Amber Waves of Grain

not waving...but drowning

continued from yesterday


In the comments yesterday, JulieB from Australia pointed out that there are many factors to the grain shortage--including severe drought in important grain-growing regions.

On top of that, a larger population is by itself a difficulty, and when many in that population are eating high on the food chain (meat rather than plant), it taxes the system further.

It is not a simple picture.

Lola pointed out the effect of biofuels in the comments yesterday. So today I thought I would elaborate a little on the role of biofuel in the hunger crises.



Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, spoke in Takoma Park on Wednesday evening.

One of the things he pointed out is that while the food economy and the energy economy have until now always been independent, they are now utterly linked due to the growth of biofuels. We've had food crises before--but they have been much more event related. We could see the end of them.

Things have changed.

It is not an inexpensive proposition to turn agricultural products into energy. If the price of oil is under about $70 a barrel, it just isn't a profitable switch. But when energy prices are high (and right now oil is just about at its record high of $115 a barrel), the price of grains go up because there is increased demand.

In our industrial food system, high grain prices mean high prices for dairy products and beef as well. (Under a traditional system, cows eat only grass and are pastured on land that is not particularly usable for other agriculture.)

Chickens, accustomed to foraging on a mix of foods including lots of garden bugs, are now fed "vegetarian" feed which is predominantly grain. We even feed the fish we eat grain these days. So the price of chicken and fish also rises.

And even agricultural products that are totally unconnected to ethanol production wind up going up in price as farmers sacrifice planting other crops in order to grow more food for fuel.

The corollary is that non-food crops grown for fuel can force food crops off of good agricultural land.

So, as the price of fuel goes up, the price of food goes up.

The price of oil seems unlikely to drop substantially. But let's imagine what would happen if it did: grain prices would suddenly plummet because of the oversupply as oil companies turned away from biofuels. Many starving people would be able to afford to eat immediately, but almost as quickly, local farmers would loose their livelihoods.

Disturbingly, this is exactly the pattern that can occur when wealthy countries dump subsidized grain as food aid on poor countries. Grain from abroad floods local markets, removing the ability for many farmers to support themselves. They move to cities in an effort to find some sort of work. When they lose their farms, they then cannot feed the local community and the people of their country.

And the cycle of need just starts over.

* * *

from Britain's Telegraph:

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.

We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.

The article is continued here.

Enough

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
--Gandhi

* * *

In the last few months, a lot of us have been worrying about how we're going to afford to fill our gas tanks.

During this same period, increasing numbers of people are worrying how they are going to afford to fill their stomachs.

"The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions," the director of the U.N. World Food Program (the world's largest humanitarian agency) said recently. World Vision Australia head Tim Costello called the situation desperate and chronic: "It is an apocalyptic warning."

World Bank President Robert Zoellick holds up a bag of rice at the opening press conference of the World Bank-IMF spring meeting. (Photo courtesy of the World Bank)

International Monetary Fund managing director Dominic Strauss-Kahn says if food prices continue to rise there will be dire consequences. "Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving," he said.

* * *

In the United States there has been a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months.

Any increase in food costs sets up a simple equation: give something else up to pay for food. "I was talking to people who make $9 an hour, talking about how they might save $5 a week," said Kathleen DiChiara, president and CEO of the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. For some, that means adding an extra cup of water to their soup, watering down their milk, or giving their children soda because it's cheaper than milk.

It is even harder in much of the rest of the world.

In Bangladesh, a 2-kilogram bag of rice now consumes about half of the daily income of a poor family. Poor people in Yemen are now spending more than a quarter of their income just on bread. The price of wheat has jumped 120 percent in the past year, meaning that the price of a loaf of bread has more than doubled in many places. It is typical that the poor spend as much as 75 percent of their income on food.

