Ebooks: Also Available At Independent Bookstores!

I am a huge fan of independent bookstores, something in no small part instilled by spending a lot of time in them as a child and later working in one as an adult. There is something very specific about a good independent bookstore that is hard to pin down in a simple formula that can be replicated anywhere, like chains attempt to do; the environment that welcomes all customers, the friendly staff, the excellent selection of books, the service customised to the area and the actual shoppers. A bad bookstore can be a terrible thing to see, but a good bookstore can be a beautiful one indeed, and their numbers are sadly shrinking.

Independents have been struggling since the rise not just of Amazon, but big chains with substantial capital to sink into expansion. They can afford to offer extremely steep discounts on books because of their negotiated deals with distributors, and many happily break pricing agreements, well aware that publishers may not find out and if they do, they’re unlikely to protest and lose a huge sales outlet. You can’t very well refuse to supply books to a store potential readers will expect to carry them, unless you want to create ire among your customers. With Amazon comes that added convenience, as well, of being able to access a variety of products for next day delivery, which is hard for a lot of consumers to pass up.

The numbers of independents are shrinking, even as all brick and mortar bookstores are having a hard time, as seen with the collapse of Borders earlier this year. The new culprit being fingered for this is ebooks, although of course obviously there are complex economic factors involved in why independent bookstores are having a rough time surviving. Why all businesses are having a very hard time, to be strictly honest. This is not a problem limited to booksellers, but to community businesses in general.

Ebooks aren’t helping, though, runs the argument. Amazon has very effectively and aggressively cornered the market with convenience and pricing. The Kindle and the Nook are brilliant tools for sales because they ensure a steady income stream and lock readers in, unless people are willing to modify them, which many readers are not. Devices like iPads and third party ereaders are less likely to funnel customers to specific distributors, but not immune. It’s so easy to click the in-program link, for example, to be routed to a large bookseller to buy more ebooks.

And many people are not aware that independent bookstores sell ebooks. Through an agreement with Google Books, it’s possible to buy ebooks through independents, although unfortunately the interface is less than ideal. It takes time to get accustomed to navigating, and it’s important to be aware that books have to be purchased through the bookstore’s website, not the Google Books site, as otherwise bookstores don’t get a cut of the transaction. This is information that is not readily conveyed to consumers.

Part of the problem, with that communication shortfall, I suspect, is a reluctance on the part of booksellers to get into the nitty-gritty of the transaction. Which is a pity, because customers would certainly support their independents if they knew it was an option, just as people who know that running debit transactions results in lower fees than credit ones may use their debit cards at small merchants if it doesn’t make a difference to them either way.

The selection of books is quite large, and Google Books also offers publisher freebies and promotionals when they come up, so people won’t miss out on free ebooks, and they can get the convenience of electronic reading while still buying through a local store. Pricing varies, depending on the book, but isn’t unreasonable. It’s like having cake, and eating it too, for people who prefer electronic formats but feel guilty about not patronising independent bookstores. For stores that aren’t part of the network yet, asking about it might be a good way to make staff aware that there’s interest so they can look into joining, and also makes it clear that customers want to stay loyal and offer support, they just need an opportunity to do so.

There’s something very particular about an independent bookstore that isn’t offered through a website, or through the impersonal corporate service at many chains, where employees may be penalised for individuality instead of being welcomed. It’s in the personalised book recommendations from people who get to know you, in the quirky assortment of books, in the ability to order anything for you, in the comfortable place to sit in the window that you won’t be driven out of, even if you haven’t bought anything. And no, not every independent offers that, but those that do are having a hard time surviving in this business climate, so I like to throw them money when I can.

The great thing about availability of ebooks through independents is that if you don’t have a local, or it’s not a very good bookstore, you can still support independents in other areas. If you visit a new community and find and independent you like, by gum, maybe you should think about buying your ebooks from them in the future, to let them know you appreciate a bookstore with good service and friendly employees and a nice selection within their walls. Positive reinforcement to keep great bookstores alive, with all the convenience of ebooks for your reading satisfaction. Everyone wins!

Because the good independent bookstore isn’t a thing that should be allowed to die without a fight.

31 December, 2011 – 10:32 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , |

Driven to Predatory Loans

A car can be a powerful tool, especially for low-income people in communities with inadequate public transit, which is many. Lack of transportation can be a barrier to seeking work, to getting adequate nutrition, to reaching a doctor’s office. And yet, reliable, safe cars are out of reach of many because of their high cost. Even a ‘cheap’ junker can cost $2,000, which may be more than many low-income buyers can afford, especially if they also want to keep their vehicles registered and insured to comply with the law and assure themselves of coverage in the event of an accident.

The Los Angeles Times ran a three-part series on exploitative ‘buy here, pay here’ dealerships earlier in the fall, discussing the vicious cycle, the role of investors, and the limited options available to people who want to buy cars and don’t have many choices when it comes to auto financing. The series attracted a great deal of attention in a way that other predatory lending reports have not, possibly because there’s more interest in the subject as a result of the flailing economy, but there’s something deeper going on there as well. It’s about more than just exploitative lending, but the specific involvement of these practices in car sales.

