Newsletter

34: Stuck in the ice

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Listening to the hull of the ship groaning and creaking under the pressure outside

HMS Erebus and Terror in the Antarctic by John Wilson Carmichael (before the fatal Franklin expedition)

Last week I was wondering whether we might be learning to live a smaller, slower way of life during all of this, and I think one way we are all experiencing that slow down is in reduced travel. That’s had me thinking about an early issue of the newsletter and so I thought I would revisit that one today. But it’s not a rerun so do not skip ahead I will be able to sense it. Also most of you have not read this before so it’s new to you.

In last year’s Halloween issue I reviewed the first season of this great show called The Terror, which adds these supernatural horror elements to already horrifying moments in history. And there were a bunch of Crisis Palace-y elements in that first season, which is about well actually I already wrote about it so here just read this:

In May of 1845, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus set out for the Arctic on a mission to chart the last unknown section of the Northwest Passage. For centuries, European explorers had been trying to complete a route between the Atlantic and the Pacific by meandering through the treacherous waters north of Canada, and Sir Jon Franklin was going to be the guy to finish the job.

The expedition sailed into the Baffin Bay that July and was never heard from again. All 129 men aboard died presumably grisly deaths by disease or starvation or exposure, some resorting to cannibalism. It was the worst tragedy in the history of Arctic exploration. It was also a huge mystery, as the shipwrecks weren’t even found for another 170 years. 

The show imagines what happened to the expedition after it got stuck in the ice over the winter and it’s this tense conflict between some people with good intentions trying to cooperate and help each other get through it, and others with not so good intentions, all in this deadly environment that doesn’t really give a shit either way.

There’s this sense of slow-moving catastrophe. One of the most effective touches kicks in after the ships become trapped in the ice pack, a deadly fate that not only carries a ship wherever the ice decides to drift, but can also crush a ship’s hull. Throughout much of the show, we hear this steady, dull creaking and groaning of the ice pressing against the hull, a reminder of what horror is to come. 

The show made me think about climate change no doy, and one theme in particular, which is the way humanity (or at least one element of humanity) seems unable to sit still for one stupid second. So in the case of these 19th century explorers, there’s this unbelievable arrogance and just disaster after disaster from trying to travel from one place to that other place way over there, in part because of yes, expanding global capitalism through new trade routes, but also because it’s just kind of this thing we always do:

There’s a chapter in Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction where she explores what set modern humans apart from our prehistoric relatives like Neanderthals. Evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo brings up one important distinction, which is that we just can’t sit goddamn still.

Kolbert calls it our “Faustian restlessness.” See, unlike Neanderthals, it’s only modern humans who started to migrate by venturing out onto open water with no sight of land. 

“How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Pääbo says. “And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.”

We never stop.

He hypothesizes that there could be some “madness gene,” an evolutionary quirk that makes humans compulsively explore, and has ultimately led us to alter the ecosystem of the whole planet. 

And yet, Kolbert also explores in that chapter another thing that sets humans apart—our skill at reading social cues, which gives us the unique survival advantage of collective problem-solving.

The Terror made me think of that part of the book, these human tendencies and the tension between them, particularly in the context of climate change—of conquering versus collaborating. You might describe it the way Eric Holthaus did in the last newsletter—the divide between colonialism and “relearning our interdependence.” 

So this suddenly feels very relevant now, first, because the introduction of new viruses and their rapid spread across the planet is one consequence of that Faustian restlessness that Kolbert was writing about. Our razing of wilderness that has led us toward environmental crisis also kicks up these new viruses. Then, when a virus jumps from one species to another species and then to our species, our non-stop international travel just smears it across the face of the planet.

Now that a particularly bad virus is here, we suddenly have no choice but to sit still. As noted in the last issue, Kate Brown wrote in a recent article on the ecological factors behind a pandemic: “In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves.” It really feels like we’re stuck in that ice, listening to the hull of the ship groaning and creaking under the pressure outside.

While we are stuck, we might rethink some of that restlessness. This is difficult, as I certainly traveled before the pandemic and I’ll certainly travel again. But back when things first started getting universally canceled, I remember it being so clear just how much people move around the globe, some way more than others. So many conferences, so many trips to work, so many events. With all of it now ground to a halt, maybe we are going to learn that it had become a little too easy to burn massive amounts of energy to shoot human bodies nearly anywhere on the planet we want to go.

I don’t mean for this to be a diatribe about how awful it is for people to fly in planes. It’s more about to what extent we can control how much we give into that madness gene of constant growth, expansion, exploration, conquering, colonizing, that got us, at least in part, into our current mess, and continues to drive the climate crisis.

Not everyone in England in 1845 was an Arctic explorer, and not every nation in 1845 was the British Empire. There are other ways to be. So instead of raging against our current constraints, rushing to return to slash and burn capitalism, I hope we have the ability instead to call upon our collective problem-solving nature. To work together toward a shared well-being that will get us through the rough times when we’re stuck in the ice, and steer us clear of it in the future.

—

OK one last thing on this, in the original post on The Terror, I noted that while I was first watching the show, there was an Arctic exploration mission just getting underway, the Mosaic Expedition, an international climate science mission that had been planned for several years. The Polarstern research vessel intentionally got stuck in the ice pack to drift with it and study the conditions along the way, in order to improve our understanding of how the Arctic is changing and inform our response to climate change.

The mission was in near total isolation for months as the coronavirus spread, and travel restrictions derailed its plans to resupply the mission and swap out the crew by plane. After considering dozens of alternatives, Mosaic now has a contingency plan to break out of the ice and meet a supply ship in open water, then travel back to complete the mission. The crew of 90 people will have been on board the ship for two months longer than planned. And yes, the ice against the hull of the Polarstern also makes noise, described as a dull scraping.

What I Wrote

I wrote a profile of an organization called Foundation for Louisiana, which among other things addresses the cascading societal and cultural impacts of coastal land loss and flooding. One impressive thing about this group is the way it fights against, or rather, funds community groups to fight against the structural racism underlying these impacts. Here’s part:

Underlying FFL’s work is an understanding of how these climate impacts are shaped by Louisiana’s deep history of systemic and environmental racism, dating back to colonialism and slavery, but also generations of wealth inequality and petroleum industry pollution. In particular, there’s a stretch of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley,” or “Death Alley,” because of the several petrochemical plants in the area and regional clusters of cancer cases in surrounding communities of color. 

“The context is that these residents are exposed to any toxic fallout from that industry and are disallowed from fully participating in the economic boom that then came from that industry,” says Caressa Chester, climate justice program officer. 

…

Of all the things they try to impress on funders wanting to have a positive impact in the Gulf Coast region, there’s one piece of advice they recommend above all else—listen. 

“Listen to what has already been going on, because people have been fighting these battles for decades, generations, and they know what they’re doing,” Chester says. “And that doesn’t mean that they don’t need support, and that working together is not necessary, because of course it is. But you just have to listen to Southern black and indigenous leadership.” 

In fact, the team sees the communities they serve as national leaders on climate change, with expertise they can share with other regions. Increasingly, people from other places experiencing coastal flooding and land loss are coming to Louisiana, looking for insights.

“We are not necessarily waiting on a Green New Deal or similar policy at a federal level for us to really transition and build anew the way that our communities and businesses and culture work,” Russell says. 

Links

Watching

One time way before the pandemic, we were cleaning up the apartment and contemplating getting rid of a bunch of DVDs. My case for keeping them was that maybe there will be some catastrophic event and the internet will be gone, and then we wouldn’t have anything to watch. Jamie said, “Oh so you think during the apocalypse we’re going to want to sit around and watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall?” which goes to show that nobody can dunk on you like your significant other.

But lo and behold, the other night I really wanted to watch the 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead and the only version online was a low quality YouTube version. So I did break out the DVDs during the apocalypse after all and found my copy. Who is glad we kept the DVDs now just me I guess.

One reason I wanted to watch this movie was I kept thinking of this sequence where the main characters settle down in a shopping mall during a zombie apocalypse and fall into this numb, hypnotic routine of bourgeois distractions. It is eerily familiar and might be a liiiittle on the nose for you right now but here it is queued up to the start of the five-minute montage if you are up for it.

I Endorse

Let’s not end on that depressing note, instead I endorse watching concerts on TV, with other people if possible. Every year for the past 11 years, my friend Eric Swedlund has thrown this kind of ridiculous music festival in Tucson to celebrate his birthday. This was the first year he couldn’t do it since Swedefest (yes that is what it’s called) started, so for his birthday on Monday, a few us got on a video call and watched some concert movies, Stop Making Sense and then Shut Up and Play the Hits. It was a lot of fun. Two weekends ago, Jamie and I watched a short concert of Phoebe Bridgers playing some songs in her pajamas, and then an old video of a boygenius concert. It is a little sad to see huge crowds of people dancing to live music but it is also nice, you can say to each other, oh it’s this song I love this song yeah me too it’s a good one, etc. Feels good.

Where are your friends tonight

So you know, good moments, bad moments, we’re all having them. Last Sunday I sat out in the backyard with a book and it was just a little too cold and windy to do that activity and I was just a little under dressed for it. But I decided to stay out there anyway with my little dog and book and just be cold for a while. For a few minutes, it felt like when you go on a vacation, and maybe you didn’t pack warm enough and you’re sitting on a beach or a deck or something and catch a chill and everyone is like, ooh got a little chilly, but you stay out there anyway because you’re on vacation and that’s what you came to do after all, just be some place, and a little cold never hurt anyone. So that was a nice moment for me is what I’m saying.

Maybe close your eyes for a second and imagine that we’re all on vacation together you and me and all the readers of this newsletter, and it’s a little cold but we can stay outside for like an hour more before it’s time to go in and make dinner.

Tate

P.S. There won’t be a newsletter next week, but don’t freak out everything is OK just taking a skip week.

33: Smaller, slower

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In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves

Vanitas still life with a globe, sceptre, a skull crowned with straw, Hendrick Andriessen, c. 1650

One of the big ideas echoing around the world right now, because we live in this weird time when everyone is always thinking about the same thing, is that in some yet to be understood ways we are on the brink of a restructuring of society. Depending on your outlook this might be a source of hope, or cynicism, and I imagine for pretty much everybody, anxiety.

I was listening to an interview with Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the BU School of Public Health, who is a scholar of the social determinants of health, and back in March he was saying this pandemic could be one of those generational moments when our outlook on the world changes forever, citing 9/11 and the AIDS epidemic as previous examples. In his case, he was hoping one outcome will be a better understanding that there’s no such thing as “health for some” and that public health is a shared good.

There’s a temptation to think of these moments as opportunities for a triumphant recovery and leap forward. But that’s never quite the case, is it? As we learned from the post-9/11 era, change doesn’t happen like that. Some good things happen, some bad things happen, some things go back to the way they were.

