Thoughts on Building Strong Towns

Posted on October 20, 2012 by smellincoffee

Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume I
© 2012 Chuck Marohn
174 pages
$9.95

 In California, school districts are being forced to suspend their bus routes. In Alabama,  Jefferson County – home to the state’s largest city, Birmingham – has gone bankrupt. Basic functions of the government are no longer available because the money simply isn’t there. Across the nation, cities and counties are struggling to make ends meet – and although contributing reasons vary from case to case, Chuck Marohn would argue that the fundamental cause is the same: we’re no longer building places that can maintain themselves. Worse, we’ve tried to finance the present with loans made with the promise of future growth. Now those bills are coming due. Since 2008, engineer and urban planner Chuck Marohn has been writing about the weaknesses of America’s urban places, partially out of professional interest but also as a concerned citizen and father, who is casting an eye toward the America his girls will inhabit. Thoughts on Building Strong Towns collects some of the blog’s most essential pieces in a compact volume. Marohn is passionately earnest, but reliant more on data and sober arguments than fiery rhetoric.

Marohn isn’t alone in elaborating on the fiscal problems of American urbanism: Andrés Duany revealed the same in Suburban Nation, but Marohn’s criticism cuts deeper to the bone, examining not only urban planning,  but its very financing, and the beliefs of growth-devoted politicians and the civil engineers who aid them.  His greatest contribution to the new urbanist cause is an analysis of “growth” as a Ponzi scheme, one wherein investors are paid not by productivity, but by more, future investment. Marohn puts forth a number of case studies which amply demonstrate how little return taxpayers receive on infrastructure spending, like the one below:

A small, rural road is paved, with the costs of the surfacing project split evenly between the property owners and the city. We asked a simple question: Based on the taxes being paid by the property owners along this road, how long will it take the city to recoup its 50% contribution  The answer: 37 years. Of course, the road is only expected to last 20 to 25 years. Who pays the difference and when?

Who pays the difference, or who paid, is the federal government: a reliable means of expansion for the past half-century has been dependence on the state for funds to build roads, pipes, and other infrastructure, with the municipality benefiting from them only having to assume the costs of maintenance. But the kind of development that springs up from these grandiose projects doesn’t even generate enough tax revenue to meet upkeep, and cities are going broke in their attempt to meet these obligations. But the federal government’s own obligations are too numerous for it to continue to cover everyone else’s losses.

A new attitude is required. We can no longer buy casually into yesterday’s dreams of easy returns: reality is not The Field of Dreams, and throughout the work Marohn advocates toughminded frugalism while lambasting the if-you-build-it-they-will-come  mentality that continues to pervade the minds of government officials and engineers. Instead of chasing growth  (or hunting it, as he puts it  elsewhere), we should maximize the value of what we have already, analyzing every project with the question: does this add value?

I’ve been a Strong Towns follower for the past couple of years now, being attracted to Marohn’s work for its bluntness: while opponents to new urbanism can scoff at arguments made on aesthetic or quality-of-life grounds, Marohn’s by-the-numbers criticism isn’t partisan and can’t be ignored. Like it or not,  the urban fabric of America will change in the coming decades: it is up to the people whether their towns and cities will survive as leaner and more productive, or be ruined.

Thoughts on Building Strong Towns is definitely recommended to the serious-minded citzen, although I did miss the inclusion of Marohn’s “The High Cost of Automobile Orientation“, which points out how much more productive traditional city blocks are to those used in recent decades.

Related:
StrongTowns.org
Review at National Resources Defense Council

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Teaser Tuesday (16 October)

Posted on October 16, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish game hosted by Should Be Reading wherein participants share excerpts from their current reads. This week I started Bernard Cornwell’s King Arthur trilogy, which has proven captivating so far.

