Half Past Noon

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves…. It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

We got a fish yesterday.

This is Ponyo.

We adopted Ponyo into our family because, unlike our landlords, my wife and I are both what you would call “animal people.” Actually, unlike A and D, we’re cat people, but when you’re renting you take what you can get. And we could get a fish. So we did.

I thought I’d be relatively disinterested in a fish – after all, fish are slimy and aren’t very talkative – but it turns out that marriage has fostered within me all sorts of ancient and mysterious impulses and among them is the impulse to raise a child. Of course, a fish is nothing at all like a real live wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-spit-up-on-your-flannel-pajamas child, but again: you take what you can get, and we could get a fish. And so, for better or for worse, we’ve pretty much adopted this little goldfish into our family and with it all of the stereotypical expressions of parenthood.

Take, for example, the picture above. My wife snapped that photo earlier this afternoon, all the while cooing at how cute our fish looks and wanting to capture her from an angle that correctly represented her unique shape and markings. When I went to select a good introductory photo, I was pleased to find that over a dozen pictures had already been taken, each featuring different perspectives, distinct lighting, and appropriate framing. While it was convenient for me that such pictures existed, a dark suspicion looms in my mind that they’re actually going to be compiled into some sort of baby calendar sometime during the next month.

In stark contrast to the above, consider the following picture, which I took not long before I started composing this post:

You’ll note the inferior lighting, blurry caudal fin, and peculiar orientation of our fish. That is because after some amount of reading, I have become convinced that Ponyo is suffering from constipation and as a result is having difficulty regulating her swim bladder. The behavior being exhibited in the picture above is called “nose standing,” and is indicative of internal problems due to trauma, overfeeding, or poor diet. I have subsequently prescribed a day of fasting and then a strict diet of de-shelled frozen peas, which serve as a laxative and should clear out any blockages in the intestinal tract.

Of course, this swim bladder issue has been something of a mania for me all day. I know more about goldfish – their history and status in various Chinese dynasties, the varietals found almost exclusively in Japan, common ailments and courses of treatment – than I ever really wanted to know.

But I guess I’m that dad. The dad that reads obsessively, goes grey after the first month of collecting stool samples and plotting their pH levels, and ultimately overconditions his poor child. And I hadn’t even realized it until, after hours of study and relating various findings to my wife, she looked at me and said:

“When we have our first child, you’re going to go crazy.”

Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million — a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton’s response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues did not exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. “I’ll fire anyone who cashes the check,” he told them.

It’s from a very progressive source, The American Prospect, but it’s too funny not to post. Has a definite ‘robber-baron’ feel.

Update: blogger slacktivist runs down why Wal-Mart’s ridiculous check cashing service is less of a rip-off than the banking system is.

Emmanuel Jal did a TED Talk not too long ago, and every time I run across this guy I like him even more. The talk below is long, but well worth the investment:

This video evokes the usual platitudes for me – get off your bohunkus, stop armchair charity and start actually helping – but there are a few things that were absolutely striking to me.

The first is Jal’s version of these same platitudes, because his English is so plain and his poetry so earnest. “What would I be?” The punch line is powerful. I quote from the song:

I remember the time when I was small
When I couldn’t read or write at all
Now I’m all grown up, I got my education
The sky is the limit and the cup is running over
How I prayed for this day to come
And I pray that the world find wisdom
To give the boy in need some assistance
Instead of putting up resistance, Yeah
Sitting and waiting for the politics to fix this
It ain’t gonna happen
They’re all sitting on they asses
Popping champagne and scrunching up the masses
Coming from a refugee boy-soldier
But I still got my dignity
I gotta say it again
If Emma never rescued me
I’d be a corpse on the African plain

Second is Jal’s dance. It starts around 16:40, when Jal announces “I’m gonna get crazy now.” I can’t get over that dance. It looks like the way I should have spent every Gloria Patri I’ve ever sung, so sincere and vulnerable and beautiful and while it’s unlike any dance I’ve ever seen, I know exactly and precisely what it means. It is the dance of a man made alive by love.

Immortalized in gif form – he puts the animated in animated gif. His secret is that he’s reading a book by an eo theologian in the NSA library – devious!

According to the press release attached to this video, most egg producers do this.