Cars are a sort of icon in the United States in a way that is sometimes hard to articulate for people from other places. There is very much a car culture here, particularly outside of major cities. If you grow up in rural or suburban regions of the US, there’s a strong chance you’re going to be longing for a license at 161 and hoping for a car. Not just because you need a car for transportation, but because it’s part of the culture around you. The car is a symbol. Having a car means you have access to something. Freedom, sure, but something else less tangible and hard to grab on to. As a car owner who doesn’t drive very much, just knowing that the car is there is reassuring because I’m steeped in that car culture and the expectations that come with it.

So predatory lending specifically focused on cars strikes at the heart of an iconic tradition in the US. Middle class owners may have a tough time conceiving of a world without a car, let alone the idea that some people can’t afford cars or are forced into hazardous financial transactions to access a car. The idea that a car can be a lifeline, too, may be alien to some car owners who haven’t been without a car for more than a day or two. Security, perhaps, is the thing that cars represent to so many of us, the knowledge that all is not lost, even though people may not be aware of the security until it’s gone. Buy here, pay here dealerships take that all away.

The shadowy world of alternative financial services runs deep, and generates huge profits. It’s a system that constantly generates a larger customer base because of the way it preys on people. It starts with someone who has a limited credit history and can’t access a traditional loan, perhaps, who takes out a high interest payday loan to get by. Then comes the default, turning to another alternative lender, and another, until the only lenders who will offer money are those who operate in this world, the same place occupied by buy here, pay here dealerships. The world where turnover is high and vicious and lenders prey on lack of knowledge when it comes to topics like interest and rights as a borrower.

Similar practices were seen in the home loan industry, which isn’t an alternative financial service provider at all. Borrowers were encouraged to lie, fudge their numbers, and cheat their way into home loans by unscrupulous brokers, real estate agents, and loan officers. This was particularly acute for people who qualified for insurance through programs like the VA home ownership assistance program; the people, in other words, who are likely to be low income and who may not be very financially literate. After preying on them, banks waited for them to default, often after an abrupt interest rate hike, so they could seize their homes and start the practice all over again, just like buy here, pay here dealerships.

There’s a perception that car dealerships are sleazy and banks are not that feeds into the disparity in the coverage of similar stories, why it is that exploitative car loans attract outrage and similarly structured home loans aren’t deemed as offensive. Because people expect this of car dealerships and it vindicates their beliefs, while bankers are considered upstanding types who wouldn’t engage in this kind of questionable behaviour. Bankers, thus, got off largely unnoticed for exploiting their base population, while auto lenders are not.

What people fail to understand here is that people are driven to predatory loans in a system that very specifically steers them that way, and this problem is rife throughout the financial industry. It doesn’t stop with homes or cars or personal loans. It’s everywhere, because it’s an immensely profitable endeavor. Lenders have no reason to stop doing it because they’re making huge amounts of money for their investors. When you’re processing scores of predatory loans, high default rates aren’t a problem because there’s so much money coming in. And when the government is handing you money and praising you for engaging in practices that drove the economy to its knees, that sounds an awful lot like an invitation to keep doing what you were doing. After all, you’ll get bailed out again if you run into trouble.

Unlike the borrowers trapped in your loan products.

  1. Or whenever your state grants them. ↩
30 December, 2011 – 10:11 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , |

Turning the Border Into A War Zone

Good fences, goes the saying, make good neighbours. Walls and fences have been used as messaging for thousands of years; early humans probably made a point of building fences as soon as they could figure out how to do it. We’re fond of fences as a method of social control, a firm reminder of who belongs out and who belongs in. The Great Wall of China. The Berlin Wall. And, of course, the forbidding fence that stretches across the US-Mexico border, even as crossings into Canada are not similarly secured. That disparity is a particularly firm reminder of the purpose of the fence. It’s not about physical control, but social and cultural control.

It’s not just the fence, though. It’s the use of National Guard troops at the border, even though they’re a military force, not trained for policing activities. Using the military at the border also sends a stark message to people thinking about crossing it, legitimately or otherwise. Between the visuals of the wall and armed troops, the message is clear: This place is a war zone. You pass through it at your own peril. The United States has created a war zone without actively declaring war while the world looks on, powerless to stop the fence just as the neighbour can’t do anything about the monstrous fence someone erects to make it clear that people are not welcome, unless it violates zoning, which apparently doesn’t apply on an international scale.

Immigration policy in the United States has always been deeply troubled and in recent years it’s taken on particularly sinister and aggressive aspects. Touting itself as a land of opportunity, the United States wants to limit these opportunities, and not in a functional or logical way. This does not involve concerns about whether we can meet the needs of new residents, how we will adjust infrastructure to accommodate new residents, how we should make the country welcoming. This is specifically about race-based exclusion and it’s transparent and it’s hateful.

The United States has effectively declared war on its neighbours to the south and expects to take a free pass on it. It wants access to the factory zones along the border where cheap labourers produce low-cost goods, it wants inexpensive produce grown in Mexico, but it doesn’t want people. Just products from their hands, and the ability to exploit people to get what it wants. The United States wants to export pollution and labour exploitation and harsh industrial and agricultural chemicals without paying the cost for these things, it wants to be able to scream about ‘illegal immigration’ and punish its neighbours for existing.

