and very many of them are employed in the labor of agriculture.

The capitalized farmer is one of the more pleasant prospects to join with, and represents an interesting character himself. He runs a profitable little enterprise, providing food and shelter for his laborers. The laborers bring their families and move onto his place. It is feudal, but his is a generous reign. Importantly, he was 'peak aware' before the calamities hit and prepared for life after oil. Thus he was well capitalized, had important hand tools, and had been stocking up on heirloom seeds and old fashioned farming methods. When the calamities hit, his was one of the few places with excess capacity and the ability to help people.

The religious zealot is more sensible than I would have expected Kunstler to portray him. His followers are clean cut and helpful, but as we find out later, they are not afraid of violence when necessary. The religious group has traveled far, escaping persecution and trouble in the south, then in the DC area, and finally finding peace in upstate New York. Sort of a Mormon migration eastwards if you will. They take over the abandoned high school and start converting it to their quarters. Their numbers add a critical mass to the town which had been drifting aimlessly prior to the start of the novel. While the religious group is sensible and helpful, they are not above pure weirdness. This is illustrated by their building essentially a beehive for their queen bee oracle who appears to have some sort of supernatural powers. I have not figured out yet what the she means in the novel.

The criminal element is represented by the biker crowd out at the junkyard. In the novel they are scavenging off the remnants of the 20^th century economically. They would appear to stand in for the less savory elements of modern society. First, they have taken over the junkyard/dump by simply by force. There is some discussion that the junkyard/dump should be a resource for all, but they stepped up and monopolized it first. Second, they are entertained by the most crass forms of public entertainment. In the absence of the vulgarity of TV, this crowd improvises, creating its own low-brow entertainment.

In the sociopolitical vacuum slowly being filled by these feudal peasants, religious compounds, and tribal warlords, our protagonist is (accidentally) instrumental in rebuilding the community that is the optimal solution to the problem of oil peaking. Our protagonist finally leaves his sadness for the past behind him, and takes over the leadership role forced upon him. He is instrumental in setting up peaceful relationships between the town and the farm, as well as the religious group. He is also key in eradicating the power base of the criminal element at the junkyard, removing their threat to the town. Personally, he also accepts the family responsibilities thrust upon him in the novel.

The novel thus resolves the central conflict and shows a path forward. Kunstler does not sugar coat the difficulties that his vision suggests. People die for lack of medical care, protective city, state, and federal security are non-existent. The lack of easy travel and communication that such a scenario forces on the town is extreme in its isolation. At the same time, by rebuilding communities, focusing on local production and trade, and building relationships with our neighboring communities, it seems Kunstler is suggesting that there May be a way to deal effectively with the problem of energy scarcity.

Farce

2008-04-24T07:52:00.003-05:00

I just heard of another research firm which is passing off a content analysis of provider-client dialog as " quantitative ethnography"

Bahahahahaha!

Check out these guys

2008-02-05T22:35:00.000-05:00

These guys built a raft out of garbage and floated the Missouri and Mississippi, til the Coast Guard stopped em. What a hoot.

Lucas Brunelle video.

2008-02-02T10:06:00.000-05:00

His other work:
Lucas Brunelle

Speaking of Michigan - Here's a video of blighted urban core

2008-02-02T09:14:00.000-05:00

Thing is, structural reallignments happen. That's what happened when we switched to a suburban model of city development. That's also what happens as we move from one sort of economy to another (think extraction to manufacturing to service to information-drive).

Detroit is where the city model and the economic switch have led to chunks of the city being quite literally completely abandoned. John Hartigan (Sociologist) has written an article called "The Greenfields of Detroit" discussing the disintegration of the urban core.

Another ebbing tide

2008-01-15T12:28:00.000-05:00

Consider for example the presidential candidates in Michigan yesterday. Most were saying that they cared about Michigan and Romney for instance saying he wouldn't rest until Michigan was fixed.

But seriously. Everything about Michigan just screams fundamental rearrangement. We are not going to get the 60s back:

As goes GM, so goes America (ok that one probably still holds - unfortunately).
Big unions.
Big pensions.
Steel from Gary.
Ore from the iron ranges of Minnesota.
Middle class strong enough to afford all those cars, and support union wages and pensions.
Oh yeah, and oil from texas.

What's changed?
Unions are shaky - and quite possibly part of the problem
American car companies are loaded with debt and entitlements
Gary is toast
The iron ranges are deeply depressed
China does quite a bit of the manufacturing for us here in the US
Perhaps the largest emerging markets in automobobiles are in India and China, where airbags, nav systems, and cupholders (although certainly cool) are not the issue. Affordability is.

So what is the rebalancing that can make Michigan work again?
How do wages come down to be competitive?
How do American autombobiles, and American manufacturers compete against furren'ers?
How do American manufacturers aim for the future that includes climbing energy costs, dealing with those debt and entitlement burdens, and changing markets abroad?

Seriously, these guys are stoned if they think there's anything they can actually do to fix this. Good thing the US govt has money in the bank to help with some of those expensive retraining programs they are talking about.

T4T

2007-12-20T09:01:00.000-05:00

Pat, you hit the nail on the head with my interest in saecular turnings. I am actually an active contributor at T4T forums.

Strauss and Howe deeply influenced how I think about Sociology, and have me thinking quite a bit differently than other analysts out there on today's issues.

First, many sociologists fall hook like and sinker for linear development of trends, often missing the cycles discussed in saecular thinking. As such, what we see now are books discussing the demise of community, the move towards completely atomized individuals in a society with nothing holding it together (in a Durkheimian mechanical solidarity sense). See for instance Putnam's Bowling Alone. In that book he talks about diminishing community and also talks about the things we can do to change that. Of course, if one is a SnH reader, then the way to change it is just to wait. There will come a time when the tide turns and ppl tire of atomized, individualistic communities. To think we can actually change these tides smacks of hubris.

Similarly with suburban sprawl. If you read a Kunstlerian critique of suburbia and its architecture, he makes a fair argument that even our community infrastructure is oriented almost entirely towards the private realm, and dismissive or even hostile toward the public (or community) realm. I find his critiques to be motivating, but I also can't help but think that this is something that also is likely to be influenced by saecular turnings. How things will change we don't know, but we may expect that a fourth and first turning to redirect ppl's attention towards community and away from the individual realms. If that happens, then there is no reason to think that everything from attitudes, orginizational membership, morality, all the way to community infrastructure to be affected.

Now, following the banking and housing issues going on today, many are hoping that these things will just blow over, or be handled by the Fed. I am certainly not a better analyst than most of those out there with good reasons why this should not dint the economy too much. I also am hesitant to say that this is going to be the end of the economic world as we know it. But, based on having SnH in my back pocket, I will say that this is likely to be worse than most expect it to be, simply because everybody that remembers the last truly catastrophic economic problem are mostly dead now. It will be worse than ppl expect simply because most ppl think "it's different this time."

On hold

2007-12-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

After wondering and thinking through the various possibilities for what seems like years, I feel like we have entered a period of wait and see.

Debt/finance issues
Energy
Infrastructure

Well, the subprime thing is keeping us all entertained with volatility in the markets. Doomers pat themselves on the back one day for their clairvoyance, and the cheerleaders laud the inevitability of American capitalism the next. My gut feeling is that this isn't over, and I can't say that the few months since it all started have changed our economic situation any, really. So we'll wait and see.

Energy too seems to not be very exciting. Except recalling that oil was NOT priced in the 90sUSD range a year ago, and 93 gasoline was NOT 3.40 a year ago.
Similarly, Prudhoe Bay has not been rediscovered, the North Sea has not been rediscovered, Ghawar is not her sexy teenaged self, and Cantarell has not crawled back from the edge. China and India are still there, with their billions. So, we'll wait and see.

And truthfully, infrastructure, well I just don't know. Detroit has greenfields in its abandoned core, but Dallas is planning billions in I 35 upgrades. We'll just have to wait and see.

On all of these things, my vibe is that we are far from fundamentally sound, but perhaps I am using too conservative a measure. Once again, we'll just have to wait and see.

Of course the election ought to be entertaining.

Thanks Pat

2007-10-03T15:50:00.000-05:00

It does appear that at least a few interesting things are going on, relating to structural issues.

The first is the subprime banking collapse. This would seem to have the potential to cause some serious trouble. The cheerleaders say all is well. I am not sure I believe them though.

Another interesting tidbit is an investment letter that has been pushing water infrastructure. Apparently, 2006 was a record year in terms of sewage leaks and sinkholes, and 2007 is on track to be another record year. The water and sewage infrastructure is 60 years old in a lot of cities, with a design life of 50 years.

And just today, another sinkhole swallowing million dollar homes in LA.

So, the things that I think are interesting may be showing some movement. Of course, any of these things will also take some time to play out. Wait and see.

And Brittney lost custody of her least 'uns.

People Read This?

2007-08-03T12:44:00.000-05:00

Hello all! (or 3)

Turns out I have readers - all of whom are my family and mentioned it at the family reunion.

Seriously though, I am always a little embarrassed to find out that ppl read what I write. Of course you don't write for nothing, but there is always the risk that ppl won't understand what you're saying, or will take things differently than you mean them. And so on.

Part of the reason the blog has been slow lately is that most of what I do at work is proprietary. Suffice it to say though that qualitative sociology can be valuable.

Another reason is that so much of what interests me structurally is still in limbo. Our energy situation has not changed, nor is it likely to in a short term. It will be interesting to watch the long term, because the structural elements are (or at least seem to be) pretty straightforward. Along those lines it will be interesting to see how our society adopts - and I mean this infrastructurally too.

The war grinds on. I still don't know why. I don't think anybody involved with it agrees why either. Either we are fighting the terrorists over there (which place had nothing to do with terrorism, or WMD, or, or, or...), or we are fighting for the oil (the net result of which is to reduce global supply, drive the short term price up, and waste 500 billion that could have moved us quite a ways toward energy independence)? None of it makes much sense.

The infrastructure continues to decay - witness Minneapolis. But we have neither the money nor the interest in addressing something as boring as bridges in our politics. Dikes, bridges, what else might need fixing? I told my dad that I was sick of gay marriage and abortion, and the first politician who mentions boring old infrastructure will be who I vote for.

And even the Protestant Ethic which I posted about so many months ago still intrigues me. I am completely turned on by listening to the motivational tapes and speeches of the MLM set (Mary Kay, Quickstar, Equinox, Arbonne) and their focus on godliness. Especially when combined with the discipline and religiosity of Dave Ramsey, you have Weber's Calvinist Protestant Ethic right here and now. There's something about the Christian right and how it interacts with businesses that is intriguing. However, that's an article that I still need to write. Someday.

Thanks for reading guys! Look forward to seeing you all at the next reunion.

public sociologist

2007-04-03T23:28:00.000-05:00

I just came across the competition.

averypublicsociologist.blogger.com

When I looked into a title for this column, I used public sociologist. Partly I was trying to carve out a space in the digital world, partly I was trying to supplement what I was doing in the universities. Partly I was trying to raise the visibility of sociology to the public (yes I realize I was indulging myself with that one).

Part of the problem with being a public sociologist is that Sociology does not want to engage the public. In a meeting discussing the death of Symbolic Interaction (SI), one of my favorite perspectives, I ran into a very heated gentleman of the boomer academic flavor. I have run into him, or someone like him, at many conferences. Those who wanted to save SI said we needed to return it to its grassroots radical beginnigns. I couldn't help but think that these guys were out of touch. The grassroots is not radical in the same way it was in 1968. Further, when I suggested that SI would be well served if we could build demand for the major by helping our students find work (more demand for soc grads = more demand for soc majors = more demand for soc profs...), I almost started a fight. Turns out that our fellow Boomer SI Sociologists (at least some of them) are proud to "not be running an employment service".

So then I reread Burawoy's speech where "public sociologist" was laid out. Allright - it was the first time I read it. But it turns out that Burawoy's take is decidedly left. So, if you want a piucture of what the American Sociological Association president had in mind in mentioning the "public sociologist," read the above kid's column.

I can't help but think we (the discipline) are misguided. The paying public has turned much more conservative since 1968 when these guys were in grad school. What good does it do us Sociologists to maintain a track so different than the one the public is following? Well we get to feel special, wear earrings, and bitch about republicans - but otherwise no one is listening.

OTOH, in private industry, I am currently involved in a variety of qualitative research projects. These projects retail from between 25k to +300k each. People are willing to pay quite a lot for our research. It is our own fault if we let these opportunities go by. We need to overcome the disconnect between academic sociology which at times disdains to deal with the rest of the world, and which doesn't care if its graduates can get jobs, and sociological research that ppl are willing to pay for.

Hope the revolution goes well.

Thoreau

2007-01-13T07:36:00.000-05:00

"Most men lead lives of quiet desparation"

This is one of HD Thoreau's most famous quotes. But truthfully, I think Thoreau is a jerk.

If you've been following, you will have noticed the air of 'quiet desperation' in the characters I wrote about below. This was intentional, to illustrate a few things that I think Thoreau missed.

First, while many are indeed 'chained to mortgages,' they are simply putting a roof over their and their families' heads. Chained to mortgages is certainly better than homeless, and you'll note that Thoreau's time at Walden was not in a tent. Mortgages are just how we provide housing in our world, so why would Thoreau be so frustrated with that?

Second, the idea that spurred the series, are dreams. What roles do they play in ppl's lives? Why do they matter? All the characters below must have some sort of dreams, but are they realized, and what does that even mean?

Thoreau is deeply loved by social critics, and elements of his thought run through social critique today. What is it about regular ppl's lives that so many of the intelligentsia deride so vigorously? What is it about having a relationship, a house, kids, a job that is not ok?

I don't have an answer to that, but I do know that if we were to query ppl about the lives they are leading, many would not see them in Thoreau's negative light. Many would say their families, their homes, what they've done in their careers are things they are proud of. Indeed these elements are huge symbolic elements in the country music genre (you'll notive the intelligentsia doesn't like country either).

Another aspect is compromise, or even sacrifice. And there is no one living a fully realized life who hasn't had to make compromises. Once you let other ppl into your life, you immediately start compromising, or you don't have relationship. When you bring ppl into the world, the sacrifices and compromises get larger.

It's telling to me that what gives ppl struggle is also what gives life meaning. This seems obvious. Why cannot Thoreau see that being chained to a mortgage is also providing for your children? And if your children are important to you, then those mortgage chains mean something differently - and that meaning would be opaque to Thoreau.

The reader is left deciding what balance between 'dreams' and real life he wants for himself.

I was talking with my father about a certain very famous cyclist. This is a guy who has followed his dreams and wowed the world. He provides wonderful inspiration for millions. Yet, this is a man who has been through a marriage and a half (including Cheryl Crow! who passes that up?) in pursuing his dreams.

