Et In Terra Pax

At first I dismissed it as typical hype, and worse, another example of a vexing condition from which we suffer. But first let me tell what prompted it all.

The New Day, or El Nuevo Día, as everybody else calls it, is the island’s largest newspaper. And today, it took the sensible step of telling us all how to cope in the event of nuclear fallout or rain.

Well, I remember the t-shirt from the sixties, which had more succinct and trenchant instructions. “Close all windows,” the t-shirt counseled, “sit in the middle of the room, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.”

Well, the New Day acted more professionally, today; they gave several intelligent pieces of advice. We should all have an emergency plan, including a meeting point in the event that a disaster happens when we are not at home. We’re supposed to have cash on hand, food for at least a week, water, extra medicines, insurance policies and identification documents. Then, we maintain ourselves informed—sorry, these Latin constructions are creeping in to my English—as well, of course, as tranquil (¿bíjte?).

Now then, in the event of an evacuation, we should have sleeping bags—time to run out to Wal-Mart—and also cages or carrying cases for all animals. Oh, and remember, you’ll need to check out whether the shelter will accept animals.

This is, you understand, just slightly surreal. We have four cats, one of whom is virtually impossible to put in a cage. And don’t even think about putting more than one cat per cage. So am I really supposed to go and buy two sleeping bags (in Puerto Rico? It’s early April and the temperature is already in the high 80’s) and three more cat carrying cases?

Somehow, it reminded me of Jack, my father, who got it into his head in the early ‘60’s that nuclear attack was imminent, and so he had to be prepared. Which meant that he got up one Saturday morning, headed down to the basement, and began beating the hell out of one of the walls with a pick ax. Then came the backhoe, and in a month’s time we had our bunker—a room about ten feet by twenty feet, with two single beds. Since there were five of us at the time, it wasn’t exactly certain how this arrangement would work—would we sleep in shifts?

Another problem, which Johnny—of course it would be he—pointed out, was that it wasn’t much of a secret around the neighborhood what we were up to; nobody could really believe that the backhoe was there for the garden, could they? So what to do about the neighbors, their children in their arms, who come running to our house when the A bomb hits? Would we let the Goodriches in, but not the Baumans?

And what was the point, asked Johnny, of the little stove pipe in the corner of the shelter that communicated with the outside? Was Jack really going to open that up, all the better to breathe in radiation-laden air?

Jack covered the pipe with a piece of plywood the next day.

So now the New Day has fulfilled its mission—in the event that a madman in North Korea decides to unload a missile on South Korea or Guam we readers are informed and ready to take necessary procedures to safeguard life and property. Oh, and fear not, because in the event of an disaster, the government—which barely works in normal times—will activate the emergency management team, and everything will be well under control. Wow!

The New Day did point out a few more things. Yes, it’s unlikely that North Korea will do a direct strike on the financial district of San Juan. But if it zaps South Korea, it may well contaminate the entire region, and guess what? We get a lot of our food from there.

Then there’s the little problem of radiation in seawater. In fact, a month ago fishermen off the coast of California pulled up a tuna contaminated with radiation. One wonders—how did they know? Are Geiger counters standard equipment on fishing boats nowadays? Or was the tuna merely glowing?

Oh, and the BBC reported that the Japanese nuclear reactor, Fukushima (always loved that name), had reported a leak yesterday. Well, that seemed sufficiently important to check out, and I’m happy to say it’s not true. In fact, Fukushima may have had THREE leaks since Saturday. And here’s what one writer for the BBC said, after touring the plant last March:

The scale of their task is daunting, and it will decades before anyone can truly say the Fukushima disaster is over, and the threat from the plant contained.

There is still a reactor—Number Three—that is so highly radioactive that no one can go into it. So how are they getting the rods out? By using remotely controlled cranes. Another reactor—Number Four—still has 1500 spent fuel rods, and the building may collapse if there’s another earthquake. And there are thousands of tons of highly contaminated water sitting in tanks that now, apparently, are leaking.

“Puerto Rico is an island surrounded by mirrors,” goes an old saying, “and when on occasion we look out to see the world, we can only see ourselves.” That’s what occurred to me this morning—a crisis is imminent a world away, and The New Day was worried about how it might affect us. In fact, it’s not improbable that the crisis happened two years ago in Japan, and anything North Korea does will only make it infinitely, infinitely worse. 