Creating a war zone at the border has serious implications. It started with a slow creep, conservative policy pushing further and further against the boundaries. The 11 September attacks created a more hospitable climate for racism in the United States by stressing that The Other is bad and suspect, and the best way to identify The Other is by skin colour, which makes those who are darker bad and suspect. People moving across the border for work, to join their families, to seek education, are maligned and treated like criminals no matter how they cross, whether in a tunnel or openly with a visa across the border control plaza.

For people in the United States, the war zone creates a figure of very real fear—after all, we wouldn’t need such tight controls, we wouldn’t need to militarise our border, if there wasn’t a real danger, right? The messaging of the images from the border has effectively created public support for the border and reinforced it. Going against the war zone is to imply that you don’t care about public safety or, worse, that you don’t think ‘illegal immigration’ is a problem, even though of course people enter the country illegally through many points of access, through ports, along Canada’s border, but it’s only one border the government seems worried about. Worried, it claims, because of the high volume of movement across that border, but we all know the truth. We can all stop lying to ourselves. This is about preventing unwanted immigration, with ‘unwanted’ being a definition that has shifted over the years through centuries of racist immigration policy.

Militarising the border may have consequences the United States cannot recover from. Mexico has recently raised repeated concerns about the handling of immigration policy and the demonisation of Mexican immigrants, and it’s possible that the nation’s efforts to push back may take a more aggressive form in coming months or years. Cracking down on the maquiladoras, for example. Enacting tougher anti-pollution legislation to reject the toxic compounds the US wants to export to its soil. Raising a diplomatic stink to make it clear that this open warfare when no war has been declared will no longer be tolerated.

There are people growing up in the United States right now who have always known the border as a war zone, who have accepted it as part of their lives. Who believe that this is the natural state of the border, that of course it needs to be secured with troops and heavy-duty fencing and trigger-happy vigilantes. These are the people who will be growing up to make policy in the future, who will be the next generation of diplomats, and the messages they are absorbing right now have the potential to be deeply damaging. Pushing back on the border now isn’t just about righting an injustice, but about addressing the very real fact that this injustice becomes more deeply entrenched with each passing year, that it becomes the new normal, utterly acceptable and unremarkable.

29 December, 2011 – 10:56 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics, race | Tagged , , , |

Juvenile Offenders: Farming the Next Generation of Prisoners

The prison-industrial complex is a monster that uses a variety of tactics to feed itself. For adults, there’s the gamut of mandatory sentencing laws used as ‘tough on crime’ posturing to force people into prison for relatively minor offenses, often for long terms, and to land people in prison for life when too many offenses rack up. There are also, of course, the disparities in terms of who is arrested and prosecuted for crimes, and who is able to mount an effective defense to stay out of the prison system and avoid the problems that come along with a conviction, which can include disenfranchisement, trouble finding work, and difficulty finding housing.

Once adults enter the prison system, it can be hard to escape, because the prison system feeds itself. It’s very specifically not rehabilitative in nature and there’s no real effort to make prison a place where adult offenders can reform. Effectively, prisons create a revolving door situation, where the same people keep returning to their populations for longer and longer terms until they’re trapped forever. It’s a neat way to ensure a steady stream of ‘customers’ in an industry that is growing more profitable every year, with the rise of privatised prison facilities to take over for the government. Make no mistake, this is a capitalism-based model.

In the juvenile justice system, the story, as in the narrative that is presented, is very different. The claim is that juveniles enter a more rehabilitation-focused system that is intended to give them a second chance at life, so they can make something of their lives when they get out of prison and join the civilian population. There’s talk of programs to help prisoners earn equivalency certificates and get technical training, for example, so they can have a chance at getting jobs when they get out. Prisons for juvenile offenders are depicted much as the Victorian workhouse was to members of the public, a place for reform.

The truth is much different. As with adults, juveniles face the same profiling problems that plague the justice system as a whole. Youth of colour are more likely to be stopped and pursued by law enforcement, they are more likely to be prosecuted for crimes, courts are more likely to hand down tough sentences. These risks increase for trans and queer youth of colour, who experience high homelessness rates. Being homeless puts you at increased risk of being a victim of crime1, but it also increases the chances of being in a situation where you will come into contact with the justice system from the other side; when, say, you are working in the sex industry to survive and you are penalised for it.

Mentally ill youth also fall into the justice system, and when they do, they often don’t get out. The fact that family members of youth with mental illness are still specifically told to give their children up when they can’t access care is telling, and speaks to the lack of support for juveniles with severe mental illness. Many end up in prison because there is nowhere else to put them, and this is not an environment where they are going to be able to access treatment and services they might use to build better lives for themselves.

Once in the prison system, it is as difficult for juveniles to escape as it is for adults. Prison provides exposure to people and situations that are difficult to shake. And when you get out, you deal with the stigma of being a juvenile offender. Despite the fact that records are sealed, juveniles may still be dealing with parole officers and other limitations that make their situation obvious. Potential employers may be reluctant to hire them in the belief that they are irredeemable, while schools reject them as too much of a risk.

The end result can be a push right back into crime, and into crimes that escalate over time with increasing desperation. Increasing encounters with the system and with law enforcement, including encounters that turn violent and dangerous. And time in prison, again and again, until the juvenile is an adult and can be subjected to even harsher sentences. And, once an adult, the attitude that there is no hope left so the focus should be on punishment means that few opportunities at a second chance are going to be made available. The prison system has neatly created a new ‘incurable offender’ for itself.

