In the Garden: Veggies! (And, Like, Other Stuff Too)

The endless wet of March gave way to mostly sunny days in April, which made it increasingly hard to stay inside and work, let me tell you. Fortunately there was lots to do in the garden, including repeatedly mowing the lawn to keep the grass from exploding, weeding, and lolling among the flowerbeds.

Fortunately, I had help. Meet my garden assistants:

Heads of the Impatient: Two horses lean their heads over a gate with interest.

Karrot and Additur (aka Pesky) hang out in our pasture for part of the year and they have been immensely lovely to have around, as is their pal Sierra. Not least because when they spend a lot of time over here, the deer find somewhere else to be.

Speaking of deer, I’d invite you over to see this beautiful columbine in person, but they ate it. So here, have a picture.

Columbine: A purple columbine flower, just emerging from its bud.

For some reason, they have been leaving the freesia mostly alone, which is excellent, because I really like the scent:

Freesia: A spray of red freesia.

Someone on Twitter kindly identified this plant for me and I promptly forgot, but it’s pretty neat:

Leaves and Flowers: A plant with bright red new leaves, older dark green leaves, and sprays of white flowers.

It was here when I moved in, I can’t claim any credit.

Veggies! I planted mesclun mix, bok choy, green onions, lemon cucumbers, and experimental basil. Seeds aren’t very exciting to photograph after you plant them because, you know, all you can see is dirt, but the mesclun mix obligingly started to germinate:

Future Mesclun Mix: Tiny little green leaves emerging from the soil.

As did the bok choy:

Future Bok Choy: A single tiny shoot.

I also have plans to do carrots, but in a container, because holy shit, people, if my dad’s is Club Med for gophers1, my house is, I don’t even know, Hedonism for gophers? I’ve got a bounty out on their heads and the neighbourhood cats still can’t keep up. I was lying on the porch reading a book the other day and one of them had the audacity to pop up, look at me, and then disappear. About 30 seconds later, I watched one of the lupines just vanish. It’s war, gophers.

  1. Speaking of which, did y’all catch Ailanthusaltissima’s fantastic fanart based on that post? ↩
30 April, 2011 – 10:24 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in photography | Tagged , , |

Guest Post From Andrea: Estate Planning So Your Executor Doesn’t Desecrate Your Grave

This is a guest post from Andrea. Andrea lives in the backwoods of northern Virginia with a small menagerie, where she fritters her life away reading, hiking Civil War battlefields, and surfing the internet when the weather allows her primitive satellite connection to stay up. She’s involved in social justice, battlefield preservation, and is foolish enough to try going to school full time while holding down a full time job that requires a 100 mile daily commute. You can catch her blogging this idyllic life over at the Manor of Mixed Blessings (posts there have no redeeming social value).

Back at the end of January, my estranged father passed away intestate (without a will). He was also divorced. This meant that I was his sole heir, and also got saddled with being the executrix of his estate. And let me tell you, I had good reasons for being estranged from the man but prior to his death I didn’t really loathe him. After his death, I most certainly do. Disposing of his estate has been a nightmare of flailing around trying to piece together the financial life of a man I didn’t know, who lived a 12-hour drive west of me, kept every single piece of paper ever in a series of various boxes and drawers, and apparently did not communicate anything to anyone, ever. It is no lie when I say to you that I am contemplating making the 12-hour drive to visit his grave JUST so I can have a dog pee on it.

This has led me to the conclusion that you can handle your estate in one of three ways: you can hire a lawyer to be your executor, you can saddle the person you most dislike in the world with the duty, or you can set things up such that whoever does it does not end up with a burning desire to resurrect you just so they can choke you. It’s the third one I want to tell you about; there’s some very, very basic things you can do that will make life a lot easier for your executor when you’re gone. My advice is necessarily US-centric because I have no experience being an executrix anywhere else in the world.

The first is make a will. In it, specify who you want to be your executor. Get that person’s agreement. I cannot stress this enough. Do not surprise some poor bastard with the news that they will now have to handle disposing of your estate, even if you are the most organized person on the planet. It’s cruel and unusual and no fun for the person you’ve just surprised nastily.

The second is start making lists. You need to make a list of every bank where you have a financial account and every insurance policy you have. This list needs to include the telephone number and address of the institution where the account or policy is located, and the account or policy number. For insurance policies, list the amount of the payout and the beneficiary. Give the beneficiary’s contact information, as well. For financial accounts, if possible keep a copy of the latest account statement with this list.