Not that I could ride like him, but I rather prefer my family. I like not having to split weekends with my children. I like my little house. And even with its ups and downs, I (mostly) like my career.

So, Thoreau can bite me in the ass!

Men, 2

2006-11-02T23:28:00.000-05:00

I knew a fellow who really thought ppl didn't have dreams. Or they never followed them. He used the two ideas interchangeably.

I also knew a fellow who followed some dreams. And they failed.

This guy was a cop in the 60s in the San Diego area. As a result, he didn't really like hippies, since he had to deal with some of the unsavory ones he ran across. As a human, he was an interesting character. He could really get ppl to talk, and as a result he spent many hours listening to ppl's stories all over the country. He himself was vulgar, and quite un-pc, telling stories and using profanity in public that would make the delicate cringe. He squeezed his wife's butt in the kitchen, as well as at restaurants, he flirted with waitresses, and at the asian restaurant combined that with ethnic jokes that were entirely inappropriate.

But that was Chaim. He was rough, but as warm hearted as could be. And proud.

He left San Diego to start a business in his home town. In the 70s, he moved his family back to a frozen valley in North Dakota and opened an office supply store.
He and his wife ran it for a couple years, before it finally went belly-up. I am not privvy to the details, but rumor has it that he wouldn't take the bail-out on the business loans, because his conscience wouldn't let him. As a result, his wife got a job assisting at the local catholic school, and he took a job driving truck. While his kids grew up, he spent his time driving OTR. Two weeks on, three days off. For years and years. His youngest child was well out of college by the time he retired.

But still, given the loans they had to pay back, they struggled financially, and the family back home saw the electricity turned off. In January. In North Dakota.

By the time he could retire, he wanted a pickup he could put a topper on and go camping with his (now elderly) wife. I met them when they were still in their early fifties. Last time I saw Chaim he was looking old.

All sorts of questions occur to me. After all those years, how does he get along with his wife? Do they still like each other enough to go camping on the open road? Was his obligation on those business loans worth missing his children growing up? I don't know. And I never asked him.

But back to the first guy. He thought ppl didn't dream. Or couldn't dream. Or didn't follow their dreams. One of the things he saw that set himself apart from others was his ability to dream up a crazy vision, and implement a strategy to make it work. Work harder than everyone else, go further than everyone else, make the deal noone else wanted to make, and you could attain those dreams others wouldn't actually reach for, and which only rich ppl could afford.

One of his dreams was a vacation cabin filled with family and little children sleeping in the rafters, a band on the mezzanine, a roaring fire in the fireplace, and a cuddly wife toasting her toes by the fire. He imagined his folks hanging out there, perhaps even retiring there. He imagined growing old there himself.

In attaining this dream, he got a good education, all the way to the masters level. He racked up 100k in student loans. He took time off after his education to build the place, but may well have missed passing his professional exams in his field because of this time off. When he has friends there, he gets antsy, and whenever his siblings bring their children they are on a short leash. They are not really as welcome to roam the woods as he would like to suggest. They are not really welcome to screw around in the house built so tough they can't break it. In fact, the kids look bored. I never saw his parents spend a lot of time there either.

So his dreams don't look like dreams to me. In fact, I might think they were a nightmare, despite his discussion of how noone else dreams, or goes after their dreams, or is willing to sacrifice for those dreams. I see a lonely guy, aging, without making the personal relationships necessary to create grandchildren, whose family doesn't visit that much, whose career is stagnant in a vacation area, and who has enough student loans that he now is a debt slave.

These two fellows are father and son.

Men 1

2006-11-02T23:08:00.000-05:00

I saw G outside of his house and drove around the block to tell him the news. I pulled up and got out. He was trying to set pinstripes on a truck with this father in law. He was like this. He often did things on his own. His own parents had died, his mother after a long and protracted decline that included her staying at his and his wife's house as an invalid. One time he told me "you think kids make you old, but it's not until you have to take care of your parents that you really age."

Any way, I really liked G. He was one of the more solid guys I have known. He gave me a cut rate deal on a used bike so I could ride with him. He had a garage full of bikes, a classic jeep, and two cool trucks for himself and his wife. In an aging neighborhood, his house was a standout of flowers, a fountain, and landscaping.

Here's the kicker. It was all paid off. All of it. And he was a middle school art teacher. When he bought his house, he bought it on a 15 year loan and busted ass to pay double for 7 years. He told me once that his house was a 90k house in a 60k neighborhood. He saw the general decline in the neighborhood, but it wasn't all bad. As near as I could tell, he wasn't overly concerned. It was paid for.

On the bike he could kick my ass. A spry 52, he was lean and fast. He was a little small for drafting, and he rode three or four days a week in the summer. He raced in past years, and was still fast. When I started riding with the road club, he would drop off the back to haul my sorry butt back up to the peloton. There was only one year that I could keep up with the group, and I still don't think I was faster than him that summer. He was 17 yearas older than me.

So I pulled up to get out and tell him I was leaving. Even though I hadn't seen him a lot over the last year, I was going to miss him. He was one of those guys that was as solid as could possibly be. I told him I was taking work on the east coast. There was more upward potential. More money. More opportunity.

G wished me well and said he would be sorry to see me go. But it was what his father in law said that really struck me. It was pure Indiana.

Always remember, there's more to life than money son.

Silent Sociology

2006-10-19T21:47:00.000-05:00

In my field (Sociology), the best wave of writing was done by the Silents and came out in the 50s and 60s. The boomer writing that followed just doesn't do it for me in the same way.

I'm thinking of writing along the lines of
Berger and Luckman's [i]Social Construction of Reality[/i], [i]Sacred Canopy[/i], [i]Invitation to Sociology[/i] and many others
Mills' [i]Power Elite[/i], [i]Sociological Imagination[/i] and others,
Mills' english translation of Weber and others,
the resurgance of ethnography in community sociology,
and so on.

That period captures something interesting going on in Sociology. It was a cusp between the functionalists and industrial sociologists of old (How can we tweak the industrial system to make it more efficient?) and the neo Marxists (What is the lived experience of being a factory worker?). But the neo-Marxists brought an energy into analysis, and a perspective that had been ignored for 50 years. They blew fresh air into a stale discipline, but at the same time, the old analyses weren't completely discredited. By the time I hit grad school, that old stuff had been reduced to ridicul-ous strawmen. And the new fresh analyses were starting to feel stale. The thing is though, is that the originals weren't stale, just those who fancied themselves in the newer tradition.

Talking with colleagues, I have wondered why this is. Why that tigh focused period of such good writing? On the one hand, the old stuff was a little shopworn. The new was fresh, and needed, and ripe for exploration. Forty or 50 years later, the neo marxists feel pretty pathetic. Sociology is ripe for another revolution.

Randall Collins [i]The Sociology of Philosophy[/i] suggests that academic generations are about 35 years long, or the working life of a scholar. The neo marxists have certainly been going at it for 35 years. Strauss and Howe's Silent Generation kickis in here too. These guys would have seen the good stability of a solid social system in their youth, and they would have seen the benefits of opening up to the awakening as solid adults. This might have given them a perspective that made for such good analysis. The boomers that follwoed BELIEVED the awakening line. The GIs that preceded them BELIEVED in social stability. But the silents in the middle would have had a decent, fairly mature, vantage point from which to see the costs and benefits of each.

At any rate, the time has come for a new generation of writing in Sociology.

South Bend

2006-10-17T12:28:00.000-05:00

Hey Michael, that's great.

The only problem is that South Bend is a lot like Omaha. It's a fine place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit.

If you are there over a football weekend, that's enough to see on its own. You will also have to call Lula's coffee shop (just off the south east corner of campus) and find out when the Irish band has their open rehearsal, if they're still doing that.

You also have to visit the university village and building h, just for history's sake.

I'll dream up some stuff and get in touch.

Mike

Cycle Theory

2006-08-24T12:31:00.000-05:00

More on cycle theory. I have been wondering for some time if there would be a point where a crisis would be made clear, and the various fractions within our society would pull together to overcome that crisis. It would seem that this is necessary to overcome a crisis and pull into the next cycle. Going backwards, the depression and WWII seem to have forced a consensus on the population. But before that was the Civil War. No consensus. And before that the revolution. There was a consensus on the American side, but this was a civil war too, except that the yanks won that one.

But, perhaps it doesn't go that way. A recent T4T discussion focused on the idea that in fact, crises worsen the culture war splits. Because now these things matter a lot. What appears to be consensus may simply be historical hindisght. After all, there were those that didn't want the US involved in WW2. There were those fighting for the South and all it stood for. There were those that thought the US should stick with the crown. In hindsight the losers' side looks obviously wrong.

This puts even more weight on the question of what is going on now? There are a number of outstanding issues right now, that different factions think are threatening our well being. The terrorists hate us for our freedoms. The American Way Of Life is non-negotiable. Climate change and global warming are here and hitting faster than even the doomers thought. Peak Oil will knock the the resource structure out from underneath the west. The Empire is fighting wars abroad and can't afford the bread and circuses back home. The housing bust will start the next Great Depression.

Debt, resources, infrastructure decay, military/foreign policy do all seem to be pertinant issues. Whichever "hits" first or worst may be arbitrary, but could propel its 'proponents' into the winning position as it were. I mean: if oil declines and massive changes befall Americans, then the Peakers will clearly be the winners forty years from now. If, OTOH, something terrible goes wrong with terrorism, the middle east, or anything surrounding the "East vs. West" cluster of issues, then the Clash of Civilization ppl will be the clear winners.

Whatever turn out to be the structural problems we face, we may expect Grey Champions to arise in accordance with that set of problems.

This article Priest and Prophet shows an example of two different characters who would be such candidates. If we were to have an environmental Fourth Turning, these guys would be the kind of guys with the vision to lead us out of it.

** this does not mean I advocate or agree with anything either of them say necessarily - just the role visionary thinking would play in such a crisis**

bobby mcgee

2006-08-21T05:37:00.000-05:00

I miss home. This is funny because it's the idea of home. The first hint of summer cooling down brings it on. It is:

The sound of geese around the lakes at Notre Dame, the (very light )smell of manure around the cornfields by the dam sites in Omaha. The smell of cool dew in the morning. The fall light, yellow grass, and sound of crunching gravel at a truck stop off I94 in Minnesota. The cold steely Lake Superior splashing against the backdrop of autumn trees.

So home is all these things, but it isn't what you think it is. I couldn't go back to my hometown, nor would I want to. Maybe someday - but that's not what missing home feels like. Home is an idea, and for me at least, nostalgia is pining for that idea. I have a hometown, I have people, I have 'roots'. But when I feel homesick it is for this amalgamation of moments in my life. All of them were embedded in larger situations that were not perfect. They were just contextual life. But take these little snapshots out, and you have a 'home' to miss as life notches one more summer into it's belt. Perhaps missing home is as much ackowledging our progress to the final exit as anything else.

From the ashes of WW2

2006-08-12T07:07:00.000-05:00

"From the ashes of WW2 rose Israel" is what Sharon said on TV somewhere recently.

I have been wondering for some time about what might be on our horizon. It is clear to me that we are going to face energy and related challenges. I also strongly suspect that there may be financial issues we need to face as well. In thinking about Iraq and what might be going on there, I wonder about the role of resources, and money. Half of our taxes go to the military, and pieces of the B1 bomber come from every state in the nation so that it never gets shut down. The free-market US allows no-bid contracts for Haliburton to cover the support and infrastructure in Iraq, a company that seems to have a history of almost a century of getting government contracts and then overrunning the bid many times over.

Well, what's one supposed to think after all?

The conservatives think future challenges are a result of radical Islam. I'm not sure if I buy that thesis, but I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand either.

Both of these patterns are patterns that were set in the last go-round. The military-industrial complex was our (new) solution to the crisis of WW2. FDR's welfare-statism was its own response to the crisis of the great depression.

Haliburton, government contracts, bankrupt social security and medicare programs are all results of the patterns set in the war or postwar period.

Further, The US's transportation system and economic dominance since then are both results of access to tremendous amounts of cheap oil at home (until the early 70s) and later abroad. This creates a constellation of interlocking pieces all eminating from the postwar paradigm, and relying on that postwar paradigm.

So it is easy to see that in global chess, we need the oil. Our military needs it, our economy needs it, our indebted consumer needs it. Even if our military activites in the Middle East result in expensive oil in the short run, it positions us nicely for the future when Indian and Chinese demand, for their own economic growth, seriously challenges our own. If it gets too expensive, the whole thing slows down. If other nations bid up the price so that it seriously harms American consumers, then the whole economy slows down. If they get it and grow, perhaps our sole hegemon status is changed. What if the US economy is on a downward trajectory (outsourcing of both blue and white collar jobs, consumer demand and factories over there - not here, consumers indebted and unable to consume) for the next 40 or 50 years, while over there larger nations go through a period of growth similar to our 40s-60s? Then our position in the world will change no matter what. Period.

But Sharon's statement got me thinking. It is clear that Israel and everyone else out thatta-way doesn't necessarily get along. Clearly the middle east plays into the outlined scheme above - but how, and why?

"Out of the ashes of WW2." Of course. That's it. The conservatives may well be right too in worrying about culture clash and religious-national ties. Those guys are on the same timeline. They are dealing with a "problem" set up during WW2 - the creation of Israel. Everyone is trying to deal with it the only ways they know how, except since it isn't working they are trying harder and harder, and opinions are calcifying on both sides.

I don't know. I don't have answers, but I don't even know if I'm asking the right questions. What I am seeing though is that the left could be right about resources and military, the conservatives could be right about culture clash, and the libertarians could be right about debt and imperial statism all at the same time.

The only thing that does seem clear is that something is going on, and people are beginning to notice.

"Running on Volts, not Fossil Fumes"

2006-06-16T08:05:00.000-05:00

This was a window sticker stuck on a Toyota Prius I saw the other day. Man we got a long way to go.

First, unless this is a 'hacked plug in' prius, guess where those volts come from? Yup gasoline engine. duh.

Second, Priuses are what environmentalists drive to assuage their consciences. It carries the appropriate 'green tax' of costing more, and allows for a (false) sense of moral superiority.

Why would I say such a thing, especially after spending so much time discussing oil? Because the problem isn't sport utes, it's our transportation system in general. Bashing sport utes is just plain silly, unless you manage to ride bike everywhere, or walk. The transpo structure is built for a certain kind of behavior. Acting outside of that behavior is very difficult (riding, walking, mass transit). As long as the system stays the same, the problem is there. Getting everyone into Priuses only tweaks that system a bit, making it run a little more efficiently.