A Winter's Journey Re-journeyed

Right, so as usual I’m a little behind the times. It’s officially spring—time to pay the taxes, watch for the scilla (yes, my dear computer—it’s a little blue flower that against the newly green of grass and a fresh snow manages both to soothe and to shock the eye at the same time) and get the frisbee out for the dog to play with. I spent the last weekend, however, immersed in that most wintery of music, appropriately called Winterreise, a Winter’s Journey.

Now for a word of reassurance. Readers of Iguanas will know that this was the music that I chose that was given to me when I descended into madness in December of 2011 and the following January. Relax—I’m not in the same place, but in one much better.

Saying which, I will also confess to not knowing now, as I didn’t know then, whose finger had been on the iPod then, or the mouse pad now. I simply stumbled onto Winterreise, which of course I don’t believe and neither should you.

So I was there and not there, a state eerily similar to the experience of watching a documentary, Over the Top with Franz, about the filming of a DVD about the singing of a glorious English tenor and the playing of a majestic also-English pianist of a song cycle written by an Austrian composer about a guy with serious problems.

The composer is Franz Schubert, the year was 1827, and the physical / psychological conditional of the composer was, as we would now say, quite compromised. Right, Schubert was rotting away with syphilis, untreatable at the time, and staring into the face of eventual madness. This normally does not provoke gales of laughter….

So Winterreise has moved out of autumnal and into the coldest of regions. Fitting, then, that as I read the lyrics—which you can do in five minutes, though the performance will last an hour easily—they’re really images: the weathervane, the village inn, the frozen spring. And the lyrics are spare; these are the lyrics to the song in the clip below:

He used to see three suns, but two of them have turned away to shine upon another, and now he sees only one, and he wishes that would pass away and leave him to the darkness.

Schubert’s treatment, to me, paradoxically matches that sparseness and is extended as well. Thus, you find yourself suspended in a long, bleak, horizontal landscape with no possibility of escape. The singer has left willingly the warmth of home that he knew; he could but will not go back.  The first poem makes this clear:

By moonlight, in winter, the poet leaves the house as he came to it, a stranger. The daughter has allowed their love to grow, and the mother has encouraged the pair to think of marriage: but the daughter's love has wandered to some new sweetheart. So he quietly and secretly steals away while they are sleeping, writing 'Good night' on her door, and leaving the path of his footsteps in the snow.

Pretty romantic stuff—the moonlight, the poet, the broken romance, writing “good night” on her door. But it’s almost artifice, this hoary repetition of the hero with the broken heart—the music suggests much more. Curiously, Schubert’s other song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823) has the same theme, but the jilted young man has both an unhappier end and yet a stouter heart. Yes, he drowns himself, the hero of Mullerin; the hero of Winterreise goes on mutely, accompanied by an organ-grinder he encounters at the edge of the village. But could anything be worse than endlessly enduring, stoically going on, a poet chained by his own misery to an organ grinder?

Everything about Mullerin speaks of youth; everything about Winterreise whispers age, decay, and death.  And yesterday, I came upon a wonderful clip of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performing and discussing three songs of Winterreise. They say, as does everyone, that it’s music for the old; Pears decided to wait until he was fifty to perform it.

Ian Bostridge, thank God, decided otherwise. And while it had been a superb German baritone, Matthias Goerne, who was the singer who accompanied me on my own winter’s journey a year ago, it was Bostridge, an amazing English tenor, who sang for me last weekend. And more than sang—I followed him throughout the process of making the film as he argued and sparred with an opinionated director, David Alden, a guy completed uncowed by the two artists in front of him. Both the pianist, Julius Drake, and Bostridge must have been frustrated; equally, they must have trusted that Alden would produce an interesting piece.

And it appears that he did, though I would have slapped Alden several times along the way. He constantly pushes Bostridge and Drake to be more gothic—at one point Drake plays the open notes of a song in a perfect parody of a music hall organist. Drake means it to repel; Alden is delighted.

But however much Pears may have been right to wait until his fifties to sing this work, I’m glad Bostridge didn’t. He’s perfect for the part—rail thin, gaunt, sunken cheeks and wide eyes.

His singing is amazing, his control perfect, and he’s unafraid, in one of the clips I saw, to make a truly ugly sound a couple of times in the last song. It shouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work with anybody else, but with Bostridge it does.

