Grand Rapids

I’ve watched this twice now, and both times it made me tear up a little. (I’m a sap, and I know the song is trite beyond description, but I know all the words). The thing that’s actually sad isn’t the tragic death of the Big Bopper in a plane crash, but the fact that the initial impetus to make this video is a sad truth: Grand Rapids is a dying city in a dying state in a dying empire.

Although the production is excellent (what are they blowing up on that bridge?), I fail to see what you’re supposed to experience about Grand Rapids. Unless you know the city well already, who would even guess that was where this was shot until the camera whizzes up into the stratosphere at the very end? I didn’t.

Michigan, where people get arrested for growing vegetable gardens, is one of two states to have lost population in the 2000s. The auto industry might have been spared a gruesome death, but you can’t arrest a half-century of deindustrialization with a tough union contract and a bailout. They’re in trouble.

I have no doubt that quality of life is higher there than in a lot of places, and that the eager participants in the video were genuinely happy to be part of this, but the fact that they need to do it at all says everything. I would never want to live in China, and I wouldn’t want to live under a banner that says something like “Civilize Our City, and Make Yourself a Citizen” or whatever their propaganda du jour might be, but I doubt you’d ever see something like this there.

It would be nice for a mid-size Midwestern city to become a tech haven for wind turbines that float on the ocean and harness wave power, with their rotors bejewelled in photovoltaic cells. They could de-acifidify seawater so the corals don’t bleach and, WALL-E like, condense the garbage in the North Pacific Gyre and they would never need replacement, ever.

 

“I’m not a Democrat, I just care about my family’s health”

The New York Times has certainly imploded, but every Sunday they have one very long piece of outstanding journalism, typically limning another depressing facet of our imperial decline. This week’s dead tree presents an odyssey through the natural gas boom, specifically the vast amounts of radioactive waste that are now found in drinking water all over the country, much of it in western Pennsylvania. “Hydrofracking,” the method used to recover tiny bubbles of gas from the surrounding shale, is apparently pretty messy.

One region of Texas has elevated rates of asthma but regulators can’t or won’t dissect the cause of the problem because “the area has had high air pollution for a while.” Local mom Kelly Gant’s reaction to this charming catch-22? “I’m not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist, or anything like that.” She just wants to look after her family.

In other words, to have any standing as a complainant against giant corporate interests that are poisoning her kids, she first has to tick off the full roster of illegitimate groups to which she doesn’t belong. It’s pretty depressing to think that the air has to be cleared that way before you can gripe about who’s befouling the air.

On the one hand, this is par for the conservative course. Nothing causes the right-wing to change its tune like seeing the effects of their ideology on their own. Of course Dick Cheney has been pro-same sex marriage; his daughter is a lesbian. Of course Nancy Reagan is an outspoken advocate of stem-cell research; Ronald Reagan died of Alzheimer’s. Maybe this Kelly Gant didn’t think too hard about this or that company spewing toxic vapors, because pollution is just an unfortunate byproduct of job creation, or maybe not. But disavowing any liberal label in order to demand something as basic as that is a sure sign of something.

What’s especially surreal is how far backwards we’ve been catapulted. I’m sure when the Clean Air Act became law–signed by Richard Nixon, more or less the anti-hippie–its critics prophesied doom for American industry, but it is simply not the case that to ask for breathable air was to be identified by any particular label, so much so that insisting on the very opposite is necessary.

If her entire family was gunned down at the mall, would she have to say through her tears and widow’s veil, “I’m not one of those anti-gun nuts, I just don’t want my family shot execution-style”? Can the right’s capture of public discourse be so advanced that the very term “clean air” is now suspect? If this issue intensifies, will it be shunted into the same meat-grinder as every other issue, to where we have ordinary human beings favoring clean air and big companies and their astro-turf groups rhapsodizing unregulated “liberty oxygen”? If clean air=liberals=freaks, then you, as patriotic Americans or good Christians or just plain normal people, ought to know whom to trust.

