Review: Debt, by David Graeber

(Full title: Debt: The First 5000 Years)

In these very pages, over the last several years, a sufficiently masochistic reader can dig in to find me struggling toward some basic criticisms of the modern study of economics. One of the basic complaints I've raised is that the field which claims to predict human behavior ignores far too much relevant humanity. Rather notably, it assumes away the dynamics of power and control, and as well presents a distorted and jaded view of the positive human motivations by which we estimate value. David Graeber has problems with this too, and he takes it further than I ever would have thought to. The central claim in Debt is that the majority of the economy, for the majority of history, actually arose from these interpersonal relationships and values, and not that truck and barter shuck and jive. The discussion relies less on neatly-tied case studies, or on any ideological paradigm (although he does make ethical judgments), and more on a broadly scoped anthropological and historical understanding of how lives were lived across time, among different classes, in different societies. There's a fair amount of jigsaw work in the earliest examples (as their must be when it comes to understanding very old or remote societies), and like all history, it's qualitative (although admirably inclusive), but holy fuck is it ever refreshing to read someone base his ideas about human economic interaction by observing human interaction, instead of burying it in a mountain of assumption-fudging artificially precise quantitation.

The opening bombshell (which I've linked to once or twice) is that, unlike the textbook discussion, there has never been any historical barter economy worthy of note, and that exchange using impersonal coin tended to arrive centuries after institutionalized credit arrangements. Most economic affairs were more typically conducted using a more or less elaborate organization of debts and favors, where members of a community would lend and borrow with varying levels of formality, and with individual cultural character too. It's also observed that community- and family-minded people are motivated by a "baseline communism" (as he cautiously calls it, meaning that at some point, we're all in this together) and tendency for hierarchical organization, most of which tends to get underplayed by the various modern economic theories.

Graeber divides the economic history of the globe broadly into pre-monetary times, ancient urban societies and the following imperial ages, the middle ages, and the capitalist era (not failing to speculate on whatever the hell it is we've transitioned into now). In discussing the early development of money, Graeber utilizes what he can in that period of history between writing and coin (the earliest writing known, after all, is ancient Sumerian credit accounting). He also leans heavily here on isolated cultures as they had been encountered and studied by Europeans, and the social and economic ways they reacted to the contact. (It tended to go badly for them.) Precious money-like objects, when actually used, tended to be reserved exclusively for social, human exchange (that is, for the not easily quantifiable--for men to woo women, in most cases), and while tokens have also been frequently used to keep track of debts and favors, this too was built on interpersonal trust and a sense of community. It's a recurring theme that it has historically taken a violent disruption of that social network that to turn these habits into more impersonal varieties of monetary exchange.

[As an aside, I think this is an interesting way to consider the evolution of western thought too, and it calls into question some of the things that were left on the table when the select pieces of the canon were going into the sociological scrapbook. Which was the bigger mark that ancient Athens left on the European world? Was its philosophical schools (the rediscovery of Aristotle), or was it the acceptance of slavery and the subjugation of women, right down to the veil (which count be more as an evolutionary initial condition)? Also, I wonder how much resistance there's been in European thought to universalizing human behavior by studying groups of people that Europeans were butchering and enslaving, literally by the boatload. My comic book understanding of the history of philosophy is not really up to the task, and admittedly they didn't know a lot about them yet, but it does seem the colonial-age thinkers argued a lot more with hypothetical primitive people than actual ones.]

The basic theme here is in fact a moral one. Slavery (which was rather a sudden concern for some of the African people he mentions), punitive state power, and imperial war were highly correlated with the transition to and away from currency, right up until the modern era. It took a powerful government to make the stuff official, and if there really is intrinsic value to gold, it's that it can be stolen and anonymized. Generally, Graeber writes, the estrangement of debt and finance from human connectedness made the tragedies worse (he doesn't make a more disturbing case than the Conquistadors, who kept at it because of a fucked up finance system that kept those vicious fuckers in debt too--how is the systematic destruction of a civilization more moral than not paying back your sponsors?). Adam Smith's contention that the economic sphere was separate from the human social one (and was in fact to the good), was as radical as it was utterly ahistorical. It's taken a lot of violence to get to the point where that's the default assumption, Graeber notes, and even then, the moral imperatives of debt aren't even equally applied. And really, who's doing more for the world, the one who impoverishes himself in misery to pay off his creditors, or someone who spreads happiness among his family and friends?

One interesting aspect of this viewpoint is the picture it makes of the middle ages. Graeber paints a different environment than we usually imagine, in large part because he expands it beyond the borders of violent and backward Europe. But even there, yes, it was indeed horrible in the usual respects, but people were also by most measures unprecedentedly free. Slavery was not reinstituted in any of the world civilizations following the previous imperial age, and (again despite the popular conceptions), regular people were largely left alone by greater powers. The world didn't revert to barter, but it did revert to credit. [And you know, this sort of quiet utopia is pretty close the sort of community relationships that Wendell Berry idealized in rural America too.] It's interesting to point out too, that the closest the world has seen to a free market (that is, an ungoverned one, that still works), was in the Islamic world of this time, which esteemed its merchant-adventurer class, and it succeeded because, according to the author, it was both anti-capitalist (usury was forbidden in spirit and cultural practice), and built on personal trust and community connection.

Does it all hold up? Graeber presents a great deal of compelling correlations, and some good causal hypotheses--the arguments for the origin of money are convincing--but now and then I think he goes a little too far. I wasn't quite convinced, for instance, that materialist thought was really generated from contemplating the economic nature of things, although no doubt the ideas of the time got swapped liberally around. The author frequently resorts to etymology (which must be an anthropologist's trick) to showcase various points, and while it's interesting how these thinkers of the time (and Graeber is quite good at linking thinkers to their times) found commonality in the ideas, it still feels like a stretch to state, say, that a sense of mind/body duality arose because coins have two sides. The institutions of the various imperial eras--savery and organized war--that originated coinage and then went hand in hand with it, have in my less expert opinion, much to do with resource availability and population density, and call it an emergent property of urbanization perhaps. For example, I don't think the middle ages would have evolved the Medicis and the Renaissance without coal. It seems an important additional ingredient to universalize our imperial economy (which runs on de-personalized credit) with the ancient ones, but then again, that's just my hobby horse. So far as the utopian qualities of the middle ages or rural subcultures go, I'm skeptical. You don't choose your communities, after all, but you're stuck there. As an alternative to the slavery/coin/military complex, people developed strictly hierarchical societies, a perversion of a different one of the human metrics presented in the book. (And fuck the communism of the rich, anyway.) It seems that history tells us we're left to pick our poison, a tradeoff of one kind of evil for another. Being tied to a small-town underclass is a different sort of hell. Maybe the next age will give us a genuine reimagining of social and economic organization. Here's hoping.

