Plague, Day Zero

Dr. Jane Diamond adjusted the microscope carefully, seeking the elusive structure that seemed to disappear every time she attempted to look at it straight on. It, she suspected, held the key to her research, if only she could document that it really did exist, and wasn’t just a figment of her imagination. She was tautly focused on the microscope, only dimly aware of the lab around her, when something seemed to change.

Pulling back sharply, she looked around the lab, trying to put her finger on what suddenly seemed different. Lights blazed and machinery ticked and muttered quietly to itself, but the distinctive hum that always throbbed quietly through the First Genus building was silent. Something deep in the heart of the building’s core had gone dark, and she wasn’t quite sure what it was.

Releasing her brake, she wheeled briskly to the door and stuck her head out in the hallway. Silence. On a Saturday night, of course the lab would be silent. Doors to other labs were locked and the rooms behind them were dark except for the occasional bank of lights. The desk by the elevator, usually staffed by a secretary, was empty, inbox overflowing slightly with paperwork deposited over the weekend.

The ventilation system, she realised. The cool air that normally swept past her when she opened the door wasn’t moving. If there was a contaminant in the system, the alarms should have activated, but they didn’t. So, apparently, even multimillion dollar labs installed sub-par air conditioning systems that went bellyup at inconvenient moments. Rolling back to the desk, she picked up her internal phone to call the security staff downstairs to see if anyone knew what was going on, but the signal was busy.

One break is as good as another, she thought, and decided to go downstairs to eat and find out what had gone wrong with the air-con. She shut down the microscope, grabbed her purse from her office, and locked the lab behind her. Her phone chirped once, weakly; for reasons unknown to her, the damn thing never worked in the building, or, rather, it would work just enough to tell her she’d missed calls, but not enough for her to actually use it, unless she went outside. It was probably Sara, and she could return the call from the portico.

Jabbing the elevator button irritably, she waited for it to arrive. The button lit up, but the elevator shaft stayed resolutely silent. Jane frowned. Probably a handful of people were working in the building, ergo, the elevator shouldn’t be tied up. Sometimes the system turned off to save energy, but when you pressed the button, it was supposed to reactivate. She tapped her fingers restlessly on her armrest.

Reaching back to the secretary’s desk, she picked up the phone to call security again. Still busy. The elevator light glowed blankly, but there was total silence. Relishing the opportunity to zip down the hall without busybodies to fuss at her, she zoomed to the other end and the waiting dedicated freight elevator. Less dignified, perhaps, but a perfectly acceptable solution. Digging in her purse, she found the key to activate it, but while she heard the ‘click’ of the key snicking home, the freight elevator didn’t come up either.

This made no sense. The elevator systems weren’t linked. The freight elevator was always supposed to be on. Turn the key, the elevator comes. The flickering fluorescents of the hallways suddenly seemed less familiar and more ominous. Jane shook her head, trying to shake off the sudden sense of unease. A strange skittering, rustling sort of sound erupted from one of the corridors, but when she whipped her head around, she couldn’t see anything.

Stop being ridiculous, Jane, she told herself. It’s late and you’re tired. So, the elevators aren’t working. There’s some kind of glitch in the building, that’s all. State of the art zero impact negative emissions blah blah blah, long story short, the crip can’t go down a floor and rustle up some dubious cafeteria food because the damn elevator isn’t working, maintenance is probably working on it. What else is new.

Unlocking the lab, she picked up the phone for an outside line. Sometimes, mysteriously, the switchboard got tangled, and you couldn’t call via the in-house phone lines, but you could bring up an outside line and dial someone’s number directly. No dial tone. Silence. Not even a crackling. She clicked back to the inside line. Busy. In the corner of the lab, a rustling like falling paper, at the same time all the lights in the hall clicked out, making her flinch.

Right, just the energy savers, she thought. She peered into the corner, where there was indeed a snowdrift of paper on the floor. One of Bethany’s stacks had apparently finally keeled over. Nothing more. She bent to pick it up, but succeeded only in pushing pieces under Bethany’s desk.

