Propaganda of the Deed

“Advertising Shits in Your Head – Strategies for Resistance,” by V. Raoul and M. Bonner, 2019

This is a mostly anarchist and artistic take that pushes back against the omnipresent advertising in public and shared spaces.  Sort of like Adbusters but on the street level.  As Baran and Sweezy’s book “Monopoly Capital explained in 1966, the ‘sales effort’ is a key part of capital’s attempt to not only increase ‘market share’ but also to increase new desires and new markets.  If advertising was stupid and useless, capital would not spend any money on it.  But it works and so they do.  It is one of the fundamentals of a pure and destructive consumer society.

These activists, mostly from Europe and New York, have found ways to cover urban advertisements with street art, with blank whiteness, with political comments and political art, with humor and in the process slyly removing and undermining the sales effort.  They consider it a way to take back public and shared spaces from the privateers.  The various action groups of ‘subvertisers’ and ‘brandals’ also advocate banning outdoor advertising, as some cities have done.  Advertising, as Bernays pointed out years ago, is propaganda.

Some groups or individuals replace ads with non-political graphic art. Others create political art that covers police violence, war profiteering, sexism, climate change, toxic food, homelessness, the Catholic Church and deportations.  Some is anonymous, others are signed. The book contains many color pictures of the installations, which are mostly in covered ad boxes in London or covered ad boxes on phone booths in New York.  The groups distribute tools and keys that will open these large rectangular boxes to anyone, along with instructions on how to jam the ads.  Many of these people grew out of the street art movement led by Banksy and Fairey.         

The book contains pictures of the various installations, which are also posted on-line.  It has detailed instructions on how you too can become a ‘subvertiser.’  And definitely many of these efforts are funny.  I think anarchists have a better sense of humor than Marxists, whatever their other problems.  

My one issue is that many of these subversions will not be noticed by the general public, as the ‘ad boxes’ themselves announce that this is an ‘ad.’  “The medium is the message,” as McLuhan pointed out.  And in this case it is the box.  Some of them could come across as really subtle ads that barely say who is sponsoring them, or as some kind of jokey or ‘woke’ branding, or even part of a city beautification project.  Anyway, even if you’re not an artist, keep your heavy black marker on you and the next time you run into an easily marked ad, fuck it up.  That one over the urinal?  The one at the train station?  The one at the bus stop?  Or if you’re in a rural area, your chain saw!  That is until advertising as a whole is ended, since these efforts only have a small effect on the smothering sales behemoth that surrounds us every day.

Adbusters is carried in May Day’s periodical’s section. 

Other prior reviews on this subject below, use blog search box in upper left:  “Banksy,” “Propaganda” (Bernays), “Monopoly Capital” (Baran & Sweezy),“Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” “Ways of Seeing,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Bullshit Jobs” (Graeber), “Doublespeak,” “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky), “The Truth About the Drug Companies.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 7, 2020

Time to Re-Load

“The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment,” by Thom Hartmann, 2019

This short primer is most notable for its legal take on the issue of the Second Amendment and the power of the NRA.  Hartmann details how none of the ‘founders’ thought guns were to be in every citizen’s hands, nor was that the meaning of the 2^nd Amendment.  In the 1970s the NRA was a normal ‘gun safety’ group that advocated reasonable gun laws.  Then it was taken over by the hard right and turned to fear-mongering over crime and drugs, sort of a justification for modern slave patrols and ‘open carry.’  In the process it became the lobby for gun manufacturers.

Re-Loaded

A part of the book could be seen as borrowing from Dunbar-Ortiz’ 2018 book “Loaded” in the relation between guns and native American genocide (100M dead) and centuries of African American slavery.  A key part of overturning Reconstruction was the seizing of weapons by Klan-like groups that were owned by southern people of a darker color.  Like Dunbar-Ortiz, Hartmann also deals with cowboys, mass killers, fascists and crazed young white men, starting in 1966 with Tower shooter Charles Whitman.

Hartmann is an ordinary left-liberal, so his solutions are patterned after reforms in Australia where owning a firearm is the same as owning and driving a car - with registration, training, insurance and licenses.  Yet at the same time he attempts to show how guns are embedded in U.S. society and here he falls short.  His larger solutions involve getting rid of corporate ‘personhood’ and money as ‘free speech,’ while trying to get different people on the Supreme Court.  Hartmann never mentions the bi-partisan militarist U.S. foreign policy and police, nor the role the Democratic Party has in the incarceration state and the drug war.  He thinks overturning all this is possible by simple, reformist means.