Review: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is a novel of loss and cultural contact. It tells the story of a west African village community some time around the turn of the last century, from the point of view of its prominent citizen, at an especially transitional time. The plot moves from the drama of local life to the drama of its disruption by British colonials and missionaries (evidently penetrating further up the Niger than the slave trade did). It's told from the African perspective in the vehicle of an English-language novel, which is an interesting contrast on its face. If it works as a window on traditions that are unfamiliar to most English speakers, that hardly seems to have been the intent. I don't believe for a second that it was written with the edification of the colonialist culture in mind, and Achebe's defense of writing in English includes his schooling and habits, and the fact that the native Igbo written form was drained of its lyricism when the Brits went and standardized it. The author himself grew up among the Igbo communities in Nigeria, but as a recognizably bright kid, quickly found himself moved into the European educational system. The novel could be a chronicle of his parents' or grandparents' generation.

It is a short, compact book. And while it's recognizable as a "novel," the happenings of the plot move on without a overburdening heap of western literary tradition. There's not much in the way of foreshadowing, for example, and no quasi-scientific psychological churnings, but the actions make sense both in the context of the setting, as well as in a broader human one. You can get a sense of an African storytelling tradition in there (or at least to the extent I've been exposed to it--this amounts to some folktales I read in grade school and since, and some writers who were enchanted by them), and the early characterization runs short and sweet like that, introducing the outlines of the characters, and then filling up the narrative with story elements that illustrate their traits. In that sense, the people often feel like archetypes, but if they are, they are not simple ones, and there is not a lack of depth to them. It is just revealed simply, which is a powerful thing to pull off.

The story is told in two broad parts. The first is the rise and fall of Okonkwo, the protagonist, within his own community. Okonkwo is a fairly complicated man with any number of uneasy conflicts at his core (that could certainly offer plenty of material for agonizing psychoanalysis were this a different kind of book). The product of a difficult childhood, he rebels by becoming ten times the man that he felt his father was, which brings him relentlessly close to tradition, and perpetually on the verge of violence. His anger, his work ethic, and his discipline conflict with his actual affections, and if he makes some progress toward reconciliation, it takes an arbitrary loss to bring him down the first time. I'd describe the first half of the novel as a tale about the costs of ambition and the fragility of success.

Against a cultural invasion that has grown in momentum (and force) during his exile, however, Okonkwo finds he is much less well prepared. Missing some expected literary tells, I didn't quite predict the dramatic arc, making the climax that much more unexpected, even as, looking back (starting with the title, so maybe there's one cue, duh), it seems inevitable. But until Okonkwo meets the new authorities, the culture shock is delivered in the second half of the book in small, relentless sparks. I was reminded suddenly at the end that Achebe had been gauging the story for its moral impact as well, and it hit me like a hammer.

The sometimes fable-like quality of the telling lends to that feeling of universality. Transporting the reader to a less modern setting seems like it can be a perilous exercise, one that can lurch into spectacle, judgement, piety, or insincerity, but Achebe avoids all this. Tribal life is different from mine, but it's given matter-of-factly, on its own terms, with obvious room for joy, loss, failure, decency, deceit, frustration, respect, and so on: all the range of human drama that we will find anywhere. The author doesn't really romanticize the culture left behind (there is surely sadness and fondness in the memory, but it's implicit) or brought in (there are good and bad missionaries too, also trending toward archetype), and although the mind and motives of the African characters is accessible, they don't betray modern thinking at moments convenient to the plot (like you might get in any number of mediocre speculative fiction novels).

If it seems a little sacrilegious to compare it to sf, please bear with me: it is the genre with which I usually associate stories of first contact and (you might blame Tolkien for this one) decline of an older, more firmly rooted culture. It's full of writers that try very hard to represent the subversion of different societies, with wildly mixed results. It's enough to get a sense for just how bloody hard it is to develop an understanding that is both accessible to a wide audience and which comes off as authentic. I found myself brewing up similar comments for this review, for example, as I did about Mission Child, also impressed at the skill it took to present an intimate portrait from the point of view of the invaded, but someone like McHugh has exceptional works like this one in her canon to draw from. Achebe's not inventing the world he writes about, and is instead portraying directly his own experiences of two cultures, living in one, and remembering the other with humanity and regret.

Down With Disease

I want to defend--in a completely irrelevant context, pointlessly after the fact, and to a totally different audience--something I said recently. After a little nudge in this direction, I've been trying over the past few months to expand my musical horizons a little (comically, maybe, at my age), and I've been asking around here and there. I have been soliciting, more than usual, stuff that will feed a taste that I usually describe to people as "upbeat, but pissed off." Mysteriously, I caught mytself putting a Phish song in that category, and although it's a ludicrous description on its face, I think I must stand by it.

For the minimal effort of keeping my conversations separate-ish and my blog posts less redundant, I am not going to back up here too much. Suffice to say that one of the great things about music is its ability to play off of expectations, to establish them by virtue of tradition, even-numbered tempos, or harmonics, and then to delay or reward that expectation at will. That it's so effective is still pretty much magic to me (in other news, goddamn you talented people anyway), much as I like to pretend to puzzle it out* (boring whoever will listen). And when it comes together it's indelible. I've needed other moods served too, but my favorite is still something that takes frustrated energy and gives it any kind of positive conduit. And if it gets me to sing along or run in double-time, then it's very special indeed. The blues is the legendary embodiment of this kind of thing, except that in my preference, I'm not so much about channeling misery into a perverted joy. Or maybe it's better to call it a different kind of misery that I need to channel, something that's keyed in the middle ground between defiance and defeat, a little closer to the brand that I am forced to live in, or that I create prodigiously my own damn self.

There are about three or four Phish songs on my forever playlist that evolved only slowly since the Napster days. If Down With Disease** had an ancient cameo on this-here blog once, that's because my eternal rotation only contains forty-two tunes. I can't help it. I fall into music like friendship, and I have a difficult time with casual acquaintance.

Me and Phish never did quite became BFFs (er, BPhPhs), but I've always gotten along with them well enough. They are a band that defies my rule of thumb that good recording artists tend to be terrible live ones, but then I understand that their live shows, with their lengthy and tight jams, really eclipse the experience of popping in a CD and getting caught up wondering if the lyrics mean anything at all. And I'll get to find that out for myself next month. My brother has supplied me with about 4,032 continuous hours of concert bootlegs in preparation, and hopefully by the time the damn hippies get to Worcester, I'll be properly brainwashed. (My hair is still long, so at least there's that.) They do sound great live, and I'm looking forward to the show. Upbeat? Sure, it's delightful. But I've never heard anything less pissed off in my life. Phish, of all bands, has none of this negativity going on. They find a groove, and just stay happily there, making it look effortless. I think they've been in the same one for almost 30 years. It's like if the Grateful Dead were happier, and did funky jazz.

But I can find something in Down With Disease. It's a little pissed off. It's explicitly about being pulled off your game (by these demons in your head), about being held down when you want to move on. It ain't deep by any means, and Wikipedia tells me that it was, just like it sounds, the writer's (and non-band-member Tom Marshall's) ode to the joys of mononucleosis. The fact that it's performed with those zippy riffs and silly chants makes for an odd juxtaposition, but here, it doesn't amount to nonsense. It captures the giddiness of being feverish in an entertaining way.