‘Oh, bother.’ Her voice echoed in the empty lab. ’Fuck it,’ she said. The skittering noise she’d heard in the hall erupted again, but this time, when she glanced over, she saw a small white rabbit.

‘You!’ Dr. Jones’ rabbits kept escaping and running amuck on the floor. Either Jones had the world’s most incompetent lab assistant, or the guy was an embed from some animal rights group. Earlier in the week, one particularly adventurous rabbit had made its way all the way to the ground floor before anyone noticed, and was brought back up, writhing and screaming, by one of the security guards. Rabbits screamed. She hadn’t known that. A peculiar keening noise.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Tonight’s your lucky night, bunny, because there is no way I’m chasing after you. Have at it.’

The rabbit stared back at her with a dubious expression while she tapped on a pen on the bench, trying to decide what to do. She was trapped on the seventh floor, which hadn’t been a problem until she realised she was trapped. Going back to work didn’t sound appealing, but neither did repeatedly picking up the phone to see if there was a dial tone yet.

A helicopter swept past outside, and she peered out the windows. The area around First Genus was completely devoid of people and cars. It was like she was the last person on earth, except for whoever was in the hovering helicopter. The helicopter’s spotlight came on and swept the ground, and as she watched, a small caravan of vehicles zoomed down the drive and through the empty parking lot, all lights, no siren.

People poured out, dressed head to toe in moon suits. Respirators. Something about them seemed unusually businesslike, and less ‘this is only a drill.’

This would be the point where Jane started to panic.

31 October, 2010 – 10:16 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in fiction | Tagged , |

What We Talk About When We Talk About Advertising

I was recently having a conversation with Lauredhel about pushbacks to feminist discussions about advertising. Feminist critiques of ad campaigns meet with responses ranging from ‘don’t you have something more important to do’ to ‘it’s advertising, what do you expect.’ I think what some of these critiques miss is that feminist conversations about advertising do not happen as isolated instances, targeting specific ad campaigns and ideas. They are part of a much larger conversation about not just advertising, but media and pop culture.

Sociological Images, a site I am immensely fond of, has a number of posts featuring ongoing conversations about advertising, picking up and running with the threads of various ideas ranging from gendering in advertising to the way that women’s bodies are used to sell certain types of products. Viewing an individual post as righteous outrage about a specific campaign is a pretty epic case of missing the point, because it’s not about the individual ad, it’s about the institutions behind it.

We talk about advertising because it is one of the most distilled examples of media we can find in our culture. In a 30 second television spot, a billboard that will be driven past in 10 seconds, a single page ad in a magazine, an advertiser has to accomplish so many goals, ranging from making people aware of a product to making them want to buy it. The ad has to convey massive amounts of information and it must do so clearly and accessibly, while at the same time using coded imagery and words to target specific demographics; shibboleths, if you will, to speak directly to readers, viewers, drivers, listeners.

In a single advertisement, we can see the utilisation of numerous different tropes and ideas and we can see how the ad builds on social attitudes, ads that have gone before it, and commonly held beliefs. When you see a baby wearing a pink bonnet in an ad, that image is loaded. It can’t be viewed in isolation. It’s not just a baby in a pink bonnet. The image is conveying information that speaks directly to you as a result of your cultural exposure.

Viewed alone, an ad doesn’t have any deep meaning. Some ads manage to be more outstandingly clever, or offensive, or interesting than others, but it’s ads as a whole, the collective of the advertising industry, that is a topic of interest. And this is why we talk about advertising. Because in order to talk about the collective, we need to identify individual instances within it and talk about what they mean.

When we see an ad for a cleaning product that revolves around the woman being stalked by the cleaning products she has abandoned for the new and superior product, we aren’t just talking about how cleaning products are sold. We are talking about the fact that it is assumed that women are doing the cleaning, and that it is also assumed that this ad will appeal to women, because they are the ones being targeted as potential buyers. And we are also talking about what it means when stalking is used as a plot device in a story used to sell products, and what that says about social attitudes when it comes to dealing with stalking and other forms of abuse.