This gaping maw, the prison system, doesn’t chew people up and spit them out when it’s done with them, because it is never done. It chews people down and swallows them, making it virtually impossible to get out. Prison is justified as a necessary thing to protect the interests of members of the public, to maintain order, to keep people safe, but these considerations are not extended to prisoners, who are pushed into dangerous and desperate situations by a ‘justice system’ that is explicitly penal in nature.

The goal here is not to build a better world. It is to punish people. And as long as this remains the fundamental premise of the prison system and the reason people are sent through the courts, nothing is going to change. For juveniles, the broken system farms the next generation, all behind cinderblock walls and claims that it’s for their own good and the system will result in rehabilitation and a chance at a new life, at reform, at an opportunity to make good. It’s all lies, a house of cards that would collapse easily enough if pushed, but very few people seem willing to push it.

  1. And decreases your chances of having that crime taken seriously. ↩
28 December, 2011 – 10:53 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics, social justice | Tagged , , , |

Disability Does Not An Unfit Parent Make

Attempts to minimise discussions about ableism often place it in a historic context—this is something that used to happen, this is the way things used to be—the idea is that things aren’t that way anymore, so the claim that disability-based discrimination and hatred continue to be issues is invalid. In fact, many of these ‘historic’ attitudes continue to be alive and well, and often on an institutional level as well, not just a social one. It’s not just that people believe these things, but that these things are built into the legal framework of the systems used to make critical decisions about people’s lives.

Take, for example, the belief that disability makes someone an unfit parent. Not just that people with disabilities shouldn’t have children because they might also be disabled1, but that disability itself excludes people from the ability to be able to parent safely and responsibly. That disabled people with children should have those children taken away and placed in a ‘more appropriate’ home where they can receive ‘appropriate care,’ because obviously their parents can’t care for them.

This is not an attitude of the past. This is not an attitude that reigned in the early 20th century and was beaten back by campaigners arguing for full social inclusion. It’s something that continues to be an issue, and enough of one that some disabled people have very legitimate reason to fear that their children may be taken away from them by authorities who deem them unfit to parent. These fears may be pooh-poohed, especially in discussions about reproductive rights, where the idea that some people need to fight to keep their children is viewed as somewhat whimsical or unlikely and the focus is on unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.

Children are taken from mentally ill parents because their parents are considered ‘dangerous.’ They are taken from blind or deaf parents because their parents are deemed somehow lacking in the ability to interact with their children. They are taken from parents with physical disabilities because their parents, outsiders think, might not be able to ‘care for’ them. These cases come up regularly, although they very rarely make the news, and they usually involve parents fighting ferociously for their children, and sadly, usually also involve losing those fights because it is very difficult to resist the ableist attitudes underpinning the decision to take children away.

Sometimes it starts with a ‘concerned member of the public.’ The person who calls the police because a woman is using a wheelchair and wearing a baby in a sling, say, or the person who is ‘just worried’ about a child and disabled parent seen in the grocery store, so decides to call child services. It triggers an investigation, puts the parent on the radar, raises the spectre that perhaps the child doesn’t belong in that household, even if the parent ‘seems to be doing okay.’ Who knows, after all, when that might change. Even if the first complaint doesn’t result in seizing the child, the next might. Or the next.

Or it’s a physician. Doctors occupy positions of authority and are regarded as trustworthy and reliable when it comes to making assessments about the abilities of their patients. All it takes is one doctor suggesting that a patient might not be able to care for a child, or expressing worries that a patient’s parent might not be safe, to trigger another investigation. Complaints from doctors are weighted heavily and it means that they are taken very seriously. A routine visit to a doctor’s office, an offhand comment to a physician, might result in ripping your family apart.

Partners, too, play a role here. In a mixed relationship where one person is disabled and the other person is not, the nondisabled partner may argue that the child is safe because of the presence of a nondisabled person to take over if necessary. When people separate, though, the same mixed relationship can become a liability, rather than an asset. Because in the custody dispute, the nondisabled partner just has to say that there are ‘concerns’ about adequate child care to plant the idea in the heads of the people making decisions. So what if it means raking a former partner over the coals in an attempt to prove inadequacy? At the end, you ‘win’ and get custody.

These are very real risks for disabled people with children. Yet, they’re rarely a topic of discussion. There’s not a lot of acknowledgement of the risks of parenting while disabled, let alone how to fight these attitudes to make disabled parents safer. Parents with mental illness, for example, should be able to seek treatment if they need it without judgment and without the risk of losing their children because they did the right thing and got help for ongoing issues. Parents shouldn’t be afraid to take their kids to the pediatrician, or to go out in their communities with their children, but these fears are there, and they are not acknowledged.

Disability does not an unfit parent make, but you wouldn’t know that from social attitudes about disability and parenting. You certainly wouldn’t know it from the way that agencies tasked with safeguarding children behave, because they continually promote the idea that disability, on its own, is hazardous. Endangers children. Threatens their welfare. Makes it impossible to provide care. And those attitudes filter out to the general population, which regards reporting disabled parents as an act of public service.