But if you want to map it to deeper frustrations you can, and by a fingernail, that's what grabbed me. There's a fuck-you solidly embedded in the joyous sentiment, looking forward to a perfunctory goodbye. It's delivered with an open smile, mind you, and the smile's as sincere as the irritation is temporary. But somewhere in this unlikely song too, in that weird dichotomy, is a secret that I can only find those rare times when I'm actually on my game: how to channel that churning internal conflict into a positive life-affirming force. How, in a strange way, they're both the same thing. I do my best to write that way, or write about that kind of subject, and do a lot less well to live it, but at the end of the day, it's still alchemy to me, and I struggle to even spot the thousand barefoot children that I know are out there.



*Been at it for some time, speaking, as I was, of my own underwritten schtick. The CD I was listening to with my daughter when she was nine, by the way, was The Cult's Sonic Temple, which is still awesome. And yes, I did manage to warp her. We used to groove to this Phish song too.

**Evidently the only video they ever made, for painfully obvious reasons. Back in 1994, they forced you to.

Review: Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of essays on fatherhood and masculinity from Michael Chabon. I'd come across it originally when August (he among the quiet friends) had quoted some select bits, and years later, I had the presence of mind to snatch it up from the bargain bin when I saw it there. It wasn't, as things turned out, the ideal time for me to read this book, although it's not because it failed speak to me easily. It did. It was great in its way. In fact, Chabon's humor is familiar, his self-effacement is similarly backhanded, and his values, while not quite identical, readily map to mine. I've gone so far as to write, not only on the same themes, but on some of the very same subjects as he does in this collection (Legos, for just one instance). Nope, my mild peckishness comes from a couple places: (1) Chabon's a zillion times a better writer than I am, and it's not a whole lot of fun reading a worlds-better version of your own schtick, which, I'll add, in Mike's case has also got him gainfully employed and all kinds of attention; and (2) I've been turning the corner a bit too often lately from ironic bemusement into a fairly devastating self-analysis.

I'll dwell on the second point a bit longer. Chabon often finds himself comically awkward and ineffectual, but let's not pretend he's not also charmed by this, that he doesn't likewise expect others to find it charming. He's managed to forgive his own faults, for the most part, or at least make peace with them, and he is generally a whole lot more sensitive to his younger self than I've been lately to mine. In one essay, he describes the failure of his first marriage, in the context of discovering the not-very-deep limits to his misery. Even his bitterness, as he tells it, comes with a certain ironic detachment. In one of the opening bits, he goes on about the low expectations and over-praising that fathers who pay minimal attention to their children tend to receive, and okay, it's a good bit, and true. It goes on to suck up, however, just a little bit, to the women who deal with these things as stoically as society expects them to, and while that doesn't seem so out of place in that essay, by that point, somewhere in there, I'm noticing that his family is successful and wealthy, his (current) marriage preternaturally respectful and sustaining, that he lives in an absurdly supportive liberal community (Berkeley CA), and the burdens placed historically on women aren't much shared by any of the group. Somewhere in there, and throughout the book, is the acceptance of male and female roles as they currently are. It's an unsettled and questioning acceptance to be sure, and it's happy how far they've evolved from his parents' day, but there you are.

Or maybe I can define this by contrast, citing an essay that really worked for me. A later one reveals his younger self as enamored with the role of a Henry James style affable cad, and how, while working with capable women, he was forced to identify and outgrow, with some chagrin, that brand of misogynistic little-shitness. We men often start out with all kinds of affirmation of that little-shit behavior, he observes, and indeed it's a bizarre sort of tragedy that learning how completely unwarranted it is, remains an optional exercise. That thought seemed to come from a more sincere place than remembering everything that dear old Mom went through. Or again, maybe it's just a reflection of where I'm at these days.

I wasn't in a mood to read a cautious celebration of nuclear fatherhood either (I don't feel like a failure at it, but I'm royally sick of the all the sitcom conventions that pervade our conceptions of the job) but lots of these thoughts got right to me. One of his early essays managed to win me by the second sentence: "Almost every day, at least one of my four children comes home with art... And almost every bit of it ends up in the trash." It seems to me that faking our way through fatherhood, uncomfortable with our own authority, is a nobler and more selfless struggle than trying to figure out girls, and I'm glad that Chabon is uncomfortable with the romance of it too. Here, his slightly childlike enjoyment of relationships and culture shines more brightly, and fits into place more snugly. With kids, a mild and jokey push against authority is just the level you want. (And I did think a lot of my own father while reading these sections).

And Chabon is funny in a comfortably self-mocking way. That goes on here in spades. He's got a sense of the bittersweet that I can't help but share. Thematically, it offers a powerful message that we always muddle by in an odd juxtaposition of youth and age, men and women, past and present, expectations and reality, memory and hope. It's never a wholly bad exercise to get yourself caught up in the heartbreaking beauty of now.

The Invisible Hand ...of God!

Maybe because we're soaking in it, free market economics can be a satisfying thing to make fun of, or you know, at least mockery is healthier than drinking heavily. I've had several problems with the whole discussion these last couple years I've been trying to think about it very independently, starting with the basic premises. The "free market," for one obvious thing, is a whopping misnomer. It's not a spontaneous human enterprise, but rather a carefully-drawn set of rules and proscriptions established by the authorities (if that's somehow not the dreaded state, then it's the church, the mafia, Mom and Dad, or the fuckheads running the company store). Nor has it ever seemed right to me that assessing and swapping goods a fundamental human concern that is separate from the authority-defined marketplace. Economic-minded people are weird about glorifying that hustle and bustle. (I mean, is that how you interact with your social group? In the book I am currently reading--Debt, the First 5,000 Years, which is great--David Graeber makes a convincing case that this behavior only arose in human history when the hierarchy got sufficiently centralized, large, powerful, and impersonal. Spontaneous pre-monetary barter is a myth.) Considering that the practice of economics is intended as the reduction of a huge set of human behavior to quasi-scientific principles, it seems important to get the relevant aspects of human behavior right.

Perhaps the most annoying free market trick of all is a little bit more derived, though. The Libertarian-style question-begging argument is something that drives me batshit. You've probably seen it: the tendency to discuss hypotheticals and gedanken experiments instead of evidence and data, discussions where some desired outcome is defined (for today's example, let's posit that the highway system should work (via)), the method is given (the highway system should be private, because free markets!), and the rest is figuring out how the known solution will lead to the desired outcome, often using a lot of circular reasoning and, to throw 'em off the trail, a really big thesaurus.

[In other news, I'm really glad they didn't have blogs when I nineteen.]

There is a disturbing tinge of theology to that, something resembling Intelligent Design. We know God did it, and let's demonstrate how. Since it's God, then it's clear that everything is made just-so, and to bring us even closer to the near-perfect state, we must make less contribution. It's the same kind of reasoning you get in climate denial, which, coincidentally, is yet another conservative darling. It's optimism in the old sense: nature produces the best possible result. And evidently, it's explicitly central to the field of economics. I guess I didn't quite realize it went so deep.