Gun-ownership is really a health crisis, as 2/3rds of the 34K yearly gun deaths are suicides.  Yet studying the issue in the U.S. is legally banned.   Studies from other countries show that the more guns in a society, the more suicides, murders, accidents and fascist and crazed mass shootings occur – an almost 1 to 1 correlation.   U.S. states that have more restrictive gun laws have less gun violence than those with fewer laws.  There is also a high correlation between inequality in a society and gun violence.  It is no accident that suicides, mass shootings and fascist activity under U.S. capitalism are all increasing as inequality and misery increase. The ‘right to bear arms’ has become its dialectical opposite, as the contradiction within the Amendment has flowered.  It is now also the right to die by gunfire.

2^nd Amendment

Hartmann looks at how the 2^nd Amendment was formulated.  Jefferson, a slave-owner, was wary of a standing army.  Madison, a slave-owner too, wanted to make the southern slave states happy and so included their ‘state’ language in the 2^nd Amendment.  Patrick Henry, a slave-owner, was the most vociferous in demanding that states, not the federal government, have control over the militias. He was worried that if the federal government controlled the militia, slave patrols in the south would be in danger.  It might also lead to ‘manumission’ for African-Americans if they were in a federal militia.  

The White Wigged Gentlemen

Hartmann notes that the phrase ‘bear’ arms implies a military duty, not an individual duty, as Jefferson wanted federal militias to substitute for a standing army.  Hamilton and a number of states also wanted no part of a standing army.  Jefferson was also for banning corporations and he was far from alone.  Now we have corporations, a standing army and the most guns of any society in the world.  Not sure that: “…the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards freedom.”  In essence, the Constitution was written in the shadow of slavery and that shadow continues to be cast.  It can certainly be seen in the 2^nd Amendment and all the other Constitutional ‘states rights’ issues.

The Text

The actual text of the 2^nd Amendment does not read the way the NRA and gun shops quote:  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The NRA and the gun shops only include the last half of the sentence. When the Constitution was adopted, the ‘people’ did not include native Americans or slaves.  Indentured European-American servants were added after some internal debates.  Women and lower class European-American men were not allowed to vote, but the men could be forced to carry guns.  It was originally drafted with ‘nation’ instead of ‘state’ until the slavers got their way.  Including the military word ‘bear,” it is very clear that the amendment refers to a civilian militia defending a state instead of a standing army.  It does not refer to everyone owning an AR15.  Yet the ‘originalist’ U.S. Supreme Court codified the NRA interpretation in 2008 in “D.C. v Heller.”  This case was championed by Scalia, which interpreted the 2^nd Amendment to be about individuals protecting ‘hearth and home,’ not serving in a state militia.

Hartmann cities the 1912 prohibition of corporate money that was codified in the 17^th Amendment under President Taft.  It sought the election of senators instead of their appointment by purchase.  1976’s Buckley decision by the Supreme Court contradicted this understanding of corruption.  It declared that indirect expenditures on issues were allowed for campaigns, as money was now part of ‘free speech.’  In 1978, the Supreme Court in “1^st National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti” decided that corporations have ‘free speech’ rights on ballot initiatives.  Those decisions were amplified in 2010 with Citizens United that gave corporations ‘personhood,’ allowing unlimited direct donations.
Corruption was originally defined as buying political representatives with money donations, which inspired the 17^th Amendment.  Now it has an extremely narrow definition, while the Constitution's definition was much broader.  All this relates to how much money the NRA and the gun industry can funnel to Republican and Democratic Congresspeople, along with every other form of legalized political bribery.

The Right of Revolution?

Karl Marx and many subsequent Marxists have always understood the ‘right of revolution,’ which was included in the Communist Manifesto.  This is also mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a document having its origins in a revolution itself.  As is obvious from this book, there is no connection between the Declaration’s statement and the 2^nd Amendment as so many right-wingers claim.  Marxists have supported the right of the proletariat to have guns, an outlook also propagated in the Communist Manifesto.  But that does not preclude a rational and modern approach to the health risks of weapons or disarming our own forces of repression.