I can’t help but start tracing everything back to imperial collapse. At some point, certain industries will have commissioned enough long-term studies to know that we’re at the point of no return, so get what you can now and hope to ride out the catastrophe to come. If I were wealthy and privy to certain information, as, say, the heads of certain energy companies, I might press for the total repeal of all twentieth century progressive legislation, too. Better to face the inevitable with unshackled hands, even if it accelerates the rush towards the end. Cause and effect have united as one. We’re on our last gasps–which may or may not even be breathable.

The World Might Be Collapsing, but Here’s A Bunch of Good Things, Including Cookies

For today, I refuse to get worked up about cartoons in the New York Post where the punch line is apparently “Black people are monkeys” or how depressing it is for the Obama Administration to continue some egregiously malevolent Bush anti-terrorism policies or how Goldman Sachs executives are openly stealing bailout money or how Detroit will have a population of 500 by 2020.

Here are links to nice things.

First, the EPA may regulate carbon dioxide.  Really, they just have to or we’re all fucked.  This is technically a minor good thing that relates to a strongly terrible thing, but we’ll take it.

Second, NYU students have occupied a floor of the Kimmel “student center.”  I got my entire secondary education at that school, and Kimmel is a hideous trainwreck whose real purpose as the student union at a university with no campus is to boot students out for donor luncheons and special events, because NYU is actually a vast real estate empire with auxiliary teaching duties it maintains to keep up appearances.

I was on the speech and debate team and my freshman year (’99-’00) we had a practice space and an office — the bad old days.  By the time I was in grad school (’04-’05), I had to coach the kids in an open lounge where everyone was talking and moving around.  The more buildings NYU erects or conquers, the less space there seems to be.  They’re like Robert Moses, building highways to eradicate traffic.

The students’ demands are a greate combination of considerate, radical and achievable.  Opening Bobst Library to the general public is especially progressive.  As of now, it’s a hermetically sealed Borg cube perched at the corner of Bloomberg Square Park.  (When you graduate, you’re permitted to return only once.)

Third, the inebriated fun of the Bay to Breakers race might not go the way of Halloween in the Castro.  (I realize the possible laziness of linking to the NYT from SF about an SF event, but googling it and searching wordpress didn’t come up with anything better).

Finally, delicious things.  I want to make this.

And I’ve been making chocolate chocolate chip cookies compulsively since finishing the lemonade cleanse, and I think I’ve achieved jouissance.  I follow this recipe with some variations.

First: instead of 1/4 tsp of salt I add a heaping 1/2 tsp.  I swear nothing comes out tasting salty and the ability of salt to intensify the taste of everything is particularly effective with the butter.

Second: double the vanilla, from 2 tsp to 4.  This enables you to cut back on the sugar by maybe 1/8 – 1/4 cup.

Third, I also substitute some brown sugar for a bit of the white, so that the total amount of sugar is a little more than 1 1/4 cups, of which at least half a cup is brown.

Fourth, nuke the butter till half of it is liquified.  You really need to watch the microwave; no multi-tasking during this part!  I like to compare sticks of butter melting to the implosion of the Twin Towers.  Once it’s clear that the FDNY are all dead, stop the microwave.

Fifth, mix it by hand.  It’s not hard, you have fewer utensils to clean and I really believe that a heterogeneous mixture–i.e., with little lumps of butter–is the shit.  If you can’t tell, I love butter.

Sixth, refrigerate the batter until it’s as cold as the fridge.  Sure, it’s a pain in the ass waiting and having stiffer batter, but if you’re like me, you actually make cookies as an excuse to eat raw dough anyway.

Just ate the last cookie.

The Fuck-You’s are Starting Up

Aside from a Justice Department that tortures people because they believe the president is some kind of Sun King, there’s probably nothing worse than an EPA that actively works with Big Coal to destroy the environment.

I can see two trends.  One, Bush uses his remaining month and a half to issue fuck-you’s with varying consequences that will at the very least serve as annoying distractions for the Obama team.

And two, whenever anyone brings this up, people will shout, “Marc Rich!  Clinton pardoned Marc Rich because he wanted money for his library!”  Which was transparently corrupt.  But Eric Holder was a force behind it and he’s now going to be the Attorney General, so while hundreds of miles of streams are buried under slurry forever, the moral of the story will be “Bush Shady, Clinton and Obama Shady Too.”  Greaaat.