Wikipedia quotes a contemporary of Schubert’s, Joseph von Spaun, in the following anecdote:

"Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: "These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.'".

That hasn’t happened for me yet. I suffer through Winterreise when it comes upon me, and am glad when at last it goes. I endure, not listen, when the unknown finger hits the play icon. Nothing about Winterreise is beautiful, everything about it is essential.

Is that its strange beauty? 

The Colors That Run

Well, we’re seeing the true colors of our Congress, and guess what? It’s not red or blue, but green. The green that lives in your wallet, not on the trees.

The polls all say the same thing—somewhere around 80 to 90% of the American people favor background checks for anyone buying a gun. So naturally, Congress is going to have to act, to get right up there at the head of the parade, to wave that flag around and pass that legislation that is more popular than motherhood, right?

Lawrence Lessig, the guy in the clip below, might say no. Or he might say that the answer is very simple: look at the money the NRA spends on Congress versus the money the gun-control groups spend.

Well, I know the answer to that one—and here it is, courtesy of the Washington Post. 

Congressmen and women spend up to fifty percent of their time on the first priority of any politician: getting reelected. And all too often that means money, preferably big money, because look, are you going to spend hours trying to get a 10-buck donation? Remember Mitt Romney and the famous 47% remark? He made it in a room full of people spending 50,000 bucks a head. That’s 100,000$ a couple, plus parking and the babysitter.

Well, we certainly saw Mitt in his element, but the bad news? That’s every politician’s element. But until we all get together and force change on Congress, we’ll keep getting what we’re currently stuck with: the best Congress money can buy.

Consider this fact from POLITICO.com: “the top 0.07 percent of donors are more valuable than the bottom 86 percent.”

Well, I’m sure at this point you must be scratching your head and saying, “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions!” And I’m happy to say that Lessig argues that there are solutions out there—varying proposals to empower the small donors and lessen the power of super donors. I’m all for it, as well as for bringing back the hand-counted, paper ballot.

Question is—which to do first?

Silent Noon, by Ralph Vaughan Williams

When Mother Goes Bad....

The definitive performance of an aria entitled "The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart...." We're not all of us lucky in our choice of mothers....

Stage set for an 1841 production of the Magic Flute.

May Music

Let me give you a hint, a kernel of advice, if you ever decide to do anything as inadvisable as write a daily blog. The first months will be easy, the next months will find you praising yourself for “professionally” practicing your craft. In the end, you’ll spend large amounts of time groping for material, and feel that you’re simply writing the same thing over and over again.

Short version—it gets stale.

Anything does, you know, if you do it repetitively. Musicians know that one—you love, you absolutely love the Dvorak Concerto, that first week you’re finally allowed to play it (it’s pretty mean…). You’ve been listening to recordings of it for years. Flash forward five months or—to put it better—150 hours of practicing the damn thing later. You dread the hour you have to spend on it—you’d rather play scales.

The other thing is that you cannot, you really cannot be in a rage all the time, because look—aren’t the lives of your readers hard enough? Are they turning to you for a rant, a diatribe, every morning? Nah—you can get away with a bit of it, but a steady diet is a turn-off.

What do you do then, after a week of raging at the National Rifle Association and agribusiness? Especially when North Korea is hovering to send missiles into South Korea, when Puerto Rico is about to be downgraded to junk bond status, when a jewelry store across the street from you is intermittently blaring its alarm into your apartment, your ears, and especially your sleep? Oh, and the owner of the store, which is closed, is in the United States, and the only thing you can do is talk to the employees of another jewelry—this one open—owned by the same guy. The employees there assure you they’ll try—never an assuring word—to get in touch with him.

I’ll tell you what you do. You tell yourself—this is the best part of being old—that you’ve seen a lot, been through a lot. There was the day your mother died virtually in your arms. There was that morning when your lost your job—that was OK—as well as your connection to 500 people who were friends / students / functionally your children (not OK). The day, years ago, that you sent off your lover to Puerto Rico, where he had to live and where you couldn’t, and walked through the longest terminal in O’Hare with the stupid, dentist office music welling behind you, and you thought the credits would start rolling. The movie, the life, was over.