We can solve this problem, but not by buying priuses. Buy a prius because it makes good economic sense for the kind of driving you do. If we care about energy security, then we need to improve rail, and perhaps electrify it. We need to move toward more electric vehicles in the city, including the ones we already have like golf carts and such, we need to think about power (clean coal and nukes) and we need to zone so that cities are more walkable and bikeable. These things together can move us toward independence and security. In the absence of that, well, I hope your sticker makes you feel good.

The US Political Climate

2006-06-15T10:18:00.000-05:00

Selections from a letter I wrote to a friend. When can we have a useful politics?

You've got some great points here. I've been thinking for a while the best way to respond.

First, it sounds like you work at my school, but I never see you on campus! Seriously though, that kind of experience is one of the reasons I am frustrated with academics in general, not just at my school.

On politics here at home. I don't know that it would matter if you were here. We have a very strange climate. On the one hand, it is as if there is nothing going on in the world. There is no sacrifice, no sense of trying to accomplish something. The best we get is some version of 'if we stop shopping, the terrorists have won.' What utter BS.

At the same time, underneath that veneer, the politics is absolutely vitriolic. I listen to the am talk radio sometimes, and those guys are astoundingly mean. Just flat out mean. The left is not any better, reading the Daily KOS reveals the same thinking from a different perspective. The one thing that neither side is interested in is actually debating or discussing with the other side. 'Anyone who thinks differently than me is clearly an idiot' kind of rhetoric. I hate it. Particularly since I don't have a strong leaning one way or the other, all I get from the climate here is turned off. It's honestly not worth voting.

So if you were here, and you were pissed about the war, you could say something, or go to a protest, or something. At which point you would be immediately marginalized and de-voiced into either the left or right gutter. Just like a bad game of bowling. That's what it looks like to me. Any reasonable question from either side is immediately dismissed by the other side, and all you've left is a shouting match.

But that brings me to the point of that blog you commented on. Truly, neither side agrees on what problems we might have, why we are fighting the war, or anything.

The far right really wants this to be a christian country (!?!).

The moderate right sees this as a clash of civilizations a la Huntington. And they luv the military.

The moderate left seems to think that Afghanistan was necessary, but Iraq was not. They may or may not think of the petro-economic implications.

The far left thinks that Bush is Hitler, the mess in the middle east is genocide, and so on.

Personally, when a conflict is important enough for the Prez's children, then I might enlist or allow my children to do so. Not before.

Why we cannot look at real structural problems and address them with some debate, dialogue and compromise is beyond me. It's either gays, abortion, ten commandments in the courthouse, or the mainstream media is downplaying success in Iraq. WTF is that?

Where is a discussion of energy security? And it's transportation implications? Where is a discussion of governmental and personal profligate debt spending? Where is a discussion of the shocking fact that (regardless of what one thinks of illegal immigration) while we are fighting a war in Iraq, we cannot secure our borders against a third world neighbor and a bunch of unarmed peasants? Where is a discussion of a Corps of Engineers that can't build a dike? Or a FEMA that can't deliver a bunch of house trailers?

We are exposed to myriad structural weaknesses in this country. A few of the proper wrong events and we are in a world of hurt. But hey, massage the numbers and the economy is great. Gay marriage is threatening the very social fabric. Bush is hitler. Global warming is gonna get us. How can we get our guy back in (or keep the other's guy out)?

Truly, what are we paying these fuckers for?

Weber's Protestant Ethic

2006-06-08T23:33:00.000-05:00

David Brooks in On Paradise Drive makes a good argument that in many ways all of middle class America is driven by imagination. This is a Weberian point that culture can drive economy, for Weber argued that indeed the Protestant Ethic is what developed into the America Work Ethic. Sociologists will understand this, others should read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I recommend both books.

But we see this ethic elsewhere in American society too, and in a purer form than Brooks finds in modern suburbs. This is evidenced by Dave Ramsey's radio show. Dave Ramsey is a very popular financial advisor for regular people. He sells books, does appearances, has tutorials, and has a daily radio show. His main point is that debt is bad. All of his financial advice is driven by the bible and his own bad experiences with money.

It's pretty straightforward stuff, but it boils down to 1) live on less than you make, 2) save up for expenditures, 3) save your money, 4) most importantly - always avoid credit. If you can follow this advice, you are on your way to wealth. It requires frugality, acrifice, discipline, goal setting behavior. As I said, it is bible inspired (the borrower is slave to the lender), and there is no embarassment or shame for having achieved wealth. This despite those who think the lesson of the New Testament is to give up all your property and hang it with a long haired hippy in sandals. [ FWIW there are places on the web to find long essays on why the bible advocates capitalism - and it's always fun to start an argument about whether Jesus was a communist or a capitalist].

Of course, Weber would recognize this immediately. It is his Protestant Ethic. Live cheap. Save your money. Invest it in your business or your investments. It is all about aesceticism, discipline, work as vocation, and following the bible. Reinvest your profits and you're golden.

So here in the middle of the red states, where we are very near to many evangelical, bible-informed Christians, we find Weber's Protestant Ethic alive and well. This alongside Brooks' illustration of how elements of the same cultural strain can be seen in even the most areligious upper middle class suburbs.

We might say that we see various iterations of the protestant ethic applicable to the working and upper middle classes. Brooks' "History of Imagination" for the upper middle, and Ramsey's Total Money Makeover for working folks.

Cool.

Reds - Blues again

2006-05-27T09:01:00.000-05:00

I do not agree with many critics that the Red Blue problem in the US is overrated. It would be nice if the map were as purple as some say. Here is why I do not agree, and what I see as concerns for the future.

The Red/Blue problem is not simply a political problem about who votes for whom. It is a cultural problem. It is about how we define our America, and this is visible in the approach to Iraq.

Iraq is not Vietnam, but our approach to it does have some echoes of that earlier conflict. For better or worse we are now engaged in a ground conflict with insurgents. The people who are in charge and running this war are the same people who were fighting the last one, or protesting it. It should not be surprising that the responses we hear now echo those from Vietnam.

And what are the responses we hear? Well, Michael Savage and his people are calling for overwhelming force, damn the civilian casualties. You win the war then mop up. Be aggressive, brutal, and unmerciful against the insurgents, and after they are routed worry about nation building. Yes civilians will get hurt, but this is war, which sucks no matter which way it is run. Better to fight it as if to win it. In this view, Bush is sucking precisely because he is not going in strongly enough. This is certainly a reasonable approach to warfare.

On the other side, Neil Young has written a whole album of protest. He is at his best doing what moves him most. Midlife boredom does not make as good an album as righteous anger. The album is fun, and at one point calls for impeaching the president for leading us into war on a pack of lies. There are two points to note here. First, I doubt Mr Young was ever open to the idea of war in the first place. So the innocent citizen thing is a little disingenuous I think. But secondly is the call to impeach Bush. There is a little tit for tat going on here. You don’t like something my pres does, so you impeach him – well, I’ll do the same to yours.

So both sides are ramping up along the same battle lines laid down in Vietnam. The right –more power, more strength, more military. Savage’s example was Dresden(!) after all. The left, the same characters even, putting their moral outrage into the artistsic venues, but without much real approach to solving the problem.

Incidentally, I’m not sure which side has a more unrealistic version of the perfect world we are working towards. The right seems to want the US to be the global hegemon, in charge of the world, but not throwing much welfare to the smaller nations. Sort of a cross between the big bad daddy, and the older brother. We will kick ass if you get out of line, we will help you get yourself together so that you can help yourself, but it’s up to you to do it. In fairness, they do think this will lead to more peace and prosperity globally. But really. In pursuing this dream, we spend a shocking amount on military. Face it, most of our taxes are not going to welfare moms. They are not going to corporate bailouts. They are going to supporting the military. This is an acceptable cost pursuing this global vision. The right are Hobbesians. At home then, the Reds want you to be self reliant, and work for your rewards. American is a place where if you dream, and risk, and bust ass, you can accomplish almost anything.

The left seems to be out for Rousseau. If everyone was prosperous, and happy, the natural goodness of man would allow for everyone to just get along. We would use something like the UN to mediate conflicts. When there are problems, we can all get together and talk about it, make a compromise and everyone will live with it happily. At home, the Blues want the general prosperity to be shared with the unfortunate. To them, America is a place where the richest country in the history of humankind ensures that nobody starves, nobody has to live under a bridge, or out of their car, and nobody dies of stupid diseases because they can’t afford the medicine. Crushing poverty shouldn’t exist in this era of wealth.

To my understanding then, the Reds and the Blues are philosophically very different, they have two different understandings of what America is. In and of itself, this shouldn’t be that troubling. The problem is that in pursuing their own vision of America, each side is less likely to play the compromise game that is the beauty of our government. Rather than lose an election, each side sets up trying to impeach the other as soon as possible. They are increasingly less likely to use the rules and compromise to achieve their America. As I’ve said elsewhere, as a group the idealism of the boomers (as a group – not the individuals) is troubling. They are not fighting politically, they are fighting ideologically. And since they are fighting an ideological battle, the rules matter less. They perceive the stakes to be higher, so they act as if the stakes are higher, and then the stakes are truly, much higher.

Where does that point us in the near future? The Reds see Iraq as an expression of the clash of civilizations, and is not going to allow for the security of the US to be compromised because of a few leftover hippies. More Americans shall not die because the Islamo-fascists hate us. In the words of Nicholson’s character, “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Since that is the war they think they are fighting, expect little compromise. Would you?

The Blues see nothing short of a hijacking of the United States to make large (esp military) corporations rich, to ensure the well being of our elites, and to control the world’s resources, all at the cost of regular citizenry both at home and around the world. Since that is the war they think they are fighting, expect little compromise. Would you?

Now that both sides are moving into higher powers in the government, things may be interesting in the near future. These are two competing ideologies, with two competing visions of America, and two competing visions of how to achieve their visions. They may not be willing to compromise. I expect more strife along the Red Blue lines before that conflict is settled.

Graduation

2006-05-18T06:59:00.000-05:00

We gradiated em!

We graduated a great senior class this year. The ceremony was marked by a speaker who said he would be brief, but wasn't, girls who haven't worn anything but flipflops for three years tottering at the top of the stadium steps in heels, and the usual scripting for such an event.

It would have been sad, but I didn't really get to see my favorite students. Lost in the crowd, I didn't see the ones I would miss. I did see many students though, and I am happy to see them moving on in life. It's also fun to meet all their parents, quietly proud, and looking like the grown-ups these kids will grow into.

The ice road picture is apt for graduation. Where's the road going? Could be to some exotic little island. Could be to some prison where you're trapped the rest of your life. The road itself is half the experience, and you're not sure at all whether it will hold, or drop you and your vehicle into the icy depths below. Sounds like life. Good luck grads.

As I stated earlier, when the graduation ceremony doesn't move you at all, it might be time to look for other work.

Ice Road

2006-05-06T15:37:00.000-05:00

Not much going on - or too much

2006-04-26T20:13:00.000-05:00

Not many updates here. I'm not dead, and haven't given up. Just nearing the end of second semester, so I've been quite busy.

I took three undergrads to the annual meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society in March, and they did a bang up job. One presentation covered the preliminary results of the 'Meth Lab'. Another presentation covered the structure and experience of undergraduate research teams, including both the Iceland project and the Meth Lab. One of the students presented her senior thesis, a qualitative analysis of international immigrant work teams at her hotel. I also touched base with some old mentors and friends in the discipline, which is always very nice.

I presented the progress on the Methamphetamine research to our client, the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Methamphetamine Demand Reduction Group last week. They were pleased with our work so far, and I gave them a tentative report date of June. At that time they are going to have a press conference anyway, and it would be nice to release our work to the public at that time.

And, we got one of our (allright Psych's) students into the Notre Dame Sociology PhD department next year. Good luck to her.

So, I've been busy doing all sorts of sociology, keeping me away from internet sociology. I will say more when time allows.

Not to Get Rid of Cars...

2006-02-14T09:37:00.000-05:00

The problem of cars is one of costs and benefits (good god I sound like an economist). Right now the costs are hidden (100 deaths per day, parking req's built into zoning laws, single-use zoning, fed funding of freeways...). The benefits are manifold. We now enjoy mobility never before seen in human history, which is benefit enough.

But, in a market where costs and information are not transparent, what happens? Mutation. Now, our trains are a joke. Airlines are good, but costly for fuel, while rarely turning a profit, and amid frustratingly crowded airports. Our cities are sprawling in ways that make ppl nervous. And other consumer options wither up and die.

The point isn't to get rid of cars, but to promote more efficient ways of transporting. That will give us more efficient cities - more mobility, quality of life, etc for the same cost. Or if the peakers are right, maybe similar quality of life, with less fuel.

Getting rid of cars as an academic or political goal is rather futile, and even arrogant (and this coming from a bike guy). And if the neighbor wants to drive an SUV, that's his choice. I'm not comfortable means-testing ppl's needs for cars - that's why I hate the anti-sport ute bashing.

The problem is that this is an environment that has been promoted at the cost of consumer choice, at the cost of consumer financial well-being, and at the cost of civilizan safety. In the long run it has put us over a barrel militarily, and now leaves us in a situation where everybody driving priuses (prii?) really isn't going to change anything.

However, mixed use, mixed transport, neighborhood-oriented cities, do move us in a direction that is more efficient, more organic regarding individual market choices, and more robust regarding international resources. Think of it as diversifying your urban portfolio. Loading up on sprawl may be similar historically to loading up on enron. Or not. Who knows?

Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac

2006-02-10T12:10:00.000-05:00

I revisited Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”, and the Ataris’ cover. Part of why I like this song is that I always liked resort towns in the fall. They are still beautiful from summer, but there is a bittersweet-ness to them. I spent enough time on the lake as a kid to appreciate the “summer half blonde” and other references. Especially as the summer ended. If you had enjoyed a good summer, one of those that sticks with you for the rest of your life, then the quiet beauty of fall truly was bittersweet. It was over, and beautiful, but gone for good.

At the time Henley’s version came out, I was not really old enough to understand the “dead head sticker on a Cadillac” reference. By the time the Ataris covered the song, “the black flag sticker on a Cadillac” was entirely too poignant.

There is a generational spin to this as well. The song came out in the early 80s and was sung to the boomers as the summers of their youth faded. Thus the dead head sticker.

Strauss and Howe open 13th Gen with a beach scene, at the end of summer. But instead of the bittersweet feeling of something beautiful ending, you get the feeling of those that came to the party too late, and are left to clean up the mess. They use this analogy for GenX (and the very late Boomers). The Boomers found this pristine beach. Huge party, bonfires, beautiful suntanned beach kids, lots of beer. By the time the Xers arrive, the beach is dirty, beer cans, burnt logs, and litter everywhere. Party’s over, and to see the beauty you have to squint through the junk.

