Opinion
R.I.P. Bartcop: The passing of a modem, a smart mouth, and the truth
Way back in the dewy early days of the Internet, back when it was still the World Wide Web and people actually prefaced a website address by saying "W-W-W", there were not many places that were readily available to rage against the machine, indulge in the growing art that came to be known as 'snark', and generally vent at the world.
For some there were bulletin boards or listservs, where like-minded people congregated and traded stories and quips and information that was gleaned from between the lines of what eventually became known as the 'Mainstream Media.' Speaking for myself, a cheery group of us lived daily on Salon's Table Talk, which you might say became the training ground for more than a few "somewhat popular bloggers."
And then there was Bartcop.com.
Bartcop was a snarky, no-holds barred, riotous - at times mean-spirited, but never untruthful - oasis of hilarity and vitriol, where politicians and a compliant media were called out for their bullshit. Along with Media Whores Online ('The Horse"), no journalist was ever again safe from having their stories fact-checked online and then held up to ridicule.
Bartcop was the brainchild of Terry R. Coppage, based out of his beloved and sometimes mocked Tulsa, Oklahoma home. Terry was fearless in a way that other media critics couldn't be for a simple reason: he wasn't angling to move up the fawning beltway food chain with a guest spot at The Washington Post. He didn't pull punches and he called bullshit for what it was: "bullshit."
The site was crude, the graphics sometimes even cruder (I have a special place in my heart for his animated gif of Tim Russert repeating "Clinton's cock" over and over and over again), but most importantly it dispensed with the niceties with a wicked grin with a well-placed deflating shiv between the ribs.
Terry Coppage, "Bartcop," passed away this past Wednesday due to complications from the flu, pneumonia, and leukemia at the age of 60.
Before Terry passed away he wrote a last post to go up in the event of his passing or inability to write again. You can read it here.
Terry left behind a wife with a mortgage and medical bills that she can't handle. He asked, after years of giving it away for free on Bartcop, for his readers to help her out with donations in this time of sorrow and need.
We here at Raw Story, and speaking personally for myself, encourage everyone to help her out to the best of your ability.
Without Terry "Bartcop" Coppage, many of us never would have started the blogs and websites and even moved up the Beltway food chains if it weren't for him showing us the way. What you're reading here is because of him.
Terry Coppage was a pioneer, and he will be greatly missed...
Thanks to technology, the traditional hierarchies of state and business are falling away
Humankind is going through one of its rare but profound paradigm shifts. And as ever, it's driven by technology. From the stone age to the iron age, from farming to Fordism, how we make and do things has always affected how society operates. Marx may have been overly deterministic about the effect of the economic base on the social superstructure but as he wrote, "the windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist". So what does the age of the internet, the smart phone and social media give us?
It gives us Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates but something much more. It gives us informed, enabled and empowered citizens precisely because we can learn, talk and act together to solve the critical challenges of a world in which the poor get poorer, the planet burns and democracy is in crisis, because traditional politics can't reverse either inequality or climate change.
The old icebergs of state and corporation are dissolving into a fluid sea where action only becomes meaningful in concert with others. The waves of change demand interconnections, because we know all of us together are smarter than any one of us on our own.
Today the world and our ability to shape it is literally in our hands. We can criticise, disrupt, collaborate and share at the touch of a few keys. Transparency and accountability rule. We rule; but only if politics changes too. For the new rules of this epochal shift go with the grain of a good society precisely because in a flattened world, we talk and participate as equals. That's why the post-1945 social settlement could never hold, because it was built on well-meaning but hierarchical institutions. And so the counter-revolution of neoliberalism took hold in the late 1970s against the daily grind of an elitist socialism.
But the radical promise of a flat earth could become transformative and permanent, because equality and democracy have become both means and ends. This doesn't deny the need for struggle. The big corporations will try to commercialise these new flat planes, and the threat of authoritarianism is real. But here at last is a terrain that can be genuinely contested by radicals because democracy and equality are now what we struggle with, and what we struggle for.
This paradigm shift is not a prediction – it's real, and happening now. Kickstarter, Wikipedia, Open Source, Mumsnet, the People Who Share and Thoughtworks are some of the first movers in a future that is being co-produced.
But it's the implications for the way we do politics that are truly profound. If elitism is out and participation and connections are in, the results – as the old clashes with the new – are increasingly explosive. For instance the Danish government recently sold off parts of the national electricity company to the investment bank Goldman Sachs, giving it influence over a strategic sector despite the company's dubious involvement in the financial crisis and its recent role in the botched sale of Royal Mail in the UK. In Denmark the move triggered a network-based movement resulting in huge demonstrations, more than 200,000 signing a declaration opposing it and polls that showed 80% of people objected to the sale.
Yet it went ahead. Partly as a result one of the government parties, the Socialist People's party, is crumbling as its MPs are in conflict with each other. The party has left the government. The finance minister, Bjarne Corydon, who before this debate was one of the most powerful politicians in Denmark, is now ranked as the second most disliked minister in the government. The old politics could not contain a decision about what the public should own and what should be in private hands. The cycle of frustration and anger deepens – and the old parties will either transform themselves or die and new political entities will take their place.
What is the shape of that transformation? Representative democracy must now take its place alongside direct and deliberative forms of democracy and a mash-up of all three: what is being called liquid democracy, as we cast, lend and pool our votes. People will stop being the occasional consumers of politics and instead become its permanent producers.
The culture will change too. Tribalism and adversarialism will give way to shifting alliances. Empathy, respect and the ability to engage with people you don't agree with will be crucial. So if you want to be a rebel, be kind. And leadership will be less about pulling levers for people and more about building the spaces and capacity for people to do thing collectively themselves.
The big and successful transformations in values and behaviour, like support for gay rights, greater gender equality and the end of apartheid, only take place when the overwhelming majority see change as common sense. If a "good society" is achieved by even a metaphorical big stick, then that stick will go on being used in that so-called good society. Remember, means shape ends. So we must be change we wish to see in the world.
In these new times political parties will still matter. After Tahrir Square – or some day soon Trafalgar Square – someone has to offer the candidates, make the manifesto coherent, set the budgets and establish the policy basis for capacity building. As the Guardian journalist John Harris said at the recent Change: How? conference, "you can't redistribute income sitting in a tent outside St Paul's". The party must become the "bridge" between the state and the new horizontal movements.