Then you go to YouTube and try to figure out—if there were a piece of music that was absolutely quintessential, what would it be? You’re thinking this way because you’ve just heard the end of a work by Schumann, and were struck immediately by another work by Schumann, the first song of Frauenliebe und -leben.

That makes you remember the first time you were introduced to lieder, which—don’t get thrown off here—is nothing more than the word in German for song. You were eighteen, alone, living away from home for the first time. You didn’t know what you would make of your life, and worried what life would make of you. Because it felt, you know, that it was more likely that life would shape or misshape you; you weren’t the kind to go out, grasp circumstances, sculpt the world to your liking.

Let me turn around here and get back into the first person….

So there I was that day, in Boston, with my aching shoulders—practice an instrument for five hours a day and the smallest tension leads to knotted muscles—and my tired ears listening to the radio. I had come to study cello with the best—or so he said—cello teacher in America, a man with a method that had become a sort of cellist production line. You got on and four years later were bumped off, ready to spend the next forty years playing the standard orchestral repertoire—maybe a hundred pieces in all. It was already clear—I was falling out of line.

And then, someone was singing—an opera singer, I thought. And I didn’t like opera—or singers at all. There’s always been an animus between instrumentalist and singers. Mention the phrase, which used to be in common use, “musicians and singers,” as in, “musicians and singers, assume your positions,” and watch the singer bristle….

Then, the singer on the radio, having been rumbling around in her low range, soared effortlessly up to a pure, shimmering note: a feather on the breath of God. And I was hooked—I had to hear that singer.

I was broke, so I sat in the cheapest seats in the theater, and heard Jessye Norman sing—yes, as you suspected—Frauenliebe und –leben. In English, A Woman’s Love and Life. It’s classic Schumann, totally melodic, at times joyful, at times melancholic. It follows the story of a woman’s love from the beginning until the end—“Now you have caused me pain for the first time,” sings the mezzo, after her husband has died.

And it’s music, I think, for a young man or woman. However much I wouldn’t go back to it, there is something wonderful about discovering life and love for the first time in your twenties. The sun has never shined before on a young man but you, the moon has never streamed its silver before on a boy and girl, holding hands, stopping to kiss in doorways, dancing in the empty streets.

There’s also, of course, music for the old—music which could only have been written by someone who had suffered and endured, seen life ebb and then flicker out, suffered mourning and resignation and finally acceptance, and a cold joy. For me, that was the greatest of the Schubert song cycles, Die Winterreise, and that was the music I turned to, as I lost my mind following losing my job following losing my mother. And it’s music that I haven’t been able to hear since. (In fact, I’ve barely heard Schubert this year.)

But Schumann, what of Schumann? In case you want to feel guilty for being seriously unproductive (or underproductive), I give you this fact—in one year alone, Schumann wrote not one but the three greatest song cycles of his career. And arguing whether Winterreise is better than Liederkreis is like arguing whether War and Peace is better than Brothers Karamazov—any decision would be subjective, and who cares? They’re masterpieces.

The year was 1840, sometimes called Schumann’s “year of song”; Schumann had just won a long battle to marry the love of his life, Clara Wieck. And that comes through in the music, as well as the poetry—this is a young man writing.

Or in this case singing. Because I decided that the first song of the Frauenliebe und -leben is really sort of meaningless, listened to alone; so much of it is setting up the mood, and also the structure (the theme will be heard at the end). So why not dig up Fritz Wunderlich, an amazing tenor who died at just age 35 from falling down the stairs at a guest’s cottage. He virtually owns Liederkreis.

“In the Wonderful Month of May,” it’s called, and really—that’s all you need to know….. 

Life Under the Palm Trees

Hey, guess what! There’s a new member in Puerto Rico’s Agriculture Hall of Fame and it’s none other than that benign, loveable agri-giant (it’s a word now, computer!)—Monsanto!

 “What,” you say, “what’s Monsanto doing in Puerto Rico?”

A very good question with many answers, most of them not known. What is known is that the biotech industry is very large in Puerto Rico—we have the second largest amount of land per square mile devoted to genetically modified seed production and experimentation. Who’s number one?

Hawaii.

Astute and discerning readers of this blog—and if you’re reading this, you are by definition astute and discerning—will have noted that both Hawaii and Puerto Rico are islands, separated from the continental United States by thousands of miles of sea water. Is that just coincidence?

If you say yes, then I’d really like to tell you about this bridge I happen to own…..