What a funny coincidence, that the metaphor Strauss and Howe settle on, is the same one Don Henley sings about as the Boomers’ adulthood finally settles in for good. This is the one that Xers were listening to as young teens, and this is the one that the Ataris cover, capturing the existential angst of X perfectly, only by changing the song to include a Black Flag sticker. I guess that’s how culture works.

Modernity Inevitable?

2006-01-26T10:39:00.000-05:00

Since the Iceland trip, I have been thinking about modernity. The Icelanders are closer to their roots than we Americans are. Some holdouts lived in turf homes as late as the 1930s. They also live in a marginal environment. It is beautiful, but they are isolated, and rural, and the land is not productive like the Midwest here.

They actively court modernity, taking every idea that might work and giving it a shot. From tourism to almunium smelting to the original fish the Icelanders are willing to give development a chance. In Akureyri where the study was, there has been much consternation over the 'decline of industry' and associated jobs. While they seem to be moving into the service economy (the whole point of the study), there is no guarantee of that. There are towns up there that are losing everything as their last bit of fishing quota is sold off. North Iceland and the American Midwest are facing similar issues.

Anyone who has lived outside the major cities and loved their land over the last 30 years has watched with sadness the ever progressing sprawl, malls, subdivisions. It seems unstoppable, but if that was your dad's farm, and you couldn't pay what the developers would, then it was toast. I bring this up not to complain about development, but to show that there is a certain felt inevitability about it. You can't stop the WalMarts, you can only move farther away, and watch the land get chewed through.

But this inevitability might be an illusion, resulting from the local economic conditions. As industrial captialism moves through its waves of boom bust and first second third sector economies some local places suffer the opposite of that inevitable development. Some face seemingly inevitable decline.

Look at Detroit. As recently as the 50s and 60s this was a new center for Black culture, a mighty economic engine that powered mid century America. What's good for GM is good for America.

So it goes. Detroit is now the poster child for scary urban chaos in movies like Eminem's 8-mile. "I've spent my whole life in the steel mills down in Gary, with my father before me I helped build this land" sings John Mellencamp. South Chicago, Buffalo, East St. Louis. All the industrial rust belt cities decline because the manufacturing wave of industrial capitalism washed past them, while nothing took its place. Lots of places here in the US are places where it could be said, modernism has abondoned, or declined, or whatever we might say it does.

And looking around the world, we find whole camps of ppl who suggest fixing the world's problems by bringing modernism to the natives. But since there's no guarantee of modernism working equally well here at home, it might seem wishful thinking to think modernism is going to work equally well out there. Some places out there are going to do great. But not all, and probably not most. At times, the natives don't even want it, but just because they do, doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Bobos or boomers?

2006-01-17T10:54:00.001-05:00

This is a short that I wrote a little while ago.

Bobos Refined

Public Sociologist

publicsociologist.blogspot.com

Brooks’ engaging work of “comic sociology” provides us with some valuable tools to discuss modern society (Bobos in Paradise 2000). Bobos, or bourgeois-bohemians, very nicely captures the flavor of an emerging international elite. There are two points that I would like to discuss about Bobos.

Bobos or Boomers

Brooks points out that the collapsing of the bohemian into the bourgeois may be the result of the rise of an economy and class structure based more on education and achievement, and less on breeding. This may be the case. I would however posit that there might be another factor involved as well.

Bobos are simply grown-up Baby Boomers. Brooks recognizes this, but it needs to be restated. This is a generation that gained a sense of social consciousness through the late 1960s. Boomers underwent a distinctly Bohemian transformation during this time period.

This generation then gained a sense of business acumen and enjoyed a taste of material success in the next stage of their generational career. The yuppies of the 1980s epitomized this drive for material success. Boomers acquired distinctly bourgeois tastes at this time.

It is a little hard to categorize the 1990s just yet, but the end result is that all that work in mid career finally paid off. So now we have a generation of mid- and late-career folks who, as a whole, have these very contradictory moral drives.

To outsiders, the hippie-cum-yuppie was an ideal type worthy of the worst derision. This is a character that, while young and idealistic, demanded that the world stop and change to suit him or her. As soon as this character graduated from college and had to pay bills, he or she sold out to the highest bidder as quickly as possible and then reaped the consumptive benefits that earlier college education provided.

Of course, this hippie-cum-yuppie probably doesn’t exist. Those who stayed true to their hippie ideals went on to become anthropologists at community colleges. Such an individual managed to maintain her ideals, while being able to make a reasonable living. Teaching in community colleges allowed her to avoid selling out to the rat race of academia. She wears dangly earrings made by native people to illustrate her commitments. This is one of the individuals in Brooks’ “Superiority Complex” (Atlantic Online May 2002).

Those who kept quiet in college went on to become successful upper executives in Payroll departments. Finally extricating himself from the misery of leftist-dominated colleges of his era, he was free to hone his business skills and advance toward material success. Eventually he gets tassels on his golf bag, a Porsche, and a great watch.

From the outside then, the Boomers generate a reputation that individuals within the generation most likely don’t deserve. The generational character is more than the sum of all the individuals within it, and is certainly not a picture of specific individuals within it. The anthropologist and the payroll executive only comprise pieces of the greater whole.

Now this aggregate of Baby Boomers is mid-life and mid-career. Boomers have as much money now as they ever will. The values hammered out early in their experience have influenced elite culture. Thus the Bobos are really the Boomers who as a generation have worked out the relationship between anti-establishment values and material success. While I argue that the hippie-cum-yuppie is only an ideal type, it is still an interesting tool. It might be helpful to think of the ideal-typical character (we’ll call him Boomer) as a mildly spoiled and naïve, but intelligent person growing up. Off to college, young Boomer becomes the radical his ideals tell him to be. He eats it up. Then reluctantly graduating and waffling through his twenties we find Boomer falling into a career that his college prepared him for while he wasn’t looking. As a spouse and kids come along, Boomer pays more attention to his work and realizes that he likes to exceed there too. Entering his forties, he finds himself owning a career, a minivan, and three kids, and wonders how that happened. As his mid-life crisis hits, aging Boomer realizes he has lost his moral certainty gained in college. He also finds that he dislikes young punks an embarrassing amount. After all, he did once advocate never trusting anyone over 30, and now he can’t stand anyone under 30. Boomer and his family try to ensure that despite their material success and despite their seemingly average consumption patterns, they consume responsibly.

Enter the marketers. While Boomer seems to have a split personality, it turns out that you can sell him and his family a lot of expensive stuff if you can appeal to both sides of his personality. Not unlike sport utility commercials that convince the buyer that owning the rugged humvee-jeep-Xterra makes him both a unique individual and a member of an elite community, marketers selling to Boomer need to resolve the tension between having a lot of values, and simply having a lot, as Brooks himself puts it. This is why Seabrook, in Nobrow (2000), can so accurately point out that the focus on consumption in contemporary America is not on quality, as he claims it once was, but rather on authenticity. Authenticity is a moral claim in a world where lifestyles are picked out of a consumer catalog. This is reflected in Brooks’ anthropologist: she is just so damn earnest.

Bobos Displaced

But there is another point about Bobos that is worth discussing. That is the focus on a sense of place. One of the driving forces behind Bobo culture is the pursuit of a sense of place. This idea of place infuses academic work, environmental groups, free trade movements, farmer’s markets, clothing companies, sport utility design, and perhaps most importantly of all – marketing for all of these things.

This sense of place is an extension of the environmental consciousness of Bobos. Think globally and act locally. As such, it may be a distinctly bohemian piece of the Bobo equation. But the prices ensure that the bourgeois isn’t far behind. Brooks’ $10,000 dollar slate shower and Patagonia’s $140 recycled pop-bottle vests ensures that the consumer is going to spend a lot of time indoors and away from the slate paying for these items.

A sense of place is a wonderful thing of course. This hardly needs to be explained. People will be more careful of their watershed if they envision their kids swimming in the local river. Corporations are less likely to create a superfund site downtown if the CEO lives in town. A sense of place will have positive effects on the local environment as well as the local community. People who are rooted have a responsibility to both.

But rooted is precisely what Bobos are not. The economy has changed and is now international. This internationalism forces elites to be mobile. Elites respond by being mobile. Especially in the late 1990s it was fairly common practice to play companies against each other for the most sought after workers, who would move from workplace to workplace and city to city with the best offer. Who could blame such rational behavior?

Kaplan, in An Empire Wilderness (1998), calls these people cosmopolitan elites, and points out that these folks enjoy an international culture that is remarkably similar across the globe. Whether in western Omaha, Silicon Valley, or Bangkok, a good espresso and a nice Thai restaurant are not far away. Kaplan’s cosmopolitan elites are Brooks’ Bobos. These are two different models for capturing the same change in the economy, and the elites’ position in that new economy. They also share the focus on the culture of this new elite.

Kaplan juxtaposes these cosmopolitan elites against locals everywhere. Spending time with these cosmopolitans will eventually yield derisive talk about the local locals. While the elites will never say they don’t like the locals for being poor white trash, this is invariable the issue. Locals don’t share the international experience of the cosmopolitans, they don’t have the broadly cultivated taste of modern elites (‘my favorite two genres are early jazz and late 70s punk’), they are not especially open-minded when it comes to multi-cultural issues, and they are notoriously distrustful of outsiders.

This distrust of outsiders captures one of the essential differences between locals and Bobos. This is an expression of the sense of place that the Bobos strive for. Locals are distrustful because you’re not from here – you don’t belong here. This is simply a sense of place being defined exclusively rather than inclusively. The locals will not tell the Bobos where to go plinking cans along the levy, they will not tell where to drink beer and go skinny-dipping, they will not reveal their favorite hunting spot. This knowledge is the very definition of local cultural capital – a sense of place.

This difference is played out in their symbols as well. In cold climates, Bobos wear North Face and Columbia outerwear. This is clothing that is good enough to climb mountains in, or ski the backcountry in. It is tough enough to handle the grinding of equipment, ice, and granite. Locals wear Carhart coats. This is also clothing that is extremely tough. It is good enough to drill for oil on the tundra, lay brick in the snow, and splice cable during the spring thaw. The difference in these two garments reflects the difference between these two groups. Both are meant to deal with obnoxious outdoor environments, both are very endurable. But there the difference ends. Few North Face coats will ever see the north face of even a small hill, much less Everest. Few Carhart coats will not see mud, snow, and construction sites. The Bobos’ clothing is perhaps a little more ambitious than the locals, as is their sense of place, but it is also underutilized, as is their sense of place. The locals’ clothing is more likely to get used in its intended manner, just as their sense of place is likely to involve real people living in real communities in real places, with skinny dipping spots, plinking spots, and hunting spots.

In sum, Bobos are likely to be dreaming about Everest, Tibet, and Sumatra wearing their North Face parka sitting in traffic. They would like their sense of place to engage here, except that here is so damn flat and boring, and the locals are so obnoxious.

The locals are likely to be planning to stop by Grant’s point, the levy, or the overgrown orchard after work, wearing their Carhart Arctic Coat. They too, may well be stuck in traffic however. They are likely to be thinking that while new industry in town is supposed to be a good thing, it would be nice if all these university types would take their expresso and go home.

Conclusion

I present some commentary on Brooks’ Bobos here. First, along with other societal forces that caused the emergence of Bobos, one of the important causes is the trajectory of the Baby Boom generation as it ages. The culture of the Bobos is the result of the Boom generation going through the bohemian 1960s and 1970s, and then the bourgeois 1980s and 1990s. Bobos are, I am arguing, the epitome of the maturing Baby Boom generation.

Secondly, I explore the relationship between Bobos, locals, and a sense of place. Bobos yearn for a sense of place in their culture, because this is precisely what they leave behind in their pursuit of economic and career success. Where a sense of place does emerge is among the non-Bobos, who are necessarily involved with their families, friends, and communities in the context of their natural environment. This sense of place is not exactly what the Bobos are looking for, in part because in doesn’t reflect the other aspects of their Bobos culture, and also in part because the locals are not dieing to share it with other dis-placed but economically more successful people. Those people are outsiders. Those people are Bobos.

Back home

2005-12-24T07:41:00.000-05:00

The family is back, all safe and sound. Long travelling, but we made it. The kids got home just in time to go back to school for a couple days before break. It was nice seeing the neighbors. Nice being able to understand the signs and conversations around me.

American space is different. First, you don't really look at people here. There, they look until they are done looking - a couple seconds. An American would think they are staring. Second, personal space is much larger here. There, ppl might brush you in the store, squeeze past on their way somewhere, and in a crowd simply bump shoulderes. At the same time, they don't really keep out of the way. On a walkway or store aisle, they will just stop to talk or whatever, and everyone else has to squeeze past them. And their bathrooms are small. You will bump the wall with your elbows, and the same in the shower too.

Americans will not touch you. They take a very wide berth. They usually move their carts to the side of the very wide aisels if they're looking at something for long. You will not touch the walls in anyone's bathrooms. American space is easy to like.

Fieldwork

2005-11-12T09:13:00.000-05:00

We are going to be in Akureyri Iceland for the next 5 weeks. If you are interested in following the progress of our work, please see the sister blog at Akureyri Community Study 2005. Thank you.

Pro Soldier

2005-11-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

It's been said by others, but I will mention it again. Especially after my previous post. But it is possible to be pro soldier and anti war.

Soldiers are young men and women. As a prof, I see plenty of these young men and women, and they are filled with idealism. For those kids going into the service, their idealism puts American freedoms ahead of even their own lives.

My whole job is to stand in front of a classroom and talk smack (Sociology smack, but still). If I want to pick on our political leaders, I am free to do so. If I want to argue the mechanisms of free market economics (after tenure), I am free to do so. As long as it honestly speaks to the students, it is worthwhile.

There are 17 year olds out there who value that right of mine, that they are willing to put themselves on the line to protect it. These kids put their futures at stake for that freedom. I have nothing but the deepest respect for that. Thanks does not capture my debt to these fellow citizens.

That is why it is so important to me that we take these soldiers' commitment seriously enough to engage them only when absolutely necessary. And this respect is comlpetely seperate from the politics of oil.

Thank you. RIP

2005-10-25T22:47:00.000-05:00

We passed 2000 today. We should be careful how we use the lives of our servicemen and women.

Part Time Capitalists

2005-10-25T16:46:00.000-05:00

Part Time Capitalists

Sociologists are well known for being lefties.  Many sociologists are even still Marxists.  I don’t really think a gigantic planned economy would be less problematic than the market system we do have, although I do understand Marxists’ critiques of market systems.  That said, closer to home than whether capitalism is unfairly exploitative is the basic problem that our citizenry appears to be economically illiterate.  Not only do they not understand why a sociologist might be a Marxist, they don’t even understand the theory of basic free market economics.