I really like the way Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote about this recently as she was coming to grips with the hollow promise that things always get better.

So I look a bit further, and I find these words, from Alondra Nelson, a historian, in a recent interview: “The great mythos of American life is the idea that we’re always improving, always moving forward. And the great story of science and technology is that it is also always leaping forward to good ends.”

She notes that we have “an overinvestment in a progress narrative — particularly with regards to racial politics, issues of gender equality and equity — without sufficient attention to the fact that there’s the falling backward as much as there are leaps forward” and that “this political moment should be one of humility, of paying attention to looping back, and of acknowledging that sometimes looping back means failure, means going back to the woodshed, means throwing out what we thought we knew and thinking again.”

Farhad Ebrahimi, founder of the Chorus Foundation and someone I’ve talked with a lot over the years about climate justice and social movements, likes to use an analogy that I’m going to steal from him because it feels similarly appropriate. It’s the science fiction trope of the gravity temporarily going off in the spaceship, and everything suddenly becoming weightless, floating around, massive objects hurtling across the room. But the gravity inevitably comes on again, and everything crashes back to the ground with its full weight.

He uses it to refer to fast-moving, “movement moments” that happen periodically in social change work, but I think it also applies to any time of general upheaval and change. Right now, for example, the gravity is off. We’re experiencing the terror of floating around in space untethered, while also wondering how we should move some things around before the gravity comes back on—what we want the new status quo to look like once everything falls back to the ground.

Last week I talked about how exposed public health inequalities and societal vulnerabilities are one reason people are saying that now is not the time to back off on climate action. This is another: During a crisis, everything is on the table—for a while.

The big obvious thing here is the extent to which we try to take the moment to transition away from oil and gas. But lately I’ve been thinking how it might lead to a shift in our overall perceptions of consumption and economic growth, and how that’s manifesting in my own experience. While not all pandemic solutions are aligned with climate solutions, I wonder if a smaller, slower economy might be one that serves both, and maybe leads to a better way of life.

This is actually related to a pretty heated debate in climate circles. So there’s one crowd that says climate change is just another thing we have to figure out and it will be hard but we’ll innovate our way out of it and continue our general upward trajectory of better technology and economic growth. Another crowd says, actually, climate change is indicative of a sick relationship we have with the planet and its resources—overconsumption, consolidation of wealth, corporate globalization, industrial agriculture, loss of biodiversity.

If you’ve read any of my other emails or just the way I wrote that last sentence, you will rightly suspect that I lean toward the latter story, but like all of these stark divides on climate, I think there’s some truth in both. The idea that we should somehow dial back technology and standard of living and return to some kind of agrarian society seems both impossible and undesirable (Bill McKibben is a climate hero, but he lives in rural Vermont and that says a lot if you know anything about rural Vermont, and I once heard him say in an interview that in some ways maybe life wasn’t so bad in the Middle Ages it’s like come on Bill McKibben).

But coronavirus—and the urbanization, deforestation, and trade of wildlife that spark pandemics like it—casts a firm vote for the idea that our relationship with our surroundings is broken. It’s one consequence of what’s been called the “Great Acceleration,” a rapid expansion since the middle of the 20th century in human energy use, emissions, and population growth. We’ve reached a point where people, some people at least, go everywhere all the time and have anything they want, and it just can’t continue. As Kate Brown put it in a recent article on the ecological factors behind a pandemic, “In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves.”

I guess this is a pretty traditional concept in environmentalism, one of anti-consumption, but I don’t think the answer is we all just tighten our belts or go and live in the woods like Michael McKean in The Good Place. So I don’t know, I think it has to be both. We can’t go backwards, but we can’t continue the same way. We have to make it different, better.

Right before things started getting bad, I read this opinion by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, who made a case for abandoning growth of GDP as our measure of success. For one, he cites data that says if we carry on economic growth as usual, the rate of decarbonization required becomes far outside the realm of possibility. Keep in mind that, as renewable energy has rapidly expanded, burning of carbon has still well outpaced it.

But besides the climate argument, he writes, “Beyond a certain point, which high-income countries have long since surpassed, the relationship between GDP and human wellbeing completely breaks down.” There are several examples of countries with GDPs a fraction of our own having much better life expectancies, education, healthcare, and investments in public goods. That’s largely because when economic growth gets to a certain point, the vast majority is going straight to the wealthy, so you get this split economy of a top tier reaping massive rewards of growth, with everyone else scrambling at unsustainable levels of busyness just to cover expenses. Hickel proposes economies with less material production (and therefore emissions), less consumption, less planned obsolescence, and eliminating massive intentional inefficiencies built into our current economy—and yes, less work. Just. Less.

I think a lot of us right now are feeling what this kind of contraction might be like, sort of unintentionally trying on different aspects of it to see how they fit. That includes traveling less, shrinking our workloads through lightened expectations, or unfortunately, furlough and layoff. We’re slowing down, pruning our lives back. We’re buying less, burning less, trying to figure out how to sit around and do nothing more. For me, for corona- and non-corona-related reasons, this has been a slower than usual month for work, so it’s been little things like waking up without an alarm, not tracking all my working hours with productivity apps. I spend two hours every day reading. When I want to buy something, I know I can’t have it in on my doorstep in exchange for a relative pittance and in mere hours, but instead now it’s maybe weeks or maybe it’s not available at all, so I rethink it. These are all surprisingly uncomfortable things and they feel weird.

You always want to be careful with this talk, for one because my kind of experience is an enormous privilege that is only accessible to people in very fortunate positions. And even if crisis is changing our perceptions, the still-baked-in inequality means that for many others, life is only faster, harder, and worse. You don’t want to glamorize poverty, and the temptation to celebrate silver lining environmental benefits of human tragedy is a form of eco-fascism. Nobody should look around at how things are now and say, yeah this right here is the way I want life to be. The clear skies may be nice, but this is a nightmarish way to get there.

If this isn’t the way life should be, though, I’m thinking about how personally and on larger level, we might take some new habits and perceptions away from this tragedy, and use them to shift things into the way we do want life to be, one that is maybe smaller, slower, and hopefully better.

Watching

The other day this video came up on my Facebook feed and it’s 2:43 minutes and my attention span is basically fried these days I read like 50 articles and 1 million tweets a day. But this little video is so beautiful and a couple times during it I found myself clicking away to something else and then I was like you know what just sit down and watch these fucking elk for two minutes and forty three seconds with the sound on you deserve it. So I did and I encourage you to do the same.

Links

An amabie from a woodblock print, late Edo period

Listening

I recently found out about this musician Hailu Mergia, who I guess is a keyboardist but he plays all kinds of things he did an accordion record and originally was famous in Ethiopia during the 80s for his role in the Walias Band. They played jazz and funk mixed with traditional Ethiopian music. Anyway he has this wild story where he tried to make it in the US, didn’t have much success so drove a cab for years in DC, then was rediscovered in 2013 and has been putting out new music since.

This song is a little different than most of his music, more quiet contemporary jazz but with these unique rhythms and layered melodies in there. The other day I got stuck listening to it on repeat for like a half hour and it kind of put me into a trance. The song title means “singing about love” the kind of wistful humming you might do about a distant loved one.

Finally, I want to close this week with a video from the National Network of Abortion Funds, which is where Jamie borat voice my wife works which is why wherever we (used to) go random people thank her and ask if they can give her a hug. NNAF made this video with Padma Lakshmi and Molly Crabapple and it’s a really powerful message about access to abortion but also just about imagining a world where we treat each other with love. Here it is:

Take care out there folks. If you can, slow things down, prune things back, and see how it feels. Watch the elk and listen to the piano song as many times as you want. You deserve it.

Tate

32: Weaknesses and vulnerabilities

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Things are breaking too easily, and in all the most predictable ways

Vanitas Still Life, n.d., Herman Henstenburgh

As the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear, Shamar Bibbins, a senior program officer at climate funder the Kresge Foundation, was on a call with a public health nonprofit they fund in California, going over the kinds of questions that everyone working on climate change is having to face, like whether climate action should be taking a back seat to the immediate health threat. 

The grantee made it clear that these are not issues that can be separated and dealt with in isolation. Remember, they told Bibbins, “Wildfire season is just around the corner.” 

When the $2 trillion stimulus package was being debated, I remember reading a NYT article that said something like, oh it’s not just oil companies with their hands out, environmentalists want a piece of the action too, which is just unbelievable that in 2020 climate change is still being framed as a special interest cause of environmental groups. There was some similar criticism early on that continuing to prioritize climate action now is somehow inappropriate or tone deaf. 

The thought of wildfire smoke coupled with a deadly respiratory illness is especially chilling, but feel free to swap it out with run-of-the-mill industrial pollution, any extreme weather event, flooding, or an urban heat wave to visualize how climate change is not some pet issue to be put back on the shelf, but a problem that compounds all other problems, and will hammer the same systems being tested by the virus.

“We like to say that climate change is a threat multiplier, that it affects everything. Climate change is a public health issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s a poverty issue, it’s a social justice issue,” Bibbins said. “As this pandemic just keeps unfolding, we’re seeing the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our systems.”

In other words, things are breaking too easily, and in all the most predictable ways. 

I interviewed Bibbins for an article about the overlap between coronavirus and the shocks and stresses of climate change, and how we need to become more resilient to all kinds of severe impacts that may be on the horizon. That includes building resilience within communities, one of the big focuses of her work at Kresge, but also confronting the massive structural inequality and racism that ensures that every single time, whenever we face a crisis—flood, fire, storm, or outbreak—certain populations suffer the most. Here’s a little section from the article on that: 

Just as climate change acts as a threat multiplier, straining every other system, COVID-19 has had similar cross-cutting impacts, and the weaknesses they exploit are often the same. 

For example, Bibbins points out, populations hit hard by COVID-19 often overlap with populations already struggling with poverty, heat island effects, air and water pollution and pre-existing respiratory problems. 

Indeed, a New York Times analysis found that low-income neighborhoods of New York City are being hit the hardest by the pandemic. Early data in other cities is showing that communities of color are experiencing alarmingly disproportionate numbers of cases and deaths from COVID-19. Research has found that respiratory viruses, asthma and air pollution can compound to increase the risk of serious symptoms, even among children. Meanwhile, the crisis has also shone a spotlight on weaknesses in the social safety net by exposing how people without access to healthcare and worker benefits are at greater risk.

Bibbins worries that once we get through the COVID-19 crisis, society will simply move on to the next threat that arises without examining the vulnerabilities that exacerbate these impacts.

“I just feel like it’s so critically important that we use this opportunity to really deepen our understanding of how the historical and institutional racism and inequity impact policy and planning across all levels,” she says. 

“More than ever, we really need to acknowledge that, we need to address it, and we need to make sure our policies that we’re putting forth seek to correct those structural inequities that affect climate change, that affect COVID-19, and any other environment or public health crisis.” 

