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Opinion
Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws
Philip Seymour Hoffman's death was not on the bill.
If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily, we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell.
But Philip Seymour Hoffman? A middle-aged man, a credible and decorated actor, the industrious and unglamorous artisan of Broadway and serious cinema? The disease of addiction recognises none of these distinctions. Whilst routinely described as tragic, Hoffman's death is insufficiently sad to be left un-supplemented in the mandatory posthumous scramble for salacious garnish; we will now be subjected to mourn-ography posing as analysis. I can assure you that there is no as yet undiscovered riddle in his domestic life or sex life, the man was a drug addict and his death inevitable.
A troubling component of this sad loss is the complete absence of hedonism. Like a lot of drug addicts, probably most, who "go over", Hoffman was alone when he died. This is an inescapably bleak circumstance. When we reflect on Bieber's Louis Vuitton embossed, Lamborghini cortege it is easy to equate addiction with indulgence and immorality. The great actor dying alone denies us this required narrative prang.
The reason I am so non-judgmental of Hoffman or Bieber and so condemnatory of the pop cultural tinsel that adorns the reporting around them is that I am a drug addict in recovery, so like any drug addict I know exactly how Hoffman felt when he "went back out". In spite of his life seeming superficially great, in spite of all the praise and accolades, in spite of all the loving friends and family, there is a predominant voice in the mind of an addict that supersedes all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.
Addiction is a mental illness around which there is a great deal of confusion, which is hugely exacerbated by the laws that criminalise drug addicts.
If drugs are illegal people who use drugs are criminals. We have set our moral compass on this erroneous premise, and we have strayed so far off course that the landscape we now inhabit provides us with no solutions and greatly increases the problem.
This is an important moment in history; we know that prohibition does not work. We know that the people who devise drug laws are out of touch and have no idea how to reach a solution. Do they even have the inclination? The fact is their methods are so gallingly ineffective that it is difficult not to deduce that they are deliberately creating the worst imaginable circumstances to maximise the harm caused by substance misuse.
People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even remotely deterred by prohibition. What prohibition achieves is an unregulated, criminal-controlled, sprawling, global mob-economy, where drug users, their families and society at large are all exposed to the worst conceivable version of this regrettably unavoidable problem.
Countries like Portugal and Switzerland that have introduced progressive and tolerant drug laws have seen crime plummet and drug-related deaths significantly reduced. We know this. We know this system doesn't work – and yet we prop it up with ignorance and indifference. Why? Wisdom is acting on knowledge. Now we are aware that our drug laws aren't working and that alternatives are yielding positive results, why are we not acting? Tradition? Prejudice? Extreme stupidity? The answer is all three. Change is hard, apathy is easy, tradition is the narcotic of our rulers. The people who are most severely affected by drug prohibition are dispensable, politically irrelevant people. Poor people. Addiction affects all of us but the poorest pay the biggest price.
Philip Seymour Hoffman's death is a reminder, though, that addiction is indiscriminate. That it is sad, irrational and hard to understand. What it also clearly demonstrates is that we are a culture that does not know how to treat its addicts. Would Hoffman have died if this disease were not so enmeshed in stigma? If we weren't invited to believe that people who suffer from addiction deserve to suffer? Would he have OD'd if drugs were regulated, controlled and professionally administered? Most importantly, if we insisted as a society that what is required for people who suffer from this condition is an environment of support, tolerance and understanding.
The troubling message behind Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, which we all feel without articulating, is that it was unnecessary and we know that something could be done. We also know what that something is and yet, for some traditional, prejudicial, stupid reason we don't do it.
• Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton, is petitioning for an inquiry into UK drug laws: sign here.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Janet Yellen and I were taught to revere capitalism. But it's a failing system
The growing disconnect between the Fed's policies and people's lives means we need to start exploring economic alternatives
Janet Yellen, the United States' Federal Reserve's new Chair, and I were graduate economics students around the same time at Yale University. The professor who shaped the macroeconomics we learned was James Tobin. He taught us to be Keynesian economists: that is, to accept capitalism as the sole object and focus of our studies, to celebrate it as the best possible system, and to preserve it against its own serious faults. Keynesian economics teaches that to secure capitalism's blessings requires systematic government intervention in the workings of the economy.
Yale doctorates during those years certified that we had learned how the monetary and fiscal policies offered by Keynesianism comprised the government's optimum tools of economic intervention. Central banks (in the US, this meant the Federal Reserve) would administer monetary policy. This meant manipulating the quantity of money in circulation and interest rates. Legislatures and executives would administer fiscal policies, namely, manipulating tax rates and government expenditures. The goals of both monetary and fiscal policies would be to prevent private capitalism's instability (its recurring swings between sharp upturns and downturns), or at least to ensure the downturns were short and shallow (unlike the long and deep 1930s Great Depression that inspired Keynes's work).
Successive Chairs of the Federal Reserve sought to manipulate the nation's monetary system to those ends, so far as possible. Whatever their party affiliation (Bernanke is a Republican, while Yellen is a Democrat) they coordinate their monetary policies with the fiscal policies pursued by the sitting president and Congress. Indeed, policy differences have been limited and rarely arose among them in their shared quest to manage capitalism's inherent and immensely costly instability. Thus, from the standpoint of economics, the two parties are better understood as two wings of one capitalist party in the US sharing virtually dictatorial political influence.
The Federal Reserve has needed to "manage" the monetary system also by bailing out collapsed financial firms on occasion, and much of the entire industry since 2007 (at an historically unprecedented clip costing trillions). Nor did the Fed ever prevent capitalism's cycles. The official downturn counter/measurer, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), lists a dozen capitalist swoons since the end of the Great depression: on average, one every five years.