As you can see from the clip below, genes from genetically modified seeds have been found in plants a thousand miles from the nearest source. There’s something, you see, that all these guys with advanced degrees in genetics and bioengineering haven’t thought about. The wind blows.

Now little Puerto Rico has several other advantages that other states don’t have. The weather, for example—you’d really have to modify severely a soybean to get it to grow in Iowa in January. But in Puerto Rico? Not a problem—you can get four crops a year.

There’s also the fact that we, as citizens, are not as activist as the good folk of Wisconsin or Iowa. Most of my students had tuned out the news, and why not? Six more murders, eight more corruption schemes, inane stories about celebrities—who needs it? Just dealing with the morning tapón (the traffic jam), soothing / ignoring the crying baby, dropping off the kids, doing the next leg of the tapón, and trying to sneak by your boss so he / she doesn’t know you’ve drifted in late was enough to exhaust most of my students—and it was just 8AM. Life is hard on the island—nobody has much time for standing around in demonstrations, or probing into what’s going on on the island.

And then there are some nice incentives. We once had a pharmaceutical industry—you can thank Puerto Rico for all that lovely Valium you’ve enjoyed for years—but whoosh, that went away. So what’s next?

Well, we decided to make ourselves the capital for agricultural biotechnology, and we put in some nice little incentives to do it. Here’s what the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo had to say:

Transgenic seed companies operate freely and the government protects them. The whole structure to continue making Puerto Rico a transgenic paradise is based on Law 62 of 2009, better known as the Business Promotion and Development of Agricultural Biotechnology Law, driven by Luis Fortuño. It establishes "cutting edge" public policy for Puerto Rico to become a mecca for these companies, giving them fast-track permits, facilitating the acquisition of buildings and providing financial incentives through the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and the Department of Agriculture.

Well, there is a little problem. First of all, the constitution of Puerto Rico specifically states that no company can own more than 500 cuerdas (about an acre) of land. It was a measure designed to protect local farmers from giant agricultural interests—remember King Sugar? But Monsanto has 1500 cuerdas, 500 of them from the government itself. So how does Monsanto do it? The old trick—set up a subsidiary company.

OK—what’s the land being used for? Some of it is crops, and the government pays the agribusinesses a buck or two for every hour paid for field laborers. But most of it is lying vacant—its only use is to isolate the fields from contamination. And all of the land, apparently, is surrounded by tall chain link fence, with coiled barbed wire at the top. If you stop and take a picture, a cop appears from nowhere and tells you that’s prohibited.

Yeah? Even if it’s land owned by the government of Puerto Rico?

There might be another problem as well—Puerto Rico produces almost none of its food. In fact, less than 10% of the food consumed on the island is actually grown on the island. In terms of food security, we’re in terrible shape. Oh, and agriculture represents only 1% of our gross domestic product.

So here, under the tropical sun, we have another set of contradictions, paradoxes, absurdities that only García Márquez could dream up. We are luring multinationals to come down, scoop up vast parcels of land which will go unused to produce a series of crops that will not benefit us (most of the experiments, by the way, are for corn—not frequently thought a tropical crop) and that may in fact harm us. Oh, and we don’t have the land in the first place, and every time the price of oil goes up, the California head lettuce in the grocery store jumps 20 cents.

And you know, it’s not the first time. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when there was still a lot of chemical / pharmaceutical production on the island, parents began noticing something a bit strange. Girls as young as 2 were growing breasts. So what was causing it?

It’s been studied; it’s still not clear. Here’s what a study cited in a report by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice had to say:

“Premature breast development (thelarche) is the growth of mammary tissue in girls younger than 8 years of age without other manifestations of puberty. Puerto Rico has the highest known incidence of premature thelarche ever reported. In the last two decades since this serious public health anomaly has been observed, no explanation for this phenomenon has been found. Some organic pollutants, including pesticides and some plasticizers, can disrupt normal sexual development in wildlife, and many of these have been widely used in Puerto Rico… The phthalates that we identified have been classified as endocrine disruptors. This study suggests a possible association between plasticizers with known estrogenic and antiandrogenic activity and the cause of premature breast development in a human female population.”