Sadly, just as this article ran, a wave of additional news reinforcing these disparities surfaced, and a chorus is growing, pointing out that while we may all be in this together, some of us are clearly more in it than others. 

In addition to the examples in the article, new research is showing that air pollution is linked to higher coronavirus death rates, and there’s longstanding data on low-income and communities of color being disproportionately exposed to industrial pollution. It’s becoming clear that coronavirus is killing Black Americans at starkly disproportionate rates—counties that are majority Black have six times the rate of death of majority-white counties. On the Navajo Nation, where many people rely on generators for power in their homes and have no running water, cases are surging. 

It’s true that what we’re experiencing now is a new threat, not quite like anything we’ve experienced before. But in some ways, it’s a story we’ve watched countless times in the past, and without serious changes, the next version is right around the corner.

You can read the full article, including some hopeful news about community-driven resilience efforts: Lessons from the Intersection of Coronavirus and Climate Resilience

Links

I Endorse

Pandemic Instagram. I’ve been looking at my phone way too much lately, sometimes for obsessive reasons but also because I’ve been looking at a lot of the same things and it’s nice to look at different things for a change. I’ve particularly enjoyed Instagram during quarantine, as some accounts have risen to the occasion and others have offered a welcome retreat. Here are some of my favorites lately:

Interior design accounts – I like to look at what it’s like to being inside other places. My two favorite accounts are @the_80s_interior and @kimcoolmon.

@lianafinck – Liana Finck is a New Yorker cartoonist but her best stuff is not there because it’s a lot weirder and darker than a typical gag strip. Her comics feel to me like what it’s like to be a person.

@aminatou – I mainly know Aminatou Sow from one of my favorite podcasts Call Your Girlfriend, but her Instagram stories are a world-class curation of memes.

@totalvibrationtapes – Lars Gotrich of NPR Music is their metal/punk/experimental correspondent and during quarantine he is going through his massive cassette collection. Unless you are extremely cool you won’t know the bands but the way he writes about music even in these little captions you can practically hear it. And it’s just nice to look at physical media.

@ig__bee – A photographer in Japan. Japan seems nice.

@douglascoupland – Douglas Coupland is one of my favorite novelists, and back in 2011 he did an art project called Slogans for the 21st Century, a series of funny and poignant statements on backgrounds of vivid color. On his Instagram, he has been resurfacing newly relevant originals, tweaking some for the moment, and I think writing some new ones.

Watching

I’ve been chipping away at a rewatch of The Sopranos, which is one of those shows I would look forward to watching all week when it first aired. I just wrapped season two and I would say it’s mostly holding up, maybe like 80%. One big difference is that, when I first watched I thought of it mostly in terms of commentary on the anxiety of modern life, but on rewatch, it’s hard to see it in any way other than, first and foremost, a sendup of patriarchy (although at times, it also glamorizes it). It’s a funhouse reflection of a world where dumb, violent assholes run everything and then their sons take over when they die.

What makes The Sopranos still great, when it’s at its best, is that it’s remarkably multi-layered, so it’s this rollicking mob story, family melodrama, comedy, and also a meditation on therapy and internal life. The scenes with Dr. Melfi get worse beyond season one, but what an odd thing for a TV show to air fictional, often realistic therapy sessions. It’s also still really funny on second viewing, a stream of subtle, smart jokes that will fly by you if you’re not paying attention, and Tony Soprano who is the undisputed king of dad jokes. The emphasis on how stupid some of the characters are always cracks me up too, like when Christopher thinks this guy Emil is named Email.

What also made the show special when it aired was that extra layer of symbolism, a not-quite magical realism that gave it this literary depth you rarely saw on television at the time (now it’s almost run-of-the-mill). The dream logic, the ducks, the Russian, the bear, all these off-kilter moments when things slipped just a little from straight realism. The tension between the family drama and the gangster stuff always got a lot of attention, but The Sopranos was at its worst when overindulged either genre. When it was at its best, it was a whole lot more than either.

Reading

Another old favorite I’ve been revisiting is Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, the 1986 classic that I first read probably as a freshman in college. I was blown away by it back then, the way it subverted a lot of the superhero books I was more into at the time, but now its gritty take is more or less the standard so I was wondering what it would be like to read it again.

This is you when you read this newsletter, information in its most concentrated form, the most sobering potion I know.

With greater distance from when it first published in 1986, it serves on one level as this twisted history of the Cold War-era, the volume turned all the way up. Watchmen has some clear anti-fascist messages, but it’s also very morally complicated, with each character’s philosophy casting its world in a very different light. (The excellent HBO show had all of that complexity, maybe more, and the Zack Snyder movie had none of it.) I have to admit, I found some elements, like the back matter and the pirate story to be kind of a drag this time around, maybe a glimpse of the overindulgent Alan Moore we’d see in later years.

But one thing that is really clear on reread is that Watchmen is masterful visual storytelling. It’s so economical in its use of every panel, with little visual gags and rhyming imagery and wordless plot developments throughout, and while it’s heavily goofing on superhero tropes, it’s also has some really good superhero action scenes! For a comic, it’s not a light read, but I think anyone who enjoyed the show would get a lot from the book.

So much media stuff this week if you can’t tell I’m watching, reading, and listening to a lot lately so you know most of my updates are coming in the form of what I’ve been consuming while sitting on the couch. Although earlier this week we had two days that got almost to 60 degrees and clear skies so we ate lunch in our little backyard. It felt like a luxurious getaway, definitely looking forward to getting back there again in the future. I also washed an unopened bottle of mezcal in the sink with hand soap so add that to the list of new experiences. The cat’s thyroid condition is getting better.

Take care of yourselves. Keep getting sad and angry about what’s happening out there, but give yourself moments of peace too. Listen to some old music that you love and haven’t heard in a while. Move some furniture around if you want. We just gotta ride this thing out you know.

Tate

31: Your problem is my problem

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It’s been hard to force both catastrophic threats to live inside my skull at the same time

Vanitas Still Life, Pieter Claesz, 1625

Not very long ago, like pretty much everyone, I was living in a world in which Covid-19 was not my problem, and then all of a sudden I was living in a world in which it very much was.

There was a window there when it just wasn’t something I was engaging with much, the way I might think, I’ll admit, about a violent conflict overseas. On January 16, I flew from Cambodia home to Boston, about a week after the first reported death from something called novel coronavirus, and I recall brief flashes of lit signs in the Seoul airport about travel restrictions from Wuhan.

On March 2, two days after the first reported death in Washington State and the US, we flew out to a dear friend’s funeral in Minneapolis, an event I look back on warmly now, fearlessly greeting so many old friends with bear hugs, tears and snot on our unmasked faces and crumpled Kleenexes in our hands and pockets, as we made small talk about a virus that still seemed more distant than it was.

It was closing in by the time we got back that week, but still didn’t seem like much was happening in Boston yet. I remember making some comments about it I now regret. I remember reading an early article about how we should buy a two-week supply of food and not leave the house, and thinking at the time that seemed so extreme.

Then on March 7, I was texting with a good friend who lives in Seattle, where the number of cases had exploded in just one week, and the reality became very clear. He and his family were homebound, store shelves there were wiped out, schools were closed. He said if we all can quarantine now it could save millions of lives (I’ll respect his privacy but I have really smart friends). And that was it. We bought a couple of weeks worth of dry goods and other groceries that night, and have been riding it out mostly and increasingly at home since.

Just like that, a problem I thought was someone else’s became my problem too, and very soon after it would become my biggest problem, and then everyone’s biggest problem.

I think a lot about that moment when it flipped for me, how it was more than two weeks before the governor issued a stay-at-home advisory here. Later I would talk to other friends and family about what it was like in Boston, and I suspect that helped flip it for them too, like a fun little present of fear and home arrest that I could pass along. It’s that pivotal moment when you realize that even though you might look outside your window to your own street and everything seems totally fine, it is actually not fine, and you have to do something right now.

That can be a difficult shift, and it’s one that climate scientists and activists have been trying to get people to make for decades now, with not great results. It’s hard to avoid certain comparisons to climate change, even though you don’t want to be the person who spends all day saying hey you know what this is just like…climate change. (OK fine I basically am that person.) The comparisons only go so far, they fit but they don’t fit, some solutions align but others conflict, and that’s one reason I haven’t written that much about the issues in tandem yet, like it’s been hard for me to force both catastrophic threats to live inside my skull at the same time.

But I also know it’s important that we start drawing new maps with both things on them. And there are really important, clear parallels, as Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive, pointed out to Yale Environment 360:

“The public is coming to understand that in that kind of situation you have to act in a way that looks disproportionate to what the current reality is.” … If you wait until you can see the impact, it is too late to stop it.

That means something has to nudge people into action. One big difference is that coronavirus is way, way faster than climate change, so we’re watching the fatal consequences of people not taking action until it actually is too late. To some extent, it’s understandable why it happens. As with climate change, it’s complex, there’s all this disinformation coming from people looking to protect their own interests, incompetence on the national stage, genuinely confusing data points.

And then there’s just some percentage of the population that’s extremely hesitant to heed warnings or are by nature resistant to viewing themselves as part of a collective. There are always those people who figure things are going mostly OK for them, they figure the status quo is actually quite fine, so let’s not make any big changes. They call themselves pragmatists, rationalists, they warn against a cure that is worse than the disease. They caution against alarmism.

So how do you get those people to shift? Well, in a global pandemic, I guess it eventually reaches a point where they don’t have much choice. But what about in other scenarios where there’s a communal threat—poverty, systemic racism, inequality, environmental collapse—where collective action is needed to stop it?

It’s true that action by governments and institutions and putting policies into place are important and ultimately necessary, after all, some percentage of 7 billion people will just never do the thing unless forced. But we know top-down action has limits without broad support, and besides that it can take forever. So more and more I think, as in my case, it takes personal connection to create sufficient change—like a jolt of empathy ricocheting across our networks. The importance of relationships doesn’t stop with acknowledging the problem either, because as we’ve seen with restricted travel and a hobbled federal government, the strength of our response is often reliant on these hyperlocal connections, whether it’s through mutual aid, networks of volunteers, or moral support sent from afar.

In Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan’s book Why Civil Resistance Works, they outline how, while there are many factors involved, key tipping points in successful mass movements usually involve some kind of defection of loyalists. Often military or police forces who once propped up corrupt regimes will flip, and either refuse to act against the movement or actively begin supporting it. In other cases it’s the business community or professional classes who came on board.

That’s an idea that I want to get into more another time, and non-violent regime change is obviously a very different scenario than fighting a pandemic or climate change. But I think there’s a lesson there that to bring about a sufficient response to a collective problem, we have to connect with people who were once resistant and get them to flip, and then maintain strong relationships with them. We have to weaponize those moments of recognition that someone else’s problem is my problem too.

