Speaking of South Carolina Peaches
How could I resist the opportunity to showcase the giant Gaffney Peach? Here are a couple of photos from Flickr user halfmortimer.
Click the photos to go to the Flickr pages for larger versions.
Dynamist Blog
Take Me To Your Leader...You Must Have a Leader
Thoughtful, original, nuanced, curious, and empirical (and also often funny), Jonathan Rauch exemplifies what intellectual journalists are supposed to be. So it's no surprise that while the keepers of conventional wisdom at the NYT and New Yorker desperately try to identify the secret bosses of the Tea Party movement, Jonathan has been trying to understand what's really going on. For the short version, you can watch the video, but it's better to read his article on how the radically decentralized movement actually works. Here's the opening:
Though headless, the tea party movement is not mindless. Its collective brain meets every Monday night.
More than 200 leaders of local tea parties -- coordinators, as they usually call themselves -- join a conference call every week organized by an umbrella group called the Tea Party Patriots, the largest national tea party organization. On one Monday recently, three national coordinators begin the session with a rundown on plans for upcoming rallies. The events are expensive; does anyone have a problem with a search for $1,000 donors? (No one does.) An organizer has put together a manual on what to ask candidates at town hall events. ("That will go to the entire e-mail list.")
The group is polled on whether to hold a second round of house parties throughout the country. (Yes.) A coordinator gives an update on an iPhone app for tea partiers who will be going door to door this fall to talk to voters. (It will use Global Positioning System technology to download walking lists and upload voter data in real time -- cutting-edge stuff.)
The floor is then opened. Local leaders propose ideas, announce new tea party groups, float queries, and offer tips. (How can we maximize free publicity? Lawn signs, movie events, and digiprint postcards are cheap and effective.) A newcomer introduces a start-up tea party in Winfield, Ind. A coordinator in nearby South Bend offers a welcome. ("I know all these folks. I want to get you connected with them.")
Rick, from Albuquerque, N.M., asks if the national agenda includes investigating voter-roll irregularities, something his group is concerned about. Mark Meckler, a Tea Party Patriots coordinator and co-founder, weighs in. Newcomers "often don't understand how badly we need you to lead the way," he says. "If this is an area of concern to you," he admonishes, "the way the Tea Party Patriots works is that you guys really lead the organization. We're a relatively small group of people who are just trying to help coordinate. We're not in charge; we're not telling anybody what to do. You need to take a leadership role and stand up." Meckler suggests that Rick gather a group of people concerned about the issue and go to work.
Rick gets the message. "We'll get on the Ning [social-networking] site and try to take the lead on that."
Will vote fraud emerge as a tea party cause? Maybe, maybe not. Meckler, the closest thing the movement has to an organizational visionary, meant what he said. No one gives orders: In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists, people just do stuff, talk to each other, imitate success, and move the movement.
Read the whole thing.
Fashion and Culture
In March 2009, a few days before a major exhibit of Andy Warhol portraits opened at the Grand Palais in Paris, the curator faced a minor crisis. Pierre Bergé, the partner of Yves Saint Laurent and keeper of his legacy, objected to having the late fashion designer's portraits grouped with the likes of Giorgio Armani and Sonia Rykiel under the heading "Glamour." Saint Laurent was an artist, Bergé said. His image should hang with those of David Hockney and Man Ray. After all, Mr. Bergé said, Warhol himself had proclaimed YSL "le plus grand artiste français de notre temps."
The show went on, to glowing reviews, without the Saint Laurent images. It was an irony-drenched and very French moment, all about maintaining the status distinctions that Warhol himself had exploded. This was, after all, the man who famously compared department stores to museums. "Why do people think artists are special?" Warhol once said. "It's just another job."
Absurd though it was, Mr. Bergé's protest expressed a widespread conviction: that fashion is an inferior, unworthy, trivial and culturally suspect pursuit. Art is much, much better. In museum circles, observes Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, "Fashion is really seen as the bastard child of capitalism and female vanity."
So Sept. 9, when Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week opened at Lincoln Center, marked a significant cultural moment. The performing arts complex is doing more than providing a venue for runway shows. (You can, after all, rent its facilities for a bar mitzvah or corporate conference.) The center has hired a director of fashion and will incorporate fashion, along with opera, theater, dance and music, into its year-round lineup of featured arts, with plans for fashion films, photo exhibits and lectures.