There have been many more beautiful women, and thousands who were better, but since the world was weaned I doubt there have been many so unforgettable as Guinevere, eldest daughter of Leodegan, the exiled King of Henis Wyren.  And it would have been better, Merlin always said, had she been drowned at birth.

p. 172, The Winter King: a Novel of Arthur. Bernard Cornwell

‘Get the mines working, rebuild the bridges, pave the fords, dig out the sluices and find a way of persuading the Sais to go back home. That’s enough work for one man’s life, don’t you think?”
‘Yes, Lord’, I said nervously, and wondered by a warlord would busy himself repairing water conduits.

p. 109, The Winter King

‘Dear sweet God!’ Sansum bellowed. ‘Thy servant comes, slaughtered by wicked men and their foul witch! All I did was obey Your word. Receive me, Lord! Receive Thy humble servant!’ This was followed by a scream as he anticipated his death, but it was only Issa lifting him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his robe and carrying him gently away from the stone pile to the pond where he dropped Sansum into the shallow, muddy water. ‘I’m drowning, Lord!’ Sansum shouted. ‘Cast into mighty waters like Jonah into the ocean! A martyr for Christ! As Paul and Peter were martyred, Lord, so now I come!’ He blew some urgent bubbles, but no one besides his God was taking any notice and so he slowly dragged himself out of the muddy duckweed to spit curses at my men who were eagerly dragging the stones aside.

p. 311, The Winter King

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The Twelfth Imam

Posted on October 14, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Twelfth Imam
© 2010 Joel Rosenberg
512 pages

Who’s up for the Apocalypse? Israel stands ready for a preemptive strike against Iran, whose concealed nuclear program is on the verge of being able to produce warheads. Considering that both Iran’s Supreme Muckety-Muck and president subscribe to a cult within Islam that believes the end and salvation of the world can be brought about only through a war of annihilation against Iran’s foes (namely, Israel and the United States), Tel Aviv just may have cause for concern. Especially seeing as there’s a fellow roaming around the countryside performing miracles and claiming to be the Messiah, ordained by God to restore the Islamic Caliphate and subordinate the entire world to his will.

 Such is the setup for Joel Rosenberg’s The Twelfth Imam, a doomsday novel that starts out reading like a political thriller in the vein of Tom Clancy, complete with a CIA operative inserted into Iran with the objective of thwarting the nation’s nuclear ambitions. The book quickly proves to be much more along the lines of Left Behind; this is an apocalyptic novel in its truest sense, because the religious prophecies drive the plot, and not merely as motivation for the characters; instead, supernatural forces and creatures are active elements within the plot, making it light fantasy and…well, somewhat silly.  I say  silly because while I started reading Left Behind knowing it would have fantastical elements,  The Twelfth Imam began with a more sober setup which is derailed by them.

 It is perfectly believable to anyone that Iran could be led by religious lunatics, because it is; it is perfectly believable that Israel could be aggressively wary, because it is; it is perfectly believable that a man could claim to be the messiah and create a following for himself, complete with magic tricks and illusions. And the premise is outstandingly interesting: although Christianity is the religion most identified with the concept of messiahs, other religions with an apocalyptic strain believe that a hero – a powerful warrior, a charismatic leader, a righteous judge – will rise and lead the forces of good to a final triumph over evil, and establish a paradise on Earth. The Jews call this figure the moschiah; the Muslims, the Mahdi.  Christians believe that Jesus will be this figure when he returns, but a minority (the Left Behind readers) believe that fake messiah, the Antichrist, will emerge as a popular and powerful figure, and create a world empire of scum and villainy.  The Twelfth Imam combines two views of the messiah: the Mahdi has come, but he’s coming in the role of the antichrist, the villain.

 Done well, readers could have been treated to the story of ‘good’ characters who put their trust in a leader promising and apparently delivering great things, who are later agonized when his intentions prove to be malevolent, and who undergo crises of confidence — like The Good German.  Alas, Rosenberg instead uses this premise to demonize Islam, complete with his Mahdi offering the same deal to Iran’s supreme muckety-muck as Satan offered to Jesus during his 40-day fast in the wilderness. Worship me, and the world is yours. There are no sympathetic Muslims here: the devout are without exception utterly slavish stereotypes, vowing and delivering violence against non-Muslims. In one scene, a Muslim father drives his kids across town and cheerfully quizzes them on how the Koran instructs them to hate Jews and delight in slaughter. (Then he drops them off so they can become human minesweepers. Dad of the year, he’s not.)  There are a few characters the reader can identify with from Iran or Iraq, but they’re not devout and in the course of the novel will be bejesused when Jesus himself shows up to covert them and start giving them advice on life.