We talk about advertising because it is important. An individual ad? No. Individual ads are rarely important. There are a few landmark, groundbreaking ads, like the ad introducing Apple’s first personal computer, that are indeed important and revolutionary. But, for the most part, whether a company is using pro-ana phrasing to sell pretzels or creepy stalkeresque plotlines to alert people to the existence of chemical residue, individual ads are not important. They will come, they will go, new ads will replace them.

But those individual instances, when threaded together, start to tell much more complicated narratives. Why is it, for example, that advertising campaigns featuring stalker storylines are so common? Why is the target almost always a young, conventionally attractive, nondisabled woman? What else are these ads selling, beyond the obvious, and what are they playing into?

Reviewing 10 advertisements can provide people with an extraordinary amount of information about how a society thinks, feels, and behaves. Looking at the techniques used to sell things is important, because these techniques rely on deeply embedded social narratives. There’s a reason ads from other countries don’t always make sense. It’s because they are referencing concepts and attitudes that may not translate well between nations, because national sensibilities are complex and extensive, and people are introduced to them at a very young age.

I don’t need to be told, for example, that pink is a girl’s colour, and a baby in a pink bonnet is actually a little girl. And from there, the whole narrative of the ad changes. It’s not just a baby in a bonnet. It is a symbol of innocence, and also of potential, of hopes and dreams and nice, soft things. A baby in a pink bonnet is sending me some very specific messages, and this is why we talk about advertising, because we want to take ads apart to get at what is happening underneath, and what it means, and why it means what it does.

There’s no particular reason that a single word or image should be so very evocative that an ad campaign can construct entire narratives, lifestyles, and attitudes around it, but images and words are highly loaded in our culture, which allows ads to do just that. When we talk about advertising, we’re not looking at a specific instance and deploring it; we’re looking at an example of a much bigger institution.

30 October, 2010 – 10:27 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice | Tagged , , |

A Multiplicity of Needs: Prevent, Detect Early, Support, Cure

When we examine campaigns focused on breast cancer ‘awareness’ or ‘raising funds for the cure,’ we also need to acknowledge the complex set of needs involved when it comes to talking about campaigns surrounding cancer. I fear that some of these campaigns only focus on one facet, ignoring others, and as a result, they are sometimes alienating or not very productive.

In an ideal world, we would simply prevent all cases of cancer. If cancer doesn’t happen, then anything else isn’t really necessary. Full cancer prevention may never be possible. While we know a lot about contributing factors to cancer and can address issues like hazardous pollution, sometimes cancer just happens. Or it’s the result of an unrelated medical treatment someone needed to live. This doesn’t mean we should give up on prevention efforts, but it does mean prevention can’t be our sole focus. By all means, we should continue to research causes of cancer and to address obvious issues, known contributors to cancer in the population.

The next step in the logical progression is early detection. The earlier a cancer is found, the easier it is to treat, and the better the prognosis for the patient. Early detection is something a lot of organisations are working on, from providing low-cost and free screening services in low income communities to establishing protocols to get at-risk populations screened regularly to catch cancers early. These efforts, based on the idea that complete prevention is impossible, are a realistic approach to fighting cancer. You can’t stop it from happening, but you can attack it before it becomes monstrous.

Providing support for early detection of cancers requires a lot of funding as well as community outreach and education. What works in one community will not necessarily be as effective in another, and populations have varying levels of comfort with programs for early detection. Designing programs tailored to specific populations is critical, as is addressing factors that hinder access to such programs, like geography, poverty, race.

Cancer treatment is a complex and multifaceted topic, but one thing that does not get nearly enough attention is the support needed by cancer patients in treatment. People with cancer need help. This can range from help paying for treatments to the need for assistance with completing daily tasks. And cancer patients themselves are often left out of cancer ‘awareness’ campaigns. There’s a heavy focus on prevention, a heavy focus on ‘doing something for the cure,’ and on survivors, but people actually in need right now, people who have been diagnosed with cancer, often get left out of the dynamics.