We don’t as a people recognize that when we buy on credit, we get less stuff in the long run.  Why?  Because the interest has to be paid.  If we were to buy with discipline, in the end we get to keep all those interest payments and buy more stuff.  If we want to be more disciplined, and do without the extra stuff, all those interest payments could be banked, and the interest could work for us.  It is the difference between living as a sharecropper, and living as economically independent citizens.  It is the foundation of Jeffersonian democracy, of free market capitalism.  By having some small wealth in the system, we are going to make smart decisions regarding our resources.  What you work hard for, and follow personal discipline for, won’t be squandered easily.  But people don’t see that.

The same logic applies in a rising fuel price environment.  Fuel prices are going up.  But the best the citizenry can come up with is that we are being gouged by evil oil companies, or G Bush is making a load of profit for his buddies, or those darn Arabs are throttling us again (nice pun eh?).  However, regardless of which of these scenarios might be true, in a free market the wise thing to do is to cut back on that resource.  Period.  Economics doesn’t care if you bought too big a house, or live too far from work, or drive your kids all over town for activities.  The responsible citizen will husband his resources carefully.  He will not make decisions that risk his family’s wealth and well being, and trap him economically.  And yet, that is how the average citizen approaches fuel.  We are not really ready to absorb higher prices, and so hope Bush will bail us out.

The same is true with immigrants.  Regardless of what one thinks of the political implications of illegal immigration, one has to have respect for these guys.  They are willing to risk their lives, sleep crowded into a house, ride bike miles in all sorts of weather, all for an 8 dollar an hour cash job with no benefits, no security, and the risk of being exported.  Why do they do it?  To send some money home to their family.  To work toward a better life for their kids.  To save a little cash and start a small business here or back at home.  This is the essence of free market incentive.  Work hard, live cheap, save up, and accomplish something.  And these guys manage to do it.  All while many native citizens have trouble making ends meet on 60 or 80 thousand a year.  Now, who has the drive, the spirit, the incentive of Real Americans?  Who is making free market capitalism work for them to the best of their abilities?

American “red states” tend to be money losers I’m told.  This is not surprising though.  Throughout the 20th c, the extraction and later manufacturing economies that drove the middle of the country concentrated into fewer and fewer jobs.  Many people stick around though because they liked living here, even though employment prospects are limited.  We can keep the economic carrying capacity of the red states artificially higher by subsidizing them.  So large farms scoop up government money, ranchers can rent grasslands below cost, timber lands are rented below cost, local governments desperate for economic development cut taxes for new manufacturing, the list goes on all the way down to bricklayers who take unemployment all winter long, and people who exist on disability who were injured with characteristically dangerous work.  Without arguing the points of these and other government spendings, it does become apparent that the economies in red states are not free market economies.

Urban areas are similar.  We have witnessed a tremendous growth of suburban development over the last century.  Since WW2 this has been the kind of growth that has been promoted by govt spending policies.  Mae/Mac loan guarantees, loans only for new builds, roads funded by federal monies and property taxes rather than use taxes, federal money to destroy urban and poor neighborhoods to build new freeways, and so on.  The cities we have now are sold to us as the results of selling us what the customer wants.  However, a closer look recognizes that while the customer may indeed like them, they are the result of heavily manipulated markets.

Free market capitalism comes with risks and costs.  The system we have now is not one that encourages citizens to accurately gauge the risks and costs associated with different economic activities.  Consequently we have western state citizens trying to keep the government out of everyone’s business.  We have suburban commuters wondering why they are being gouged.  We have people buying homes with irresponsible loans.  We have well meaning people trying to limit immigrants’ attempts to make and save money.  Everywhere we look, we see American citizens NOT behaving in economically responsible ways, hoping someone will bail them out.  We see American citizens LIMITING individual economic freedoms, for someone else’s “own” good.  We see American citizens being willfully ignorant of their governmental support, regulation, and manipulation of their economic freedoms.

Of course there is a role for regulation.  What’s troublesome however is that people are not recognizing their freedoms and responsibilities when it comes to economics.  They hope to live in a world of plenty without absorbing the risks and costs of it.  They seem not to understand the basic laws of economics and mathematics, which are for better or worse, integral to responsible American citizenry.    Whatever we have here, it is not a free market economy.  But we don’t apparently know this.

We are economically illiterate, even while we are in the middle of a war which, according to the right is to bring the benefits of our economy to the Middle East.  According to the left, it is about petrodollars, transportation, and economics.

Either way, we are part-time capitalists at best.

Madonna

2005-10-24T23:43:00.000-05:00

Newsflash. Madonna thinks American culture is trashy.

I have always respected Madonna. While I was never a huge fan of her music, I felt like I understood what she was doing. When she was rolling around onstage in a wedding dress and crucifix, partly in reaction to her conservative Italian Catholic parents, I was a young teenager enduring puberty surrounded by conservative Irish Catholics. Later when she embraced her sexuality and made soft porn books, I understood that she was taking sexual freedom and experimentation to a certain end point. Although I can’t say I would’ve published those pictures of myself, I understood that she was exploring a sexuality that was accepting and non-repressive. Very respectable, even if somewhat over the edge.

This has been my attitude towards Madonna for twenty years now. I went through puberty, adolescence, and young adulthood not really interested in her pop style, but appreciating the interesting intellectualism of it all. Until now. This weekend Madonna has joined the likes of Tom Cruise in wacko land. She says that American culture is trashy, she doesn’t let her kids watch TV because of it, and understands that we are all spiritually pathetic (and perhaps going to hell?).

Now, it is understandable that she may get a little more conservative as she ages, especially now that she has children. We all are probably a little chagrined by our youthful activities. However, this is exhibiting an almost total disconnect between the old Madonna and the new one. When someone has such a deep change of position, I cease to take them seriously, despite giving them some credibility even if they hold far out ideas in the first place. If they are free tototally disavow themselves from earlier positions, what commitment to current positions should we realistically expect from them? How long before Madonna absolves herself of her new Kabbalah and anti-TV position?

The Kabbalah thing is interesting too. Much of Madonna’s earlier vibe derived from her reaction to conservative Catholicism. How funny that now she has become even more conservative and fundamental in her spirituality. Judaism of course predates Catholicism. Kabbalah is a fairly hardcore version of Judaism. So now the young woman who felt repressed by her conservative upbringing, has become even more conservative.

This dovetails well into Strauss and Howe generational theory. Madonna turns out to be just another Boomer. Totally committed to her individual exploration of life as a young adult, to a detrimental extreme, and then as an adult being totally committed to her newfound conservatism, again to a detrimental extreme. It is as if the one thing this generation completely lacks is a sense of moderation. I am disappointed in Madonna.

Letters to the Editor

2005-09-25T10:05:00.000-05:00

The local paper published the letter below. I had resoved not to send any more in, after my first one was not published. However, they had been asking for opinions about gas prices for a couple weeks, and that morning I had two unfortunate incidents with motorists on the way to school. I was so angry that the letter was not as coherent as it should have been. And there were grammatical mistakes. That's what one gets for writing while pissed. They published it. I felt good. As a silver lining to the fuel prices there are lots of cyclists, including those without lycra, on the streets at rush hour. Motorcycles and walkers too.

Fuel. Again.

2005-09-09T14:06:00.000-05:00

I must write in regarding gas prices. This morning dropping my daughter off at school, I was almost hit twice by Evansville drivers. This after being hit in January, thankfully without either of my children riding with me.

People are wondering what to do about fuel prices. Maybe daddy Bush will cap the prices or something. Econ 101 instructs us that this will most likely lead to shortages, lines, and rationing. Perhaps he can invade someone who has oil. 2000 soldiers and 200 billion dollars later, I am not sure we have achieved greater energy security.

The government should not do anything about gas prices. They will only make the problem worse. We the people need to treat it like an economic problem and respond accordingly. Some people are already doing that. Many working folk in Evansville get around on their feet and on bikes and on motorcycles. Many middle class people do the same. But apparently a significant portion of the town can’t be bothered to respect their rights on the road. Bikes are to be given the same rights and responsibilities as any other vehicle. Look it up in the driver’s manual they give to 15 year olds.

We Americans have confused the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Cheap gas is not a birthright. Economic, political, and social freedoms are. Overconsuming on credit cards, home refi’s and new trucks are not a responsibility. Wise choices regarding our families and our budget are.

We might get what we deserve, even if it is not what we expect.

Im pretty depressed

2005-08-31T21:39:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty depressed about this whole mess. The human tragedy alone is bad enough. There are still ppl out there who haven't had food or water in 3 days. Some of the elderly, sick, and babies must be dieing at this point.

But for a country for whom energy is everything, and whose energy infrastructure is stretched pretty thin, it really scares me to think of the economic implications of taking such a hit. This region is vital to extracting our own crude, to importing crude, and to refining. It could have an impact on winter heating prices. Can the US absorb $600-800 monthly heating bills while motor fuel prices are above 3.00? The population is stretched pretty thin on credit already. What's that going to do to the X-mas shopping season? Where does that leave us?

Can the US absorb the hit of losing that much economic activity in such an important place for however many months it is going to take?

And finally, the management. Everyone knew NOLA was a deathtrap. And apparently the hydro-management funding was cut short to fund the Iraq adventure. W doesn't leave his vacation for three days afterwards, at which point he flies over in AF1. Couldn't this have been averted? Couldn't it have been managed more effectively? I don't know if there's anything W could realistically do, but it doesn't even look like he's trying.

I'm not comfortable seeing the US look like a third world country all day on the TV. It is so depressing, but it is too hard to turn the damn thing off. I don't like thinking, "well, I saw NOLA when I was ten" any more than I like thinking "only got to NY after the towers were gone." My children won't have seen either.

This is so fucked up. And the economic, political, energy ramifications are frightening to the extreme. This could be a catalyst. It's just going to take weeks to unfold.

tragedy

2005-08-31T10:35:00.000-05:00

My thoughts, condolences, and best wishes go out to those who are suffering this terrible tragedy right now. There is simply nothing else to say.

Supply and Demand for Fuel

2005-08-24T15:31:00.000-05:00

Here is a letter to the editor of my local paper. It has been a few days already. I don’t know if they will publish it. The information is readily available in nonfiction literature.

Dear Editor,
Friday’s paper included a letter expressing frustration with gasoline prices, and some disgust with oil companies for price gouging. This merits some discussion.

As individuals and families, high gas prices will no doubt hurt our bottom lines. We should understand the underlying economics as much as regular citizens can.

High gas prices are driven by high oil prices. High oil prices reflect such things as the “terror premium,” political instability, and short term speculation. However, there are still fundamental supply and demand concerns influencing the current prices.

Demand has risen tremendously the last few years. Domestically, the US has moved away from passenger cars to light trucks for daily driving. We have also continued our suburban expansion of the last several decades. This means that Americans are driving farther in less efficient machines, increasing demand.

Internationally, demand has increased even more. India is industrializing at a rapid pace. This will increase demand for oil. China is industrializing even more quickly. The Chinese are growing their economy at around 10% per year and they desire an auto-oriented society. China also uses petroleum for electricity. The demand side of the petroleum equation is staggering to say the least. Demand growth abroad has more than outpaced brisk demand growth here at home.

Turning to supply and delivery, many agree that our petroleum extraction and delivery infrastructure is stretched to its limit. We may not be able to produce more petroleum without global capital investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Infrastructure won’t be built unless petroleum prices remain high enough long enough to assure these investments’ profitability.

Further, excess petroleum on the market tends to be of lower quality than what the US is set up for. US refineries tend to be set up for light sweet crude, not the heavier, more sulfurous “sour” crude. Running lower quality crude though such refineries may damage them.

Finally, there are sober, rational, conservative people who suspect that new reserves may not be able to replace the oil extracted. They would argue that we are soon entering an era of depletion, where oil supply will fall slowly and steadily, by a few percent per year.

Supply and demand are tight enough that seemingly minor political troubles send the price of oil bouncing. In order to increase supply, the whole world is going to have to invest in exploration and discovery, in development of new wells, in increased exploitation of old, and in developing the kind of infrastructure to handle the cheaper, lower quality oils.

We must treat fuel like the commodity it is. When prices are high, we need to substitute and conserve where possible. Find ways to decrease the miles driven by your family by consolidating trips, walking, or riding bike if feasible. It is possible that many will substitute and conserve, leading to lower prices. Longer term decisions include more efficient vehicles, and living near work and your children’s activities. The longer term options are worth thinking about as protection against future volatility. In a free market economy like ours, the individual needs to be informed and act rationally, to protect his or her wealth and well being.

Buzz on Campus

2005-08-22T21:41:00.000-05:00

This time of year is exciting for faculty.  There certainly is a lot of stress and busywork preparing for the semester.  Syllabi not yet finished.  Summer projects not yet wrapped up.

It is also tremendously enjoyable.  There is a buzz on campus as the kids come back.  As a student this was one of my favorite times as well.  I genuinely missed my friends and the kind of summer jobs I enjoyed were strong motivation to continue my education.

It is just as true for faculty.  There are students you haven’t seen in months.  I talked with one of my favorites for 20 minutes today in the parking permit line.  There are the new seniors, all grown up from the kids you met a few years ago.  Some of them have shockingly ambitious life plans.  They can be pretty together young adults after all.  They could even be your friends.

But the real drama is the new freshmen.  Here are these oversized high school kids, with trepidation in their eyes.  They are excited to be on their own finally, and more than a little scared.  Their parents are just as anxious.  They are proud of their kids.  They are hopeful they taught them well.  Maybe they’re just scared for the finances.  But you can see the misty eyes.  I had a friend who said that from day one, parenting was about letting a little bit go everyday.  They have to be their own person at 3 and at 30.  There are few moments when this is truer than when mom and dad have to drive away and leave baby at college.

And think of the life opportunities and ramifications of that moment.  What careers might you do or not do, because you went to college.  Or chose this school over that.  So many people meet their spouse in college, there is a good chance that this decision will lead you down one conjugal path out of many possible.  Going to school, and where, really is a turning point in your life.  When Mom and Dad drop you off, that is the pivot point to that turn.  After that it becomes your life.  What are you going to do with it?

If I failed to get excited at this time of year, I would know the time had come for me to change careers.

Regular People and Academics

2005-08-10T22:48:00.000-05:00

Last week I was having a conversation with an old friend. It seems like we’re not as close anymore, and I was wondering why that was. It occurred to me though, that he doesn’t really get academics. He understands that we teach college of course, and that we are supposed to be doing research. But, as an entrepreneur himself, he really doesn’t understand the rest of it (Not that I do). For instance, our pay is tied to… what? If we publish an article, we don’t get paid. If we get good teaching evaluations, we don’t get a raise. If we teach a lot of student hours, we don’t get a bonus that semester. The only way to up your pay is to play this horrific game of publish and do well here, so that someone somewhere else might pay me a little more, get an offer, negotiate, move. If you tie your pay directly to your performance, the way a union school might, or write for profit, or teach lots to pay the bills, other academics are likely to think that you’re a sell out, or not serious, or something. The only way to get more money for your department is to play serious hardball politics. Get some of your guys into the administration. Serious stuff. No one’s going to increase your funding just because your student hours per prof are high, or your faculty’s publications for the last couple years look nice.