For that matter, keep all your financial information in one place and organize that crap. It doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t even have to be in alphabetical order, but folders labeled with the names of the banks or companies with any and all correspondence stuck in them will be useful as hell to the person cleaning up after you’re dead.

Make multiple copies of your will and your list. Put a copies in a folder labeled “OPEN WHEN I’M DEAD” or similar and keep it with your financial folders. Consider giving copies to your executor if they’re the kind of person you trust with that information. Take all your folders of financial information, your OPEN WHEN I’M DEAD folder, and put them in a sturdy box. Plastic, for a preference, because it does not decay and fall apart like cardboard and is easier to lift than a fireproof safe. Label the box in large letters “IMPORTANT FINANCIAL INFORMATION” or similar and stick it wherever you like, but tell your executor where to look. Keep these files up to date, particularly that list.

Now sit down and make yourself another list. This one is a list of everyone who sends you a regular bill: phone companies, utility companies, landlord, credit cards, loans, whatever. It should look a lot like your other list, only labeled “BILLS” instead of “WHERE I BURIED THE MONEY”. Give the company/person’s name, their contact information, and your account number. If the bill is a static amount, list the amount. Stick this list in your OPEN WHEN I’M DEAD folder.

If you have an online presence, you may want to make a list with the URLs, account names, and passwords.

Make one last list, finally. Call this one “People Who Will Want To Know I’m Dead”. It’s pretty self-explanatory and should include names and contact information. Put it in your OWID folder and keep it updated as people move, change phones, or ditch one e-mail address for another.

If at all possible, make arrangements to pay for your funeral ahead of time. Your bank accounts will be tied up in probate for months even if things go quite smoothly, so if you haven’t pre-paid for a funeral ask yourself how your family is going to pay for the arrangements you want made. Consider, if you have a terminal illness, adding your executor to your bank account as a joint tenant with rights of survivorship (this is the only thing my dead estranged father did right), which will give them the ability to access that account without having to worry about probate.

Let me tell you how my estranged father’s death went, without all of this. I got the call that he was dead and had to plan his funeral arrangements from some 800 miles east of where he died. Luckily his sister was willing to put the costs of his cremation and memorial service on her credit card. I then packed my husband and puppy in the car and we drove twelve hours west, attended the memorial service, and then had to clean out my dead estranged father’s apartment and try to track down who all needed to know he was dead.

I had exactly 5 days off work, and one Honda CR-V which also had to carry me, my husband, the puppy, and our luggage. Time and space were at a premium. My husband and I moved through that small apartment like a hurricane, looking for any meaningful family artifacts and any important paperwork. We had four 15-gallon or so Tupperware containers we filled up. Because papers were everywhere, we just collected anything and everything and dumped it in the “Paperwork” Tupperware bin. Family oddments I actually wanted went in the other three.

And then, because I was fortunate, I was able to hire a lawyer who had everything left in the apartment taken care of, including the motorscooter. Meanwhile the husband, the puppy, and I drove twelve hours home where I started digging through the paperwork so I could tell the lawyer what the estate consisted of, financially. I called, I am not shitting you, three different retirement programs plus the Social Security Administration. I called the phone company. I dug through my dead estranged father’s personal mail and tracked down his regular correspondents and notified them. I provided what I believed to be a complete list of assets to the lawyer, and he got an order to dispense with administration of the estate, and then two months later one of the retirement programs sends me a letter to tell me there’s $36,000 in assets with them that they need to distribute but they won’t so much as tell me who the beneficiary is without a copy of the order to dispense with administration specifically listing those assets. Which I do not have, because when I called them and informed them of my estrange father’s death, they said nothing about these assets. Helpful. Very helpful.

At this point my estranged father has taken up significantly more of my time and energy dead than he ever did alive, and the whole process strikes me as a perfect example of the kind of self-centered assholery that made me decide I was better off without him in my life. I regret, at this point, allowing his ashes to be buried rather than taking custody of them so I could use them as litter box filler. Do not be my dead estranged father. Your heirs may be more on the ball than I am and you may spend eternity soaking up cat urine. Sit down, and start making some lists.