I’ve harped on it in this series because it’s important. People with cancer do not get enough support, which is saying something when you consider the fact that cancer is a very media-friendly disease and people with other types of chronic illnesses and disabilities get no support at all. Friends and family tend to rally around them initially, but then they drift away over the course of the long haul. Attitudes about how cancer treatment works means that people are asked when their treatment will be ‘done,’ why it isn’t ‘over yet,’ why, even though they are not in treatment, they still aren’t capable of working or maintaining friendships or doing other things society expects of them.

Support for cancer patients can take a lot of forms, and every patient has different needs. Centring patients in these conversations would be a good way to start. If we are interested in fighting cancer, why not talk to the people on the front lines? Creating support networks for people is something that tends to happen on a community level, which is natural, but I don’t see a lot of these big ‘do something about cancer’ organisations telling people to find such networks in their communities and offer assistance. Some campaigns do help cancer patients with everything from housing to accessing clinical trials, which is excellent, but it’s often hard to find information about these programs, almost as though they want to hide them.

There’s a certain aspect of competition here, it feels like. These groups want your money and they say they will use it in the best and most effective way, but that might not always be the case, and there might be community-based things that would have a more immediate impact. Whether that’s a cancer resource centre or a research study or a program for early diagnosis and treatment.

And, of course, the eternal quest for the ‘cure,’ complicated by the fact that cancer is not something simple, it’s a moving, constantly shifting target and there is no way to develop a single method for attacking it. We can develop methods of chipping away at it, of targeting specific cancers, but there will always be more, always be something else. The focus on the ‘cure’ as the holy grail seems, to me, a little bit misguided. Targeting cancer as something that can be treated, something we need better treatments for, seems more realistic than demanding a ‘cure’ we can never actually achieve, especially when the lobbying for the ‘cure’ comes at the cost of providing support to people with cancer right now.

No one organisation can be all things to all people. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect organisations working on cancer to address every single issue related to cancer, it’s simply not possible. But I do think we can ask for a more interconnected network of organisations, each focusing on different facets of the issue and each supporting the other rather than regarding it as competition. As it is now, it seems like a handful of big names compete for huge amounts of money and it’s not really clear, necessarily, where that money goes and what it does and how it will be used. Creating different organisations to target different topics and explicitly interconnecting those groups might be a better and less adversarial way to approach the problem.

29 October, 2010 – 10:57 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in health | Tagged , , |

Bloated Chaperones

Adam Sobsey at Indyweek: Walking in black women’s footsteps: Two important new histories of the Civil Rights movement (Content note: rape)

Little’s case was a tough one. For one thing, African-American women had been victimized for centuries by white sexual violence in the South, but fear of reprisal kept most crimes from being reported, let alone prosecuted.

Michael Miner at Chicago Reader: It Didn’t Start With Sam

Examine a news shop across town staffed by judgmental people you run into a lot and you’ll linger over every nuance. But every New Yorker knows Chicago is a simple, bawdy town and Sam Zell is a billionaire Hell’s Angel. Broad strokes will do—let ‘er rip.

Jake Nicholas at JH Weekly: State resources for sale

It would be easier, Million reasoned, to get the water out of the river in Wyoming above Flaming Gorge or just at the mouth. That way, Million could utilize existing infrastructure and land rights easements for his pipeline along the I-80 corridor in Wyoming.

Bill Forman at Colorado Springs Independent: The force is still with him

Then again, those who skew left-of-center, as Democrats occasionally do, are less naturally inclined to line up and stand at attention than their right-wing counterparts.

Jefferson Dodge at Boulder Weekly: Tea party crashers

The tight races for governor and U.S. Senate have some wondering what effect the Tea Party movement in Colorado will have on those contests and certain ballot initiatives.