It's a high-profile indicator of an intellectual trend that has been building for decades. Fashion is shedding its cultural stigma. It is increasingly recognized as a significant cultural activity—indeed, one of the defining characteristics of our civilization.
"Fashion attests to the human capacity to change," writes the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky in "The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy
," his iconoclastic 1987 book. Like science and industry, "fashion is one of the faces of modern artifice, of the effort of human beings to make themselves masters of the conditions of their own existence."
Read the rest here. I highly recommend Lipovetsky's book
Was I Too Complacent about Locavore Coercion?
In response to my WSJ column, Jim Prevor, the founder and editor-in-chief of Produce Business magazine, the online Jim Prevor's Perishable Pundit, and all-round perishable-food-business guru, emails:
[Y]our off-hand comment at the end that the local-food movement would be dangerous if it were somehow enacted into law is not such a distant hypothetical as that remark implied.
For example, at public universities all across the country there are increasing restrictions on food procurement. Although these policies are not "laws" they allow ideologues to impose real costs on the students, on their parents and on the public--without anyone voting for these policies. Recently we've run a series on food procurement at UC Davis:
Everyone Is In Favor of Better Flavor But Is 'Local' A Solution Or An Ideology?
Tom Reardon of Michigan State University Speaks Out: Wither Local?
Dissecting the Meaning of Local, Sustainable and Flavorful
The national school lunch program and related programs use the power of the purse — potential loss of federal funds — to get schools to adopt an anti-trade procurement policy. Some of this is explicit, the law contains a "buy-American" provision. There are exemptions, so a school can buy Chilean grapes when no US grapes are available, but competition is forbidden. The buy-local issue is more complex. The law is actually contradictory with some provisions requiring schools to seek out the low-bidder and other provisions urging them to buy local. The Obama administration has leaned toward the second provision in its discussions with state officials and school districts. We ran a related piece here: 'Buy American' and 'Buy Local' Requirements Confusing School Foodservice Buyers...Chilean Fresh Fruit Association Speaks Out
There are also special nutritional funds that are available only if you buy in politically approved places, such as a Farmer's Market. Here is a link to a government description ofa special program that adds on WIC funds — but only for purchases from Farmer's Markets with the explicit goal of encouraging the purchase of local produce: WIC Farmers' Market Nutrition Program
Beyond these public policy issues, we run a series of focus groups and mall intercepts and other studies that interact with consumers from the UK to North America and on to Australia/New Zealand. You would be shocked at what people expect. A seemingly intelligent woman walked out of a farm stand in Massachusetts. The stand stood on a small farm but probably 90% of the sales of the farm stand were purchased off the local wholesale market. Yet when we asked shoppers why they liked shopping there, more than one pulled out their pineapple and pointed to the advantages of a good Massachusetts grown pineapple!
Economist Luke Froeb comments further on the costs of localism, with video from Stewart Brand at TED. I will note, however, that consumer preferences need not be "rational." It's well and good to argue about the environmental impact of locally grown food with people who buy it because they think it's good for the planet. But we should avoid the technocratic temptation to subject individual subjective tastes to centralized cost-benefit analysis.
In Defense of Pricey Peaches and Foreign Fruit
In a column in Saturday's WSJ, I defend Michael Pollan's expensive taste in peaches but question the locavore ideal. Here's the lead:
Michael Pollan
Those figures were way too specific and way, way too high to go unnoticed. The humanistic foe of industrialized eating suddenly sounded like a privileged elitist, and the local-food cause seemed insensitive to cash-strapped shoppers.
But Mr. Pollan was only being honest. Patronizing local farmers who produce in small batches tends to cost more. You may find some peak-season bargains at the farmers' market, but there's no such thing as a free locavore lunch. Getting fruits and vegetables only from local farms necessarily limits variety — few crops are available everywhere all the time — and it doesn't come cheap. Economies of scale apply even to produce.
Read the rest, and some interesting comments, here. My column will run every other week in the Journal's new Saturday "Review" section. For a bit more commentary on exotic fruits, see this post on my DeepGlamour blog.