 This is the part where I started giggling, where the tenseness of the spy novel became a farce. Rosenberg has managed to write quite a few novels without being schooled on the meaning of Deus ex machina, apparently: Here the fantasy elements take the plot off the rails by physically picking them up and plonking them down wherever: once Jesus shows up (repeating the Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus bit  line for line in a random conversion),  he makes a habit  of rescuing the main characters from conflict. Need something? Oh, good, Jesus just told that guy in the supermarket to give it to you.  Flying down the highway with the mahdi’s state apparatus looking for you? Jesus is your GPS: turn left, now, to avoid capture. Unfortunately, the novel becomes increasingly ridiculous as it wears on: at one point, the Mahdi summons the leaders of Islamic countries and groups together and proclaims the caliphate, at which point they happily drop down in fealty. Forget the hostility between Iranians and Arabs, between Hezbollah and Hamas, between Shiites and Sunnis: all that is trivial compared to the power of a man in black robe who shouts generic jihadist phrases.

 Ultimately this isn’t a spy thriller or a story of political intrigue: it’s Left Behind for a new generation, meant to broadcast a particular view of the world to a mass audience, and it’s just as narrow-minded, partisan, arrogant, and fearmongering. It stands apart for having a far more interesting premise and being somewhat better done than the Jenkins-LaHaye novels. It still manages to be entertaining, for all tis weaknesses, because the back cover refers to Rush Limbaugh as a “leader”.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also read the sequel, The Tehran Initiative, which is mildly better but still has absurd situations like Satan worrying if his cellphone is secure. Yes, really.

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This Week at the Library (10 October)

Posted on October 10, 2012 by smellincoffee

Fall arrived rather suddenly this week, although I imagine the cooler temperatures won’t stay for too long. October 3rd was ‘der Tag der Deutschen Einheit’, or the day of German Unity. As I did with the United States and France in July, I planned a set of German readings. I’m not quite done with that, partially because Five Germanies I Have Known is denser than I expected and because I keep getting distracted by other books. Here are a few:

In certain remote areas of the United States, there are churches which believe the Bible encourages the faithful to take up poisonous snakes. In Salvation on Sand Mountain journalist Dennis Covington explores their world. Although at the first he seems like an objective investigator, as the story takes on a manifestly personal light as it unfolds. Covington’s own family history is connected to the snake handlers, and despite disagreeing with their theology he’s entranced by the practice, and is seduced by it to the point that he “takes up the serpent” himself.  The reader is thus partial witness to an intense ‘spiritual’ experience; Covington retains enough clarity to describe those moments of holding death in his hands as a way of experiencing transcendence  a losing of the self.  It’s a disturbing work, but it does shed some light into a dark corner of the fundamentalist mind.

Guyland takes as its subject the extended adolescence of middle-class young men, who instead of assuming the rights and responsibilities of manhood right out of high school or in college, are instead deferring it until their late twenties. In this expansion of boyhood, they spend their time loafing around in college or in dead-end jobs, when they aren’t drinking themselves into stupors,  “hooking up” with girls, and staying up all night playing video games. This youth culture is somehow rooted in the Guy Code, which emphasizes being  tough (drinking until you puke is so manly), repressing emotions,   and using women.  Kimmell is sharply critical, but he doesn’t quite demonize his subjects, who act like badly behaved chimpanzees, raping and pillaging: they’re just as miserable as their victims. There’s a lot to consider here, but in the end I’m impressed by one central weakness and one really engaging idea. The weakness is that he tries to address the culture of American young men in general based on the lifestyle of the guys he interviews here, who all come from relatively privileged backgrounds. Of course they’re depraved, selfish, and obsessed with entitlement; they’ve nothing to work forward to. But a recurring theme caught my eye, that of homosociality. Every aspect of the youth culture examined here eventually circled back to how guys relate to other guys, even dating women.  I’m interested in this from an anthropological perspective: how deeply rooted is that behavior?

Fiction has been nowhere to be seen in recent..er, months, but just a couple of days ago I read Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov. It’s a bit unusual in that the story isn’t Asimov’s: it was a movie he was asked to produce a novelization of.  I’ve not seen the movie, but the novel  is supposed to have removed plot holes and bolstered the scientific content  The story is one of scientific adventure and political espionage, combining the cultural norms of the 1960s with technology beyond today’s imagination. In the world of Fantastic Voyage, the globe is still polarized into the NATO and Warsaw camps, and the peace of the Cold War is kept by stalemate: neither side can gain a decisive advantage over the other quite quickly enough. That may change: for years, both have maintained experiments in miniaturization technology (that is, shrinking things), but the technology hasn’t proven militarily useful yet because of restrictions. A Soviet scientist has found a way to get around those restrictions, and he has defected to the United States. Astonishingly  the Soviets weren’t just willing to let him desert without offering a goodbye kiss, so now he’s in the hospital with a blood clot in his brain threatening death or dementia. The American solution is to shrink a submarine to the size of a bacterium, and use it to eliminate the clot with a laser. Unfortunately, one of the crew is a traitor, and so the book’s hero, Grant, must ferret that individual out while the ship navigates the perilous world of the human body, a world which must be survived but not fought because fighting it might mean the death of the defector.