It’s not surprising that he doesn’t understand that part. But that’s exactly where the public really doesn’t understand. Somewhere between the 4583^rd mention of how great it must be to have summer off, or how nice it must be to be able to sit and have coffee Tuesday morning because you aren’t scheduled to teach, you start to get aggravated. This is why academics are sometimes churlish about their work. It is easy to get the impression from general society that their impression of you is that you’re a lazy bastard. “What a great life” they say, and then I think, ‘yeah that’s what I worked for all those years. And it’s still a lot of work. But you’re right, no, I wouldn’t want your job.’ Of course you just smile and bite your tongue.

So predictably, this whole thing started out a couple years ago with me defending tenure to this friend.

It’s senseless. Says he.

Well, it protects speech. Say I.

I wish I could do nothing and not get fired.

It’s hardly nothing, after 6 or 8 years of grad school, a few years on term contracts, and seven years of work, IF you get tenure at your first school, you’re 15 years into your career and damn near 40 years old. And you still get fired if the money runs out, or you sleep with an undergrad. You just can’t get fired for being a Republican.

They should just have renewable one year or five year contracts.

That would be great too, except the good schools are still holding onto tenure. At least the community colleges agree with you.

And so on.

Well this weekend the talk was about gas taxes (a discussion left unfinished and as such, with distinctly the wrong impression), and business.

And this is where the other thing about being an academic strikes me. The right has accused us of having the leftie thought police around, and it’s true that academia is liberal. Sociology has a reputation for being one of the more leftie disciplines within even this environment. But, and this is what bothers me, there is no reason sociology should be liberal, and it shouldn’t be a problem even if it is. The discipline has been used non-liberally in the past, and is just as useful for fascists as for commies. Further, despite the leftie flavor of the liberal arts, the astute observer will note that the fundamental core of the liberal arts is the best of western civilization. Believing in, being committed to, and passing on the best of our western culture, is not necessarily a liberal thing. In fact, some conservative colleges have arisen with exactly this purpose. Thomas Aquinas College is an example. And while the political flavor is definitely conservative Catholic, the education is an excellent grounding in the liberal arts classics.

So here I am, a white male from the Midwest, spending time on the in-laws’ farm, and my friend says to me two related things. Colleges should be turning a profit, dealing with market forces the same way everybody else does, and “while capitalism isn’t perfect, it’s the best we have….”

Let’s look at this. First I don’t really care whether colleges are run for profit or not. The money has to come from somewhere, and the way trustees (and the general public) treat colleges seems to be as some athletic club with a school attached as a fundraiser. (Why did Notre Dame get rid of Willingham? Who gets the highest salary? What is the biggest budget sink in a small college?). But focusing on only the tech side, and treating the liberal arts like some little feel good project is fundamentally missing the point. The monks in Ireland did not sit around copying the recipe for cement during the dark ages, they were copying the best philosophers and theologians of the West. These ideas were the fundamental root core of western civilization. Contract law, individualism, free will, dynamic capitalism, republicanism and Judeo-Christianity are all necessary for our high tech wonder world to work. And so it will be next time around. No one is going to sit and copy the diagram for an 80gig hard drive by candlelight. It will be the best of the modern thinkers.

But perhaps that is a point lost on business oriented tech guys.

He starts later: “While capitalism isn’t perfect…” Everybody knows sociology profs are all Marxists. It’s very fashionable to be a Marxist in sociology circles. My friend knows this. But, while I criticize the negatives of capitalism fiercely, the market system is the best we have. Nothing else seems to be so good at distributing stuff efficiently to an industrial-sized civilization. Some of the worst abuses seem to come from too great a centralization in industry. Economists will argue that this increases fluidity and efficiency, but I see it at the cost of local business and communities. I can’t help but think that the ideal focus for politicians is to rebuild the grassroots economies of their areas. Find a way to make the unemployed into those who have a stake in the system. Find a way to make the laid off into craftsmen and owners. When you look at places where illegal economies thrive, they seem to be places where the grassroots economies have been devastated. Inner cities, deindustrialized cities, rural areas. These are places where the economies are “thin,” if you will. And what happens but the locals start manufacturing methamphetamine, distributing all sorts of drugs, marijuana agriculture, resource re-extraction (theft and burglary). So I’m all for local business development. I’m all for more corner groceries, more Sanford and Sons, more mechanics. I don’t know – whatever skills and needs the neighborhood has.

Here’s why this is funny. He comes to the conversation with the idea that I’m an unrepentant Marxist with no understanding of budgeting or politics. I come to the conversation being one of the most pro-business, pro-markets, pro-grassroots-entrepreneur sociologists on the earth. He talks about making universities rational and profit driven, and I think it would be great if our department was funded per capita. Hell I dare ‘em!. But it ends stale, with no real common ground. And the final end is when he leaves visibly frustrated, when someone else (not me) suggested that we need at least a buck a gallon gas tax. His family had to leave, so the conversation was cut short. No discussion of petroleum supply constraints. No discussion of demand competition from China and India. No discussion of the challenges of bridging the energy gap (is there another side to bridge to?) which even the optimists say is only 30 years off. No discussion of why a gas tax might be better than mileage requirements. How there would be better consumer choice, more transparent costs, and encouragement for the market to start to move toward the best transport options, rather than the ones we impose from the top down.

Instead, the small entrepreneur who drives 900 miles twice a week left thinking only of how a gas tax would hurt the middle class. He was also almost undoubtedly thinking that the two academics in the crowd were out of touch and only too happy to impose their crazy leftie ideas on the rational populace.

And crude topped 65 a barrel today.

Frustrating.

Black Bobos

2005-08-10T17:12:00.000-05:00

So it turns out that Black Boomers grow up to be bobos too. This really shouldn’t be surprising after all. Black Boomers emerged in the sixties with just as much idealism and vitriol as white Boomers did. In the end though, radicalism fails, and stales, and eventually ends up in the politics of authenticity.

What the hell am I talking about? I was listening to NPR (National Professor Radio) last week and found out that former Black Panther Party members are now selling hot sauce. Yup. Hot Sauce.

White radicals in the sixties grew up. And this presented a problem for them. When you commit to a revolution at 20, what do you do when you’re 30? Especially if the revolution seems ever more unlikely? At some point you will realize that you are tilting at windmills. At 30 you might still be extra cool for not selling out. But face it, at 40 if you’re still tilting at that same old windmill when all of your friends now have careers and families and suburban homes, you’re going to seem out of touch. By 50 you will just be pathetic.

‘Bobos’ is the term David Brooks came up with to capture what happened to those guys. At least the ones with the houses and careers. Since you really do have to get a career and children and a house and all that other grown up stuff, you start to focus on the little things. Like Vasque boots, Birkenstock sandals. Or extra-natural stuff in your house –granite counter tops, slate showers. As it turns out, being green is quite expensive. Which is good, because if you spent your early 20s being anti-materialistic, and you end up making some money, it’s going to be quite embarrassing to end up being a flaming materialist.

Somewhere in there, your politics change too. One can’t be expected to be a radical after one has bought so deeply into the system. Private property is not so bad if you’re sitting in a half million dollar mcmansion. Soul searching forces the question “Was I wrong when I was young?” The answer ends up being “No – I was committed to my beliefs (always a good thing).” The focus turns to authenticity. As in “I was authentically a revolutionary.” So as not to completely contradict their youthful idealism, they turn their revolutionary zeal into life’s mundanities.

LikeBen and Jerry’s ice cream. Good certainly – but horribly expensive. In trying to live up to their earlier idealisms, the cows have to be owned by local farmers, and milked to NPR every morning, by old women.

Patagonia clothing company is another of my favorite examples. They use organic cotton, instead of regular cotton (too destructive an agriculture), but prefer organic hemp. Since we here in the US are afraid someone is going to try and smoke the feedstock, this has to be imported from some third world country. Which means it has to be fair trade hemp, and so on. They recycle everything they can. 2 litre bottles for polyfleece sweaters for instance. They use lots of solar and wind power for their headquarters. You can see where this is going. In trying to be the perfectly sustainable company they drive their prices so high, the average person cannot afford Patagonia clothes.

To wear Patagonia illustrates that one is willing to suffer a little for their ideals (I really do like their clothes, but find I only want to suffer enough for a belt). It also shows a certain affinity for the climbers, skiers, backcountry types that the company claims is its inspiration. Here’s why this is important. We might not be able to fix global inequality. We might not be able to save the environment. We might even find our contemporary abundance a tad embarrassing. But, if we use some of that abundance to support a company that promotes fair trade with third world farmers, that does its best to be gentle to the environment, then our pudgy middle aged selves don’t need to feel so alienated from the revolutionary idealist from our youth.

Just as boomers were authentically revolutionary when they were young, they now try to bring their ideals into their daily lives. In a sense, their commitment to their lifestyles, their authenticity as it were, is a measure of their moral worth. For if instead of buying Patagonia clothing, they simply shopped at WalMart for whatever cheapest sweatshop rags fit, they would then be hypocrites. They would be inauthentic. They would be immoral.

Back to the Hot Sauce. There was much for Black Americans to fight for in the 1960s. There still may be. I won’t say – that’s their battle after all. But time moved on and those windmills aged just as fast as the revolutionaries did. However to hear Bobby Seales proclaim that revolution really means evolution, and that somehow this evolution is tied to hot sauce, well that makes this Xer giggle. Of course there is plenty of good in hot sauce. It might be recipes passed down within the culture. It illustrates the importance and goodness of using your skills and selling your product as craftsmen. It provides great role modeling for a group that needs it. And it is wonderfully sensual. It is the opposite of Marx’s alienation.

But, I don’t know. It’s kind of funny. At least the attempt to tie it into the earlier radicalism of the Panthers. Over the course of your life, a man leads many different lives. It might sound less funny to just say: “We’re selling hot sauce now.”

Daniel-son

2005-07-27T18:39:00.000-05:00

So, it's been a busy summer, and I've been thinking more than writing. I put up a couple of postings I had been working on today. And then this one, which I've adapted from a forum posting. This focuses on GenX culture. In thinking of generational theory, I hew pretty close to the Strauss and Howe line

Yesterday I was washing the car. Even waxed it too (it's about that time of year). Every time, literally everytime I do this, I hear Mr. Miagi in my head. Now, the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that daniel was a perfect xer and that movie caught the essence of the generation.

So here's an outcast, the poor kid. Folks divorced, he's with his mom. Not accepted in his new town, which is a run down post industrial dump (how's that for an accurate picture of 80s cities). And what happens? All the cool kids get their rocks off beating him up. Where are the grown ups? I dunno. The grown up associated with the cool kids is himself a dangerous psycho lunatic. His mom would like to help, but coming of age as a man is not really her forte.

So he goes to find Miagi. Since he's an immigrant he is really out of the cycle. All of the training focuses on daily chores (the lessons of life are in the real world). Wax on wax off. Don't fight on the street, take it to the competition. Work through the pain. Win the girl.

Lessons:
No one will help you. But the really wizened might give you the skills to help yourself. Those skills best come fom real life. Defense is better than offense, but as long as someone else opened that can of whupass, might as well dish em out a big serving. Keep it on the playing field. Root for the underdog and achieve for yourself.

Risky Business

2005-07-27T18:13:00.000-05:00

It's funny, but we humans have a poor grasp of risk. This is worth noting in an era of extreme sports, car surfing, living on the edge, and so forth. We say that we understand the risks we undertake. But I do not think that is so.

Listening in on cycling forums, especially mtn biking ones, gives us a clue. A few weeks ago witnessed a terrible tragedy in Moab, Utah. A family started out riding the trails there, and the day ended with a 15 year old daughter dead, and other family members hospitalized.

I read about this on a forum, and the responses were telling. The first were cold and heartless, focusing on the supposed lack of preparation, the stupidty of being out there, one poster even nominating the family for the Darwin awards.

This is important because it focuses on the idea that risk can be contained. Many of these folks don't see themselves as statistics. The dangers of mountain biking, rock climbing, back flipping on dirt jumps, and so on are contained because these riders have the skills, the experience, the preparation to avoid having these things happen to them.

Then it turned out, horribly, that the father was one of the forum's regular posters. Further, he was one of the most safety conscious of the forum. He was one of the most experienced of riders, and had taken his family on plenty of trips. In short, the whole family was experienced, and certainly prepared. They knew what they were getting into.

The forum talk predictably turned toward consolation, and sympathies. As it should have. Knowing that the rider would have been experienced and prepared meant that folks had to switch to their second line of reasoning. "Well, at least she died doing something she loved." Ppl know there are risks to these things, and sometimes bad things happen.

But do you think that kid feels that way? Do you think the parents feel that way? I don't know and won't presume to speak for them, but I can imagine that a shorter ride seems like a better idea in hindsight.

It is a terrible tragedy, and my heart goes out to the family. They do make an interesting example because the line of reasoning among the other riders was so clear:

1) Idiots shouldn't do it.
2) If something bad happens, they died doing what they loved.

But after the fact, is that true? I don't know but I sure do wonder.

It seems clear that this line of reasoning mentally deflects a scary-as-hell truth. The best sailors go down. The best climbers freeze atop. The most prepared riders run out of water and dehydrate in the desert. The most conservative road riders get hit.

And in truth, the father's story read just like a sailing disaster. One thing happened. While that could be dealt with, it threw the rest of the system off a little. Which led to another thing. Then another. Until tragedy was staring them in the face. No system is so robust as to be failproof. But many systems are good enough most of the time.

Now, in the realm of risk awareness I do a class exercise. Ask who knows someone killed in 911. A couple hands will go up (here in the midwest). Who knows someone who had West Nile disease. A couple hands go up.

Here's the kicker. Ask who knows someone who has died in a car wreck. 70% will go up. Ask if you know more than one person, put both hands up. And suddenly the classroom is a forest of outstretched arms.

Then I ask them "So what do you really need to worry about?"

Thoughts on Human Nature

2005-07-27T18:10:00.000-05:00

When I was in college, the school decided that their liberal arts mission would be “Exploring the Human Condition.” I never figured out what that meant when I was there.

But I have a different vibe nowadays. However, it’s not the grandeur that many focus on. It’s not the humanistic achievements that so much of the liberal arts is grounded in. Instead it focuses on the gloomy side. In short I can’t believe the amount of debasement and cruelty we humans are capable of. Examples abound. Medieval tortures and executions, Shariah head and hand choppings, tribal punishments. All that human creativity directed towards hurting each other as painfully as possible is sometimes astounding. Why do we do it?