Other prior reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left:  “Loaded,” “A Culture War Debate,”  “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Witty Lightweight Attacks Marxism,” “Is the U.S. an Actual Democracy.”

And I got it at May Day’s excellent used/cutout books section!

Red Frog

February 3, 2020

WTF Series #11 - The Endless Picnic

The Avalanche of Plastic, Stupid Packaging and the Lies of Recycling

Sitting on the toilet and looking at a shelf full of plastic containers holding every useless thing imaginable, you suddenly realize that single-use crap is everywhere.  Look in your fridge and kitchen cabinets. Go to a grocery store and it’s like a plastic nightmare.  Check out the local big-box store. Plastic is a carbon product and it’s doomed.  We are not just the people of the corn, we are ‘plastic people!’ as Frank Zappa sang.  Check it out:

*  Bread is sheathed in plastic bags or paper with a cellophane window! (The latter can’t be recycled unless you remove the cellophane.)  Sometimes you return plastic bags to a grocery store.  Do you know where those bags actually go?  No, and stores aren’t telling.

*  Milk is put in small or large milk containers that are plastic or have a plastic pour spout. (Can’t technically be recycled unless you pry out the spout.)  Or put in a bullshit ‘’Tetrapak’ made up of a plastic lining, paper and a thin aluminum film.  (Can’t be recycled because it has multiple materials.)  Remember when we had a waxed paper box that you could just pop open?

*  Then there is the plastic packaging of food or products that have no number on them.  (Can’t be recycled.)

*  Only plastic numbered 1, 2 & 5 are recyclable for the most part, while higher 'mixed' plastic numbers are not actually recyclable in most systems or are fake recycled. (I.E. sent to landfills, Haiti, Africa, Vietnam or Albania as garbage.)  You have to check each city’s regulations and then actually believe them.  China called the U.S. bluff on this ‘feel good’ habit that enabled so many consumerist fantasies. 

*  So much packaging uses two, three or four different materials which can’t be recycled as is. 

*  Products that you can barely open because of the way they are packaged in plastic, as if terrorists are on the prowl everywhere.  Thank the ‘Tylenol bomber.’ In other words, why do we have plastic bottle caps instead of metal ones?   Why the ubiquitous plastic seals?  Hardware stores love unbreakable plastic shells on products. Why do they have plastic packaging you can’t get open without a reciprocating saw?

*   Plastic assures food products stay ‘fresh’ longer at a lighter weight, which means they can be brought from thousands of miles away.  Which, naturally, increases carbon transport output compared to most local produce.

*  Then there are all those stupid tiny containers made of plastic – ‘travel size’ stuff that has no reason to live.  One-use bottles an inch tall containing one day’s worth of something. 

*   Small plastic caps and similar small items get stuck in recycling center conveyor belts and equipment and cannot be recycled.

*   The insanity of one-use plastic pop and water bottles.   

*   Visit a hotel or travel on an airplane and that shit is there too.  In fact, what happens to all the airplane meals trayed in plastic containers, eaten with plastic utensils, cupped in plastic?  Garbage, garbage, garbage.  When did you take a flight with a real knife and fork?  A metal cup?  Reusable food containers?  A long time ago.  

*   What about all those company feeds in the company kitchen or meeting room in which everything is made of throwaway plastic like its an endless picnic?  As if no one knows how to wash dishes or bring a reusable plate, knife and glass to work.

Tetrapak Fantasy

Look in your fridge and you’ll see nearly everything is in a plastic container or bag.   Some plastic-like materials pretend to be recyclable but aren’t and others are plant-based but people don’t know they are organic recyclables so they go into the garbage.  Or when they get to the recycling center they are trashed.  Incinerators are used in some cities like Minneapolis to provide power or heat by burning trash, so that is ‘some’ kind of recycling.  Just check the air quality though.  Others are turning the off-gases from landfills into methane fuel, but that’s not common yet.

Now in the old days people brought containers and bags and put raw food into glass, metal, wood, paper, canvas or burlap.  Unless you are in a real co-operative or organic food store, that option is not available or for just a few products like nuts, trail mix or coffee.   Actually nearly everything is going to have to be provided that way in the future as we go back to the past.  If packaging doesn’t get better, bringing glass Mason jars, tins, canvas bags and paper or plant-based bags to every grocery store will become normal.