Recall here what Smith was trying to do when he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Above all, the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of economics as a science. [...] Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument. God--or Divine Providence, as he put it--had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided "as if by an invisible hand" to promote the general welfare. Smith's famous invisible hand was, as he says in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the agent of Divine Providence. It was literally the hand of God."

--from Debt: The First 5,000 Years

As I've probably said before, I respect greatly the urge to quantify and rationalize things. I don't really have any problem working with the best intellectual tools of the times, nor is there any issue when the analogies that lead to improved understanding later turn out to be bad ones. If some of the central assumptions of economics are flawed, they can be revised if the theories still work. Adam Smith was by all accounts a great thinker, more nuanced and decent-minded than his dumber followers two centuries later, and Isaac Newton was a wonderful man to emulate.

But the problem is, there seems to have been little impetus to revise or question these central thoughts. Smith wrote a century after Newton, and that kind of optimism was already getting colorfully leveled by his contemporaries. (Poor Liebniz: a brilliant man who got stuck with a pair of the best antagonists in history.) Secular philosophy has reduced the anthropic principle to the level of fallacy. And even if it remains a matter of faith or motivation to some scientists, the modern pursuit of science no longer torques itself up to include "god did it" in its explanations of the universe. And we can argue that economics, similarly, abandoned this approach as well, but as far as I can tell, it's never much had much of a conversation about it.

The idea of economics as a field independent of other human behavior, that is only connected to authority in the sense of a bargain among equals, originated, according to Graeber, with Adam Smith himself, that it's in fact his major contribution. It's pretty far down the chain, but here we reliably have libertarian, erm, thinkers today, perpetually arguing, as a matter of faith, that things will be great, spontaneously, if this system is somehow made more true. Even though it is never true. This bothers me.

Perspective II

I recently read the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (a longer review is forthcoming), only to find myself unsettled, a little, by some of my reactions to the first part of it. It tells the story of a transitional time in west African tribal culture near the end of the 19th century. It had survived more or less intact from the days of the transatlantic slave trade (or at least the communities in the novel had), but was now facing cultural imperialism by the British. Achebe presents tribal life with hardly any explicit moralizing (one reason it's such a powerful little book), and as he got into Igbo life, my mind kept rebelling--what an unsatisfying way to live! Not, I mean, in terms of abstracts--in those areas, the Igbo peoples had the Europeans squarely beat, even in terms of whitey's own stated secular values. The tribal organization that Achebe describes put modern notions of democracy and egalitarianism to shame. The villages weren't ruled by kings or caste, and titles are awarded through accomplishment and are more tokens of respect than actual authority. The closest thing they had to government were priests (who advised on superstitions), and occasional meetings among decision-making elders. It's presented in the book as ideal a non-authoritarian society as humans have yet produced, ruled for a thousand years by traditions rather than by people. Nor does Achebe communicate that these folks lacked intellectual or emotional sophistication. The book itself, though parable-like, is a walk through that very landscape.

Nope, I was thinking more shallowly in terms of the habitual western quality of life. The Igbo villagers could expect a lifetime of toil, of violent superstitions (infanticide, circumcision, threat of exile, conflict with other tribes), and believing things that are tragically untrue. Their diet sucked--yams are on the high labor and low nutrient side for a staple crop--and outside of domestic labor, they don't have a fuck of a lot to do. Women, like in many cultures, could look forward to lives of drudgery, sexual obligation, and the occupation of lesser social spheres. It's almost enough to make you understand missionary zeal. Those poor bastards live in dirt huts!

The Christian missionaries that sailed up the Niger River no doubt had the best intentions, but they brought their own corruptions, including, as Achebe states it, a government too. The moral argument for the new Christian faith varied greatly with the missionaries who made it, and Achebe appears to harbor some sympathy (as I do) for those inspired to great humanity through faith, and to acknowledge some universality of all belief. The British that came to semi-fictional Umuofia brought in a religion that accepted society's rejects, and although it won converts by refuting local gods through empiricism, it still was a faith (and this is the very definition of faith) that was apart from available evidence. (It's just that Christianity by then had learned to scope itself outside worldly cause and effect.) History tells us that the Igbo would soon fall for Christianity in huge numbers, but was it an improvement? Hard to really say.

You'll have to forgive me here. I've been wrestling with a gigantic post for some time, about 20% of which (the part about life expectancy) came out a couple years ago in one big installment that was boring enough to scare me straight, and yet here I am again, about to liberate another chunk of it. It's trying to address a paradox of modern times: the world has improved, right? But human nature has remained the same.

Improved for whom, you might first ask? And by what measure? And for how long? The global metric I prefer is, more or less, better lives for more people, sustainable for longer—these are things that morally justify our social nature. What else is there, really?

Technology and organization let us achieve more spectacular evil, but they also seem to palliate some burdens of living. In my past blatherings, I've attributed the general condition of the species to population density, resource availability, and the level (or manner) of technological development (for which "improvement" isn't linear, or a given). Modern America may net a better score than the colonial powers of the late nineteenth century, a hideously overrated time if there ever was one. Igbo social taboos arguably existed to accommodate high-impact slash and burn agriculture and to manage a sustainable population (even amidst horrifying infant mortality). However, at least to hear Chinua Achebe describe it, they avoided the iron rule of oligarchy better than most societies (although maybe tell that one to the women), and offered a simple and satisfying life. Could the more egalitarian parts of Igbo tribal culture really survive with modern scientific inquiry, population level, and global communications?

If I had to define "standard of living," I would put in terms of how difficult it is to do the stuff that we want to do. If we have few impediments to performing those things that our minds suggest are fulfilling and feasible (travel, eat, surround ourselves with beauty, enter and exit places freely, accomplish entertaining tasks), then our standard of living is high. If, however, we can afford few of the comforts we can conceive, then it's not so high; if we can't get our hands on the necessities of life (nutritous food, sanitation, optimum health), then things are officially squalid. If we're looking across centuries or across cultures, I'd take a normalized standard of living as a measure of, given the known options and preferences, how much of it a can body hope to enjoy.

As an economic term, it normally refers to, more or less, how much stuff we have. GDP per capita is a measure that is often connected to standard of living, and it's imperfect for the various ways that Wikipedia describes. [If you must go that route, I think energy consumption is probably a better scorecard than currency. Kilowatt hours describe how much we actually do per capita, not like these things aren't correlated.] By this measure, standard of living suffers from inevitable fallacies of small or large numbers; when we are measuring our happiness in stuff, there are rapidly diminishing returns at play. Attainment matters immensely when we have next to nothing, but there's also some threshold at which we don't--or shouldn't--experience a greatly increased standard of living due to additional television inches, or housing square feet, or asset valuation. And of course we're about due for a horrifying lesson in the environmental consequences of overconsumption as well.