* * *

Food riots have erupted in Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the Philippines. There have been tortilla riots in Mexico, protesting the rising price of corn. In Indonesia, ten thousand people demonstrated outside the presidential palace in Jakarta after soy bean prices rose more than 50% in a month and more than 125% over the past year. There was a general strike in Burkina Faso after the government promised to control the price of food but failed. Thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan and Thailand to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour.

In Egypt, rioters have burned cars and destroyed windows of numerous buildings as police in riot gear have tried to quell protests. At least seven people have died there in fights, or of exhaustion queuing for subsidized bread. In Cameroon, at least 24 people killed and 1,600 people arrested in February in food riots. Haiti's prime minister was ousted over the weekend following food riots there where at least four were killed and twenty wounded.

* * *

Do you remember when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual hunger statistics in 1999, showing that Texas was near the top?

George W. Bush, then running for president for the first time, responded defensively: "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in this state. You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas."

(You would think so, wouldn't you?)

Are we--those of us with high-speed internet connections and the leisure to read and write blogs--living in the same kind of dream world? Do those who are suffering realize how little the privileged (to whatever degree) even know about what is happening in this world, even in our own countries?

* * *

As I think about these issues, I keep getting stuck on metaphors of abundance directly related to nourishment: I am fed up. I have had enough.

As Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says, "We've had 10 major sets of food riots across the world. So if you want something which should be close to our global agenda... [it is] how do we contribute to better food security around the world." The idea of a politics of the fork never seemed so important.

But this time, it is a lot less clear what we can or should do. Assisting starving people in the short term is not nearly as complicated as confronting the root causes of world hunger and poverty.

* * *



Richmond Bread Riot, 1860s

* * *

UPDATE: Also check out this insightful post .

Victory Begins at Home

Last night at knitting grope, Lisa told me she had tried making the chocolate cake and her family found it rather grainy. After chatting with one of the expert cooks in the group, we came up with some ideas for people who aren't keen on grainy cake (as we more or less are now): try whole wheat pastry flour, white whole wheat flour, or a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat in whatever proportion you'd like. Or replace some of the whole wheat with some barley flour, a very soft and slightly nutty flavor.

After the cooking consult, Amy informed me that the origins of this kind of cake--Victory Cake--are from the World War I and World War II eras when butter, eggs, wheat, and sugar were in short supply. (Well, this one certainly uses plenty of its share of sugar and wheat.) Cool!

I remember making the wells in cakes when I baked with my grandmother, who easily could have started doing it during the war. The recipe I put up was one I riffed off from a crumpled recipe for a similar cake made from white flour and the like.



Given that I am currently obsessed with home activity during the Great Depression and World War II, I am absolutely thrilled to learn the history of this cake. Thanks, Amy!

On the Calendar

Son filled out our kitchen calendar and included this event
for tonight at 7pm:

Knitting Grope

Now this should be fun....

Creating Revolution

One of my favorite knitting podcasts is Sticks and String. Every week the host, an Australian "bloke" named David Reidy, offers up interesting talk, peaceful music, and truly insightful essays. A few weeks ago, he offered up his musings about why knitting is such a revolutionary act.

Although many of us spend way too much money on yarn and fiber, fundamentally knitting is an anti-consumerist activity. Even if we hang out on Ravelry, read numerous knitting magazines and blogs, and go to every local yarn store in every place we visit, we are not constantly being marketed to by huge corporations whose advertising budgets partly go to psychologists who can tell them the best way to brainwash consumers. Far more often, our money goes to local businesses or small companies with very few advertising dollars. This is an economy that is much more sustainable than buying products made by child laborers in developing countries and sold for cheap at big-box stores.

On top of that, the money we spend actually winds up not seeming like a lot (even when we buy luxury yarn) when we consider that we get, as Reidy says, "multiple sources of pleasure" from each of our fiber purchases. Instead of paying for some entertainment or other, we get to do the planning and knitting of what we are to make. And then, afterwards, we have the thing itself. A sweater to keep us warm (and allow us to keep the heat down)? A lace shawl to show friends and relations how much we treasure them? (A felted tote bag to carry our way-too-much yarn and way-too-many books?)