  1. Many people also seem to have a poor grasping of genetics and don’t seem to understand the difference between genetic, congenital, and acquired disabilities. ↩
27 December, 2011 – 10:35 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , |

Woah, Careful With Those Pesticides! Pesticide Overuse on US Farms

Advocates have been warning about the dangers of pesticide overuse since the 1990s, and as yet, the agriculture industry shows no signs of adjusting its practices to address these concerns, protect the environment, and create a safer place for workers. The pressures on farmers to use pesticides are considerable, but the costs of continuing down the path industrial agriculture is taking are also very high. Something has to give, and it’s not going to be the bugs, which show signs of gaining, rather than losing, ground under current practices, much though the industry might attempt to deny it.

The primary contributor to pesticide overuse is agriculture intensification. As farms push to produce more food, they need to enact tighter controls to address potential threats to the crop. Not just insect pests, but also small animals and weeds, in addition to the usual gamut of weather and situations outside the farmer’s control, like the risk that the crop might lose all value by the time it gets to market. Intensification means more pesticides and herbicides, it means less crop rotation, it means exhausted soil, heavy water use, and an increasing reliance on chemical fertilizers, because these are the only things that will support this level of production.

Resistance is the obvious consequence of pesticide overuse. Farmers applying heavy pesticides to their crops are encouraging the development of organisms that will be able to survive them. Those organisms survive multiple applications and spread, threatening other farms. As pest control methods become inadequate, farmers may switch and mix up their chemicals in an attempt to stay one step ahead, but they will always trail behind the bugs. Pesticide application is defended because of the devastating effects of insects on crops, but part of the reason they’re so devastating is because of close cropping, failure to use cover crops, and other changes to farming practices. Adjustments to how people farm would make a significant difference in how pests affect farms.

For workers, pesticide overuse has serious consequences. The workers tasked with applying pesticides are often provided with inadequate protection from the harsh chemicals they handle, which means they’re coming into direct skin contact with and inhaling pesticides. Sprays from planes endanger people living around farms, like migrant workers who live in temporary housing or trailers. Farmeworkers are widely treated as disposable commodities, not human beings, which means that this human cost is often minimized in debates about pesticide use and the responsible handling of agricultural chemicals.

People may not care about farmworkers, but they should be concerned about the costs associated with sick farmworkers. Crops can’t be harvested if the workforce is sick, and sick people end up in hospitals and public clinics, where they need services. Many don’t have health insurance or other benefits and rely heavily on public assistance; effectively, the government is subsidizing irresponsible farming practices by paying to treat sick workers. That’s only the workers willing to seek treatment, of course, which can be risky when you’re undocumented, which many farmworkers are. Some may be sick and in need of treatment but too afraid of deportation.

Consumers are also under threat from excessive pesticides. Chemicals on fruits and vegetables people consume can make them sick, and in farming communities, this can be a double problem. Not only are people ingesting chemicals at every meal, they’re also drinking them, because pesticides leach into groundwater and other sources of water. This is a concern in California, where carcinogenic fumigants have been approved for use on crops like strawberries, with very real public health consequences. In their haste to meet perceived consumer demand, farmers are making their customers sick with the pesticides they use in an attempt to keep yields high. These unintended consequences are dismissed by the industry, of course, but should be an important consideration for consumers preparing to support an industry that is willing to kill them for profits.

The environment loses when farmers apply heavy pesticides to the fields. The same leaching problem affects animals in the environment, particularly fish, which can be extremely vulnerable to contaminants in the water supply. Some research suggests that fish kills and other peculiar animal dieoffs may actually be traceable to industrial agriculture, raising a grim reminder of discoveries about DDT documented in Silent Spring. Despite the fact that DDT was a known problem by the 1960s, it wasn’t banned in the US until 1972.

Similar problems are being associated with pesticides in common use right now, raising the question of whether the government is planning to spend a decade debating whether to ban them, with pressure from industry lobbyists to keep them legal or issue dispensations that effectively make them easy to access even if they’re formally banned. The placement of the interests of industry over people, especially over public health, is a pressing issue in the United States that appears to be on the rise, and unchecked. Even as the country struggles with the public health crisis created by a totally dysfunctional health care system, it encourages companies to engage in exploitative and abusive behaviours that harm the general public. The companies that manufacture and promote pesticides are well aware that the consequences for their actions will be minimal.

Fighting pesticide overuse requires a total shift in the farming system and a push towards more functional, holistic farming practices where the bottom line isn’t the most important thing. As long as profits continue to be placed over workers, consumers, and the environment, there’s going to be an incentive to slop chemicals all over US farms, because the alternative is unprofitable crops that can’t yield enough to keep a farm operational. We’re all trapped in this together.

26 December, 2011 – 10:12 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues, Food | Tagged , |

Snow

People often like to say that California does not have seasons. These are the same witty people who seem to be under the impression that the entire state is a palm-lined beach that remains a balmy 72 degrees year-round. This despite the fact that California is an extremely large state. With mountains. And ski resorts. And deserts. And plains. California is like the land of microclimates, really, in terms of the varied conditions you may encounter here.

I tend to get rather testy about this because it gets extremely old when you’ve lived here for most of your life. Everyone who repeats this claim seems to be under the impression that it’s highly original and no one ever has made the joke that the state doesn’t have seasons. Apparently new material is hard to come by for amateur comedians, or people think that stale jokes are somehow funny if you tell them enough times.