I Was So Right about This
The NYT is marking the 40th anniversary of its op-ed page by interviewing a few writers of some of its more memorable op-eds. I was honored that my 1999 piece on the Microsoft antitrust suit, "What Really Scares Microsoft," made the cut.
"Adaptive Reuse" and Careers: How to Live Longer & Prosper
My latest column at Big Questions Online argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, an aging population need not be an economic or cultural calamity--but it does require new thinking about careers. Here's the opening:
In 1955, a 50-year-old American could expect, on average, to live to be about 75. By 2005, that number had jumped to 81, with a significant improvement in health and vitality. (Unlike statistics for life expectancy at birth, these numbers do not reflect changes in infant mortality or other deaths before age 50.) Even more striking, the chances that a 50 year old would live past 80 rose from a mere 37 percent to 58 percent — a new norm.So why aren't we celebrating?
"Live long and prosper" once sounded like the most logical of greetings: good wishes everyone could agree on. But now that people are actually experiencing significantly longer lives — not in decrepitude but in relatively good health — attitudes have changed. Longevity has come to portend "an aging society" and the very opposite of prosperity.
The fears are far more profound than mere fiscal concerns about Social Security and Medicare. Illustrating a common reaction, Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez warns of the "Floridization of America," with "a less optimistic and forward-thinking culture." Looking at Japan's "exhausted" and "depressed" but otherwise healthy elderly, he fears "an epidemic of loneliness and ennui." His conclusion: "Be careful what you wish for. You could make it to 100, with consequences as onerous as the ones you ate right and exercised to avoid."
Buried in this column is a crucial assumption: that people over 65 will be retired.
They'll withdraw from active engagement with younger colleagues, from productive problem-solving, from the world outside their seniors-only enclaves. They'll spend 20 or 30 years playing golf, watching TV, and chasing people off their lawns. They'll occasionally visit the grandkids, but mostly they'll wait to die. They won't learn anything new.
Even ignoring the question of how to pay for those retirements, that assumption makes neither economic nor psychological sense. Assume the life expectancy numbers are correct. (They're best estimates, and may be understated.) Six years added to a 40-year working life represent a 15 percent increase, the equivalent of nearly two extra months of work a year. That's a lot of economic potential, especially when you multiply it by 79 million baby boomers.
Read the rest here.
Nationalism, Boosterism, and World's Fairs
Writing on my Facebook page, Reason's Shikha Dalmia recalls her own May visit to the Shanghai Expo, along with some local Chinese.
They were terribly disappointed with the US exhibit and regarded its lack of seriousness almost as a slap on the face. They were really moved by the dazzling Chinese pavilion -- which suggested to me that the real reason Chinese authorities have spent $60 billion on such a white elephant, in addition to what you mention, is to keep alive a spirit of nationalism.
The U.S. pavilion, which looks like a prefab movie theater and whose main feature is the filmic equivalent of a guidance counselor poster, is famously lame. But the Chinese misunderstand why. It's not a slap at China. It's a slap at world's fairs. On a positive note, it features great, improvised performances by bilingual U.S. college students, who do things like teach the Chinese crowd to shout, "YOU...ARE...AWESOME."
Shikha's comment gives me an excuse to resurrect some material that didn't make it into my final column. An earlier draft included the following observation on the boosterism of world's fairs:
It gives visitors the same thrill Sam Hyde, a bookkeeper from Belleville, Illinois, felt upon entering the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair: the feeling "that the whole world [is] there and every nation [is] showing its best products and doing its best to please."
Here is the most peculiar aspect of world's fairs. As classic tools for city and national boosters, they combine openness to the world with a sense of (often-defensive) local superiority: We are the center of civilization, our culture its standard; that's why everyone's here. The foreign exhibits simultaneously validate the host's importance and provide a sort of petting zoo of exotic cultures. Remembering his 1904 visit, Sam Hyde noted the popularity of the Filipino military band, praising the "extraordinary talent of those little brown fellows." Today's readers cringe at his language, but the point of the sentiment is appreciation, not difference. Exoticism provides a bridge to empathy. But the locals still determine the standard of value.