My question—are we going to wait until we develop weird cancers or start frothing at the mouth before we start studies that will return answers of varying validity? Fifty countries, according to our friends at the Center for Media and Democracy right there in Madison, Wisconsin, required labeling on foods with GMO ingredient. The European Union has banned the stuff. And here’s what Carmelo Ruiz Marrero of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety had to say:

And 2008 saw the release of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report (IAASTD), a unique, unprecedented and definitive report on the state of world agriculture. It was authored by over 400 international experts, subjected to two independent peer reviews, and was the product of an inclusive and participatory process in which industry, governments and civil society participated as equal partners, with the support of UN agencies and the World Bank.

The report concluded, in a nutshell, that the model of industrial, corporate, globalized agriculture cannot continue, as it is unsustainable and is literally eating up the planet’s patrimony, and favors in its stead small-scale agroecological production that uses local resources and minimizes the use of fossil fuel-based inputs- precisely what environmentalists and organic farmers had been advocating for decades.

Puerto Rico has one of the most highly paid legislatures in the country, with advisors making colossal sums of money. How could such a bad, such a cynically evil situation occur? A kickback here and there—sure, we’ve learned to expect that. But putting a whole island’s health at risk? Why would you do that?

Open up your wallet and see….  

Wednesday Morning Rant

What’s going on here?

Susan sent me Maureen Dowd’s column, which featured one of the creators of “Will and Grace”—which apparently was a television show—as being disgusted and heartsick at the Supreme Court. He felt—didn’t we all?—that we were all in a sort of time warp; five of the justices are all back in the fifties, the rest of us have moved on.

Well, I can see that—but only out of my right eye. My left eye went cloudy, last Thursday, just in time for the Easter weekend. Of course my ophthalmologist wasn’t working, so I spent the weekend being intermittently worried—was it an infection? Cataract? Worse, was it macular degeneration, which had robbed my mother of her vision, and really of her joy in life, those last hard years?

Well, I don’t have to worry, or rather I do. It’s a cataract, and the procedure is simple. It takes ten minutes to do the surgery, 24 hours to recuperate, and no more of those hideous eye patches. Amazing, really, the innovations in eye surgery.

Wait, did I say, “I don’t have to worry,” somewhere up there? Wrong—I do. This afternoon I will spend substantial amounts of time calling an insurance company, trying to figure out how to fund this operation. “Lucky you,” you say, “lots of people don’t have insurance.”

And indeed, I am lucky. But it may be just general irritation or an inbred tendency to see the glass as half-empty, because it does occur to me—I’m somewhere in the middle of the lucky gradient. Other people with insurance simply sail in, flash the card, and the operating room doors open by magic.

I only have insurance, you see, through Raf and his former job. Since his company closed he was allowed to retire, and qualifies for the health plan. And yes, that health plan allows him to put a same sex spouse on the plan. Raf’s current employer does not. So I have an excellent insurance plan that—since the company is located in the US—nobody on the island accepts.

And I live—a bit tangentially, but still live—in the richest nation on the planet. And that nation, currently, has no national health plan, and so throws its marginalized into a terrible position. At 56, with a college education and good people skills, I can easily figure out how to manipulate the system—rigged as it probably is against me. (“It does occur to me,” I said to John grumpily yesterday, “that the insurance industry is the only business I can think of which charges its customers an enormous amount of money so it can pay people to say ‘no’ to its customers….”)

Right, so Canada and Norway and most of the developed world have figured out how to dispense health care—we have not. And in nine states I am legally married, and in 41 states plus the territories I am not. And now, we will have to wait around until June to see what will be, in all likelihood, a half victory.

And yesterday, I read an interesting statement when looking for something to blog about. “The history of farming,” an article stated, “has been inherently open-source.”

Say whaaa…?

Translation—nobody owned, until agribusiness came along, a seed. That was the whole point—you grew whatever it was and ate 80% and saved the rest for the next year and that’s how it was for millennia. Now, farmers are the pawns of the seed / fertilizer / herbicide company, and we are suffering or about to suffer a massive jolt to our health—physically, environmentally, economically.

And the Supreme Court, in one sweeping decision that nobody much noticed, was the body that changed “open-sourced” agriculture to corporate agribusiness.

The Supreme Court, who last week worried that homosexuality was newer than cell phones. And yet these guys, so worried about making a “sea change” socially, had no problem completely shifting the foundations of what we put into our mouths?