29 April, 2011 – 3:03 pm | By Distinguished Guest | Posted in Servicey | Tagged |

Every Animal Has A Story

There’s a narrative in the animal welfare community that’s been particularly irking me lately. With millions of homeless and unwanted animals across the United States, shelters facing budget cuts and declining donations, many regions are facing a crisis with animals in need of homes, and nowhere to go. Yet, this is rarely covered. The media occasionally discusses shelter crowding and related issues, but what it usually focuses on is animals with A Story. And every time it does, the coverage inevitably notes that once the story of the animal was publicised, requests to help, and often to adopt, flooded in from all over the nation, and sometimes from different countries.

Apparently a homeless and unwanted animal becomes important when ou attracts the attention of a journalist and can be hyped up in the media. And apparently people who mostly do nothing about the crisis with animal shelters in the United States suddenly feel inspired to adopt by reading a story. I wonder, you know, what happens to all the people who can’t adopt these animals; do they go to their local shelters and decide to bring home a dog or cat, to save an animal who needs their help but doesn’t have a flashy narrative? Because I suspect that they don’t.

And I also have to wonder what they were doing before. Where are they for the homeless animals in their community? Where are they when animals in their own community need help? Where are they when shelters in their own communities need help from members of the public and issue appeals for assistance? Why does a homeless animal only matter when ou comes with a horrific, frustrating, angering story attached?

I think this speaks to a larger problem in the United States when it comes to how people think not just about animal welfare issues, but also social justice for humans. And that is the tendency to personalise it and make it an individual problem, rather than to examine the institutions that lead to it. It’s the tendency to think that things can be solved by addressing situations on an individual level, rather than by confronting the much larger systems behind them.

When people focus on one homeless animal to the exclusion of others, that animal certainly gets help. When members of the public donate thousands of dollars so a dog can have expensive orthopedic surgery, that dog certainly gets help, instead of a death sentence. But what about all the other animals? This country euthanises millions of healthy dogs and cats every year because no one wants them. It kills millions of animals because it doesn’t know what else to do with them. How does helping one animal, one sad case, address this problem?

It doesn’t. If anything, it makes the situation worse because people feel good about themselves for sending $10 to the fund to help the cat with horrible injuries from animal abuse, and then their sense of civic duty subsides and they can return to whatever they were doing before. They don’t have to stop and wonder why so many animals are homeless, they don’t have to consider their own complicity in the situation animals face in the United States.

When people publicise and talk about these sad cases, they miss the fact that thousands of cases like this are happening right now, are ongoing, and no one’s talking about them. Maybe the abused animal escapes and dies quietly in the woods somewhere. Maybe the shelter takes one look and euthanises because it doesn’t know what else to do and knows, in that cold hard metric you learn when you work for shelters, that the costs for care would be too much to justify with hundreds of other animals in need. Maybe a member of the media doesn’t happen by to put the animal on the front page and suggest that readers of the paper help out by sending some money the shelter’s way. Money often earmarked specifically for that animal, so the shelter can’t do anything to help the other animals it has, and ends up sitting on a pile of funds it cannot use.

Personalising institutional violence is a way to make people feel good. It turns it into a small, digestible thing that is easy for people to cope with because they don’t need to think outside themselves. They can send money to the appeal or talk about how sad it all is over brunch and then forget about it. For animal welfare advocates, who work with cases like this on a daily basis, who struggle to get people to pay attention to the huge problems with the way this country handles animals in need, it is a frustrating, constant reminder that the only way to get any attention is to parade an animal with A Story before members of the public to get them to care.

Every animal has a story. Every animal matters. And we all play a role in the way this country deals with animals, from the number of animals your county shelter kills each week because it doesn’t have enough space to, yes, the animal that ends up in the paper because the abuse ou endured was so horrific and unusual that even shelter workers, used to the acts of people who treat animals like disposable objects, blanched. We are all a part of this.

And we are all complicit in the fact that people feel obliged to personalise the stories of abused, abandoned, and unwanted animals in order to get people to care. This is on us. It is our need for animals with Stories that drives this. Every time people flock to help a single animal they read about in the news or saw on the television, while ignoring the other animals that need help, well, that’s on us too.

29 April, 2011 – 10:38 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in animals | Tagged |

Questing Radiators

Dave Devine at Tucson Weekly: Government in Action

A Republican push to slash health-care programs as part of the recently adopted 2012 state budget is either “balanced” or “devastating,” depending upon who’s talking.