Fundamentally, knitting is not about buying STUFF to bring us instant (and fleeting) fulfillment, or the "convenience" of no work. Instead, knitting teaches us to be patient, to work hard and to work creatively, to appreciate these handmade items because we spent hours (or days or months) of our own time in their making and stitched ourselves into each one, to expect something different from cookie-cutter perfection when we look for beauty in the world.

Cake

...for the Earth, this week.

Easy Healthy Wholesome Vegan Chocolate Cake
(a total winner of a recipe that we may have a bit too regularly)

1.5 cups whole wheat flour (or barley flour or millet or whatever)
3 TB of cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup sucanat or other sugar (we put in a bit less and it was still plenty sweet)
0.5 tsp salt
5 TB olive oil (or canola or whatever. I want to try coconut oil.)
1 TB vinegar (we use raw apple cider vinegar but plain white should work just fine)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup cold leftover coffee (but it is great with just plain water too)


Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients, with a whisk so you can avoid sifting everything. (You can keep this dry mix in a jar in the pantry if you feel the need to be ready tout-suite for cake emergencies.)

Make three indentations in the dry mixture. In one, pour the oil. Another gets the vinegar, and the third gets the vanilla. (This is mostly to entertain your 8yo sous chef.) Then pour the coffee or water all over the top and mix everything together.

Pour into an 8x8 or 9x9 cake pan (which can be greased but doesn't absolutely require it).

Slip it in the oven and bake for half an hour.

Yummy.

See here for a recipe update and some history of this cake.

Visiting the Past

We spent the morning exploring farm skills at Claude Moore Colonial Farm. What a lovely day! The combination of lovely weather, a fascinating place, and a bunch of good homeschooling friends made it a wonderful place to be.

First, the obligatory fiber pics. Son got to card the wool of sheep that live on the farm. Here he is, figuring out how to share the experience with the most adorable little fiber convert I've seen:



Then they took the fiber they carded to women who showed them how to make yarn with drop spindles. Many of the kids in our group have done a lot of spinning a home, and I think the volunteer spinners were totally taken off guard by the knowledge of these youngsters.



But alas, work on a farm is not all about fiber.

So we dipped candles:



And then we headed off to grind corn. Here is Son's friend at work. (Incidentally, she shares both my first and middle name, both very old-fashioned names.)




Then off for some play.

Playing hoops, Colonial style:



Bowling:



Throwing corn cobs with feathers stuck in them through hanging hoops:

Sabbath for the Earth

See my works, how fine and excellent they are!
All that I have created, I have created for you.
Think upon this and do not corrupt and desolate My World,
For if you corrupt it, there is no one to repair it after you.
--Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:28

Melinda over at Elements in Time, realizing how wonderful Earth Hour was for so many of us, has suggested we schedule it weekly. What an inspired idea!



For many years, my family celebrated Shabbat very regularly. We made our own challah, had a nice dinner, drank wine, said blessings over candles and over each other, and spent the evening enjoying one another's company. In some years, we carried our celebration of Shabbat into Saturday (which is, of course, the norm--Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, more or less)--but sometimes we just emphasized Friday evening.

This year, we've been trying to reconcile our connection to our Jewish heritage with our fundamentally secular beliefs about God. Taking the traditional blessings and making them meaningful in an egalitarian and non-religious way is not at all difficult--but at this point, the words don't yet have years of repetition to make us feel connected.

We have still been lighting candles on a lot of Friday evenings and we've been trying out various Humanist-Jewish "prayers," but it is kind of astonishing to me how many Fridays we haven't celebrated at all, in any way. It is something I miss tremendously--not only because of the cultural ritual, but because Shabbat is a time of intense recognition of our relationships with each other and with friends, a recognition that gets enacted at the altar of the table, every week.

When I read Melinda's proposal for the weekly Hour for the Planet, I realized that combining our environmental politics, our desire for authentic connection with others, and our Shabbat traditions could be exactly what we need.