I go back to wondering, at times, whether men should really be allowed. Yes, we do some things very well. Yes, I’m a guy myself. Yes, I have worked in almost all-female environments and yearned for a nice, testosterone-driven guy.

But maybe it’s time to recognize—agriculture was for millennia a female activity. The men were out there hunting; the women were in the field. And more than that, they were sharing information, swapping seeds, observing how plants grew and why. The essence of agriculture celebrates some traditionally feminine traits—cooperation, patience, nurturance.

Hunting is a guy thing, as is—let’s be honest—business. I worked in the biggest company in the world, and yes, it paid lip service to diversity. But any woman who was going to get seriously ahead was going to have to have bigger balls—sorry!—than the guys. It was about competition, winning, going for the kill.

You know, I don’t accept the Supreme Court being “behind the times.” Not being able to say the word “gay,” but always using “homosexual.” Asking how many states allowed gay marriages, and comparing being gay to cell phones.

That’s bullshit, and an insult. Dowd’s friend may be heartsick….

…I’m pissed.

A Change of Bastards

It’s a relief, almost, to take a break from wrestling with seriously bad bastards—that would be the National Rifle Association, and do they know, I wonder, that I’m after them?—to deal with another seriously bad bastard.

That would be a little company called Monsanto—which, by the way, my computer seems to know, it corrected me when I spelled it with an “a”--founded in 1901 and located in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

And you probably know that it’s an “agribusiness” and producing genetically modified seeds—indeed, it was one of the first companies to produce and market a genetically modified seed, a soybean that was created in 1983 and tested in the field in the late 80’s.

What you may not know—I didn’t—was that Monsanto started out as a chemical company, and it produced everything from plastics to DDT, Agent Orange, and PCBs.

At about the time that they discovered how to play with genes, they got rid of most of that part of the business. They are still making, however, an herbicide that they tout as “as safe as table salt.” (Or at least they did, until the New York Attorney General got after them. They settled out of court, agreed to drop the slogan in New York, and paid $250,000—small change for them—and denied wrongdoing.)

Roundup is by far the most commonly used herbicide, and its toxicity was for years thought to be low. Is it? As always, it depended on whom you asked—when I was gardening in a public park, I would avoid the garden for days or until a good rain after the city had used the stuff. Oh, and I was growing flowers, not food.

And there is evidence that the studies—funded by guess who!—may have been either poorly done or frankly fraudulent. But two things are known: the stuff is all over the place and farmers who refuse to use the herbicide are at a great disadvantage.

Now then, having created an herbicide of questionable toxicity, Monsanto cooked up a great scheme—create a seed that is resistant to Roundup! This way, the farmer sows the seed, waits around until the weeds appear, and then douses the hell out of his field with Roundup. So Monsanto wins twice, if not three or four times (depending on how often Farmer Jones sprays his field). 

Monsanto wins—but does the farmer? Do we, eating the farmer’s crop? One source reports that over 90% of the soy and canola harvested come from Roundup Ready (as the seeds are called) seeds. Since a lot of soy is used for livestock, nobody knows how high up the food chain Roundup really has gotten.

And Monsanto is not a company particularly easy to like. It tends to go after the people least likely to be disliked—those good farmers out there in the field. Such as the Canadian farmer, who the company charged had a Roundup Ready canola plant growing in his field.

“Hey,” said the farmer, “I don’t use that stuff. The pollen blew in from my neighbors field…”

And are you wondering—how can a company go after a farmer for having a plant in his field?

Because that’s no plant, that’s intellectual property. Yes, in 1980, the Supreme Court decided that the patent laws applied to manmade living organism. So now, 93% of soybeans are from Roundup Ready seeds. Oh, and guess what? The price of seed has tripled since then.

Nor is Monsanto content just to operate this scheme, it is today arguing before the Supreme Court that a farmer violated the law by first buying seeds from Monsanto and then buying seeds from a local grain elevator to plant a second crop. The farmer argued that he had already bought seed for the season, and that the second crop would be less productive, and less profitable. Monsanto said he had no right to buy Roundup Ready seed from anyone except the company.

Can it get worse?

Of course. If memory serves from reading Michael Pollan, Monsanto is now developing sterile seeds, which will have the farmers really locked in a corner. And what will happen if the genes causing the sterility in the seed are transferred to other seeds—not genetically modified? Oh, and what will happen—as it has happened—when the plants develop resistance to Roundup? Already, farmers are told to use multiple herbicides.