In a way, standard of living is always subjective, and based on what we think is possible, that in turn increases with existing understanding, scientific knowledge, and social precedent. Innovations eventually become necessities because we know that they are available. Medical care, for example, wasn't a necessity back in the barbarous days of medieval barbering, but now that medicine is sufficiently advanced to improve health more than damage it, it has become an important component in the equation, as reasonable to expect as shit-free drinking water, which is to say, because we know better. That's not to say that people wouldn't already imagine a better life without cholera (or cancer, or oppression, or aging, or managers, or the aristocracy, or…), but it's another thing entirely to believe existence is without them is attainable. What did the Igbo people think of infant mortality? They imagined life without it, and believed (falsely), that they could reduce it drastically through superstition. Did that wrong belief further reduce their standard of living? (I'd say yes.) Would they have been happier with improved medicine? (Probably if it didn't come with the British district commissioner. It's not so clear the British could have provided it in 1900 either, mind you.) Would a people in possession of improved medicine be wrong to withhold such information (probably), and is it hopeless paternalistic to intervene with it, assuming without nuance what another group of people can and can't imagine, and what they do or don't value? Or, for that matter, is it hopelessly paternalistic to assume that we understand very well what we think we know now? (Please, let's take a moment to laugh at the Victorians again.) Anthropologists must make for terrific basket cases.

Qualitative changes exist though, differences in kind, not number, that really do improve the game at a basic level. Incremental technical innovations can be oversold, but there are a few that really did change the human experience: agriculture, air travel, telephones, washing machines, that sort of thing. It's grown, and increasing the options for human happiness might be a good argument for increasing accurate knowledge in general. Better to devote energy to understanding how electricity works than to appease the proper gods, right? But there's more too. A counterargument is that technical progress has always increased the options for human misery as well. Another is that it rules out simpler, more isolated options.

Mostly we Americans accept obligations for all of the other things, continuing to do so even as productivity (measured per unit American anyway) increases. There is an ideal where productivity shoots to infinity (zero man-hours to make all the shit we feel we need), in which people would at least not want for things, feeling free to waste their days wreaking their philosophical havoc. Let's posit infinite energy, and look at fun literary experiments from Player Piano (suggesting it's deeply unfulfilling to violate our natures like that) to The Diamond Age (or that we'll find other ways to ensure inequality) to Steel Beach (or maybe find new ways to be a bunch of useless gadflies, so long as we can prevent our nearly omniscient helper from being too much like us) to The Cassini Division (when the means of production is trivial, Communism will finally work). I love reading this kind of stuff.

Modern America, Europe, Japan, all look great in terms of standard of living, at least if you take the self-affirming view that those regions tend to, and exclude people who don't fit the story. Here in modern America, a young black man was killed--a sadly unremarkable fact in itself--last week in a manner that managed to highlight, even in our cynical times, a class of people that half of this allegedly Enlightened country would still prefer to exile. (There's little doubt that the arrest, investigation, and the interpretation of "self-defense" would have been different had Mr. Martin been white.) A small wealthy group consolidates its power at the expense of most of the rest of us, fighting hard to define obligations which preserve their financial wealth, and dismantle any state mechanisms that share the wealth. And even the reasonably well-off waste their lives unhappily in front of a computer instead of in front of a hoe. As well, the U.S. is doing its level best to recreate the British experience in Afghanistan, inspired as much (and as little) by revulsion at their backward religion as the colonial British were. Even our staple crop, maize (which Igbo people also grew at the time of the novel), is another nutritionally inferior one, no matter how much we can creepily over-engineer the stuff. Our own times tend to overestimate themselves.

Happiness, satisfaction, contentment--these things are what really matter. Forming gigantic social groups may have allowed the technological development that has improved our chances of finding these things. On the other hand, advanced civilization also takes happiness away just fine.

The Future Stinks

I don't wish to alarm you, but I believe I've uncovered a massive conspiracy to change the very substance of the future, and it's going on right under our noses. Not just the path of the future, but the substance and savor of it, the very chemistry of our air. Their agents have been subtly tagging the world for decades, and I can only believe that their goal is the chemical control of our psychology (possibly working synergistically with fluoridated water), probably for engineered complacency. I mean, no one knows who Mr. Clean really is, but the signs of his agenda are there in plain sight. I bought some of his eponymous product last month, and it says right on the cover that he's now in league with "Gain," which you may have long assumed, like I did, was nothing more than a second-tier laundry product, but I now realize is a secret organization dedicated to remaking the world in its own stench. The Gain mafia is everywhere, laying the moon landings over with an artificial miasma, freshening up suspicious suicides, laying a scented cloud over the ruins of downtown Manhattan.

I bought some of the stuff for an experiment, what has so far passed for science in the new job, a quickie study to acquaint the ("senior scientist") noob over here with some of the materials and tests. It pitted me against the agents of Gain in a small enclosed room, and I had no chance over it. I left dizzy, sore-throated, and ready to do what they told me. (Gain has taken over air fresheners too, and there was a can of next to the toilet when I got home.) I've noticed it in other name-brand (not-Gain) laundry detergents too, and the smell of "clean" has clearly changed since I last remember accidentally slipping into the world of name-brand home scents. There's something more thin and acridly (instead of sweet and cloyingly) floral about it. More hops going on, and less lilac. More raw, wet wood and less sun-warmed dead plant matter. And yet even if it's considered on that spectrum, it's not any of those things, a creature entirely of its own that is far more revolting than any natural aroma I can pick out. It's a product (or at least a formulation) that's the vogue of the American chemical industry as it exists in 2012, and not in some other remembered time, and not anything very real.

It's well understood that characteristic smells are strongly associated with memory, and I can close my eyes and recreate, say, what my grandparents' houses smelled like. [For me, it's something that I tend to get more with places than stunning events (but there are a few there too).] The human tendency to do so is, I assume, the motivation of associating branded products with characteristic smells (and this Gain shit is extra nasty) in the first place, with teams of engineers and marketing pukes toiling to tie your sense of "clean" with their shitty prouct, with the product landscape evolvoing as they forever seek to differentiate themselves in the existing perfumatory space. But if stale beer and musty fruit and ancient house unfailingly makes me think "college!" such individualized reactions shouldn't be confused with collective ones. The interior of your first car is like the weather of scent memory, while the Gain mafia is trying to shift the olfactory climate. The fuckers.

Sometimes I try and imagine what the world smelled like before I lived in it. It must have gotten bad in crowded environments. I have the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as redolent with horseshit, tobacco, coal smoke, rot, and unwashed human ass. What was human company like when smokers munched cloves to cover themselves up, and before people believed in halitosis? It sounds appalling, especially as the decades wore on and the cities got crowded, and flushed of any plant odors at all. I was reading recently, how the misguided Gilded Age public moralists would roll through the New York slums and, based on their primitive understanding of hygiene and health, would spray entire neighborhoods down with carbolic acid. It's a chemical that comes up in the literature of that time, but I don't really know what carbolic acid smells like, and struggle to imagine what it's like to have the whole street reeking of it. And yet, I find some comfort in the antiseptic smell of hypochlorite bleach, I like the aroma of iodine, and ammonia doesn't offend me too much either.