According to Mercy for Animals, male chicks are of no use to the industry because they can’t lay eggs and don’t grow large or quickly enough to be raised profitably for meat. That results in the killing of 200 million male chicks a year. The United Egg Producers [trade group for egg farmers] confirmed that figure and the practice behind it.

“There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens,” said spokesman Head. “If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we’re happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need.”

Using a grinder, Head said, “is the most instantaneous way to euthanize chicks.”

First, if you’re my wife you’re not allowed to watch this. Secondly, a disclaimer: I didn’t watch this with the sound on, and I didn’t finish it.

Let me see if I can be coherent. Let me be clear: the capacity for most of the animal rights movement to be more concerned about animal suffering than human suffering is apalling, so if the narrator says anything ridiculous, set that aside.

I’m sure there’s no fun way to kill an animal, and most uninitiated people from urban settings would probably be uncomfortable with the everyday realities of the most ideal farm setting. I really don’t have any problem with farmers having to kill animals – part of my desire to reclaim a life that’s more local and agrarian is a desire to be more grateful for the sacrifices that go into providing food for me.

But how could anyone be comfortable with this? I can’t possibly be grateful for my eggs after learning about this mind-numbingly disgusting practice. The industrialization and inhumanity of this are evident – the process robs dignity from everyone involved.

I wondered whether or not small farmers kill their male chickens. Some of them probably do, and as I’ve thought about it I’ve realized that I don’t have a problem with that. My problem is – wait for it – with the philosophy of the industrial food system, which treats animals as machines to be exploited rather than recipients of human stewardship and dominion.

And now we come to paragraph five. I believe that technically speaking I am now on what the experts refer to as “a tear”. That makes this one a bonus. How long will otherwise intelligent people trot out the claim that modern industrial farming is necessary to feed large populations of people?

Ok, reeling this back in. Gabe, what’s your take on all this? You’re the only real farmer I know well enough to ask who’s also a friend enough to not be alienated by the virtual spittle.

I haven’t written something in forevs, so here’s the new newness: Don’t Read the News! My favorite bit o’ bs from it: Liberal bias is to be expected in the news, because the news prioritizes change over permanence, and that’s hostile to a conservative outlook. Like everything I do, I mean it all with an almost painful sincerity.

James K.A. Smith posts an extended passage from The Guardian which takes genre writing to ask, quite harshly. A sample:

One doesn’t wants to decry authors who are certainly outstanding in their field (constructing a page-turner requires narrative skill); neither does one want to sneer at the tastes of book-buyers, for whom reading at all in this age of distraction is an increasingly fought-for pleasure. …. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina’s disdain, in her comments, for pushing boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer’s first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers’ expectations for convention, or they have failed. It’s easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market ‘product’ and fears innovation as a ‘risky sell’. At a time when capitalism is scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. This is far from being just a Scottish issue.

Austin should hopefully have more to contribute here, but I wanted to jump in and offer a few comments first.

To begin, I don’t really understand how writing, say, a fantasy novel is any different than writing a sonnet. Both forms are bound by a set of rules that may be bent but not truly broken. And since both forms are “abstract” (to a degree), they can be easily abused by bad writers. (We’ve all seen trashy novels and heard terrible poetry.) But in the hands of a skilled writer, both forms can be used to illuminate something new and something beautiful in our world.

Moving on, my experience with “literary fiction” has been anything but “empowering” and “illuminating.” Aside from the acclaimed “great authors” (i.e. Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, etc.), the literary fiction I’ve encountered has tended to be liveless, dull, and far too heady. I say this not to knock literary fiction: there are many great writers in that scene, and I know that my experience does not speak to the whole. However, I do take issue with the assumption that “literary” writing is by definition superior to genre writing. Could it be, for example, that J.K. Rowling is better at speaking to the human condition than James Kalman? Does being a “fantasy” writer limit Rowling’s abilities? Does being a “literary” writer enhance Kalman’s?

Finally, and what I always come back to, is the historical record of “classic” authors whose works could be fairly slotted into genres. The list is a very long one, but all I really need to do is throw out the name “Jane Austen” and my case is made. Could it be that dismissing others’ writing as “genre writing” is merely a capitulation to our times? To a modernistic impulse to categorize everything?