Scott Wittkopf at Isthumus: Michigan-style financial bill may still be in the works for Wisconsin

After “financial martial law” was enacted in Michigan in the midst of the Wisconsin protests over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union agenda, questions started bubbling as to whether or not similar legislation was in the works for the Badger State.

Samantha Power at Vue: Closed door policy

While the Conservative party campaign boasts of the highest rates of immigration in 50 years, the facts aren’t quite supporting the claim, though that hasn’t stopped the Conservatives from launching an aggressive campaign attempting to secure the votes of Canada’s diverse ethnic communities.

Kate Giammarise at Pittsburgh City Paper: GOP lawmakers pushing restrictive welfare-reform bills

Advocates for low-income Pennsylvanians are sounding the alarm about a package of bills in Harrisburg that places serious roadblocks in front of anyone seeking assistance through food stamps, welfare or other social services.

Chelsea Long at Boulder Weekly: The Elephant in the classroom

In its recent election, CU students showed up in record numbers to elect a new set of representatives. And in a sweeping victory, one ticket took every seat it ran for.

29 April, 2011 – 9:09 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: The Hayseed

I often encounter the attitude that people living in rural areas have nothing to contribute to the rest of the world. They are hayseeds, rednecks, country bumpkins. This thinking comes from the idea that the only work ‘of worth’ in this society is creative work, that a novelist is more important than a farmer, a sculptor means more than a mechanic, an actress is more important than a stay at home mom homeschooling her kids1. This pervasive attitude contributes significantly to the devaluation of rural communities in the United States; to the idea of the ‘flyover states,’ for example, like huge swaths of the country are just cultural voids. Their citizens don’t do anything. They don’t make creative work. They don’t invent things. They don’t work to make the world a better place.

They just…what do you think rural people do? Work on farms? Maybe in some aspect of a support industry for farmers? Do you think rural people are all farmers or tractor mechanics or horse trainers or cowherds or something? Because that’s the impression I get from a lot of people when they talk about how rural areas have nothing to add to the rest of the country. Oh, sure, they make food, but that’s about it. Who cares about food, I mean, really.

I live in a rural area that does not produce food, not in the sense of staples like wheat, corn, rice, vegetables, fruit. Our primary agricultural products are marijuana and wine. I guess that means we don’t do anything except get people drunk or high. Oh, except, wait. I’m a creative professional, living in a rural area. Which…seems to suggest that maybe some rural areas contain creative professionals who, like, write books and stuff. Maybe they’re journalists, photographers, sculptors. To name just a few of the things my friends, who also live in this rural area, do.

Aside from the fact that producing food is a huge contribution to society, that urban areas cannot produce their own food and rely on farmlands to do it, that people in the city would not survive if it wasn’t for the work of the ‘flyover states,’ rural areas have a lot to contribute if you’re going to use the ‘creative people are the most important people’ metric. Creative professionals can and do live in rural areas, and they build careers there. I know literary agents in remote areas of Ohio. I know Hollywood actors who live in rural communities. I know tons of authors, documentarians, journalists, visual artists, who all live in rural communities. I know attorneys who argue in front of the Supreme Court who live right here, in this community.

Our work is regularly displayed, discussed, and promoted in urban areas, but no one talks about where we come from. No one talks about the fact that we are coming from some of the most maligned communities in the United States, that despite the claim that everyone who lives in a rural community is a ‘useless redneck,’ we are contributing things that urban communities value highly. We are accomplishing these things in the face of tremendous odds; we don’t just have to try and build creative careers, we have to do so when we may have trouble accessing the Internet, when we can’t easily attend meetings in urban centres. And when we are constantly reminded that we have nothing to contribute, and we are devalued.

I’ve talked before about the attitude I commonly encounter here where I run into people and they say ‘oh, you’re still here,’ with a sneer on their faces. I’ve always been bothered by this (one may as well make the same comment to them). People act like I am giving up and turning into a failure by returning to the community I grew up in. They talk about how I had such promise and a bright future until I ‘gave it all up’ by coming back to Fort Bragg, like it’s functionally impossible for me to contribute to society in any meaningful way as long as I live here.

The idea that rural people have nothing to contribute is so widespread, so entrenched, so widely believed, that even people in rural areas, who should know better, buy into it. People tell me it’s impossible to build a career in writing or journalism without living in a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles, or preferably New York, cornerstone of the publishing industry. People tell me that I am throwing my life away by stubbornly remaining in my home town.