Modernity and the human values of love, empathy and connection are being aligned. Instead of trying to fit people to a bureaucratic state or a free market we can bend this increasingly flat world to our values and us. We are all particles in the wave of a future that is ours to make.
• This an extract from Compass publication The Bridge. The full version can be found here
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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We've gone too far with 'trigger warnings'
Trigger Warning: this piece discusses trigger warnings. It may also look askance at college students who are now asking that trigger warnings be applied to their course materials.
If you've spent time on feminist blogs lately or in the social-justice-oriented corner of Tumblr, you have likely come across the Trigger Warning (TW): a note to readers that the material following the warning may trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction. In the early days of feminist blogging, trigger warnings were generally about sexual assault, and posted with the understanding that lots of women are sexual assault survivors, lots of women read feminist blogs, and graphic descriptions of rape might lead to panic attacks or other reactions that will really ruin someone's day. Easy enough to give readers a little heads up – a trigger warning – so that they can decide to avoid that material if they know that discussion of rape triggers debilitating reactions.
Trigger warnings in online spaces, though, have expanded widely and become more intricate, detailed, specific and obscure. Trigger warnings, and their cousin the "content note", are now included for a whole slew of potentially offensive or upsetting content, including but not limited to: misogyny, the death penalty, calories in a food item, terrorism, drunk driving, how much a person weighs, racism, gun violence, Stand Your Ground laws, drones, homophobia, PTSD, slavery, victim-blaming, abuse, swearing, child abuse, self-injury, suicide, talk of drug use, descriptions of medical procedures, corpses, skulls, skeletons, needles, discussion of "isms," neuroatypical shaming, slurs (including "stupid" or "dumb"), kidnapping, dental trauma, discussions of sex (even consensual), death or dying, spiders, insects, snakes, vomit, pregnancy, childbirth, blood, scarification, Nazi paraphernalia, slimy things, holes and "anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD".
It is true that everything on the above list might trigger a PTSD response in someone. The trouble with PTSD, though, is that its triggers are often unpredictable and individually specific – a certain smell, a particular song, being touched in that one way. It's impossible to account for all of them, because triggers are by their nature not particularly rational or universally foreseeable. Some are more common than others, though, which is why it seems reasonable enough for explicitly feminist spaces to include trigger warnings for things like assault and eating disorders.
College, though, is different. It is not a feminist blog. It is not a social justice Tumblr.
College isn't exactly the real world either, but it's a space for kinda-sorta adults to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge of the cultural canon, to interrogate power and to learn how to make an argument and to read a text. It is, hopefully, a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset, a place where the student's world expands and pushes them to reach the outer edges – not a place that contracts to meet the student exactly where they are.
Which doesn't mean that individual students should not be given mental health accommodations. It's perfectly reasonable for a survivor of violence to ask a professor for a heads up if the reading list includes a piece with graphic descriptions of rape or violence, for example. But generalized trigger warnings aren't so much about helping people with PTSD as they are about a certain kind of performative feminism: they're a low-stakes way to use the right language to identify yourself as conscious of social justice issues. Even better is demanding a trigger warning – that identifies you as even more aware, even more feminist, even more solicitous than the person who failed to adequately provide such a warning.
There is real harm in utilizing general trigger warnings in the classroom. Oberlin College recommends that its faculty "remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals". When material is simply too important to take out entirely, the college recommends trigger warnings. For example, Oberlin says, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is a great and important book, but:
… it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.
Students should be duly warned by the professor writing, for example, "Trigger warning: This book contains a scene of suicide."
On its face, that sounds fine (except for students who hate literary spoilers). But a trigger warning for what Oberlin identified as the book's common triggers – racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide (and more!) – sets the tone for reading and understanding the book. It skews students' perceptions. It highlights particular issues as necessarily more upsetting than others, and directs students to focus on particular themes that have been singled out by the professor as traumatic.
At Rutgers, a student urged professors to use trigger warnings as a sort of Solomonic baby-splitting between two apparently equally bad choices: banning certain texts or introducing works that may cause psychological distress. Works he mentioned as particularly triggering include F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The warnings would be passage-by-passage, and effectively reach "a compromise between protecting students and defending their civil liberties".
But the space between comfort and freedom is not actually where universities should seek to situate college students. Students should be pushed to defend their ideas and to see the world from a variety of perspectives. Trigger warnings don't just warn students of potentially triggering material; they effectively shut down particular lines of discussion with "that's triggering". Students should – and do – have the right to walk out of any classroom. But students should also accept the challenge of exploring their own beliefs and responding to challenges. Trigger warnings of course don't always shut down that kind of interrogation, but if feminist blogs are any example, they quickly become a way to short-circuit uncomfortable, unpopular or offensive arguments.
That should concern those of us who love literature, but it should particularly trouble the feminist and anti-racist bookworms among us. Trigger warnings are largely perceived as protecting young women and, to a lesser extent, other marginalized groups – people of color, LGBT people, people with mental illnesses. That the warnings hinge on topics that are more likely to affect the lives of marginalized groups contributes to the general perception of members of those groups as weak, vulnerable and "other".
The kinds of suffering typically imaged and experienced in the white western male realm – war, intra-male violence – are standard. Traumas that impact women, people of color, LGBT people, the mentally ill and other groups whose collective lives far outnumber those most often canonized in the American or European classroom are set apart as different, as particularly traumatizing. Trigger warnings imply that our experiences are so unusual the pages detailing our lives can only be turned while wearing kid gloves.
There's a hierarchy of trauma there, as well as a dangerous assumption of inherent difference. There's a reinforcement of the toxic messages young women have gotten our entire lives: that we're inherently vulnerable.
And there's something lost when students are warned before they read Achebe or Diaz or Woolf, and when they read those writers first through the lens of trauma and fear.
Then, simply, there is the fact that the universe does not treat its members as if they come hand-delivered in a box clearly marked "fragile". The world can be a desperately ugly place, especially for women. That feminist blogs try to carve out a little section of the world that is a teeny bit safer for their readers is a credit to many of those spaces. Colleges, though, are not intellectual or emotional safe zones. Nor should they be.
Trauma survivors need tools to manage their triggers and cope with every day life. Universities absolutely should prioritize their needs – by making sure that mental health care is adequately funded, widely available and destigmatized.