Plastic is actually a pretty weak material in most crucial consumer uses, as it breaks easily.  Crappy plastic zippers, crappy plastic snow shovels, crappy plastic toys, crappy plastic switches and crappy plastic moving parts which break after sustained use.  Anytime you see a heavily-worked part made of plastic, look out.  Plastic is a key ingredient of capitalist planned obsolescence.  The businessman in the 1960s film The Graduate didn’t tell Ben to go into ‘plastics’ for nothing.

How many individuals, supermarkets or restaurants dump their food waste into compost bins and put it in the soil instead of putting it in the garbage?  1 out of 1000?  At least some cities have leaf/wood collections which are mulched or used as fertilizers.  Only San Diego as far as I know recycles toilet water and human waste.  Why aren’t grey water systems and point-of-use electric hot water heaters mandated in construction to not waste or recycle water?  The questions and answers are endless.

Single-stream recycling (everything put in one bin) is cheaper but ends up being a mess at the recycling plant because residents are no longer dividing their materials first.  Some cities like Atlanta are not picking up recycling from people who treat their cart like another garbage bin.  A few cities have stopped recycling all together due to this problem. Yet in Japan they have 45 separate categories of recycling.  In European countries like Finland, recycling is much more targeted as well.  In the U.S. you actually have to research and take certain items to special places.  For instance some cities say batteries don’t need to be recycled or taken to toxic sites, but they leak in land fills, so you even have to ignore some city recommendations and find someone who takes them!  (And why aren’t single-use batteries outlawed anyway?) Coke© in Atlanta expects municipalities to recycle Coke bottles but rejects return fees for their plastic PETE bottles and pressures politicians and bureaucrats to go along with them.  Remember when Coke⟳ was in a small washable glass bottle? (Bloomberg, 1/29/20)

So what is the solution?  Hey, plastic is convenient but not sustainable.  The corporate government doesn’t care and the corporations certainly don’t.  The government has never mandated ‘single material’ packaging.  They have never mandated only recyclable plastics. (Which of course can only be recycled once or twice anyway.)  They’ve never mandated banning ‘single use’ plastic except for local moves against plastic bags and straws.  They’ve never limited plastic products to useful long-running purposes.  They’ve never mandated that production facilities use plant-based ingredients instead of oil-based plastic.  Henry Ford actually invented a naturally-made plastic in the 1920s made from hemp and other plants. They’ve never told producers to find something recyclable to replace plastic.  The federal government has never given a shit. It is laissez faire capitalism because Big Plastic / Big Oil, the retail sector and Big Capital own most Congressmen and have for decades.  This is no surprise.  Ultimately capital cannot stop itself. It's internal drive for profits means it will package any way it pleases.

P.S.  - Those 'terrible' Chinese have announced they will phase out single use bags and bottles in 2020 in major cities and the rest of the country in 2022.
P.P.S. - Link to Guardian article debunking plastic recycling:  
 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/18/americas-recycled-plastic-waste-is-clogging-landfills-survey-finds

Another on how plastic is ubiquitous in the U.S. - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/europe-is-beating-its-addiction-to-plastics-why-is-the-us-so-far-behind

Other prior reviews on this issue, use blog search box upper left:  "Garbage Land," "Civilization Critical." 

Red Frog

February 1, 2020

Will Get Fooled Again!

USMCA Fraud – “a Macabre Joke”

I’m going to take an excellent article from Counterpunch by Pete Dolack on the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) and distill it.  As you know the Congress approved the bill with overwhelming Democratic Party support.  At the last debate the great enemy of Wall Street and corporate America Elizabeth Warren also signaled her approval, going along with Donald Trump’s negotiators and the Republican Party and the rest of the Democratic Field except Sanders.  Even though Warren stated that the problem with trade agreements is that they are fashioned by corporate negotiators. Republican Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley, said 95% of the new deal “is the same as NAFTA.” 

Sanders was the only one to oppose it at the recent Democratic debate, though he only made a quick point about its fraudulent nature on the environmental front.  The AFL-CIO in all their gullible misleadership glory supported the agreement, probably under the heavy influence of the UAW leadership.