The smell of the present, with its disturbingly tailored chemicals, from Gain, to Axe body wash, to McDonalds' propriety French fry reek, will look barbaric by future standards too, whatever standard they reach by then. It's barbaric even to my memories of the recent past.

Update (a week later): I didn't realize that carbolic acid is the same chemical as phenol. I know that one pretty well: it's vile, burny, stinky, and toxic. (Fuck you, the Gilded Age, buncha sickos.) It was a scent memory that tipped me off, too. I was working with the stuff yesterday, and realized it smelled like the "cow ointment" the old farmer up the street from my parents used to use, and I was led to wonder if it was the same stuff.

Review: The Ophiuchi Hotline, by John Varley

The Ophiuchi Hotline is one of John Varley's "Eight Worlds" novels, which share a common setting in which humanity has been exiled from earth to populate (gradually, and with difficulty) the moon and surrounding planets. The novels and shorts tend to focus on related themes: the meaning of life when it is indefinite; the meaning of sexuality when the body becomes easily reconfigurable; psychological exploration when boundaries of brain and body are expanded; of species survival in a hostile world; of the relationship between culture and the individual. Varley consistently does a difficult thing very well: creating social thought experiments in a society that is convincingly complex, with only the necessary minimum of sf kludges, and comprised of people who act like people, and he does it with interest and humor, with a real joy in the details, pointing out weird but sympathetic variations on human behavior. He's a bit less good at creating a setting which is consistent among the various stories, and even though the backstory and themes are very similar, The Ophiuchi Hotline has some big issues of chronology and emphasis with Steel Beach and the other books he wrote in the nineties to make the meaning very different, but maybe given the long intermission he took in writing, we can consider the later ones sort of a reprise.

It's a few centuries after human technology (and terrestrial humanity, very nearly, as a consequence) has been eradicated from the home planet. The marginal Lunar settlement was able to survive for awhile, but things only really started moving forward for the species when they were able to intercept and decode a broadcast, apparently from a good 70 light years out, beaming out endless technical information to get the hairless apes up to speed. This novel, quite unlike the others (in fact, I think the hotline isn't a feature of any of the other stories at all), puts a focus on the various extrasolar denizens of the universe, a brief light on what they're like, and what they want. The invaders, never observed but in this one, are cetacean-like species, incomprehensible consciousnesses that perceive the universe in some fundamentally different ways, endemic to gas-giant planets (including Jupiter), and the motive for wiping out people was sympathy for their ocean-dwelling cousins. The broadcasters of the hotline are different kinds of beings, and the mechanics of the plot are driven by a sudden change in the message: after 400 years of free information that got the last shreds of humanity to thrive across the solar system, they are now presenting us with the bill. I won't spoil the resolution very much, except to say that it kind of maps an ecology of life and culture in the broader universe, but not in a very resolute way, and it's not as satisfying as in the usual Eight Worlds story, where the invaders are mostly considered a fait accompli, and humanity is left to be its own worst enemy.

The plot itself is plenty people-centric. We're introduced to convicted felon Lilo, a scientific pioneer whose research has run afoul of the few hard and fast rules of the Eight Worlds society. The science of cloning and memory recording is a serviceable way to extend life of the individual, but the society has strict population rules, and even when everything goes, where outward morphology and internal plumbing hardly matters anymore, people remain squeamish about the philosophical consequences of duplicating yourself, and of losing whatever genetic heritage makes us uniquely human. Normally, death of the body gets you reset at an earlier point, from whenever you were last recorded, more or less like a video game death. For her crimes, however, Lilo faces a grim sentence, execution of her body and erasure of the record of her mind, and the opening of the book, presents the first of her desperate evasions of fate. The first dodge is sacrificing an illegal (fully sentient, fully Lilo) clone in her place, and it starts the exploration of lives bifurcated, survived, and lost. Outside the law now, she's conscripted to join a team of similarly shanghaied individuals to work on (it turns out) the mystery of the changed message from mankind's benefactors. The trip's a compelling one, and it presents plenty of details to explore a strange, but familiar world.

For someone who's presented with a strong sense of individuality and will to live, there must end up six or seven Lilos by the end, each, convincingly a little bit different in character (or differently influenced by her surroundings). It's a little bit cruel of the author to do this to her, and it makes for a disjointed reading experience as well, making it hard to connect to the character or the story, especially as she changes subtly. An intentional irony, and Varley emphasizes it further here and there by jumping the style: sometimes a point of view is presented as a journal entry, and occasionally as a deposition (but these don't distinguish a different Lilo, as is only very clear near the end). Some Lilos meet the respective interfering cultures, and the kaleidoscope of her character is also meant, in part, to tie in to the unexplainable way that Varley tells us the invaders experience time. For the confusing style, and for the more outward-looking (and, strangely enough, consequently weaker) emphasis, and for the unsatisfying resolution, I rate The Ophiuchi Hotline lower than most of the stories I've read in this setting, but it's still a thought-provoking read.

The Devils We Know

It gets to the point of cliché to observe this, but through every new election cycle I've tried to stay awake for, it's that much more obvious that we're meant to judge our candidates by some kind of cultural shorthand more than by their positions and views, or the historical evidence they present for pursuing them. [Would we have a beer with this guy is the dumb shorthand, but it's not like I'm a special flower, above all this. For me, I found that George Bush's dumbfuck fake cowboy routine made my teeth grind, but I was occasionally susceptible to more mature poses, such as Al Gore's or Barack Obama's ability to patiently speak in complete sentences containing polysyllabic words. It's not less an act, it's just one that is meant to appeal to knowledge-worker tools such as myself.] Expectations are justifiably low. The human concerns that most desperately require collective action (such as looming environmental crises, resource management plans, egregious class inequality, and the well-being of the non-elect) require a serious disruption of the existing power structure to achieve, and I have a cynic's faith that that it won't be achieved using that structure. Which isn't to say that any of these guys, when elected, won't turn that machine toward making things actively worse for the species. That cynic in me expects new and expanded wars as a matter of course, but the boundaries of the in-group, who is included and who isn't, is given as a sort of wildcard, and that's the place where our votes may actually help. I don't think the dominant ideologies will push any other big issue forward much, but if some of our would-be leaders really believe in turning back the clock on equality, then that's all too feasible.

Which brings us to Rick Santorum. There is much about that vindictive cracker that seriously bugs me, but I can't tell if he's only offering cues to a tribe that's not mine, or if he does in fact contain an extra level of evil in his tortured soul. It's not like he lacks for insincerity, and the anti-intellectualism isn't exactly unusual from what you get from team Republican, but when it comes to religious types with a taste for power, it can be hard to tell where the scam ends and the conviction begins. In the puckered little sphincter of Rick Santorum's mind, any belief is automatically justified because he sees himself as a godly sort. Last week's soundbite about the theology of radical environmentalism ("not real theology" says Rick) gets me to the core, as if any kind of theology should dictate environmental policy. Mixing religion and politics buys a super-secret mystical threat to underline every statement and action he may pursue: if you don't support this guy, if you believe anything other than what he says, then you don't just disagree with him, you sin. When it comes to Santorum, the froth doesn't even stop at vague righteousness. He's doubled down on the usual evangelical language, named names, called out God and the Adversary to perch on his shoulders and look down at you. Maybe it's the natural progression of all this "under god" shuck and jive, the crumbling wall between church and state has let through a refutation-proof justification for anything and everything when someone professes loudly enough that they have the big bearded dude on their side. Scary to consider Santorum a would-be theocrat.