Links. So many links.

Watching

I rewatched Melancholia recently just seemed like an appropriate thing to do. It’s a lot but it’s such a beautiful movie. There’s this one part that stuck out this time where spoiler the world is just about to end and Kirsten Dunst’s character says to her sister, “You want us to gather on your terrace to sing a song, have a glass of wine, the three of us? You know what I think of your plan? I think it’s a piece of shit” which I thought was a little harsh but point taken I guess.

Reading

I recently finished Abuses of the Erotic by Josh Cerretti, and I am biased because Josh is a dear friend and by law he is my brother, but that aside it is an excellent book. It focuses mainly on the period after the Cold War and before September 11, so roughly the 1990s, and the different ways sexuality and heteronormative “family values” were used to militarize American society. He has a great disclaimer up front that promptly casts aside the view from nowhere: “I openly concede my bias in favor of democratic civilian control of politics, the pursuit of peace instead of war, and social justice at large.” I also found it especially effective the way he uses newspaper reports and snippets from popular culture to chart out the societal values from that time (including some sick burns on relics like GI Jane and Sublime).

Listening

Anyhoo there we have it another dispatch from the compound. One thing I’ve enjoyed in this time is the way various friends have been channeling anxiety and frustration and maybe boredom into various culinary adventures. I, for example, made a giant tuna casserole this week, something I have not done in years, and ate the whole thing. I’m seeing a lot of weekday pictures of steaks on the grill. One friend said he and his family roasted a turkey and had a full Thanksgiving dinner last night. Another said one day he had nachos for breakfast and pie for lunch.

I don’t know what it is maybe running out of ideas, or just lacking the willpower to not eat like a bunch of five year olds. Or maybe it’s a kind of nostalgia, flipping through our memories of eating in better times and trying to experience them again. Regardless, I’m there for it.

Email me back with some of the strangest things you’ve been eating under quarantine and maybe I’ll share highlights. Hang on tight you can ride this out.

Tate

30: Anticipatory grief

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It’s dumb and I don’t want to learn anything from this

Dreaming of Walking near Fuji, Isoda Koryusai, 1770-73

I have this running note where I jot down ideas for this thing during the week and I looked at it today and it is basically that Always Sunny meme with Charlie and the cigarette in front of the conspiracy wall, except it’s me trying to keep up with the news and my reactions, and what I think I should be writing about these days.

Actually, that’s kind of how the news overall feels right now, this frantic grasping for lessons and meaning, every single possible take and angle being explored, everyone having to become a public health reporter. That is not to say that all of these takes are bad or unnecessary, it is our job after all, but it makes for a dizzying experience. It’s like I was saying before about how I’ve become a machine that creates analogies, and it also reminds me of this part from William Gibson’s post-9/11 novel Pattern Recognition.

For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.

So I thought I might try taking a little time out from the spinning of the given moment’s scenarios and instead just talk a little about feelings.

So buckle up or just skip to the links if you want, but one of the reasons I started this newsletter was because I wanted to have an outlet that could be very emotionally honest, something that’s not always easy to do in journalism. I figured that would mostly be about expressing anger, but this week the dominant emotion is definitely grief.

I struggle to write about being sad, because well, I am a cisgender man and that is just not our societal default setting. I also have a hard time with it because I am highly aware of and grateful for how fortunate I am. I’m healthy, so far I only personally know a couple of people who have symptoms of Covid-19, and nobody who has it seriously. My work continues, my home is secure. It feels crass to talk about having a hard time as a white, middle-class man who could have it way worse, and who benefits from the systems that are making it so much harder on other people.

But I know that in my own activism and writing about social justice, I feel a tendency to want to be this stoic, stiff-upper-lipped ally, when what’s really needed is full engagement, intellectual and emotional. In mainstream climate change discourse, in particular, the dominance of white male voices, often scientists trying to stick to their data, has cultivated a sterile, emotionless tone that many feel has held back the cause.

One of the strongest voices on this topic is Mary Annaïse Heglar, who recently wrote an essay for the New Republic about how, while the comparison has its limitations, her grief in response to the pandemic is remarkably similar to her grief about climate change.

This is painful. It’s supposed to be. We are suffering through a collective trauma. We’re watching our world change, and it feels like it’s falling apart. That’s not supposed to feel OK: It’s not OK.
…
I believe that we have it in us to face the great unknown that’s on the other side of this collective trauma. But only if we allow ourselves to mourn our losses—be they temporary or permanent.

There’s a tendency in activism or in media or whatever where we want to respond to a threat with a corrective—to fix things, or find lessons, to make things better next time. To form a strategy and an action plan. That’s an important part of the response, but as Heglar points out, the grief first must be felt for what it is. Any therapist will tell you it can’t be bypassed.

I tend to bristle when people give advice like let yourself feel the grief because it usually comes during times when we are already experiencing a lot of grief so it’s like yeah no shit I don’t have much choice you know. But this kind of grief we are going through now is different, in that it’s not easy to even recognize it as such. That’s because there may be no apparent personal loss that we would normally associate with the grieving process.

But the healthiest and safest among us are watching important parts of our lives and worlds crumble around us, with little way of stopping it, fighting it, or even knowing for certain how temporary or permanent it’s going to be. We’re not supposed to go this long without physically interacting with other people. We’ve lost basic joys like picnics and meeting friends at bars and cafes, watching people play music. We’ve lost our favorite places, in some cases maybe for good.

One of the saddest things I’ve read was how the virus is hitting Portland, a city where I lived for 5 or 6 years in my 20s, that’s defined by its social and cultural assets. Powell’s Books, the heart of the city, has shut its doors and is fighting to survive. McMenamins, a local chain that repurposes old spaces into bars, restaurants, music venues, and theaters, laid off 3,000 workers. I can’t even count the number of people I know who have worked at those places. Portland, like all cities, will recover with enough time, but it feels like watching a place, as I have known and loved it, suffer a slow death.

Then there’s the sadness of others’ sadness. Seeing people I love on the brink of losing their livelihoods, running out of money to pay longtime staff, watching their life savings dwindle. Talking to friends in the health care field who are devastated and scared and lacking the basic resources they need to do their jobs. We all have people we love who are vulnerable to illness, and can’t come close to them to offer help.

There’s also the hovering sadness of what’s to come, a feeling in our bones that things are about to get massively worse. David Kessler, who co-wrote On Grief and Grieving with the famous five stages of loss, described this as “anticipatory grief.”

Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it.

For me, this shows up as a persistent feeling of worry, but also an almost physical weight that grows throughout the day. I do alright, but it gets heavy. We all cope however we can, but for whatever reason I don’t find much solace in the singalongs, the baking, the kitchen dancing, the modern fables of animals reclaiming cities. I drink my coffee, work, read, listen to music, joke around, go for walks, drink some drinks, and on it goes as things unfold.

I do want to be careful not to suggest that there isn’t fighting to be done, or that we just need to ball up and cry for the foreseeable future. There are many enraging human and systemic injustices that are worsening this crisis, and there are things we can all do to confront them and to protect each other. We’re going to have to tear some things down and build some new things before it’s done.

But there’s also something about this that sets it apart from other struggles, in that many of the tools and weapons we normally turn to can only do so much, or they’ve been blunted. On some core level, the reality of death by illness is blameless and without lesson. There’s no reward to be found in the struggle against that reality. It’s just something really bad that’s happening to everyone.

There’s a song by Mount Eerie that is about Phil Elverum losing his wife to cancer and it’s pretty much the saddest song I’ve ever heard but also one I think about a lot.

It opens

Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb

It closes

It’s dumb
And I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you

Links

Listening

Run the Jewels released a couple new songs and I love this one. Quite different from Mount Eerie but also serves as a balm in its own way. I think we’re going to have some good quarantine releases let’s get that new Fiona to drop am I right.

Watching

Castlevania, Season 3. This is an animated series by Warren Ellis who is one of my favorite comic book writers but I guess he’s also a TV writer and a novelist, and the show seems to be doing quite well it’s getting a fourth season. The third season steers away from the Dracula hunter tropes of the video games and first two seasons and gets into a lot of bizarre world building and mind-bending fantasy-horror with a final two episodes that basically had me staring at the screen with my mouth open for about an hour. It’s also pretty funny.

This is you when you are waiting for this newsletter to arrive.

I Endorse

Wearing comfortable pants all the time. I recommend light material hiking or travel pants, athletic pants, even chinos with a little stretch to them. Or go full sweatpants if that’s where you’re at.

When you work from home, especially as a freelancer, you have to build this skill of balancing when to be hard on yourself and when to be easy on yourself. You are your own boss and your own employee at the same time. I get the feeling a lot of people are struggling with finding this balance right now, which is manifesting in online debates over what you should wear on Zoom meetings, whether you have to iron, dress nice, put on a bra, etc, if you’re not even going outside.

Someone I follow on social media was commenting about how it’s a weird time because in one way it’s the most stressful period in any of our lives, but in another way it’s oddly calm. Individual situations are clearly very different, for example, health care workers are essentially working in wartime conditions. But for most people, and all of us in some respects, the riot of modern life has quieted.

As much as possible, I think we should err on the side of going easy on ourselves and use the stillness as a kind of shelter. Let the abnormality break our normal state of obsessive productivity or barely managed burnout. Be easy on yourself. Wear comfortable pants.

Here’s another song for you to listen to.

That’s the Palace for today. Not a very funny one this week! I know it was a little different than most, maybe it was a bummer, maybe it helped. I hope it was the latter. Don’t worry, we’re doing OK here overall.

Hey, everyone should do one of those video call parties, not with me sorry, but you know with your own friends. I did one this week and it was surprisingly fun and rewarding. My friend’s kid was in the background and saw it was me so he said this funny rhyme I taught him once about diarrhea. There is so much beauty in this world.

Tate

29: Things that seemed so inevitable

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‘Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact’

The Fall of the Cowboy, Frederic Remington, 1895

This phrase has been rattling around in my head while sitting inside my own little box surrounded by all the other boxes of other people, all of us refreshing our web browsers and streaming Netflix and doing weird stuff like putting up Christmas lights, and that phrase is “All that is solid melts into the air.”

It’s from Marx, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind,” a quote that I’ve seen a few times in reference to the pandemic, because in times of crisis all thoughts seem profound and then are instantly cliched. To be honest, I only have a basic understanding of the context in which Marx wrote it, referring to revolutionizing economic systems, but it captures a certain surreal feeling of things that once seemed so inevitable, that we depended on or railed against, becoming vapor.

This is a terrifying feeling, but it is also revealing of what exactly it is we are all doing here. What we’ve been valuing all this time and what we subject ourselves to, often needlessly, in service of a system that is, at least for now, loaded with holes. As Anne Applebaum puts it, “Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.”

For one, they unveil with stark clarity the worst humans among us, that some portion of the people who are always holding back our quality of life, our collective liberation, our basic survival, are quite simply, forgive me, just pieces of shit.