NAFTA+ Re-Run - Trump Signs USMCA with support from Democrats, Liberal and Mexican 'progressives'

Dolack says:  “Although Democrats and public pressure forced through some improvements, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), or NAFTA 2, isn’t substantially different and remains a document of corporate domination.”  Dolack speculates that Pelosi and the Democratic Congress went along to show they can ‘get things done.’  I suspect they went along because they agreed.  AMLO and Trudeau also gave in, which is not surprising given Trump’s threats of more sanctions and tariffs.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

1.       Chapter 14 on Investment.  It contains an expectation of a maximum profit on derivatives, speculation, intellectual and intangible property and capital outlays.  In the past tribunals over ‘damages’ back up the claim to a maximum profit against claims to local content, health, safety, worker or environmental claims.  Chapter 14.6 supports “customary international law,” a phrase that refers to adherence to prior decisions by free trade tribunals. Chapter 14.8 forbids nationalization or expropriation, even in an ‘indirect’ way, which means certain U.S., Canadian or Mexican regulations, like health or environment, that impede profits.

2.       Chapter 14.17 on ‘social responsibility’ is all voluntary.  In this section the words ‘must’ and ‘shall’ are now replaced by ‘may’ and ‘can.’ 

3.       Chapter 17 prohibits any limitations on international financial institutions or capital repatriation. This is Wall’s Street’s favorite section.

4.       Chapters 15 & 19 prohibit any restrictions on “cross-border transfers of information” which is Hollywood, Microsoft and Google’s favorite section, as personal information cannot be protected. This is based on a prior TISA ‘free trade’ agreement that was to benefit professional services, but can be expanded to include communications services.

5.       Chapter 11 is about “technical barriers to trade” which adapts language from the WTO wholesale. It invites ‘citizens’ from other countries to be involved in creating regulations.  This is a corporate lobbyist’s favorite section and shows again how the USMCA is really an attack on sovereignty and democracy by the most powerful corporations and state.

6.       Chapter 14.D.3 says disputes will be settled by the ICSID, an arm of the World Bank, though the parties can also decide on another forum.  These panels must be stocked with those who have ‘expertise’ and ‘experience’ in this setting, which usually means corporate lawyers. So ‘secret tribunals’ are not banned, as Trump’s claim went, just moved around with the same cast of characters.

IMPROVEMENTS?

Dolack says there are 3 improvements in the USMCA language over the NAFTA language. 

1. Hearings over disputes are to be public, though there is nothing about public notice. 

2. An agreement between Mexico and the U.S. upholds the right to collective bargaining and free association (i.e. real unions). However it is up to the U.S. to sue and no Republican administration will sue.  Even a neo-liberal Democratic Party administration might not sue, as they lived happily with NAFTA for years.

3.  Article 24.2 includes pro-environmental language similar to past NAFTA language in the non-binding ‘encouraged to promote’ style, which Dolack says “has proved to be meaningless window dressing.” It explicitly says that environmental rules cannot constitute a “restriction on trade.”  This is a giant loophole, as prior WTO rulings have gone against environmental rules for dolphins, gasoline additives, PCBs and others. 

Counterpunch is carried at May Day, along with many other magazines and newspapers.

In his survey Dolack does not mention the USMCA’s open door for the gas, oil and fracking industries, which enables global warming.  Another thing omitted seems to be the limitations on generic drugs in the USMCA, but Bloomberg reports that those 10-year protections to limit generics were thankfully scrubbed. Dolack does not cover the increased pro-corporate protections for 'intellectual property' either. He also does not mention the increases in Mexican auto worker pay and U.S. content rules which inspired the UAW, though reports have shown the Mexican auto industry is not worried.  Perhaps because wages are already above the $16 floor.

The Trump administration has cited 137 countries for creating “barriers to trade” which is the main logic of these agreements. The USMCA, like NAFTA, the TPP, the TISA, the TTIP or GAAT and other ‘free trade' agreements mandate that the whole world has to roll over in order to allow imperial penetration into their economies.  Chlorinated U.S. chicken anyone?  Much of the language Trump’s negotiators are using is adopted wholesale from the rejected TPP.  Canadian progressives and the Canadian Labour Congress, small U.S. farmers and progressive Ag groups, nearly every environmental group and all socialists have opposed or did not support the USMCA.