So the lights will stay out, as they did for Earth Hour, from the time we light the candles until we go to bed. We'll turn off the computer. The table is set, dinner is made--including a really healthy vegan chocolate cake (whose recipe is forthcoming if it the cake is any good), and the candles are ready.

May this be a night of peace.

Putting Your Foot (and your pocketbook) Down

Crunchy Chicken can always be counted upon to lay out a great challenge.

I just signed up for Buy Nothing Month. This is the kind of challenge I've been thinking of doing since I heard about Buy Nothing Day and then read the fabulous book by Judith Levine, Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. A day seemed too short--but a year seemed to long. But here in the Buy Nothing month, as the clever Miss Crunchy says, we have sort of a "sub-Compact".



I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the amount of advertising that surrounds us. On my recent flight to a conference and book signing, I put my shoes through security in a plastic tub with an advertisement in the bottom. After we took off, I lowered my tray table to find yet another advertisement. Neither of these places are particularly heinous places for advertisements--not like ads on a school bus or something-- but it certainly does add to my feeling that I am constantly under siege by the corporate world.

This challenge is just a little way of fighting back, of resisting.

* * *

On the other hand:

I spent a little time Sunday at a yarn party in my neighborhood. There were about a dozen local completely independent vendors there, selling hand-spun yarn, hand-dyed fiber, hand-sewn knitting bags, and self-designed patterns. I don't want to stop buying things that support the makers. The yarn party is the fiber world's equivalent of the farmers market. THIS is the way I want commerce to be.

But sometimes, we need a little kick to get us to reset our priorities and help us see things from a different view. So I've signed up for this month--a month, I might add, which is conveniently situated smack dab between the yarn party and Maryland Sheep and Wool.

* * *

Buying nothing means:

* No new clothes
* No new gadgets
* No new furniture or housewares
* No salon services
* No makeup
* No tools
* No whatever the hell else people buy

There are exemptions for edibles, supplies for vegetable gardens, household necessities (like toilet paper for visitors), necessary fuel, and anything else we need for our survival. And if participants must absolutely acquire something else, we must try to borrow, barter, or buy it used. Preplanned (or emergency) home repair is also exempt, as is anything already ordered.

April is the month of the both my son's birthday and my own. I've already ordered special presents (ones that are sort of relevant, in their own ways), so I think this first barrier will be easy enough to get past.

April is also the month of Passover--and therefore my in-laws will be visiting for a week. The visit might be a harder challenge than the birthdays, since shopping is something my in-laws enjoy and therefore we do more when they are visiting than we do otherwise.

Of course, you can always set any caveats in advance that make one of Crunchy Chicken's challenges more appropriate for you. In this case, mine is that at the yarn party, I told one of my favorite fiber pushers that I wanted to order a particular color and would contact her soon. So that, I think, is my exception.

And Crunchy Chicken does give an option for the weak among us: "If you end up buying something new that is non-essential, I'll be hosting a weekly Sunday Confessional for you to justify your purchase. So, just think about having to confess to the world what you couldn't hold off on buying."

* * *

Of course, I am not signing up my partner or son for this adventure. Perhaps they'll join me--but perhaps not. Son has his cat-sitting money burning a hole in his pocket--but even if he spends it, it is likely to be at the charity-supporting thrift store.

But I'm here to recruit all you readers to join me in whatever way feels right to you. Let me know what you think!

Looks like real education, eh?

I love how our child can be poking around the basement for some new excitement, find an old tool of a parent's, and start fiddling around--and wind up in a pose perfect for the twice-a-year county homeschool review....

This--this follow-your-heart glee--is what learning is really about. I feel so honored to be a part of it.

Celebrating

Last night while we celebrated Earth Hour, we shared a lovely local meal:



Meatloaf with local ground beef, an egg, and a little milk all from the same source combined with onions from the farmers market, dried tomatoes (which we dehydrated ourselves during the summer) and chives from a pot on our deck.