What the Fed claims is that its interventions likely made downturns less awful than they might have been. Bernanke the Republican Fed Chair aimed for that, Yellen the Democrat agreed as Vice-Chair, and now she will continue to aim for that as the new Chair. If ever the phrase "same-old, same-old" applied, it does so in this non-event of musical Chairs at the Fed.
Thus, after Yale, Janet Yellen and I took different paths in our approaches and experiences working within US capitalism. Ever the liberal Democrat, she endorses capitalism despite its cyclical and colossal waste of resources and the human tragedy this imposes across the globe. No courses at Yale troubled Yellen or myself with any analyses of how exploitation lies at the core of capitalist production. We were never taught that the majority of industrial workers produce more value for employers than what employers pay them. We were prevented from encountering arguments examining how this idea of "more" (or, in economic terms, of a surplus) contributed fundamentally to the systemic inequalities that define capitalist societies.
No irritating Marxism was allowed to disturb our deep, or the unquestioned political tranquility that professors embedded in Yale's graduate economics curriculum. The celebration of the free competitive market, although often extended rhetorically to the free marketplace of competing ideas, was suspended in the case of Marxian concepts and analysis of capitalist economies. The latter was systematically excluded at Yale, as at most US universities then and ever since. No free marketplace of ideas there.
Like Bernanke, Yellen will do her job as best as she can. No thought about alternatives to capitalism will likely occur to her. She and the Fed's board of governors will consider no policy responses to the current system's grotesque flaws and injustices that entail changing the system. No free marketplace of competing ideas at the Fed either. She will, like her predecessors, transfer the deep political conservatism of her graduate economics education in the US to her policies.
Critics have attacked the Fed since its inception a century ago because of its structural (and extraordinarily cozy) entwining of government regulation and the banking industry it presumably regulated. Just as important, however, are the conceptual continuities between mainstream economics as academic discipline and as governing policy ideology. What threatens those continuities now is the emerging dissent to mainstream academia and the widening disconnect between the Fed's policy universe and most people's lives.
The global capitalism into which Janet Yellen and I graduated with new PhDs in the 1970s proceeded ever since to illustrate growing inequality of income and wealth across and within most economies, which has contributed to mounting social unrest, conflict, wars, and unspeakable social tragedies. Since 2007, the global economic meltdown has reminded everyone of capitalism's vulnerability to the kinds of economic catastrophes that marked the 1930s. Gradually before and quickly since 2007, interest in Marxian and other critiques of capitalism and in socialist as well as other alternative economic systems has been rekindled.
Yellen and I had the same economics education and have experienced the same global capitalist development since, yet we have responded very differently. The same systems generated contradictory outcomes. Capitalism's dysfunctions have led me to appreciate and independently learn what Marxian economics has to teach me, outside of Yale's mainstream economics. Yellen and her cohorts avoided and bypassed all that.
Convinced that we can do better than capitalism, many have analyzed the incipient alternatives emerging from capitalism's deficiencies, such as cooperatives, workers' self-directed enterprises and others. For us, Occupy Wall Street represents a powerful surge against capitalism, yet another sign of the waning tolerance for a system that Yellen will try to preserve.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Excuse me, but we shouldn't be moving on from West Virginia's chemical spill
Authorities in West Virginia declared the water of 300,000 residents affected by last month's chemical spill safe to drink on 14 January, just five days after the incident. Since then, a few things have happened. Stop me if you've heard them before (but I doubt you have).
1. On 15 January, the Centers for Disease Control issued a statement advising pregnant women to ignore the state's OK.
2. On 17 January, Freedom Industries, the owner of the plant involved, filed for bankruptcy, a move calculated to protect them from the financial consequences of the spill.
3. On 21 January, Freedom Industries admitted the presence of a second toxic chemical in the spill, a proprietary mixture of polyglycol ethers known as PPH.
4. On 29 January, a member of the state's water quality board told a panel that he could "guarantee" residents are still breathing fumes from that formaldehyde.
5. On 30 January, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, asked the company in charge of that region's water supply for another 20 truckloads of bottled water – on top of the 13 truckloads they already donated.
This may prove prescient. On 31 January, Freedom Industries reported a second spill. But not to worry, they assured the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), "None of the stuff got into the river." DEP itself was less-than-clear on what happened, one official telling the Charleston Gazette:
It's kind of like a lot of the piping up there … It's got some groundwater in it. We don't know where it is coming from.
On a related note: 1 February brought the news that the DEP never reviewed Freedom Industries' pollution prevention plans in the first place.
This seems like juicy stuff to me. Yet the story, as the national media sees it, is over. On Friday, MSNBC killed a segment with activist Erin Brockovich on the topic in order to devote more airtime to Chris Christie's traffic problems.
To anyone that follows environmental news, this arc is familiar: A human-interest story with an environmental pollution angle breaks through the media chatter. Cable news outlets roll clips of distraught residents. Footage the damage unspools (with or without stomach-turning images of dead or injured wildlife). There is a news conference of dubious utility. Investigative reporters find evidence of previous infractions of safety and environmental regulations. Politicians declare the need for hearings and more strict enforcement. Volunteers show up to help. Sometimes there's a concert.
Then we move on. We move on despite the fact that the chemical leak was, in some ways, an improvement on the status quo for West Virginians: at least the residents knew there were questions about the water piped into their homes. Most of the time, most West Virginians simply live in the toxic aftermath of the daily release of not-quite-as-verifiably deadly chemicals. The mix of air, water, and soil pollution that is a matter of course in coal mining counties means that children born in those areas have a 26% higher risk of developing birth defects than those born in non-coal-mining counties. That's not from drinking water that's been declared contaminated, that's from drinking water, breathing air, and playing on ground they've been told is safe.