Original article in Counterpunch: A-Macabre-Joke

P.S. - Counterpunch reports on 1/29 that the USMCA has a 'poison pill' section which allows the U.S. to pull out of the USMCA if either Mexico or Canada sign a trade agreement with China.  National sovereignty anyone? 

Counterpunch is available at May Day's excellent periodical's section.

Prior reviews on this issue, use the blog search box upper left: “NAFTA 2,” “Impeachapalooza,” “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,” “Duh! We Shuda Knowed!”  “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “Reviving the Strike,” “Embedded With Organized Labor,” “Save Our Unions,” “Rebuilding Power in Open-Shop America,” “Drug War Capitalism.”

Red Frog

January 28, 2020

The Limits of Liberalism

“The Potlikker Papers - Food History of the Modern South” by John T. Edge, 2017

This is basically a foodie’s guide to the U.S. South, with a garnish of politics on the side.  It is mostly a form of apolitical cultural tub thumping common to upscale Southern liberals.  It starts with a number of interesting chapters that link the civil rights movement with food and one about rural hippies on “The Farm” bringing the vegan to Tennessee.  Then as the myth goes, after the 1978 election of Carter the ‘New South’ was born (once again) and politics and economics disappeared.  Negatives are now just ‘stereotypes.’  The book becomes a long boosterish litany of southern restaurants and roadhouses, chefs, culinary teachers and food writers.  It reads like an advertising article from any local newspaper praising the latest restaurant opening. In the process Edge almost claims Southern ownership of the farm-to-table food movement.  Only at the end does the author wake up after the Paula Deen scandal and realize that food is STILL intertwined with politics and economics in the South.  As it is anywhere.

Suffering from some kind of inferiority complex, pro-Southern culture professors and pundits seem to have a serious blind spot when it comes to politics, economics, statistics or quality-of-life gauges. They dwell on their mint juleps and shrimp and grits and their next visit to a new restaurant.  Edge himself seems to be for local and non-industrial foodways, which is certainly progressive.  But then he celebrates Memphis ribs being Fed Exed across the country.  He’s against industrial farming but has an enthusiastic chapter on many of the fast food chains that came out of the South, led by Kentucky Fried Chicken but which includes Hardees, Burger King, Wendy’s, Chik fil-A, Long John Silver’s, Popeye’s, Schlotsky’s and others.  He says at one point that vegetables are the heart of southern cooking, then has involved chapters on artisanal pork and dry-rub barbecue pork.  He understands that food involves health, but then ignores the idea.  He never covers organic food, agro-ecology or sustainability.  So it is hard to know what he actually believes other than Southern promotion.  In that sense he comes across as the breathless professional P.T. Barnum or Babbitt of ‘southern foodways.’  As he puts it, food unites the South. I’ll put it another way.  Food unites humanity.

Edge’s early chapters are interesting.  As radicals like Fannie Lou Hamer might have said, “you can’t eat ballots.”  A founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she later started local co-op farms that provided fresh vegetables and pork to starving African American’s in the Mississippi Delta.  Edge profiles a home cook in Montgomery, Alabama who fed Civil Rights activists like King and others in her house restaurant.  He talks about a heroic waiter in a ‘white gentry’ restaurant in Greenwood, Mississippi who frankly talked to the national media about racism and got fired for it.  He reminds us of the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program, which provided healthy and nutritious food, not chips and soda.  He also reminds us that many left-wing black nationalists opposed ‘soul food’ due to its negative health impacts.  In these chapters he does not forget that segregation’s intention was to hurt and exploit African-American labor, land and businesses.

Paula Deen’s racist 2013 comments as she cooked black-created food knocks Edge out of his food coma.  Deen was a ridiculous southern TV cook who substituted doughnuts for bread in sandwiches, displaying an unhealthy sweets fetish that is common in southern foods.  African-Americans brought rice, black-eyed peas, okra, watermelons, Kola nuts (first used in Coca-Cola), coffee, kidney and lima beans and yams to the Americas.  The book’s title comes from potlikker, the healthy broth left in the master's pot that slaves used for their own cooking.  Corn, the main ingredient of grits, cornbread, bourbon, some whiskies and hominy, was a south-eastern Native American food, as are peanuts, squash, sweet potatoes and others.  Edge claims southern cooking originated from black female cooks on plantations or private homes – though those many Southerners without slaves or without servants must have eaten something! His references to Appalachian cooks might provide an answer.