Beyond the obvious pieces, we see it in senators rushing to sell off their stocks while reassuring the public that everything will be fine, “hustlers” filling up storage units with hand sanitizer and gouging scared consumers, tech execs dismissing precautions in the name of maintaining productivity, landlords demanding rent from tenants left with zero income, “private jets pouring in” to remote vacation communities and straining the seasonal towns’ resources and labor.

On the flip side, we are also seeing what we are capable of in the name of helping each other. That includes intimate acts of virtue and charity, but also systemic changes happening seemingly overnight now that a widespread emergency has made the need appear sufficient.

That includes Republicans suddenly proposing essentially universal basic income, laborers awarded free childcare and sick pay, suspending evictions and foreclosures, Wikimedia dropping its full-time work week to 20 hours. And maybe my favorite example because it involves reconfiguring actual physical space, Bogota expanding its bike lanes overnight, with a snap of a gd finger, to accommodate transportation and improve air quality in a city of 8 million people. Granted, it’s not like everything is suddenly perfect by any stretch of the imagination it’s a real mess out there, but wow look at this stuff that we can fix.

A lot of people are pointing these changes out, and the absurdities they put on display, these bullshit scarcities we manufacture, made eerily clear by vacant hotels and ghost flights in the air for no reason. Dan Kois at Slate says, “the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest.”

There is a pitfall here of being disingenuous in concluding that we could sustain all of these emergency measures during times of non-emergency. But, then again… Maybe we could?

The main difference that is prompting these expansions of certain benefits is a temporary shift in who we perceive deserves care. Things have reached a certain level of badness for all of us and, presumably, every one of us needs some kind of assistance right now. So when everyone needs help under extraordinary circumstances, we’re forced to temporarily set aside our founding American principle that some of us deserve it and some of us don’t.

Meanwhile, every single one of the negative impacts people are experiencing albeit on a more widespread basis during pandemic (illness, poverty, unemployment, untimely death, loss of mobility, lack of food and water, social isolation) are experienced by some people in this country every single day, often with little or no societal recourse. And we tolerate it because.

As Annie Lowrey points out, the pandemic exposes our pitiful social protections:

[The US] spends less than a third of what the average OECD country does on helping the jobless, about a third supporting families with kids, and 50 percent less on incapacity, meaning disability, sickness, or injury that might keep a person from accessing the labor market.

This reminds me of Elizabeth Anderson’s argument for a new understanding of equality (see Crisis Palace 15: Shared fates), based on interdependence and the belief that all people, regardless of an individual’s own “fault” or bad luck, have equal worth and deserve certain conditions in life.

So if we’re willing to change some of these rules once the shit has hit the fan for all of us, why couldn’t we do so when it was happening for some portion of us, all the time? Why couldn’t we say that nobody deserves this kind of hardship? That it’s never OK? That societal well-being is a higher priority than maximizing economic growth and the latter doesn’t create the former? (Here’s the mandatory connection to climate change this week.)

So maybe we can look at this sudden loss of solid form—the sweeping overnight changes, the heightened transparency, the bad actors exposed—certainly not as a silver lining, but as a way of recognizing that things are the way they are because we’ve made certain choices based on certain values. And consider how things could be if, in times of non-crisis should we godwilling experience them again, we changed those values.

Links

  • A couple of reports have now predicted the pandemic could last 18 months.
  • “There’s no better place to self-distance than Martha’s Vineyard,” said Gary A. Jenkins, a New York entertainment lawyer. “I can sit on my front porch, smoke a cigar, and not see anybody.”
  • Don’t get dressed to work from home.
  • #ReleaseTheButtholeCut this will be the most popular link I just know you people.
  • The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more energy than the bottom tenth, wherever they live.
  • Want to read a takedown of that horrible video of celebrities singing Imagine yes of course you do.

Listening

This is a cover of a Built to Spill song that sounds nothing like the original and I love both versions. It’s by Frances Quinlan the singer from Hop Along she has a whole solo record out.

Watching

I know everyone has been talking about this right now and you’re probably sick of reading about it, but I feel like I have to address the question of which is better, 2018’s Mission: Impossible Fallout or 2015’s Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have a clearcut answer there’s a lot of nuance involved. For example, Henry Cavill in Fallout is a huge step up from Jeremy Renner, but Rebecca Ferguson shines with more screen time in Rogue Nation. Ultimately, I think the only reasonable way to think of them is as one combined work of art, two parts of a whole. Actually, scratch that, Fallout is better but Rogue Nation is still pretty good. Both are better than Ghost Protocol.

I also watched Bad Times at the El Royale which is kind of a ridiculous movie but the campy performances and mid-century modern set are a lot of fun. Reminded me of all those stylish indie hits from the 90s.

I Endorse

Going out of the way to pay service providers, nonprofits, artists, and small businesses you love, if you have some financial stability. There are a lot of great ideas out there for ways to do this.

Like if you hire domestic workers, you can pay them their usual rate even if you’re not using their services (and/or consider paying into the National Domestic Workers Alliance Coronavirus Care Fund).

You can buy gift cards for restaurants and cafes you like, and takeout is considered safe as long as you are careful.

Donate to your local food bank.

It’s a good time to buy music and merch from artists you love, including on Bandcamp, which is forfeiting its share of sales today (Friday).

You can support your bookstore by ordering gift cards, ordering online if they offer it, or by linking them to a Libro.fm audiobook membership. Even if you don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks, your monthly payment gives the store a regular kickback.

If you read comics, indie publishers and fantastic stores like Floating World Comics in Portland are taking online orders for delivery or curbside pickup. My dear friend Jason at Floating World is sharing a lot of amazing rare comics he has for sale on his Instagram feed and using the hashtag #stayhomereadcomics

And if you love a particular artist, designer, etc. from Instagram or wherever, they probably have an online store where you can buy stuff from them.

From Floating World Comics

So how are you doing? Fine but not fine? Same same but different? Yeah me too. As much as this issue was all about things changing so much, it also feels like we’re just at the very beginning of something. A friend relayed an insight from a mutual friend who works at a hospital and said it feels like he’s watching this enormous wave starting to form in front of him.

I don’t really know what to tell you to be honest, but remember how I mentioned people are doing all these weird things right now? Well one funny thing I did was decide to repair my suitcase. One of its wheels is broken and I figured I would finally order a replacement part and fix it. Then I realized this is kind of ridiculous because I will presumably have no need for a suitcase anytime soon. Oh good thing that suitcase is in good shape so I can be ready for my upcoming trip from the bedroom to the living room.

But you know, we have to be aspirational right. So maybe now’s a good time to think about something you want to fix that literal or metaphorical suitcase wheel to repair for when it’s time to go somewhere again. Or not you can just watch TV if you want it’s totally fine.

Tate

28: First line of protection

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This fantasyland daze we walk around in, pretending all of our fates are not connected

The Threatened Swan, Jan Asselijn, 1650

Hello from Crisis Palace where we are healthy and safe, working from the palace, and responsibly limiting human contact.

I have found that Covid-19 has turned me into a machine that makes analogies. It’s kinda like this, it’s not quite like that, think back to SARS, September 11, Hurricane Sandy, the Marathon bombing, the 2016 election. That kind of thinking back is one way that people have made it this far, I guess, by remembering what this thing happening now is like and then responding accordingly. But, of course, this one is not exactly like any of these other things, because it is after all novel coronavirus it’s right there in the name, one of many reasons this is all so difficult and frustrating.

One thing it is kind of like though, which you may have guessed I would bring up, is the climate crisis, stirring up many of the same dynamics only on an exponentially faster timeline. Coronavirus and climate change are similar in that everything seems fine until it’s clearly not fine anymore but by that time it’s mostly too late because what really mattered was all the stuff we should have been doing when everything seemed fine but we didn’t.

So in both cases, when you take precautions in advance you might feel silly and some people might even make fun of you, but then later if you didn’t act in advance, you will feel like you really screwed up like James Franco in that movie where he squished his arm in the rock and was like ah shit I can’t believe I left that bottle of gatorade in the truck now I have to drink my pee.

So let’s not have to drink our pee, metaphorically or literally, and even though it seems like things are changing every single minute, we can go through some stuff that we do know, heavy on the links to other people who know way more than I do, with some Crisis Palace-y thoughts along the way.

Not great, Bob

I suspect by the time this goes out, people in many? most? parts of the US will have gotten past their initial instincts of saying, oh it’s probably not that bad people are overreacting or fear-mongering everyone settle down already.

I guess we all have to cross that threshold on our own, but we certainly have here in Boston, where the city has pretty much shut down. Two very concerning realities in Massachusetts are that 70 of our 108 known cases of coronavirus came from just one business conference (update: it’s now 123 total). Second, our confirmed cases seemed to have slowed, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot because even worse than in other states, we’ve had a severe shortage of testing. As of Tuesday, we had only tested 400 people since Feb 28. Looks like next week they are trying to increase that to 400 a day. Doctors described the lack of testing so far as a “debacle,” seeing patients with probable coronavirus, “some of whom had recently been on buses and planes — and being unable to test some of the suspected cases.”

National testing for the virus is also going not great and making it all the worse is the fact that the “dumbest, meanest, laziest asshole on earth is in charge,” a president whose “policy regarding coronavirus has unfolded as if guided by one rule: How can I make this crisis worse?”

And, if taking precautions like canceling gatherings and staying inside seems like a gigantic pain in the ass, be sure to read up on what it looks like when this virus tears through a community at full speed.

This interview with the leader of the WHO team that visited China shows, for one, just how impressive and necessary the response from the Chinese government was in getting the outbreak under control. He also describes a probable fatality rate of 1 to 2% (I’ll let you do the math on your city’s population), building entire new hospitals, millions of people staying home, and an entire economy put on hold. “This is the Wayne Gretzky of viruses — people didn’t think it was big enough or fast enough to have the impact it does.”

Meanwhile, Italy is under quarantine. All of Italy. As one Italian describes it:

A few days ago, an American friend asked me if someone I knew had contracted COVID-19. No, I didn’t know anyone. Until two days ago, when I did. Today, I know three. The more the days go by, the more the numbers grow, the more the circle tightens. When I talk to my friends abroad, I only have one piece of advice: Keep your guard up.

Systems failure

One thing that a lot of people are observing as this pandemic unfolds is that all of the things that are already screwed up about the United States are being magnified and exposed. I want to go back to that WHO guy Dr. Bruce Aylward, who points out that one thing China has going for it is that all testing is free, and if you do have Covid-19 the state then pays for everything.

In the U.S., that’s a barrier to speed. People think: “If I see my doctor, it’s going to cost me $100. If I end up in the I.C.U., what’s it going to cost me?” That’ll kill you. That’s what could wreak havoc. This is where universal health care coverage and security intersect. The U.S. has to think this through.