The underlying crisis behind most environmental tragedies is the part of the story that we rarely hear about. Our attention is shifting away from chemical spill, as it has from mine collapses and explosions, from oil spills, and, often, from natural disasters as well. Ironically, it's natural disasters – the ones with the least tangible connection to the actions of specific individuals – that manage to sustain the most interest among the national media. I am pretty sure this is because no one lobbies on Hurricane Sandy's behalf. Tornados are not considered to be good Sunday talk show guests.
That the coal industry spends upwards of $14m a year for the past four years on lobbying efforts – not including the $14m they spent just last year on direct contributions to campaigns – partially explains why our attention is so fleeting. It also explains why the disasters are so bad.
The latter consequence stems from a distressingly simple pattern of cause and effect: for 200 years, and most particularly during the last two decades, the coal industry (and the energy lobby in general) has been as much, if not more, effective and industrious in its influence on politicians than it has been in generating electricity.
Our country has grown a vast and complex regulatory and financial support system for cheap, dirty energy: tax breaks, loopholes and the like. Researchers estimate that if Americans has to pay the real cost for each kilowatt-hour, factoring in hidden costs to communities' health, economy, ecology, we would pay three times as much than we do today. The energy lobby's approach to influence peddling, on the other hand, has systematic elegance of a see-saw: They put money into politicians' pockets, and they get legislative favors back. Indeed, it has been 38 years since Congress passed any law that had a substantive impact on the use of toxic chemicals. To put that in context: in 1975, we were still using asbestos in our walls, you could smoke on airplanes and the food packagers did not have to report or monitor pesticide residue levels on fresh produce.
I have a more tenuous explanation for the transient and vague concern of political reporters over environmental matters. I believe it probably has something to do with how terrified most of us are of science, which is full of numbers and big words.
I should emphasize that many reporters do fantastic work in this field. And by "many" I mean about a dozen. Two days after the Freedom Industries spill, the New York Times announced that it was dismantling its environmental reporting team; that left 15 dedicated environmental reporters among the nation's top five papers. Some context: across the industry and worldwide, the Society for Environmental Journalists has 1,400 members. Last year, almost twice that many reporters attended the Conservative Political Action Conference alone – I was one of them.
CPAC attracts journalists primarily because it's considered an early indicator presidential horserace odds; I wish we pundits would bring to science the same intrepid attitude we have toward reporting on those fuzzy facts. Indeed, the same certainty with which pundits cite poll numbers could be applied to scientific findings with even more confidence – journal studies are peer-reviewed and designed to have reproducible results. That polls can be wrong, or the mood of the electorate shift rapidly, is simply acknowledged with a wink: "The only poll the matters is the one on Election Day." In the world of scientific investigation, and for environmental studies in particular, every day is Election Day: you can see the proof of their conclusions all around you.
When it comes to the West Virginia chemical leak, one might suppose that the Washington Beltway has insulated the chattering class from the stink: not just the because of the bubble of self-absorption the Beltway represents, but because of the sheer distance between West Virginia and Washington DC. It's about a five-hour drive. New Jersey is just an hour closer, but the shared obsession with process politics (and Bruce Springsteen) makes it seem like next door.
Still, West Virginia is closer than DC reporters might think, and its toxic water may yet wind up in the ice that clinks during Washington cocktail parties. Many of the chemicals that coal production sloughs off into the air, water, and land are heavy metals. They don't decompose with time and instead migrate and accumulate; what was in West Virginia's soil can eventually contaminate suburban Arlington's rain.
Last month, the supreme court heard arguments about an Environmental Protection Agency regulation designed to address just that: the "Cross-State Air Pollution Rule", which is exactly what it sounds like. At issue is the way the EPA apportions clean-up and directs policy changes; in the federally designated "Ozone Transport Region", a select group of states whose power-plants causes other states' to fail federal air-quality standards would have to submit to the EPA's authority in fixing the problem.
The rule was successfully challenged by "upwind" states at the appellate level and the Supreme Court's predilection is unusually inscrutable: With Justice Alito having recused himself, it's possible that the decision will end in a tie between its traditionally left and right wings. In the case of a tie, the appellate decision will stand.
At the time, Governor Tomblin celebrated the appellate court's ruling: "It's time for Washington to stop trying to tell us how to run our coal mines," he said. He meant "the White House," not Washington, of course. Because in Washington, they still don't care.
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Obama: Jekyll & Hyde on energy
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama once again tried to reconcile the split personality of his energy policy. On the one hand, the President clearly stated his Dr. Jekyll…
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We face being buried under an avalanche of Chinese science
I was chatting with a friend and collaborator based in Germany recently about the completion of a new building that his university was constructing, dedicated to biomedical imaging sciences. I was sharing my own exhilaration about the serious investment that our government, regional agencies and the EU were making in graphene research at the University of Manchester. At some point in our conversation it became apparent that as extraordinary as the investments in our institutions were, they did not even come close to what we had both experienced from recent trips in China.
Our conclusion was that "for each floor refurbishment in Europe, a new building is built is China, and for each new building in Europe, a new campus is built in China …"
The magnitude of R&D investment in China is unprecedented and well-documented. Nanoscience is a strategically important field in the eyes of Chinese policymakers: a poster-child of new-age, high-tech China. The volume of scientific data generated and published by Chinese laboratories in all areas of nanotechnology has been increasing exponentially.
What I fear is that we all – Asians and westerners alike – run the risk of getting buried under this avalanche of manic scientific output and the oversimplification of capitalist principles applied to science in an artificially consumerist – yet not truly capitalist – society. Let me try to explain.