29 October, 2010 – 10:03 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

The Crossdresser’s Holiday

I often hear Halloween referred to as ‘the crossdresser’s holiday,’ in reference to the fact that it’s the one day a year when anything goes, when you can be anything or anyone you want without fear. Of course, this isn’t actually true, as any fat woman who has dressed up in anything ‘revealing’ for Halloween will tell you, as can any man who’s dressed ‘too femme’ in a hostile community, but it is true that there tends to be far more latitude when it comes to gender expression on Halloween, for people of all genders, and that makes it a holiday of particular relevance to my interests, as someone very interested in gender expression, and oppression.

I think it’s good that we have a day in the year where people can more comfortably explore their gender identities and where people have an opportunity to express their gender with less fear of reprisal. But, on the other hand, I feel like making a point of only doing this at Halloween also has the tendency to exoticise gender expression, rather than normalising it. As a result, I have mixed feelings about the day. Is it a symbol of progress, in the form of a day where people can encounter gender variance and get comfortable with it, or does it have the tendency to pigeonhole people, underscoring their ‘weirdness’ and ‘peculiarity’ by having it only really be acceptable on one day of the year?

I was thinking about this last year when I ran into a friend on the street, who looked absolutely gorgeous. She was fully decked out and spectacular, and she confessed that this is the one day a year when she gets to be the person she wants to be. The rest of the year, she goes by a different name, a different gender. This did not come as a completely earthshattering surprise to me, as I’ve picked up hints here and there, and this is a small town, where certain things tend to attract attention and discussion; it does not escape notice that her Halloween ‘costume’ is always runs along the same theme.

In her case, Halloween isn’t about crossdressing. It’s about taking the one day a year when there’s more tolerance about gender performance and personal expression, and using it to be herself. It’s not a holiday, it’s the one day a year she is allowed to simply be. She can use the name she wants, she can femme up. At the end of the night, when she hangs up her gown, she slips back into the other name and the other gender.

She’s an older transgender person, and grew up in an era when people like her were very much told that there was something ‘wrong’ with them and they ought to just toughen up and deal. I do know people in her age group who have transitioned, but there aren’t very many. She can’t be one of them, for a wide variety of reasons that aren’t my business, but I ache for her, thinking of how much she is looking forward to Halloween this year, like she does every year.

I think it would be worse to have no day at all where you could be yourself. But I also think there are some problems with calling Halloween ‘the crossdresser’s holiday,’ as it addresses only one type of variance in gender expression, and it kind of tends to suggest that other people under the trans* umbrella1 should be lumped with crossdressers, which is simply not the case; trans folks on Halloween may fly under the radar by being read as crossdressers, but that’s not what they are, and it’s important for people to understand the difference between individual members of the trans* community, and to be reminded that transgender identities are complicated.

I want to live in a world where crossdressers can go out comfortably, no matter what day of the year it is, without being endangered, without attracting comments or remarks, where they can simply be accepted for who they are. And I want to live in a world where being transgender is not conflated with crossdressing, although I know some older trans folks who started out as crossdressers when they were exploring their identities, and some who are crossdressers now; these identities are not exclusive.

What do we mean, when we say that Halloween is ‘the crossdresser’s holiday’? Do we mean that it’s awesome to have a day of the year where people can be themselves? Do we mean that those people should only be allowed one day a year? Does Halloween help, or hurt, when it comes to full integration into society for people with variant gender expression and identities? These aren’t necessarily questions I have the answer to, they are just things I am thinking about, with Halloween rapidly approaching, costumes out on the shelves, pumpkins appearing on porches.

It will always be a kind of bittersweet holiday for me, I suspect, because there’s something that makes me very sad about people who can only be free, who can only live, one day a year. Because at the end of the night, some of us have to put their identities in boxes and get ready to square off against the world on All Soul’s Day with the memories of being themselves receding in the background; how long can you hold on to that? A year? I know I wouldn’t be satisfied with only being allowed to be myself once a year, with the knowledge that when I was, it was as an object of fun and mockery.

  1. Not all crossdressers identify as members of the trans* community, which bears noting. ↩
28 October, 2010 – 10:22 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , , , , |

Sour Doughnuts

Joel McNally at Shepard Express: Swooning for the Rich

A lot of totally irrational forces seem to be swirling around the midterm elections this year.