It’s rather like The Odyssey: what was supposed to be a simple run from the neck to the brain turns into a prolonged and dangerous trip through the entire body, where something goes wrong at every turn. Here the monsters are white blood cells and antibodies, not cyclopes; and here the obstacles are the beating heart and lymph nodes, not Scylla and Charybdis.  The decades since this book and the movie’s publication have seen a lot of works inspired by it, like the Magic Schoolbus trips inside the body I watched as a kid, but this original exploration of the body is still fantastically interesting, even  considering the cold war context where a female scientist is an oddity.

Oh, and there’s The Lolita Effect, which covered the same material as So Sexy So Soon, but not as well.

Reviews are pending for Hamlet’s Blackberry and Gone Tomorrow, and by pending I mean they would have been posted last week had they not gotten deleted accidentally.

This next week…

I’m just about to finish Jesus for the Nonreligious, by John Shelby Spong, and am thinking about doing a few more religion reads. Specifically, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the origins of Satan. Ever since 2006, I’ve been interested in the evolution of Judaism, and how parts of it were transformed into apocalyptic Christianity, with Satan as Mr. Evil and a fallen rebel instead of God’s quality-assurance agent, as he was in pre-christian Judaism and is now.  Also, I am considering a book on the plumbing side of waste management.

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Waste and Want

Posted on October 3, 2012 by smellincoffee

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
© 2000 Susan Strasser
368 pages

     Consider your trash can. In all likelihood, you cannot imagine not using it. What else would you do all with the trash generated in the course of day to day living? And yet trash cans haven’t always been a fixture in our homes; until the 19th century, people invariably fond uses for whatever extraneous materials they produced, so much so that waste was an anomaly  But now,  disposing of it is a mammoth task, handled by the government and large corporations. In Waste and Want Susan Strasser reveals how waste rose to such heights, and despite its subject matter it manages to be charming rather than ‘offal’.

Throughout most of human history, material goods have been too precious to waste. Every article represented hours of hard labor, where that work was invested in the sewing of clothing,  the milking of cows, or the manufacture of pottery. Economy forced prudence, not to mention self-reliance:  people made their own candles out of cooking fat because they needed candles, and like all skill made objects they were not easy to come by, being either rare or expensive. If an item broke, it was repaired; if beyond repair, it was put to future use. Clothes were extensively modified to extend their lives, and passed down through the generations (as were most household items). Cloth remains too small to be used in clothing could be sewn into quilts. Food scraps were fed to animals, who converted refuse into more food — and if nothing else, the items were burned as fuel in the family hearth.  Even if a given family didn’t possess all the skills and time required to recapture the value of every scrap, local economies thrived on communal recycling. But all that changed with industrialization.

Although the first factories, like paper mills, inserted themselves into the garbage cycle seamlessly — using refuse like rags to produce paper — soon the industrial process broke a circle of endless reuse to the one-directional “waste stream”, the stream that has turned into a torrent by the 21st century and is fast filling up landfills, incinerators, and the open ocean. This disruption began as industrialization became increasingly efficient through economies of scale: large operations that relied on waste for their manufacturing (like the paper mills) demanded too much to be satisfied by communities: instead, they had to be fed by other factories, and the trash of the common people fond itself without an outlet. Transformations in the home (like gas stoves) removed the use of garbage as fuel. Factories also made consumer goods cheaply: as they became abundant, they lost value. Why repair when you can replace?  In the 20th century, companies seized on that idea and encouraged it, first through changes in fashion (cars replaced by new models every year, the only real distinction being aesthetics), and then through Planned Obsolescence, wherein items were manufactured with the intent of their breaking down within a relatively short time frame  and requiring replacement. (They could be repaired, at first, but then someone hit on the bright idea of engineering every part in a given machine so that they would all begin breaking down at roughly the same time…)