The key question is whether this surge of research activity in China is going to be translated into industrial leadership, economic growth and benefit to humankind. The assumption of the Chinese ruling class is based on the "American paradigm" of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, that tremendous investment in academic, governmental, military and industrial R&D will lead to world domination in science and business innovation, creating both wealth and power. It is widely believed that Chinese officials, and the majority of the Chinese people, are eager to challenge if not take over world leadership from the US.
There are, however, a few fundamental differences between the United States of the 1950s and China in the 2010s that go well beyond the realms of nanoscience.
First and foremost, after the ravages of fascism and war, the United States of the 1950s was perhaps the most welcoming, positive, liberal and liberating environment worldwide. It opened its capitalist gates to everyone with ambition, vision and creative energy.
Irrespective of our views on the political divide during the cold war era, the fundamental difference between the US and the Soviet Union, or later Japan – which have at times both been in a position to challenge the scientific dominance of the United States – can be summarised in one word: "openness". Openness in a broad sense, including thought, expression, social acceptance, attraction and retention of the brightest foreign minds. I do not think that China today is by any means close to that measure of openness compared with the United States of the 1950s and 1960s.
Second, the US has always been a deeply "western" society, built on European philosophical principles, with the values of independent thinking and dialectic discourse deeply ingrained. Such a mindset allows challenges of the status quo and unconventional thinking that are intricately linked with scientific and entrepreneurial progress. I am still not convinced that these values can be adopted by Chinese (or other Asian societies) where completely different cultures and philosophical principles prevail, for example the strong respect for hierarchical order.
We should therefore recognise the need for a modified version of scientific discourse and practice in China that is, not necessarily worse, but certainly different from that of the Descartian rationalism predominant in western societies. It is enlightening when one realises that going to a conference in Asia will not involve open discussion and challenge ideas, simply because this is considered disrespectful.
Third, the blind adoption of capitalist incentives into the practice of science by the Chinese establishment is outright wrong. For example, if a Chinese colleague publishes an article in a highly regarded scientific journal they will be financially rewarded by the government – yes, a bonus! – on the basis of an officialacademic reward structure. Publication in one of the highest impact journals is currently rewarded with bonuses in excess of $30,000 – which is surely more than the annual salary of a starting staff member in any lab in China.
Such practices are disfiguring the fundamental principles of ethical integrity in scientific reporting and publishing, agreed and accepted by the scientific community worldwide. They introduce motives that have the potential to seriously corrupt the triangular relationship between scientist or clinician, publisher or editor and the public (taxpayer) funding agency. They exacerbate the damage caused by journal quality rankings based on "impact factor", which is already recognised by the scientific community in the west as problematic.
Such measures also do nothing to help Chinese journals gain recognition by the rest of the world, as has been described by two colleagues from Zhejiang University in an article entitled "The outflow of academic articles from China: why is it happening and can it be stemmed?".
I admire Chinese culture, history, creativity and motivation for progress. However, judging from my personal experience in nanoscience and medicine (which I suspect applies to many other disciplines), we have to accept that the scientific landscape is being dramatically remodelled by the way research is being implemented in China. Asian and western academics, politicians, publishers and investors must engage in an honest discussion about the massive changes to the way science is practised, being made by a society that is culturally, linguistically and philosophically very different from those that have a historical tradition in modern scientific discourse.
• Kostas Kostarelos is professor of nanomedicine at the University of Manchester and director of the university's Nanomedicine Lab
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Scientist Touching Dna Molecule on Shutterstock]
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Noah's Ark revealed to be filled with cannibal rats, drifting toward British coast
Cartoon Christian and Tea Party clown Bryan Fischer alerted us to the Associated Press story about Noah's Ark this morning.
Ancient Mesopotamian tablet confirms biblical account: worldwide flood, huge ark, animals in pairs. https://t.co/hD8T6y7cI7
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) January 25, 2014"Ancient Mesopotamian tablet confirms biblical account: worldwide flood, huge ark, animals in pairs," he wrote.
Of course, the story he linked to does no such thing. The excellent piece by the AP's Jill Lawless explains that a new book is coming out about a 4,000-year-old clay tablet from modern Iraq that contains a fascinating message in Mesopotamian cuneiform writing.
The tablet gives detailed instructions for building an ark for surviving a flood. And yes, it talks about putting animals on it "two by two," but the craft described has a circular shape -- it's known as a coracle, Lawless explains, which was a familiar kind of craft for plying the rivers of Mesopotamia.
The man who translated the message, Irving Finkel of the British Museum, explained to the Guardian that the tablet's tale is far older than the Biblical story, and he figures the Bible's writers were drawing on accounts that had been passed around "by Hebrew scholars during the Babylonian exile."
In other words, a Mesopotamian folk tale ended up being recycled for the Bible. (And there are plenty of other examples.)
The tablet's tale is supposedly spoken by a deity, but Finkel doesn't say which Mesopotamian god described the ark (there were plenty of gods to choose from). One thing's for certain: it's not the god of the Bible.
Also, there's this: "I am 107% convinced the ark never existed," Finkel said.
Sure, even 4,000 years ago, the people passing around that fantasy knew it was just a tall tale, perhaps built up from memories of an even more ancient deadly flood.
That's just how these sort of tales get embellished. It even happens now. Take, for example, the story of the derelict cruise ship that may or may not be floating around in the North Atlantic. The Lyubov Orlova was built in what was then Yugoslavia in 1976, but by 2010 was sitting abandoned in Newfoundland after its owners defaulted on a debt. Seized for scrap, in 2012 it was being towed to the Dominican Republic when it somehow got free, and has been floating around, a ghost ship, ever since. Or maybe it's sunk by now. No one seems to know for sure.