Garden Greens from our own backyard: a little chard, a little kale (both of which made it through the winter, and some baby dandelion weeds, sauteed in local butter with some more of the onions and the soaking liquid from our sundried tomatoes.

Baked Potatoes from our farmer's market dressed with sour cream from our above-mentioned meat-and-dairy source.

* * *

We topped off our celebration by rereading (by candlelight) a bit of the perfect spring book: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Then we serenaded ourselves before bed by playing trios on our recorders--something we have not done in far too long. What a fulfilling way to spend Earth Hour!

* * *

Earth Hour

Tonight is the international Earth Hour, also known here in the States as Lights Out America.



Turning off the lights for just one hour does make a small difference all by itself--but primarily, this is a symbolic opportunity. Join us in celebrating it by turning off your computer, your television, and the lights. Sit down for a romantic meal by candlelight, read poetry, play word games, pull out your guitar or banjo for a sing-along--and lets spend the evening talking with our families and friends tonight, remembering what is really important to us. What a great opportunity to recognize that the "sacrifices" that we have to make in order to protect the earth and its inhabitants may not be sacrifices at all but may ultimately bring us to a better and more authentic life.

* * *

Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Black and White

Peter Singer, the author of such classics as Animal Liberation and The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, wrote a very powerful book in 2004 called The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. Over and over, President Bush has embraced not only the ideology of cut-and-dried moral thinking but its rhetoric: "We are in a conflict between good and evil, and American will call evil by its name," the president said in 2002. Our "moral nation" would go to war (literal and figurative war) with "the axis of evil."

For him, "moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place." And rather than using evil as an adjective and then condemning behavior, Bush has a tendency to use evil as a noun--as Singer says, "as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal, and selfish acts of which human beings are capable." This is not a way of talking about ethics that fits in easily with the diverse modern secular world.

Singer's book is an extended discussion of Bush's own moral philosophy. The author contrasts the president's views on stem-cell research to his position on capital punishment, questioning what the "sanctity of life" actually means to Bush. If you say you care about the legions of children living in poverty, is it ethical to cut services in order to pass tax cuts for corporations? Singer has a knack for contrasting policies that really highlight large moral inconsistencies such as the rhetoric about free trade versus the reality of massive subsidies to industry. The importance of both family and states rights--except in the case of gay marriage. Or--perhaps my favorite: having a brief but messy affair with a presidential intern and lying about it versus lying about why the nation should enter a very long and messy war.

Singer speculates that the president might well be stuck in "conventional morality," the characteristic of teenagers, in which simple moral rules constitute one's moral outlook, and the idea that such rules might conflict hasn't sunk in yet. At the very least, Bush has not thought through the complexities of the issues he is called upon to deal with.

As reviewer Colin McGinn summarizes, "The conventional view of George W. Bush is that, while he is a man of marked intellectual limitations, he is governed by a consistent set of deeply held moral convictions. Singer's book refutes this comforting myth. Bush is a man of sporadically good moral instincts, perhaps..., but he sways inconsistently and opportunistically in the political breeze, and has no idea how to make his beliefs fit coherently together."

* * *

Coming up soon: a review of Glenn Greenwald's 2007 book A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

The Philosophy of Fair Isle

I recently started my first big stranded project: Philosopher's Wool "Color Your Own" cardigan in the Fall colorway. My hope was to make my way through the sleeves before the heat set in enough that I wanted a lighter project.



Well--one week later and they are both done! Fair Isle knitting is incredibly addictive and it just flies--at least when it is knitted with worsted-weight yarn.

But now...

I'm hesitating about casting on 200 stitches for the body....

I currently have way too many projects on the needles and keep finding excuses not to do such extensive counting. Hrmph.

But I'll screw my courage to the sticking place (yes--I just saw the Folger's amazing Macbeth)and pull out the long needles, the black yarn, and several markers to mark my progress. Wish me luck.