One answer is that is simply life, or sometimes it is simply war. All that gives me is a yeah but feeling. Yeah but what a crappy answer. That implies that it is simply part of being human. Since that’s the best answer we have, I guess it’ll have to do.

Other, more optimistic folks, will point to the great things humanity has accomplished. But that in no way makes the negative “worth it.” It simply states that the equation balances out. Hmm, that leaves me cold.

Others live in the hallucination that somehow, we moderns, we westerners, are different. Would be nice if it were true. But let’s face it. We’re human too. Our nation started as a religious experiment. How much blood was spilt in pursuit of the city on the hill? Then the US genocidally depopulated the land it wished to occupy. All the while building much of the nation’s wealth on the backs of slaves. This doesn’t make me a US hating liberal. Just an honest guy.

But what does it feel like to experience this stuff? What is the experience of having your ear nailed to a post while you’re whipped, until you are cut free? What is the experience of standing on the verge of the 90^th story thinking of your family but knowing you can’t stand the heat another 30 seconds? What is the experience of having a burning coal placed into your kneepit and bound in until it cools – because you ran away from your husband? What is the experience of being a 7 year old girl, watching your family murdered, your little brother raped and murdered, and yourself raped for weeks? What is the experience of watching the cavalry gallop down onto your little village, with your grandparents and your children in the village? What is the experience of hearing the bombers and looking up only to see the world explode as in Hiroshima or Dresden?

I guess this is where god would help. It would feel good to think that there was some greater plan and all this human suffering actually meant something. But what if it is just the nature of humanity? Our cruelty and creation might be no different than other carnivores killing their prey so their young can grow.

That thought will make you existential quickly. Especially realizing that you really have no control at all. Japan invaded China for reasons that no citizen of Nan-King had anything to do with. And in the invasion, butchery and slaughter were the good parts. Imagine the cruelty of having to rape your daughter, which fathers were forced to do. Imagine having to choose which of your children to leave in the school occupied by terrorists in Russia last year. How does someone deal with that? How do you go through life after that? Better to just leap off a bridge.

Then I look at my own kids. All I can think is that if I can help it, not them. But this is knowing that this crazy shit does happen to regular people. On a regular basis. And sometimes it is our people who are doing it.

I don’t know if my alma matter had this pessimistic existentialism in mind when they started exploring the human condition. The existentialism is important though, because in this valley of sorrows, any love, any beauty, any life and creation that can be snatched momentarily from entropy, misery, and nonexistence is beautiful. In short, it’s the little bit that we do have.

Western Nebraska

2005-06-22T20:18:00.000-05:00

I did a bike ride across Nebraska this spring. It was enjoyable, but it also provided a lot of thinking fodder.

First, one of the really cool things about Sociology is the respect it gives you for how different people live their lives. We live in a country of almost 300 million people. Even though most of us know several thousand people, there are huge swaths of our fellow citizens about whom we know nothing. Further, people tend to overlook the differences. So any time you can talk to someone and learn a little bit about a life not like your own, it's a good thing.

In that sense, western Nebraska really rocked. Out in the ranch country, and in the sandhills, there would simply be no one around. A few cows maybe. And the driveways would have signage saying "Joe's ranch 3 miles" right down a dirt road. The folks you did run into were terribly friendly, and respectful. Wanted to see the bikes, respected good equipment. Didn't make jokes about lycra. The standard ranch truck seemed to be a half ton American pickup with a flatbed. Some of the towns welcomed us with carriage taxis, kids on horses. Folks wore cowboy hats, boots, buckles. The whole costume - but it was real. That simply is what they wore. I met a drifter, walking from town to town. Doesn't hitchhike after 911. Ppl are too wierded out. Met folks who ride way more bike than I do. Met small town kids who were certain their little town is both the center of the universe and completely off the map at the same time. Try and tell them to dig it while they can, not too many ppl are living like that nowadays. One town had the oldest, largest straw bale building in the country. It was a church, and many folks interested in alternative building wander through town looking to check it out. Even more interesting though was that these completely pragmatic townsfolk had several other strawbale buildings. Some of them brand new. They're not hippies, they just see an interesting effective way to build a building. And they did. And as I sat in some of the bars out there, doors kicked wide open (no bugs), evesdropping on conversation, absorbing little aspects of all these strangers' lives, I thought to myself, "California wouldn't believe it. New York doesn't even know this is here. Nebraska is flyover country of the worst kind." Of course many of the ppl in Cali and Manhatten are transplants from the midwest. There is only so much work here, after all. But that's beside the point. The point is that here in the United States, we have ranchers, small town kids, drifters, retired ppl who ride bikes for fun, artists, horsemen.

Looking at the last post, the review of Kunstler, it is entertaining to think about how energy plays into things. First, I actually did fuel my travels with cheeseburgers. So you know that much is possible. That knoweldge alone can be a freeing in contemporary times. The trip was supported, so plenty of fuel was burned getting there, getting bags back and forth, setting up food stops, and so on. But at least it is a start - a way to look at the world differently.

On the topics of energy and geography, it was interesting to revisit these old western towns. They are built on a grid, surrounding a town square, retail, offices, bars, all lining the square. There will be single family homes spread around that. The whole thing is entirely walkable. It could be run without modern fuels. And there are still people living in these places. They may look like antique towns, and many of them have not fared well, but some of them are up and running, with real citizens. At least it's interesting to see. Who knows what might happen economically in an expensive energy environment though? Who even knows the energy future? Not me, but it is a fun tool for analysis. It is nice to see people and communities that could probably do allright in such a scenario.

After the ride, we drove into Omaha. My interest in transportation and urban geography stems directly from the experience of growing up in a midtown Omaha neighborhood, where everything a kid could need was accessible by bike. Bikes are about freedom for me, and they always have been. You could get by on a minimum of gasoline in my old neighborhood in the 70s. Well, there has been a tremendous amount of suburban development around Omaha. So much that now I sound like my parents. "When I was young I used to ride out here, and it was just a stop sign at 108th. Nothing but corn by 114th." Now the town goes out well past the 200s. Anyway, coming into Omaha was a tad depressing. For anyone that worries about debt, oil, and a possible real estate bubble, the scenes were nightmarish. The city fathers are, I'm sure, ecstatic. The scene was one large rolling hill after another of brand spanking new homes. Thousands of them on what used to be terraced farmland. It occurred to me that each one of those subdivisions held more people than any of the towns we had passed through. There were unfinished strip malls. Brand new Home Depots and Walmarts that only needed their signage. Another mile out of town and they are pouring the curbs and walkways for a parking lot that's not laid yet. This went on for miles. "Where are they going to grow the food?" I asked my dad. It gets even more depressing, oil aside. My folks still live in a decent midtwon neighborhood, and over the past 5 years, the grocery stores have been closing. Only the new bigger ones farther out are viable. Now it is happening with the retail too. Target is closing and moving out, for instance. The midtown mall that I used to frequent, which was rejuvenated and did quite well in the 80s, is thinning. Like I said, even independent of oil, this creates a 10 mile odyssey simply to do some shopping, essentially killing the convenience of living midtown. Further, that puts my folks on the road more and longer to run the same errands. Increasing congestion. I don't know how to do it better, but I sure can see how we are amplifying our problems by doing exactly what we have been doing for the last 40 years.

There is no real moral to the story except, read everything you can get your hands on, and use it to analyze the world around in different ways. For instance, Peak Oil might be wrong, but it gets you to think about energy flows which adds another dimension to your understanding the world. And most importantly, talk to people. Good sociology comes from a respectful understanding of real people's lives.

Kunstler's Long Emergency

2005-05-18T08:27:00.000-05:00

I finally read Kunstler's Long Emergency. I sometimes have mixed reactions to Kunstler's nonfiction (I've not read his fiction). Sometimes I think he is spot on. His critiques of suburban sprawl hit very close to home for me. He seems to zero in on and bring to the fore issues of development that I experienced as feelings, but never could put my finger on. Since I was seven.

Growing up in Omaha, and visiting the new neighborhoods, why did they feel negative? So empty? Why did these new neighborhoods feel almost exactly the same way my moving company jobs did, with their weedy backlots, acres of concrete for moving trucks, and three story pole barn for warehousing overseas airmen's containers of household goods? Partly it was archetecture, I now realize. Partly it was landscaping too. The nicely manicured grass did very little to ameliorate Nebraska's July sun, and the staked-out saplings were pathetic little sticks compared to the older parts of town.

Sometimes however, I didn't like Kunstler's vitriol against suburbs. Face it, intellectuals hate suburbs. Artsy people too, hate suburbs. Think of the movies alone. The 80s' "Suburbia", "American Beauty", "Edward Scissorhands." TV's "Desparate Housewives". American intellectuals loathe suburbs and all they stand for. As long as intellectuals are toeing the anti-suburban line, I think their analyses are somewhat compromised. And I was never sure if Kunstler fell into that camp or not.

Contrasting intellectuals' dislike of suburbs, is David Brooks' On Paradise Drive. Brooks is a more politically conservative commentator than many intellectuals, especially in regard to the suburbs. Instead of simply hating them, he wants to know why so many average Americans choose to live their lives in the suburbs. Avoiding the elitism that is so inherent in so many other cultural critiques, he recognizes them as repositories for average families' dreams. The suburbs represent reasonable choices for average Americans following their career and life trajectories around the nation. I like that about Brooks.

Back to Kunstler though, his criticisms may sound elitist. But I think they are more grounded than simple intellectual snobbery. While disliking suburbs for 'junking up the landscape,' delivering 'abstraction' instead of real life, and creating 'cartoon architecture' he argues the point that suburbs are inherently inefficient, and therefore bad investments.

This is interesting. Note that many of these are not politically liberal points. Classicism in architecture is not avant-garde, it is not uber-hip, it is conservative. Essentially you are saying 'we've found these minimally essential points, let's retain them.' As opposed to modernism which throws them all out. Or postmodernism, which tends toward the chaotic and random.

He says suburbs are wasteful and inefficient. This makes sense in a free market economy. Truly, is it in the best interest of a free-market society to build homes, retail, schools, so that they are essentially used up about the same time their mortgages are paid? Arguably not, but more importantly, in doing this we are treating our infrastructure as a consumer good, not as investments. Investments retain their values after they are paid off, and should create some value. Who takes all their capital and wastes it on consumer goods? Not effective capitalists.

So this illustrates that Kunstler does not fit easily into boxes. He sometimes acts like an artsy-fartsy snob. Until you read closely and recognize that he is also acting a lot like a crusty old conservative. I like ppl who think on their own and avoid boxes.

But all of this is played out in his earlier urban books. Long Emergency begins looking at American life, complete with the inefficiencies described above, but from the perspective of the oil peak. The Peak Oil argument should be common knowledge. If you are not familiar, google it. Essentially Kunstler is asking what happens to American life, as energy prices progress on an intractable climb? Suddenly those inefficiences in urban infrastructure really matter. Suddenly all that capital invested into our way of life is transformed into lost consumer spending. It was fun while it lasted. Now it's over and the money's gone.

Suffice it to say that this is a somewhat depressing book. And the questions are worth asking. What does happen as fuel costs go up? Is our current retail infrastructure going to work? Kunstler thinks not. Sam's Club/Wal-Mart is predicated on all of us having cargo vehicles, ready to drive anywhere from 5-30 miles to stock up for the week on our stuff. It's cheap because it's all made in China, and shipped thousands of miles. I could see that being problematic in a high fuel environment.

Are new homes going to continue being a rock solid investment returning these amazing gains in value year after year? Kunstler thinks not. He argues that the entire economy is founded on continuing suburban sprawl. Including Home Depot, Cash-Out refi's, and yet more mega-retail blocks on the edge of town. If fuel costs were to go up, then certainly some of the commutes ppl make to afford these homes will become unreasonable. If fuel costs go up, the single use zoning of suburban development are going to become unreasonable. This infrastructure will be terribly difficult to retrofit for public transportation, if it came to that.

I could go on. I won't though. If you're interested go buy the book. I have to credit Kunstler and some of the new urbanist writers because they revealed a new aspect of sociology to me. Until I encountered this genre, it simply did not occur to me how infrastructure shapes the lives of community. This sounds pathetic, I know. How did I get through grad school with that blindness? I took courses on political sociology, feminist sociology, social movements, power relations, symbolic interaction, meaning in modern life, social thoery, and more. I wrote about communities. All of it was good, but you will notice that there just is not much focus on streets and transportation in that list.

So, as a sociologist, the Peak Oil argument is fascinating. Regardless of if one buys in with the "Peakers" or not. Simply analyzing how infrastructure, transportation, and energy are interconnected is excellent sociological practice. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume Peak Oil is true and happened today, and there will be a 2-3% gap in meeting energy demand next year. What economic implications are there going to be for individual families? On manufacturing? On retail? On politics? What about the following year, and there is now 4-6% demand being unmet? Fuel prices are rising, what happens to politics, family life, small town communities, urban areas, suburban areas? How long until there is demand destruction? And what does that even entail? When does it make sense oto rebuild American manufacturing - to stop shipping stuff from China? Can we even do this in a high fuel price environment?

These are fascinating questions, and provide excellent exercise in sociolgical thinking. How does my individual life, my story, tie into the broader historical movements and changes of today? What are the goings-on of today that will be historically meaningful?

One more point and I will end this lengthy essay. First, Kunstler did not start life as a sociologist, nor do I think he would call himself that. He started as a writer, a journalist, then moved to fiction, and has most recently taken up nonfiction. As a regular citizen with a gift for good writing, he analyzed what he saw around himself. Now his books are kept in the sociology section at Barnes & Noble. Funny thing is, in that section I don't find many sociologists. This is no disrespect to Kunstler at all, but it does reflect my first essay. We sociologists have done a terrible job of bringing our discipline to the public. Many people do not know what sociology is, and if they walk in to a B&N, they will not find sociologists. We need to make ourselves relevant again, the world needs our input.

Community in different forms

2005-04-16T07:41:00.000-05:00

The New York Times ran an article about Megachurches. Megachurches are the new form of church sprouting up in the new subrubs everywhere. They are notable for looking like the big box consolidated retail that already exists out in the 'burbs. They tend to be fundamentalist Christian churches with only a loose denominational affiliation. The case study in the article reflected this trend.

More interesting to me than which denomination or how to define megahurches however is how they are marketed. In order to appeal to those who aren't religious or have been turned off by religion in the past, many of these churches work on the soft sell. In the NYT article, the preacher wore a Jimmy Buffet inspired getup of hawaiin shirts and casual pants. The religion may tend toward the feelgood as well. But they also provide a variety of services that will draw people in, even if the Sunday worship service does not. This is where the theology interest ends and the sociology interest begins.