Last year, there was a story about the ship possibly drifting toward the British Isles, and an official mentioned that if it crashed on the coast, the rats living inside might be a "biohazard."
A year later, the story came up again, and those details got somewhat embellished by creative minds. Now the ship was barrelling toward the English coast and the rats inside were eating each other to stay alive.
Some scolds at the Smithsonian and elsewhere chastised the press for promoting this "bogus" story, but really, did anyone read "ghost ship with cannibal rats heading for British coast" without realizing it was an exaggeration?
When tales get told and retold, they tend to pick up a life of their own. That's what people do. We tell tales in an attempt to make sense of the world. In this case, didn't everyone realize the cannibal rats story was a pimp?
Maybe not. There are still people who believe a giant ship was built by a guy named Noah, after all.
And Hollywood is banking on that! Check out the trailer for this year's March release, Noah, which features Russell Crowe in the title role, as well as Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, and Jennifer Connelly...
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'The Days of Anna Madrigal': review
As Armistead Maupin's beloved cast of free spirits convene at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, Laura Miller bids a fond farewell to the Tales of the City series
It's hard to determine which piece of news makes a more devastating javelin to the heart of San Franciscans: that Armistead Maupin has published the final book in his Tales of the City series or that the author, the literary embodiment of San Francisco's grand old hedonistic, bohemian spirit, has moved to Santa Fe. What's more, most of the new novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal, takes place in Nevada at the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert and in Winnemucca, the town where the title character, Anna (then Andy), grew up and now the destination of a pilgrimage she makes in her 93rd year.
If you've never read Tales of the City or the seven novels that come between it and The Days of Anna Madrigal, this is not the place to start, and if you have even the slightest hankering for freedom or capacity for joy, do yourself a favour and go and find the first book right now. In the nearly four decades since 1976, when Maupin first began writing his serialised fiction about life in San Francisco for a local newspaper, his long, twisty narrative has encompassed homophobia, Jonestown, Aids, cancer, divorce, Republicanism and many other shocks and disappointments, all without losing its essentially sunny spirit.
Perhaps the most telling detail dropped into The Days of Anna Madrigal is the news that 28 Barbary Lane, the funky boarding house where, in the 1970s, Mrs Madrigal grew pot and played enigmatic but sagacious den mother to the four questing young people at the centre of the series, has been bought by wealthy "dot-commers"; they have "made it look like a five-star B and B". Anna now lives with Jake, a young transgender carer, in a flat near the Castro district. The unofficial "family seat", as one character puts it, has been relocated to the Noe Valley household of Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and his husband, Ben. Anna's unconventional clan consists of a group of people who share very little blood but a whole lot of history. They are what she calls her "logical family".
That's been the overarching theme of all the Tales novels: the way that people with rejecting (or simply absent) relations have formed families of choice in the fog-washed utopian outpost of San Francisco. Maupin's characters go spinning out of each other's orbits periodically, yet somehow always end up drifting back together again. Brian, a one-time singles-bar habitué, phones from his roving Winnebago caravan at the beginning of this novel to tell Anna he is bringing a new wife home to meet her. Brian's adopted bisexual daughter, Shawna, author of a successful novel composed entirely of text messages, has decided she wants a turkey-baster baby, to be conceived at Burning Man. Ambitious Mary Ann Singleton, whose mid-life crisis provided the subject of the previous Tales novel, Mary Ann in Autumn, has "divorced well in the East" and settled in a prosperous Bay Area suburb to take yoga classes and hang out with DeDe and D'or, an inter-racial lesbian couple.
Like all Tales novels, The Days of Anna Madrigal is part tenderly unfurling soap opera, part dispatch from the more sybaritic precincts of the Bay Area's counterculture. Shawna had a blog (Grrrl on the Loose), back when that was a thing, and now she hangs out at Litquake (an underground literary events series) and wears a high-waisted dress "as a friendly nod to Lena Dunham in Girls". Jake, Anna's carer, meets his boyfriend via Buck Angel Dating, a service for trans men. And finally there's Burning Man, that explosion of eccentricity, wild costumes and performance art in the vast alkali flats of Nevada. In the course of the novel, the characters gradually converge there to take drugs, stage pageants, get laid and generally let their freak flags fly.
Much of the appeal of The Days of Anna Madrigal derives from catching up with familiar characters, so a goodly chunk of exposition has to be got out of the way before you start to notice how vividly Maupin writes, with the economy of a good journalist and the instincts of a poet. Burning Man, in particular, with its biblical accompaniment of dust storms, brings out these talents: a car's wipers "carved adobe arches on the windshield", while the festival itself is "block after block of dust-fuzzed tents and shade structures jutting like bat wings into the sky, [while] the night rang with the sound of sledgehammers on rebar". Maupin is here not just to tell you what the wild kids are up to these days, but to make you see and feel and hear it as well.
In counterpoint to these contemporary shenanigans are the sepia-toned chapters recounting Anna's past as a teenage boy in the Blue Moon brothel, owned and operated by her mother. It turns out that Anna Madrigal, that reliable dispenser of startling plot reveals, still has a secret up her sleeve, and getting to the bottom of it will require a return visit to Winnemucca in Brian's caravan. This juxtaposition makes a sweet coda to the series, a reminder of just how far Anna has come in her life, and how much of her own hard-won self-acceptance she has managed to inspire in her many charges.
Yet so little of that old liberation can be sourced in San Francisco nowadays; the dot-commers and finance guys have priced the city out of the range of the people who once generated its best tales. The Days of Anna Madrigal is by necessity a somewhat melancholy book, as Anna charts the "small surrenders" of old age, what she gracefully chooses to regard as "simplification" and "leaving like a lady". Like her creator, she understands the virtue of letting go when the time comes, and one more time the two of them show the rest of us how it's done.