Newsflash: Some of those books on the New York Times bestseller list? Were written by rural people. In fact, about half the year, when I take a look at that list, I see a book written by someone from this area. This particular rural area happens to have a lot of creative people, and so it’s not surprising that I encounter their work being singled out for praise by city people a lot. The demographic is a bit skewed. But this is not the only rural area with creative people. This is not a strange outlier. This is a place, like a lot of other places.

This is a place, with people in it, and they are contributing things of value to society. We are not bumpkins, hayseeds, rednecks. That guy down the road with the jacked up truck and the gun rack? Yeah. You call him a redneck, but he’s a poet with a very lengthy list of publications in very, very prestigious places. So, you tell me: Do you still think rural people have ‘nothing to contribute’ according to your fancy city metric that says only creative people are of value?

  1. And that all of these categories, of course, are mutually exclusive. ↩
28 April, 2011 – 10:35 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in commentary | Tagged , , |

Erroneous Deermice

Trevor Scott Howell At Fast Forward Weekly: He promised change but delivered more of the same

Yet, five years later, Harper stands accused of the same style of political crimes he claimed to abhor — only now they’re packaged in a Conservative blue sweater.

Lucy Jockiel at Honolulu Weekly: The Foreclosure Fiasco

…for many of the 52,000 local Bank of America mortgage holders who have lost–or could lose–their houses due to the bank’s nationwide frenzy of mortgage foreclosures, the possibility of being houseless is terrifying.

Claire Lawton at Phoenix New Times: SB 1070 Has Been Bad for Arizona and Worse for Mexicans, But It Inspired a Year’s Worth of Great Art

In the past year, images of Arpaio and Brewer have been pasted on walls, stenciled onto posters, and shaped into piñatas and masks.

Gregory B. Hladky at Hartford Advocate: Medical Marijuana Gets Closer to Legalization in Connecticut, But Some Worry Over Its Regulation

Rhode Island and New Jersey aren’t often put in the beacons-of-light category, but Connecticut is right now looking to those two states to help illuminate the tricky pathway toward state-sanctioned growing and sale of medical marijuana.

Joe Eskenazi at SF Weekly: Who Owns The Castro Rainbow Flag?

Petrelis is tired of having to beseech the Castro Merchants every time he’d like to honor a cause by lowering the flag. “For the public to have to go to a private group to access public property — that’s not okay,” he says.

28 April, 2011 – 9:14 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Glee: Born This Way

Two things about this week’s episode: It was bad, from a purely structural/entertainment standpoint. Also, it was bad. Did I mention it was bad? And I didn’t like the music, but that’s because the numbers they chose this week were just not to my taste. The episode was all over the map, like the creative team wanted to cover eight different things at once. Indeed, it seemed like they were trying out for a PBS children’s special. Had I wanted to watch a very inspirational episode of specialness, I could have popped on some Veggietales.

I’ve talked about the shift in tone on Glee, and this episode was really illustrative of it. This was not an episode with fun singing. This was a painfully moralising episode where the show clonked viewers over the head repeatedly. It’s…maybe I was the wrong demographic for this episode, but a full hour of ‘it’s ok to be you’ from a show that actually spends a lot of time telling me it’s not ok to be me was a bit hard to swallow.

The storyline in this episode with Emma was extremely painful. We have Will pressuring her and demanding that she label her condition with a term she’s not comfortable with, that she call it OCD instead of whatever terms she might prefer. Badgering her, even when she’s made it clear that she wants to be left alone, suggesting that she’s ‘an expert at deflecting’ when she tries to push back and ask him to stop harassing her. Is this going to be a storyline where we are supposed to see what Will is doing as wrong, or are viewers reading him, once again, as the tragic hero, just trying to help his love interest ‘get better’?

That scene in the staff room was just plain painful, and Emma had what I thought was a pretty awesome response: ‘You think torturing me with unwashed fruit’s gonna make me take that step?’ Given the rest of the episode, I might have read this storyline as ‘Will is riding for a fall,’ but that doesn’t mesh with the way the show seems to view mental illness. Will tells Emma that they’re all ‘humouring’ her (that’s what ‘accommodations’ really are, don’t you know), for example, and that really they all just wish she wouldn’t be crazy. These lines were not shown in a ‘this is presented for criticism’ kind of way, but a ‘these are established facts’ kind of way.