As one Congresswoman Katie Porter pointed out in a video that made the rounds, how can we expect to contain this thing stateside if people are terrified of what it will cost them to go to the doctor?

More than 28 million Americans have no health insurance, most of us who do have private insurance still pay a lot out of pocket, and one report found that 40% of Americans can’t cover an unexpected $400 expense. That certainly will be exacerbated by all the people in the service and gig economies who are losing income as a result of outbreaks and precautions.

Here are some things I said this morning when I was tired and upset:

And none of this is to speak of the different ways the systems that are supposed to directly deal with public health crises are failing us, in part due to chronic underfunding of America’s public health system, along with a global lack of preparedness.

De-centering ourselves

So what are we supposed to do? Well my dudes you’re on your own there I’m afraid because recommendations are different in every place, changing every day, and the biggest problem is what we don’t know. But here is one reporter’s attempt to figure it out and there is some very good advice in there.

I guess I can say what we are doing at our house, which is as of about a week ago, stocking up on dry goods, toilet paper, etc. in case it gets to the point where we really can’t go out—but NOT panicking and overbuying like an asshole. The usual hand washing, disinfecting. Minimizing our trips out, avoiding crowds.

I’m also trying to more generally get my head around how to think about this thing over what’s starting to look like will be a long haul, and one compelling case I heard from Ann Friedman today was that we should all do our best to “de-center ourselves” in our decision-making. Again, like climate change, a public health crisis like this requires us to do things with the best interests of everyone in mind, instead of our own, since every personal action impacts the herd.

What each of us does affects, not only our own risk levels, but everyone else’s—our moms, dads, grandmas, and grandpas, friends and neighbors with chronic health issues. When you say, “oh it’s just like the flu what’s the big deal” or “I’m not afraid of a little bug,” and go to a hockey game or say a Smurf convention, you are really saying, I don’t care if other people get sick.

I read two very good articles that explain this concept, which is very frustrating that it needs to be explained, but still.

The first is from Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist who teaches about pandemic response and who readers will recognize, as I’m a fan of her research on social movements. She started banging this drum very early on, when, honestly I was still shrugging off the threat:

It seems to me that some people may be holding back from preparing because of their understandable dislike of associating such preparation with doomsday or “prepper” subcultures. … Others may not feel like contributing to a panic or appearing to be selfish.

Forget all that. Preparing for the almost inevitable global spread of this virus, now dubbed COVID-19, is one of the most pro-social, altruistic things you can do in response to potential disruptions of this kind.

We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. We should prepare not because we are facing a doomsday scenario out of our control, but because we can alter every aspect of this risk we face as a society.

The second is this beautifully written, moving essay by Meghan O’Rourke, which truly, this whole newsletter should have just said go read this instead. But here is one part for starters:

Americans have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than the community, must do all the healing. COVID-19 is a stark reminder that the community, rather than the self, may be the first line of protection. To be ill is to know our interconnectedness, but to be ill in America today is to be brought up against the pathology of a culture that denies this fact.

So yeah we can ask ourselves how we might shift our behaviors from self-preservation to caring for the community. At the recommendation of one of our city councillors Michelle Wu, we’re going to round up contact info of close neighbors and start a group chat or email in case people need help, something that we probably should have done a long time ago. As Wu put it, “Let’s do more than just wash our hands. Even as we practice social-distancing, it’s more important than ever to strengthen our social bonds.”

If it makes sense in your circumstances, mindfully meet in small groups to avoid social isolation. Call people. Stay in contact digitally. Without bombarding people with links and lectures, we can text to check in, see how it’s going, what cancellations we’re sad about, what TV shows we’re watching.

Who knows how this pandemic unfolds from here and what things look like on the other side of it, but when we get there, maybe we can be stronger and better prepared for the next thing—whether it’s another virus, a flood, a storm, a drought, or a wildfire. Then we can look back and say, oh this thing is like this other thing, and this is how we got through it.

Listening

Watching

Not that long ago I would have said that I don’t really need anymore Mission: Impossible movies in my life beyond the first one that I saw in the theater in the 90s and the second one that I don’t remember being that good. But I was wrong. I watched 2018’s Mission: Impossible—Fallout and it was so much fun. Solid self-quarantine viewing. Even if you don’t really like Tom Cruise, you’re really showing up for Rebecca Ferguson and Henry Cavill.

Image result for henry cavill mission impossible gif

Let’s see, for TV I watched the last season of Preacher which was not very good but the final episode salvaged it a bit. Now on to season 2 of Lodge 49!

Comics

I’m working through a rather large stack of comics I’ve piled up and one is Jack Kirby’s OMAC (One Man Army Corps) published in 1974 and 1975. If you are a fan of Marvel stuff, there’s a 100% chance that you are a fan of Jack Kirby’s creations, and he basically created the style of visual storytelling that still dominates mainstream comics. Beyond his influence on superheroes, though, he’s one of the most beloved artists among even today’s most elevated and indie cartoonists. And finally, Jack Kirby just came up with some of the weirdest shit in comics history.

OMAC definitely falls in that category. He is basically this super-soldier from the future with a mohawk who gets his power from a satellite called “Brother Eye,” which is controlled by a kind of UN stand-in. There were only 8 issues but the first one involves basically exploding sex dolls, and in the last one he faces a villain who steals entire bodies of water. It’s weirdly anti-corporate too look at this plot line about privatization of public space lol.

OK that’s enough for this week I’m whipped. This whole thing sucks right? It’s scary and sad to have to face something difficult and not be able to gather together to make it easier, the one thing we would all typically do in tough times. Hang in there, be kind to each other, don’t panic but do prepare. Read the news but not all the time. Have some fun, joke around, eat a bunch of pasta, make a big thing of soup or a casserole.

Feel free to respond to this email and let me know what you’re thinking about all this mess, how you’re responding, what you’re doing to keep it together.

Tate

PS. And seriously, if you only hit one link this week, hit this one.

27: Me. Not them.

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I don’t think we should be in the business of moving backward

Still Life with Birds and Fruit, Giovanna Garzoni. c. 1650

I had a really cool opportunity this week to co-author an article for the fancy French publication Analyse Opinion Critique (AOC) with political scientist Edouard Morena of University of London Institute in Paris. He was invited by the magazine to write something about Bloomberg’s presidential run in the lead up to Super Tuesday, and he read this recent issue of Crisis Palace (24: Drag anchor), and thought elements of it paired well with a thesis he had in mind.

I’m a big fan of Edouard’s work, and have interviewed him in the past and I cite his book The Price of Climate Action all the time so was excited to collaborate. His research interests include climate politics, philanthropy, and social movements so we have a lot of overlap, and I find it’s always good to collaborate with someone smarter than you because it makes you look smarter by association.

The publication is in French, so if you speak French (I do not), you can just hustle your bilingual self right on over to AOC and enjoy (it’s free but you have to register). If you don’t speak French, Google translate on Chrome does a pretty good job you should be able to get the overall idea. But for Crisis Palace readers, I also pulled a few passages that I particularly like and that sum up the argument rather well. Google and Edouard helped me translate it here you go:

Bloomberg is on a mission. Beyond the conquest of the White House, it is, perhaps above all, about saving “philanthrocapitalism,” the idea that the pursuit of individual profit and the well-being of society are mutually reinforcing. Faced with the double threat of Trump / Sanders, it is about upholding the idea that entrepreneurs/billionaires/philanthropists are looking out for you, and, given their personal and professional experience, their extraordinary “business acumen,” their ambition, and their “strategic” mindset, they are best placed to solve the great social, democratic, and environmental challenges of our time.

…

Bloomberg’s commitment to climate action and cities is particularly revealing of this. Internationally, and following Trump’s decision to exit the Agreement, he has built up an image of “savior” of the Paris Agreement. Beyond Trump and the Paris Agreement, he is more broadly establishing himself as defender of what Steven Bernstein calls the “compromise of liberal environmentalism,” the dominant normative compromise in international governance, according to which environmental protection and a liberal economic order are mutually reinforcing. Historically, it is an approach to environmental problems that pays lip service to social justice issues, favors a “gradualist” or incremental and compromise approach, and is not always attuned to the urgency of the situation. 
…

It is Bloomberg’s worldview that is currently at stake in the Democratic campaign. Whether it be activists who protest at climate conferences such as GCAS, or the rise of the democratic socialist wing within the Democratic Party, a growing number of people no longer accept the idea that billionaire philanthropists are best placed to address the great challenges of our time. On the climate front, Bloomberg’s pro-market and non-interventionist approach is being overshadowed by a young generation of activists—notably the Sunrise Movement—who are carrying out an ambitious low-carbon transition project focused on social justice and the redistribution of wealth: the Green New Deal.

Supported by Sanders and championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a rising figure on the left wing of the party, the Green New Deal is based on an unprecedented mobilization of the federal government in favor of climate action, notably through major investments in infrastructure, housing and energy. The Green New Deal is the opposite of the Bloomberg project. 

There’s also a pretty good dunk in there about how Bernie’s slogan is Not me. Us. but Bloomberg’s could be Me. Not them. It’s obviously become somewhat dated since Bloomberg dropped out this week, but I think the point that this election (and current Democratic politics overall) has put the Bloomberg worldview on trial still holds, even with the election coming down to Biden and Sanders (and Tulsi Gabbard lol).

Raze and rebuild redux

Speaking of the election, kind of a dark week here in Boston. Warren withdrew after taking third place in Massachusetts, which is just so maddening. Lots of takes on that out there but she was one of the best presidential candidates the party has ever had and basically didn’t stand a chance because she’s a woman. And if you are like whoa come on now, please consider that women make up only 23% of the US House and 26% of the Senate and it is the year fucking 2020.

By the way, there was one of those perennial debates on Twitter about whether journalists should vote, and you will not be surprised to find out that I think the idea that they should not to be quite cockamamie. I think we should vote, say who we voted for, and also say why. Anyway, I already voted for Warren and I’m not a big Bernie fan but I hope Sanders can upset Joe Biden because I don’t think Democrats should be in the business of moving backward and I really don’t think anyone can predict what will happen in the general.

Other depressing stuff, remember that creative affordable housing project the city wanted to build on top of a city-owned parking lot in my neighborhood? I wrote about it back in 8: Raze and rebuild and you can go back and read it if you want I would probably consider it “one of the good ones.” Well there was a second meeting, this time the city did a big open house with all these discussion stations, which went a lot better but still not awesome, and anyway, they just announced they are not going to pursue the project. Basically a mob of angry people led by the local business community chased a bunch of new affordable housing out of Roslindale, a neighborhood that constantly pats itself on the back about how diverse and inclusive it is.