But they do students no favors by pretending that every piece of potentially upsetting, triggering or even emotionally devastating content comes with a warning sign.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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Firing Piers Morgan can't disguise CNN's wider failings
However low the chat show host's audience had fallen, it was far from the worst on the cable channel
Many people, on both sides of the Atlantic, don't much like Piers Morgan, and most of them chirped up when his CNN interview show got cancelled. Too English, too cricket-obsessed, too crazy about gun culture? Perhaps. Morgan dutifully – and cheerily – ate bumper portions of humble pie. But there is a wider problem here, a CNN problem, that mere pie consumption doesn't reach.
Take a typical day of US cable news ratings just before the announcement of Morgan's exit broke, say Thursday 20 February. Daytime viewing overall: Fox News with an average audience 1,153,000; MSNBC with 358,000; CNN with 257,000. Over prime time (8pm to 11pm) the figures are: Fox, 1,856,000; MSNBC 785,000; CNN 323,000. Before Piers goes on air at 9pm, Bill O'Reilly for Fox (2,519,000 viewers) and Chris Hayes for MSNBC (778,000) both wallop CNN's Anderson Cooper, with a mere 316,000. Morgan's 364,000 at 9pm is actually CNN's best/least-worst score of the day.
In short, though you wouldn't quite know it, CNN's American cable channel – with a slightly greater reach than any of its rivals – performs miserably against them. It recovers a bit when there's big breaking news, but limps and slumps on a daily diet of headlines and chat. And its difficulty is sadly evident. Fox peddles rightwing credentials, MSNBC does a liberal turn. But CNN ploughs right down the middle: ostensibly fair, balanced, and miserably watched in a 24-hour TV environment which doesn't believe in the passing show and can't make events – just headline stuff – into a viewing habit. Blame Piers, by all means, if you want to, but wonder about the supposed allure of non-stop fairness and balance as you do.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Pizza Hut's 2,880-calorie monster: a taste of a burgeoning global food crisis
We throw away 1.3bn tonnes of food a year, and eat more than is good for us. Greed, says Jay Rayner, is creating a food security crisis that is endangering billions
A chilly late autumn day in 2013 and I am sitting in a central London branch of Pizza Hut trying not to be noticed. I wanted a table towards the back but they directed me instead to one here, in the window. I turn my body away from the glass, but it makes no difference. I am well over six foot, have a chest so big there are plans to build a high-speed rail link between my nipples, and have hair like an unlit bonfire. Plus I whore about on television. Sitting in a public place inconspicuously is not part of my skill set.
Quickly someone tweets that they have spotted me. Oh God. I fear my carefully honed reputation as a paragon of good taste is about to be destroyed. I feel like some Bible-bashing Republican senator who's been caught strapping himself to the wall bars in a secret torture garden, my appalling morals revealed. And so I am forced to explain. Pizza Hut UK has just launched a new product; an item so terrifying, so nightmarish, so clearly the product of a warped and twisted mind in matters edible, that I feel I have no choice but to try it.
I am doing this so others do not have to.
Most of the diners here today are going for the £6.99 all-you-can-eat buffet deal. Not me. I am ordering a large double pepperoni pizza with cheeseburger crust. I am consigning myself to my very own grease-stained, cheese-slicked gastronomic hell. I am doing this to shine a light on the way a deformed model of nutrition has come, in the past year, to play a key part in the debate around global food security.
Quickly it arrives. It's certainly not misnamed. The middle is standard Pizza Hut: a soft doughy base as sodden and limp as a baby's nappy after it's been worn for 10 hours. There is a scab of waxy cheese and flaps of pink salami the colour, worryingly, of a three-year-old girl's party dress. What matters is the crust. Each of the 10 slices has a loop of crisped dough and in the circular fold made by that loop there is a tiny puck of burger, four or so centimetres across and smeared with more cheese. It looks like a fairground carousel realised in food.
When I prise out one of the mini burgers, the greasy, insipid dough beneath looks like the white flesh of an open wound that's been hidden under a plaster. Do I need to tell you that the burger is a sweaty, grey orb of deathly protein? It is advertised as 100% British beef, but origin is irrelevant after this has been done to it. Those poor, poor animals. Surely they could have reached a more dignified end, perhaps by cutting out the trip to Pizza Hut altogether and going straight to landfill?
As I bite down on the meat, hot salty water leaks into my mouth. There is the fat-soaked dough, the wretched insult of the cheese sputum, and a general air of desperation and regret.
Pizza Hut UK admits that the cheeseburger crust pizza is 288 calories a slice, or 2,880 for the whole thing, well above an adult male's recommended daily calorie intake and above the previous Pizza Hut big dog. That was the BBQ meat feast stuffed crust, its doughy edges suppurating with cheap cheese, at 2,872 calories. Extrapolating from figures for that BBQ meat feast stuffed crust monstrosity, the cheeseburger crust has north of 120 grams of fat; the recommended daily limit for men is 95 grams. That could be mitigated only if the person who desperately wanted the cheeseburger crust pizza could find a friend with whom to share it. Or quite a few friends. That might prove a challenge.
What's most peculiar about all this is that in March 2011, Pizza Hut, along with many other big players in food retail, signed up to the British government's Responsibility Deal, an attempt to co-ordinate efforts by the food and drink industry to encourage healthier lifestyle choices by the public. One of the core pledges to which Pizza Hut signed up was: "We will encourage and enable people to adopt a healthier diet." And yet here they are, two years later, introducing to their menu an item that looks like it could clog an artery at 20 paces.
The head of the food industry division of the Responsibility Deal is the nutrition expert, Dr Susan Jebb. She declined to comment on Pizza Hut's gastronomic delights, having not had them inflicted upon her. However, between deep, weary sighs, she did say that "if we are going to support people in making changes to their diets then the food choices they are offered are a crucial and critical element". Indeed.
It's easy to dismiss the wretched cheeseburger crust pizza as a mere food curio, a tragic example of the terrible things done to perfectly innocent ingredients by those operating at the bottom end of the market. And it's certainly that. But it's also something much bigger: a rallying point for those talking seriously about the challenges of food security in the 21st century.
For years the debate has been solely around improvements to agriculture; about ways to increase yield and productivity while reducing impact on the environment. It has been about what sustainability actually means, and the need to revolutionise the way we make food or, as it's known, the supply side. Nothing has changed. That agenda remains firmly in place. The impact of climate change on our ability to feed ourselves really is going to be huge, and we need to be serious about taking measures to mitigate that.