Alex Baca at Washington City Paper: Media Matters Wants You to Drop Fox Like It’s Hot

Conservative-correcting non-profit Media Matters for America wants you to “Drop Fox”—and they’re launching their campaign from the bottom up. As in, the bottom of a subway tunnel.

Jesse Fruhwirth at Salt Lake City Weekly: Queer Elephants

It was the year in queer politics that wasn’t. And now, Johnson has left the Legislature and taken a job in South Carolina, so there’s a vacuum that leaves one wondering whether or not the LGBT momentum will continue.

Matt Coker at OC Weekly: Marijuana Legalization Debated at CSUF, Local Christian College and Newport Beach Hotel

Recent polls show marijuana legalization will go down in flames in California on Nov. 2, while some interpreting those surveys claim many voters saying no to pollsters will punch yes to Prop 19 once inside the voting booth, paving the way to victory.

David S. Bernstein at The Boston Phoenix: Three-Fall

In a less politically charged world, the triumvirate of Democratic political leaders in Washington — President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — might now be taking victory laps over one of the most productive two-year sessions in decades.

28 October, 2010 – 10:05 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , |

What Are You Supporting, Exactly?

One of the things that accompanies ‘awareness’ campaigns is the idea that people need to ‘support’ the subject of the campaign in some way. People are sold things like lewd t-shirts and ridiculous rubber bracelets and bumperstickers not only because these things are said to make people more ‘aware,’ but because displaying them in some way conveys ‘support.’

A lot of this gear, in the case of breast cancer, is really sexist and objectifying and gross. Trust me, people, a shirt informing me that you want to ‘save the boobies1 does not really make me feel like you have an interest in public health issues, or care about women’s health in particular. Likewise with all other gear reducing people to component body parts and focusing on how dreadful it would be to lose a mammary gland or two; I’m far more interested in lost lives.

I’m not really sure what people are supporting, here, and this may be a fundamental cultural incomprehension. I don’t really get how displaying a US flag ‘supports’ the United States for example, or how wearing some colour or another on a given ‘awareness’ day is ‘supportive.’ I get some support campaigns; for example, I think campaigns exhorting people to wear particular colours or logos on particular days to support anti-bullying campaigns help, because they send a clear message, telling people that the person wearing the gear is against bullying, wants to provide support to people experiencing bullying, will fight bullying, and is engaged in trying to create a safe space for victims of abuse and violence. In this case, physical and clear support is needed because it’s in doubt. Gay students being bullied, for example, don’t know who is safe to approach because everyone could potentially be dangerous, and having people identify themselves as safe serves a clear function.

But what is being ‘supported’ here? It’s not like anyone is in doubt that breast cancer is a bad thing. Most people are, I believe, anti-breast cancer. I certainly can’t think of anyone who thinks breast cancer is awesome, and talks about how sweet it is when people die of painful chronic diseases. Thus, it’s not like people need to outwardly display their hatred of breast cancer, or shame people who don’t carry similar outward displays, because, really, people, we are all in this together. Pretty much everyone hates cancer.

And I am not arguing that breast cancer patients and survivors do not need support. Far from it. While in treatment, people could use a lot of support. Post treatment, as people adjust to life in remission, they still need support. But, here’s the thing, maybe I am wrong, but I don’t see how wearing a pink ribbon provides any kind of meaningful or useful support. I’m willing to be wrong here, since I am not a breast cancer patient or survivor. But I have lost family members to breast cancer, and seeing a pink ribbon doesn’t make me feel better. I am at high risk for breast cancer, and seeing an ‘I heart boobies’ bracelet doesn’t make me feel supported.

I think there is, perhaps, a tendency, when we are confronted with things that are huge and scary, to try and figure out a way to combat them, and we realise there isn’t an immediately meaningful way. Fighting them and confronting them requires work. And here, the breast cancer ‘awareness’ industry has swept in with a pile of junk people can use to show how ‘supportive’ they are, to make people feel better about the fact that they personally cannot cure or prevent cancer.