And that’s definitely been the message projected throughout the show, that it’s bad that she’s crazy and she needs to be cured. This was reinforced in the therapy scene where the therapist basically suggests that she needs to be cured 1 to ‘find herself,’ which is a rejection of the way some people feel about their mental illnesses. This is not to say that all people with mental illness reject or do not want cures—far from it. Nor is it to say that there is only one right attitude to have about mental illness; there are many ways to feel about mental illness and they are all valid. But the predominant attitude about mental illness is that it is bad and needs to be cured, and that the idea of living with your mental illness, embracing it, of mad pride, is alien and scary to a lot of people. Reinforcing the dominant view doesn’t do much to destigmatise mental illness, even if it rings true to the experiences of some people with mental illness.

Some people with mental illness are ‘born this way’ and are happy this way, to boot. In a whole episode telling us about how important it is to just be yourself and not change yourself, one of the key storylines involved fundamentally changing a character’s identity and eradicating part of it because it’s ‘bad.’ I note, too, that Artie didn’t get a pride anthem, or even a pride shirt. Because, you know, what’s there to be proud of, right?

It’s clear that Emma personally wants to manage her OCD differently and that it is causing impairments for her; she wants to find a treatment that will be effective for her needs. But that doesn’t equate to wanting, or needing, a cure. And let me assure you that forcing people with anxiety disorders to ‘confront’ the sources of their anxiety is a really great way to create more anxiety and to make them feel even worse both because their anxieties will be more intense and because they are acutely aware that you just want them to be normal and stop being so crazy and why does everything have to be such a big production.

Is it possible that Glee is actually responding to criticisms of its handling of mental illness and it is planning to take this storyline in an interesting direction where Will Learns A Lesson, in keeping with the rest of the tone the show seems to be taking on, where all the characters need to be Educated (usually at the expense of a marginalised person)? Since we had the obligatory ‘there’s a stigma about mental illness, you know’ scene in a therapist’s office, that seems to be the way things are headed. (Will Glee acknowledge the role it plays in perpetuating that stigma?) Or is it, as usual, flailing around, not doing its research, and claiming to ‘educate’ viewers? Only time will tell.

I will note that if Glee really wants to clean up its act, it should start with hiring actual consultants with actual experience (like, say, people with OCD), which it may now be doing, but I doubt it, because it would be crowing about it from the rooftops. And it should try approaching marginalised identities from a position other than ‘the only way to incorporate marginalised people is to feature them in Very Special Episodes.’

What they’re doing with Lauren Zizes is actually a good example of how they could be handling marginalised characters; she’s there, she doesn’t give a fuck what people think about her, her fat is not the all-consuming main feature of her character, she does things other than just standing around, being fat, and talking about fat. Yeah, sometimes it becomes relevant to a storyline and her fatness becomes more central, but it’s not the subject of a Very Special Episode. And it’s not all we know about her. Unlike characters like Artie, and Emma, who are just The Disabled Ones. Mercedes, The Black Girl. Tina, The Asian Girl.

If they could get to where they are with Lauren with those characters, it would be such a better show. If those characters could be allowed to develop some personality, where their identities become part of who they are instead of their only distinguishing features, Glee would be offering all the education it needs to offer. It could go back to being a fun show with a mixed-up group of underdogs, confronting oppression by working in solidarity with each other, and silently challenging viewers to rethink their attitudes.

It also doesn’t escape my notice that the song they chose to use as the ender in this episode, the great positive affirmational number that’s supposed to leave everyone feeling good…has been criticised for racist content.

  1. With meds, of course, which…maybe those have worked for some other people with OCD? But they did not work for me. ↩
27 April, 2011 – 7:33 pm | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability, television | Tagged |

What If PETA Threw An Ad and Nobody Came?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) gets a lot of attention with its outrageous advertising. Every time the organisation comes out with a new ad, I see numerous people commenting on it, arguing about it, discussing it. It’s unafraid to exercise pretty much every -ism in the book in its advertising, whether it’s telling people to go vegetarian so they won’t turn into fat whales, or comparing Black women to animals. It’s pretty safe to say at this point that if it’s a PETA ad, it’s offensive.

Clearly, the organisation is doing this deliberately. I think most people recognise this at this point. These ads are supposed to be ‘provocative.’ PETA is choosing to ‘go against the PC tide’ in their ads. They put a lot of thought into how they present themselves and they want to be ‘edgy,’ but above all, they want to spark discussion and debate, particularly in progressive communities, where the jump from ‘caring about progressive issues’ to ‘addressing animal welfare’ is a pretty logical extension.