They offer workout classes for moms with children. They offer Tuesday night pickup ball for dads. They offer financial counseling, marriage counseling, substance abuse counseling. They offer daycare. Anything that might be useful to their future congregants is offered. On the one hand, this is certainly helpful for ppl. On the other hand, the marketing hand, this gets ppl in the door. Folks who might not go to worship may stop by for daycare or perhaps counseling. This begins integrating them into the community, allaying whatever fears they may have had regarding worship. Provide services, make a friendly welcoming environment, that is emotionally supportive, and folks will find their way to the Sunday service.

These churches, where successful, bring in thousands of worshipers every weekend. They can run several services, and all of them will be packed. Why are they so successful? Part of it is smart marketing. But part of it is also where they are. As the NYT article is subtitled "The Soul of Exurbia," these churches arise in the farthest out, newest, largest suburbs in the megacities of our nation.

As the NYT and demographers will tell you Americans move all the time. The average American moves almost every 5 years. So in these brand new subdivisions you are faced with thousands of new residents and families, many of whom have moved from somewhere else. As such they may not know anyone in town. They may have no family in town. They lack the networks of kin and community that knit an aggregation of people into a community.

This is where the "get them in the door" services are interesting. Help with children, help with marriage, help with finances are all things that would have been provided through kin and community relations in the past. So these new churches are bringing ppl in the door by providing them the services that they lack for being highly mobile Americans. These churches are succesful partly bcause they manufacture community.

This isn't that different from earlier churches. Urban neighborhoods throughout the US from the late 1800s and early 1900s also often focused on churches. These churches also were centers of community life. The same thing is true of the small town heartland. The church was the site of the obvious rituals, baptisms, weddings, funerals. But it was also where the bazaar was held every summer. It is where ppl got together for bingo. It is where the school fundraiser brought everyone together for bad food twice a year. And the school itself. As a service to bring children up to value their parents' religious traditions, religious schools were one thing. But they also served the purpose of knitting together the whole community. And as the residents cycled through their lives, generations of families could have proceeded through these schools, had their lives' moments celebrated at these churches, met spouses through their events. The church as site for creating bonds builds all those community and kin networks that we understand as (C)ommunity.

You can see it too, as some of these small towns and urban churches decline. You now that when the school is closed, the community is suffering. You know that the neighborhood has lost vitality. When the church is consolidated, then you know the town is toast.

I would argue the megachurches then are not that different from older churches. They build themselves by providing the requirements to build communities for their new residents. They do this partly out of a sense of mission to be certain, but they also do it because it is what makes them successful.

The real difference is one of scale. As you drive past (never walk) one of these, the feeling is the same as driving past a Home Depot/ Wal Mart superblock. Thinking of the old neighborhood church, the grocery, the hardware store with the creaky floors one wonders - can we really live this way?

authenticity politics

2005-03-27T15:51:00.000-05:00

Authenticity politics is an idea I came up with a few years ago to capture the kind of discussions that surround a particular identity. Specifically I am thinking of who is a real cyclist, or skater, or islander, or blues musician, or whatever. If you have spent time with a group like this you will have noticed that a lot of discussion surrounds the identity itself, and how the various practitioners enact it. The discussants slice the world up into those who are real whatevers, and those who are not. Those who are not are labelled posers, goat-ropers, tourists - there are all sorts of good terms.

In day to day life among the practitioners, discussions revolve around what characteristics actually count in the identity. If one is a cyclist, does one have to spend $500 on the bike, $1000, $2000? Does he have to shave his legs? Does s/he have to wear the whole spandex getup? What about the wackos - the singlespeeders and the fixed gear types? Do they count, even if their rigs are cheaper and their legs hairier?

Is it possible to spend too much money on the bike, and the clothing? Ahh yes and this is the worst offender - the wannabee. If one spends a lot of money on the bike, one better have the legs to back it up.

More often than not if you follow these games all the way through you end up in an ideal type that ensures no one is a real anything. The mythic figure of cycling is the old farmer in overalls on his single speed schwinn who shows up and wins the race. On Islands the mythic figure is someone who was conceived there, born there, lives there currently, hasn't been off the island for very long (in short a very dull person). In blues clubs it's four grizzly old black men sitting in the basement drinking burbon out of water glasses pickin out tunes.

The real people that actually do these activities fall short of the ideal types. Cyclists come in all flavors. Many would like more time to ride and more money to spend on their equipment, but what matters is they are riding. Islanders also come in all flavors, but what matters is they are living and trying to make a living in their little town surrounded by water. So too with blues men. They may not look like Muddy Waters in his juke joint, but they're playing blues to paying customers. What bothers the purists is the songs are old timeworn classics and the customers are often white tourists.

This game goes on ad nauseum with almost every subgroup I bump into. Indeed it is really more about community, belonging, and politics, than any of the philosophical issues associated with the identity. It seems to mostly be about who is strong in a community, who his/her associates are, and who are left out. These identity politics turn out to be about the same thing any politics is about - power and resources. Being in with the right crowd allows cheaper resources, better help, more knowledge from those who know, and so on. To be accepted as a cyclist by a community of cyclists gets you access to all sorts of used parts, knowledge, wrenching help, and sometimes at-cost parts. The solo cyclist, with no cyclist friends has to buy everything at whatever price s/he can negotiate or find on the net. S/he has to teach him/herself to wrench, breaking lots of expensive stuff in the process.

The reason it is authenticity politics is because the authenticity of that particular identity is negotiated between the individual and the community, and between neophytes and the established members all the time. These negotiations are part of the subtext of conversations about the identity and the paraphenalia that goes with it.

An interesting aspect of this approach to identity is that it focuses as much on community acceptance as it does the individual's behavior. This is in stark contrast to lots of thinking about identity. Much that is out there today focuses solely on the individual enacting an identity, missing out on the community aspect.

Spring Break

2005-03-12T21:11:00.000-05:00

This week was Spring Break and I was as lazy as my students. So no update March 7th.

But I have been thinking a lot about oil this last week. There are a few people who think that the Iraq endeavor was not about WMDs, but rather think it was about oil. Some of them protest the war, and get shown on TV with big placards reading "No Blood for Oil!"

I love these placards. They are so wrong. Oil powers our transportation. Period. If oil were to become more scarce, there would be immediate effects upon personal transportation. We could not switch to electric without a complete infrastructure overhaul.

Secondly, all city building done in the US since the 1960s assumes that each and every citizen has a car. These same placard holders will complain that people are too lazy to walk to the store, or work. They complain that people don't want to ride the bus. But again, the fundamental point is that because of the choices we made regarding our cities people physically cannot walk to work, school, the store. The bus sucks as a transportation option. However, because of those same choices, effective mass transit is almost impossible to retrofit into newer development.

Third, all of our retail has evolved into big box shopping. I get most of my groceries at WalMart. Hardware stuff at Home Depot, electronica at Circuit City, cat food at Pet Smart. None of this retail is going to work if oil is not cheap. Further, retail that would work for people in an expensive fuel environment has succombed to the competition of the big boxes.

Fourth, implied in the big box, but necessary to state seperately is over the road trucking. We use trucking more and more every year. I don't know the exact numbers for OTR freight, but it is a tremendous amount of our products. And how does stuff come from China in the first place? Ships, running on petroleum fuels.

Fifth, while we don't really have a replacement for transport energy, this is not the only important thing we use oil for. How do we farm? Diesel tractors, diesel combines.

This is leaving out the plastics, the chemical derivitives, the meds, and so on and so forth.

Now, I'm not sure I want to take sides on Bush's middle east shindig, but I know those folks with the placards are wrong. The US needs oil the way agricultural empires need land. If we aren't going to fight for oil, then we aren't going to fight for anything. Oil may be one of the few things worth fighting for.

Forums and the Sociology of Knowledge

2005-02-27T20:15:00.000-05:00

The Internet is an interesting thing. Bulletin Boards or forums especially so. One of the ways they are interesting is that they group people by interests. This isn't especially different than anything else in the world. Churchgoers find other churgoers at, surprise, church! Further, churchgoers have a certain working knowledge of the world. So the conversations one will have at church will vary greatly from the conversations one will have at the autoshop.

But you can see this again on various internet forums. Cycling forums for instance might have a certain political leaning towards environmentalism, they will share an understanding of how bicycles "should" fit into transportation and recreation in society. They will share certain orientations toward fitness.

These differ from other forums. Peak oil forums will share a specific understanding of resource depletion, and their conversations will reflect that understanding. They will share an understanding that modern society cannot go on without energy, and their responses recognize this. Some may want to solve the problem technologically, some may want everyone to live Amish-style to make the problem go away. Some will see no hope for modern society at all, with nothing but Mad Max in our future. These folks may store guns and plan on hiding out in Idaho somewhere.

Some contrarian economic forums see the same Mad Max future, the same 'hiding guns and gold coins in the basement' solution. But they will arrive at that conclusion based not on oil running low, but on the debt behavior of the United States.

Rapture forums see Mad Max as the result after they (somehow the posters are all certain they themselves are being raptured) are assumed. And so on. There are message boards for gun collectors, ex-Mormons, altar boys who were abused by priests, you name it. If there is a subject, there are dozens of message boards surrounding that subject.

This virtual community aspect is worth looking at all on its own, but not what I am interested in today. Today I am interested in how different the cultures- or shared knowledge base - of each of them are. For instance, on the peak oil sites, it's a known fact that Hubbert's peak is near. It's implicit in all the discussions. But, on the contrarian economic site, Hubbert's peak is simply an interesting possibility. And on a history site, an unlikely scenario. Who's right? Who knows? Eavesdropping on message boards is a wonderful study in how knowledge is socially constructed. Someone happens on a site because it covers an interesting topic. They hang around and internalize the common knowledge of that site. After a while they contribute to the discussion, externalizing the knowledge all over again. Devil's advocates are drummed out, or tolerated, but don't really cause much weakness in the shared knowledge. If anything DAs reinforce the important points for everyone else. Eventually a consensus emerges, at least on the important points.

This process reminds me of Hegel, Berger & Luckman, where the consensus drifts closer toward the (T)ruth as the various posters test each other back and forth and add new elements to the discussion. It's hard to know if any particular forum is right or wrong regarding the neumenal (T)ruth. Interestingly however, what if it was possible to take the internet in sum? Is the internet allowing a group mind (Mead), an international generalized other to evolve? Are humans as a whole getting closer to the (T)ruth, through this global conversation? Is a new human understanding emerging (more Mead)? Is it even possible for humans, who come from highly localized tribes, to utilize or participate in such a global understanding?

This is of course pretty out-there stuff, and it's hard to imagine that the (T)ruth contains as many UFOs, EOTWAWKI, and SHTF possibilties as the internet and the blogosphere contain. But again, who knows? Put your money down and watch it all unfold.

Value to Students

2005-02-21T17:10:00.000-05:00

In the same vein as getting Sociology to the public, we find undergrad students. There was a moment fall semester my senior year when I went into my advisor’s office and asked what kind of work I should be looking for. He looked at me and said he didn’t know.

I loved that professor, but was troubled by his answer. Within 12 months I was de-boning chicken breasts at a processing plant. That followed a stint selling books as a temp at the other college’s bookstore after graduation. Now I certainly don’t think I am “too good” for such jobs, nor did I really expect the college to hold my hand and get me a career. However, pondering Marx at 50 degrees Fahrenheit, for eight hours, boning breasts, it occurred to me that this was not the career trajectory I expected after college.

As faculty now I find myself in the professor’s shoes, and I want to be able to at least give my students some direction. Other disciplines accomplish this through effectively networking with their alumni, setting up internships, keeping contacts with the local business community and so on. Basically they have done good jobs building weak tie networks. Why this didn’t occur to us, I don’t know. But I also know that our students are good students, our programs are good programs, and our discipline is a good discipline. What those other programs are offering is simply more on-the-street connection for the students – not better academics.

Building these kind of professional networks for the undergraduate students will take years, especially since I am thinking this needs to be done across the discipline. But it needs to be done, and for several reasons. The first is simply self-interest. If a Soc degree is more marketable, there will be more demand from the undergrads. If there is demand from undergrads, Soc departments will be bigger, there will be more demand for faculty, and so on. So it’s good professional activity in the long run.

But more importantly, it’s what we owe the students. The only part of the students’ experiences we have control over is what happens in our program. If they are spending roughly $100,000 for their education, they at least deserve to walk out with a marketable degree. Granted, faculty cut of that $100k is only around $30k or so, but still, it’s what they are here for. Further, good internship programs, and networking into the local community does not mean the value of the liberal arts approach has to be compromised. It doesn’t need to mean that the academic quality needs to be compromised. It is simply balancing our discipline so that undergrads receive a more valuable degree.

First Post

2005-02-17T23:12:00.000-05:00

I would like to start a running column detailing some thoughts about Sociology and its role in the world. Public Sociology is the attempt to bring Sociology to the citizenry in such a way as to be helpful. It is a hijacking of the term public intellectual that is more popular in Europe. Really, if what we do academically doesn’t eventually reach the citizenry, and help folks make decisions about their lives and communities, then all that’s left is autoerotic amusement. And while I enjoy a good conference as much as the next academic, I wouldn’t want my valuable discipline to get lost in the fray.

That said, Sociology has not done a good job making itself known the last few years. Economists, Psychologists, Social Workers, Opinion Researchers, Pollsters, Criminologists, and many other social scientists have done a better job connecting their disciplines to an interested public.

I don’t know if it’s because of the politics of the discipline, the efforts of academic success, or what, but we need to do a better job connecting with people. Everybody who’s done at least a year of grad school in sociology has heard the explanation “Oh cool, my brother in law is a social worker too.” The only news service that ever seems to contact Sociologists for comment is NPR, and as much as I like it, some days I think only other academics are listening. So we clearly need to get out of the tower and onto the street.

Here we can be a little critical of the discipline. It is fairly easy to fall into thinking that since I study the social world, economics, politics, culture, and such, that I have some special insight into the social world. Even if I do, approaching the public in that way is counterproductive. We need to balance our insight with respect for the opinions and perspectives of the people we wish to address. Certainly, a parent of a new freshman feels he or she has some insight into the social world. Certainly a small business owner feels he or she has some insight into economics and human nature. Certainly the lawyer thinks he or she has some insight into politics and the law.

So in my attempt to get my discipline out to those who might benefit from it, I am also going to try and listen better. I will try and respect what the public is saying, even if I disagree. In the best of all possible worlds, my Sociology will help them make better decisions in their lives and communities, even if we don’t see eye to eye on everything.

So, if you wish to hear what I might have to say, check back from time to time. Let’s try for Mondays for a little while.