Waste food adds 3.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere and uses 1.4bn hectares of land – 28% of the globe's agriculture area
In the past year, however, a second debate has come to the fore, and this one is all about the demand side. It's not just about how we produce the food we eat; it's about how much of that food we're consuming – or not actually consuming, as the case may be. In the past year, for example, the volume of the debate around food waste has been turned up and up. In September 2013 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization released a report, Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources [PDF], which revealed that the 1.3bn tonnes of food wasted globally each year caused $750bn worth of damage to the environment. The water wasted is equivalent to the entirety of the flow of Russia's Volga river. The waste food adds 3.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere and uses 1.4bn hectares of land, or a full 28% of the globe's agriculture area. All to grow food that will never be eaten.
In November 2013 a report by the British government's waste advisory body, the Waste Resources Action Programme stated that Britons were still throwing away the equivalent of 24 meals a month, or 4.2m tonnes of food a year. Every day UK homes were chucking away 24m slices of bread, 5.8m potatoes and 1.1m eggs.
But there is another kind of waste, summed up by the Pizza Hut cheeseburger crust pizza, and that's overconsumption.
Eat food you really don't need to eat and that too has been wasted. Joining the middle classes, as millions across China, India, Brazil and Indonesia have done, provides access to loads of cool things like education, flat-screen TVs and karaoke machines. It also provides access to eating opportunities which might not be for the best. Like cheeseburger crust pizzas.
A full 18 months before it was launched in the UK, the cheeseburger crust pizza made an appearance in the Middle East. It's no surprise Pizza Hut chose to trial it there. Of the top 10 countries in the world for prevalence of type 2 diabetes, six – the likes of Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – are in the Middle East, where it affects a whopping 11% of the population (compared with around 5% of the population in the UK). How better to decide where to launch the worst kind of junk food than by identifying the part of the world with the highest prevalence of an obesity-related disease? All these people who are developing type 2 diabetes – the kind related to lifestyle rather than the non-lifestyle related type 1 – will surely be total suckers for a pizza freighted with cheeseburgers.
Clearly, Pizza Hut now needs to focus its efforts on the boom lands of China. In September 2013, just as the cheeseburger crust pizza was arriving in Britain, a new study into the disease in China was published by the China Noncommunicable Disease Surveillance Group, based on a survey of nearly 100,000 people. As a measure of economic advancement, of an exploding middle class shamelessly demanding to eat as their equivalents in the west do, you couldn't hope to find much better. In 1980 less than 1% of the Chinese population was diabetic. By 1994 the figure was 2.5%. By 2001 it was 5.5% and six years later 9.7%. The report revealed that 11.6% of the Chinese population is now diabetic, with a staggering 50% showing signs of being pre-diabetic. Even the USA, that stadium for all things lardy and obese, the outright winner of the biggest-arses-in the-world contest, can only manage a diabetes rate of 8.3%. China has well and truly won the global competitive over-eating contest. As treating each diabetic costs around £900 annually in the UK, the financial implications of the disease are huge. If just a third of the pre-diabetics in China went on to develop the full-blown disease, in just a few years China could be facing a bill of around £300bn a year.
But there is also the simple issue of resources. As I was told by Professor Tim Benton, the co-ordinator of government and academic work on food security in the UK, if we all ate like the Americans we would need four planet Earths. We are all moving towards eating like the Americans. We are suckers for cheeseburger crust pizzas. And the last time I looked we didn't have four planet Earths.
How do we solve this problem? If we study the numbers it all looks very simple. Along with the cheeseburger crust pizza, and the Chinese diabetes statistics, September 2013 also saw the publication of a study that weighed the benefits of techno fixes to agriculture to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, against simply fixing the world's diet. The report, written by Pete Smith of the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, along with many other academics worldwide, concluded that if every single techno fix was introduced – renewable power generation, lower carbon methods of tilling, waste recycling and so on – it would reduce CO2 emissions by between 1.5 and 4.3 gigatonnes (a gigatonne being a billion tonnes). However, if the world changed its diet and went completely vegan, emissions would drop by 7.8 gigatonnes (though that ignores the positive impact that well managed ruminants have on the landscape and their ability to eat waste from agriculture).
There are many people who advocate just that. They say that if we all went vegan everything would be fine. And I'm sure they feel a warm glow of self-righteousness as they deliver these claims. There is nothing more empowering than making airy proclamations about the way forward, when you have no power whatsoever to make it happen. It's worth repeating: certain social groups in Europe and the US may wish to make these changes, but who fancies telling the newly emerged middle classes in China that they can't now eat like us? It's also true, of course, that if we stopped living in the 21st century everything would be fine. If we hadn't had an industrial revolution everything would be fine. Best of all, if, as a species, we hadn't been so damn successful, and we didn't keep being born and living longer, everything would be completely fine. There'd be fewer of us and, as a result, enough resources to go round. The fact is that, as the Smith report acknowledges, the world is not going vegan any time soon. That said, an optimal diet, as defined by the Harvard Medical School, which reduces the intake of animal proteins in rich countries and raises it in poor countries, would lead to a reduction in emissions of 4.3 gigatonnes. If that could be combined with advances in agricultural sustainability and improvements in yield, we might be getting somewhere.
According to Tim Wheeler, professor of crop science at the University of Reading, who is both deputy director of the Centre for Food Security and deputy chief scientific adviser for the British government's Department for International Development, it's only very recently that the debate's opposite parties have finally started talking. "Longstanding concerns with supply of sufficient and nutritious food to a growing population have spurred new ways of thinking about the links between agriculture and nutrition," he says. "What have traditionally been two separate schools of thought on food production and on nutrition have started to come together to tackle global food security challenges."
As he says, the dialogue can't come too soon; the over-nutrition issue is not something that can simply be dismissed as a "first world" problem. "Even in countries where stunting among children persists due to under-nutrition," he says, "there are fairly high and growing levels of adult overweight rates in urban and rural areas, with child overweight rates also rising rapidly in Latin America."
There are, it seems, an increasing number of places around the world where Pizza Hut could make a serious splash with that £17.25 cheeseburger crust pizza.
In the early summer of 2013 I was approached by a senior press officer at Tesco plc. Would I like to have coffee with Philip Clarke, the chief executive? Apparently he wanted to hear more about my views "as a food expert, on our commitment and our ideas on how to achieve it". How very flattering.
And how very, very odd. Historically, Britain's biggest retailer had also been Britain's most bolshy. Generally press inquiries about their business were met with a curt "no comment". They sold stuff, lots of stuff, and they didn't see why they should have to explain to filthy journalists how they sold that stuff.
Then a cheap, own-brand Tesco burger was found to be 29% horse, and everything changed. The discovery of horsemeat in four Tesco products, announced by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland on 14 January 2013, cast a long shadow over the year which has not yet receded. Their ups and downs have, in many ways, mirrored the debate around global food security and the role of large corporations in it.
Other food retailers in Britain including Iceland, Aldi and Lidl were implicated in the horsemeat scandal, but Tesco was the biggest player by far. The scandal was described as a wake-up call for mass retail. The question is will they all doze off again, given half a chance?
Within a few weeks of the discovery Tesco was taking out full-page adverts in newspapers to declare that they understood they had screwed up. They insisted that they had "changed". Shortly after that, the initiatives began. In early May they announced they were going to help their customers to waste less food. Which was nice. A week later, they announced they were going to help their customers to eat more healthily. Each time they made these announcements in radio or television studios they came up against a big man with a goatee beard, sideburns and a book to sell: me.
On waste food I asked why they didn't just stop doing the buy-one-get-one-free deals, the famed "bogofs" that encourage shoppers to buy more than they need?
Why didn't they stop selling bagged fruit and veg, with their unnecessary use-by dates, which infantilise customers and make them throw away food that is perfectly edible?
Tesco insisted that most of the waste was either in the field or in the home and not in store. This seems more than a little disingenuous. A lot of waste in agriculture is a direct result of supermarkets cancelling orders, or refusing produce on spurious quality grounds. Sure, it never reaches the supermarket shelves to be wasted there, but that doesn't mean the supermarkets aren't responsible for it.
Their initiatives on healthy eating were even less robust.
They admitted that the plan, which involved looking at their customers' eating habits via Clubcard information, required those customers to opt in to the programme. Anybody who opts in for healthy eating advice is probably not the person most in need of it. Demolishing Tesco's publicity-seeking initiatives, their attempts to recast themselves as the good guys post the horsemeat scandal, really didn't take much effort.
Hence the email requesting I sit down with the chief executive to explain what I thought they should be doing. I declined, and not very politely, because I really do have appalling manners. I told them I wasn't really up for acting as a free consultant to a multi-billion-pound company. Far better, I suggested, that I stick with being a journalist and they stick with being a supermarket.
I suggested we do a face-to-face interview with the boss of the company, all on the record. To my surprise, they agreed.
Philip Clarke's predecessor as chief executive, Terry Leahy, had been businessman as rock star, the buccaneer who wielded a well-cut suit like it was a lethal weapon. Clarke presents as the comfortably upholstered grocer. And it was the sweet-natured, local grocer who was there to meet me in his sleek boardroom in the heart of London's St James's. Tesco, Clarke said, was not just a retailer. It was a custodian of the food chain. "When you have 30% of the retail trade it comes with responsibilities. And I bitterly regret that four of our products were laced with horsemeat." He accepted that the deals they had done with producers had been too tough, that they needed to be in partnership with them. He acknowledged that the global marketplace had changed, that they couldn't just assume they could buy in food from all over the world because the emerging middle classes of China, India and Brazil may have got to them first. In what was a remarkable admission for the man who runs one of the UK's biggest food retailers, which competes furiously on price, he acknowledged that food was simply sold too cheaply for farmers to get the sort of return they needed to invest in the agricultural base.
"Because of growing global demand, it is going to change," he said. "There's going to be more demand and more pressure. Over the long term I think food prices and people's proportion of income may well be going up but we'll be doing our bit. Unless more food is produced prices must go up. It's the basic law of supply and demand." Philip Clarke had said the unsayable.
In the days that followed, Clarke's admission on the need for food prices to rise would make headlines.
He finished by admitting to me that Tesco had a big part to play in cutting down on waste, by not reneging on contracts and forcing farmers to dump crops. "There will have to be an end to that," Clarke said. Tesco would have to become better at forecasting their needs. And where they had ordered too much they would have to take responsibility "for selling them on the open market for a lower price than we contracted to pay". Unsurprisingly a lot of this openness and commitment to change was met with scepticism by both industry and consumers. After all, this was big, bad Tesco we were talking about. Surely they didn't actually mean it?
In October 2013, Tesco's report on waste within its own food supply chain showed that in six months it had wasted almost 30,000 tonnes: 21% was fruit and veg; 41% was bakery items
But still the initiatives came. In October 2013 they issued a report on waste within their own food supply chain. In the first six months of the year they had wasted almost 30,000 tonnes of what could have been lunch; 21% was fruit and vegetables, but a vast 41% was bakery items. They were filling their shelves with bread that nobody ever bought, let alone ate. Tesco estimated that across the UK food industry as a whole, 68% of all bagged salads were never eaten.
And so they started making commitments: where possible, food that had not been bought would be distributed to charities like FareShare, for redistribution to community projects and food banks. Bogofs on large bags of salad would come to an end, in-store bakeries would put less bread on display and they would remove display-until dates on bags of fruit and vegetables, which consumers said they found confusing. It's not the same as removing bagging altogether, but it is a start.
How seriously should all this be taken? Can a company like Tesco really be part of the solution? The honest answer is that we can't afford for them not to be. Mass retailers are a part of the landscape whether we like it or not. A privileged few may have lifestyles that enable them to avoid multiples altogether, but the majority will continue to shop there. We need Tesco to take seriously the challenges of food security. The real question is whether they can continue to do so in the face of pressure from shareholders. As 2013 came to an end, Tesco plc was faced with some truly horrible trading results. UK sales were down 1.5% in the third quarter. In Ireland they had plummeted 8.1%. The rest of Europe was down 4%. A year that had started with the company discovering there was some horse in its burgers ended with Tesco looking like a bit of an old nag.
It wasn't just the big food retailers who spent 2013 struggling with their responsibilities. In June, David Cameron, convened a "hunger summit" of world powers to thrash out a new international plan to combat malnutrition. He would have been forgiven for being a little disappointed by the turnout. He was the only actual leader to attend; the rest were mere ministers.
Around £2.7bn was pledged that day to tackle the problem, though it was pointed out by critics that in 2009, at another intergovernmental meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, nearly £15bn had been pledged, and very little of that money had ever been released. In any case, much of that turned out to be cash already pledged as part of other international aid initiatives.
During the hunger summit a 45,000-strong crowd gathered in Hyde Park, London, at a rally staged by the Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign, which argues that the issue isn't one of lack of food, but of lack of equal distribution and unfair taxation and aid regimes. It was proof, if proof were needed, that the issue had moved far beyond the tight world of policy wonks and academics. Food security was now officially part of the political agenda. That same week a report [PDF] in the medical journal the Lancet revealed that there had been a miscount. Previously it had been thought that somewhere north of 2 million children under five die globally each year of conditions they might otherwise survive if they weren't malnourished. The statisticians had redone their sums and discovered that the number was actually north of 3 million.
In November, a leaked draft of a new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due for publication this spring, revealed that fluctuations in weather are already having an impact on global agricultural yields. It predicted that worldwide food production could drop by as much as 2%, while both population and demand continue to rise.
In short, the food security forecast during 2013 was gloomy and troubling, with possible outbreaks of calamity. But not everything was misery and disaster. Because in London that fine company Pizza Hut (UK) Ltd had decided that precisely the right moment had arrived for the launch of a £17.25 pizza boasting a crust containing 10 mini cheeseburgers, with an overall calorie count of 2,880. Many will tell you it's hardly the end of the world. It's just a pizza. And they would be right.
By itself, it isn't the end of the world. But it has the potential to make a bloody good contribution.
This is an edited extract of a new chapter from A Greedy Man in a Hungry World by Jay Rayner
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
GOP Rep: Healthcare is just one drunken car crash away
Remember 'Bubble Boy' from Seinfeld?
Everybody who lived in the town where Bubble Boy lived loved him because he suffered from an autoimmune disease which forced him to live in a 'bubble'. And living this way was supposed tomake sad and noble in that way that we always assume that people who have been dealt a shitty hand in life are sad and noble and can probably teach us Important Life Lesson or two.
Except, in the Seinfeld case: Bubble Boy was a dick.
Trading on his illness, he had free rein to be as big of an asshole as he wanted, knowing full well that people will look the other way and bite their tongue before they would say a disparaging word about the less fortunate among us, no matter how dickish they may act.
Now meet Rep. Josh Miller, a Republican state legislator from Heber Springs, Arkansas.
Eleven years ago, Miller and a buddy got drunk and went for a drive (Miller can't recall who was driving) when the truck they were in plunged off a ravine. Miller didn't die, but he suffered a broken neck and was paralyzed.
Miller was also uninsured.
As Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times explains:
Months of hospitalization and rehabilitation followed, including a long stretch in intensive care at St. Vincent Infirmary. There was a $1 million bill. Medicaid paid most of it. Miller was placed on disability and checks began. In time, between Medicaid and Medicare, all his health costs were covered by the federal government. For that reason, he need not be among the 82 Arkansas legislators (61 percent of the body) who enjoy heavily subsidized and comprehensive state employee health insurance.Health insurance isn't Miller's only government benefit. Another federal Medicaid program for which he qualifies provides daily personal care assistance.
After the government picked up all of Miller's bills, he picked himself up and got a job managing rental units (some of which are government subsidized) and then ran for state office.
Good for him. Inspiring.
But now the Republicans are using his disability as a shield to go after the expansion of Medicaid, and Miller is going along for the ride.
As Brantley noted, Miller has invoked FDR's "a hand up, not a "handout."
And by a handout, he means what is given to people who are not him.
He said some who qualify for the private option aren't working hard enough. He claims many want health insurance just so they can get prescription drugs to abuse. He draws distinctions with government help for catastrophic occurrences such as he suffered. He falls back, too, on a developing defense from private option holdouts that they prefer an alternative that wouldn't end coverage for the 100,000 people currently signed up, at least until next year."My problem is two things," Miller said. "One, we are giving it to able-bodied folks who can work ... and two, how do we pay for it?"
I'm no economist or health care expert, but I would assume that we would pay for it in much the same way that we spend a million dollars on some idiot who goes out, drives drunk, and paralyzes himself.
Many of the people in need of quality health care are predisposed, genetically and otherwise, to various illness and disabilities. It is written in their blood, in their genes, and in their stars.
If you want to say that stupidity is also genetic, I can't say that I would argue with that.
But Miller wants to take the hand that lifted him up and turn it into a fist with the thumb turned down for people who are not the Josh Miller who has been given so much for being so dumb.
Therefore: Josh Miller is a dick
Fortunately for him though, under the Affordable Care Act, that is considered a preexisting condition which is also covered...
Also, too:
[Disabled parking spaces on Shutterstock]
Dog whistle politics: what if only white people voted?
After the 2012 election, Buzzfeed put together a series of electoral maps that showed what the results would have looked like if we didn’t have universal suffrage. A couple of them went viral, including this one, which depicts the election results…
["Stock Photo: A Man Who Voted Holds Up His Voting Badge Lapel Pin" on Shutterstock]
Filmmaker Spike Lee trashes motherf*cking gentrification in epic f*ck-filled rant
Addressing a crowd at the Pratt Institute in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, filmmaker Spike Lee unleashed an epic rant over the gentrification of predominately ethnic neighborhoods of New York City.
According to the Daily Intelligencer, Lee was asked a question about “the other side” of the gentrification debate and he took a few moments to rail about "some bullshit article in the New York Times saying ‘the good of gentrification.’” (The NYT's “Argument Over a Brownstone Neighborhood” and New York’s “Is Gentrification All Bad?”).
In a seven-minute long mf-bombing diatribe, Lee went after the lack of social services prior to the arrival of the white gentrifiers, hipsters, dogs, and "real estate motherf*ckers' changing neighborhood names.
On gentrification:
"Then comes the motherf*ckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherf*ckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherf*ckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherf*ckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherf*ckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherf*ckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the f*ck outta here!"
On renaming neighborhoods :
"People want live in Fort Greene. People wanna live in Clinton Hill. The Lower East Side, they move to Williamsburg, they can’t even afford f*ckin’, motherf*ckin’ Williamsburg now because of motherf*ckin’ hipsters. What do they call Bushwick now? What’s the word? [Audience: East Williamsburg]That’s another thing: Motherf*ckin’… These real estate motherf*ckers are changing names! Stuyvestant Heights? 110th to 125th, there’s another name for Harlem. What is it? What? What is it? No, no, not Morningside Heights. There’s a new one. [Audience: SpaHa] What the f*ck is that? How you changin’ names?"
Listen to the audio below:
[Image via Thomas Rome on FLICKR, Creative Commons licensed];
Will Ferrell's Facebook followers don't want to 'get covered,' they want him to 'get f*cked'
On Tuesday, actor Will Ferrell took to Facebook to encourage his followers to "get covered," only to be met by a barrage of unhinged conservative backlash.
His original post features a link to Healthcare.gov and admonishes his followers to "put some clothes on":
Some of his followers expressed their disagreement with him in a manner that was both polite and topical:
Most, however, simply disagreed:
Ferrell, it seems, has the "millions of dollars" required to sign up for Obamacare, but is also so broke that he must go, hat in hand, to the Obama Administration's Celebrity Czar and beg for handouts with a cardboard sign. But not before he does two more things:
Once Ferrell was safely ensconced on the "wrong side of History" with all of his followers' guns and a fair amount of crack, it was safe for them to be topical again:
At least for one comment. No doubt, though, Ferrell appreciated the career advice before crying many manly tears at news that someone, somewhere out there had reluctantly decided to boycott his films. Then it started getting really ugly:
The nicest thing anyone had to say about him, it seems, is that he was a "flop":
And, well, "a douche bag sheep." In case Ferrell didn't understand the implications of being "a douche bag sheep," his former follower was keen to point out that whatever else it is, it isn't "funny." Because Ferrell isn't funny, he's just stupid:
And rich. His conservative followers hate him for being -- wait, they hate him for being rich? "Makes me sick you rich think you know what's best for us middle class" sounds a lot like class warfare. Are conservatives turning the socialist corner and embracing class warfare?
If they're calling him "Mr Business Bad Man!!!" we can only assume they've come around, right?
Never mind, the world makes sense again. Besides, it's not even Ferrell who posted that image on his own Facebook wall:
It's a Photoshop job! Just look at the kerning!
We're sure his conservative followers are happy to know that they need not burn their cherished copies of A Night at the Roxbury.
Malcolm X's dedication to the truth is something to which all Muslims aspire
The revolutionary leader strived to live up to Islamic ideals. But it was his humility that made him a hero to us
When Malcolm X split with the Nation of Islam, he traveled on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, where he was exposed to mainstream Islam – the Islam that the majority of the Muslim world practices. Historically, of course, Mecca is where Prophet Abraham established a sacred site for the worship of one God. It was there that Malcolm X first witnessed unity among different people, irrespective of their race. He wrote of his trip:
But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white … But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts …
This was typical Malcolm X: to discard false understandings in light of reality, to remain dedicated to the truth.
Today, many will remember the assassination of the revolutionary civil rights activist and reformer. Many will also undoubtedly lay claim to his legacy: his unswerving dedication to equality, unity and the truth.
For many Muslims, this is what made Malcolm X's life both inspirational and exemplary. We saw him as one of our own. We still do. He died, 49 years ago today, in a manner that we would consider to be martyrdom, because he died on the path to God.
Malcom X's life is also one that echoes the history of Islam itself. A little over 1300 years ago, the grandson of Prophet Mohammed, Hussain Ibn Ali, refused to pledge his allegiance to an unjust ruler. The ruler therefore ordered the beheading of Hussain, without so much as considering the stature or honor of the man he was about to kill. Afterward, the tyrant trapped a small band of Hussain's family and friends in the desert, denied them water for three days, and then challenged them to battle against an army of tens of thousands. Needless to say, the small army of Hussain was crushed and quickly subdued. With the exception of his very fragile son, all of Hussain's men were killed and women captured, ready to be chained and paraded in foreign lands.
But to this day, millions of people commemorate the event. In fact, the world's largest peaceful gathering occurs on the same day every single year in Karbala, Iraq, where an estimated 25 million people come together to mourn and remember Hussain Ibn Ali and his sacrifice.
Like Hussain Ibn Ali, Malcolm X's life exemplifies a dedication to truth and justice, as well as a commitment to faith. These are prime tenets to which all Muslims adhere, regardless of where they come from or what school of Islam they follow. I'd also like to think they're principles that all people – irrespective of creed or religion – can share.
Many Muslims revere Malcolm X not only for what he shares with other revolutionary figures, but also for his own special legacy. Like others, Malcolm dedicated himself to the pursuit of justice. He was always on a path of self-enrichment and he did his best to live up to Islamic ideals. But he made mistakes too, and his many imperfections have made him all the more relatable to Muslims everywhere, especially the younger generation. Malcolm's humility – his willingness to admit to his shortcomings if it led him to the truth – is arguably one of the most important lessons we, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, can draw from his life.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The Ole Miss statue noose is another sign we're not post-racial
The recent incident at Ole Miss shouldn't lull us into thinking that racism is confined to the South. It's alive and well across the US
It's black history month, and here's how America is celebrating: another Florida jury decided that a white man who disliked "thug music" didn't commit murder when he shot an unarmed black boy to death. Members of the Ku Klux Klan turned up at a black history month presentation at the Boone County Library in Harrison, Arkansas, wearing "Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White" stickers. Campaigning in Texas for Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, rocker and gun fetishist Ted Nugent called Barack Obama a "communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel". And in the early hours of 16 February, somebody "decorated" the statue of James Meredith, the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi, with an old Confederate flag and a noose around the neck.
In the US, we like to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come since the 1950s and 1960s. Racial prejudice is no longer enshrined in statute. The most famous scientist in the country is a black guy: astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And 12 Years a Slave may win a slew of Oscars.
But the so-called post-racial society everybody got all excited about in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president hasn't arrived, no matter how hard we've tried to will it into being. "Things have changed in the South," said Chief Justice John G Roberts when he wrote the opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, the most important legislation to come out of the Civil Rights Movement. As if the state legislatures of Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania (among others) weren't passing laws to impede voting by college students, women, the poor and especially people of color.
Conservatives want to believe that African Americans need to get over it and stop whining about slavery and Jim Crow and white privilege. According to the Fox News wing of the Republican Party, racism is practiced mostly by black people like Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, black people who apparently hate white people. Terrified of demographic projections showing that by 2043 non-Latino whites will be in a minority, they've convinced themselves they're already being oppressed. One form "oppression" takes is that ghastly "political correctness". They know they shouldn't email pictures of President Obama in a feather head-dress with a bone through his nose or assume that a young black guy in a hoodie is going to rob, rape or murder them. They know they can't call Martin Luther King a terrorist out loud, or make jokes in public about the black and gay football player Michael Sam.
Clearly, the pressure on white folks is immense. No wonder they need to let off a little steam by vandalizing the statue of James Meredith with the central symbol of racial violence, the noose, a reminder that in the years following the end of Reconstruction, over 3000 African Americans were lynched. Some comments in reaction to news reports insist it was just a little harmless "fun," not like back in 1962 when Meredith first set foot on the Ole Miss campus and the place exploded in days of rioting, killing two and injuring 300.
This particular strain of stupidity is not (and never has been) confined to the states of the Old Confederacy. This January at Arizona State University, a white fraternity commemorated the Martin Luther King Jr holiday by wearing basketball jerseys, sideways baseball caps and saggin' britches (you know, African American national costume), flashing what they imagined to be "gang signs" and drinking out of watermelon cups. Former top aides to Wisconsin governor (and possible 2016 presidential contender) Scott Walker have recently been caught sending racist emails. In New Jersey, the all-white state champion high school wrestling team tweeted out a photo of themselves cavorting in front of a black blow-up dummy hanging by a rope, and a private school in California got into the black history month spirit by serving students a lunch of fried chicken and watermelon (what? no chitlins?). Indeed, Ted Nugent is from Michigan.
The good news is that when there's an eruption of idiocy in the South, the brighter bulbs amongst us fight back. We're the ones with the lurid 350-year history of slavery and legal segregation, the stage on which America's racial drama plays out. We know how to articulate the problem; we know how to call for a solution. Within hours of the Meredith statue's desecration, University of Mississippi alumni ponied up a $25,000 reward for information on the perpetrators and students organized a rally.
The nickname "Ole Miss" refers not to "Old Mississippi," but the name the slaves would call the eldest white lady on the plantation. Yet the university's deep-sixed a lot of its former Old South imagery, replacing "Colonel Reb", the mascot who looks like a cartoon antebellum plantation master. They've invested in the study of the South's cultural gifts to the world: the Blues, barbecue, the writing of William Faulkner and Richard Wright.
This is not to oversell Southern enlightenment: we still vote Republican and a billboard with SECEDE in gigantic letters has just appeared in Tallahassee, the capital of Florida. It was put up by the League of the South, self-proclaimed neo-Confederates who've apparently forgotten just how well secession worked out in 1861. But despite the South's bloody and hateful history, there's hope for progressivism. The new generation, the kind of young people who surrounded the statue of James Meredith at Ole Miss, holding its bronze hands and calling for an end to hatred, will stick around – and, as the old song says, take their stand in Dixie.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The Times They Are a-Changin': Fifty years of Bob Dylan's stark challenge to liberal complacency
The album's anthemic title song now has an elegiac patina – but the radicalism of The Times They Are a-Changin' still burns
Fifty years ago this month the 22-year-old Bob Dylan released his third album, The Times They Are a-Changin' – the acme and as it turned out the end of his "protest" period. Dylan renounced this genre so quickly, and took his fans on such a giddy journey afterwards, that there's a tendency to downplay the extraordinary achievement and impact of his work in this brief initial phase of a long career.
As a collection, the album is one of the high watermarks of political songwriting in any musical genre. These are beautifully crafted, tightly focused mini-masterpieces. And they have a radical edge, a political toughness, that one rarely finds in the folk music of the period. Abstract paeans to peace and brotherhood were not for Dylan; the songs are uncompromising in their anger and unsparing in their analysis.
The album includes the two songs Dylan had sung at the March on Washington, six months earlier. But while Martin Luther King appealed to an inclusive future, Dylan struck a very different note: When the Ship Comes In was a revenge fantasy whose joyously vindictive climax is a vision of the total destruction of the oppressors; the other song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, was written in response to the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, in June 1963.
The subject of this song, however, is not the martyred activist, but the man who killed him. And rather than a villain or psychopath, Dylan portrayed him as the product of a system: a system that set poor white against poor black for the benefit of an elite. A South politician preaches to the poor white man / "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. / You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.It was a class analysis of white supremacy, made at a time when this was a fringe idea even within the civil rights movement – though that would soon change.
In The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll Dylan again situates an act of racist violence within a larger system of social hierarchy. It's a story told with the deliberation of constrained outrage, leading to a devastating payoff in the final verse, which reveals the complicity of the state, and society at large, in the crime. "Now," Dylan scolds us, "is the time for your tears." Unusually for the time, Dylan does not allow his audience to wallow in moral superiority. At every turn, he challenges liberal complacency.
The album's treatment of the cruelties of class is stark. In Ballad of Hollis Brown, a farmer is driven to the destruction of his family and himself by the relentless pressure of poverty. North Country Blues chronicles the fate of an iron-mining town in Minnesota when the owners shift production to "the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing". It's a story of de-industrialisation and globalisation, written long before those terms entered the lexicon.
With God On Our Side, a sweeping survey of American warfare from the genocide of the native population to the nuclear standoff of the cold war, is a radical revision of the authorised version of American history (decades before Howard Zinn). In this centennial year, the verse on the first world war stands out: The reason for fighting / I never got straight / But I learned to accept it / Accept it with pride / For you don't count the dead / When God's on your side.
Where did the politics come from? Woody Guthrie had been Dylan's first connection to the radicalism of the 30s, and in New York he met other veterans of the half-forgotten Popular Front era, including Pete Seeger. In the Greenwich Village folk scene he mingled with socialists, anarchists and pacifists. You wouldn't know it from the film Inside Llewyn Davis, but this was a milieu buzzing with political argument and radical ideas. But the spark was surely the upsurge in youth activism, most notably in the sit-ins in the south, where young people had engaged in a direct challenge to power and succeeded in redefining the boundaries of the politically possible. Their boldness supplied Dylan and others with the self-confidence to "speak truth to power".
The album also includes three intimate, enigmatically personal songs. Boots of Spanish Leather and One Too Many Mornings are both evocatively equivocal. Restless Farewell, the album's finale, is mainly of interest in hinting at Dylan's imminent departure from what he'd come to see as the protest-song straight-jacket. "So I'll make my stand / And remain as I am / And bid farewell and not give a damn."
As for the anthemic title song, even in its day many found its naivety and generational self-righteousness irritating. And yet, in articulating in such broad rhetorical strokes the belief that epochal change was possible and imminent, Dylan left us with a precious distillation of a historical moment. Over the decades the song has acquired an elegiac patina as the millennial hopes that produced it recede into a distant past. But just as the injustices challenged by Dylan's songs are still very much with us, so too is the need for the all-embracing emancipatory aspiration of The Times They Are a-Changin'.
• Mike Marqusee is the author of Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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