• Laura Miller's The Magician's Book is published by Little, Brown.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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You'd be surprised at how poor the new 'middle class' is in the developing world
The International Labour Organisation has identified a rapid growth of 'the developing middle class' – a group earning between $4 and $13 a day
When a million people swarmed on to the streets of Brazil last June there was consensus that the protest was a phenomenon of the "new middle class" – squeezed by corruption and failing infrastructure. As the Thai protests continue, these too are labelled middle class: office workers staging flashmobs in their neat, pressed shirts.
But what does middle class mean in the developing world? About 3 billion people earn less than two dollars a day, but figures for the rest are hazy. Now, fresh research by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) economists shows in detail what's been happening to the workforce of the global south during 25 years of globalisation: it is becoming more stratified – with the rapid growth of what they term "the developing middle class" – a group on between $4 and $13 a day. This group has grown from 600 million to 1.4 billion; if you include around 300 million on above $13 a day, that's now 41% of the workforce, and on target to be over 50% by 2017. But in world terms they're not really middle class at all. That $13 a day upper limit corresponds roughly to the poverty line in the US in 2005. So what's going on?
The ILO researchers mined data from 61 household surveys across the world to come up with these figures. In the process they adopted a rough definition of the lifestyle of the sub-$13 group. The key markers were: families had access to savings and insurance, were likely to have a TV in the home and to live in smaller households (four people). They would typically spend 2% of their income on entertainment – plus they would have better access to water, sanitation and electricity. These, then, are the "winners" from globalisation: an expanding group for whom global growth has meant a serious rise in real income, year after year, compared with the recent near stagnation of incomes for working and lower-middle-class families in parts of the developed world.
You might assume the "developing middle class" are mainly factory workers but they're not. One of the most startling results of the ILO survey is that more than half the "developing middle class" works in the service sector. Factory workers form between 15% and 20% of each income group: they are spread from the destitute to the above-$13 group. This, say the researchers, reflects the fact that the industrial sector of the global south now offers as much skilled, high-value work as it does sweated labour.
When Harvard economist Richard Freeman calculated the "great doubling" of the world's workforce – as a result of global development and the entry of former communist states into the market – the assumption was that this would recreate a "proletariat" at the periphery of capitalism. It did, but the ILO calculation is the strongest evidence to date that they are moving steadily towards stratification and more service-oriented work, just as its rich-world counterpart did in the 1960s and 70s. Go to the reality of being "new middle class" in Brazil, Morocco or Indonesia and the word "comfortable" does not spring to mind. It means often living in a chaotic mega-city, cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty and crime, crowding on to makeshift public transport systems and seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials, middlemen and grey market people. This in turn has shaped what people protest about. There remain, of course, high-profile workers' struggles: in Argentina there are still more than 180 occupied factories. The cotton city of El-Mahalla el Kubra in Egypt remains the kind of place that can pull a total work stoppage and, as in December 2012, declare "autonomy" from the government.
But the ILO trend suggests that, by the second quarter of the century, the typical social dynamics of a medium-developed country will be a mixture of "workplace" conflicts and the more networked, sporadic and volatile ones we saw in Turkey and Brazil last year. The western left has lived through decades of angst over the decline of the manual work, and its ideology of resistance, sometimes softened by the hope that it would all be recreated somewhere else. The ILO survey suggests not.
What was unthinkable 20 years ago is now becoming tangible: that the real incomes of skilled workers, knowledge workers and managers in "developing countries" are overlapping with those at the bottom of the heap in western society. But where once this prospect was understood to foretell stability, it does not. As the World Bank lead economist Branko Milanovic has shown, when it comes to causing inequality, the impact of class and location have reversed: "Around 1870, class explained more than two thirds of global inequality. And now? The proportions have exactly flipped: more than two thirds of total inequality is due to location."
Milanovic calls this the "non-Marxian world", in which class struggle becomes less useful as a strategy and the logical thing to do is migrate: "Either poor countries will become richer or poor people will migrate to rich countries". I think, on the contrary, that the upsurge of unrest is a signal that the rising, poor, new middle class – which cannot migrate en masse – has decided to force poor countries to become richer in democracy, sustainability, urban infrastructure, healthcare.
They're choosing signal issues – corruption, transport, green space as in the Gezi Park occupation in Istanbul – but across the world their determination to make life on $13 a day less arbitrary and insecure is clear.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Is the author of 'The Social Contract' as relevant as ever?
The philosopher's thought still has the power to challenge our deepest assumptions on identity, religion and the Enlightenment
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is generally seen, especially in Britain, as the worst sort of intellectual: absurdly self-regarding, and dangerously naive, in his fond belief in the natural goodness of humanity, which fed the excesses of the French Revolution, and maybe sowed other totalitarian seeds.
I have come to think he deserves more respect. While recently researching the roots of secular humanism, I found that he stood out from the list of dead white males I was considering. While other thinkers made important contributions to this or that movement, Rousseau made the weather. Also, he is psychologically fascinating – he makes other thinkers of the age seem wooden.
His thought is as relevant as ever, for he confronted deep human needs, such as the need to reconcile personal integrity with social belonging, the need to reconnect with the natural world, the need to escape the hyped-up tinny crap that passes for culture and seek out some sort of authenticity, and above all perhaps, the glorious yet embarrassing need that drives us all, the need to be ourselves. And some of our deepest assumptions seem rooted in his thought, or first expressed there. For example, the assumption that the large-scale systems we inhabit are corrupt, tawdry, destructive, and that we individual people are the poor little pure-as-snow victims. Another example: we are all the authors of our life-stories. We don't notice such patterns of thought until we see them being thought up.