The question is, why do people keep taking the bait? What would happen, in other words, if PETA threw an ad and nobody came? If PETA came up with another pile of offensive schlock designed to bait people, and people didn’t rise? If they released an ad and it wasn’t promptly circulated on every progressive site in the universe by people who want to tear it apart?

People criticise PETA ads endlessly because they say it’s important to call the organisation out and challenge the offensive material and force the organisation to rethink its strategy. This is not working because the organisation’s strategy very clearly is to offend people. PETA wants progressives to see its ads, get angry, and talk about them. It’s hardly a novel advertising strategy, but it seems to be working very well. People are responding to these ads and they’re proving the old saw about ‘no such thing as bad press’ to be painfully, clearly, obviously true.

If PETA released an ad with the usual offensive content and met with silence from the progressive community, it would have to rethink its strategy. Especially if it did it again and people still didn’t rise. The way to make PETA rethink the way they approach animal welfare issues is not by screaming at them. It’s by ignoring them. You want to show them their offensive ads don’t work? Don’t respond to them.

I guarantee you that, faced with a boycott on responding to their ads, the organisation would have to seriously reconsider its current branding and advertising strategy. And you would see some actual change in their work and a shift in focus from trying to offend people to trying to actually reach people. And I say this as an animal welfare advocate who used to belong to PETA, and left the organisation when I grew disgusted with the shift in their tactics.

I often get asked to comment on PETA ads by people who seem surprised that, as someone who is pretty attentive about media, pop culture, and everything else, I remain silent on PETA’s tactics. I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. I don’t say anything because we all know that their methods are offensive, and surely I am not the only one who realises that this is the point. PETA wants to make you angry, and judging from the outrage that flares up every time they come up with a new ad, it’s working.

People say that these ads create a backlash; certainly on almost every comment thread I see about new horrors from PETA, there’s someone trotting out with the ‘this ad makes me want to go home and eat a lot of BACON’ line, like it’s original and funny. People say the ads are not effective because they alienate people from the animal rights movement and cause people to kneejerk the other way in response, to eat more meat, say. And these arguments are certainly true if you look at the ads on a superficial level.

But if you go deeper and see the amount of free publicity PETA gets every time progressives get all riled up about their ads, you see a different story. You see a very successful media powerhouse, an organisation that is very conscious about the demographic it wants to target and is, as far as I can see, doing a terrific job at it. You might not like it, but these are the facts; this is how PETA operates, and it is working. Every time you get outraged about a PETA ad and say so, you are doing exactly what they want you to do.

So, what if PETA threw an ad and nobody came? What if we collectively agreed, as a community, that we were going to ignore the next ad the organisation puts out, and the next? What if we decided that rather than dignifying an ad clearly intended to offend with a response, that we would give it the cold shoulder? Do you think PETA might be forced to adjust their strategy?

Because I think they would. The image of a radical, edgy animal rights organisation that ‘cares more about animals than people’ is a lot harder to keep up when no one is talking about you, when people collectively pretend you don’t exist. That flashy advertising doesn’t count for so much when no one responds to it and people make a conscious choice to move on to other topics of greater interest.

Topics like, say, improving living conditions for farm animals.

27 April, 2011 – 10:33 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in animals | Tagged , , |

Furry Hooks

Bob Doran at North Coast Journal: Mr. Dave

He favors instruments you’re probably not familiar with: the caz, the Weissenborn lap guitar, cittern, gumbu, charango and zither.

Nate Seltenrich at East Bay Express: The Cruel Irony of the Oakland Zoo Expansion

Environmentalists also contend that the zoo, an organization ostensibly dedicated to conservation, is trying to skirt California environmental laws that are designed to protect threatened and endangered wildlife.

Jordan Green at Yes! Weekly: Upside down

The foreclosure hearing room is heavy with a suffocating air of inevitability, if not finality.

Gustavo Arellano at Orange County Weekly: Ruben Vives, Former Illegal Immigrant, Wins Pulitzer for Coverage of Bell Scandal

Let’s be clear: Vives is a reporter, first and foremost. Not a Latino reporter, not a former illegal immigrant reporter, but a reporter.

