Urbana.org All Things New Blog - culture

Non-Ironic Cigar Smoking

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

So I was in Alexandria, Virginia the other day, attending an academic conference. Specifically, this was in a hotel two subway stations away from the Pentagon. There were military contractors everywhere.

It was a good reminder of two fantasy worlds: on the one hand, I live in Madison, Wisconsin, hometown of the only Senator who voted against the Patriot Act, a city once described by a Wisconsin governor as “30 square miles surrounded by reality”. So every once in a while it’s good to get out; to see what the rest of America is up to.

But being a mile from the Pentagon is not the rest of America. The place is pulsing with power. Contractors eating lunch in a little park puff on cigars in a non-ironic way: they’re smoking cigars, and they mean it.

The most surreal was this: an advertisement for the Lupus Foundation, with a little boy, who wants you to donate so that he can get better. You’ve seen those posters. But this one said: “Some day he’ll fight for his country. Today he’s fighting Lupus.”

And that’s when I knew I was in a strange place. People talk about “inside the beltway,” by which they mean the political world alternate reality. How about the alternate reality of militant charity?

And the Nobel Prize goes to ...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:08:00 -0600

Just attended an academic conference in Washington DC, where I found myself in a two bizarre alternative universes: the academic one, and the Pentagon one. I'll talk about the latter tomorrow.

The isolation of the academy is no story here: everybody knows professors (I'm hoping to become one) are a little off-center to start with, so when you get a couple thousand of them in one conference center, their eccentricity magnifies. It's one of the few times a year where everybody is like them. This one was the German Studies Association.

So, when I got there last Friday, the conference was abuzz about the just-announced Nobel Prize ... for Literature. It went to Herta Müller, a German who grew up in the German diaspora in Romania. From all I can tell, this is a worthy prize winner, so I don't mean to dismiss it.

But that morning the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the US President, whose residence was two miles away. All of Washington was talking about it. People were debating it on the subway, with strangers.

As soon as I got to the conference hotel, I heard the word Nobel in a conversation--but it was the literature one they were discussing. Sure, that's not remarkable, but it happened all day. Dozens of times, people were talking about the literature prize; not once did I hear mention of the peace prize.

This is neither good nor bad. For me it was mostly an impressive display of the power of community to shape reality. Washington DC is a strange place, and so is the academy. And when you only hang with policy wonks, politics can become the lens through which you view reality. The same holds for academics.

But rarely do you get to see such a fun showcase of professorial wierdness.

Back Online

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:43:00 -0600

I’m back, after a four-week exile from my computer. Thanks for the patience! I’ll start up again on Monday.

My computer spent nearly a month in the shop, a period coinciding with my first month in grad school. During that time, the best I’ve been able to do is give you token reading material, written from infolabs and kiosks. It’s been unnerving to discover how dependent I am on fragile machines.

Across the digital tracks

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:57:00 -0600

I've been offline all week in the 21st century, with a broken computer. (Right now I'm standing at a kiosk in a library.) While these things happen, this difficult week has opened my eyes to the problems of folk who don't have computer access for real.

This week, I

Couldn't pay my bills or do some banking business I needed to do;
Couldn't do my homework (which consisted of posting a reply to a reading);
Couldn't find out when to head to the bus stop;
Couldn't register for a conference I need to attend; and
Couldn't check the status of my computer's reparis.

This is not a navel-gazing complaint. Rather: since I enrolled in grad school, I've been repeatedly unnerved by the sheer gap in privilege between the world I now am part of, and the world of my neighborhood, which is mostly below-working-class.

During the several years I've lived in south Madison,

I've been burgled,
I've had cops run through my front yard with drawn handguns,
I've gotten to know drug dealers and prostitutes at a personal level (the former used to plow the snow from my driveway, frustrating my simple attitudes about drug dealers).

I have as neighbors alcoholics, mentally disabled folk, underemployed folk, unemployable folk, convicted felons, and registered sex offenders. They're all here, because their problems (self-imposed or not) combine to push them into poorer, across-the-tracks neighborhoods like mine.

And throughout this time, I've never been unintentionally offline. I've always participated in the broader world, courtesy of the internet. But this last week has helped me understand my neighbors better, understanding above all the isolation of poverty.

I don't consider myself poor, although the government might consider me so, due to their hard-and-fast charts for measuring these things. I don't consider myself poor because we're here by choice (the location is convenient), and our low income is a function of choice (working for InterVarsity; working for our church, etc.). In an information age, in an age where most jobs require computer literacy (even applying for jobs at Wal-Mart means sitting at computer terminals to fill out forms), being stuck outside the information world is more consequential than I'd previously understood.

"If an undergraduate did this, he would be expelled"

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:20:00 -0600

As I head to grad school next week, after a decade on staff with InterVarsity, I’m thinking about academic values. Specifically, about the difference between an education and a degree.

An education is what you go for; the degree is a certificate that you’ve passed some standards. I am going for both. I want to learn how to be a scholar, and I need the paper to get a job as a scholar.

Colleges and universities, it seems, are very jealous of their reputations. Reputation is a soft human value that bridges education and degree: Your degree is worth its reputation, while the education is much more priceless.

So if my degree will be worth its reputation, I ought to be very concerned if my institution is putting its academic reputation at risk by tolerating plagiarism. Plagiarism, of course, is a grenade of a word, which is why I say “if my institution,” withholding judgment for the time being.

But, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting, Wisconsin medical researchers have been putting their names on other people’s work. And worse: they’ve been publishing studies written by big pharmaceutical companies (and extolling the drugs sold by said companies).

One of the scholars laughed off the journalist:

Speroff, reached at his home in Oregon, said the practice of ghostwriting remains commonplace, and he defended it.

"There is nothing dishonest about it," he said.

He laughed at the idea that someone might be offended by the lack of transparency. "If you don't like the way it works, that's your business," Speroff said.

But another UW scholar disagrees:

James Stein, a UW cardiologist, said he was approached twice in the last week to put his name on educational material for different drug companies. He said he turned down both offers because, "frankly, it's plagiarism."

"If an undergraduate did this, he would be expelled," Stein said.

When a drug company puts a doctor's name on an article that actually was written by a professional writer, it is able to present a more biased and promotional version of an issue as though it were coming from an independent source, Stein and others say.

What if Local Christians are Wrong?

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:26:00 -0600

A brilliant lecture I heard recently by Brian Stanley of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for the Study of World Christianity detailed evolving missionary thought from the Victorian period to the Modernist period: during this time a shift in emphasis emerged from Christian universalism, with its attendant focus on the “brotherhood of man” to a multi-ethnic focus on cultural diversity.

In the first case, the motive of mission was to embrace those outside the faith with the blessings of Christian community, which was usually and unfortunately understood as coterminous with contemporary European culture, including modes of dress and etiquette.

In the second case, a Christian was assigned a “cultural mandate” to diversify. Theorists started putting a lot of weight on verses such as those of Revelation 21:24-26 where, speaking of the New Jerusalem, it reads:

24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Both emphases are faithful to the bible and point to an inherent tension in the Christian faith—that of a scattering localism on the one hand, and of a center-focused universalism on the other. While it’s hard to live without either force, because extremism rapidly emerges—whether fascism and racism on the one hand, or insistent conformity on the other—the two forces are in constant tension in our minds. It’s a fact of life.

Stanley’s point was this: that at first glance the Victorian civilizing missionary is greatly embarrassing to today's sensitivities, and yet: we today need to listen to them, because they had thought long and hard about creating a global family. We needn’t follow them to the conclusion of conformity to Western cultural standards, but neither should we reject their universalism out of hand.

Today’s insistent multi-culturalism, Stanley concludes, uses nearly the same compassionate language as the civilizing mission of the 1880s, and needs to be brought back into the tension of local vs. global. If local is the only acceptable incarnation of faith, correction from the global community becomes less likely, and locally-birthed bad ideas and practices can blossom unchecked.

As one example, we need only consider the religious justifications for slavery in antebellum America (south and north alike). As Mark Noll demonstrates in God and Race in American Politics, so important a book that I’ll need to write about it separately, the sheer volume of pro-slavery sermons can only point to a widespread fear that slavery was somehow unchristian.

In the end, Noll suggests, the white church of the American south convinced itself that faithfulness to scripture demanded a political separation from the north; the civil war can thus be partially conceived as the last great Western religious war.

hich leads to the question Brian Stanley was asking: what if local faith is wrong? What if, in the interest of creating a grass-roots Christianity we also make a Christianity deaf to correction from the outside?

This is a really disturbing question to me, who have dedicated a lot of thought to the multi-ethnic aspects of my faith.

Dirt and the Soul

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

While waiting at the Columbus, Ohio airport recently, I found an art exhibit that really moved me. It was pictures of gardens in Dresden, Germany (a sister city of Columbus’). Specifically, these were Schrebergärten, or Allotment Gardens. [the picture above, from Wikipedia, is neither from the exhibit nor from Dresden, but it's the same idea.]

Named after Schreber, a 19th century doctor who came to see industrial urbanism as dangerous to the health, in particular of children, these are small plots of land on unused urban space, with which families can grow produce, or come in contact with real, live dirt.

Some of the allotment gardens in the Dresden exhibit are over a century old, and have been passed down the line in families. In some cases, the families have lived their entire lives in dreary (erstwhile) Communist high rises in this heavy-industrial city, and their garden is their joy and delight.

It occurs to me that anyone who wishes to find the heart of the German-speaking world could do worse than starting here, in these intimate spaces, where people host friends and family, serving their home-made fruits, vegetables (and, it seems, their fermented ciders etc.).

I remember a Schrebergarten in Zurich, where I grew up—I rode my bike past it all the time on the way to a friend’s house. On summer evenings it was not uncommon to hear song and laughter wafting out and over from someone’s gathering of close friends, in that particularly Swiss way, which manages to include hot political debates and singalongs in an effortless transition. If you want to find a center in this decentered world, start here.

Where Is Yale?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:44:00 -0600

A few days spent at an academic conference at Yale, along with several late-night ethnographic field trips among the undergrad social world on campus left me with an unnerving question: where is the spark that produces president after president?

Yale is a factory of world leaders, Nobel Prize winners and industrialists. Yet more than any other impression I gained last week, what really stuck out to me was the ordinariness of Yale’s student body.

I watched them eat ice cream and drink beer; I listened to their coeducational lamentations and joking. And I could have been at any college. These kids were surely intelligent and promising—that’s why they got into Yale—but only slightly more so than at UCLA, or Macalester, or Arizona. In fact, with three times the student body of Yale, UC Berkeley only has to produce geniuses at a third of Yale’s rate to rule the world.

So where is the magic? I remember a philosophy 101 class I took as a freshman. Discussing the mind-body problem, the professor asked us, where is the university?

Knowing full well that it was the wrong answer, we gave him what he wanted: it’s at such-and-such an address. But, he challenged, that’s only the campus. What if there are no people? Where then is the university? But it would equally be wrong to say that the university is its people: it is also its facilities.

Back to Yale: where is its Yaliness? The buildings are nice, but I’ve seen nicer. The students are sharp, but where is the magic?

The answer, I had to believe, is in the connections and the expectations, which is to say, the culture of the university. That is an intangible I can’t catch in a few days on campus.

So where is Yale? It’s in New Haven, CT—certainly. But it’s also in alumni associations, and attitudes. But what else is missing for a full picture? I’d love your opinions.

More Free than the West?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

It’s now twenty years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. While Tiananmen was hovering in the background to the 2008 Olympics, and all the calls for boycotts, many of today’s Chinese students were babies at the time, and have grown up in an entirely different environment.

Here’s a great interview Yu Hua, a Chinese novelist, gave with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of Switzerland. It’s in German, but signandsight.com has translated a key paragraph:

In an interview with Andreas Breitenstein, Chinese author Yu Hua, whose epic novel "Brothers" comes out in German in August, talks about how "sensitivities" in China have changed since 1989.

"You shouldn't forget that the freedom-loving students of the 80s had all lived through the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution. They knew what a life of poverty meant, and they recognized that the lack of freedom in which they were forced to live was the reason for this poverty. Today's student generation has grown up in a boom era. They have no idea about poverty, and they delight in absolute personal freedom... China is a strange country. On one hand we are still living under the dictatorship of a party that can control everything with administrative measures. On the other, we are much more free than the West. We can bad-mouth anybody or anything to our heart's content and with impunity. You just can't criticize the government."

The NZZ accompanies the interview with the nice collage above right: the same street in 1989 and today: attacking tanks have been replaced with teeming personal automobiles—or: untold wealth driving upon the stones where a crushed democracy movement once marched. But, Yu claims, personal freedom in China is not lacking.

The Whites at Juneteenth

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:26:00 -0600

During a visit to Madison’s Juneteenth celebration on Saturday, I was left wondering, once again, where all the white people were, at least the ones like me.

Juneteenth is the celebration of African American emancipation from slavery, marked on the day when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was finally enforced in Texas. It’s evolved in recent years to be a celebration of black life and history.

Juneteenth contrasts with Martin Luther King day in a few important ways: most Juneteenth celebrations are homegrown, and don’t take place with mayors and congressmen trying to look good. And for reasons probably more to do with summertime (vs. January’s MLK day), Juneteenth celebrations are a lot more fun.

Back to my question. There were indeed, as always, plenty of white people present; at least two percent, which in a big crowd, amounts to a decent number. But in a city with 85% white people, the disbalance still sticks out. The white people at Juneteenth generally fall into three categories: those somehow related to black people (spouses etc.); those left-leaning elite-ish types who fancy “solidarity”; and those with something to sell, like Obama t-shirts.

Notably absent are middle class white families, despite this being a terrific family event. I can only guess at why: people don’t think the celebration is for them; and most importantly, they don’t know anyone there. So it may be nothing more (or perhaps nothing less) than a segregation problem.

In recent years, evangelicals have begun reasserting their role in abolition, loudly talking about William Wilberforce and similar. So why not come and join in the fun? Well, perhaps folk don’t feel that the resolution of a moral evil is worth celebrating; that celebration seems somehow wrong next to all that suffering.

One of the best lessons I’ve learned during my decade-plus in a largely African-American church is the skill of celebrating in the midst of everything else being rough. Joy is an act of the will, and I don’t think I was taught much intentionality in joy while growing up in White Baptist circles.

And so, few white Christians come out to celebrate Juneteenth. The solution, I imagine, would be more interracial church socializing, and a mindset shift among white Christians that interracial anything is anything more than a downer. Come out and celebrate! Have some pie, enjoy some music, and celebrate life!

Utopia Vanishes

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

The trouble with visiting places you’ve long dreamed about is the inevitable arrival of reality. The dream is so often sweeter than the truth.

So it was with Viroqua. The closest thing to a city in the Kickapoo Area, it’s a center of commerce and cultural life for a densely inhabited surrounding farmland.

In keeping with the large numbers of dropouts, hippies and back-to-earthers in the area, Viroqua is home to a bewildering array of alternative medicines, shamanists, and other counterculture types. A friend told me that nearly all his friends are pot smokers; a walk around town feels far more urbane than most big cities in the Midwest, what with the punks, the artists, organic food co-ops, counterculture book stores, coffee roasters, pet therapists and random wandering lost souls.

My friend further told me of a significant cultural divide between the churches in town, and the “Ridgers” as the counterculture folk are called. It’s not exactly animosity; it’s people living in different worlds and speaking different languages, even as they live on top of each other.

For years now, whenever we’ve gotten fed up with city life, Becca and I have dreamed of some day living in Viroqua. The dream was not fully based on real experiences. After a day in town, on the drive back to Madison, Becca asked: “are we ready to talk about Viroqua?” Because we both knew. There was an unfriendly feel.

Rather than finding a utopia, we found a real place. The only utopia lived in our heads, in the original, Latin sense of the word: Utopia means Nowhere.

Viroqua is not nowhere. So my first response to her question was: “Is there anywhere that we belong?”

The slap in the face of a real town, with real, rude people, culture gaps, and so on—it reveals a deeper need: this is a spiritual question more than anything else: Where will we find our rest?

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Hebrews 4:9-10

Amish and Hippies and Indians, oh my!

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I had a chance, over the weekend, to visit the Kickapoo River valley in western Wisconsin, and have so many remarkable stories to tell that I’ll have to spread them out this week.

The Kickapoo River, a meandering river if there ever was one Is locally nicknamed “the crookedest river in the world,” but the term might be extended to the cultures and peoples of the area. An incredible thing is developing here, in terms of culture and land, as very different people with very different values—mutually exclusive values, at times—own land next to each other and end up working together to conserve the uniquely rich soil, which makes the whole enterprise possible.

Land ownership makes all the difference, I’ve come to realize. The transience of urban life, where even technical ownership (house or condominium) doesn’t demand, and doesn’t automatically guarantee, connection to a place—urban life makes it far easier to live disconnected from one’s neighbors.

Furthermore, as Bill Bishop has recently pointed out in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, Americans have gradually grown to dislike living with, or even hearing from, people unlike themselves. We’re growing more and more segregated, in ideological terms too.

But here you have living on top of each other:

Traditional Wisconsin dairy farmers—many or most of Norwegian stock;
back-to-the-land hippie farmers, who participate in commercial farming with prosperous co-ops like Organic Valley;
off-the-gridders and dropouts (who can be seen in shacks and old school buses);
Amish and Mennonites, identified by horse-drawn farm equipment and black laundry hanging on clotheslines; and
Ho-Chunks (the natives), who never went away but are becoming a growing presence, this time with lots of money.

Something really interesting is happening here, something that may be important for all of us to watch.

[photo credit: flickr user ~Darin~ on a Creative Commons licence]

Signs: June Weddings

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Are you going to a wedding this summer? How many? What have weddings you've attended recently made you think about the institution of marriage?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member penywise]

I didn't smoke crack

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:29:00 -0600

No, I did not smoke crack and party with prostitutes with that man. That’s what I told the detective the other day, standing in my front yard and showing me a mug-shot. In fact, I’ve never seen him.

As it worked out, the detective had already “suggested” the correct answer (the one I gave), because they already had this small-time crook on thirteen burglary charges (for each of which he’d given the same alibi of a wild time, no matter that some homes were families, and some were elderly immigrants), and we were the fourteenth. The detective didn’t want to hear anything but a dismissal of the loser’s alibi.

Which is fine, but for the humiliation of being asked, in front of my young children, if I’d smoked crack and cavorted with prostitutes with this (pointing to mug-shot) man.

Urban living, like all living, is far less glamorous than advertized. Over the many years of my association with InterVarsity, inner city living has consistently been sold as somehow more radically Christian than alternatives (especially suburban).

True: there are great needs in the inner cities, many of which can only be addressed by presence, rather than programming. To the countless at-risk children (boys, especially) who don’t know what stability looks like, and see no admirable future for themselves, simply seeing an intact family, with parents who go to work at jobs is no small deal.

But when we got burgled four years ago (the guy made off with a jar of quarters, a bracelet worth fifty dollars, and a GPS), it gave us a certain street cred in InterVarsity, though hardly in my neighborhood. That’s because urban living is interpreted, in those circles at the intersection of academy and activism (where InterVarsity resides) as somehow more authentic, or deep.

And that’s humbug. Being burgled is no more edgy than stopping a neighbor from torturing her dog, or sending the kids out the back because a guns-drawn arrest is taking place in the front, or arguing with the neighborhood association leader over “those” people, or knowing a crack dealer by name (Al) and seeing him help little old ladies (Maria) weed their flower beds and plow people’s driveways in the winter.

Being burgled is a bummer, and it didn’t make us more awesome, any more than the burglar’s arrest, four years later, was a relief.

Heroin ODs and the Taliban

Mon, 25 May 2009 11:41:00 -0600

Heroin overdose rates are going way up in Wisconsin, and probably elsewhere in the United States, because of prices on the market.

A new report by the (local) Dane County Narcotics and Gang Task Force notes that cocaine, the biggest killer for many years, has gotten a lot more expensive, due to the escalating narco-wars in Mexico.

Meanwhile, Heroin, a derivative of Poppies (the flowers that put Dorothy to sleep in the Wizard of Oz), is Afghanistan’s largest export, and funds much of the Taliban’s budget in its ongoing wars in South and Central Asia. That itself is fairly significant of a moral objection: when you shoot up the Taliban make money.

Heroin may get more expensive for a short while, as US and Afghan forces seized a hundred tons of heroin and poppy products the other day. But competing poppy production is also present in Colombia and Southeast Asia, so heroin is not going away any time soon.

In the spring of 2001, when their biggest threat was international outrage over the demolition of ancient Buddhist statues, the Taliban decreed heroin production un-Islamic, according to this report from June 2001 in the Telegraph of London. Today, that principled stance is on hold, as the Taliban need more money.

[photo credit: Bayer brand Heroin, from Wikipedia]