Also, I think that looking at Rousseau's thought can nudge us towards more intelligent discussion of religion and atheism. This is not because I agree with his thinking on religion – I don't. But it helps us to see where our debate stems from. He passionately believed in a God who created the world and who allowed himself to be known – but not through revelation, in the sense of something contained in scripture or church tradition; rather through the compassion that comes naturally to us, and the appetite for rational wonder that he has instilled in his creatures. He thought that this natural moral impulse will flourish as long as false ideas and conventions do not twist it out of shape. There's a major overlap with what we know as atheist thinking here, but in religious, or at least theistic, form. Maybe attending to this can prod us into seeing our own debates afresh.
Rousseau was born in Protestant Geneva in 1712. His father was a watchmaker; his mother died in childbirth. Aged 16 he left his apprenticeship and wandered through Savoy, doing odd jobs. He found a patroness-cum-mistress who was a very liberal Catholic; she helped him find work as a musician. He then moved to Paris in 1741, and did some writing for the Encyclopédie. Then, in 1749, he had an acute experience of vocation. It came as he saw the title of a journal's essay competition: "Has the advance of the sciences and the arts helped to destroy or to purify moral standards?" Suddenly he knew that he hated his culture, and that he was a great thinker. He won the competition, and fame, by arguing that modern culture was, for all its proud enlightenment, a mire of falsity, corruption and inauthenticity. And he showed that he meant it, by refusing the identity of the urbane literary star and choosing to earn a living by copying out musical scores – no schmoozing with influential employers for him. (He also wore conspicuously cheap clothes, like someone choosing to wear nasty old jumpers from charity shops.)
What was his problem? Didn't he believe in rational progress towards a more humane world? Here's the interesting paradox: he did believe in this Enlightenment vision, but with an awkward intensity that made him see its other advocates as complacent, worldly, merely pragmatic. He thought that the humanist vision needed a new basis in a big narrative about the liberation of humanity's innate goodness, a story about how civilisation tends to impair this. This was expressed in various works of the 1750s and then in The Social Contract .
He also found a wider audience as a novelist. But he became no more settled, no less prickly. His novel Emile expressed reformist religious ideas that so angered the authorities that he had to flee – to Germany, then England for a time, where he was hosted by a rather bemused David Hume. He now developed a partly justified persecution complex. He started writing autobiographically: his startlingly frank Confessions occupied his last years. He still failed to enjoy his fame as an author, forever complaining that his ideas were misunderstood and his character maligned. He found some solace in his hobby of botany. He died in 1778.
Oh yes, and all this time – since his move to Paris in the 1740s – he had a partner, or mistress (they finally married in 1768), with whom he had five children. What fortunate children, you might think, to be born to such a great champion of the compassionate human spirit. Think again: they were given away to an orphanage as babies.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Facing the truth of China's 'Cultural Revolution'
Chinese and Western scholars have written extensively about the causes, directions and details of some of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, and now estimate that at least 100 million people were persecuted in some way: arbitrary arrests, brutal confrontations, beatings, torture, outright murder, serious injuries, forced suicides, denied medical treatment after beatings, houses looted, forced banishment to remote rural provinces. Top officials were not spared. A half dozen of them committed suicide in the opening overtures of the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiao Ping’s son, Pufang, was thrown out of a window during a “struggle” session and left paralyzed for life.;
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A man was shot for texting at a movie. This isn't an anomaly in America
The spontaneous shooting of a father over some texting and tossed popcorn had barely grabbed our attention when the headlines came about the even more horrific crime in New Mexico. Both were senseless, both all the more riveting for their quotidian settings. The antsy atmosphere of a pre-screening theater, the casual boredom of a student assembly – these are the universally-identifiable situations of stand-up comedy routines. To have them turned inside-out by unspeakable violence provokes primal outrage and fear.
Because school shootings absorb us especially thoroughly (they are especially appalling), they attract the most sympathy for the gun control cause. Support for stronger regulation is never more ardent than after such tragedies. The New Mexico school shooting will likely stir up more calls for changes to the law. It's terrible that it takes such tragedy against our kids to motivate us to action.
But I wish more Americans realized that it's shootings like the one in the Tampa, Florida suburb at the movie theatre that say more about how gun control laws have failed everyday Americans, and made us less safe, not more so.
We may have the good sense to understand that the wall-to-wall coverage of school shootings is still, thank God, out of proportion to their frequency. It's their infrequency, in addition to their awfulness, that makes them news. Advocates of gun control use them as evidence not because they represent the scope of the problem, but because most people instinctively understand that part of the tragedy is the sense that it could have been prevented. The mind recoils so thoroughly at the thought of children murdering children, we cling to the notion that something could be done. Gun control advocates try to leverage this desperation into laws that often only tangentially intersect with the violence in the news.
But gun advocates can trump gun control support exactly because these child-on-child crimes stir such desperation and are so shocking to our sensibilities. This may be why support for regulation seems to fade so quickly. Yes, something could be done, the National Rifle Association and others say: we can protect our children from evil by disarming evil. They argue for mental health restrictions or "enforcing existing law", both methods that depend on the belief that bad things happen because of bad people. If you're a good guy, they argue, guns aren't just neutral but perhaps necessary. We shouldn't keep guns out of the hands of thegood guys.
Curtis Reeves was a retired police officer, the very definition of a good guy. He may also prove to be unbalanced in a legally-applicable way, but that wouldn't have prevented him from getting a concealed carry permit in Florida. Since Florida grants concealed carry permits via its Department of Agriculture, rather than, say a criminal justice agency, the state cannot use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to screen applicants. To put that another way, Florida simply doesn't have the federal background check required in every other state that grants concealed carry permits.