Linda Falkenstein at Isthmus: Greenius at work! Madison inventors get creative and protect the planet

Amateur inventors are eager to improve life for themselves and others. They experiment in home workshops, weld gadgets in garages and write computer code between classes.

27 April, 2011 – 9:09 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Internships and Exploitation

It seems like every day I’m spotting a new ad for an organisation seeking unpaid interns. Unpaid internships have a long tradition, of course, but it does seem, at least on superficial glance, like there are more of them than ever before. Talking to people seeking work, there’s definitely been an uptick in people telling me they have trouble getting paying entry level positions, because organisations want them to work for free as interns.

This is a serious problem. Most unpaid internships offer college credit as compensation. Which is great if you, one, are in college, and, two, can afford to support yourself without additional income. The number of people who meet these two criteria is actually not very high, limiting internship opportunities to college students with some money behind them. In other words, upper middle class and upper class students. Most college students I know can’t afford to spend 10, 15, or 20 hours a week at an unpaid internship, especially in the summer, when they need to earn money to support themselves during the school year.

This means that the people getting entry level positions tend to fall within some very narrow categories. When the only way to get work with limited or no experience is through an unpaid internship, people have no realistic chance of building a career. Because they can’t get the experience they need to work their way into paid positions. They can’t network and make connections at a job in order to access people who can help them get ahead in a given field, because they can’t get their feet in the door. They have to work, because they need money more than they need college credit. Or they don’t need college credit at all, because they aren’t in college.

This is a real problem. There are people who need job experience who can’t get it because if they apply for internships, they are rejected, because they aren’t in school. You must be a college student for some internships because that’s how companies justify not paying people, is by providing compensation in the form of college credit. So if you’re trying to build a new career, if you’re out of school, a lot of doors are closed to you even if you can afford to support yourself through an unpaid internship. And who is more likely to be able to do that, a college student with no sources of income, or a person who has been working and saving?

I am far from the first person to discuss the fact that unpaid internships are exploitative and that they reinforce class divides. A casual Google search can point you in the direction of any number of articles, including in publications like the New York Times, discussing the problems with internships and suggesting that the system needs reform. That, bluntly, no person should have to work for free to get job experience, no person should be forced to work for free in order to advance a career.

Internships are not volunteering. Volunteerism has an important place in society and I think it carries tremendous benefits. But the purpose of volunteering is distinct from interning. Interns are in a workplace to learn, to acquire skills, to make connections, to explore a possible career. And their employers get a lot out of them. Interns are writing code at tech companies, working on articles for magazines, conducting research. Their work is valuable and in the real world, they would be paid for it.

Interns add value to an organisation, even if their stay is brief. To not pay them is insulting. It’s not just exploitative, it’s not just rife with problems in terms of how people think about class and careers and building lives. It’s also just…rude. It’s rude to tell people that they should work for you for free, no matter how big and impressive your organisation. It’s rude to tell people that, functionally, they should pay for the privilege of working for you.

Sure, some organisations provide housing for their interns. Sometimes. A lot don’t. Most don’t provide food, unless the company has a kitchen with chefs preparing food anyway. Some may offer help with transportation. Many don’t. So when you enter an unpaid internship, you have to think about the cost of living in the area and whether you can afford to pay for job experience and a name on your resume. You have to think about how the internship will hurt your finances, which is ridiculous.

Companies talk about needing ‘interns’ to separate them from ‘real’ employees, like they are doing people an immense favour by accepting them as sub-par workers. Interns have to bust their humps, though. They are often at the beck and call of other employees, they put in long hours, and they have to do it with a smile on their face so they get a good writeup and recommendation, and possibly a chance at ‘real’ employment with the company in the future. To be an intern is to put in hard hours with minimal reward. For some people, the reward of working at a company they like is just not enough.

People working as interns feed the system, contributing to the idea that companies can continue to demand free labour and get away with it because there will always be people applying for internships. And I don’t necessarily fault people for being in that position, because for some fields, you have to intern, and it has to be unpaid, if you want a chance at breaking into the field. Interns are the victims of the system as much as they are perpetuating it, and it’s not as simple as saying ‘people just shouldn’t accept unpaid positions and the system will stop.’

Reforming the system requires top-down work, and it requires valuing interns as employees who deserve more compensation than some credits on their transcripts. It requires opening up entry level jobs to everyone, not just college students with money.

26 April, 2011 – 10:30 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , , |