Rare Medium - Our Man in Boston

Rare Medium • Waiting for the Electrician

At almost any given moment one may stroll the streets of urban America (unfortunately, I can’t speak for the hinterlands) and observe what appear to be human beings perambulating (the boulevards) while staring at their palms. This, you may guess, is the voodoo mojo of the smartphone in action, which some commentators may point to as one more sign of the decline of civilization. Not wanting to be identified as such a naysaying declinist, I would more point to a startling and hazardous symptom of a diseased body politic: namely the renaissance of the Know-Nothing Party (in mid-19th-century America also known variously as the American Party or the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner).

Today the appellations “right-wing nutjobs,” “Republican noise machine,” etc., injudiciously fail to take seriously the nasty pathology gaining traction in the land and certainly don’t address the objective conditions that allow it to escape its petri dish of disease to infect large numbers of otherwise healthy citizens. Thus it is a small comfort to read someone intelligent and humane addressing the rising tide of our troubles.

Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, best known for her Man Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, has a new collection of essays, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Haymarket Books) that (ironically) Time magazine hails as “Gorgeously wrought…pitch-perfect prose… In language of terrible beauty, she takes India’s everyday tragedies and reminds us to be outraged all over again.”

The irony being that if you replaced her examples and case studies and applied them closer to home, Time would either ignore Roy or work to defang and declaw her.

In the book’s introduction, “Democracy’s Failing Light,” Roy explains:

…Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly—our nearsightedness? … Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.

It would be conceit to pretend that the essays in this book provide answers to any of these questions. They only demonstrate, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would…

…The essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy; they’re about the fire in the ducts…

The inimitable John Berger commends Roy:

The notion of Democracy and the pleading for human compassion first came together in Sophocles and the Greek tragedies. More than two thousand years later we live under an economic world tyranny of unprecedented brutality, which depends upon the systematic abuse of words like Democracy or Progress. Arundhati Roy, the direct descendant of Antigone, resists and denounces all tyrannies, pleads for their victims, and unflinchingly questions the tragic. Reflect with her on the answers she receives from the political world today.

—Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 3, 2009

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Rare Medium • Waste Not, Want Not

One wonders what it would take to shock the American (or any public) to action with revelations of wrongdoing, corruption, or human and animal abuse as the muckrakers of a long-bygone era were able. Or if it is any longer possible. (For example, shouldn’t the relatively small number of people who have seen the powerful documentary Food, Inc. spurred some measurable insurrectionary noise?)

Hopefully, glancing at the images English writer Tristram Stuart collected at the web site for his exposé, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (W.W. Norton), might stir something more than the obligatory mumbo-jumbo lip service about “having to do better” and invoking green this and green that. No doubt we (at least us urban dwellers) all have a street-level awareness of the excesses of our economy: Look at what lines the city streets on trash collection day. Stuart points out that North America and Europe discard up to half of their food, and as a committed freegan he ably suggests it’s sufficient to feed all the world’s hungry at least three times over. This book offers a worldwide tour into the unconscionable waste produced that points to a global food crisis (yes, another crisis) and some measures employed to mitigate it. Additionally, Waste does offer some strategies to alleviate the problem(s).

As environmental activist and chronicler Bill McKibben opines:

The world faces incredibly difficult challenges—we simply can’t afford the kind of crazy waste Tristram Stuart uncovers and describes in this beautifully reported work. It’s nauseating in places, but ultimately hopeful: if we got serious about preventing this waste, we might just find the margin we need to deal with our biggest problems.

—Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 22, 2009

» Watch Michael Pollan and director Robert Kenner discuss Food, Inc.

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Rare Medium • Hand Me That Rake

If you need a reminder of how degraded, sycophantic, lazy, smug, boring, and predictable contemporary journalism has become, San Francisco State University mentor Peter Richardson’s (American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams) A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (The New Press) accounts for the brief, sparkling life of Ramparts magazine (1962-1975), which carried on in the best American muckraking tradition, winning awards and exposing numerous government depredations, illegalities, and worse (e.g., the use of napalm in Vietnam).

With a national circulation of 250,000 and a list of contributors that includes Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, Eldridge Cleaver, Adam Hochschild, David Horowitz (yes, that David Horowitz), Jessica Mitford, Christopher Hitchens, Jann Wenner, Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Thomas Merton, Paul Krassner, Peter Collier, Michael Lerner, Susan Griffin, Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag, we have ample clues to why the San Francisco-based magazine was so influential.

Looking over today’s bland, commerce-driven media landscape, only Mother Jones, Scheer’s Truthdig (both legacies of Ramparts), and TomDispatch show any signs of intent to rabble-rouse—sadly a nearly extinct practice. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 8, 2009

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Edited by Bridget Fitzgerald

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Saturday, November 21, 2009