Here's Rick back in 2008 (via, which got it from the Drudge report, of all places, which I ain't gonna link). Tremble in holy fear:

“While we all see all this as a great political conflict in warfare between the Obama camp and the McCain camp and culture wars, what Bishop Aquila put his finger on and what I think, I suspect those of you who are here understand, this is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war.”

“And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”

The thing is, I know this schtick. And I am a little resentful for the experience. I'm a little surprised to find it rendered as a Catholic thing: Guilt? The (negotiable) threat of hell? Those as Catholic menaces I know of, but Satan walking among us, tricking the naïve out of their souls, that's a lot more like the televangelist grift I grew up with. It was the early eighties, okay? And there was an active hysteria about corruption of young minds through rock music,* which took some purchase among the minds of worried church parents, and those lessons filtered down to us kids, about how Satan might be invited into our lives unknowingly: how participating in innocent-seeming secular rituals might be a subversive form of witchcraft; how the wrong music might subconsciously turn us to the dark side, through overt irreverence or secret backwards messages; how we might mutter the wrong figure of speech and actually end up selling our precious soul for a donut.

And y'know, it's funny. Although you'd routinely pray for sick people and so on, the best that the personal relationship with Jesus was really supposed to afford you was a sort of meditative serenity, a knowing of some kind. It was implied that Satan, meanwhile, if you gave up enough, could actually accomplish stuff in the material world. It was an insidious superstition to a little ambivalent type like me,** considering that (a) I had none of the private epiphanies that were supposed to be the route to Christian salvation, and (b) I did occasionally, more or less, accomplish stuff--did every step forward in my life come at the expense of some portion of my soul? Neither of these conditionals coule be disproven. There was no promise of miracles if I did believe, and no way was I going to take the gamble of dealing with the big red feller on purpose (although an attempt would have no doubt been instructively futile). Effects to my invisible soul from these purported bargains were ineffable by definition, and I could always fail any test with insufficient faith, which for me, was inevitable.

The most insightful thinking on obsessive-compulsive disorders that I've read (or heard about--I think it was an NPR segment actually) is that they are essentially a bodily expression of mental anxiety, and not centered on beliefs that compulsive actions will influence things. That seems like a correct understanding to me. It makes sense that concern about your kids' rebellion could get you obsessively overturning rocks to find a reinvented Satan living under them. And it made sense that an 11- or 12-year-old could find mortality such a cosmic affront that he'd resort to superstition, especially when the nicer adults I knew had bought in and sold it to me as pure truth.

As things scale up, I am undecided on whether puissant pissants such as the guiding stars of the Christian Coalition, or Rick Santorum, are merely in the business of transferring their doubt and superstition to the public because they're in a position to do so, like parents worried about their kids' music habits or if they are exploiting the religious fears of the little peaople. Are they cynically assuaging the legions of OCD-style moralists out in the world to make them follow, or are they simply speaking the language of shared anxieties? Maybe paternalism is just a viable route to power, and god knows it's been tried. I am not sure those things are exclusive, or whether the reasons matter. It'll be hell on those of us who have grown up.


*I actually must have been around 14 or 15 for this anecdote (my daughter's age!), which tells me that the desire for belief went on longer than I prefer to think. I can place it because my brother had a Guns n Roses T-shirt on, skulls on a cross, which puts him at about 13 and the year about 1987. The poor kid ended up being the perfect person from the crowd to draw out and shame. The lecture was in a church basement somewhere, and we were brought there out of a very sincere concern that some kids from the youth group didn't quite bring themselves to renounce Led Zeppelin, etc., who were, we were told, indeed proselytizing on behalf of Satan himself. Until this point, the faithful people that I'd encountered had been very honest and well-meaning, good examples, and this con artist might have been the first person in my consciousness to finally cross the streams of Selling Something and Good People, and it was a big turning point. To this day, the motivations puzzle me, but most likely, it was a paid seminar, and this fuckhead was the spiritual equivalent of the unaccountable consultant uselessly instructing corporate drones to think outside the box or some other such happy horseshit.

I remember that the course opened with a quote (from Nietzsche?), that I've since been unable to find. Something about how if you wish to control a people, you first must control their music. It's an aphorism that I'd in fact prefer to locate, because like much that's used to mislead, there's an element of truth to it. Revolutions and movements have all had their theme songs, as do nations, and the twentieth century tapped some of that stuff intentionally. It's an interesting theme to riff on, but there was, to the point of the talk, no devil that was whispering in the ears of rock and roll musicians to further his nefarious ends. This guy played us kids on a great big false syllogism.

Not to say there wasn't explicitly anti-Christian music out there at the time, not that I'd expect any promoter putting himself on the side of Jesus H. Christ to address very honestly the various reason that it was written or would sell. The thing is, he drew that kind of iconography down so far as to include anyone who'd ponder spirituality at all, lumping in any reasonably honest disagreement or question or disillusionment, and, because no countervailing discourse could be tolerated, everything not on the overt God list got lumped in with Slayer. (Seriously, Hall and fucking Oates was one of the bands he tried to make us worry about.) Call it guilt by association maybe. Even the most negative stuff, my adult self realizes, was probably only ever meant ironically, or as sincere criticism. And what wasn't those things was most likely a marketing gimmick, those bands manipulating their audience's irreverence just as cynically as this guy who was peddling Christian angst. I love me a heartfelt dissent, but I tend to remain unimpressed with rebellion that's done without honesty or humor or artistry. Those fuckers are making a different buck, but they're grifters too.

At the end of the seminar, we were all asked to close our eyes. Everyone who's accepted Christ raise your hands. I wonder, as he counted, what he thought. Probably it was just gauging success of the lecture, how long could he keep up the racket. Maybe there was some personal satisfaction at conversion, thinking he had worked the audience, maybe turning them to what he saw as the good. My own eyes were shut tight, and I was trying hard, but not succeeding, to accept this line of crackpottery, almost certainly for the last time. I wonder how many of my peers kept 'em open. I wonder what they thought as they did, if they were wise enough to realize the crowd was getting played. I wonder who raised their hands.

**Even today, I tend to view the world with a great deal of ambivalence, coming to conclusions only after a very lengthy devil's advocacy (so to speak). Eventually, it gave way to a naturalist perspective, and I hope I've become the right sort of skeptic as a result. I had an ear for profundity as a kid too, a need to find deep meaning in existence, and I really wanted to believe in a higher order of things. In those days, Middle Earth was even more compelling than Christian salvation, and it's maybe a good thing no one was telling me that was real. I am fortunate that I had some good anti-authoritarian influences, but there was no one at that age to really show me how beauty and depth is compatible with empiricism, and I think it's kind of a shame that I didn't find any of that reading until much later.