Indeed, even if Florida had a more stringent conceal carry screening process – or if it didn't have a concealed carry law at all – Reeves could have had his weapon on him. Retired law enforcement personnel are allowed by federal law to carry a concealed weapon in any jurisdiction except where it's explicitly banned by law or the property owner. This is a loophole that may seem natural (again: good guys!), but it's actually a reflection of just how deeply we've bought into the myth that guns aren't the problem and we only need worry about who has them. That's not true: we need to worry about guns, no matter who has them.
The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.
To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.
Much as with gun suicides (which account for a majority of all gun deaths), these are the deaths that the government has the most power to stop, simply by making guns harder to get a hold of. Any argument can end in violence, no one can stop that. But if there's a gun involved, the likelihood of someone dying is far greater.
You keep a gun out of the argument, you will save lives. This is not hypothetical. A person may be intent on killing someone else, but it is simply harder to do with anything else. That's why forms of homicide other than guns account for only about a third of all homicides. Someone gets angry at someone else, they may reach for a weapon. If we make guns harder to get, by requiring a test for the license, or by banning handguns more broadly, the one at hand might be far less deadly. Like, say, popcorn.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
['Man pointing a gun' via Shutterstock]
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That West Virginia chemical spill? It's likely a bigger scandal than Bridgegate
If we called West Virginia 4-methylcyclohexane-methanol leak "Watergate", do you think the political press would pay more attention?
Hours of cable news time and thousands of words have been spent in search of what "Bridgegate" means for Chris Christie. An equal and opposite amount of energy has been poured into an examination of what the Christie situation means for Obama.
Meanwhile, in West Virginia, there are 300,000 people without useable water, and an unknown number who may fall ill because the warning to avoid the tainted supply came seven hours after the leak was discovered – and perhaps weeks after it happened. (Neighbors of the plant have told reporters they detected the chemical's odor in December.)
Complaining about desperate news coverage is to call foul on a game that is actually just playing by a different set of rules. I know that. I know, too, that there's no organized conspiracy, nor even any vague ill will, involved in how it came to be that Bridgegate continues to attract punditry while West Virginia only generates the kind of sympathetic-if-distant coverage we usually grant far-off and not too devastating natural disasters.
Bridgegate is just sexier; it features big personalities and a bold storyline. It gives reporters a chance to show off a range of pop culture references (The Sopranos, Bruce, assorted other Twitticisms!). It is taking place in the literal backyard of most national political reporters. It has very little to do with policy, or numbers, or science. Perhaps best of all, to opine about Bridgegate is to engage in a punditry wager with little or no cost, since 2016 is so very far away. Write that it's the end of Christie's career! Write that he'll be fine! No one is keeping score (truth be told, even when people keep score in punditry, nothing bad happens to the losers).
Journalists can further excuse their myopia about the lane closure controversy with the notion that they're just giving the public what they want. The story is "breaking through" because everyone can identify with those poor stuck commuters: "Traffic is a huge deal," as one writer put it. That may be the case, but don't even more people drink water?
I shouldn't be too hard on journalists, though. On the surface, the West Virginia spill just isn't as interesting or dynamic as revenge conspiracy. It's a single event with an obvious bad guy (the deliciously-named "Freedom Industries").
There's no compelling narrative, no unfolding drama, no whodunit to solve, and catastrophic environmental destruction in West Virginia, on an even larger scale than the nine counties affected by the spill, is old news. The state harvested its entire 10m acres of virgin forest between 1870 and 1920. In the past 50 years, mountaintop-removal mining has made over 300,000 acres of unfit for economically productive use, and the clean water supply has been systematically reduced by= 20% in the last 25.
I suspect there's a more subtle yet uglier motivation in how the New Jersey story beguiles us even as West Virginia toxifies.
Bridgegate as we understand right now it in no way asks us to take a look at our own lives or behavior. The questions people have about the Fort Lee lane closures take as a given that people should be able to drive to and from work minimal interference; we want to get to the bottom of "why the traffic was held up for hours?" but not, "Why are there so many people driving?"
That people identify with the drivers ("that could happen to me") and see the West Virginia chemical draught as a merely a terrible misfortune ("those poor folks") illustrates why dust-ups like Bridgegate decide elections but environmental issues continue to lag far behind as an issue voters care about, despite the growing urgency to combat climate change. We can personalize a scandal, but the effects of environmental damage happen to other people – the people of West Virginia, to be specific.
Because make no mistake: our country's national habits are at the heart of West Virginia's regional tragedy – perhaps even this specific one. We don't get much coal from West Virginia anymore, it's true – because a century of steady consumption stripped the state almost bare. (There are West Virginia mines that have been continuously excavated for over 120 years.) As coal production has shifted away from the Appalachians to Wyoming and the plains, West Virginia politicians have become increasingly desperate to make their state as attractive as possible to industry. In that context, that state authorities knew about Freedom Industries' massive stockpile of MCMH as long ago as last year and did nothing about it makes sense.
Compared to the systematic devastation of an entire region's environment, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" seems like the petty feud that it was. But my real hope isn't that we shift our focus from New Jersey to West Virginia, it's that people realize that both are scandals, and both are environmental policy stories. And they both speak to the costs of letting shortsighted, local economy goals trump more global concerns.
The traffic on the George Washington Bridge is, in part, as bad as it is because of the antiquated rail service between New York and New Jersey. The system needs the exact sort of overhaul that Christie scuttled as one of his first acts in office. And if you thought that New York bureaucrats hated the traffic Christie's cronies caused, well, they hated the congestion pricing that Bloomberg threatened to bring about in his first term even more. (Just last November, New York Governor Cuomo dismissed the idea again.) One sure way to foil traffic vigilantes of the future, after all, would be to deny them a hostage.
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