Project Spectrum: Fire

Growing Your Own--just a little...

Due to my long lingering case of croup, I have not done a whole lot of anything--blogging, cooking, knitting, gardening, even reading. But last night we ate the first fruits of this season's garden: a sprinkling of herbs (chives and parsley).



We wilted some baby spinach, sauteed some mild fish, and put together a light sauce from fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice boiled down with butter. The little home-grown herb garnish was just the right finishing touch.

And while the grapefruit juice was reducing, I took the highlighter to the seed catalog and dreamed of the last freeze date.

juxtaposition

David and I received a thanks for our donation to Doctors Without Borders today, with this amazing photograph on the front. There is something about the combination of poverty, tradition, deep pride, beauty, and plastic that just hit me in the gut. I can't even break apart what I feel.

Homegrown Revolution

Isn't it incredible how dangerous the act of creating can be?



As these inspiring gardeners say, when you produce your own food and are able to separate from the commerical food supply, you are in danger of becoming free.

Plague

After one post on pain and the next on fear, I suppose you must really be craving a happy post--but unfortunately, I am living in the house of the plague.

For a week I've been coughing my little head off--apparently with the croup. (Did you even know that post-toddlers can get croup?)

Just as I did when I had asthmatic symptoms or whooping cough or what have you when I was a little girl, I've spent an enormous amount of time in the steam of a hot bath. Can't wait to see the water bill.... But the steam really works, at least for an hour or so. And now I'm taking oral steroids, too. (I asked the resident doc if I could go to the olympics and he said not this week--due to the cough, not the drugs.)

David came home from work last night feeling very ill himself--possibly the flu?--and is asleep upstairs. At least he gets an adult illness....

Our son is still healthy and has been making us endless cups of tea, repositioning our pillows, and getting pretty bored. Luckily, our friends have been looking after all of us and entertaining him occasionally. He is a pretty amazing kid who doesn't need much to be happy.

Although I still bark quite a bit and my head is too cloudy-headed to do any significant work, I'm starting to get a little better, I think.

Upcoming: a series of posts on unconventional revolutions, a series of posts on the ways people have imagined life in a chaotic future, and a picture-heavy post of me modelling my still-as-of-yet-unseamed-but-still-lovely aran cardigan.

"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning"

--F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up

Son and I enjoyed watching the DVD How Art Made the World last week. One of the most fascinating parts included a discussion of the power of images that tap into the the fear of death.

In the DVD, the presenters were talking about very early art--but when I looked further into a research study cited in the documentary, I came across the extensive work of Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg. Although in the film they do not explicitly discuss the manipulation of fear in modern politics, their larger works do.

Their book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror explores the way that terrorism, by tapping into our deep fear of death, destabilizes society in a way far greater than the actual threat itself.

It is because of our anxiety about our own deaths that we reach out to strengthen our relationships with people with like minds. That could be all for the good--but what is far more pronounced than our efforts to create community is our efforts to conceive of people with whom we do not share a world view as our enemies. In a time of peace, we might be able to coexist happily, but in a time where the threat of death looms, we feel we must fight the opposition. And to fight that opposition, we feel we must have a parent-leader whose rule is not challenged.

We've seen how the Bush administration has recruited that natural process in order to support his own ends and his own position of power. Making sure the American people stayed in a state of fear allowed him and his cronies to avoid any significant opposition from his people.

The researchers from the Art documentary looked at campaign rhetoric as well. As one summary of their study said, "In one experiment Greenberg and colleagues ran during the 2004 campaign, volunteers who completed a questionnaire that reminded them about their own inevitable death (how thoughts of their own death made them feel and what they thought would happen to them physically after they died) expressed greater support for Bush than voters of similar leanings who were not reminded of mortality. The researchers also found that subliminal reminders of death increased support for Bush (and decreased support for Kerry) even among liberals."