This is definitely a place that has seasons, although the shape of those seasons can be very different, depending on where you are. Maybe it’s hot, humid summer weather, or extremely dry, harsh summers, or heavy, wet, foggy ones. Maybe it’s rainy winters or snowy ones, hail and thunderstorms or frost in the mornings that dissipates by noon. These are seasons. These are changes that happen in the climate as the Earth spins through space and weather systems cross it and things shift. From month to month, the environment and the climate are very different, especially if you pay attention and notice things.

But it’s true that it rarely snows here, in this precise corner of California, and when it does, it usually doesn’t stick. Our winters are extremely wet, starting in November and stretching on into February and March. It rains and rains and rains and rains and rains until everything overflows and the roads turn into rivers and streams of topsoil choke the rivers and trail out into the ocean in big brown banners. For a few weeks in the dead of winter, sometimes it gets really cold, especially at night and early in the morning, before the sun has had a chance to warm things, and everything freezes over and turns brittle and glittery before it starts to melt and the weather returns to an even keel. During those days it’s usually clear, and then the cold, clear days pass and it’s back to rain again.

So there is a certain deep, intense delight when it snows here, as it did very briefly last year. I looked up to see white flakes swirling around, some very large indeed, and was filled with irrepressible glee that led me shooting out the front door and into the yard to dance around, letting the snowflakes melt as soon as they came in contact with my skin. A few tried to stick to the ground for a few minutes before giving up and turning into tiny drops that wicked away. They certainly didn’t build up in deposits on the leaves of the trees or pile up in drifts at the edges of the road. There wasn’t even enough snow to bother throwing sand down for people with balding tires.

But for a few moments, it was this sudden giddy experience of snow, and it was all the more precious because it was unusual. Because we do have seasons, but snow, here, is not usually part of them. And I came back in all fired up with exhilaration and had a big debate with myself about whether to share the show or keep it to myself, jealously, hiding it in the corner of my mind, not least because I know how people love to sneer about how California doesn’t have seasons, and I couldn’t have that experience popped and trodden underfoot by people who seem to be bent on some sort of path of weather supremacy, like your worth as a person is decided by what your winters are like and how much it snows, or doesn’t.

This claim, that California doesn’t have seasons, it’s the thing that does some people in when they move here. They expect clear, sunny skies and even temperatures and that’s really not what they get, unless they go to very specific parts of California. They spend the summers here complaining about the clammy fog and the winters whining about the incessant rain while everything turns green and lush and rich all around them, while everything is exploding with life, while you can practically see the plants growing, because it’s just that fecund.

Perhaps we do not have the flashy seasons, here, the weather extremes that people seem to think mean ‘seasons.’ Our seasons require patience and diligent attention, focus and respect. You cannot simply expect them to come to you. You need to pay attention, go outdoors sometimes, actually look at the world around you. You need to follow the flush of new growth on the edges of the trees as it spreads, slowly, creeping, until suddenly everything is an aggressive kelly green that fades over the coming weeks as it matures. You need to walk in the fog to know its different incarnations, the playful, light, wispy fog, the thick, heavy, murky fog, the fogs that are so wet with moisture your glasses steam up and the fogs that leave you chilled to the bone.

But don’t tell me these things aren’t seasons, or that they are some kind of measure of worth.

25 December, 2011 – 10:56 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in history | Tagged , |

The Sweetness of Good Camp

I have a huge, deep, intense fondness for campy television. It’s one of my things. Look at Buffy. This is camp to the max, complete with cheesy sets and fake-looking blood and dim lighting to cut stunt costs. Or Grimm, which is borrowing a similar style and aesthetic. As a viewer, you understand that it is not real, even as you also get pulled into the storylines and events. The camp becomes part of the experience, what holds you, what makes it purely fun in a visceral way that more serious television is not.

And it’s really, really hard to do. There’s a sweet spot with camp that television really seems to be struggling with these days. A combination of factors is pulling together to make it challenging to do camp well, and I dearly hope we’re not about to face the end of an era, because camp is not something that should be allowed to fade quietly into the shadows, never to be seen again. It’s such an important part of our pop culture heritage, and critically, it’s something that the next generation shouldn’t be deprived of. Everyone needs a cult television show, because the alternative simply isn’t fair.

Viewers seem to have an increasing expectation of reality in their television, especially with the rise of high definition. They want detail and authenticity and good special effects. And you don’t really do that, with camp. Camp is seeing the boom mike in the corner of the frame sometimes and being fully aware that the werewolves are people dressed in furry suits and noticing that the blood really doesn’t have the right viscosity and wondering if they used ketchup from craft services. There’s an honest lack of authenticity that goes with good camp, that’s also hard to hit well. If it’s too fake and cheesy, it’s not going to work, you’re going to be pulled out of the narrative. If it’s too realistic, your perception of the show changes and you expect more.

Acting, too, is different in camp. You see people on Grimm and they look like they are having fun. They’re enjoying themselves immensely and being silly on set and really working into the roles, with an awareness that it’s also meant to be fun, with a note of silliness, with low expectations. Contrast that with Once Upon A Time, where everyone is trying to be earnest and serious, but doesn’t pull it off well. It doesn’t work for viewers and it makes the show jarring, especially when you feel like the actors, far from getting into character or just having fun, are actually embarrassed by what they are having to say. It’s a grim slog, rather than a smirking romp.