The thing is, some people who do a lot of supportive work wear ‘support’ gear. I can’t tell by looking at someone in a ‘save the ta-tas’ shirt if that person is in the process of picking up groceries for a cancer patient, provides rides to medical appointments, helps clean houses for people with cancer, visits people in hospice, heck, participates in cancer research, is a cancer survivor, even. It’s not like research scientists wander around with ‘hello, I am a scientist working on breast cancer’ nametags. However, I also can’t tell if that person bought a pink ribbon and then called it good, decided ‘ok, I’m being supportive now.’

Because, here’s the thing. Many people like to say they are supportive and like to wear the outward trappings of support, but when it comes down to it, a lot of those people tend to disappear. When they are asked to provide support and assistance and are given some options appropriate for their level of interest, involvement, and ability, they don’t respond. Or they say ‘well, I want to help, but not like that‘ as though there is some other, easier way of helping. Or they want to tell people what kind of help they need, instead of asking cancer patients what would actually be personally helpful to them.

There’s a certain point in treatment when you start to realise that most of those ‘supportive’ people won’t be there for you, won’t help, that it will take more time to explain what you need and convince them to provide it than it will to just take care of it yourself. There’s a point in treatment where people stop calling, stop visiting, stop asking your partner about your wellbeing. There’s a point where people just start to forget you. And all the pink ribbons in the world don’t make up for that.

  1. Unless, of course, you are referring to the blue-footed booby, a bird that could actually benefit from some conservation efforts. ↩
27 October, 2010 – 10:29 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in health | Tagged , , |

Pallid Emblems

Hal Riedl at Baltimore City Paper: Freeing Willie
 (Content note: Discussions of sexual assault, violence)

Willie Featherstone’s case is simply an example of the institutional amnesia, laziness, and indifference that hound Baltimore’s way of delivering criminal justice.

Beth Barrett at LA Weekly: Barry Minkow 2.0

…you would never know about the challenges to his credibility if you rely on the journalists who helped create Barry Minkow 2.0.

Chris Haire at Charleston City Paper: The Case Against Nikki Haley

…the 2010 gubernatorial race comes down to one thing and one thing only: Did Nikki Haley have an affair with Will Folks?

Greg Beato at New Haven Advocate: Google’s Self-Driving Car Might Spell The End For Driving/Drivers

“Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use,” Google engineer Sebastian Thrun exclaimed in the company’s official blog.

Caitlin Donohue at San Francisco Bay Guardian: How they’re sitting

Ironically, though the homeless kids on Haight are the explicit inspiration for Proposition L, the sit-lie measure on the Nov. 2 ballot, their voices have been significantly absent from the vitriolic debate on its merits and faults.

27 October, 2010 – 10:05 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

Any Colour, So Long As It’s Green: Race, Class, and the Environmental Movement

The environmental movement has some serious housekeeping to do, and it’s always kind of amazing to me that it is, technically, a branch of the social justice movement, because, well, the environment is a social justice issue, but the environmental movement has a lot of work to do on its handling of social justice. The future of the environment has serious implications for us as a society and many of those implications are deeply tied with social justice issues, from the exploitation of immigrant labour to the communities that are mostly likely to suffer the immediate consequences of environmental damage.

There are so many -isms in the environmental movement, it’s kind of hard to know where to begin. Vicious fat hatred, for one thing. Ableism, with leading lights of the movement suggesting that people with disabilities are a waste of resources and we should just die, already, or not be born. Sexism, as members of the movement reinforce binary gender roles and attitudes about gender. Classism, and the closely entangled racism. Janani Balasubramanian wrote at Racialicious last year about the race and class issues entangled with the food movement, and these issues are still very much present, and still very much preventing the movement from making some important and meaningful changes.

This is a pretty classic example of why intersectionalism is important. It is not enough to say that the environment is broken because of our actions and we need to fix it. Both of these things are true and they are important, but the way we deal with it needs to take place in context. Some injustices involved in the current way we approach things like food production and environmental policy are explicitly social justice concerns; race and class injustice are closely tied with things like who is exploited to produce our cheap food, and who winds up in neighbourhoods used as dumps for our unwanted toxic waste.