That's psychologically realistic. The official ideology of international expositions may stress common humanity, but one thing human beings have in common is the tendency to divide the world between our group and others. The Chinese want to celebrate China, and Chinese fairgoers really do view all those foreigners as foreign. The deception lies in the way international expositions gloss over conflicts, portraying a world as harmonious as the International House of Pancakes. (Both "Bel-Gem waffles" and Disney's "It's a Small World" were hits in 1964.) In Shanghai, irony-minded westerners head for the North Korean and Iranian pavilions, conveniently located next to each other on the unofficial axis of evil.
And here's a photo:
The Lost Glamour of World's Fairs
Americans long ago consigned world's fairs to the toy box of history. Once celebrated as showcases of world cultures and windows into the future, these grand expositions lost their glamour sometime during the Johnson administration. Like Space Food Sticks and Jonny Quest, they are fondly remembered — at least by those over 50 — but a bit ridiculous: all that ethnocentricism, naive internationalism, and technological good cheer. The last one to warrant much attention was Montreal's Expo '67, from which the now-defunct baseball team took its name. (Sorry, Seville '92.) Our cynical culture is done with world's fairs.
Not so for Shanghai, where Expo 2010 opened on May 1 and runs through October. In its first two months, the Shanghai Expo attracted more than 20 million visitors, mostly from China itself. Spanning more than 1,300 acres on both sides of the Huangpu River, the fair is an ubiquitous presence throughout the city. Public gardens reproduce the logo in white flowers, subway-car TVs broadcast upbeat interviews with exhibitors and tourists, huge LED screens on downtown buildings play promotional videos, and street vendors hawk knockoffs of its squat, blue, Gumby-like mascot. Visiting Shanghai in May, I quickly discovered that the Chinese authorities haven't lost their zeal for propaganda. They've just changed their colors from revolutionary red to Expo green.
Taking place in a society that is both authoritarian and rapidly developing, the Shanghai Expo highlights the double-edged allure of world's fairs, which are both deceptive and inspiring. The Expo's cheery boosterism and sanitized reality match Lawrence R. Samuel's description of the 1964 New York World's Fair in The End of the Innocence: a "protective cocoon" where "foreign nations sang in harmony, corporations existed to produce things that made life better, and, most important, the future looked brighter than ever." Like all glamorous objects, the '64 fair was an illusion. Yet its optimistic spirit, and those of other fondly remembered world's fairs, fostered attitudes that often did produce real progress. "For the tens of millions of kids who went," writes Samuel, who was one of them, the fair "planted a seed of the possibility to achieve great things."
Read the rest on BigQuestionsOnline.com, a new website for which I'll be writing a monthly column.
[Shanghai 2030 is a still taken at the GM pavilion's video which, like GM exhibits at the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs, foresees a future of self-navigating cars.]
Progress and Decline
In her NYTBR review of the much-needed but jargon-clotted new translation of The Second Sex
Having recently read portions of the old translation of The Second Sex, I concur. De Beauvoir was writing about another world. That's what's known as progress.
Du Plessix Gray's review also demonstrates with parallel translations just how needlessly ugly and opaque the prose employed by academic humanists (notably including academic feminists) has become.
A few instances: Writing about the aggressive nature of man's penetration of woman, [earlier translator] Parshley felicitously translates a Beauvoir phrase as "her inwardness is violated." In contrast, [new translators] Borde and Malovany- Chevallier's rendering states that woman "is like a raped interiority." And where Parshley has Beauvoir saying of woman, "It is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life," the new translators substitute, "It is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity." In yet another example, man's approach to woman's "dangerous magic" is seen this way in Parshley: "He sets her up as the essential, it is he who poses her as such and thus he really acts as the essential in this voluntary alienation." But in Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, "it is he who posits her, and he who realizes himself thereby as the essential in this alienation he grants." Throughout, there are truly inexcusable passages in which the translators even lack a proper sense of English syntax: "Moments women consider revelations are those where they discover they are in harmony with a reality based on peace with one's self."
Toril Moi made a similar point, and included the French, in an earlier, devastating review in the London Review of Books. Translation is always tricky, but if "affectivity" is the best you can come up with, you need a better command of English.