November 2008 Archives

Recession? What recession? Shoppers spent more on Black Friday this year than they did last year. Good news, right?

Well, Sharon Astyk begs to differ. If you think the Black Friday bargains were good, just wait till you see what you can buy come February, when people start running out of money to buy crap. A reader wrote this morning asking if I didn't think that there was something deeply wrong with the credit-card companies that pounded people with offers to take out lines of credit that they couldn't afford; yes, I do, and I think that laws should be passed against it. But that doesn't stop the cultural problem at the root of the manipulation. John Taylor Gatto, a lapsed Catholic and education reformer, wrote that one good thing religion has going for it is that it gives you a point of resistance against the manipulators. A spiritually content person, he said, is a lot harder to manipulate.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Sharon's must-read post:

I didn't buy nothing yesterday, I admit. It was too good a chance to take my kids to the science museum in Boston while I'm here. So I bought tickets, half of lunch with friends at a thai-buddhist vegetarian restaurant, and while I was in the neighborhood, picked up a songbook for a friend, Goodnight Moon in Hebrew for another friend, and some sheets of beeswax for a homeschool project making Chanukah candles. And I'm not claiming any level of moral purity as I sit here on my laptop.

But it isn't just that it has to stop - and it does - did you see that we now have 73% fewer zooplankton than we did in 1960? Nearly every sea animal or sea animal eating creature in the world is heavily dependent on zooplankton. That's why even if we could find a magic bullet to go on the way we could, it would just put off the inevitable reckoning. But it isn't just that it needs to stop - it is that it is stopping.

The economy is a game of music chairs, and the chairs are disappearing. When the music stops for each of us, and our chair is gone, for a time we will rely primarily on the resources we've built up now. Those of us left holding the big screen tvs and the designer handbags will have them - or whatever their resale value is. And those who have ties - biological or chosen - will have those. The truth is that our consumer culture needs us to be isolated, fragmented, alone, empty - or advertising wouldn't work, the nonsensical reasoning that we have to have this year's big thing wouldn't work. The primary project of consumer culture is to drive us apart, to make sure we do not share, we do not combine resources, or even consult on how ridiculous the things we are being told are. And it has worked magnificently.

The music is hectic, the chairs are disappearing, we're going faster and faster. And pretty soon it stops. What will you have when it just...STOPS?

Read the whole thing. And by the way, check out Sharon's post about deflation and how it will affect the way we think about energy and peak oil.

Reader Rick R. sends along this piece from a South Carolina high school teacher talking about why Jane Austen's novels speak to her public school students. Excerpt:

Jane Austen's characters have lives circumscribed by the social conventions of a rigid class system. Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennet are acutely aware that their lack of rank and money are insurmountable handicaps as they look for happy endings - or would be if they weren't just characters in Austen novels. As women, they are financially and socially dependent on men in their lives. In the ways that matter, they have little or no control over what happens to them.

Most of the students in this general level English class are circumscribed by the limits of class and money, too. The majority eat free or reduced-price lunches. They depend on the school bus for transportation. After high school they will go straight to work or the military, few of them able to pursue higher education. At least the English department's insistence that they read every day in class has turned many of them into voracious readers.

At some level they seem to know that their modern lives of easy entertainment and frank sexuality are unworthy compromises in the search for romance and love, that Austen's women have richer lives than their own. When impetuous Marianne Dashwood finally had a soft word for Colonel Brandon after rejecting him throughout "Sense and Sensibility," the class gave an audible sigh of satisfaction. When I told the class we only had about 10 more minutes of "Pride and Prejudice" to watch so I would just tell them the ending instead, they screamed.

The author of this piece, Kay McSpadden, has written a book about her teaching experiences, "Notes From a Classroom." Check it out.