The results? Trash — lots of it. Dealing with the trash has required new technologies and systems of organization to cope with it. The pressing demand for waste management is mitigated (ever so much) by recycling, but our pitiful attempts at reusing resources are nothing like those our ancestors managed. Recycling is a meager flame overwhelmed by the mighty ocean of garbage that consumerism encourages and our economy relies on. The amount of waste necessitated by modern life is staggering: next time you visit a grocery store or supermarket, consider how almost every item in the store comes in a cardboard box, and inside it may be goods wrapped in plastic. We cannot possibly find uses for so many boxes, and what on earth would we do with even one ice-cream wrapper, let alone the dozens or hundreds we are liable to rip off in a year?

Waste and Want is a fantastic little  bit of history and indirect social criticism.  While garbage is on the cover, it’s really a history of us, of how we relate to the world through our use of its material resources and how that has changed. It’s a fun read, sure, but by its end one can’t help but be impressed by the fact that waste is an issue we must think about. Environmentalism aside: in this era of austerity, how can we possibly justify throwing way so many resources and even consuming more resources to manage the waste?  It behooves us to act more responsibly, and as the 21st century progresses I can only hope that our worsening economic condition will force a rebirth the prudence of our forebears.

Related:
Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture; Ellen Shell
No Logo, Naomi Klein
 

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Germany

Posted on October 3, 2012 by smellincoffee

Germany: Unraveling an Enigma
© 2000 Paul Nees
236 pages

If you follow European news, chances are good that you’ve heard the name Angela Merkel in recent months. Chancellor of Germany, her nation is the economic heart of Europe and essential to the eventual resolution of its debt crisis. And yet, just a little over two decades ago,  Germany was a divided nation…and a generation before, it lay in ruins, largely destroyed in a war which instigated, a war which casts a shadow over all Germans, even those born today. Germany has a long, storied, and troubled past: it is the land of Beethoven and Marx,  but also of Hitler and his ilk.  Europe and the world have been ravaged by Germany’s military in times past, but buoyed by its contributions to culture — and it will likely continue to be a major player throughout the next century. All that in mind, what makes the Germans tick?

Paul Nee’s attempt to answer that question comes in the form of a cultural analysis, an exploration of the German character which seems to be largely written for Americans interested in doing business in America, but his guide concerns Germany as a whole. Even the latter two-thirds of the book focused on business and economics — explaining both the social market system as well as Germany business culture, exploring practices in the United States and Germany which might be at variance with one another — are fascinating, as they build on the general themes which Nees set forth at the opening. There, he explores the German mind, elaborating on convictions that most Germans share. He not only identifies the concepts, but demonstrates how they are interwoven throughout Germany society. In the section titled “Ordnung muss Sein”, for instance, he shows how the concept of good order manifests itself not only in politics, but in the way people relate to their possessions  a shoddily maintained car is unthinkable. The picture of the Germans which emerges from the book is that of a intense, serious, and passionate people.

Nees’ book is similar to Sixty Million Frenchman Can’t Be Wrong, which tries to explain France to Americans. Nees is (suitably, for his subject), more “solid”: he concentrates on a few ideas and explores them thoroughly.  Although seemingly targeted toward businessmen, its thorough thoughtfulness recommends it to anyone with a curiosity about Germany.

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Conundrum

Posted on September 29, 2012 by smellincoffee

Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse
© 2012 David Owen
272 pages

If only all big problems could be tackled with product substitution. We’re consumers at heart, and our response to difficulties of all kinds usually involves consumption in one form or another. My car’s a problem? Tell me what to drive instead. Wrong water heater? I’ll switch. Kitchen counters not green? I’ll replace them. The challenge arises when consumption itself is at issue. The world faces a long list of environmental challenges, yet most so-called solutions are either irrelevant or make the real problems worse. That’s the conundrum facing anyone who yearns for “sustainability.”

Green is in, but what if we’re doing it wrong – and our earnest attempts to be environmentally responsible are backfiring on us? Such is David Owen’s proposal in The Conundrum, in which he asserts that typical approaches to sustainability are only aggravating the problem, and confronts the reader with the possibility that we already know the most effective way to keep the climate crisis in check…the only question is our will to do it. That’s the conundrum.

Owen turned conventional environmental thinking on its head with his The Green Metropolis, which took an economical approach and asserted that cities were the most environmentally prudent technology on earth, for they allow each human being to use as little energy as possible. Cities are part of the solution, but here Owen is more concerned with driving home the extent of the problem.  In the past we have been concerned with using energy more efficiently, but this only allows us to use more energy.  The price of gas is an obvious example: when prices are high, we drive less. We have an incentive to do so. When prices are low, however, we drive more.  Attempts to make our current lifestyle Green are doomed to failure, because the living patterns of the first world in the 21st century are fundamentally energy intensive. The “little things” like using better lightbulbs or recycling cans can’t overcome the fact that society as a whole has become utterly wasteful.* Even our attempts to free ourselves from using dirty ol’ fossil fuels only maintain the pattern: solar power plants might use renewable fuel, but the physical construction of the plants systems requires intensive processing of scarce resources.  Ultimately, he argues, the solution to our energy and climate problems is simple: use less energy.

While he doesn’t elaborate on what that entails (having already pointed out the resiliency of cities in a prior book),  readers must take a long, hard look at their own lives to see where waste has made itself a habit. Extravagance has become the norm in the west, where today’s gas station make more use of refrigeration units than the grocery stores of the 1960s.  Waste inherent in the built environment: because we have air-conditioning, for instance, we’ve stopped bothering to build homes that can mitigate. Our windows are to look out of, not to provide ventilation. Our shutters are plastic decor, not functional.

It remains to be seen if we will make the hard choices. Eventually we will have to: reality will leave us no alternative. I’d tend to recommend The Green Metropolis over this; it makes the same point in a broader context and proposes some solutions.

Related:

* Not that this means you should stop bothering. Conventional lightbulbs wasted over 90% of their energy as heat, so if you stick to using them you’re only getting a dime of value for every dollar you send to the electric company, and not even that much if you take into account the increased expenditures for air cooling to compensate for all that heat…

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No Logo

Posted on September 29, 2012 by smellincoffee
No Logo: the Case Against the Brand Bullies 
© 1999, 2009; Naomi Klein
544 pages
The political and financial turmoil of the past few years have seen a rising tide of anger targeted against the political power of wealthy corporations. Little wonder: since the crisis erupted in 2007, millions have lost their jobs, yet the corporate officers of these failing businesses continue to award themselves extravagant bonuses, in some cases with taxpayers’ money.  And there is no help to be found in the government;  anti-corporate protesters in New York and elsewhere have been set on by police, and the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be “people”, whose freedom of speech in the form of campaign donations should not be limited in the least. (And those actual people who express their own freedom of speech by impeding corporate actions? If their protests are judged to have caused $10,000 in losses, they are deemed domestic terrorists and join the 10% of Americans already in prison.) No Brand  is a sharp criticism of corporations, but one from a different era. First published in 1999, she scrutinizes brand corporations first for their business model, which emphasizes style rather than substance, before examining their invasion of public space and notorious legacy of abusive labor practices.
As a child, I scoffed at my classmates’ obsession with the Nike brand. My derision was born not of any preternatural consumer consciousness; my parents simply were not the kind to pay for overpriced t-shirts. For that is what they were; a Nike t-shirt is not made of magic cotton that repels water, heals wounds, or bestows upon its wearer +2 Armor. The same is true of its synthetic products, aimed toward actual athletes: while they may wick sweat and keep users comfortable, they do it no better than those manufactured by Champion or generic brands. Nike has never advertised its gear on the basis of superiority, like washing detergent. And yet early this spring, when shopping for athletic clothes, I went to Amazon and simply typed in “Nike”. I was interested in all manner of sports apparel, and Nike…was sports.
Therein lies the basis of Klein’s criticism.  Brand companies aren’t about quality, they’re about Ideas, and consumers are not paying money for superior merchandise but are instead buying into an image of themselves, of something they want to be. It’s a formula that has given religions and political ideologies success for thousands of years, and today it is the approach of almost every major corporation. But because their products don’t advertise themselves the way quality products might, these brand corporations have to push their product aggressively, and in the section “NO SPACE”, Klein details how brands are using not just conventional media, but putting up advertisements in schools. While parents might merely resent a company taking advantage of a financially struggling school system to hawk its shoes,  this branded invasion is literally dangerous when school cafeterias become hosts to McDonalds annexes and Coca-Cola gains exclusive distribution rights. Children become a captive audience to advertising; their values are those introduced not by parents or concerned teachers, but marketing execs who are grooming the next generation of consumers.
 Because the companies chiefly concern themselves with pushing their Image, and give little attention to the manufacturing side of things, rampant labor abuses escape their notice completely. The abuses are familiar to anyone conversant with the term sweat shop:  long hours, marginal pay, no rights, and no tolerance for anyone who resists the abuse. Even in countries which have something resembling human rights laws, they are often moot where corporations are concerned. In the Philippines, for instance, there exist economic development zones, little islands of virtually zero regulation where the only rules governing corporations are those they impose upon themselves. Shockingly, with their only motivation being profit margins, exploitation is rife.
But in the United States and Europe, citizens’ groups are working to give these companies another motivation. In “NO LOGO”, Klein covers the growth of activism against these companies, showing how boycotts and government actions have forced Nike and other companies to take responsibility for the labor costs involved in their products. This activism isn’t limited to aging hippies or idealistic college students, either: certain groups have met success in stirring up anger in decaying urban areas, among young black men who dream of making a success of themselves by wearing Nike shoes.
 No Logo is as mature a critique of brand corporations as one might ask for – sharply pointed, but not a screed. She builds her arguments up slowly and steadily, allowing the facts to present the case instead of passion.  The result is disturbing and damning, yet encouraging. Definitely a work to remember. (For those who have read the original, Klein updates it with a section that declares President Obama to be the first superbrand president…with the problems therein.)
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This Week at the Library (25 September)

Posted on September 25, 2012 by smellincoffee

Germany’s national holiday, Der Tag der Deutschen Einheit, falls this next Wednesday, so this week my reading will be oriented toward ‘das Land der Dichter und Denker’,  just as in July I celebrated the American and French revolutions. On the reading menu? Germany: Unraveling an Enigma and Five Germanies I Have Known. One is cultural examination; the other, history.

Late last week, Stephen Baker’s The Numerati caught my eye. Its cover belies the remarkable content inside, as Baker addresses as how every facet of our lives is being converted into data and tracked. Our masses of decisions and feelings  are turned into bits that computers can analyze so that mathematicians can construct models that allow corporations to target us more accurately — or ‘serve us better’, if you prefer. There are seven chapters, detailing the ways we are examined as workers, shoppers, voters,bloggers, potential terrorists, patients, and lovers.  Although Baker is rather optimistic about the future of our lives under the microscope, I for one  find that the idea of being tracked and scrutinized by economic powers stinks of predation. Baker takes heart in the idea that the Numerati, the mathematicians tied to the computers who use their analyses to construct models that predict our behavior,  aren’t one monolithic elite. The political scientists are scrutinized as shoppers, and if they object to a shopping cart suggesting where they should go based on their purchase history, they can fight abuse within their field. I don’t find this terribly reassuring, especially when it comes to labor issues. I recently read in Naomi Klein’s No Logo how a certain coffee firm has realized how much more profitable it is to only call in most of their staff during peak hours, so that people are summoned to work at short intervals throughout the day instead of serving through a shift. The workers exist only for the employer’s convenience: the modeling serves the managers’ bottom line nicely, because they sell the same amount of merchandise but don’t pay nearly as much for labor. The workers, on the other hand,  can’t make enough to support themselves and don’t have time to do anything productive during their little intervals. It’s the kind of story that makes you sympathize with those kids throwing bricks in Seattle.

I have some interesting book reviews and comments lined up for this week — Naomi Klein’s No Logo, David Owen’s Conundrum, and William Power’s Hamlet’s Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.

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Teaser Tuesday (25 September)

Posted on September 25, 2012 by smellincoffee

The conversation cut off by another person’s telephone ringing. The voice that trails away as eyes and brain tunnel into a screen. It’s annoying when you’re the victim, but then, don’t you do the same thing yourself? You’re in a real place with someone who means a great deal to you, say having lunch with a close friend or colleague or reading a book to a child. To all appearances, you’re present and fully engaged. But your attention is provisional, awaiting the next summons from beyond. A faint vibration or beep is all it takes and off you go.

p. 52, Hamlet’s Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which participants share excerpts from their current reads; it is hosted by MizB of ShouldBeReading.

The above is why I keep my cellphone turned off and only check it in the evenings. To everything its place and time..

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