Of most theoretical interest is Edge’s description of a nationalist and patriotic debate over what is ‘American’ food.  He ignores the fact that the Americas stretch from Tierra Del Fuego to the Arctic, so the U.S. cannot appropriate the name for itself.  Edge describes how many southern chefs imitated the dreaded French, then except for the ones from New Orleans, shouldered them away for more patriotic dishes.  Edge vacillates between nationalist tub-thumping for a ‘brawny’ American cuisine of certain designated dishes (barbecue!) while dissing fusion - and realizing that a nation of immigrants, including African-Americans, makes it inevitable that fusion cuisines exist.  The problem with fusion is that local food cannot include slave-grown avocados from Mexico or exotic ingredients from everywhere, so only melding the two ideas will be environmentally possible. 

Picking green tomatoes in Florida

In the second to the last chapter Edge regains an edge by commenting on the slave-labor conditions for Latino workers in chicken processing plants and in Florida tomato fields.  The South hosts 3 of the top 4 chicken producers.  But in the process he’s praised right-to-work laws, corporate welfare and how Reagan helped the South “colonize” the nation.  As I said, they have a very large blind-spot.

Southern regionalism as not imagined by Edge is actually different than many other U.S. regionalisms given the peculiar nature of the South’s long history and its continued role as the most politically backward area in the U.S.  There is no new South, unlike the post-Carter propaganda of the Southern professional class and in spite of the proliferation of cul-de-sacs and skyscrapers.  There is a newer, updated version of the ‘old South’ that has changed its clothes and has still not been defeated.

On a personal note, I’ve had a platter of 40 crayfish in a restaurant on Bourbon Street.  I’ve eaten tasteless shrimp and grits in Athens.  I’ve eaten at the touristy ‘southern’ restaurants in Charleston.  ‘Southern’ food for the most part is heavy, greasy food, light on the vegetables – rural comfort food really. I avoid it except for the excellent cuisine in New Orleans.  There is no doughnut like a beignet I gaur-ron-tee!

Other prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Florida Will Sink,” “Monroe, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Foodopoly,” “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “Behind the Kitchen Door,” “The Italian Brand,” “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “A Redder Shade of Green.”

And I got it gratis at Normal Books, Athens Georgia

The Cranky Yankee

January 25, 2020    

A Christian Morality Tale?

“Children of Men,” by P.D. James, 1992

This book is the foundation of the 2006 film of the same name but the film is actually more left-wing and apocalyptic than the book.  The film is a great example of a dystopian story, set in 2027 Britain.  It seems like a very near reality, given it pictures mass prisons for migrants, violent internal police, an authoritarian government, constant protests or war around the world and an underground rebellion in the U.K.  I would imagine most know of the book through the movie.

Most future fiction books include one ‘event’ that changes everything, an event that is sometimes unexplained, such as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  The key apocalyptic twist in this book (and film) is that no human baby has been born in the world since the 1990s, so the human race is seemingly done. A bit similar to the fertility crisis in the earlier "The Handmaid's Tale." Both center around this calamity. Infertility in these stories might function as a reflection of other dooms that could befall humans - climate change, starvation, war or pandemics.  Though there is present evidence that testosterone levels are dropping in males.

James wrote elegant and intricate detective stories, serving as a modern Agatha Christie.  So this 1992 book is quite the exception given its social theme. The narrator of the novel, Theo, is an upper-class Oxford professor ruminating on life at the age of 50 in 2021.  He’s been a failure at everything except studying Victorian England – a lousy son, father and husband.  At the beginning he’s also something of a physical incompetent, a “Mr. Peepers.”  Theo gets drawn into a conspiracy by the self-named ‘Five Fishes,’ as he is a former advisor to the Warden of England and they want his help contacting the Warden.  The Fishes want some modest changes to the English government.  They want an end to ‘Quietus,’ which is a way groups of old people commit suicide by drowning.  They want better treatment of poor migrant ‘Sojourners’ who do much of the grunt work in the society; an end to compulsory sperm testing and better supervision of the Isle of Man, which has been turned into an island prison camp run by the most violent inmates.  Altogether quite modest goals for these five somewhat inept and isolated rebels.