It's becoming ever more apparent that the Mumbai attacks originated in Pakistan. But what does that mean, ultimately? Did the Pakistani state aid and abet the creation and sustenance of the group or groups behind this attack? Almost certainly yes, through its ISI intelligence agency and its military. Here's Steve Coll writing in the New Yorker:

It is important, of course, to assume nothing about where the evidence trail in these latest Mumbai attacks will lead; in a forensic and legal sense, only the evidence matters, and there isn't much of it available yet. Still, even if it turns out that the attackers were all rooted in India, and derived all of their training and supplies from mainland Indian sources (unlikely, but conceivable), this does not absolve Pakistan of responsibility for a foreign and intelligence policy, pursued relentlessly for twenty years, that deliberately sponsors and nurtures terrorist groups. India's Hindu chauvinists have done their share to stoke Muslim rage within India; it is difficult to imagine, however, that without the proxy war conceived and supplied by Pakistan's Army that scenes such as those now unfolding in Mumbai would have otherwise occurred.

The question is, though, to what extent should one hold the recently-elected government in Islamabad responsible for the violence? It's a critically important question when deciding how to respond to the attack. It would be a mistake to assume that they're in full control of the ISI and the army -- which, you'll note, has essentially lost control of the tribal regions of the country. This morning on This Week, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US, tried to portray Pakistan as a "victim" -- his word -- of Islamist terrorists also. Meaning, in part, that the jihadist attacks on India are helping undermine his government too, and Pakistani democracy.

That point is harder to refute considering Amb. Haqqani's credentials as an anti-Islamist Muslim. Just over a year ago, I appeared with him at a one-day Hudson Institute conference on the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. Haqqani spoke about the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of US Muslim institutions (download the transcript here). I blogged here about Husain's speech at the time. Here's an excerpt from that entry:

Apologies for light blogging. I've been in bed sleeping most of the day. Seem to have picked up a little bug somewhere, maybe at our men's group meeting last night at church, where we bottled the wheat ale we've been brewing in honor of Metropolitan Jonah. Or maybe I overdosed on tryptophan in yesterday's turkeypalooza pig-out. Anyway, I'm probably going to go back to bed in a few minutes, but blog addict that I am, I wanted to put a couple of pieces up.

Readers of the Dallas Morning News know that each year, the editorial board chooses a Texan of the Year. In the lead-up to the voting, columnists and others at the News write an endorsement of their own nominee. I'd thought about T. Boone Pickens, for his forward-thinking energy policies, and also former Sen. Phil Gramm, for his key role in helping bring about the fiscal regulatory regime that got us into such a mess in 2008 (Texan of the Year nominees don't have to have done good -- last year's TOY, the Illegal Immigrant, was chosen because immigration dominated Texas news in 2007, not because the board had a particular love for illegal immigrants; still, we caught hell from our readers).

Anyway, my nominee for 2008 Texan of the Year is Ron Paul. Excerpt from my column:

Well, not quite, but she hates what the idea of chef-ness has done to our culture. In today's NYT, the grande dame of Italian cooking says that the worship of the chef in contemporary society hurts us by implicitly devaluing home cooking. Excerpt:

The food Americans eat that is made fresh at home by someone who is close to them is shrinking compared with food consumed at restaurants or prepared outside. And while eating out or taking in may save us time or bring us enjoyment, I would argue that it deprives us of something important.

I am my family's cook. It is the food prepared and shared at home that, for more than 50 years, has provided a solid center for our lives. In the context of the values that cement human relations, the clamor of restaurants and the facelessness of takeout are no match for what the well-laid family table has to offer. A restaurant will never strengthen familial bonds.

Which is why, as we come together over the holidays, we should take a moment to think about how we might become cooks again. We could even begin, in these financially straitened times, by replacing store-bought presents with meals cooked at home.

After all, what experience of food can compare with eating something good made by someone you can hug? Like other forms of human affection, cooking delivers its truest and most enduring gifts when it is savored in intimacy -- prepared not by a chef but by a cook and with love.

Read the whole thing. Marcella's Italian cookbooks are wonderful, by the way; she's kind of a kitchen goddess in our house. I learned how to cook brisket through her super-simple recipe, which makes the most fantastically tender and succulent piece of meat imaginable.