Even Newsweek knows this stuff. In an article that ran only two months ago, they showed that the manipulation of fear was by far the most effective kind of political rhetoric--and they showed how all candidates were using it, even those who explicitly condemned it. They end their article saying that "a candidate who neglects the fear factor should have a concession speech ready to go."

* * *

As I packed my bags to return to the DC area from NC, I turned on the television. Not having television at home, I am always stunned by the intense images and messages that most people have targeted at them every day. (In yesterday's post about pain, I did not think about how much pain Americans see every day, acted out before them on the screen.)

Hillary Clinton's new ad--about who you want to answer the emergency phone at 3am when your children are sleeping--was playing. As opposed to the old Mondale ad saying exactly the same thing, Clinton's ad adds the deeply emotional overlay of protecting our own personal homes and our families. At home, we have a mother checking on her children. In the White House home, we have a national mother taking care of her symbolic children--us. (I guess I do prefer this image to yet another patriarchal leader--but good grief....)

I am overwhelmed, disappointed in her in a way I never thought I would be. Clinton did not get my vote in the primary, but I've always said I would be quite happy to vote for her and work for her in the general. I would be absolutely thrilled to see her as the next president, if she became the Democratic nominee.

I suppose I still will be, but her abuse of the fear card worries me tremendously. Talking about security is clearly important in this campaign, but what Clinton has done in not straight-forward talk. Instead it is a calculated strategy. She and her handlers must have read that Newsweek article.

What makes me so upset by this ad is that I see it as the first act that will tear down the Democrats. Yes--Clinton and Obama have criticized each other before, have sniped at each other, have done some of the preliminary work for the Republicans in all sorts of little ways. But this feels very different, very large.

I also wonder if the ad will backfire even if Clinton does get the nomination. If McCain were to say the same about her, what would the answer be for most of America? I'm not sure I want to know that answer. (Um... and this tactic didn't work out so well for Mondale...)

Instead, I want a president who will try with all of his or her might to keep that phone from ringing.


* * *

"One of [Bill] Clinton's laws of politics is this: If one candidate's trying to scare you, and the other one's trying to get you to think; if one candidate's appealing to your fears, and the other one's appealing to your hopes; you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope." --Bill Clinton, 1994

* * *

So that does it. I'm putting Fear on my "Do Not Call" list.

Pain

I spent the past few days in North Carolina, enjoying the beautiful spring temperatures and flowering trees that seem to have popped up there.

Last Thursday evening, my cowriter and I gave a book reading and a signing in Durham at one of my all-time-favorite bookstores (after prepping for it over gelato at the incomparable Francesca's.)

The next morning, the two of us headed over to Chapel Hill for a conference on Civil Rights and the Body. For two days we listened to the papers of many young scholars--about the pleasures of the body, about gaze, about illness, about violence. Our paper was the final one of the meeting.

It felt so...good? comfortable?...to be with other scholars who are also enmeshed in horror. So often we as a society--or possibly we as a species?--shy away from this kind of intense focus on difficulty and pain. Here I was with others, equally obsessed with racial violence and its very specific affects on individual people. Many of us spent a lot of the weekend on the verge of tears about our own projects and about other people's work.

I sometimes wonder how people who deal day after day with immediate pain in others incorporate it into their lives. How do doctors, for example, handle having patients who are dying or who are in intense pain? Clearly, being on the fringes of violence or illness is nothing at all like the pain felt by the actual victims and patients--but on the other hand, the historian or the social worker or the doctor or whatever is supposed to leave the archive or the office and go back to the perfectly normal world where there is no space carved out for their own emotional devastation.

I raised this question with a few of the other historians there, joking that my next project will be on the history of birthday parties or something. One, who studies lynching and Jim Crow violence, told me that after his lynching book, he wrote about utopian communities. This kind of change is something in our bodies calling for self-preservation.

* * *

I returned home with a big sleep deficit and a massive sore throat. Now, instead of obsessing about the violation of people's bodies in history, I'm thinking about phlegm. Cough, cough.