Some fun points from the memo announcing they were abandoning the plan:

  • Only 12% of Roslindale’s housing stock is income-restricted, compared to city average of 19%.
  • More than half of renters in Roslindale are cost-burdened, meaning they pay 30% or more of their income on rent.
  • “Issues of race and class surfaced during the course of the engagement and feedback process. As several community members expressed, the longstanding impact of structural racism, decreasing access to opportunity and financial security, as well as opposition to the development of affordable housing, perpetuate many of our city’s inequities.”

In short, the city was like, hey we aren’t going to do this thing that would have been a lot better than a bunch more high priced condos because you basically want to marry your stupid parking lot, but at some point you are going to have to help this racist, overpriced city get its shit together. Those are my words, not theirs, I hope that’s clear.

On this topic, there is a much bigger battle over a developer planning to turn a defunct racing track called Suffolk Downs into what I believe is the single largest development project in the history of the city, to essentially create a new neighborhood from whole cloth. Housing justice advocates are understandably very concerned, and are pointing to the Seaport neighborhood as reason to worry. That had me revisiting this Globe investigation about the development of the Seaport, a brand new, almost entirely white, wealthy neighborhood built on the backs of taxpayers (who are lots of different races as you may be aware).

How white? This white: Lenders have issued only three residential mortgages to black buyers in the Seaport’s main census tracts, out of 660 in the past decade. The population is 3 percent black and 89 percent white with a median household income of nearly $133,000, the highest of any Boston ZIP code, according to recent US census estimates.

Boston proper is 52% white and 25% Black fyi. The development and construction of the Seaport also involved no black-owned businesses and zero to few people of color even in leadership roles at companies receiving contracts.

One other thing about Boston’s affordable housing policy, it requires 13% of new units to be income-restricted if the project is a certain size, but get this, developers can even punt the affordable units offsite or even just donate to a city fund for affordable housing instead, a cool trick some Seaport developers took advantage of.

That history might shed some light on why community groups are fighting the Suffolk Downs project and are not content to give developers the benefit of the doubt. And also, combined with that little Roslindale story, it’s clear that YIMBY vs NIMBY is not a particularly useful distinction in housing policy.

Links

  • Largest source of increased emissions in the last decade is the power sector. Second largest: SUVs. SUVs burn more carbon, kill more people, and are more popular than ever! (the fat shaming metaphor in this article is stupid, sorry)
  • Alec Raeshawn-Smith died at 26 after he couldn’t afford his insulin. His mother found his last receipt for $1,300 in supplies, cancelled because he couldn’t pay. Stories like his are “a potent argument for an overhaul of the system toward Medicare for All.”
  • A dirty secret: most writers have money coming from somewhere else. And people lie about it all the time. It’s true for freelance journalists too, as very few pay the bills with that work alone. More than half of my income usually comes from copy editing and consulting.
  • How Hank Azaria realized Apu was hurtful, and decided he could no longer voice the character.
  • “Fetishized taste is the pivotal metaphor for moral underdevelopment in High Fidelity, the way that the monsters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are metaphors for the agonies of adolescence.”
  • Do you have the bandwidth to drill down on this?
  • Reduced emissions are not a “silver lining” of a global outbreak of illness and saying so is a form of eco-fascism.

Watching

Lodge 49 is kind of a sad show to recommend because it only ran two seasons and looks to be canceled for good at this point, but I just watched the first season and it is really something special to behold. It’s so weird that when watching, I found myself mentally scrolling through other similar shows to try to figure out exactly what this thing is. While it isn’t really the same as any of them, one fond comparison that comes to mind is Six Feet Under because they both kind of make me feel the same way, which is good. Also, I only watched this because my friend Swedlund forced me to so credit to him.

This should give you absolutely no sense of what this show is like.

I also watched Justice League, which I don’t even know why I do these things to myself seriously not cool.

Mother Boxes.

I Endorse

This is a new section I decided to steal from Ann Friedman and use as a catchall for purchases I want to recommend like that one backpack from the other day, but also other things that I just think are good things.

In this edition I would like to recommend another newsletter, Starlight & Strategy, by friend and amazing poet and activist Tamiko Beyer. Here’s a snippet from a recent one:

Getting back to Audre Lorde’s quote about the master’s tools. I believe this quote is often invoked, and often out of context, in a way that I think limits our imagination and shuts down possibility for radical change. And I don’t think that was her intention. (Here’s the essay in full if you haven’t read it yet or need a refresher. Or better yet, go get yourself a copy of Sister Outsider by Lorde, which includes this essay.)

I understand her essay to mean that the master’s tools, wielded in the way that the master wielded it, using the logic of the master, will never lead to true liberation. But I think Lorde would agree with DiFranco that any tool can be a weapon.

Yeah you want to see where that’s going am I right? Subscribe here.

Listening

A lot of the music I listen to day to day is actually kind of weird stuff because I usually work from home with music on but that music has to be wordless and have certain I don’t know qualities. Lately I can’t stop listening to this UK producer Mark Barrott who has this kind of sparkly tropical sound. I like this song but this whole record Sketches From An Island 2 is good.

PS I found it through this other newsletter that sends you two hours of nice music to listen to while working, every work day.

Well this was going to be a short one but I got all riled up about Boston housing so anyway I hope you found my rage to your liking. What else, what else. First batch of pickles is done and I’m sad to report, they didn’t turn out great. The carrots are actually quite good but the cucumbers got really mushy. So I guess what I’m saying is I’m going to hold off on any contests for free pickles until I get these fuckers right. There’s a bunch of tricks you can do to stop them from getting mushy but honestly I might just move on to other vegetables and various cabbage-based products.

Pickling does take some trial and error before you get good at it, but the good news is that each failed attempt produces a large quantity of product. I guess in that sense, pickling is a lot like writing newsletters, ouch self burn, just kidding self.

If you get a bad batch of metaphorical pickles in your life, don’t feel bad, just take some notes on where things went wrong maybe too much vinegar or not enough salt and try again you just gotta dill with it.

Tate

PS Have you shared Crisis Palace lately? If you know someone who would like it you can forward it, post to social media, or even print it out on paper and hand it to someone, with the subscribe url written down neatly.

26: This paradise of participating

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This vale where souls get made

Cynara humilis, wild thistle, Flora Graeca, sive, Plantarum rariorum historia [1806-1840]

As the credits rolled on the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, audiences in theaters were instructed to take a series of actions that appeared one by one on screen, set to the soulful adult contemporary sounds of Melissa Etheridge singing the movie’s theme song, “I Need to Wake Up.” The first messages read:

Are you ready to change the way you live?

The climate crisis can be solved.

You can reduce your carbon emissions to zero.

Buy energy efficient appliances and lightbulbs.

Change your thermostat.

Weatherize your house.

Pulling it up on the internet now, I see that after a sizable list of lifestyle tweaks Al Gore was demanding of us they do get to things like voting, and writing to Congress. Eventually one of the tips says to pray. But I must not have stayed to read those at the time because I remember, although the movie was quite impactful in its own way at the time, I was so irritated that the call to action at the end started with changing your lightbulbs.

Around that time I believe I would have been working on my second (?) climate change related campaign around a renewable energy standard in Oregon so I would have been annoyed at the focus on lifestyle over policy. That focus unfortunately stuck around the surface level of the climate conversation for years, with a huge blind spot for the culpability of industry and Republican politicians, and very much lacking an environmental justice analysis that different communities contribute to and suffer from the problem at very different levels.

I get the sense that narrative has finally changed, maybe just in the past couple of years, as a much more common refrain you hear is that climate change is a systemic problem that can’t be solved by individual action. I think these days people are much more likely to lay blame at the feet of the George W. Bushes and Exxons of the world than themselves for keeping the thermostat too high, which is overall a very good thing and a sign of progress.

I wrote about this in a past issue (16: Fear of flygskam) about flying, in particular, and how even though it’s not your fault, what you do is still important, so it’s both individual and systemic change needed. But whenever you have these two binary views like personal vs systemic and neither is really correct, it’s how we reconcile the two where things get interesting.

This was the topic of a recent Climate One podcast episode, in which the host Greg Dalton posed to Tatiana Schlossberg author of Inconspicuous Consumption the difficult question of how to bridge personal and systemic change. She made this really compelling point my emphasis added:

This problem is too big to be solved by individual behavioral changes because it’s hard to get 7 billion people to do anything without some kind of government regulation, or international agreement, or corporate action. That being said, I think it’s important for me and for people who care about this issue to try to live in line with our values, because I want to be the kind of person who, if I learn more information about the harmful things that I’m doing, that I act on them.

She talks about how in doing so, we may also be better attuned to supporting systemic change. This is similar to a longstanding strategic argument you hear from snobby policy wonks about personal environmental actions—that yeah it doesn’t really matter but maybe it helps engage people in things that do matter so can’t hurt as an entry point.

I think individual change is more necessary than this gateway argument suggests (and to be clear, Schlossberg was not discounting the importance of personal change). For one, Dalton points out that individual action can get us maybe 30%-40% of the way to safety (no time to find the source of this stat right now sorry), and you know that is not nothing. But Schlossberg is also pointing out something even more profound when she uses the phrase, “I want to be the kind of person who…”

That strikes me as a potentially powerful way to look at how personal action might make its own albeit insufficient contribution, while also forming the bridge to systemic action. We might think of how personal lifestyle changes are not a tool of absolution, or symptom of guilt, but a way of walking a path toward the radical change demanded of society.

It made me think of a concept in left and anarchist politics and social movements in general that is not exactly the same, but is at least similar, called prefigurative politics. This has come to refer to something kind of specific, which is when movements for change (like Occupy) govern themselves with a highly participatory form of democracy. So it’s sometimes framed in opposition to hierarchy and structure, and that can actually be problematic when it leaves openings for loud white guys to seize control, as Zeynep Tufekci writes in her book Twitter and Tear Gas.

But at its core, prefigurative politics describes when a group seeking societal change strives to reflect that change within its own practice. So the culture the group creates, how they make decisions, the experiences people have, it should all prefigure the world we are striving for. (I am sorry to any experts out there if I’m butchering this interpretation, and if so, please do clarify or correct.)

I like how Chris Crass describes prefigurative politics in his book Towards Collective Liberation, “as a way to begin building the new world in the shell of the old.”

Or how Rebecca Solnit describes it in Hope in the Dark, as “the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded.”

That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it’s a temporary and local place, this paradise of participating, this vale where souls get made.

That last part references a Keats quote, as Solnit cites earlier, “That’s why John Keats called the world with all its suffering ‘this vale of soul-making,’ why crisis often brings out the best in us.”

There are many advantages to this approach, as it allows a venue to test out and improve ideology in real life, and it empowers people “to see themselves as agents of change who can influence the world around them” (Crass). Tufekci points out that it can also be a source of joy and motivation, noting how protest camps often become these “communities of belonging” where people reaffirm the importance of caring for one another.