Five minutes ago, I decided I was hungry, and so I am eating a peanut butter sandwich. Since I didn’t grow the peanuts, and since the peanut butter in not organic, I am very likely eating a food made from genetically modified seed. Shouldn’t I know? Shouldn’t Skippy be required to label that?

Wanna guess my answer?

Today, Everybody Goes to Their Rooms

It was a time when if you spoke out, you suffered real consequences. There’s Phil Donahue, for example, once at the pinnacle, and the next day in the pit. The Dixie Chicks, whose remarks in London set off a furor. And now we can add Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado.

I should have said “ex-professor,” since the university fired him on 24 July 2007.

And why did he get the sack?

For very serious reasons, say his detractors: plagiarism and academic falsification. Not so, say his supporters, he came out and said the unspeakable: the September 11^th attacks were an inevitable and natural result of our terrible foreign policy. But he went further, as you can read below in an excerpt from his essay, “Some People Push Back”:

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Ouch—that’s pretty strong. And it’s certainly a good way to start a debate. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a debate that it spawned, but a firestorm. The media picked it up in January of 2005, with FOX News in particular playing it up—according to Wikipedia, Fox had twice the coverage than the other networks combined.

Is it true? Also debatable—there was a restaurant at the top of one of the towers, so that means waiters and cooks, groups not often held responsible for contributing to the American global financial empire. There must have been maintenance people, secretaries, messengers. But Churchill makes a point—there was also a CIA office in one of the tower. And even if some innocent people got killed, well, we have a term for that—collateral damage. A term, by the way, that we did not get from the Pashto, Dari, or Iraqi Arabic.

Well, the fight spread to a very good school—Hamilton College, which had invited Churchill to speak. And after a news program “invited” viewers to send email to Hamilton College, the school was flooded with 6000 of them.

Eventually the school canceled the lecture, because, in the words of its president, Joan Stewart, there were “credible threats of violence.”

Two former governors of Colorado called for Churchill’s dismissal, and the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado issued a statement “apologizing” to the American people. The Colorado Legislature issued a proclamation calling Churchill’s remarks “evil and inflammatory.”

Things really got bad when people read this, taken from “Dismantling the Politics of Comfort:”

If I defined the state as being the problem, just what happens to the state? I've never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary, but it's part and parcel of what I'm talking about. You can create through consciousness a situation of flux, perhaps, in which something better can replace it. In instability there's potential. That's about as far as I go with revolutionary consciousness. I'm actually a de-evolutionary. I do not want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.

“Treason,” cried the governor of Colorado, and called for his dismissal.

The university did something different—pored over Churchill’s research, and found, according to them, serious faults.

There was the question of the blankets of smallpox victims that, according to Churchill, the US army cunningly distributed to the Indians in 1837 at Fort Clark. You may remember this old tale—it’s sometimes alleged to be the first instance of genocide. And the university confirmed that for six times in ten years, Churchill had, according to Wikipedia, “falsified his sources and fabricated his claims.”

Then there was the question of the remarkable similarity between his work and the work of his ex-wife, Annette Jaimes. But Churchill, unbelievably, came up with the reason—he had written the work and his wife at the time had published it, under her name. And since he had written it, well, couldn’t he use it?

There were other allegations as well. And in the end, the university committee unanimously agreed that Churchill had engaged in “serious research misconduct.”

Right—so what to do about him? Oddly, only one of the five people on the committee voted to dismiss him; two members thought the material insufficiently serious to warrant action; two other members favored temporary suspension.

Hunh?

There’s something screwy here. Have we really come to the point where an academic can be found guilty of “four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications’” and then not receive sanctions? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_academic_misconduct_investigation)

Well, the university took action, and fired Churchill in July of 2007. Churchill, of course, took the university to court, initially won and then lost on appeal. And today, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

My take? There used to be a time when professors could speak their mind, when they could say the things nobody else could, they could write what others might not. In the best schools they were championed; in the worst they were tolerated. The University of Colorado was completely off base.

Second ending. There used to be a time when professors were rigorous in respecting the work of others, in attributing that work, and in representing it fairly in their own writing. Plagiarism is stealing, and for people who value the life of the mind, it is the ultimate, unthinkable crime. Churchill was completely off base.