The setting of good camp is also about the right sound, light, production values. Finding that elegant balance between being too realistic and too high quality, and just feeling cheap and shoddy. It’s a production that is pulled together both by the accessories and by the actors, who relish their roles and aren’t afraid to act like it. I get the sense, watching camp, that the actors headed to the pub for pints afterward, that they had fun together on the set, that there was goofing around. Pranks may have occurred. Crew stuck with the show through multiple seasons. It’s about the creation of a family making something fun together and sharing with you.

Contrast with the efficiency, the crispness, the desire to be earnest and serious. That works really well for some shows, but especially for science fiction and fantasy, you either need to go full camp, or full realism. Battlestar Galactica didn’t mess around when it came to being serious, to being big, to going bold and aggressive, to pulling viewers in. It worked. It worked really, really well. Contrast with Star Trek, which was very campy and attracted loyal and loving fans who got deeply into the show. Versus, say, Terra Nova, which is just mediocre and boring, and does absolutely nothing for viewers. It’s not a show that will be spawning conferences and cosplay and academic papers 10 years, 20 years into the future, because it doesn’t have that drive that underlays either really high concept hard science fiction, or really campy fun pieces.

I worry that the aesthetic of camp is poorly understood by creators right now, who seem to think it’s a mishmash of elements that can be loosely pulled together to get the desired effect, when it really goes much deeper than that. It’s about the creation, from the start, of a solid family that works together on a production to achieve great, fantastic, funny, and fun things. Not every show has it and it’s hard to predict when a show will be able to cultivate it. Buffy might have been dead in the water halfway through the first season, but something, some spark, some ingredient you can’t just add, made it work.

The harder creators try, the less likely they’re going to be able to hit that spot, I think. Good camp is something that has to be born, not made, gently allowed to flower instead of being forced. It’s a fragile thing that only emerges when you look casually out of the corner of your eye, avoiding any kind of head-on confrontation, because if you look at it, it will disappear again. This requires a certain patience and faith that a project is going to come together, which is hard to maintain when you’re working in an era when networks demand results sooner rather than later and expect creators to create hits right out of the gate.

Camp needs time to swell, to build, to acquire a following, and this is something that few networks seem to have the patience for, these days.

24 December, 2011 – 10:37 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in pop culture, television | Tagged , , , |

Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: Necessities

I had to buy some sheets recently. I’m not immensely picky about sheets, but I do have some standards, and I am also not exactly rolling in funds when it comes to buying things to put on my bed. I had the choice between $2.99/pack cheapo sheets with a thread count so minimal that they looked like cheesecloth, or $200/pack, admittedly very nice, fancypants sheets that were not only very expensive, but didn’t actually come in any colours I wanted. And if one is going to spend $200 on sheets, which I am not, one would quite reasonably be a bit persnickety about the colour.

‘Just go to your local big box store,’ someone said in email when I was discussing this dilemma, and I snorted, because the closest big box stores are an hour and a half away. Yes, I’m really going to make a three hour round trip to buy sheets.

I ended up making a note to buy sheets the next time I was in the City, because it wasn’t an emergency situation, it was just a ‘another set of sheets would be really nice to have’ situation. These sorts of things come up all the time; they come up when I need towels, or a tea kettle, or pillows, or any number of other household necessities that aren’t available here. Stores that stock them either have extremely cheap, shoddy goods or extremely expensive things obviously aimed at yuppies stocking up their second homes. Mid-range things are extremely hard to find at local businesses, and there are a lot of reasons for that. The market is small, they can’t get the kinds of discounts bigger stores can, the number of such goods actually being produced is falling. These things are not their fault, but the net effect is that they don’t carry a lot of necessities.

We’re doing better than some places, where you cannot find these things at all, for any price, because the population is just too tiny and there are only a handful of businesses to begin with. Small rural communities with far-flung populations are also struggling with a growing drug crisis, as I discussed when I was talking about Shine, and that’s having a heavy impact on the business landscape in rural areas in the United States. Communities sinking into drug problems do not exactly have a lot of money to spend on necessities, and thus small businesses already struggling in the economy simply can’t make it, and close, which means another set of resources cut off.

The rise of big box stores in the US has been a topic of much discussion, but for many rural communities, they are a lifeline. Stores like Wal*Mart, for example, have expanded their reach considerably, making it increasingly hard to live in an area where you are not within fairly close proximity. And we can talk a lot about the chain’s labour practices, about the high cost behind the cheap goods it sells, about the way it pushes local businesses out of business—in fact, we should be talking about these things, because they are important. But at the same time, residents of rural areas in the United States may rely on big box stores for their necessities, because those are the only stores around, or the only ones carrying goods at the price points people need.

This country is extremely friendly to big business, and this can be seen in a slew of structures that effectively support and maintain dominance for major corporations. The Wal*Marts, the Targets, get tax breaks and other benefits, and are often actively wooed by communities that want an ‘anchor,’ that want some sort of draw. They can negotiate huge savings on wholesale prices because they’re so large, and placing such big orders. Instead of two boxes off the UPS truck, they’re getting an entire big rig worth of goods, and those deliveries are being made to hundreds of stores around the country. Target has mid-range sheets because it can negotiate an extremely good price for them, because it’s such a huge account.