That interview with Schlossberg got me thinking, in what way might personal lifestyle changes act, not as a meaningless form of “doing my part,” or merely as a means to some other work, but as a kind of prefiguration of the world we want to live in. Another way of thinking of this is, individual action could be a way of being the kind of person who lives in the world we want, even if it doesn’t exist yet.

I don’t think it’s a given that lifestyle improvements are necessarily a step toward radical change, far from it. And I also don’t know how to make it that good thing instead of the bad thing, this is kind of a half formed thingy. But I suspect it requires some kind of social element to get it there. It has to progress from not just being a certain kind of person, but to being a kind of people, something new we are building together. Maybe individual action is where it starts, community is where it goes, and then we reach systemic change. And until we get there, we’re ready for it. We’ve been practicing.

Links

Watching

I’m trying to watch more movies this year and this week we watched Aquaman which you know what even though I’m not sure why you would wear a cape and grow out your hair if you lived underwater, I’m there for Aquaman. It’s weird and fun and neon and oddly Australian. And also look who rolls up riding a giant fish it’s Willem GD Dafoe, old Bobby Peru aka the lighthouse keeper himself I can’t get away from this guy.

Listening

Lankum, The Young People

Kind of a short one this week, getting down to that end of the month crunch for us ‘lancers so a busy time they can’t all be winners you know. I was trying to think of my witty personal update for this part of the newsletter, and all the interesting things that happened were to Jamie, #mywife, like she got really sick which mostly meant laying in bed watching Queer Eye and periodically muttering to herself “cute.” And she also got a new Tori Amos tattoo, but what is this thing the Jamie Cerretti Post-Dispatch or something. One more thing is that she got this amazing print from this store in Salem called Hauswitch:

We got it framed through this startup delivery service and the note when it came back said:

This is such an interesting piece and one that looks amazing in our Newport frame. Great choice! We hope you love it as much as we have loved framing it for you.

All our best,

Becky & the Framebridge Team

I guess it is a pretty interesting piece so anyway we’ve become pretty close friends with Becky she’s the best. I realized after I sent last week’s that it was the 25th issue of Crisis Palace, which means I’ve been doing this thing now for like six months which is really hard to believe. Thank you sincerely for being part of it with me I am truly enjoying it. Here’s to 25 more crisis-filled palaces.

Tate

25: Let’s set a high bar

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Far too little and far too much at the same time

Untitled (The Moon), Willhelm Sasnal

So I ended up reading about and talking about and tweeting about and yes writing about Jeff Bezos a whole bunch this week more than I prefer to be honest but I will do just a little bit more of it for you all because I give and I give. 

Despite the topics of some past newsletters and the fact that I write a lot about funding, I don’t particularly enjoy writing about billionaires. Maybe one reason is I’ve always had kind of an allergy to stuff that people are paying attention to, which is pretty awesome for a career in journalism as you can imagine. But when you pay too much attention to people like Bill Gates, you miss out on more interesting stories on the margins about levers of power, how change happens, hypocrisy, redemption, surprise victories, etc. 

But anyway, every now and then something happens that gets everyone interested in philanthropy, which is happening a lot more often. But this was a really big one, you may have heard the CEO of this company called www.amazon.com decided to commit $10 billion to addressing climate change. I always find these moments kind of frustrating in a petty way, because everyone writes a take and some of those takes are not that hot I find.  

They aren’t wrong, necessarily, but you can feel people struggling with what exactly to say about big philanthropy, as they feel compelled to say good things about things they suspect are bad, or bad things about things they suspect are good. Over the years of covering the sector I’ve thought a lot about these contradictions about power and inequality and influence, but also progress and urgent causes and great people in the nonprofit sector (1 in 10 jobs) and great funders and you know it can be a real mess. This was I suspect my best attempt to make sense of it all. 

I’m not saying I am like the master of writing about philanthropy, but at this point I have a decent understanding of the moving parts, let’s say. And most coverage hits on maybe one of these parts. So common responses were, yes but Amazon is really bad. Or it’s fucked up how much money Jeff Bezos has he needs to pay more taxes. Or, I don’t trust his intentions. Or, all this money is super awesome, it should go to this one climate change solution because I’m a smartypants and this is the right one. 

The anger toward the corporation and the inequality behind the philanthropy I do really appreciate, and it’s great that those takes are more common instead of a lot of blind positive coverage. But after you say that, it’s kind of like, then what? Because beyond whether we think this is a good thing or a bad thing, or even what cause it’s earmarked for, what happens next—how the money moves and how certain people will wield it—has high stakes.

So I did my at least warm take I hope, which was—there are many problematic aspects of this announcement, let’s try to think about what it would really take, based on what we know about the history of major funding initiatives, for this influx of $10 billion to have a positive influence. Here’s part:

When philanthropy reaches the scale of Bezos’s recent $10 billion pledge to address climate change, it always feels to me like far too little and far too much at the same time—too little of his accumulated wealth and too much potential influence. 

Add to that Amazon’s huge carbon footprint, the tech services it provides for oil and gas extraction, and the fact that the company managed to pay zero federal corporate income taxes in 2018, and the mixed reaction to this week’s announcement of the Bezos Earth Fund is completely understandable.  

…

Of course, it’s also just a lot of sorely needed funding for this most important and time-sensitive cause. For comparison, if the Bezos Earth Fund were to become an endowed foundation, its minimum annual payout would be $500 million, nearly five times what the Hewlett Foundation, the field leader, granted for climate in 2018. Even as folks rightly point out that it’s a relatively small chunk of his net worth (7.7%), or that he should be bearing a greater burden based on his contribution to the problem, this is still game-changing money coming into climate philanthropy. 

So at the risk of wild speculation, the announcement presents us with an opportunity to ask what guiding principles might put such a windfall to proper use. 

The spoiler is that Bezos would first have to get his company’s shit together. Then yield decision-making power to people working on the issue and dealing with it on the ground, support grassroots action in impacted communities, avoid one top-down strategy, and a couple other things. I’m under no delusion these things will happen btw but you know let’s set a high bar. You can read the whole thing here I am not sure if it’s behind the paywall.  

Drag Anchor Redux

There was some news this week on natural gas and methane that I wanted to share in light of last week’s beating up on Bloomberg for enabling the fracking boom because I do love a good told you so. 

There’s this article, in which a study found that, “Oil and gas production may be responsible for a far larger share of the soaring levels of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the earth’s atmosphere than previously thought.”

So back when people were all about the idea of gas as a bridge fuel, the narrative was that yes there was a chance that resulting methane pollution could be bad, but many including funders and big green groups were basically saying, well let’s just make sure this gas extraction is done in a good way because that’s environmentalism. Turns out it is much worse than industry let on.

From Shipwreck, some weird interdimensional scifi from Warren Ellis and Phil Hester

It’s true that methane is a short-lived climate pollutant, so different than CO2 in that regard. But it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon because, as this other article pointed out, we now have all of this new fossil fuel infrastructure and a glut of cheap gas in the system: 

Gas is such a bargain that it’s being viewed less as a bridge fossil fuel, driving the world away from dirtier coal toward a clean-energy future, and more as a hurdle that could slow the trip down. Some forecasters are predicting prices will stay low for years, making it tough for states, cities and utilities to achieve their goals of being zero-carbon in power production by 2050 or earlier.

“The fact that there’s an abundance of it makes the move to complete decarbonizaton much harder,” says Ravina Advani, head of energy, natural resources and renewables at BNP Paribas SA.

Yes, this article is from Bloomberg news, and it has a little note at the end about all of Mike Bloomberg’s climate funding which is just chef’s kiss, considering he once wrote in an op-ed, “Fracking for natural gas can be as good for our environment as it is for our economy and our wallets, but only if done responsibly.”

Anyway, one more thing, because of all this news happening I was Extremely Online more than usual this week which is not great for a person’s head and why I may seem a little cranky today. I was getting annoyed at the parade of climate dudes and philanthropy dudes in the news, even though I am 100% both of those dudes. So as a remedy, check out this post and twitter list by Jen Bokoff if you want to hear from or elevate women and diverse voices who have been engaged with and challenging philanthropy for long before the current wave of critique. Gaining a Say: Lifting Up Philanthropy’s Unheard Voices

Links

Reading

Another good book I read over vacation was Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson, which is an alien invasion story set in the US Virgin Islands. Character-driven, a fascinating historic backdrop, it explores colonialism and violence through understated scifi elements.

Watching

Also coincidentally about violence and colonialism via scifi was Season 4 of The Expanse, which I finished this week. It’s equally concerned with the science of the distant future and space exploration as it is with the social and political implications. It’s the only space opera scifi, especially on TV, where I’m like yeah this seems kind of plausible. There’s also this character Bobbie and she is a real badass. Just a heads up if you’re terrified of slugs like I am, there’s some serious slug horror in one episode but you can do it be brave. You can tune in and watch it on, sigh, you know where.

Kick his ass Bobbie

Podcasts

Two pods to recommend this week. First up, one organization that I really think the world of, it is actually a network of a bunch of groups, is the Climate Justice Alliance. Now they have a podcast! It is called Stories from Home: Living the Just Transition.

CJA is really into the importance of art and culture being a part of equitable climate action, and I loved this thing that writer Samantha Harvey said in the first episode, “If you separate emotion and culture from the work you’re doing, it’s very easy to forget who you’re affecting and who you’re speaking for.”

Second one is The Slowdown, hosted by poet and former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. The Slowdown delivers one poem every weekday, read by Smith along with some words of wisdom as she introduces it. For example:

I wish I could say to everyone who lives with a fear of poetry, hey, relax, you don’t always have to understand. You can let it nudge you, let it cause something to stir. The sounds of words gliding along next to one another, the glimpse of an image, a face, an animal, something taking flight.

They are short little moments of shelter and warmth and thought, only around five minutes each and if you listen at 2x speed for efficiency, even shorter just kidding just kidding.

This week I wanted to end on a sad note but an important one, and take a minute to remember a very dear friend who recently passed away, Ed Johnson. Over the years, I was fortunate enough to have Ed in my life as a fellow organizer and fundraiser, a boss, a mentor, and finally, a friend. He died last week after a nearly 13-year battle against Multiple Myeloma.

There are countless tributes online from all the people he impacted over the years, and the fact that they all touch on some similar themes speaks volumes about his integrity and his ability to connect with people. I was talking with my friend Pat, who was very close to Ed, and we were remarking about how the thing about him is that he somehow brought out the best in all of the people in his orbit. He could see whatever spark a person had to offer the world, and draw it out, even if we didn’t always see it in ourselves. And Pat said, yeah but the other thing was that Ed always gave you the best of himself too.

It’s hard to put into words how much I learned from him, about people, about serving a purpose, saying the thing that needs to be said, doing the thing that needs to be done. And, of course, he was just a fun, hilarious, sweet person to hang out with. I will miss him so, so much.

Hug your people,

Tate