Ilium

Like everything else imbued with human associations, geography is a funny thing: we have ways of sowing it with little landmines just in the course of living our life, nostalgic deathtraps that seem to grow in power the longer we ignore them, especially in those places that struggle to ever change. I had a trip to New York the other week, to the Saratoga Springs area, near which my current employers operate a mill. It is a stretch that is not by any means The City, but is also not upstate in a meaningful sense, and while New York has plenty of nowheres to find yourself in the middle of, it is close enough to a handful of somewheres to almost count. And there’s something additionally lonely in the nightlife of a tourist town off-season. Everything’s open, but no one’s there.

If you ever need to drive from Massachusetts to eastern New York, you can’t do better than to take the length of route 2. Even as a guy who resents every motherfucking minute of my life that I waste piloting a motor vehicle, I love this particular drive. It’ll take you up through the Berkshires, around the quasi-famous hairpin turn, descending into artsy Williamstown, and up again through mountains in New York. The vistas feel local and private, not open, made up of imposing tree-covered grades across which the road is compelled to switch back and forth in order to ascend, each turn opening up to find you in the thick of more wooded slopes. Where a view does open up on the peaks, it’s inevitably affixed with the quarter-century-old ruins of motels and kitsch shops, abandoned from a time when people did more budget sightseeing. I guess even the leaf-peepers can’t be arsed to go across that way, and something in that appeals to me. If I was in a field where I could make a living while avoiding people, then, if it wasn’t the Green or White mountains, or the Litchfield Hills, then I’d live in a place like this. It’s the trees and the hillls.

It’s a lovely way come back from the Saratoga area, especially in a solitary mood, but I couldn’t return along 2 without traversing the old minefields. I went to school in Troy NY, and while on one level I enjoyed it, and although it felt like one of the few life decisions I was able to make that was right, I also managed to plant a disproportionate number of depth charges there, and that town changes slowly enough to keep nostalgia alive, even if the university continues its quixotic effort to "improve." The trip took me right through the heart of memory, and I went so far as to stop at the student union to take a leak and hopefully steal a couple minutes of wireless access, but apparently the latter privilege only comes with a thirty thousand yearly subscription. Relieving myself is harder to prevent, I guess. The trip went badly, emotion-wise, dredging up regrets that I hardly knew I had in the day, and I am in a mind to take a big old piss on the place, instead of one discreetly within its borders, as if it bears some fault for how my life has gone.

In his books, Kurt Vonnegut often referred to the town of Ilium, a sort of Mecca of American innovation and urbanity that has evaded its actual namesake for at least a century. Real-life Ilium is that rare university town that suffers little of the prestige of the couple or three institutions within its borders. Up the river there’s the Schenectady where Proteus Steinmetz worked to define electrical engineering, where even now, GE still hasn’t outsourced its R&D headquarters. Down the river, there’s the goddamn capital. In between, you got a whole lot of depressing Trojanness, as if it were rebuilt, but only just barely, after the last time it burned down 150 years ago. Back on the Fray, I had a conversation a few years ago with a guy who went to RPI fifty years before I did. Troy was, he recalled, a shantytown then too, and it must have been quite a defiant one to suck so thoroughly in the middle of a technological hotbed in boom times, supplying it with engineers even. I mean, Wikipedia tells me that it was a prosperous town once, but that was over a century ago, sometime way back before Big Steel went to Pennsylvania. It’s been sliding inexorably since. It’s got to be why Vonnegut felt he had to code-name the place, to fictionalize the Capital District enough to write out its problem middle child.

Longtime readers of this blog will notice a recurring fascination I have with New England’s midlist factory towns, as I’ve lived or passed through them, trying to piece the cultural character based on its vintage industry. It seems like I always end up in or around one of them, and I give you the likes of Waterbury and Torrington CT (brass), Willimantic CT and Lowell MA (textiles), Leominster MA Naugatuck CT (polymers). They’ve all as good as left, the industries, and the cities are filled with a different selection of immigrants servicing the different economic niches that are available nowadays. They’re similar enough historically, ethnically, and geographically, and make for interesting compare and contrast exercises. Do the cultural differences come from the nature of the work? Or maybe it’s the titans that once governed it. I still can’t answer that question well. You find all these old mills still perched on their now-less-polluted riverbanks, anti-jewels set in pastoral velvet, monuments in smoke-scorched red brick (America is only so old) to more barbarously productive ages. The rivers were convenient as drains or raw materials or (depending on how far back you might go) power, but the surrounding areas stayed rural for a long time, and you can head out to the outskirts of any of these places, and find, even now, a couple farms that aren’t quite given over to burbclaves. The vogue for the factories themselves is to renovate them into designer lofts, and the attendant railroads have been dismantled for scrap and landscaping.

My immediate and lasting impression of Troy was as a mirror of Waterbury, which is more or less where I grew up. (In one of the suburbs, itself an old factory town. I am more familiar with the edges of Waterbury, where my grandparents lived.) And although they’d look pretty comparable in a slide-by-slide comparison of their greater and lesser parts, there’s something about Troy that makes it seem so much more fundamentally shabby and depressing, like it just stopped trying. (I mean, it does have the universities, which is an incredible point in its favor, and eastern New York is almost as nice as eastern Connecticut, but these assets don’t seem to buoy the place up.) Maybe a technical college town just invites weary cynicism, because after all, who’s more grouchy and depressed than your average engineer? Waterbury, if you read the local paper, supports some sort of vindictive, authoritarian pride of place, but at least it’s something. The area is churchier, which helps the architecture some, and it has a downtown stretch that you’d be tempted to stroll around. When you drive past Waterbury, you go past the hospital, the iconic brick clocktower, and then, across the river, the south end of town manifests as white houses popping up through the trees. Troy, on the other hand, crouches on the side of the Hudson like a surly pile of rubble, like a rusting hulk, sucking away your hopes before you even cross the bridge. Yes, the alma mater rises tastefully on the hill, a pearl on the midden, and for reasons of its own, it’s been dwarfing the iconic green copper roofs with a succession of 1970s-style brutalism and zippy 1950s-style sci-fi palaces. The town itself has some notoriety for its preserved 19th century buildings, but not, like these towns east of the Berkshires, in the form of big, imposing industrial cathedrals, and more of the closed-in and oppressive variety that recalls the squalid living in old New York City that you couldn’t escape even with great wealth. Troy is a shithole’s shithole.

Although I have to say that to this day, I have never known a place in Waterbury where I’d like to get a beer, and those little niches of mordant hospitality were my absolute favorite part of living in Ilium. The place wasn’t so far gone that there weren’t places of peace and humor if you needed them, and there’s something satisfying and personal about being one to get that. And sure, the outskirts got interesting in one or two directions. It often occurs to me that maybe I’m the reason the place made such a weird impression. God knows I’m better tuned to love/hate than to uncomplicated love. Fucking regret. Seriously.