Small businesses don’t have that edge. They don’t have the tax breaks and other economic benefits, they don’t have the bargaining power with vendors, because of their size. And they’re trying to survive in small communities where the net traffic on a daily basis is likely to be very, very small. In rural communities, it’s extremely hard to stock necessities that will meet the needs of all residents. No business wants to take a chance on merchandise it probably cannot sell, and small businesses face problems like having to meet order minimums that are quite beyond their reach. The hardware store isn’t going to sell 100 tea kettles. It’s just not.

Which leaves people in a bind when it comes to obtaining necessities. Rural residents who need the most cost-effective solutions are driven to big businesses, when they’re present at all, which they aren’t here, while people who want to support their local communities, in communities that have local businesses who stock any kind of necessities at all, are trapped in a tough place. People are chastised for buying at big box stores or ordering online but there’s not a recognition that there are few viable alternatives in many communities. Those that do recognise this often attack the local businesses, demanding to know why they can’t get it together and stock x, y, or z, but this ignores the fact that many businesses would be happy to do so, and can’t, because of the pricing structures, because of the breaks for big corporations.

Necessities are not a quick drive away in many rural communities, or even a quick Internet away, given the lack of access to broadband in rural areas. We’re belittled for shopping at big box stores, treated like trash for ‘not supporting local businesses,’ but we’re provided with few alternatives. What are you supposed to do when you need sheets?

23 December, 2011 – 10:40 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , , |

Short

There is a thing that happens before the sunrise, where the sky is dark and still in the east with the occasional winking star, and then something seems to shift, quietly. If you blink and look again it will be gone, but if you wait long enough and relax your gaze, it reappears, the faintest outline in the darkness, the trees against the horizon. And then the sky starts to turn a soft grey, ever so slightly lighter than it was before, and suddenly the trees burst out against it and you wonder why you didn’t see them before, a minute ago. The stars still hover above their branches and thin threads of light start to reach out and the sun crawls up to sit low in the sky, which flushes with colour like it has something to be embarrassed about.

It’s dark so late in the morning now that it feels like the middle of the night when it’s really not, and sometimes it seems like the trees and I are together in a confessional somewhere, waiting for someone to slide open the door and peer through the grate at us. We’re sitting nervously on the bench, wondering what we will say when we open our mouths, and we are surprised by what tumbles out when we are invited to speak, to name our sins, to put paid to fear and say the things we cannot say in the open.

The trees speak, groaning in the wind, branches waving inarticulately. Their leaves drip water and they nod at the saturated soil below them, to which they know they must eventually return, but for now they stand straight and avoid each other’s gazes. They hum with nervousness and shed needles in a faint patter and shoot out new growth with an air of defiance.

Trees don’t lose their leaves here, for the most part, which means that they are defiantly fuzzy around the edges in that early morning light, when they are more shadows and ghosts than real things, hovering between imagination and reality. The rich greens in their layered branches blend with each other in a burst of colour that emerges kind of like the outlines of the trees themselves. At first they appear uniformly dark and grey, and then suddenly they are green, and you wonder how it is that you didn’t notice that, the green, when you were looking before, a minute ago.

Watching the sun rise at any time of the year is a quietly shared experience between you and the sun, playing chicken with each other to see who will look away first. In the winter, it’s easy to catch the sun even if you don’t get up particularly early, because it is dark for so long. In the summer, it’s more of an art form, to be aware early enough to see that shift in the sky and watch the trees suddenly jump out from the darkness. In the winter, it is easier to see how you might fall into that darkness, be wrapped up in it and never able to surface again.

We fear the dark instead of embracing it because we fear the unknown instead of confronting it. There is a moment in the darkness of early morning where I wonder if things will be where I left them yesterday, or if the trees have quietly crept about and changed positions when they thought no one could see them. Sometimes I wonder if there is nothing there at all, just a blank stage with everyone tittering in the wings, waiting for their cue. I am reminded of the symphony scene in The Phantom Tollbooth, where sunrise is unpredictable because it is not fated, only orchestrated, in defiance of all known physics and experiences.

Days are short and time is short and perhaps this is what the solstice is telling me this year, that out of the shortness comes light, eventually, if you look for it and are patient. That the shortness will eventually give way because all things do, in the end, the darkness must surrender to the sun and the light will spiral through the darkness and the colours will burst into being because this is what must happen, what will continue to happen, what should happen. No orchestra needs to coax the sun over the horizon and no one will step forward to force things to pass for you, because they will pass anyway, if you are patient, if you relax your gaze, if you let them emerge quietly from the darkness.

Short is not just a matter of length but also of temper, of impatience, of lack of focus, and this shortness is the thing that drives us to scream at the light to hurry up, to push back against the darkness, to demand that things move along more quickly to satisfy our desire to be out of the darkness, to escape from the dark wood wandering. It is so hard to relax into the darkness and the unknown, to resist the temptation to flick on a light to drive the fear away, to let the sun come up on its own without exhortation or pleading. But when you do, when you sit quietly, you see the flush of fire on the horizon, the blaze of colours moving so quickly and uncertainly that if you blink you will miss it, you see the order of things reordering itself, as it does every day, as it will continue to do, even when it seems that everything is falling apart.

Because the centre cannot hold, but eventually it comes back together again in new form.

22 December, 2011 – 10:52 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reflections | Tagged , |