In these cases, it’s not just the environment that matters. It is the tangled relationship between environment, race, and class. If we drop race and class out of the equation, and if we ignore the reasons race and class are so bound up with each other, we are not only failing to address these issues, we are not going to fix the fundamental problem. Thus, the environmental movement needs to be thinking about these issues if it wants to meet the stated goal of creating change.

Likewise, cultural contexts also need to be considered in the development and evaluation of plans for addressing environmental issues. For example, people who discuss food politics and want people to eat more fresh food need to find ways to make that food more accessible. That means addressing food deserts, addressing overwork that limits the time people have to prepare food, addressing cultural differences in the way people approach the preparation, handling, and sharing of food. It’s not as simple as announcing that everyone should eat more fresh food.

Very real barriers are simply ignored because they don’t fit in with the desired narrative. Class creates true situational barriers, making it impossible for people to do things, even if they think those things are the right thing to do, even if they want to do those things. The exchange of information is also all one way, with people being lectured by the environmental movement, but the environmental movement not really taking lessons from the people it is lecturing. Maybe if it did, it would learn about things that disadvantaged communities are doing to help the environment and it would do something other than figuring out how to monetise those things. How much cheap plastic crap is made to do things people in impoverished communities have already been doing themselves for decades?

The environmental movement acts surprised when people don’t universally embrace it, conveniently ignoring the history of embedded -isms, many of which are openly espoused by people prominent in the movement to this day. It’s kind of hard to take a movement seriously when it says rather bigoted things about people like you and fails to consider, at all, the context in which it is occurring. The environment is not a vacuum, and acting as though things like sexism and racism are ok in the environmental movement because it’s for a greater cause misses two fundamental truths.

1. No, they are not ok. They are not ok because they are unilaterally not ok, period. And because many people think they are not ok, including the victims of those -isms, tolerating these things in the movement and sometimes actively promoting them will result in alienating people. People will tune out and not be interested in following or engaging with the movement because they have been given no reason to think that the movement would welcome them.

2. Ignoring -isms in the movement also means that the movement is ignoring underlying intersectional -isms leading to environmental problems. Even if you have no problem alienating people by telling them they don’t matter and aren’t human beings, if your stated goal is addressing environmental problems, you need to actually address those problems. That includes looking at the ways that social attitudes contribute to environmental problems. Just for example, viewing people with brown skin as a source of disposable labour contributes to environmental degradation caused by the agriculture industry.

Can the environmental movement clean up its act? I certainly hope so, because I think the environment is important, and I think it’s telling that there are a number of splinter groups working outside the environmental movement on environmental issues because they don’t feel comfortable in the movement. When people feel strongly enough about your ‘movement’ that while they are working towards the same goal, they don’t want to be associated with you, I think you have a pretty serious problem.

26 October, 2010 – 10:47 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues, race | Tagged |

Energised Toads

Jonathan Meador at Leo Weekly: The Big Brown Machine

UPS, the world’s largest parcel delivery service, lost a five-year battle with its air mechanics union earlier this month, and nobody seemed to notice.

Kyle Munzenrieder at Miami New Times: Rick Sanchez’s Non-Triumphant Return to Twitter

Rick Sanchez may be off the air, but he’s back on the medium he truly loves: Twitter.

Greg Harmon at San Antonio Current: Enough is enough

Well, the economy is a factor that influences what happens in our families. But with family violence, what we find is that the violence and the behavior was already there.

David Downs at East Bay Express: Mark Twain’s Last Stunt

Twain was a former journalist and master of self-aggrandizement who innately understood the draw of such a document.

George Prentice at Boise Weekly: Waiting for Superman

The greatest crisis facing America today has little to do with terrorism, tea parties or toxic assets. It is, in fact, the house of cards that makes up our public school system.

26 October, 2010 – 10:04 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , |