Saturday, November 05, 2022

Hunting and Gathering Stories

This week, the New Yorker published “What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About the Frustrations of Modern Work,” by Cal Newport.

One main intent of the article is to explore the extent to which we can understand and perhaps improve our working conditions by considering the life styles of the remote societies that still practice hunting and gathering.

Anthropological research seems to indicate that contrary to common wisdom, these “primitive” societies do not work longer or harder than we do, nor are their lives more difficult or frustrating than ours.

But what resonated for me was just how apt the hunting/gathering style of work applies to certain fields, namely journalism — the craft I spent more than 50 years perfecting. (And I’m still working on the perfecting part.)

Journalists hunt for stories by gathering facts. Some are out there for the picking while other require a long sustained effort overcoming obstacles or specialized skills plus a certain type of fearlessness.

But perhaps unlike some types of office work, journalism can provide the satisfaction on a pretty regular basis of getting a juicy story and publishing it — for the entire community to then consume.

Journalists can feel that they’ve done their job once they’ve brought home the goods.

Another aspect of the anthropological research I found relevant to journalists is hunting and gathering is a type of work that require a long apprenticeship. Most of the best journalists will tell you they benefited from mentors as they were developing their skills at getting the story.

This all may seem somewhat abstract to some people but in the wake of the recent pandemic, battles are raging inside many companies (the New Yorker article focuses on Apple) over the amount of remote work that is allowed given demands for high rates of productivity.

It would be fair to say, I think, that reporters are expected to get out of the newsroom — to go out and hunt down their prey — on a regular basis. Maybe that is another reason this type of article resonates with those of us who are essentially modern hunter-gatherers.

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Friday, November 04, 2022

Final Days

It’s going to be hard to believe when we look back on this time that these were the golden times. We will not be able to believe that we didn't know how good we had it, or that we didn’t do more to save it when we could have.

But that’s the way it is going to be. Because this is how democracy ends.

Democracy is nothing more than an idea we subscribe to, plus the institutions we build to sustain it. Those institutions only are as strong as the commitment of each succeeding generation to respect and uphold them. They require our constant vigilance. 

When Richard Nixon tried to undermine the integrity of our electoral process with his Watergate schemes, and then tried to remain in office despite his crimes, my generation rose up to oppose him and throw him out of office.

Democracy survived.

Today we are suffering from the specter of hundreds of soon-to-be-elected officials from the Republican Party who are election deniers. Either out of true belief (which is scary) or a cynical calculus, they mouth support for Donald Trump’s dangerous lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

After Nov. 8th, just a few days hence, many of them will sit in the statehouses or county offices around the nation that matter most. These imposters will occupy key positions in the seven swing states that will determine the outcome of the next presidential election.

Collectively, they will represent in 2024 the one thing that Trump did not have in 2020 — a cadre of officials willing to cheat their fellow citizens out of their votes. If they do that in 2024, democracy for all intents and purposes will be finished.

Speak out now. Act if you can. Or forever hold your peace. 

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Thursday, November 03, 2022

Last Line of Defense

Today’s top link is from the Atlantic: The Courts Are the Only Thing Holding Back Total Election Subversion.

The piece by Richard L. Hasen makes several important points:

  • The false claim of a stolen election has metastasized into an election-denialist movement far worse than we could have ever imagined.

  • Fully 65 percent of Republican Party voters now say they do not believe President Joe Biden won the election in 2020.

  • Nearly 300 Republican candidates for office have denied or questioned that Biden won.

  • Conspiracism has trickled down to local election officials in areas rife with Trump supporters.

  • The greatest danger is in a handful of swing states.

  • Rural areas in the swing state of Nevada have become a hotbed for the Big Lie, and pressure has built on rural county commissioners to do the wrong thing with election administration.

  • If the gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake of Arizona and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania win their races, they will be the ones signing the certificates saying who has won their state’s crucial Electoral College votes in 2024. Both have denied that Biden won in 2020.

  • In the past, the country has relied on state and local election officials, regardless of party, to count votes fairly and to accurately report results—but that can no longer be taken for granted.

  • If the country cannot trust the vote counters, it will have to turn to the courts, both state and federal. For the most part, courts performed admirably the last time around.

  • But in 2024 pressure may come to bear on state judges and state-supreme-court justices, many of whom are elected officials and know that the Republican base is full of election deniers.

  • The forces unleashed in 2020 may have begun as little more than an attempt to assuage the ego of a man who lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote. But now they are much bigger than him. The threat is real and urgent. Our political leaders have failed us, so it’s up to the judiciary to protect us.

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Wednesday, November 02, 2022

Soundlessness

(This from 2007, just after being laid off from another job. That company soon went out of business. Similar things happened throughout my career.)

Sitting in the morning sun, sipping coffee, with nowhere to go and no one to meet. From an extremely busy schedule peppered with meetings to the long, slow silence of aloneness. All the little daily pleasantries of working in an office have vanished. You make your own coffee and there’s one to talk to at the water cooler.

Come to think of it, you don’t even have a water cooler. Or a copy machine, a Fax, long-distance telephone service or snacks. There is no Odwalla machine, no fresh bagels this Thursday morning. One irritation is you handled all your appointments via the company’s shared e-calendar system, the kind that allows others to see when you are free to meet and when you are booked.

Since leaving a company in this era means losing all access privileges, you’ve lost access to your own calendar! You cannot remember what is happening when or where. Was that board meeting for your non-profit this week or next? Was that lunch with a friend tomorrow or next month?

Disoriented, you go about your new daily rituals: Waking up long before dawn and fretting. Sending out mass emails, letting contacts know you are newly “available.” Moving the car that you used to commute in from one side of the street to the other in order to avoid getting a parking ticket.

You’ve been “redistributed.” Remaindered, de-activated, decommissioned, rendered redundant and eliminated. You’re back to being just a guy without a business card.

It’s funny how close you grow with the people you work with in offices. In the days following a layoff or a company shutdown, your first impulse is to try and continue to connect with the people who were such a vital part of your daily life for so long.

But just like after any breakup, you’ve got to realize they are gone now. They’re all gone.

It’s the first warm day since my change in status. I think I’ll go to the beach and search for some seaglass.

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Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Toward a Unified Theory

While we were doing our investigations that yielded the books “Circle of Poison” and “The Bhopal Syndrome” in the 1970s and 1980s, I interviewed many scientists researching the long-term effects of agrochemicals like DDT, paraquat and Roundup (glyphosate).

Readers were understandably concerned about either getting poisoned by pesticides, or the possibility of developing cancer, birth defects or other central nervous system damage from exposure.

Inside the U.S., much of the reaction to the books focused on the low but persistent levels of residues in foods. Others, primarily environmental activists, worried about the contamination of the soil, water and air.

Personally, as one of the people doing the reporting, I did not have much concern about the short-term effects on anyone other than farmworkers or the industrial plant workers manufacturing these toxic substances. The dangers to those on the front lines were severe for sure, but to consumers, much less so.

On the other hand, I developed a sense from the many interviews with researchers that the long-term combined effects of multiple chemical exposure might gradually weaken the human immune system.

This would be due to the interactive or synergistic effects of absorbing the virtual cocktail of chemicals all of us unwittingly experienced day after day, year after year.

There were a number of potential consequences, according to those I interviewed:

  • A weakened immune system would make us more vulnerable to mutating viruses. Accordingly, pandemics would occur.

  • Injuries would become more common in competitive activities like sports.

  • Conditions like autism and other mental health problems might increase.

  • Our life expectancy would stop increasing and begin to drop.

Unfortunately, in the intervening decades, all of these complications have come to pass. In retrospect, the cumulative deterioration of our immune systems indeed appear to have been a factor.

It would seem we still have time to react, however. By transforming our agriculture from a chemical-intense mono-cropping system to organic multi-crop system, we may minimize the damage for future generations.

This is how we could break the circle of poison that is slowly weakening us as a species.

And that is my hopeful message for today.

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Monday, October 31, 2022

Beneath Our Feet: Where Secrets Reside

 From June 2007:

From the AP: Slave Passage Found at Washington House:

”Archaeologists unearthing the remains of George Washington's presidential home have discovered a hidden passageway used by his nine slaves, raising questions about whether the ruins should be incorporated into a new exhibit at the site.

”The underground passageway is just steps from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. It was designed so Washington's guests would not see slaves as they slipped in and out of the main house.

"As you enter the heaven of liberty, you literally have to cross the hell of slavery," said Michael Coard, a Philadelphia attorney who leads a group that worked to have slavery recognized at the site. "That's the contrast, that's the contradiction, that's the hypocrisy. But that's also the truth."

***

If I was to be reborn, one of the careers I might choose would be archaeologist. Along with historians, they are engaged in rediscovering what we might otherwise forget.

It is no secret that our very first president, George Washington, kept slaves -- some 300 of them, nor that he decreed they be freed upon his death. But this particular find, in the house where Washington lived (before there was a White House), shows how the nation's leader maintained a secret passageway for his nine house slaves to come and go outside of the view of his many esteemed guests.

This, indeed, should be converted into a national museum, to counter the ultra-phallic Washington Monument that dominates the Mall. Washington relied on his slaves to maintain his lifestyle in his presidential palace, yet he did so hypocritically. After all, even in the late 1700's, it would have offended many foreign dignitaries to witness the leader of what eventually would be come to be known as the free world living in a luxury based on exploiting slaves.

Every time another artifact of that era comes to light, I am struck by the ugliness that made the privilege of our Founding Fathers possible.

And these are the guys the strict constructionists worship?

Not me. The most useful thing we could do as a society is to revise history and bring honesty to our collective story. Maybe then one of our ugliest and most persistent problems, racism, could finally find its only possible resolution: apology, forgiveness, integration, reconciliation, and the recognition that all people, regardless of race, religion, or national origin, are truly created equal under the eyes of God, which in this country, is enshrined in the Constitution.

Think about it.

***

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the CMT tribute to one of the great American story-tellers, the late Loretta Lynn.

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Sunday, October 30, 2022

2024

This week, Joe Biden made a verbal slip he’s made before when he referred to the “CEOs of countries.” He meant “companies,” of course, and soon after the gaffe he moved his hand toward his mouth, in a familiar and revealing gesture for a man who has always had a speech problem.

None of this would matter, frankly, but Biden will be 80 years old in a few weeks and he’ll turn 82 by the time of the 2024 election results are clear. So his frailties matter. Accordingly, Democrats have begun a whisper campaign about an alternative candidate. That campaign will no doubt intensify after the party loses ground in the midterm elections on November 8th, which now seems inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to have a giant Trump problem. The former president is popular with the base but would almost certainly lose if he ran again. In addition, he may not get the chance to run, given the multiple investigations that could well yield criminal charges against him well before 2024.

So what about the V-P candidates from 2020? Kamala Harris has had a notably undistinguished term as vice-president and is reportedly not on good terms with Biden. It’s hard to imagine her as a successful candidate for president.

Mike Pence has never broken through as a leading candidate for Republicans and it’s equally hard to imagine him as a successful candidate for president.

There is no one among the Congressional leadership who is a viable candidate in either party, IMHO. Liz Cheney is courageous, principled and independent, but she has no organization behind her.

That leaves the two strongest governors — Democrat Gavin Newsom in California and Republican Ron DeSantis of Florida — as the leading names to run and both are acting like they know that. Accordingly, they are positioning themselves as the standard-bearers for their parties.

That is the race I expect to materialize.

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