In the novel religion is a constant theme and dialog.  The title itself is from multiple quotes in the Bible that see the ‘children of men’ as a lesser, sinful group. Theo is a rational agnostic while two of the Fishes are good Christians, one of whom is carrying the first baby to be born in two decades, while the other Christian is the father. The father even sacrifices himself for the mother and baby during a violent confrontation, his ‘Jesus’ move. Male infertility is the problem in the book, not female infertility as in the film, so they had wished to keep the father alive too. At the end, the baby is born and Theo puts a little blood cross on its forehead, reflecting James’ own archaic Church of England obsession.

The Fishes in the film are not as pathetic.  They are a large organized group that uses violence when necessary but are blamed for bombings that the government itself carries out.  They represent illegal immigrants and their British supporters who are trying to make ‘Britain’ a legal home for everyone, as the rest of the world has dissolved into barbarism and rebellions.  Even the French are trying to cross the Channel for refuge!  But most of the Fishes also want to keep the first baby born for their own purposes and so become ‘bad guys.’ The film’s version of Theo, a handsome, cynical, yet well-meaning cube drone, turns out to be the only reliable person to help the baby and its dark-skinned mother.  Theo in the book also becomes something more than the isolated loveless academic and instead transforms into the ‘father’ in reality for the new baby and light-skinned mother.  This is because he has finally found love.

The First Mother in the Movie

The novel has no living Jasper, the charming old hippie played by Michael Caine in the film ("Pull my finger").  No migrant detention camp at Bexhill, no Uprising nor a Human Project ship.  Instead the Five Fishes try to find a hidden rural place where Julian can have her baby out of the hands of the grasping leader of the British government, Xan.  The end up in a large woodshed in the woods near Oxford.

The British, after the counter-revolution called ‘Omega,’ have given up their democratic rights to the Warden’s Council of Five in exchange for ‘security, stability and fun.’  Rural towns are being closed as the population decreases and is moved into larger places.  The old are shuffling into the sea, sometimes even when they don’t want to.  The Isle of Man prison, which became Bexhill in the film, is a violent world where the strong crush the weak, though we only hear of it in the book.  Everyone in society has given up long-range hope due to the prospective end of humanity.  Barbarous groups of Omegas (the last-born young) and Painted Faces roam the countryside.  Other than that, life in a seemingly old-fashioned and aging England goes on, tea and crumpets-style – evidently without a labor movement or any social movements except these five rebels.  Even without an economy! P.D. James was no radical herself, so the Fishes have one power-hungry mini-leader who betrays them, proving that rebel leaders are also not to be trusted.  At the end all that is left is the new mother Julian and Theo – the Adam & Eve of the new human wave.  Or as James puts it in her conservative way, a new 'race.’

The book is written switching between 1^st and 3^rd person, between Theo and narration.  It has many good lines such as this dyspeptic one on religion.  After one new Christian replaces the cross with a sun symbol to popular acclaim, Theo says:  “Even to unbelievers like myself, the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”

Both book and film predict a world where crisis leads society to a dystopian authoritarianism, even when sincere individuals do their small part. There are no forces strong enough or trustworthy enough to change the situation.  In other words, they are expressions of deep historical pessimism in classes or humanity, as neither has a positive view of the future.  Of course understanding that negative outcomes are possible is an improvement over the complacent Panglossian ‘best of all possible worlds’ approach.  Both are the opposite of a socialist perspective, which understands ‘pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will’ as one of its guidelines.  This book and film might be called “pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will except for a few exceptions…”  Essentially both are portrayals of heroic individualism on an historic canvas.

Prior reviews on dystopian books and films, some of which are carried at May Day.  Use blog search box, upper left: “The Testaments,” “Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Heart Goes Last” (all 3 by Atwood) “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin), “American War,” “Good News” (Abbey), “The Road (McCarthy) and “Blade Runner 2049,” “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick), “The Golden Age of Television,” “Hunger Games,” “Planet of the Apes” (various modern sequels); “Divergent-Insurgent,” “Cloud Atlas.”

And I got it at May Day's excellent used / cutout book section!

The Cultural Marxist

January 21, 2020